The Hadrian Memorandum Part 1

THE HADRIAN MEMORANDUM.

by Allan Folsom.

1.

WEST AFRICA. THE ISLAND OF BIOKO, EQUATORIAL GUINEA.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2. 4:30 P.M.

Nicholas Marten knew they were being watched. But by whom or how many, there was no way to tell. He glanced at Father w.i.l.l.y Dorhn, his walking companion, as if for an answer, but the tall, razor-thin, seventy-eight-year-old German-born priest said nothing. They kept on, ducking through overgrowth, crossing narrow, fast-running streams, following a dense, nearly invisible trail that snaked through the rain forest.

Now the track turned upward and they climbed higher. It was hot, easily a hundred degrees, maybe more. The humidity made it seem worse. Marten wiped sweat from his neck and forehead, then swatted at the cloud of mosquitoes that had haunted them from the start. Every piece of clothing stuck to him. The stench of plant life was overwhelming, like an intense perfume from which there was no escape. The sharp cries of tropical birds rang through the leafy, sun-blocking canopy above, far louder and more shrill than he imagined any natural sound could be. Still Father w.i.l.l.y, w.i.l.l.y as he'd asked to be called, said nothing, just continued on, walking a trail he plainly knew so well from his half century on the island that his feet seemed to make all the decisions.

Finally he spoke. "I don't know you at all, Mr. Marten," he said without looking at him. Spanish was the official language of Equatorial Guinea, but he used English when talking to Marten. "Soon I will have to decide if I can trust you. I hope you understand."

"I understand," Marten said, and they hiked on. Minutes pa.s.sed, and then he heard a low, rumbling sound he couldn't place. Little by little it intensified, drowning out the sounds of the birds and becoming very nearly a roar. Then he knew. Waterfalls! In the next seconds they rounded a bend in the trail and stopped before a cascade of falls that thundered past them in a rising mist to disappear into the jungle a thousand feet below. w.i.l.l.y stared at the spectacle for a long moment, then slowly turned to Marten.

"My brother told me you were coming, to expect you," he said over the roar of the water. "Yet he has never met you. Never talked with you. So whether you are the man he told me about or someone else who has taken his place, I have no way to know."

"All I can tell you," Marten said, "is that I was asked to come to see you. To listen to what you have to say and then to go home. I know very little more than that, except that you think there is trouble here."

The priest studied Marten carefully, still unsure of him. "Where is this 'home'?"

"A city in the north of England."

"You are American."

"Was. I'm an expat. I carry a British pa.s.sport."

"You are a reporter."

"A landscape architect."

"Then why you?"

"A friend who indirectly knows your brother asked me to come."

"What friend?"

"Another American."

"He is a reporter."

"No, a politician."

w.i.l.l.y's eyes found Marten's and held there. "Whoever you are, I will have to trust you, because I fear my time is increasingly short. Besides, there is no one else."

"You can trust me," Marten said, and then looked around. They seemed wholly alone, yet he had the sense they were being watched.

"They have gone," w.i.l.l.y said quietly. "Fang tribesmen. Good friends. They followed us for a time until I a.s.sured them I was alright. They will make certain no one else comes." Abruptly he reached inside his priest's frock and took out a letter-sized envelope. He flicked it open, slid out several folded pages and held them unopened in his hand. "What do you know of Equatorial Guinea?"

"Not much. Just what I read on the plane. It's a small, very poor country run by a dictator-president named Francisco Tiombe. In the last decade oil was discovered and-"

"Francisco Tiombe," w.i.l.l.y cut him off angrily, "is the head of a brutal, ruthless family who consider themselves royal but are not. Tiombe killed the former president, his own cousin, in order to gain power and reap the riches from oil leases. And rich he is, enormously rich. He recently bought a mansion in California for forty million U.S. dollars, and that is only one of a half dozen he has around the world. The trouble is he has chosen not to share that wealth with the ma.s.ses who remain poorer than poor." w.i.l.l.y's pa.s.sion grew deeper.

"They have nothing, Mr. Marten. The few jobs, when they can find them, are pennies-a-day labor and selling what little food they can grow or fish they can catch. Safe drinking water is like gold and is sold as if it were. Electricity, in the villages that have it, goes on, then off. Mostly it is off. Medical facilities are laughable. Schools barely exist. For any kind of decent life at all, there is no hope." w.i.l.l.y's eyes bore into Marten. "People are angry. Violence has flared often and is getting worse. Government troops react to it with savage, repeated, unspeakable cruelty. So far it has been limited to the mainland and nothing has yet happened in Bioko, but fear is in the air everywhere and people are certain it will soon spread here. At the same time, there has been a large influx of oil workers. Most are from an American company called AG Striker. It is as if something big is happening or is about to happen, but no one knows what it is. Because of the violence, Striker has brought in mercenary soldiers from a private military company known as SimCo to protect its people and facilities."

