In the period following Bastian’s trip to the Monastery with his father, their company had made a series of spectacular finds in the mountains and two new mines had already been opened. With the massive new demand for ore, the mines had become of immense value, especially to Greek investors keen to put their stamp on the lands seized by their Army in Turkey. In Athens, the talk was all about the new Greek Empire. The Greek King had arrived in Smyrna to take personal command of his Army in their final push to destroy the last Turkish resistance.
Bastian and his father had travelled frequently along the old Pilgrim Road, up through the High Pass to the valley where the Monastery lay and where the mines were located. The new mines had paid for the road to be rebuilt, so the trip was no longer a major expedition. Despite this, he and his father still used the AJS motorcycle outfit for the journey.
Clarise picked up a newspaper from the table. It was filled, as always, with war news.
“Will the war end soon?” she said. “I am sick of the whole thing.”
“The Greek papers seem to think it’s already over,” said Bastian. “Perhaps they are right.”
“Now you are being annoying. You were in the war, you must have an opinion.”
Bastian, like millions of men around the world who had survived the war, rarely spoke about his experiences. His uniform and medals lay upstairs, forgotten in a cupboard, although he habitually carried a weapon when he rode up to the mines.
“All right, here’s what I think,” said Bastian. “The Greeks have pushed the Turkish Army right back across the desert. Everything the Greeks need, the food they eat, all their supplies and ammunition and men, even water, has to be hauled overland to the front line. The Turks have been beaten in virtually every fight they have been in, but now they are holed up in their own hills. They have supplies close by and are on their own turf. From what I read in the British and French newspapers, they are now led by some of the Generals who led the Turkish Army in Gallipoli.”
Bastian paused, thinking back to the countless Turkish prisoners he had interrogated during the war.
“You can spend all day killing Turkish soldiers, but you will be wasting your breath convincing them they have lost a war on their own ground.”
Clarise looked at their son, struggling to manage the glass, totally absorbed in concentration.
“Bastian, if we did ever leave here, if we had to live somewhere else, where would we go, England?”
“England? God no. Have you any idea how much it rains over there? The food is terrible and there is no room to breathe.”
He thought for a moment.
“When I was in the Navy, I met a lot of men from Australia, soldiers. Good people, they laughed a lot and they didn’t care if your father was a duke or a butcher.”
“Australia?” said Clarise. “Sounds very wild.”
“Thoroughly uncivilized, I would think,” said Bastian. “Ideal for our young wild man.” Bastian pointed towards their son who had clambered up on a chair and was now dangerously stretching across the table, pulling the tablecloth bearing the tray of lemon fizz towards him.
As Bastian, Clarise and their boy were laughing on the sun-filled veranda of the family house, hundreds of miles away, the Greek Army was about to be annihilated.
Food and supplies were scarce, even clothing was in short supply and men were locked in a constant battle against the cold and heat of the Anatolian summer. High above them, looking down from the hills, the revitalized remnants of the Turkish Army watched and waited, training, building their own supplies and preparing for their vengeance.
For the Turks, there was to be no negotiation, no surrender of any part of their homeland. They had only one aim - to drive the Greeks into the sea. And from the most humble private to the Turkish General Staff there was only one thought:
“To the Mediterranean.”
The Valley
The road from the city up to the hills was a modern highway. Then it became a farm road. Eventually it turned into a broad dirt track, rough and unpaved, just broad and level enough for the rented Land Rover to keep up a decent speed.
After hours of steady climbing, Sparke halted the car on the crest of a hill. Behind them they could still see the sea and the coastal plain around what had been Smyrna until its name change to Izmir. Ahead of them, the road wound its way deep into the hills. Just visible, where the road disappeared around a bend, was the building Sparke and Tilly had become used to referring to as ‘The Redoubt’.
“How long would it have taken pilgrims to walk this far?” said Sparke.
“The whole trip to the shrine at Jacob’s Column took twelve days to walk, each day named after one of the apostles. Allowing for rest days, I would guess that it took about four days to get this far. As far as here, they would have been fairly safe, but from this point on it was bandit country.”
“Logical place to build a small secure fort then?” said Bastian.
“If it ever was a fort,” said Tilly. “I sent photographs from our last visit to some colleagues. They pretty much all say the same thing. Every part of its design and construction indicate that it was based on the inner defenses of a castle, a Killing Ground.”
“Somebody must have thought there was logic to it,” said Sparke.
They climbed back into the Land Rover and headed to the Redoubt. This time they spent more time walking around the outside of the building, Tilly explaining why it was flawed as a defensive position.
“Look, there is even a deep stream-bed that runs right towards the walls. Assuming that was there at the time, it would have been a dangerous weakness, and attackers could approach to within fifty yards of the place unseen.”
They walked towards the deep cut in the stony ground where endless years of water had carved a channel perhaps six feet deep and three yards across.
“What’s that?” said Tilly, spotting a tangled mess of rusted metal wedged into the rocks. He and Tilly clambered down the steep slope to where the object had been jammed between the walls.
“It’s nothing much now,” said Sparke, “but once it was a motorcycle and sidecar.”
