The Templar Key, By Number One Author (Peter Sparke Book 3) Read online

  At this he stretched out his hand towards the monk, who stared blankly at it for some minutes. Eventually, Bastian’s father realized that the monk had no understanding of what a handshake meant.

  “On the outside, we grasp hands when we make a promise.”

  “A pledge?” said the monk.

  “Yes, a pledge.”

  The monk grasped his hand and allowed it to be shaken, and then he dropped it by his side.

  Both men looked at each other. Bastian stepped forward, and raised his hand towards the monk.

  “He is only a child,” said the monk. “He is too young to make a pledge.”

  “He is my oldest son. He does not have the luxury of childhood,” said Bastian’s father. The monk nodded and took Bastian’s tiny hand in his.

  “If you help my father, I will help you and protect you,” said Bastian.

  The monk crouched down to Bastian’s eye level.

  “Will you?”

  Sinking

  “Which ship might that be?” said the Chief Secretary.

  “We’re dealing with an incident off the coast of West Africa,” said Sparke. “The ship is pinned on the rocks and it seems like the only way we can save a team trapped inside is to flood the hull in a very specific way and quickly. I know this is nothing to do with you really, but I thought that you might be one of the few people I could call who might know some people with skills in sinking ships.”

  The Chief Secretary did, in fact, know a group of people who not only knew how to sink ships, but would relish the opportunity.

  “Is this the ship on television?” said the Chief Secretary. “The one that ran onto the rocks?”

  “Yes, “said Sparke. “We need to put a number of holes in her, in a certain sequence, and we need to do it soon.”

  “Would you mind if I put you on hold?”

  “Please, I’ll wait.”

  The Chief Secretary muted Sparke’s call for several minutes, and then reconnected.

  “Peter,” said the Chief Secretary, “I have Captain McCafferty on the line. She tells me that she does have people who can sink a ship.”

  Sparke felt a surge of comfort when he heard McCafferty’s name. She was a Captain in the Royal Marines and she and Sparke had worked together in the past.

  “Mr. Sparke, how can we be of assistance?” she said.

  “Captain McCafferty, nice to talk to you again. Here is our situation: we need to put six holes into the hull a ship. They need to be the same size - approximately three meters wide - but they need to be made in a specific order and at precise locations. Is that possible?”

  “Yes,” said McCafferty, flatly and without hesitation.

  “Good. Now, because of tides, we have a critical deadline. We need to have this done within fourteen hours in a location off the coast of West Africa. Is that possible?”

  “Yes,” said McCafferty.

  Sparke had not known what to hope for from this call, but this was moving faster than he had expected. He was momentarily nonplussed.

  “What do we have to do to make it happen?” said Sparke, after a few seconds.

  “I imagine that’s down to the Chief Secretary, don’t you?” said Captain McCafferty.

  “Mr. Sparke,” said the Chief Secretary, “if you could be kind enough to send me all the details, Captain McCafferty and I will chat them through. Of course, things being as they are, we would need to send you an invoice for all this flying around and blowing things up. Is that all right?”

  “Absolutely,” said Sparke.

  The phone went dead and Sparke spent time working with the incident team, figuring the best way to retrieve the trapped crew from inside the hull.

  Sparke’s phone rang. It was the Chief Secretary and Captain McCafferty.

  “Mr. Sparke, we have done a few sums and it looks like this will have a price tag of about eight hundred thousand pounds. Would that be a problem?” said the Chief Secretary.

  Sparke’s contracts with clients gave him authority to spend several times that amount without authorization.

  “That will not be a problem,” he said.

  “Our team will be in the air in fifty minutes and on target in five hours,” said McCafferty. “How does that fit with your timescale?”

  Sparke did a rapid calculation.

  “That works. But this is a one shot thing.”

  The Chief Secretary coughed gently.

  “I think I will bow out now and leave you both to it. Captain McCafferty has full operational command.”

