by Boston Teran
The Armenians spread out among the ruins and dismounted. The priest rejoined John Lourdes and the guide. They remained mounted to maintain order and command as long as possible, or until they were dead.
The first wave of horseman broke over the rise, the next poured across that tiny bridge, or leapt the pipeline trench. Rittmeister Franke took up a position from where he could survey the isthmus. They had committed themselves to finality.
From the western edge of the isthmus there was an explosion. A concussion went through the bones of the earth and the ground beneath the riders shook. Whorls of smoke and consumed oil rose above the peninsula in a hellish cloud. Storage tanks had been detonated by the dragoman and a handful of volunteers. Before the pursuers could recognize fully what had happened the derrick on the rise blew. And when it did, it took part of the crest with it.
A battery of riders was immolated. Others were strewn about the rise burnt or dying. Their horses ablaze rushed wild and headlong across that ghost town of ruin and debris trying to escape their death. Flames from the derrick rose to such heights bits of detritus and oil fell in a scalding rain across the isthmus. Pieces of iron sheeting that had been transported to that place by wagon were thrown to the sea.
The crude that had leaked into the pipeline trench was ignited by the bridge. The pipe itself blew out, triggering a tunnel of fire down the length of that ditch and across the isthmus to the burning tanks. The pipe kept blowing where seams had been welded shut. Flames welled up out of that trench torching the brush and summer grass. The Tartar horsemen saw they were trapped and some thought they could escape by whipping their mounts to leap the fire. Others sought out the last openings in the blaze the wind had yet to close. But the wind was carrying the day, and the ground on both sides of that hollowed causeway began to burn out of control, spreading across the isthmus and down to the sea.
Everywhere there were men dying, and there were men dead. A small pocket of Armenian volunteers fighting to escape the burning grass were trampled under a wave of tunicked riders. They came out of the smoke like a feverish nightmare streaked with oil and ash and all before them went under their hooves. They fired down into the faces of the fallen and they rode on through reefs of smoke to disappear.
John Lourdes could see the battle was nearing its end. Only a handful of stragglers were left, maybe two dozen, trying to make their way to the beach. He scanned the huge storage tanks by a vast pool of oil in the middle of the isthmus. The dragoman was to have set a charge there. It should have detonated by now. John Lourdes could not pinpoint the spot well enough through the smoke. He signaled the guide, he intended to ride back and detonate it himself, when he saw the captain.
Rittmeister Franke was still mounted, still in command. He had a bandana around a head wound, his shirt was bloody. He was giving orders to his chiefs and as he scanned the ground before him another derrick blew near the rocky shoreline. Its housing had been consumed by fire, and when the well detonated part of the structure came loose from its moorings and was slung across acres of scrap iron like a ferris wheel of flames.
Through the smoke, John Lourdes started back up the isthmus toward the storage tanks. He was galloping through a vast pool of oil when the Arabian was shot from under him. He was there one moment then lost to a world of fire the next. The guide saw, and he pointed with his rifle shouting to the priest. They kicked their mounts forward and plunged into those choking latitudes to try and reach him.
John Lourdes lay at the edge of the sinkhole using the dead Arabian as a barricade. Tartars were trying to ride down on him when the guide and the priest galloped up through that swamping oil. The priest and the guide dismounted. Seared particles rained down on the black surface of that pond where the three men gathered up. Streaked with crude and ash, they fought their way up from the pond, the air a black haze that horsemen charged through. In the chaos, one of the three fell mortally wounded.
John Lourdes and the priest carried the guide into the shadow of the storage tank where the charge was to have been set. He had been shot through the sternum and one of his lungs was already drowning.
They sat him upright against the tank wall. He stared at the wound then at the faces of the last men he would ever see on earth.
“Efendi,” he said, “I am thirty-three years old. I fear I will be thirty-three forever.”
John Lourdes took hold of the guide’s arm. He went to speak, but Malek shook him and pointed. Not ten feet away lay the body of dragoman by the unfinished charge.
“Prepare it,” ordered the priest. He shoved John Lourdes. “Prepare it!”
John Lourdes understood, without the knowing, and crawled to the body of the dragoman for the detonator.
Malek took the guide’s hands in his own. “When you are at Abraham’s tent . . . and are one of the honored offering a drink of water to those who will come after . . . If I am proven worthy of that place, it is you I will look for, you alone. And I will kneel before you, and it will be my hope you offer me to drink . . .”
