The Quest: A Novel

just come back to Colonel Gann.
    Purcell said to Mercado, “Puts me right there again, Henry. How about you?”
    “Makes me wonder why we ever left.”
    They all got a laugh at that, and Gann continued his map recon.He glanced at the monk across the room, then joked, “Don’t see the symbol for hidden black monastery.”
    Purcell asked, “Do you see anything that could be a fortress?” He reminded Gann, “Father Armano’s prison for almost forty years.”
    “No… don’t see any man-made structures…”
    Mercado reminded everyone, “Father Armano walked through the night
from
this fortress
to
the spa.”
    “Yes… but what direction?”
    Purcell said, “He mentioned something about Gondar to the north. And I’m assuming the fortress was in the jungle—the dark green stuff.”
    “Yes, possibly… here is something that would be a night’s march to the spa…” He pointed to a small black square identified as “
incognita
”—unknown.
    Gann surmised, “Probably seen from the air and put on the map, but never field checked to identify it.”
    Mercado said, “Could be the fortress. I don’t see any other man-made structures in this jungle valley.”
    Gann agreed that
incognita
could be the fortress, but he advised, “The scale of this map is so large that even these hills, which we know are large from being there, look quite small.”
    In fact, Purcell thought, those hills had almost killed Henry.
    The monk had moved and was now standing across the table, looking at them.
    Gann said, “Don’t assume he doesn’t speak English.”
    Purcell said to Mercado, “Maybe this guy wants to back off.”
    Mercado said something to the monk, who moved a few feet away.
    Purcell said softly, “The priest said he was taken
from
the black… place by the monks and handed over to soldiers of this Prince Theodore, who marched him to the fortress.” He thought back to the spa and to Father Armano’s dying words. “The priest didn’t remark about the march, so maybe it was a day’s march at most.”
    Mercado, too, was thinking about what Father Armano had said. “I don’t know if we can make that assumption… I wish we’d known we were going to be looking for this place. I’d have asked him to be more specific.”
    Purcell replied, “We knew at some point, but there was a lot going on. He was dying.”
    Gann suggested, “Try to recall all that this man said. He may have given you a clue.”
    Purcell and Mercado thought about that, then Purcell suggested, “Let’s back it up. The priest said his battalion had made camp on the eastern shore of Lake Tana.” He pointed to the lake. “His patrol went out to find the place where the Gallas had ambushed the previous patrol. They found the ambush site… maybe the same day… then continued on to find the black walls and tower that the sergeant, Giovanni, said he’d seen on the previous patrol.”
    Mercado added, “The priest said this took several more days… Three? Four? And they were lost, so they could have wandered in circles.”
    Gann said, “I can tell you that you’d be good to make a kilometer an hour in this terrain. So if we assume a ten-hour-a-day march, from somewhere along this eastern bank of Lake Tana, we can reckon thirty kilometers in three days, perhaps, less if this patrol was moving cautiously, which I’m certain they did.”
    Gann took a notebook from his pocket and a pen, which caused the monk to say, “No!”
    Gann said to Mercado, “Tell him I’m not going to mark his map.”
    Mercado spoke to the monk, and Gann measured the kilometers from the map legend on a piece of notepaper that he marked with his pen, then held the paper against the map and said, “This is ten K. But to find the ambush site, we would need to know where this man’s battalion made camp along the lakeshore—which as you can see is about eighty kilometers long—then draw a ten-K radius from there, and somewhere along that radius would be the ambush site. But we don’t know where on the lakeshore to start.”
    Mercado said, “And then they wandered around for several more days to find the black wall and tower—the monastery.” Mercado said, “We’ve narrowed it down a bit, but that is still a lot of square kilometers of jungle to be walking through.”
    Gann said, “That is why aerial recon would be helpful.”
    They studied the terrain map and recomputed their numbers,based on different points along the shore of Lake Tana and different