  “Thank you for all your help,” said Sparke. “We owe you one.”

  “You owe us eight hundred thousand pounds,” said the Chief Secretary, hanging up.

  “Captain, what exactly does ‘full operational command’ mean?” said Sparke.

  “It means that once the Chief Secretary tells me to do something, I can do, more or less, whatever I need to do to get it done. In this instance, it means I get to commandeer a Special Forces cargo aircraft and the best team of naval demolition experts in the world and fly them thousands of miles into the Atlantic to blow holes in your ship.”

  “I always suspected that you were more than an ordinary Royal Marine, Captain McCafferty.”

  “Mr. Sparke,” said McCafferty, “there is no such thing as an ordinary Royal Marine.”

  Mines

  The shock of the first broadside fired by the battleship was unbelievable. The entire vessel surged sideways through the water like a child’s toy. The other vessels in the fleet soon followed and the calm, blue sky was ripped apart by a steady stream of steel shells arcing towards the coast. Their mission was to use their guns to flatten all Turkish opposition prior to a planned amphibious landing, which would clear the way through the sea channel linking the western nations with their Russian ally.

  In his darkened signals room, Bastian paid little attention to the fury of the Royal Navy barrage. He was closer to the experiences of the people on the receiving end. The radio messages coming from the Turkish military told a story of terrible devastation and desperate courage as their small field guns fought back against the forces arrayed against them.

  As Turkish fortifications were turned to rubble, they dragged their guns into the rocks and fired back. And as their supply routes were torn up by shellfire, their ammunition was brought up over goat tracks on the backs of mules.

  Radio orders were sent to Turkish batteries that no longer responded. Patrols were sent to find the guns, but were never heard of again. The rocky shore became a burial ground for the pride of the Ottomans, and the losses in both men and equipment would bring their empire crashing down.

  The effects of the barrage reached a point where it was hitting few targets of value, simply making the rubble bounce. The infantry was sent ashore.

  They walked directly into the mouths of waiting Turkish machine guns. On one of the major landing ships, ninety percent of the first wave, which disembarked through the narrow exit points on the ship, was mown down. Once ashore, the situation turned immediately into a savage stalemate, at least as terrible as the worst of the trenches in Western Europe.

  On both sides a terrible slaughter began on an industrial scale. One of the consequences of the damage done to Turkish lines of command was that radio traffic almost dried up and Bastian’s life fell into a dull monotony of listening in to low-priority traffic from inland.

  He knew that a number of Turkish prisoners had been taken, but no British officers were on shore who could speak their language. He cabled The Boss in England, asking to be sent ashore. The next day he was temporarily attached to the newly-created Naval Brigade, which had been sent ashore to act as infantry and to man the fleet of Rolls Royce armored cars.

  Dressed in an unfamiliar army uniform, Bastian stepped off the boat and into a hell, unimaginable to those lucky enough to be on board the fleet. Lines of wounded lay waiting to be shipped out, piles of stores lay heaped in apparent disorder on the beach, and Turkish shells, fired from hid
den positions, plunged into the chaos.

  As soon as he reported to the commander of the naval detachment on shore he was told that British troops had captured a group of Turkish soldiers who had been sent back for desperately needed supplies. They were carrying military communiqués from the front line and a mail sack full of letters from the troops. Bastian was to go up the line and bring back whatever he found of value.

  Rough signs made from bits of packing crate showed the way to various units. They were the only way to navigate and Bastian got lost more than once. When he finally arrived at his destination, after eight hours of walking, he found it difficult to believe that he was in a Battalion Head Quarters. It was a dilapidated shambles, part cave, part dugout, covered with a layer of rough timber and dirt. The smell was indescribable. Rotting flesh and human waste gave off a suffocating stench. Heavy rains a few days previously had washed Turkish and Allied bodies into the trenches and snipers had made it impossible to clean the debris. In any case, there was too much to lift and no soldier would want to waste effort when it could be spent on improving shelter from the near-constant enemy gunfire.

