Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  The Moudir threw some more grain into their midst and then crouched among them, holding it in his hands, so that they pecked at his palm and then grew bolder and flew up onto his forearms where he could feel the strength of their talons as they sought a grip. ‘Come on my pretties,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  The lead pigeons had flown to the loft and then swooped almost immediately back again, just as they always did. There were names for the favourites. ‘Come on, Nur, come on, Fatima, you greedy little thing.’

  The birds fluttered around him until all the grain was gone. Once night began to close in, they retreated into their loft from which emerged the sound of contented cooing.

  Back in the ruins of the old keep, where the dungeons were, the prisoner was still weeping. If it was the Armenian, he thought, it was unnecessary because they would not have touched her yet. His Kurds did not like beating women who were not related to them, not even whores. It offended their dignity as men. He had had trouble before trying to get them to soften up some female suspect with a touch of the bastinado. Perhaps she was not crying for herself, but for others. He had heard reports that thousands of Armenians had perished when they were driven out of the border areas with Russia along the Caucasian front. And quite right too. They were a menace these Christians, always willing to start trouble if the price was right.

  The Jews were no better either, at least not the Zionists, who even offended their religious brethren with their strange notions of settling and farming the land as if it was some virgin wilderness for the taking. On the surface they were grateful and loyal citizens of the Ottoman Empire. But when you visited their settlements, took a little bakshish from them in order to make some minor matter to their liking, you could sense the superiority, even contempt, behind the smiles and effusive thanks. Didn’t they consider themselves the Chosen Race? And wasn’t this Palestine their promised land? They even had their own flag. He had seen it. It was blue with a star of David, and below that a Hebrew word meaning ‘Zion’. There were plenty of arms in those settlements too: Martini-Henrys, Winchesters, even the odd Mauser which they should have given up at the start of the war but which they claimed they needed to protect them from Arab brigands.

  They were not without a certain influence, these Zionists, there was no doubt about that. They had the ear of the Germans for a start – of the Kaiser himself, some said. So many came from the German-speaking countries that it had become the first language of the race. The Moudir had witnessed the riots between the Jews in Haifa just before the war when some of them wanted to open a school in which instruction would be in German, while others thought it should be in French or even Hebrew – the dead tongue of their faith, which some of the more fanatical were trying to bring back to life. The Jews would use the Germans to grab as much as they could in Palestine, he was sure of that.

  And yet there were reports that some of the Zionists were dealing with the English, because the English held Egypt and were the greatest Christian power in the area. And the English would promise them anything because they needed Jewish gold to feed their war machine. There was supposed to be a lot of Jewish gold in the United States and those foolish Americans had just declared war against Germany. Well let them! And let the English continue to hammer on the gates of Palestine, and the Turks to pull them back by their ears and slaughter them like sheep.

  A month ago he would not have been so sure. Baghdad had fallen at last to the English general Maude, and although he had never been there the Moudir felt its loss badly. After Mecca and Jerusalem it was the third great city of the Empire, and thanks to that unspeakable traitor Hussein, who had been appointed Sheriff of Mecca by the Sultan himself, they had lost the Holy City the summer before.

  Now things were looking up. Twice they had thrown the English back at Gaza even though the enemy had given the land its first taste of poison gas and sent those landships they called tanks crawling at them like some monstrous bug from your worst nightmare. Nor were many of their best troops in Palestine, though Jemal Pasha was doing his best to get Arab conscripts replaced by proper Turkish soldiers. At the moment most of the iron regiments were fighting the Russians in the Caucasus – fighting the Germans’ battles for them, if the truth be known.

  The Moudir felt uneasy about the Germans. In fact, he would have been hard pressed to find any of his compatriots who had much liking for them. Respect, yes. For Christians they were brave enough, and there was no doubt that they were clever. Their equipment was probably the best in the world, unless you believed these stories that every American soldier had a machine-gun as well as a horsehair mattress and a gramophone.

  But they were Christians and their allies – which made the Sultan’s declaration that this was a Jihad, a holy war against the infidel English and the French, rather confusing. Here, after all, was the world’s most powerful Muslim nation, led by a sultan who was also the Caliph, the spiritual leader of all Muslims, not only allied to Christians but at war with other Muslims, such as some of the Indian mercenaries the English employed – and even the traitor Hussein’s goat-fucking Bedu, the so-called Hejaz army, the very people of the Prophet, blessed be His name. The Moudir sometimes found himself wondering what Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate, made of it all.

  When it was all over they would probably have to deal with the Bedu in the same way they dealt with the white kaffirs. There was no room in the Empire for kaffir riff-raff. They were there on tolerance, especially those wretched Christian priests in Jerusalem always squabbling over which bit of stone the Blessed Jesus had been born or died on. A Muslim family even had to keep the keys of the Holy Sepulchre – otherwise the Christians would have long since pulled the place to pieces with their feuds. He tried to imagine what it would be like if Christians guarded the holy places in Mecca, and found such blasphemy unimaginable. Better that the traitor Hussein should have temporary control than the English army. Which was only further proof, if any were needed, of the rightness of the true religion. Here were all these Christian nations with their new learning and free thinking and Jewish gold and none of them, not even the Germans, would dare to take the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from a Muslim.

