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

  “There isn’t much question about that,” said Tilly. “There was a well-known shrine here.” She pointed to a spot on the map. “It was called Jacob’s Column, which was definitely recorded as being under Templar protection through most of the thirteenth century.”

  “And a battle,” added Maryam, feeling slightly excluded from a conversation on a topic she felt some ownership of.

  Tilly looked slightly uncomfortable.

  “I would be a little cautious on the story about the battle,” Tilly said. “Records of actual battles tend to be wildly inaccurate. Keeping a detailed record of events was not the highest priority then. Things tended to be exaggerated, or even invented to suit the needs of the moment.”

  Sparke picked up the map.

  “Do you mind? I like maps.”

  The area they were examining was about twenty miles inland from the coast and from the shading on the map seemed to be very hilly.

  “Do you plan to go there? To the site?” he said.

  “That’s where we are going tomorrow,” said Tilly, trying to hide her excitement. “By helicopter. But the main research will be done the old fashioned way, in amongst the books.”

  “Not so glamorous, then,” smiled Sparke.

  “Well, you wouldn’t think it was glamorous, but it sounds quite nice to me,” said Tilly. “The main archive we will be looking at is actually in the Landesbibliothek in Munich.”

  “The State Library?” said Sparke, not able to hide his pleasure at the idea that Tilly was going to visit the city he called home.

  “Uh huh. They have a good collection of thirteenth-century diplomatic dispatches from the Bavarian Ambassador to Constantinople,” said Tilly. “He was quite the little gossip and sent back mountains of letters to the Duke of Bavaria. His boss had a great fascination for this part of the world. A lot of the correspondence is intact, but not much work has been done on the detail of the letters.”

  “You think there is some reference to the area and the Templars in that archive?”

  “We know there is,” said Maryam, who was not used to playing third place in any conversation. “That’s how we know about the battle. But there might be more.”

  “Hmm, yes,” said Tilly, cautiously. “Certainly worth digging into.”

  Sparke and Tilly exchanged a glance. It was clear that what Maryam was taking as fact, was not seen in quite the same way by Tilly.

  He was about to ask what connection there might be between a battle and the ancient Templar key, which now sat on the sun-dappled table, when his phone buzzed, then softly played a few bars of ‘White Christmas’. He glanced down at the screen and read the message.

  ‘McCafferty on station.’

  Two wheels

  Months of bloody stalemate had turned the campaign into a hellish mincing machine for both sides. The constant shelling and gunfire became secondary in terms of suffering compared to the incredible heat of the summer and the freezing mud and rain with the arrival of winter.

  Sharp rocks constantly tore at uniforms and equipment, and the absence of adequate water for washing made dirty clothes into filthy rags. Time and again, ragged lines of scarecrow figures rose from both sides of the trench line and advanced across no-man’s-land in the face of deadly machine gun and artillery fire. Trenches and hills were taken in the morning, lost in the afternoon, and recovered by night.

  Both sides suffered terrible attrition, but although they were close to their supply lines, it was the Turkish side that was shattered in terms of their ability to keep up the endless struggle. The Turkish Army had been the pride of the ancient Ottoman Empire and it was bled dry on the rocks of Gallipoli.

  Bastian made it back to the beachhead in less than an hour in the armored car. On the way downhill he passed lines of mule trains and troops heading up the line, all equally exhausted, the men dreading their moment of arrival on a front line which would have them in constant range of Turkish guns and snipers from the moment they arrived and for every moment of their stay.

  His race back to the beach had been worthwhile. As soon as he arrived, he found a corner of the cramped signals room and began to translate the captured military communiques. Amongst the orders from their headquarters were references to plans for a major assault on a low hill called, by the British troops, the Bald Man. From its summit, it would be possible to see the beachhead and it commanded an unbroken line of sight along the main supply road to the British front line. If it fell into Turkish hands, they could call artillery at will onto any movement on the roadway.

  Commandeering a signals set, he sent details of the planned assault back to his Navy commanders on the HMS Queen Elizabeth and took a copy to the Army’s Intelligence Chief. After a thorough interrogation by the Chief, he borrowed a camp bed from one of the other Navy officers based at the beach and stole a few hours of sleep.

  He was roused by a voice that he struggled at first to recognize, one he had last heard in Portsmouth when he had been pulled from his cadet training. It was the man everyone referred to as The Boss.

  “Mr. Drysdale-Behier,” said The Boss, “hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  Bastian jumped awake, his eyes bleary and his hair sticking up in clumps.

  “Morning, sir. Sorry, I was asleep.”

  “It’s evening, actually,” said The Boss. “Pleased to see you’ve settled in so well. I think I know someone in the Mess who might be able to find us some decent coffee. Could you join me? I’ll wait outside.”

  Bastian threw on his uniform and spent a few seconds getting as close to being presentable as possible, then ducked out of the tent.

  The Boss smiled as Bastian appeared and the two walked towards the rear of the Mess Tent, which was pitched on the beach under the protection of a rocky outcrop. A hand-painted sign at the front said ‘Gallipoli Savoy’.

  True to his word, The Boss had procured fresh coffee and he and Bastian found a quiet corner.

