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Kidnap the Emperor!
JAY GARNET
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph © Stephen Mulchaey / Arcangel Images
Jay Garnet asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008155278
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155285
Version: 2015-11-10
Contents
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
‘Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia, who was deposed in a military coup last year, died in his sleep here yesterday aged 83. A statement by Ethiopian radio said he died of an illness after a prostate gland operation two months ago. He was found dead by attendants yesterday.’
The Times, 28 August 1975
April 1976
North and east of Addis Ababa lies one of the hottest places on earth. Known as the Afar or Danakil Depression, after two local tribes, it points like an arrowhead tempered by the desert sun southwards from the Red Sea towards the narrow gash of Africa’s Rift Valley.
For hundreds of square miles the plain is unbroken but for scanty bushes whose images shimmer above the scorched ground. Occasionally here and there a gazelle browses, wandering between meagre thorn bushes across rock or sand streaked with sulphur from the once volcanic crust.
Even in this appalling wilderness, far from the temperate and beautiful highlands more often associated with Ethiopia, there are inhabitants. Most are herders who wander the scattered water-holes. But some make a precarious living trading slabs of salt levered from the desert floor – some five million years ago the depression was a shallow inlet of the Red Sea and its retreat left salty deposits that still cake the desert with blinding white. Camels transport the blocks to highland towns.
Soon after dawn on the morning of 19 April, a caravan of ten camels, groaning under grey slabs of salt done up in protective matting, set off from their camp along unpaved tracks towards the highlands. There were three drovers – two teenagers and their father, a bearded forty-five-year-old whose features seemed parched into premature old age by the desert sun. His name was Berhanu, not that it was known to anyone much beyond his immediate family.
Yet before the week was out it would be known, briefly, to a number of the Marxists who had seized power from the Emperor Haile Selassie eighteen