  No, there should be none of this equal rights nonsense for Christians and Jews and madmen like those Bahai devil-worshippers from Persia who had their so-called temple up on Mount Carmel. It might be different if you could rely on their loyalty, but you could not. When they got out of hand they had to be dealt with firmly – the way, by all accounts, they had dealt with the Armenians.

  Thinking these stern, dutiful thoughts, the Moudir went to the small room above the cells that he liked to call his office and picked up a riding-crop that was lying across the desk next to a field telephone handset. He was still uncertain which prisoner was sobbing. Perhaps he would give them both something to cry about, have them singing through the soles of their feet. He called for a couple of Kurdish jailers and went down to the cells. As he approached the prisoners could hear the slap of his sandals on the stairs.

  *

  His Majesty’s Ship Monegam, the monitor the Moudir had watched steaming north, was now a mile or so off the coast and almost stationary. They were opposite the little fishing port of Athlit, just south of Haifa.

  Once the engines had been set to slow the swell caught the ship’s shallow draught, and it began to rock gently from side to side as well as up and down. The sailors were hardly aware of it, but on the bridge Major Ponting found it harder to ignore the first queasy prelude to his seasickness.

  ‘It’s all clear,’ said the captain of the vessel. A lieutenant-commander, he stood alongside Ponting and peered through binoculars at a shoreline that was darkening fast with dusk. ‘They’re coming out.’

  ‘Where’s the signal?’ asked the major.

  ‘You see the tower on the end of the promontory?’

  Ponting nodded. He would have had to be blind not to see it. It was more like a miniature castle than a tower. There were several of these Crusa
der fortifications dotted up and down the coast. In some of them the Turks had placed permanent garrisons. Others were simply visited by passing patrols, who might stay a night or two. The tower of Athlit was one of these.

  ‘Go to about ten o’clock behind it and you’ll see a small wooden house. Looks like it might be a farm house. It’s got wooden stairs leading to a balcony that stretches along the entire length of its first floor. If you look closely at that balcony you’ll see a white sheet has been draped over it.’

  Ponting reluctantly raised his own field glasses and tried to focus. Aboard ship he rated trying to use binoculars as one better than attempting to read fine print while eating a bacon sandwich. The bridge refused to keep still. One moment he was thrust against the squat roundness of the Crusader tower and the next he was peering into the white top of a breaker. He felt his stomach rise to his throat and swallowed hard. He was tempted to take the naval officer’s word for it, or even pretend that he had seen the signal; but he kept searching, although his insides had begun to churn.

  ‘Can’t you see it?’ The lieutenant-commander sounded impatient. They had a lot to do, and every second they spent at that speed made them a better target for a U-boat.

  Ponting ignored him. A flash of white in the lens vanished when the vessel rolled again and he found himself looking at what appeared to be a stone wall on a terraced slope. He took another deep breath, put his legs slightly further apart, and jammed his knees against the bulkhead of the open bridge. He found the tower again and went to ten, no, eleven o’clock. He managed to steady the glasses on it this time. Behind the sheet were the three windows of the wood house’s upper storey, and beyond its sloping roof a bunch of tall conifers.

  Ponting let his field glasses hang on the short strap around his neck and took another large gulp of air. He felt the nausea rise from his innards. It was going to happen.

  ‘Can you get any closer?’ he asked. ‘It will save time.’

  ‘A bit – but we have to be careful of mines. They’re difficult to spot in this light.’

  Ponting grunted. He had become quite well acquainted with the Royal Navy during the last six months, and was not all that impressed. They were always being careful about something. He sometimes had the feeling Nelson wouldn’t recognise the service.

  Nevertheless, HMS Monegam turned towards the shore and a couple of sailors went on her bow with a plumb line to test the depth. Gun crews turned their pieces towards the medieval stonework on the promontory while teenage boy sailors took eight-inch shells off the hoists that came up from the magazine.

  Now that Ponting no longer had to look through the binoculars he felt a little better. He extracted one of the Egyptian cigarettes he had become fond of lately. Suddenly the cigarette got to him and he stumbled down to the bowl in his cabin with his hand over his mouth, hating the sailors he bumped into for not being sharp enough about giving him gangway.

  By the time he was back on the bridge the ship was steadier and they were closer to the shore. Although it was almost dark by now he could distinctly make out feathery-leaved tamarisks on the beach, and beyond them a few scraggy-looking palms.

  ‘Boat to starboard,’ called a lookout.

  Ponting, determined to redeem himself, spotted it before the lieutenant-commander. It was an Arab fishing boat with a high bow and a small triangular sail, a design basically unchanged since the Phoenicians. The sailcloth appeared to be brown or blue, he could not tell which in the dying light. He guessed that they had chosen it so that they would be less visible to a casual watcher from the shore although he was willing to bet there were nets and lines on board in case they were challenged.

  The little boat tacked towards them, taking advantage of every scrap of wind. ‘He knows his business,’ murmured the lieutenant-commander. ‘And a good thing too. We don’t want to be hanging about.’