  Using a borrowed candle, Bastian broke open the Turkish military dispatch bag and started reading. He was not a solider, so he had little way of knowing if the information was of value. Many of the messages were pleas for supplies, ammunition, relief or reinforcement, but there were also messages relating to plans for attack against British lines and warnings of weak spots in Turkish defenses.

  “How can I get back to the beachhead in a hurry?” he said to the Battalion C.O.

  “The best way to get messages back down fast is to get one of the dispatch riders to carry them. If you need to get down, your only real option is in one of the armored cars. Talk to Wimbridge.”

  Bastian saluted and went hunting for Wimbridge. He found him peering into the insides of an armored car. With the strange logic of the military, it had been decided that armored cars were the responsibility of the Navy, so eight Rolls Royce armored cars were on the coast, crewed by sailors.

  “Wimbridge?” said Bastian.

  “Yes sir, Petty Officer Wimbridge,” he said, saluting.

  “I need to get some documents down to the beach and out to the fleet urgently,” said Bastian. “I understand that your cars are the best option.”

  “Don’t know about being the best, but it’s probably the fastest,” said Wimbridge, always wary about his cars being used as taxis by officers. “We need to do a fuel run, so if you want to go, we will be ready in half an hour. We don’t have any passenger seats. Could you man the Vickers, sir?” Wimbridge pointed to the snub, ugly nose of the machine gun pointing from the turret above his head.

  “I fired one once, in training. I might be a bit rusty.”

  “Not a problem, sir. It’s so simple even an officer can use it, as they say.”

  Bastian and Wimbridge climbed into the hot, dark metal body of the Rolls Royce and spent a few minutes going over the basics of the heavy machine gun. Their impromptu training session was interrupted by the sound of deep, rumbling engines outside. Wimbridge popped his head out of the turret.

  “Mr. Stevens, Mr. Guthrie,” he said, “always a pleasure. Heading down today?”

  Bastian looked out from the turret at the two dispatch riders seated on Triumph motorbikes.

  “We heard that your bullet magnet was heading down, so we thought we would chum along with you,” said Guthrie in his soft, singsong Scottish accent.

  They all knew that the two motorbikes and the armored car stood a better chance of getting through if they left together. If nothing else, they would split enemy fire three ways.

  Guthrie, Wimbridge and Stevens busied themselves getting their vehicles ready, and then moved along the short distance to where the cover of the rocks fell away and the roadway opened out into flat, unprotected ground.

  Guthrie went first. To Bastian, crammed into the turret, Guthrie seemed to set off suicidally slowly, then, as soon as the first shots rang out from the Turkish lines, he gunned the bike and began tearing along the rough road at a speed that staggered Bastian. The ground around the road erupted as Turkish shells crashed down from the heights above, seeking out the motorcyclist.

  Immediately after the first shells landed, Wimbridge launched the lumbering Rolls along the road with Stevens following on his motorbike. The volume of fire from the Turkish lines doubled at the sight of the armored car. These cars were hated with a passion by the Turkish troops as they were virtually impervious to anything except artillery and had brought many Turkish counterattacks to a murderous end with their Vickers machine guns.

  The Rolls Royce smashed its way past the rusted skeletons of burned-out trucks in the road, victims of the accuracy of Turkish gunfire. Within seconds the noise of gunfire was joined by the high-pitched rattle of metal against metal as bullets found their target and ricocheted off the armored hull. Soon the sound of bullet-impacts drowned out the noise of the gunfire. It was a continual hail of metal against metal. Turkish soldiers, enraged by the progress of the armored car, stood up out of their trenches to get clearer aim, ignoring the fire that came at them from the British positions.

