by Allan Folsom
“Why would you be afraid of the army?” he asked flatly.
“When you are a stranger in the backcountry like we were and there is a lot of gunfire and the priest you are with, a man who very recently told you he had been serving the people here for half a century, tells you to run for your life, I would think it best to do so. I don’t have to tell you that Africa is filled with bloody civil wars and untold massacres and incursions by armed men from neighboring countries. I had no idea who the uniformed men were. So I ran.”
The major glared at him and seemed about to reply when the door suddenly opened and a hawk-faced, gray-haired soldier wearing the same kind of jungle fatigues as the others entered. Immediately the men in the room snapped to attention. At the same time, two other uniformed men came in. One carried a folding chair, which he opened and placed near Marten. The hawk-faced soldier looked at him, then sat down on it.
Immediately the major turned to Marten. “I would ask you to state your name, your profession, and place of residence and then to tell your story once again.” This time it wasn’t a formal request as before, it was an order.
“Of course,” Marten said politely and patiently, wholly aware of the hawk-faced soldier and how completely his presence affected the others. Whoever he was, he was dark-skinned but clearly not a black African like the rest. He looked more than anything like a sharp-featured Hispanic and was older than he first appeared. Fifty at least, maybe even sixty. Moreover, his uniform bore no insignia other than that of the Equatorial Guinea army. There were no service ribbons, no oak leaf clusters or stars or bars, no indication of rank at all. Yet clearly he was a superior officer, a col o nel or even a general. Who he was or why he was here Marten had no way to know. But it didn’t matter. He had been ordered to tell his story once more, and he did, being careful to leave out nothing.
“My name is Nicholas Marten. I’m a landscape architect. I live in Manchester, in the north of England. I came here on a five-day trip to . . .”
The whole time Marten talked, the hawk-faced soldier studied him. Watched his eyes, his hands, his body language, even the placement of his feet, as if something Marten might inadvertently do would reveal more about him than the tale he was telling.
And the whole time Marten ignored him, just looked at the major and repeated what, by now, he knew by heart. When he was done he sat back, his eyes still on the major, praying that was all, that he had passed the test and they would believe him and let him go.
“Thank you.” The major smiled easily, and Marten relaxed. He had done everything they asked, genially and politely. Had cooperated at each step. Trouble was the microphone was still there, inches from his face. What else could they possibly want?
Suddenly the major’s smile vanished and he leaned close. “Where are the photographs the priest gave you?”
“What?” Marten was caught completely off guard. How could they know about Father Willy’s photos? It was impossible; there had been no one there but Father Willy and himself.
“The photographs Father Dorhn gave to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The photographs Father Dorhn gave to you,” the major repeated.
“The father gave me no photographs.”
The major stared at him for a long and very silent moment. Then, with a glance at the hawk-faced soldier, he looked back to Marten. “Stand up, please,” he said.
Marten didn’t move.
“Stand up. Remove your clothes.”
“My clothes?”
“I am becoming impatient.” The major’s bloodshot eyes bore into Marten’s. His face glistened with sweat. The tribal scar covering half of it looked more fearsome than ever.
Marten stood slowly. They’d searched him before and found nothing. What the hell were they going to do now?
He glanced around the room. Everyone in it, even the goat, was staring at him. Suddenly the heat felt unbearable, and for a moment he thought he might faint. Then he recovered. If he was going to convince them he knew nothing of the photographs, he had to do exactly as the major had ordered and do it without fear or insolence. He had to prove he was a man of conviction no matter what they had in mind.
“Alright,” he said finally. Immediately his hand went to his shirt. One by one he undid the buttons, then took off his shirt and dropped it by his side. Without hesitation he undid his belt, then opened his fly, unzipped his trousers, and dropped them.
The major stared at him impassively, then nodded at his under-shorts.
You want those, too, Marten thought. Okay, you got them. Quickly he lowered his shorts and dropped them on the floor.
Now he stood naked, his clothing scattered at his feet. A white man alone in a sweltering, ramshackle room in the middle of a sweltering, ramshackle city, surrounded by seven armed black African jungle fighters, one hawk-faced ranking military officer of unknown nationality, and a goat.
10
5:18 P.M.
“Where are the photographs the priest gave you?” the major said once again.
“I don’t know what you are referring to,” Marten said calmly. “The father gave me no photographs. And as you can see I am hiding nothing.”
“You are hiding what is in here!” The major suddenly jabbed Marten’s forehead with the tip of a massive finger. “What is in your mind, your head.” Immediately he looked to one of the officers behind him.
In a blink the man stepped forward. Marten could see the swift grin, the glint in his eyes. He knew what was coming and that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Still he did his best to cover himself. It didn’t work. The kick from the man’s combat boot drove into his genitals like a piston. Marten cried out and dropped to one knee, gagging, coughing, retching. His head spun. The pain was excruciating, focused nowhere and everywhere at the same time. For a long while he stayed where he was, his eyes closed, gasping, praying for the agony to go away.
