Nelson Demille - The Quest

According to the word in the bars and embassies in Addis, however, Getachu was a psychopath, and was rumored to have strangled a dozen members of the royal family in their palaces, including women and children. Even the revolutionary council-the Derg-feared him, and they’d made him commander of the Northern Army to keep him out of the capital.

As Purcell walked up the hill toward the large headquarters pavilion, he noticed something on the far side that he hadn’t seen before. He couldn’t quite make it out in the fading light, but as he got closer he realized that what he was seeing was a pole suspended between two upright poles-and hanging from the horizontal pole were about a dozen men. As he got closer he saw they were dressed in the uniforms of the Royal Army.

He stopped about ten feet from the scene and could see that the men had been hanged by their necks with what looked like commo wire, to ensure a slow, painful strangulation. Their hands were not tied so that they could grip the wire around their necks and try to ease the stranglehold, but in the end they’d become exhausted and lost the battle with gravity and with death.

Purcell took a deep breath and stood there, staring at the contorted faces, the bloody fingers and bloody necks. He counted thirteen men hanging motionless in the still air. He wondered how many more Royalists had been shot where they were captured. Taking prisoners was not a well-understood concept in this country and in this war.

Purcell noticed that a few of the sentries posted near the headquarters tent were watching him, and he rethought his visit to General Getachu.

He turned and made his way back toward the medical tent. Vivian was not there, and the sole orderly in the tent was not helpful in answering his pantomimed questions.

The standard procedure in situations like this was to stay put in a known location and wait for the missing colleague. If he went looking for her, they’d probably miss and keep coming back to the tent to see if the other was there, sort of like a Marx Brothers routine. He looked to see if she’d left him a note. She hadn’t, but he saw that her camera, passport, and press credentials were gone, which meant she’d taken them. But then he noticed that his passport was also gone, and so was his wallet, his press credentials, and the safe-conduct pass. “Shit.”

He walked out of the tent, looking for any sign of her in the darkening dusk. Maybe she’d gone to find a latrine, which didn’t exist here, so that could take some time. He decided to give it ten minutes, then he’d go straight to the headquarters tent and demand to see Getachu. Or Getachu would send for him. In fact, he thought, that’s what might have happened to Vivian.

He waited, but he wasn’t the waiting type. After about five minutes, he headed toward Getachu’s headquarters.

He saw a figure running toward him in the darkness. It was Vivian and she spotted him and called out, “Frank! They’ve got Henry!”

“Good.”

She stopped a few feet from him, breathless, and said, “They’ve got Colonel Gann, too.”

Not good.

She explained quickly, “Colonel Gann had passed out on the mountain. Henry, too. The soldiers found them both-”

“Hold on. Who told you this?”

“Doctor Mato. They’re in the hospital tent. Under arrest. Doctor Mato says they’ll be all right, but-”

“Okay, let’s go see them.”

“They won’t let me in the tent.”

Which, he thought, was just as well. “Okay, let’s see the general.”

“I tried, but-”

“Let’s go.”

They moved quickly up the hill to where the headquarters tent sat. A few of the side flaps were open and they could see light inside.

He’d noticed she didn’t have her camera, and there was no place in her shamma where she could have put their papers, but she may have hidden everything, so he asked, “Do you know where our passports and papers are?”

“No… when Doctor Mato came to get me, I ran out-”

“Well, everything is gone, including your camera.”

“Damn it…”

“That’s all right. Getachu has it all.”

“That bastard. That’s my camera, with thirty pictures-”

“Vivian, that is the least of our problems.”

He could see that she was distraught over Mercado’s arrest, and now was becoming indignant over the confiscation of her property. This was all understandable and would have been appropriate in Addis, but not here at the front.

She needed a reality check before they saw Getachu, so Purcell steered her around to the far side of the headquarters tent and said, “That is what General Getachu does to Royalists. We don’t know what he does to Western reporters who annoy him.”

She stared at the hanging men. “Oh… my God…”

“Ready?”

She turned away and nodded.

They approached the guarded entrance of the headquarters tent. Two soldiers carrying AK-47s became alert and eyed them curiously. They’d already sent the woman away, and they wondered why she’d returned. One of the men made a threatening gesture with his rifle, and the other motioned for them to go away.

Purcell said to them in the Amharic word that all reporters in Ethiopia knew, “Gazetanna.” He added, “General Getachu.” He tapped his left wrist where his missing watch should be, hoping they thought he had an appointment.

The two soldiers conversed for a second, then one of them disappeared inside the tent. The remaining soldier eyed Vivian’s ointment-splotched face, then her legs beneath the shamma .

Vivian said softly, “I’m frightened. Are you?”

“Check with me later.”

The soldier returned and motioned for them to follow.

They entered the pavilion, which Purcell noticed was much larger than Prince Joshua’s. He noticed, too, that there were no ceremonial spears or shields in this sparse tent-only field equipment, including two radios on a camp table. Coleman-type lamps barely lit the large space.

The tent was divided by a curtain, and the soldier motioned for them to pass through a slit. It was darker in this half of the tent, and it took them a few seconds to make out a man sitting behind a field desk. The man did not stand, but he motioned toward two canvas chairs in front of his desk and said in English, “Sit.”

They sat.

General Getachu lit a cigarette and stared at them through his smoke. A propane lamp hung above the desk illuminating his hands, but not his face.

As Purcell’s eyes adjusted to the dim light he could see that Getachu wore a scruffy beard, and his head was bald or shaven. A tan line ran across his forehead where his hat had sat, and his skin was naturally dark, but further darkened by the sun.

Purcell had seen a photograph of General Getachu in an Ethiopian newspaper, and he’d noted that Getachu had the broader features of the Hamitic people and not the Semitic features of the aristocracy or the Arabic population. In fact, that was partly what this war was about-ancestry and racial differences so subtle that the average Westerner couldn’t see them, but which the Ethiopians equated with ruler and ruled. Indeed, he thought, the Getachus of this country were getting their revenge after three thousand years. He couldn’t blame them, but he thought they could go about it in a less brutal way.

He had dealt with the newly empowered revolutionaries in many countries, and what they all had in common was xenophobic paranoia, extravagant anger, and dangerously irrational thinking. And now he was about to find out how psychotic this guy was.

Getachu seemed content to let them sit there in his office while he perused the papers on his desk. Also on Getachu’s desk was Vivian’s camera, his wallet and watch, their passports, and their press credentials, but he couldn’t see what would have been their safe-conduct pass, issued by the Provisional Revolutionary government. It occurred to Purcell that Getachu had chosen to deal with that inconvenient document by destroying it.