When John Lourdes crawled back with the detonator, the priest was whispering into Hain’s ear, and the guide was nodding as best he could. John Lourdes pulled himself next to Hain, his back propped against the tank. He had the detonator in his lap, all wired and ready. He waved the priest away, “Go on. I can take care of this. Go on!”
The guide was looking at the priest when he reached out and put a hand on the detonator.
“Efendi . . . Let me finish my journey. Go with the priest.”
Malek had already risen and gotten hold of a Tartar horse. It was wounded but looked still able to run. The guide was having difficulty pulling the detonator toward him, so John Lourdes lifted it and set it in his lap. He sat a moment, then went to stand. Hesitating, he pointed at the amulet Hain wore with its painted eye.
“I will it to you, efendi,” said the guide.
John Lourdes removed the talisman from the guide’s blouse and ran to the priest.
The Tartars were sweeping the isthmus. There was no longer resistance. Everywhere were the dead, everywhere the wounded. About a dozen volunteers had made the shore and were huddled up in the sand behind the grounded tanker.
When the guide pressed down the plunger, the side of the storage tank blew out, and so too the tanks in the field around it were blown.
A tidal wave of fire went down through the heart of that isthmus. Everything in its path was incinerated. The street of abandoned sheds and barracks, there one moment, gone the next. The dead and wounded, flesh one moment, ash the next. Slicks of oil, evaporated in a breath. Sheets of metal lying in the brush, burned so hot the earth beneath melted. That wall of fire hit the tanker with such force the steel monolith literally moved. It rocked ever so slightly, the hull groaning, as the fire rose and rose and rose until the sky was gone.
e p i l o g u e
HE WORK OF Alev Temple and Carson Ammons, the newspaperman who had been with her at the Baskahle Road and Baku, was published as a book of eyewitness accounts and photographs on the atrocities committed in the name of the Turkish government against the Armenian population.
That volume, along with others, such as the memoir Ravished Armenia, which was made into a motion picture starring Anna Q. Nilsson, became part of the international literature on that infamous chapter of history. Many of these works were deemed “gross exaggerations” or “sensational lies.” Carson Ammons, when interviewed, answered those claims by stating—Let the reader discover the truth for themselves.
At the end of the Great War, with the help of President Woodrow Wilson, an Armenian republic was created. The young nation was under constant military threat from its bordering neighbors. With the invasion of the 11th Red Army, the government was crushed, and Armenia forced into the Soviet Union.
In 1991, as the USSR broke apart, Armenia was the first non-Baltic nation to declare its independence.
Also in 1920, the 11th Army marched upon Baku. All property there was seized, all
prior ownership voided. The oil fields became the sovereign domain of the USSR.
As it had been secretly planned by the Triple Entente, the vilayets of Basra and Baghdad, then finally Mosul, were cobbled into a new nation that would serve as a buffer zone and puppet state for the British, which would allow them to maintain control of the Basra oilfields and protect the gateway to India and the East.
That nation, of course, was called Iraq.
In a statement from Adolf Hitler on August 22, 1939, in response to concerns about his plan to destroy every man, woman and child of Polish derivation, the Chancellor of Nazi Germany wrote, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
In 1942, Raphael Lempkin, a Warsaw barrister, coined the term “genocide,” in part, because of the atrocities committed by the Turkish government against the Armenian population.
As for the violent engagement fought upon that small isthmus along the eastern shore of the Absheron Peninsula in 1915, John Lourdes had, in fact, conceived a plan for escape, if all were lost.
A handful of small skiffs powered by oars had been secretly cached beyond the grounded tanker. A dozen men had survived the inferno. They took to the water, then finally the boats, under the cover of fire and smoke. Among the twelve were the priest known as Malek, and a young man from the state of Texas, whose reports detailing this incident, and discovered in 1937 among the lost files of the Creel Committee, constituted the basis of this book.
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
To Deirdre Stephanie and the late, great Brutarian . . . to G.G. and L.S. . . . Jim Kelley . . . Kelley and Hall . . . Pauline Neuwirth and Beth Metrick . . . Catherine Casalino . . . Special thanks to Tracy Falco at Universal for the filmic opportunity . . . And finally to my steadfast friend and ally, and a master at navigating the madness, Donald V. Allen.
Table of Contents
PART I
PART II
PART III