The Templar Key, By Number One Author (Peter Sparke Book 3) Page 9

  Bastian enjoyed his job, despite the constant danger and the endless discomfort. He did not want to risk things by being too rash with his opinion.

  “Purely based on guesswork and my own opinion?” he said.

  “How long?”

  “Sir, if we are still here this time next year, they will be here, too.”

  Disappointment

  Some people are good at displaying disappointment and anger while being absolutely silent. Maryam Drysdale-Behier was one of them. A central part of her plans for a television documentary about her family’s link to the Templars was to show, with the help of sweeping camera shots and computer generated imagery, how her family’s former land had been the site of an epic battle between Templars and Muslims. Now this appeared to be evaporating in front of her eyes.

  “How sure can you be?” she said to Tilly.

  “Based on the sources we have, I would say that it is highly unlikely that the battle described in the manuscripts took place here.”

  “Are you saying that there was no battle of Jacob’s Column?” said Maryam.

  “No, that’s not what I am saying, but all of the sources are very clear about the landscape where the battle took place. The main one, the Ambassador’s letter, is the only one that has enough detail to make it sound as though it comes from a source who was only one or two steps removed from an actual witness. That letter makes clear references to the fight being in a small tight valley, or mountain pass. This,” said Tilly, waving her hand at the flat ground around them, “is classic high flatland, the nearest hills are about three or four kilometers away.”

  “But you believe the manuscripts are accurate about the type of landscape the battle was fought in?” Maryam’s Australian accent was becoming slightly more pronounced again, thought Sparke.

  “Most likely,” said Tilly. “When you read any historical document, you’ve got to weigh up its credibility. The main source document contains several elements that make it feel credible. If the specific facts stated in that manuscript are not believable, then it would make it hard to understand why we should believe any of it.”

  Maryam was rarely lost for words, but faced with an uncooperative expert, she lapsed into silence. Firing a historian was always a bad idea on any historical documentary: word tended to get out and that could ruin a program’s viewing figures and sales potential.

  “Let me understand,” said Maryam, “you’re telling me that this site is where the Jacob’s Column shrine was, but that any Battle of Jacob’s Column was not fought here, right?”

  “Seems likely to be the case,” said Tilly.

  “Tilly, my family left this country during a terrible war that most people in the West never even knew took place,” she said. “My people weren’t British, they weren’t Turkish, and when they fled from here they were homeless. Thank God for Australia. Your past doesn’t matter there. But I need to understand what my link is to the world before social networking and cheap international flights, and I am going to find it.”

  Tilly had not become one of the youngest professors in the country and a world leader in her academic field by being a pushover. She looked directly at Maryam, but said nothing.

  Sparke was appalled by the silence that now existed between the two women. He noticed the helicopter pilot duck his head down into the interior of the aircraft, anxious to avoid becoming collateral damage. The light breeze created a gentle whistle over the blades of the helicopter. Much to Sparke’s surprise, Maryam spoke first.

  “We have the chopper for another few hours. We might as well cover the rest of the family lands.”

  Sparke watched as Tilly lifted her sun hat off, brushed a stand of hair from her forehead, then settled her hat back on her head, slightly lower over her eyes, and squinted at Maryam.

  “I would follow the north-facing hills first,” she said calmly, “closer to the river and more likely to support some farming activity.”

  Maryam nodded.

  “You get that?” she said to the pilot, fully aware that he had been listening to every word.

  The pilot nodded, fastening himself back to the safety of his seat. The helicopter took off and was skimming over the north-facing hills in the low valley within a few moments. Tilly was peering at her tablet computer and squinting at the landscape trying to match her map to the contours she could see.

  She tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed back the way they had come. With both hands fully occupied flying the chopper, it was hard for him to make her understand that she needed to put on the headset with the intercom. After a few minutes, she understood, and pulling on the earphones and mic, asked him to reverse course.

  He flipped the helicopter over onto its side and retraced his path along the hillside until Tilly tapped him hard on the shoulder again and pointed downwards at a patch of flat ground close to the steep rock face. Sparke noticed that Maryam was not part of this dialogue. The pilot brought the machine into land, swinging its tail around flamboyantly as it touched down. For several moments after they landed, neither Sparke nor Maryam had any idea what they were looking at. As far as they could see, they were facing a nondescript hillside.

  “This has been here since 400 AD,” Tilly said. “Rebuilt extensively, of course, but, as far as we know, continuously occupied until 1922.”

  Now Sparke really looked at the rock. Like one of those trick pictures showing two separate images combined, he slowly began to see some outlines of what Tilly could obviously see so clearly. It was Maryam who spoke up.

  “Is this the Monastery?” she said. “I thought it was destroyed.”

  “Destroyed as a monastery, certainly,” said Tilly. “The building may still be fairly intact, though.”

  “Abandoned monasteries are not part of the story,” said Maryam, recovering her composure.

  “Is your intention to write the story, and then use the facts that support it?” said Tilly. Sparke felt the level of tension spike and focused closely on the rock face, finding it engrossing now for some reason.

