The Hadrian Memorandum by Allan Folsom Page B

his going there now, and then on to meet with Ryder in Iraq, would only make it look as if he knew there was trouble all along and was trying to get everyone on his side before it blew up.
    “If somehow the photographs are made public before we get them, it won’t be AG Striker that’s under Joe Ryder and the Justice Department’s laser beam, it will be Hadrian and SimCo.”
    Wirth went to the mesquite-topped bar in the corner, poured himself a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue, and drank it in one swallow. Then he locked eyes with Arnold Moss and swore an oath.
    “I am not going to lose the Bioko field, Arnie. Not to Hadrian. Not to Conor White or Joe Ryder. Not to Washington. I’m not going to lose it to anyone.”

16
    AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 959, MALABO SAINT ISABEL AIRPORT
    TO PARIS, CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT.
    STILL THURSDAY, JUNE 3. 10:30 P.M.
    The seating in the economy cabin of the Airbus 319 was three and three divided by a center aisle, and the four-man army patrol that had escorted Marten and Marita and her people to the airport had commandeered one complete row for them. Window to aisle on the far side were Marita, Rosa, and Ernesto. Window to aisle on the other were Marten, Luis, and Gilberto. The flight had taken off during a lull in the storm, and the cabin lights had been lowered shortly after that. Save for the occasional passenger using an overhead light to read or work, most of the passengers slept, more out of relief to have escaped a long weather-related delay in Malabo than anything else.
    Of them all, probably none was more thankful than Marten. Emotionally drained and enormously relieved to be airborne out of the army’s grasp, he only now realized the depth of his exhaustion. He’d been on Bioko for barely five days, but it seemed a lifetime. Still wired and restless, he tried to sleep, but it was impossible. Across the aisle, he could see the red-haired Ernesto awake, too, listening to something over a headset. A deep exhale and he turned to look out the window in time to see the Airbus break through the lingering cloud deck into a clear, moonlit night.
    10:38 P.M.
    He lay back and closed his eyes once more. They were still hours from Paris, and he wanted to sleep for as many of them as he could. To escape, for a time at least, everything that had happened in the last days.
    Two minutes passed. And then four. And then eight. Marten sat up. Sleep wasn’t going to come and he knew it. Again he looked out the window, watching as the plane banked, beginning its turn over the island. The darkness below played against the quiet whine of the engines, and for a moment he thought the combination might lull him to sleep. Then he caught sight of three reddish points of light on the ground. They were probably twenty or more miles apart in what should have been the deep black of heavily forested land. In his mind there was no question what they were. Burning villages. If he was right, either the insurrection was escalating and moving quickly north, or President Tiombe’s army was taking preventive action and destroying suspected rebel townships in a show of force. Maybe it was both. But whatever was happening, hundreds of people were being killed, and the rebellion—justified as it might be against Tiombe and his brutal, corrupt regime—was being made all the worse by Conor White’s supplying of arms to the insurgents because the army’s massive response to it was so barbaric. In Father Willy’s words, “extreme, even savage cruelty.” In Conor White’s, “The army is literally slaughtering suspected insurgents along with their friends and families, the old and women and children included, and afterward burning their villages to the ground.” To Marten it seemed as if the war were being purposely escalated on both sides. The question was, why and why now?
    What had President Harris told him in England barely a week earlier? “ Father Dorhn has been in Equatorial Guinea for fifty years. If anyone knows