He brushed the dust from the tank of the machine. Badly faded, but still legible was a symbol, made up of three letters.
“AJS,” said Tilly. “Mean anything to you?”
“Never heard of it. Looks complicated, though,” said Sparke, running his hand across the twisted collection of levers that stretched along the handlebars.
Tilly crouched, and started taking photographs of the wrecked machine.
“Wolverhampton,” she said suddenly, standing on the other side.
“Wolverhampton?”
“Right here,” she said, snapping away, “it says, ‘Wolverhampton, England’ on the sidecar. See if you can find a plate or something with a serial number on it.”
“Here’s something,” said Sparke. “It’s loose.”
Sparke pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and snapped the metal plate from the body of the machine. He held it up to the light, wiping away layers of grime.
“Should be legible if we can get it cleaned up.”
“It’s not normally a good idea to rip things off of an artefact,” she scolded. “Even a recent one.”
She peered closely at the plate. The numbers had been deeply punched on to its surface.
“How old do you think this thing is?” she asked Sparke.
“Wild guess, early 1920’s,” he said.
Tilly looked at the machine and nodded.
“We should be able to find out easily enough.”
The two walked into the Redoubt, Tilly taking endless photographs.
Sparke spent the time looking at the strange scorch marks on the walls. They were of similar size and each was at the same height of the wall. He took is pen knife and scratched slivers of the blackened stone onto a piece of paper which he carefully folded.
After a few minutes they walked back to the Land Rover and drove downhill into th
e valley, towards the Monastery, Sparke again unable to see it until Tilly told him to stop. They stood at the foot of the hillside, looking up at the dull brown rock that almost completely hid the Monastery from view.
“How old do you think this place is?” said Sparke.
“We know it was a monastery from at least the fifth century AD but it was already well established then. In all likelihood it was created by early Christians looking for a refuge from persecution on the coast.”
“Who was persecuting Christians in the fifth century? The Roman Empire was pretty much done by then, wasn’t it?”
Sparke recognized the half smile that Tilly got when she was about to prove him wrong on something.
“The people who ran the Roman Empire in this neck of the woods never got that email,” she said. “They saw themselves as Roman long after the city of Rome was overrun. Anyway, if they were being persecuted it would probably have been by other sects of Christians. These monks were Syriac Christians, not your common or garden Greek Orthodox style. Persecuting them was a hobby for a lot of people.”
Tilly hoisted her rucksack onto her back and began to haul herself up the rickety ladder.
“If I was to take a wild guess, though,” she said, “this place predates the Monastery. I mean, a natural spring in an arid area, protected by steep slopes. Too good to ignore, right?”
“Right,” said Sparke, following her up the ladder with a great deal more caution than she was showing. He was carrying a rucksack that kept him off balance. Last time they had been here they had only a few flashlights. This time he had come equipped.
Sparke’s research had shown that the attempt to turn the Monastery into a tourist attraction had been part of the Turkish tourism boom of the early 1980’s, but the company behind it had run out of cash before any real work had even begun.
They stood on the stone ledge that formed the entrance to the Monastery and Sparke pulled metal boxes from his sack.
“What do you have there?” said Tilly.
“Oh, just some boys’ toys,” said Sparke. “You know me, a sucker for technology. This thing here is a room scanner, just a basic laser measurement tool. You switch it on and the little bit on the top swivels round and measures the size and shape of the room. We take the output from that and it builds a 3D model of the whole place for us.”
“And that?” said Tilly, pointing at a black box which Sparke laid on the ground.
“Cavity sensor. It’s used in mine rescue to find out if a rockfall has any large spaces inside it. Put it against a wall and it tells if you’re looking at solid rock or if there’s any empty space behind it.”
“Neat toys,” said Tilly.
Sparke smiled.
“Let’s get to work,” he said, as they entered the ancient complex.
The silence of the Monastery was shattered by a sound that had probably never been heard there before: the sound of an incoming call on a cellphone, specifically, the ringtone Sparke’s phone used only for calls from Karin.
“Hello, Karin?” said Sparke, puzzled.
“Peter, are you in Turkey?” she said without preamble.
“Yeees,” he said slowly, wondering how she could have known.
“We have received a call from our legal team. There is a court order being issued against you in Istanbul. I don’t know what you are doing, but you had better stop it.”
Collapse
The Greek Army, high in the desert, collapsed in a whirlwind of chaos and slaughter. Since the Greek invasion, the Turks had lost almost every battle as the Greeks advanced deeper and deeper into the high plateau of the Anatolian highlands. Now, with the Turks on their last line of defense and only a few days march from their own capital, they sprung back at their tormentors. For months they had scrimped and saved every boot and bullet. Every Turkish household had been ordered to clothe a soldier. They had surrendered every inch of ground which they could not easily defend, and they had trained, trained and trained, waiting for this one chance to reverse three years of almost endless defeat. When they were ready, they attacked.