Suddenly w.i.l.l.y held up the pages he'd taken from the envelope and one by one opened them. They were color photographs printed on computer paper with an electronic date stamp in the lower right-hand corner. The first showed the main entry to a large oil exploration work area. The grounds were enclosed by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Armed, uniformed men stood guard at the entry gate.

"These are local men, lucky enough to have been hired and trained to guard the compound by the mercenaries. If you look carefully"-w.i.l.l.y slid a thin forefinger across the photograph to pinpoint two muscular Caucasian men with buzz-cut hair, wearing tight black T-s.h.i.+rts, camouflage pants, and wraparound sungla.s.ses standing in the background-"these are two of the SimCo men who trained them. Here is a computer-enhanced closer look at them." w.i.l.l.y showed Marten the second page.

The two men were seen clearly. The first was big and brawny and had singularly flat ears that barely stuck out from his head. The second was thin and wiry and noticeably taller.

"I have been an amateur photographer for more than seventy years. In that time I have eagerly stayed abreast of the most current technology. My camera is digital. When the electricity comes I transfer the images to my computer and make prints like these. I have taught many in the local community about photography."

"I don't understand."

"One night a young native boy asked to borrow my camera. He had done it before, and so I let him take it again. Then I became curious about what he was doing and asked him. 'Big bird in jungle,' he said, 'come very early almost every day to different places. Tomorrow I know where it come.' What kind of big bird? I asked. He said, 'Come and see,' and I went with him."

Now w.i.l.l.y 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.

w.i.l.l.y 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."

w.i.l.l.y'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 a.s.sault 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 a.s.sume it is the reason you have come. To find out." Suddenly w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y'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 w.i.l.l.y 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!" w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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!"

2.

Marten hesitated, then turned and ran, rus.h.i.+ng madly through the tropical downpour and back up the trail he and w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y reached the young boys. Immediately soldiers jumped from it. As they did, w.i.l.l.y stepped in front of the boys, trying to protect them. In answer, a rifle b.u.t.t was slammed against his head. The boys screamed as he fell and tried to fight the soldiers. Simultaneous rifle b.u.t.ts. .h.i.t 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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. G.o.d 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.

He ran on, the jungle as thick as a web around him, as if the rain forest itself had joined the enemy. Behind him came more shouts and then more still. They were closing in, and fast.

"My G.o.d," he breathed. "My G.o.d!"

His lungs were on fire; his legs had nothing left. He was starting to turn, to look back, more out of instinct than anything else, when suddenly the ground gave way beneath him. In a blink he was plummeting down a steep embankment. Trees, ferns, vines, foliage of every kind flew past. He tried to dig in his heels, to get some kind of purchase that would slow him. At the same time, he reached out, frantically trying to grab hold of anything that would break his fall. Nothing did. The rain-soaked soil was so slick it might well have been ice. He went faster. Then faster still.

Suddenly his right arm circled a vine, and he pulled it in tight. There was a wrenching jolt and he stopped, face up against the sky. For the briefest moment he clung there, the tropical rain was.h.i.+ng over him. Then he let out a huge breath and looked down. His legs stretched out over nothing. He had come that close to going over the edge and plunging into whatever was below. He flashed on the cascade of falls he'd seen when he'd been with Father w.i.l.l.y less than an hour before. Remembered looking down and seeing them disappear into the jungle floor a thousand feet beneath. If that was the terrain here, he had come within inches of his death.

Suddenly his chest heaved and he made some kind of animal cry, half sheer horror and half release. From somewhere far above he heard the voices of the soldiers. They were rough and raw and urgent. He had no idea how far he had fallen or if there was a way they could work around and come at him from the side or if they had ropes and would just rappel down to where he was.

He looked to his left and saw another vine. Beyond it was another. If he could use them to move across the face of the cliff or steep hillock or whatever it was, maybe he could find solid footing on the other side. If so, he might work his way into the jungle and hide there until darkness came. Something, he estimated, that would occur in no more than two hours.

He took a deep breath and grasped the vine tightly. Another breath and he swung toward the one just beyond it. He reached it and grabbed hold, then carefully tested its strength. Satisfied, he let go of the first vine. He repeated the procedure once and then again. Now he could see his destination, the edge of the ravine into which he had fallen. The rain came down harder. If the soldiers were still up there, he had no way to know.