  “The background to this Monastery is nothing new,” said Maryam. “It was an Orthodox order of monks. Nothing to do with the Templars, strictly civilian.”

  “It was here long before the Templars were even thought of, and lasted for hundreds of years after they disappeared,” said Tilly. “If anything of historical interest took place in this area, then the monks who lived here probably witnessed it. It often makes sense to gather the information then draw your conclusions from there.”

  Maryam lifted her head and smiled. It was a professional smile that had been honed over decades of cutthroat business competition.

  “How’s this for a plan? You spend a few hours here at the Monastery. The pilot takes me back to Istanbul. I have a video-conference I need to be on. He’ll be back here later this afternoon to pick you up.” she said. “Or, you and I can spend the rest of the day taking potshots at each other.”

  Tilly smiled back. She had no more interest in wasting time bickering and point scoring than Maryam had. A few minutes later, the helicopter was airborne, leaving Sparke and Tilly with a single rucksack and a cardboard box full of water and plastic-wrapped sandwiches.

  As the chopper shrank to a dot in the blue sky, Tilly heard a noise behind her. She turned and saw Sparke holding a piece of flat wood.

  “Didn’t expect to see this in a two-thousand-year-old monastery,” said Sparke, flipping the piece of wood around to face Tilly.

  She squinted at the faded text and read out loud, “Welcoming to The Monastery Experience!”

  Retreat and surrender

  One of the few things that went well in the calamitous Gallipoli campaign was the evacuation. Like a tent collapsing from the inside, the Allied forces folded in on themselves, evacuating thousands of men at a pace so fast and in a manner so quiet that the Turkish troops were unaware that anything was happening until the skies were split with the massive explosions of the Allied supply dumps being destroyed.


  Bastian and his troop were among the last to leave. The armored cars found space on one of the landing ships, but the motorcycles were wrecked and run into the sea. It was hard for Bastian to see the Triumph as only a collection of metal and rubber as it sank with a trail of oily bubbles. The campaign had been a catastrophe for the Turkish forces. As an army they were smashed and never regained the ability to act offensively. For the Allies it had been a fiasco.

  Returning to the routine of life on board was difficult. The flat repetitious regime of watch changes, signals monitoring, writing summaries of the few messages that were worth intercepting, and dealing with the petty frustrations of leading the tiny group who manned the Small Hut signals room became Bastian’s life again. With no enemy surface vessels worth fighting, Bastian spent the rest of the war on ships ploughing back and forth across the Mediterranean, patrolling or guarding convoys.

  When the end of the war was declared, Bastian’s first thought was a rush of joy that his imprisonment on these grey steel ships was coming to an end. World War One had begun as a gradually unfolding calamity: a single shot in Sarajevo was the pebble that began an avalanche that swamped the globe. But the end came so quickly that few expected it. For three years the German lines, which spread from the Channel to the border of Switzerland, had proven to be virtually impervious to Allied attack. Now, within the space of barely one hundred days, Allied forces, spearheaded by the British Army, smashed their way through and into enemy-held territory.

  Like paper houses in a storm, the ancient empires of the Ottomans and Hapsburgs disintegrated. In these collapsed regimes chaos often reigned as inter-ethnic violence erupted, captive nations sought their independence, and ancient vendettas were resurrected.

  Standing outside the Flag Quarters of the Admiral Commanding Royal Navy ships in the Eastern Mediterranean, Bastian wondered why he had been ordered to report to the inner sanctum of a man who was responsible for the lives of thousands of men and vast military resources.

  A junior officer opened the door and Bastian was ushered into the spacious room. On land it would have passed for a comfortable office, although its steel walls and sparse furnishings showed it to be a place of stark functionality. He saluted the Admiral and glanced around the group. Senior officers from the Naval Brigade and the Royal Marines and several Navy men stood or sat comfortably in the few chairs, cups in hand. Amongst them was his own chief. The Boss smiled.

  “Drysdale-Behier, nice to see you again,” he said. “Well, I hope?”

  “Yes, sir. Very well, thank you.”

  “Good, good. Now, we have a bit of a job to do, and we thought we might get your thoughts on a few points, if we could.”

  “If I can be of any help, sir.”

  “You’ve been keeping your ear to the ground with radio traffic from the Turks. What are you hearing?”

  “Well, sir, much of the traffic has been from units and commanders asking for orders. As soon as the Armistice was signed, the Turkish Supreme Command went more or less silent. Things have been difficult for local commanders. We’ve had a lot of communications about local violence, especially with the Armenians, but also between Turks and the Greeks who are still living here.”

  Some of the officers glanced towards The Boss at this, and the Admiral looked up from his tea cup and spoke directly to Bastian.

  “The French, and our Army, occupied Constantinople this morning. We are on course to Smyrna and will there by dawn tomorrow. We will not be landing an occupying force, but we need to secure the port and look after the well-being of any of our own people who are still there.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “How will local Turkish troops respond?”

  “Difficult to say, sir,” said Bastian. “From what I can see, a lot of the Army have lost faith in the old Ottoman High Command and seem to want to keep fighting their local enemies.”

  This was not a reassuring answer for the group and an uncomfortable silence fell until The Boss spoke.