The Greeks were shattered by the sudden violence of the assault. Hungry and demoralized, they scattered before the Turks. Those too slow to flee were captured, whole battalions and even an entire division surrendering en masse. Those who stood and fought were slaughtered. Ragged columns of Greek troops were overtaken by Turkish cavalry and rounded up like cattle.
In Smyrna, the Greek language newspapers continued to publish stories of victory, but in the city’s cafes the western journalists had only one story to tell: there was no news at all from the front line, the Greek command had ceased communication, and the flow of wounded from the front to the port had stopped.
Unwilling to believe any newspapers, Bastian and his father had taken the AJS motorcycle out along the main road from the coast. They had watched shattered remnants of the Greek Army limp back towards the city, desperate to escape their pursuers. Bastian had seen horror and defeat in war, but he had never seen an army broken and scattered like this.
Despite the warning signs, the population of the city was calm. The harbor was filled with warships from western powers. Over twenty grey cruisers and destroyers from France, Italy, America and Great Britain sat, still but deadly, in the port, their guns easily powerful enough to deliver devastation to any threat. Quietly, and without fuss, the ships removed the covers from the muzzles of their big guns, and waited.
Those citizens from western countries felt they had little to fear. Many had lived through the war when they were enemy aliens under direct Turkish rule and had suffered little. Also, the fleet of western warships in the harbor served as a major source of comfort.
For the Greeks and Armenians of the city, the story was different. Fear rippled through the population. Every passenger ship leaving the port was now full and berths on board had started to change hands at exorbitant prices. Still there was no panic.
Suddenly, remnants of the Greek Army flooded the city; a tide of men, many without leaders or weapons.
Bastian stood on the quayside watching a Greek troopship loading escaping soldiers. As the troops hurried up the gangways, he noticed that the ground where they had been formed up was now littered with discarded equipment. Throughout the city, uniforms and even rifles were to be found in alleyways as soldiers deserted and tried to blend in with the local population.
Bastian quietly picked up two of these weapons with several pouches of ammunition and hid them in the sidecar of his motorcycle.
After several days of chaos, there was a final flurry of activity at the harbor as the survivors of the Greek High Command arrived from the collapsing front line and scrambled aboard the final troop ships. Their staff cars sat with their doors open, abandoned on the quayside. Scores of stragglers wandered round the city, many begging local Greeks for civilian clothes.
Bastian and his father watched the collapse impassively from their motorcycle combination.
“They won’t defend the city?” said his father. “They have plenty of troops and they control the harbor.”
“They have no troops, none that they can count on,” said Bastian. “They’re not just defeated. They’re beaten and they know it.”
For a few hours, the city lived in a terrible limbo. The Greek Army had fled, the harbor was filled with western warships, and the doors and windows of every house were barred. Then, the same day that the Greek Generals had fled, the first Turkish mounted troops arrived.
Bastian made sure the house and the offices of the company were secure, and then rode to the outskirts of the city. He sat on his machine watching the cautious approach of the first Turkish troops. Intrigued by the bike, a young Turkish Captain rode towards Bastian.
“Greeks. Go?” he said in poor English
“The city is open,” said Bastian in Turkish. “The Greek Army has left.”
“Good, the boys are tired,” said the officer, nodding towards the line of horse soldiers he commanded. “They need
a rest. Is the place a mess? I don’t see any fires.”
“Not so much. Everyone is tired, like your boys,” said Bastian.
The officer nodded, then looked at Bastian, smiling.
“You speak good Turkish. Good, now this is proper Turkey again. Everyone in Kafir Izmir will speak Turkish.”
The phrase sent a chill through Bastian. Izmir was the Turkish name for Smyrna and the word ‘kafir’ meant ‘unbeliever’. For many Turks, the very existence of Smyrna was a stain on their nation. It was city of foreigners, a city of unbelievers, something to be resolved.
Bastian had seen the smoke from the villages the Greek Army had retreated through. He knew those that were ethnically Turkish had rarely escaped the torch and the fury of a defeated army. These Turkish troops had advanced through the scorched embers of the homes of their own people.
Bastian gunned the AJS and headed back to his family.
Court
“It’s the Turkish equivalent of a restraining order,” said Sparke, after he had hung up the phone. “It orders me not to enter any Turkish government property or historical site, or to request copies of any documents relating to what it calls ‘Abandoned Properties’ without court permission.”
“Where did that come from?’ said Tilly. “I mean, why would somebody want to stop you from doing any sort of research and, what’s more, find a way to get a court to make sure you can’t?”
“My fault,” said Sparke. “I never made any attempt to be subtle. I just called the few people I could find and asked for their advice. I must have stepped on someone’s toes by accident.”
“You don’t believe that someone is trying to interfere with research about events eight hundred years ago, surely?”
“No, but events less than one hundred years ago might be a problem. One of the first people I spoke to, a guy called Oktay in Istanbul, was pretty defensive when I asked him about it. Maybe he spoke to someone in the Turkish Government. Anyway, whatever it is, there’s a court order out there with my name on it. Also, my company is pretty pissed off that they contacted me through my work address. Another reason to think it was my pal, Oktay.”
The Templar Key, By Number One Author (Peter Sparke Book 3) Page 17