Another breath and he swung again, almost reaching the far side before the momentum pulled him back. He tested the vine and swung once more. Closer this time, but not quite. Another swing and he almost had it, his fingers brus.h.i.+ng the shrubbery that lined the edge before his momentum carried him back.

"Easy," he breathed and swung again. This time he went a little further. The shrubs were right there. He reached out, grabbed hold of the closest plant, and-suddenly there was a sickening jolt as the vine pulled free of the soil above. For the briefest instant he hung in midair; then came a shower of rocks and mud and he plunged backward into nothing.

He heard himself scream as he fell. For a second he thought he saw water, a fast-rus.h.i.+ng stream cutting through the jungle far beneath him. He kept falling and falling. Then he hit something hard and everything went black.

3.

Seconds or minutes or days pa.s.sed before Marten opened his eyes and looked up. He was alive, he thought, and wet and moving. The night sky above, what little he could see of it through the thick canopy of trees, was bright and starlit. Then he realized that he was in a river of some kind and the current was carrying him downstream.

It was then he remembered Father w.i.l.l.y and the photographs and the soldiers, his mad escape through the jungle, the vine and its pulling free, his terrifying fall. The thing he had hit hard, that had knocked him unconscious, had been the river; water, so delicate while drinking or bathing, so like concrete when your body hits it at high speed and from a distance. And now, so obstinate when you tried to navigate through it. What he had to do was to swim to one sh.o.r.e or another, then take stock and see if he was really alive or if this was all some kind of dream after death and the place he was trying to navigate was the netherworld.

THURSDAY, JUNE 3. 12:12 A.M.

Marten read the illuminated face of his watch. Somehow he had reached the riverbank and crawled up it in the dark. How far he had come he didn't know. His only reference was the sound of rus.h.i.+ng water not far away. For a long moment he lay there doing little more than breathing. Then slowly, deliberately, he moved his right arm and then his left. Then one leg and then the other. Each move had hurt, but as far as he could tell nothing was broken. Now he took stock of the rest. There was a long raw sc.r.a.pe on his right leg that ran from just below his knee to his ankle. His left elbow and forearm were raw as well, the same as his forehead at the hairline. His lightweight tropical s.h.i.+rt and trousers were both torn but serviceable; his travel pouch that held his pa.s.sport and small travel wallet around his neck was still there. His hiking boots, while soaked through, were still on his feet.

He sat up and listened, wondering if the soldiers had been able to follow him. If they were out there now in the dark, closing in through the thick growth of the jungle that lined the riverbank. He heard nothing but the distant chatter of a night bird. Again he looked up through the trees. As before, he saw starlit sky. Then the thought came that he had no idea where he was or which way the river flowed, east or west, north or south.

Bioko, he knew, was an island in the Gulf of Guinea. That meant that whatever waterway he had been swept along would eventually run into another, larger channel that would lead to another and then to the sea itself. If he could follow it and reach the sh.o.r.e he might find a village that had a boat he could hire that would take him north to the capital city of Malabo and the Hotel Malabo, where he'd left his things and where he might learn the fate of Father w.i.l.l.y, and then, as quickly as possible, get on a flight back to Europe.

Marten pushed himself to his feet and walked twenty or so yards back to the river's edge. Judging the direction of the current, he moved off in the dark, hugging the riverbank and following it toward what he hoped would be the sea.

4.

SIMCO HEADQUARTERS. MALABO. 12:23 A.M.

The always punctual Conor White sat in the small darkened office near the front of the large motor home that served as both his temporary company headquarters and, in the rear, his private living area. His computer screen aglow in front of him, he waited for twelve twenty-five, the time his party in Virginia would be ready to receive the secure e-mail he was about to send.

12:24 A.M.

White tapped his fingers in antic.i.p.ation. They'd lost power earlier in the evening because of the storm that had twisted over the island, coming on land in the south and then retreating back to sea only to slam into the north several hours later. Immediately the SimCo compound's backup generator had kicked in. Then the power had come back on and the generator had been shut down. None of this was new to Conor White, president and CEO of SimCo, the man in charge of the private security company's four-hundred-man armed force in Equatorial Guinea and its seventy-man contingent in Iraq. At forty-five, the powerfully built, six-foot-four White, with his chiseled good looks and dark razor-cut hair, could still be a model for the modern professional mercenary soldier. A former col o nel in the British army's SAS-the Special Air Service Regiment-he'd formed his first private military security firm, Argosy International, eight years earlier in the Netherlands, selling it as a "military security company" that provided what he referred to as "operational support to legitimate governments and companies around the world." Since then he'd built Argosy into a thousand-employee firm with satellite bases in five different countries.