Finally he opened his eyes. When he did he found the major squatted in front of him, his sweating face inches away.
“I want the photographs,” he hissed. “The photographs and the memory card from the camera that was used to take them. Where are they?”
What Marten saw in his eyes was pure hatred. Whether it was because Marten was white or because he was getting no information from him seemed not an issue. The major, like those here and the others from before—the soldiers who had slammed rifle butts into the heads of Father Willy and the two young boys and the ones who had chased him in the rain forest—were not so much soldiers as killers. Human life meant nothing. They wanted what they wanted, nothing less. Right now that was information regarding the whereabouts of Father Willy’s photographs and the memory card from his camera, and those were things he couldn’t give them. First, there was no way for him to know for certain whether copies of the photographs or the memory card itself still existed. Even if they did, he had no idea where they might be. Second, they had no evidence that he had seen the photos and were simply assuming it was true. That meant his continued denials of innocence were crucial because if they had any sense at all that he was lying they would torture him until he broke. Once he did, once he told them the truth of what had happened and what he had seen, they would kill him in an instant.
Marten brought his eyes up to the major’s. “I don’t know about any photographs or any camera or any memory card,” he whispered. At the same time, he thanked God that Father Willy had had the intelligence to burn the photos on the trail instead of giving them to him.
“We shall see.” The major grinned cruelly and stood up.
5:22 P.M.
The major went to the table, picked something off it, and came back. It was a tube, maybe two inches around and two feet long, and except for the twin metal electrodes protruding from one end, it looked like some kind of nightstick. It wasn’t. It was an old-fashioned high-voltage cattle prod.
“Holy shit,” Marten swore under his breath.
Suddenl
y hands grabbed him and he was flat on the floor on his back with the major standing over him. He brought the prod toward Marten’s face, then pressed a button near the top of the handle. There was a stab of blue light and a loud crackling sound as electricity arced violently from one electrode to the other on the instrument’s tip. The major grinned and slowly moved the prod down between Marten’s legs to just brush his genitals.
“The photographs and the memory card and you go free.”
Go free like hell, Marten thought. They’d find out soon enough that he couldn’t give them what they wanted. Nor could they let him go afterward, no matter his condition, and have him start talking about what happened, so they’d have little choice but to get rid of him. All he could do was try to buy a little time and think of some other way to get out of the situation.
“I don’t know anything about photographs or a memory card,” he whispered. “Nothing.”
“No?”
“No.”
From the corner of his eye Marten saw movement. He turned his head. The goat was right beside him. One soldier had it by the head. A second lifted its tail. The major touched the prod to the animal’s genitals and pressed the button on the handle. The loud snapping sound of high voltage was drowned out by the goat’s scream as its genitals and the muscles around them contracted in wild spasm. The goat shrieked and kicked wildly, trying to free itself from the iron grip the soldier had on its head. It was no good. The man was too strong. The major smiled at Marten, then stuck the prod between the animal’s legs and touched the button again. And then again. The terrified animal yelped and screamed in agony. Then it kicked up violently, knocking the prod from the major’s hand, jerking away from the soldier holding its head. Then, bellowing and dragging its hindquarters, to the laughter of the soldiers, it circled the room desperately looking for an escape. Finally it hid quivering under the relative safety of the wooden table. Whereupon the soldier who had been holding it walked over and knelt down as if to comfort it. Instead he grinned, drew his pistol, and shot it between the eyes.
“Cena,” the major said in Spanish. Supper. He retrieved the prod from where the goat had kicked it and came back toward Marten.
Marten’s eyes followed the prod, then shifted to the major. “If I knew I would tell you,” he said with all the strength he could manage. “I don’t.”
“That is not a satisfactory answer, Mr. Marten. Besides, it’s early yet. Very early. I’m sure it won’t be long before your memory returns.” Slowly he ran the prod between Marten’s legs, letting it come to come rest at the base of his testicles.
Just then the hawk-faced soldier raised his hand. Abruptly the major left Marten and went to him. A brief, muted conversation took place between them. When it was done, the major nodded and came back to Marten.
“Get dressed,” he said.
Marten glanced at the other man, then looked back to the major.
“Get dressed,” he said again.
A storm of relief rushed through Marten, but he dared not show it for fear this was part of the game. Make him think he’d been spared, then start the process all over again. Quietly he stood and then slowly dressed. Undershorts first, then trousers, then his shirt. The whole time he carefully watched the hawk-faced man, wondering what he’d said to the major and what was next.
In the next moment the major looked to one of the young soldiers guarding the front door. Immediately the man picked up Marten’s passport case from the table and delivered it to him.
“There is a ten-o’clock flight to Paris this evening.” The major put Marten’s passport case in his hand. “You will be on it.”
Marten stared at him, then looked around the room, wondering what they were doing, if this was some kind of trick. There was only silence.