  “Drysdale-Behier, as the Admiral says, there are not the troops available to occupy Smyrna, but we can’t have the place falling apart if the Turks get shirty. We need the Turks to keep things ticking over peacefully, until the politicians decide what is going to happen. You were born there, you know these people. What would you propose as the best way forward?”

  Junior officers were often asked questions by their superiors, but in normal circumstances they were rarely encouraged to propose strategies. These were not normal circumstances, however, and Bastian’s mind raced at the idea of getting back to Smyrna. His family had been trapped there by four years of war and he had heard nothing from them. A ham-fisted approach to occupation could put them at risk.

  “I would suggest, sir, that if we go in and treat the Turkish commanders with firm respect, we have every chance that they will cooperate. We need to be clear that we have a free hand to do as we see fit, but a show of force might not be the best approach.”

  “And what, precisely, would ‘firm respect’ look like, do you think?” said The Boss.

  “A small landing party to discuss the surrender and get their agreement to maintain law and order would make sense.”

  “Send a senior Army officer in, perhaps?” said The Boss.

  “I’m sure that would be fine, sir,” said Bastian, “but, if I could suggest something?”

  “Please do,” said The Boss.

  “Surrendering to an Army officer might reinforce the nature of their defeat.”

  “But they were defeated,” said the officer from the Naval Brigade, who, although a sailor, wore the khaki uniform of a soldier.

  “Indeed, sir,” said Bastian. “I was thinking that, given the circumstances, it might be easier for the Turkish commander to be seen in parley with someone who was not from the army who beat them.”

  “Send a Navy officer ashore, perhaps?” said The Boss

  “That might be an idea, sir,” said Bastian.

  “Yes, indeed, that might be an idea,” said The Boss. “Thank you, Drysdale-Behier. That will be all, I think.” The Admiral nodded and Bastian was dismissed.

  Back at his tiny desk in the signals room, Bastian tried to focus on work, but could not drag his mind away from the idea that he could soon be home. It was only now, with the idea so close to becoming reality, that he realized how hard he had worked to keep thoughts of his family away. His mother, father and two young brothers had been living through the war in their own way and he had never allowed himself to imagine what their lives were like, trapped in an enemy country for four years.

  He had been staring at the same piece of paper for over an hour when his door was opened and The Boss walked in.

  “You did well there,” said his Boss quietly. “The idea of all tramping ashore with flags flying for a big surrender ceremony was a non-starter.”

  “Thank you, sir. I hope I was of some help.”

  “Leaves us with a bit of a problem though,” said The Boss. “Now we need someone to lead the shore party. Needs to be a Turkish speaker, ideally with a bit of local knowledge.”

  “That would make sense, sir,” said Bastian.

  “It’s a volunteering thing, of course. Could be quite risky. Need to draw up a list of possible mugs who might take that job on.”

  “Probably not a long list, sir.”

  “No, not really,” said The Boss. “Any ideas?”

  “Well, if it is not too much of a presumption, I would be happy to volunteer,” said Bastian.

  The Boss nodded silently.

  “Better get some sleep then,” he said. “You’ll have an early start.”

  The Valley

  “This is, what,” said Sparke, “a tourist spot?”

  “Somebody seems to have tried to do make it one. But, by the looks of this sign, it wasn’t any time recently.”

  Near the spot where the sign was lying, there was a fold in the rock face. To anyone looking straight at the hillside it was invisible, but it could be seen when viewed from t
he side. Embedded in the gully the fold created were the remnants of an aluminum ladder.

  Sparke looked closely at the ladder and the steel brackets that pinned it to the rock. He was scanning the top of the ladder, where it reached a ledge. The ladder was certainly unsound, but the steel brackets looked strong enough.

  “Seems pretty solid,” said Tilly as she hauled herself up the ladder. “Bit wobbly around this rung though, best watch your footing.”

  By the time Sparke could speak, Tilly, who was carrying her heavy rucksack as though it was weightless, had reached the ledge. Sparke followed her up.

  The ledge was small, a bit too flat and smooth to be anything but man-made, and the dark entrance-way into the hillside had obviously been shaped square. Tilly handed Sparke a torch and pulled a head-torch on.

  “Were there quite a few monasteries like this, hidden in the hills, or in caves and things?” said Sparke.

  “Quite a few,” said Tilly. “Some still in use, but not many.”

  They walked slowly along a narrow passageway, glancing into empty chambers on either side as they passed. Both were surprised to see light coming from ahead of them. A few steps brought them into full daylight.

  They were standing on a stone balcony, gazing across a gap to what looked like a walkway cut into the stone on the other side. They realized, almost immediately, that what they were looking at was a spiral walkway that started high above them and looped down, through a stone basin, to a broad, deep well of water at the base. Pale light reflected by the water gave the complex an unreal feeling.

  Sparke looked closely at the structure of the building, Tilly at the faint outlines of carvings on lintels and doorways.

  “This place has been repaired and rebuilt quite often,” said Sparke. “Some of the stone is well-dressed and is standing true to vertical. Some of it is a total bodge-up.”