  “I had no idea you were over here, sir,” said Bastian.

  “Oh, I try to get about a bit. The office gets tedious.” He paused for a moment and then added, “The intelligence you brought back from the lines looks pretty decent. It fits in with what the Army chaps have been expecting.”

  “Glad to be of some value, sir,” said Bastian, fully aware the people like The Boss did not turn up at a front line simply for a chat.

  “Are you happy enough to stay on shore for a bit? We rather thought we might ask you to spend some time with the armored car chaps. They get around more than anyone and it should give you a chance to get a feel for what the other side is up to, chat to prisoners, that sort of thing.”

  “Of course, sir. Happy to.”

  “Good, good. Still need you to find time to send a few lines to Mr. Fellows, when you have a chance. Actual intelligence should go through normal channels, but we are quite keen to get a feel for the state of Turkish morale. What are prisoners saying, captured letters, that sort of thing. Sound all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Having spent months at a metal desk inside the hull of a battleship reading Turkish radio traffic, anything else was a relief, and at least he was not being sent into the trenches.

  The Boss and Bastian spent an hour in conversation, Bastian marveling at the depth of knowledge his boss had about all fronts in the global war. Eventually, The Boss reached into a haversack and presented Bastian with a five-pound bag of coffee beans, and headed back towards the pier where a launch was waiting to take him back out to the Fleet in the gathering darkness.

  Bastian stood in the cool evening air enjoying a few moments of silence. To his left, he heard a familiar voice.

  “The Triumph is not what you call a bad ride, but not my first choice.”

  Light spilled from the nearby mess tent, illuminating a group of young men standing smoking and chatting quietly next to a line of motorbikes. As he walked up, one of the men saw him and brought the rest to attention. Cigarettes fell to the ground.

&nbs
p; “As you were,” said Bastian. He looked at the nearest man. “We met this morning, I think?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m Guthrie, sir. This is Stevens, he was there, too.”

  The man’s Scottish accent sounded strange to Bastian. He imagined his own great-grandfather must have spoken like this man.

  “Glad to see you are both still alive. It seemed unlikely that you were going to make it when I saw you last.”

  “Yes, sir, it was hairy for a bit there,” said Guthrie. “The Ridge can be a tricky spot at the moment.”

  “Matter of timing,” said Stevens.

  Bastian looked at him.

  “Timing?”

  “Yes, sir. Shells around there tend to fall in groups of four. If you see where the first one falls you can time the rest.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” said Bastian, looking at the bikes.

  “Are these things difficult to learn?”

  McCafferty

  The noise inside the Hercules transport aircraft was deafening and the gaping door at the rear brought in a freezing wind that whipped around the half dozen figures standing around a strangely-shaped load on the aircraft’s floor.

  Captain McCafferty was the mission commander. Technically, she could have stayed at base, but for an operation of this size, and with the high level of contact with civilians, she decided that it made sense to be in the field.

  Almost a dozen ships and other vessels were now dotted around the wreck of the grounded ship. Containers that had fallen overboard floated on the surface or lay partly-flooded and formed a straggling line as the current pulled them away from the wreck. From an airbase in Spain, Sparke’s company had leased a maritime surveillance drone, which now kept an unblinking vigil over the ship using high-resolution cameras, sending images to the crisis management system. Sparke was watching this feed on his retina projector as he stood on the balcony of his room, his back to the scenery.

  The container ship dwarfed everything else in sight. The idea that a tiny group of people in a thoroughly unglamorous transport plane could have any impact on something so huge was laughable.

  The crews of the surrounding ships watched as the transport plane circled, then dropped to a lower altitude and began a run which would take it past the nose of the ship, clear of the floating containers.

  An aircraft in flight tries to keep stable by maintaining a level path. If its nose points upwards to climb, it needs more power as the air under the wings effectively spills out. If power is not increased, the aircraft will stall, and fall out of the sky. As the Hercules approached the wreck, it pointed its nose upwards, but to the surprise of the onlookers, it did not climb. The pilots very slowly increased power, just enough to stop the aircraft from stalling, but not enough to create additional lift. It was, in effect, flying in a stall position. In any civilian aircraft, the cockpit would have been a cacophony of alarms as the aircraft tottered on the edge of falling from the sky. The advantage of this maneuver was that the speed of the aircraft dropped to a level that would be impossible under normal flying conditions.

  As the aircraft passed the prow of the ship, the Cargo Master on board released the load which hurtled out of the gaping rear door. Almost as soon as it left the aircraft, three parachutes opened for the few seconds it was in the air, slowing it just enough to stop it being destroyed when it hit the surface of the sea. Seconds later, four Marines wearing wetsuits followed the cargo out of the aircraft. Their parachutes also opening for only a few seconds before they hit the water.

  Within three minutes, the four Marines had freed themselves from their harnesses and swam to the cargo load. Two minutes later, and it was stripped of its cover to reveal a semi-inflatable assault craft.