  It was the naval officer’s first involvement with cloak and dagger stuff. From what he could see it was all cloak and no dagger. This particular job involved Ponting collecting and sending messages via the courier who then returned to shore. He assumed it was difficult to equip these spies with the kind of wireless telegraphy equipment that would be easy to operate and, in any case, wireless messages were almost invariably intercepted by the enemy. As long as weather conditions didn’t make the rendezvous difficult, the whole operation wasn’t supposed to take more than ten minutes. Even so, it was very hard on the nerves. The captain was sure he would rather be in a pitched battle between cruiser squadrons than endure all this creeping about an enemy coast with the army breathing down your neck and making it plain that they thought you an absolute pansy if you weren’t over-keen about risking your ship.

  He was pleased that Ponting had been sick, because it should make him as anxious to get away as he was. The trouble with the army, he mused, was that officers like the good major had no idea what it was like to be in charge of thousands of pounds of equipment. All they knew was what it was like to be in charge of thousands of men and, if the way they spent them was anything to go by, they didn’t come all that expensive. It seemed one could lose an awful lot of soldiers before anybody wondered if you might be being a bit extravagant. As far as the Admiralty were concerned, big or small, it wasn’t at all like that with one of His Majesty’s ships.

  The fishing boat was almost alongside now. There were three occupants. Two of them appeared to be Syrian fishermen for they wore the keffiyeh chequered headdresses they favoured. The third, who was seated in the stern alongside the man on the tiller, wore a straw hat held in place with a scarf that was tied under the chin. It occurred to the lieutenant-commander that it was the kind of thing that back home a woman might wear for a motoring trip on a summer’s day.

  The Monegam’s engines were already on slow. Now he ordered the port screw to be set in reverse. This made the monitor revolve slowly in the water, able to spring away at the first whiff of danger from the enemy coast.

  A Jacob’s ladder was put over the side and a couple of sailors with boat-hooks pulled the fishing boat towards them. The captain looked over his bridge to see how things were coming along just as the figure in the stern of the boat stood up. My God, it was a woman! A young, European-looking woman, quite pretty too if you like them a bit on the plump side. She was wearing a light blue, high-collared dress which ended just above her ankles. A sailor seized her firmly by the arm and, as she stepped off the Jacob’s ladder, the blue dress rose high enough to reveal that she was not wearing any stockings.

  The lieutenant-commander turned to say something to Ponting but he was no longer there. He looked down again and saw that the major was down by the rail and welcoming her aboard with all the proprietary airs of some jumped-up mill owner receiving guests aboard his gin palace during Cowes Week.

  ‘Good evening,’ the captain heard him say. ‘I do hope we weren’t late. Any news of Daniel?’

  He spoke to her in French.

  2

  Jerusalem: April 1917

  As he approached the front entrance of Fast’s Hotel Maeltzer saw that Magnus was at his ranting again.

  Today he was wearing a crown of thorns on his long blond hair and carrying a pole with a short cross-piece at about chest height – so that apart from forming the insignia of his faith it also made a handy staff. Magnus was a tall man – it was rare to find a Syrian or Turk who could meet the level of his mad blue eyes – and the pole was well over five feet long. His full beard was as wild and ragged as an Orthodox priest’s. This made it difficult to guess his age, which could have been anything between twenty-five and forty.

  Sometimes Magnus preached in his native Swedish, sometimes in heavily accented English or a kind of German. Very often, when the Lord was pleased to bless him with gift of tongues, he spoke in what sounded to most poor sinners like an incoherent babble. This morning he had been so blessed.

  ‘Whaboosh, doidy krakoo cervantees eek,’ he boomed at the stone-faced Turkish sentries standing with bayonets fixed eit
her side of the hotel’s main door. ‘Doidy-dee-doi-dee-doi,’ he chanted. ‘God bellum abca ravi Inglesi napoo Christos rei.’

  Suddenly he switched to English. ‘For the Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away,’ he told the soldiers, primitive Anatolians who believed that the afflicted were blessed by Allah. ‘And they clothed him with the purple and plotted a thorn crown and be putting it on his head,’ lectured Magnus, waving his cross dangerously near the nose of one of the gentlemen from Asia Minor.

  ‘Ah Easter!’ thought Maeltzer. ‘Of course, crown of thorns equals Easter. Forgotten all about it this year. Must be the war.’

  It occurred to him that Magnus was overdoing it a bit, waving his stick about like that. You could never tell with the Turks. One moment they were all docility and the next they’d shove a bayonet through you. He wondered for a moment whether he should intervene, but decided against it. Magnus would only feel obliged to give him one of his lectures. He went up the steps quickly, a big man in a panama hat and a tan tropical suit, chosen because it never looked as dirty as it was.

  Just inside the lobby with its wood panelling and high vaulted ceiling stood a monocled German colonel wearing a boat-shaped Astrakhan hat and about to take his leave of some junior officers. This was Kress von Kressenstein, a Bavarian aristocrat who, as chief of staff to the Turkish Eighth Army Corps, had just been responsible for giving the British their latest bloody nose at Gaza. Maeltzer thought he looked pleased with himself, as well he might.