Allan Folsom - The Hadrian Memorandum

Now Willy opened the third folded page. It was a photograph of a jungle-green, unmarked helicopter set down in a forest clearing at daybreak. Several men were in the doorway helping unload crates to a half-dozen natives who, in turn, were loading them into an old open-bed truck.

Willy showed Marten the next photograph. A close-up of two of the men in the helicopter doorway.

“Same men guarding the oil interests,” Marten said.

“Yes.”

Willy’s fingers slid open the next photograph: an enhanced close-up of the truck revealing supplies that had been opened for inspection. Clearly seen was a case of assault rifles, another with ammunition, another with a dozen or more three-to four-foot-long tubular pieces that looked like handheld rocket grenade launchers, and several cases of what appeared to be the rockets themselves. In the upper right-hand corner, another man, a third Caucasian in black T-shirt and camouflage fatigues, was clearly seen. He was tall with short hair and chiseled features and was a good ten years older than the first two.

“The guns are AK-47s. The natives are Fang and Bubi tribesmen involved in a growing, organized insurrection against the government. Already more than six hundred people have been killed, mostly natives but also a small number of oil people.”

“You mean the same men hired to protect the oil workers are arming a revolt against them?” Marten was astonished.

“So it seems.”

“Why?”

“It’s not for me to say, Mr. Marten. But I would assume it is the reason you have come. To find out.” Suddenly Willy took a cigarette lighter from his jacket. “I gave up smoking thirty-two years, four months, and seven days ago. The lighter still gives me comfort.” Abruptly his thumb slid over the top of it. There was a click and flame burst from its snout. Seconds later the paper photographs flared up. As quickly Willy dropped them on the ground and watched them turn to ash, then he looked to Marten.

“It’s time we go back. I have evening services.” Abruptly he turned and led Nicholas Marten back down the trail the way they had come.

Some twenty minutes later they neared the end of the trail. They could see the dirt road they had walked up from the village and the steeple of Willy’s small wooden church reaching over the tree line. Overhead, a monkey swung from tree limb to tree limb. Another followed. Then both stopped and looked down at the men below, chattering wildly as they did. Tropical birds screeched in reply, and for a moment the entire rain forest seemed to come alive at fever pitch. As quickly it stopped. A few seconds later heavy rain began to fall. Another thirty and it became a torrential downpour.

Then they were at trail’s end turning onto the road that had now turned to mud. For the first time since they left the cascade of falls Willy spoke.

“I trusted you, Mr. Marten, because I had to. I could not give you the photographs because there is no way to know who you might run into when we part. Hopefully, you have clear memories of what you have seen and what I have told you. Take that information with you and leave Bioko as quickly as you can. My brother is in Berlin. He is a very capable man. I hope that by the time you reach him neither he nor your American politician friend will have need for you to tell them any of this. Tell them anyway. Perhaps something can be done before it is too late. Purposeful war is being made here, Mr. Marten, for reasons I don’t know. There will be more of it, and with it will come terrible bloodshed and immense suffering. Of that I am certain.”

“Padre! Padre!” The voices of alarmed children suddenly rang out of nowhere. The men looked up to see two tribal boys, maybe ten or twelve years old, running toward them down the mud-slick road.

“Padre! Padre!” They cried out again in unison. “Padre! Padre!” At the same time the sharp crackle of automatic-weapons fire erupted from the direction of the village behind them.

“Oh Lord, no!” Willy spat loudly and started toward the children as rapidly as his aging body would take him. In the next instant an open-bed army truck filled with heavily armed troops came around a bend. A second truck was right behind it. Marten started after him on the dead run. Father Willy must have sensed what he was doing because he suddenly turned and looked back, his eyes wide with fear.

“No!” he yelled. “Go back! Tell them what you have seen! Run! Into the jungle! Run for your life!”

Marten hesitated, then turned and ran, rushing madly through the tropical downpour and back up the trail he and Willy had come down only moments earlier. Seconds later he pulled off it and ducked into an undergrowth of huge ferns to look back.

What he saw sickened him. The first army truck slid to a stop just as Father Willy reached the young boys. Immediately soldiers jumped from it. As they did, Willy stepped in front of the boys, trying to protect them. In answer, a rifle butt was slammed against his head. The boys screamed as he fell and tried to fight the soldiers. Simultaneous rifle butts hit the first boy in the face. Two more hit the second; one in the face, the other at the back of his head as he fell. Then the motionless figures of all three were picked up and thrown facedown onto the truck bed. At the same time, the other army truck swerved around the first, raced toward the place where Marten and Father Willy had parted, and stopped. Immediately twenty or more soldiers leapt from it and started fast up the trail toward the place where Marten hid.

“Christ!” he breathed and pushed wildly from his hiding place, running back up the jungle path three hundred yards ahead of them at best. In seconds he realized he was leaving tracks in the mud. He looked left, then right, then picked a spot, and plunged off the trail into heavy undergrowth, his sudden move startling monkeys and tropical birds and sending them into a screaming fit in the trees above.

He ran on. Thirty feet, forty, fifty. Suddenly he stopped short. There was nothing before him but impenetrable rain forest, all of it thick as a carpet. He turned around. There was nowhere to go but back the way he had come.

He’d covered less than half the distance to the main trail when he heard them coming. They were moving hard and fast and jabbering in Spanish.

Abruptly their talking stopped and the sounds of them moving died out. The monkeys and birds stopped, too. So did Marten. Except for the rain, the jungle was silent. He held his breath. They were close and listening. He inched backward, his eyes locked on the foliage in front of him, feeling his way over the sodden ground. Then he heard someone shout, and the place where he had turned off the trail exploded with rushing men. They had found his track.

Marten whirled and raced through the tangle of growth in front of him. The rain came down harder, all but drowning out the shouts of his pursuers. He clambered over a rotting log, jerked apart a curtain of low-hanging vines, and slipped through it. The pounding of his heart roared over everything else. He didn’t have a chance and he knew it. God help him when they got him.

The rain and mud made footing next to impossible. He slid and started to fall, then recovered and looked back. He could see the first ones clearly. There were three of them. Forty feet behind him at best. Big, powerful black men in jungle camouflage uniforms. Razor-sharp machetes flailing the thick growth before them. Then one of them saw him and they locked eyes.

“There he is!” he yelled in Spanish, and they surged forward.

Those eyes-homicidal and utterly merciless-and the determination behind them were the most frightening thing Marten had ever seen. In that instant he knew that if they caught him he wouldn’t just be killed, he’d be butchered on the spot.