“Thank you,” he said finally and as politely as possible, then started for the door. As he reached it the second young soldier flung it open.
Marten should have taken the gift he had been given and left as quickly as he could. Instead he stopped in the doorway and turned to look at the major.
“What happened to the priest?” he said quietly.
“Dead.” The answer was sharp and stabbed across the room.
Marten had expected it to come from the major, but it had come from the hawk-faced soldier. It was the one and only time he had addressed him, and when he did he locked eyes with him.
“There were two boys—”
“Dead,” the man repeated, his voice cold and flat. “Everyone in the priest’s village is dead. It is a tragedy that no one seemed to know where the photographs were. Certainly one of them would have traded his life, or hers, or”—he purposely emphasized the next—“his mother’s . . . or father’s or . . . child’s . . . for them if they had. It would have been a simple thing.”
Marten said nothing. Then, with a glance at the major, he turned and walked out the door.
5:40 P.M.
11
THE HOTEL MALABO. 6:30 P.M.
Nicholas Marten stood in a tiny shower stall that was crammed, like the toilet, into a corner of his room. Head back, his eyes closed, he let the water run over him, relieved beyond imagination to be free of his army interrogators and on his way out of Bioko. At the same time, he thought of the cold bravado with which the hawk-faced soldier had told him of the village massacre.
How many had lived in that village? Sixty? Eighty? Maybe more. He wondered what was so extraordinarily valuable to the army about those photographs that they would expend so much effort and take that many lives trying to retrieve them.
The only answer that made sense was that they wanted them as proof to the world that an outside force was fueling the rebellion and that their deliberate actions in repressing it—highly criticized by human rights groups, the United Nations, and any number of countries—were justified. Still, if they were so eager to uncover the pictures and had not yet found them, why had they suddenly stopped their interrogation and let him go?
Part of the puzzle might have been the condition of his hotel room when he returned. The place had been thoroughly ransacked. Every piece of his personal belongings gone through, his bed stripped, the furniture turned over. They hadn’t found the photos there, and they hadn’t found them on his person, but that didn’t answer the question of why they had let him go when they could have as easily killed him and buried his body somewhere in the rain forest where a missing man, no matter who he was, would never be found. A missed communication between them? Maybe. Goodwill? Not from men like that, particularly when they knew he’d seen firsthand what the army did to old priests and young boys and boasted about their slaughter of the villagers. So their freeing him had to have been for some other reason altogether. What that was he couldn’t imagine.
7:10 P.M.
Freshly shaven and dressed in a clean shirt, jeans, and sport coat, Marten left his bags at the front desk and headed for the bar. He walked gingerly, his balls still swollen and achingly tender from the field-goal-like kick presented to him by the major’s “specialist.” What he wanted most was to have a gin and tonic, or two or three to kill the pain, and then get the hell out of there on the ten-o’clock flight to Paris. Yet suddenly there was doubt even about that. In the last half hour a tropical storm had whirled in from nowhere. Wind and rain pelted in never-ending sheets. The lights flickered and went off, then came back on. He’d been warned at the desk that the airport might close down.
“For how long?” he’d asked of the white, middle-aged desk clerk.
“For however long the storm lasts, señor. An hour. A day. A week.”
“A week?”
“Sometimes, yes,” the man grinned.
“The airport closes, you make sure I have a room. I don’t want to sleep here in the lobby for a night, much less a week.”
“I don’t know if that is possible, señor.”
“You don’t?”
“No, señor.”
Marten reached into his jacket, took out a small rol
l of bills, and handed him a ten-thousand-CFA-franc note, the currency of Equatorial Guinea, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty U.S. dollars. “Now you do.”
“Of course, señor. If the airport closes you will have a room.”
“Good.”
Marten walked off and shuddered as he did. The last thing he wanted was to spend another hour, let alone a night or a week, here.
12
7:15 P.M.
Noise and tobacco smoke hit Marten like a wall as he walked into the riot that was the Hotel Malabo’s bar, a big, broad room furnished with rattan and packed to the walls with Westerners, most of them SimCo mercenaries and AG Striker employees. Both groups looked like they were straight out of central casting. The SimCo people were your classic badass tough guys, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, black-T-shirt-and-camouflage-pants-wearing, shaved-headed combat veterans from probably a dozen different countries and as many wars. The Striker crew looked like field people—drillers, riggers, technicians, and the like. Most of them still wore their grease-and sweat-stained work clothes, lightweight jumpsuits with a big AG STRIKER company logo stenciled on the back, and unlike the SimCo people, not all were men.
Four women who looked like office staffers, folded umbrellas still wet from the rain hung over the backs of their chairs, sat at a nearby table drinking and talking among themselves, and once in a while looking off toward a hunky mercenary or oil driller. Here and there were unkempt-looking women. They wore low-cut, slit-to-the-thigh dresses like uniforms and took up space at the long mahogany bar or sat at cheap rattan cocktail tables working any man who would pay for their attention.
