The Quest: A Novel

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 havehidden 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