“Get a boat over there,” said the Captain. “Look sharp.”
Within a few minutes, HMS Didcot’s motor launch was cutting across the harbor carrying a complement of six Royal Marines, armed with rifles and pick axe handles.
As the boat approached the quay, there was a surge of people towards the spot where Bastian stood. The boat unexpectedly veered away and headed back out to sea.
“They’re leaving!” shouted Clarise, from the car, her voice a sob carrying over the heads of the crowd. Bastian looked at the mob of desperate refugees around him. The tiny Navy boat would be immediately overwhelmed if it came too close to the quay. He walked back to the motorcycle and pulled out one of the rifles, and then fired three times in the air. The desperate crowd, already terrified by the fire, now had to face an armed and, apparently, dangerous man. They surged back, away from Bastian and the water’s edge.
The boat from HMS Didcot now sped towards the quayside where Bastian stood alone, surrounded by a circle of terrified refugees. As the boat reached the harbor wall, the six Marines charged up the steps and formed a semi-circle around Bastian. Immediately slipping back again into his Navy behavior, he turned to the senior Marine and pointed into the crowd where his family was stranded in their vehicles.
“Two women, one child, that motor car over there.”
At that, the Marines carved a way through to the car and virtually dragged Bastian’s wife, mother, and child from the car back to the quayside.
Bastian turned and pushed his way to the motorcycle where his father sat in the sidecar. He reached out his hand to help lift his father, but rather than accept it, his father grasped his arm tightly and pulled Bastian down sharply to his own level.
“Bastian, what are you going to do now?”
Letter
Tilly read slowly, translating as she went.
“Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord, 1298. To the hand of the Guardian of this Place.”
“The Guardian?” said Sparke. “You think that was Sebastian? A Templar left a letter intended for him?”
Tilly looked up from the document.
“Let me read this as best I can,” she said, “then we better hightail it out of here and I can do the right thing and get the Turkish authorities involved and you can start making your apologies to whoever you’ve annoyed.”
She turned back to the piece of parchment and read again.
“The man who wrote this left it for the next Guardian. It must have sat here for six hundred years before Sebastian found it.”
“It’s in Latin,” said Sparke. “Could he have understood it?”
“British boarding school and British university in the early nineteen hundreds,” said Tilly. “Latin would have been compulsory. The language is pretty basic, so it’s likely.”
Sparke knew that the more he spoke, the longer it would take to find out what the letter said. He shone his light over the piles of artefacts in the chamber. There were short swords, a helmet with a full front piece in the form of a human face, spears with broad flat blades and pieces of armor. He had spent time with military people before and recognized that what looked like chaos to a civilian, probably made some sort of sense to a soldier.
Eventually, Tilly straightened up from the table.
“This is far from perfect, but I have the gist of it,” she said. “Want to hear it?”
Sparke nodded, and Tilly began to read.
“In the year of our Lord 1298. To the hand of the Guardian of this Place. This letter is from the hand of the Knight Commander of the Order of Knights Templar serving God by protecting His Pilgrims on their Path to the Shrine at Jacob’s Column. I pray you will find this place at peace. In our time, we have brought God’s peace here. The road is safe and no harm comes to those who make the Obligation. It is the peace of the sword, but it is peace and security. To bring peace here, you cannot hide behind walls and you cannot be a dog chasing crows, you must bring the crows to you and then you must bring God’s peace to them. To bring our peace, we built in the place between the first hills at the highest pass, a Tortosa Box and there we dealt with the enemies of God’s Peace. We dressed as Pilgrims and drew in God’s enemies to the Box. When they were inside we slaughtered them in their scores. Those few we left alive, we sent into the hills to carry the warning. We took the toes from these men so that their mutilation would be there for all their lives for others to see.
“The monks cannot cross the threshold. With my own hands, I have built a door to this chamber. None but I have been here. In these Godless times, respect is no longer enough to guard it. If you have been given the key, you have been entrusted to bring peace and protection to this place.