  The assault craft weaved its way through the jumble of spilled containers until it was parallel to the port side of the ship. Then three rockets fired up the vertical cliff face of the vessel, trailing ropes. Three Marines then started their long ascent. The tiny black figures seemed to walk up the steel wall until they hauled themselves over the edge and onto the deck. As soon as all three were secure, the inflatable reversed away from the hull. The men now abseiled down to positions just above the waterline, then plunged under the water holding black objects. A minute later, all had reappeared and again climbed up the side of the hull. They crossed the deck and dropped down again to sea level on the opposite side, again disappearing under water, holding three more of the black objects. All three men now pushed away from the hull and swam out to the inflatable, which was picking its way through the mass of containers.

  Once the men were onboard, the craft accelerated out to the open sea.

  In the Istanbul hotel room, Sparke heard the McCafferty’s voice break into the crisis center communications network.

  “Detonation in one minute.”

  Dozens of cameras on the fleet now focused on the ship.

  “Detonation in thirty seconds.”

  The rails of every ship were lined with watching seamen and a number of enterprising journalists.

  “Firing.”

  On each side of the stranded ship, three plumes of water erupted, each explosion taking place within a few seconds, but each at a precise time. At first the ship did not respond, the explosions had seemed too tiny to impact such a behemoth. Then the sea around the waterline turned into a swirling froth and the stern of the ship moved as though grasped from below by a huge hand as water cascaded through the six gaping holes. The whole stern was now dropping, disappearing below sea level. The bridge slid under, then the water raced along the deck, lifting ever more containers from their positions and dropping them into the sea.

  The prow of the ship could be clearly seen, the bulbous nose breaking the water and lifting clear. Water was streaming from the skin of the ship as its bow was hoisted high into the air. Pinched hard on the rocks, the ship pivoted faster and faster as the rear of the ship filled until the stern swung down far enough to crash against the sloping seabed. The impact caused the hull to bounce.

  For long seconds, the watchers and the television cameras waited breathlessly. The hull held.

  Perched at an angle of over sixty degrees, the ship was resting on the sloping seabed. Trapped inside, behind the ship’s steel structure, the members of the salvage crew were still cut off from any communication. Sparke knew that they would have been thrown around like rag dolls as the ship tilted.

  Weaving their way through the chaos of bobbing containers, the Marines boarded the ship again and began hoisting themselves up the sloping deck like mountaineers, to a point where they fastened ropes to the sides and again abseiled down to where they knew the salvage crew to be trapped. Instead of explosives, they used the device which McCafferty had called ‘The Key’ and cut their way through the plate steel hull in seconds. The Marines disappeared into the hull.

  Three minutes later, McCafferty’s voice again broke into the civilian communications net.

  “All civilians accounted for. Three injuries, no litter.” By litter she meant that no one required a stretcher to evacuate them.

  A rescue helicopter from one of the waiting ships darted out to the ship and slowly lifted the civilian salvage crew out of the hole in the hull. Once all the civilians were on board the helicopter, the three Marines dropped down the side of the ship by rope to their waiting inflatable.

  From beginning to end, Sparke had been a silent spectator. Now, with the crew rescued, the ship grounded in a way that made it more salvageable and the Marine rescue team heading out from the site, the communications net erupted. Sirens blasted from the watching ships as the news spread.

  Sparke, exhausted by the stress of the event, felt the familiar emptiness that washed over him whenever an incident was resolved. Reality came back into focus and he switched off his screen to find himself in a hotel room. In his absolute absorption in the event, he had not realized that he had been standing in the room facing a wall mirror and he made eye contact with his own refection. He was not comfortable with w
hat he saw: a man who was relaxed in situations where he was making decisions critical to the lives of others, but who found little joy in his real life. Life or death choices for other people came easily to him, too easily, but he was aware that outside of work, he made few real choices about his own life.

  He called Markus in Munich.

  “All clear, Markus?”

  “Yes, all clear,” he said, impassive as ever. “Time to look at salvage options. Want to be involved?”

  Sparke thought for a few seconds.

  “No, I’ll sign off from here,” he said. “Call me if you need me, but I’ll leave this to you.”

  “You are in Istanbul, yes? Going on vacation?”

  “Actually,” said Sparke, looking down at the terrace where Tilly still sat, “I think I might take a few days.”

  Trench

  Thin fog clung to the stark, rocky landscape as the last of the moonlight turned the world into blue and grey shadows. Nothing moved and no sound broke the cold silence. Slowly, with agonizing care, a shadow lifted itself from the edge of a rocky outcrop, and then froze, waiting. Nothing happened.

  After a lifetime of breathless anticipation, a second shadow shifted slightly along the ground, and then also froze. Over to the left, a third shadow moved, this time quickly, as though movement was a pain, to get over and done with quickly. Only the sharpest ear could have heard the hissed rebuke that followed this move. For long moments the three shadows were still, then, one at time, they edged forward, inch by inch, until they had covered the short stretch of no-man’s-land that separated the two lines of trenches.

  With agonizing caution, the first shadow lifted his head slightly above the enemy parapet to peer directly into the trench. The shallow ditch looked little different to his own, filthy and comfortless, but this one was lifeless, the cold night air had taken possession. The second, then the third shadow reached the lip of the trench and looked at the emptiness it contained.