  Inside the turret, Bastian heaved the Vickers around and began pouring bursts of fire towards the Turkish soldiers. The bouncing of the vehicle made it impossible to aim and Bastian had no idea if he hit anything, but the idea of not firing never crossed his mind. More artillery shells landed and, through plumes of dirt, Bastian could see the other rider, Stevens, take off on his own along the road.

  Now every Turkish gun in the area was aiming for the car, and bullets bounced off its skin like wasps at a window. The drive through the gunfire lasted a lifetime for Bastian; sweat ran down his face as he fired again and again towards Turkish troops, the gun glued tightly to his hands.

  The hail of gunfire ceased, to be replaced with the sound of the roaring Rolls Royce engine. They had reached a point of cover where the road dropped down towards the beach and only a blind shot could find them. Wimbridge pulled the car to a halt and leveraged himself out to check for damage. The two dispatch riders sat on their machines, goggles covering much of their faces and scarves over their mouths.

  Bastian threw back the hatch of the turret, gulping lungsful of air. His eyes were glazed and his right hand was frozen into the shape of the machine gun grip. He looked at the two motorcyclists and Wimbridge below him on the rough roadway.

  “I had no idea,” said Bastian. “I had no idea it was like this.”

  Coffee and keys

  ‘Busy or could I join you. Coffee?’

  Tilly picked up her handset when she saw the message arrive.

  ‘Coffee good’, she typed on her phone.

  Sparke hesitated for a moment, and then walked out of his room and towards the lifts. With the naval demolition team in transit, there was little for Sparke to do. The actual management of the response was being run by the office in Munich, but since the client demanded that Sparke be part of the team, he could not stray far from phone contact.

  Tilly and Maryam sat under the dappled shade of some green leafy plants. They were relaxed and animated and already quite at home in each other’s company. The table in front of them was strewn with maps and papers.

  As he walked towards the table, Maryam stood up to shake his hand.

  “Peter, I was afraid you had already left. Tilly told me you had been called away urgently for work.”

  “Yes, it’s all, ah, in hand for the moment,” he said. “I just need to be reachable by phone. Are you in the middle of something? I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “Actually,” said Tilly, quite serious now, “I wanted to talk to you. Why didn’t you mention the key?”

  “The key,” said Sparke, not sure if he had done something wrong. “I suppose that...I don’t know why. Not my key to talk about, I suppose. Why? Is it important?”

  He glanced down at the table and saw the heavy key lying amongst the papers.

/>   “As far as I am aware, that key is virtually unique,” said Tilly, relaxing. “The Templars had a thing about keys.”

  “They liked them, you mean?” said Sparke.

  “They hated them,” she said. “Knights were forbidden to have any possessions of value and had no right to any sort of private quarters. They were serious about their vow of poverty. Since they had nothing to lock up...”

  “They had no keys?” said Sparke.

  “More or less. The only keys that we know, with certainty, belonged to the Order were either for cash boxes or the main front door to their Houses. This key is too large for a strong box and too small for the sort of lock they would have on a medieval door.” She picked the key up. “The fact that their crest is embossed on the hilt shows that it had real significance, not the sort of thing we see on keys. Weapons sometimes, but keys, never.”

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the pressures of the crisis his team was managing, Sparke found his mind focusing on the strange key.

  “Let me make sure I understand. This thing has three degrees of rarity,” he said. “First, it is a rare thing to have been created at all; next, that it survived all this time; and then, it survived by being passed down through a family which chose to save it when their lives were under dire threat?”

  Both Maryam and Tilly looked at Sparke, surprised by his sudden animation.

  “Yes,” said Tilly, “I think that’s about right.”

  “Interesting,” said Sparke.

  “But not interesting enough for you to help find out more about it?” said Maryam immediately.

  Sparke dodged the question by taking a sudden interest in the papers on the table.

  “Is there a connection between the key and these documents?” he said.

  “Probably,” said Tilly. “These maps show the land which Maryam’s family had around here before they fled.”

  “And you think there is some sort of link to the Templars in this land?”