“Before me, many Guardians have safeguarded this place. Many were heathen, but they knew that this would be God’s place and served here until that day arrived.
“There may never be another of our line. There may never be another Guardian, or you may be the last. The End of Days may be soon upon us all. Our enemies are at every hand, our defeats are many and our victories few. May God be by your side and never allow you to forget your duty.”
Tilly stopped reading and looked at Sparke. For a long moment they looked at each other, both aware that for the moment, this room was a secret that only they shared.
“Sebastian,” said Tilly.
“He had been in here,” said Sparke. “He had the key to this room. When he had the chance to escape, it was the only thing he passed on to his son.”
“He must have come back to try and save the monks,” said Tilly.
“He had to come back,” said Sparke. “He had made a promise.”
Final journey
The strength of his father’s grasp shocked Bastian, but the fierce determination in his face was more shocking still.
“Can you leave them?” said his father.
Bastian snatched his hand back and turned to see the young naval officer in charge of the boat waving at him.
“Time to move, sir, the crowd.”
He followed the young man’s gaze at the surging mob around them. Across the harbor, a pleasure boat had been rushed by people desperately trying to flee the flames. As they watched, the boat tilted with the weight of the mob and turned over, trapping scores of people under water.
Bastian reached down to the sidecar where his father sat. He reached into the luggage compartment behind the seat and pulled out a battered cashbox and pushed his way through the growing crowd to the quayside. Clarise stood behind the wall of Marines holding their son. Bastian’s mother waited on the top step, reluctant to descend into the boat.
“I will come when I can,” Bastian said to Clarise.
Her face dissolved into a look of horror when she realized that he was not getting into the boat with them.
“Everything you need is in here,” he said thrusting the cashbox into her hands and reaching for his son. From the pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a heavy key attached to a piece of string and grabbed his son’s tiny hand. He leaned close to his son’s ear and spoke. Over the screams of the crowd and the growing roar of the fire, his whispered words were lost to the terrified boy who only responded when he felt the sharp pain of the string biting into his skin.
Bastian kissed Clarise, pulled off his old uniform jacket and threw it around her shoulders. He turned to the young officer.
“Get them to your ship,” he said, offering no further explanation, then pushed his way back through the crowd towards the motorcycle where his father waited. For a moment, the officer hesitated, the human chain of his men being pushed back closer to the water’s edge. It was only when he heard the roar of the motorcycle leaving that he ordered his men back into the tiny boat. The sight of the boat leaving the quay caused a wail of anguish to erupt from the crowd and several jumped into the water in a desperate attempt to find refuge.
Riding the powerful motorcycle, Bastian pushed a way through the crowd until he and his father were back in the city. The streets in thi
s quarter were eerily silent after the chaos of the docks. Few people were making for the harbor now. Most of those who could make it had already fled there. Some were standing, shocked and powerless, in the city that, until a few days ago, had been bustling and peaceful, unable to comprehend what was happening or what might happen next.
The Greek and Armenian quarters were now almost completely ablaze, but the deserted streets allowed Bastian to open up the throttle on the machine. Towards the outskirts of the city, Bastian saw increasing numbers of Turkish soldiers and Chelles irregulars herding groups of refugees into ragged lines that were being led out of the city. Alerted by the sound of the engine on the AJS, several of them turned towards Bastian and his father.
There was no time to think, Bastian opened the throttle and roared towards the men, scattering them as he rode out and up onto the Pilgrim Road.
Several shots rang out behind them, but none came close. Cursing, one of the Turkish officers picked himself up from the dirt.
“Get the men mounted,” he said to his sergeant, furious, “get the men mounted now.”
Television star
Sparke reached for the remote control and unmuted the sound of the television. Even before the titles were run, Tilly’s face appeared on the screen and, behind her, Sparke could make out the dark entrance to the Monastery.
“We will probably never know for sure what made this site such a uniquely important religious place for so many different civilizations. Since the earliest days of the Bronze Age Hittites over 4,000 years ago, this tiny chamber has served as an inner sanctum, a sanctum sanctotem for at least six different religious faiths.”
The shot faded, to be replaced by pounding theme music and a montage of scenes with actors dressed as Roman legionaries, Greek hoplites, a knight in armor. Finally, a young man in the uniform of the Royal Navy strode across the screen.
Sparke’s attention drifted to the single piece of paper which sat on the couch beside him. A final fanfare of music brought the title sequence to an end and the screen was filled with a corporate logo: ‘Drysdale-Behier Media’. Tilly again appeared on the screen, this time standing in the chamber, now lit carefully.
“Perhaps part of the story of this remarkable place is that we have clear evidence that it was not just a shrine, it was the home and refuge to a line of warriors, guardians who stretch from before 2,000 BC right up to 1922 AD when the last of these guardians almost certainly died close to this spot.”
The screen was filled with a swooping shot of the valley as a helicopter flew the short distance from the Monastery entrance to the Redoubt.
For the hundredth time, Sparke read the letter, its contents now so familiar to him that only key phrases leapt out at him.
“It is with great regret,” began the letter, “...frequent, and unauthorized use of company equipment and resources...actions which have exposed the company to unacceptable legal risks...damage to the good name and reputation of our firm...”
On the screen, Tilly was clearly in her element. She was made for television. Sparke smiled as he saw her face adopt the patient expression she used when explaining complex matters to a novice. Now she was holding Sebastian Drysdale-Behier’s revolver.
“We may never know what happened in those desperate last days in this Monastery and the actions of the last Guardian,” she said. “What we do know is that his motorcycle was found destroyed near an old Templar fortification which had guarded the pass that led to the Monastery. We also believe that there were several detonations around the inside of the building, which may have happened around that time. Is it possible that the building, probably constructed as a medieval killing ground, was used one final time in a desperate delaying tactic to allow the monks to escape.”
He smiled at Tilly’s new expertise of blending fact and supposition, and then he read the last paragraph again.
“With immediate effect your employment has been terminated.”
At the bottom of the page was the signature of Dieter from Compliance.
If you enjoyed this book, then turn the page to check out Peter Sparke’s other adventures in The Templar Vault and The Kaiser’s Navigator.
*** Number 1 Book ***
The last surviving Templar outpost must protect their Order's greatest secret.
As their world is torn apart by the jealous fury of kings, their only duty is to a sacred oath of allegiance to the Order and to each other.
Step-by-step they eradicate their footsteps, knowing that only their own obliteration will guarantee that their duty will be fulfilled.
Eight hundred years later and an international expert in disaster management sets out to prove that the Templars had a last ditch Doomsday plan.
Peter Sparke aims at nothing less than to uncover the last refuge of the Order and the secrets they took to their graves.
'This was a fast paced and very readable book'
'Time, history, geography, adventure, and story all combined in a mix of action and intrigue.'
'The story gripped me from the start and I was fascinated to see how it all turned out'
CLICK HERE to visit The Templar Vault at Amazon.com.
Turn the page for The Kaiser’s Navigator, Peter Sparke Book 2.
Crushed in the Antarctic ice, the wreck of a ship lies seven thousand miles away from where it was reported lost over a century ago. Nearby, the bodies of her passengers and crew wait entombed, frozen in time.
The lost ship is now at the centre of an international race against time played out against the tense backdrop of the South Atlantic as Britain and Argentina jostle for ownership of the seas around the Falkland Islands.
Peter Sparke, an international crisis manager, is brought in to uncover the truth behind the fate of the ship and the enigma of how the life of one young officer of the Kaiser's navy a century ago holds the key to the truth.
CLICK HERE to visit The Kaiser’s Navigator at Amazon.com.
The Templar Key, By Number One Author (Peter Sparke Book 3) Page 20