The 34th Degree sd-2 Read online

  The 34th Degree

  ( Sam Deker - 2 )

  Thomas Greanias

  The 34th Degree

  Thomas Greanias

  METEORA, GREECE, 1943

  1

  It was on the Feast of the Ascension, forty days after Easter 1943, when an agent of the British Secret Service turned up at the doorstep of the Monastery of the Taborian Light and Philip knew his life as a monk was over.

  Wrapped in his black cassock and hood, Philip had been on his knees with his brothers in the sanctuary, celebrating the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, praying in eager expectation at the blessed hope of His return. This was as he had done for over twenty years, ever since he renounced his former ways and retired to the Monastery of the Taborian Light.

  The monastery was perched atop one of the many otherworldly peaks of Meteora, the most remote and mysterious region of Greece. A thousand feet below lay the village of Kastraki, nestled in the foothills. Clinging to its gray granite summit, undisturbed by war or petty human conflicts, the Taborian Light was an impregnable retreat where the Eastern Orthodox monks could witness the unfolding of earthly affairs below and reflect on the eternal.

  Here Philip made it his ambition to lead a quiet and peaceful life, just as the apostle Paul had instructed the original church at Thessaloniki. Toward that end, he had allowed his gray hair and beard to grow long, making him seem older than his fifty years, and cloaked in the humility of a monk, he tried to make himself as small and wiry a figure as possible.

  But his shapeless cassock could not hide his hard physique or the alert, confident movements of his limbs. Nor could his hood completely veil his eaglelike nose and sharp features. Locals who glimpsed his face during a rare trip to the village never missed his shining black ramlike eyes, set wide apart, gazing placidly from beneath his bushy eyebrows. Their faces would darken with fear, and they would scurry away. Whether they recognized him or not, they instinctively knew he was not one of them.

  The sound of hurried footsteps broke Philip’s trance, and his quick black eyes darted up to see Brother Vangelis whisper into the Archimandrite’s ear. The old monk’s face, barely visible behind his great beard and the misty veil of burning incense, fell as he looked at Philip, and the peace that Philip had known for twenty years left him.

  So the day has come, Philip thought, and with it the dread.

  Philip crossed himself three times before he rose from the floor. With a silent nod, he acknowledged the Archimandrite, took a deep breath, and left the sanctuary.

  The visitor was in the narthex, admiring a wall painting of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He was dressed like a Greek peasant, and with his high forehead, long aesthetic features, and beard, he bore an absurd resemblance to a saint out of some Byzantine icon. But his blue eyes and fair skin betrayed him. When he spoke, it was in perfect Oxford English.

  “Commander Lloyd, British Intelligence,” said the Englishman, looking him over. “You must be Philip. You’re smaller than I thought.”

  That was what most men thought. Philip lowered his hood and watched Lloyd drop back a couple of steps in fear.

  “They were right after all,” said Lloyd, marveling. “The face of a hawk and the eyes of a ram.”

  Philip narrowed his eyes. “What do you want, Commander Lloyd of British Intelligence?”

  “Why, the same thing the Nazis want,” Lloyd replied. “The Templar Globe. More precisely, what’s inside the globe.”

  An uneasiness Philip hadn’t felt since his early days now gripped his heart, and he blinked as though he failed to understand. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what-”

  “The Maranatha text,” pressed Lloyd. “The one the apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonian church in the first century. The one that dates the end of history and the return of Christ.”

  2

  Philip looked at Lloyd, well bred and impatient. He is as I once was, he thought, and decided to be gentle but firm. “Even if there ever were such a text, Commander, what makes British Intelligence believe it has survived the ages?”

  Lloyd had a ready answer. “When Arab Muslims besieged Constantinople in the eighth century, the Byzantine Greeks defending the city were able to save themselves with a miraculous and secret weapon. A compound that burned when it came into contact with water. A substance that became known as Greek Fire. Now, the exact formula used by the Greeks remains a mystery, but we know it included the compound naphthalene palmitate. Better known as napalm.”

  “Which is hardly a secret anymore,” Philip observed, “as napalm is commonplace in your bombs and flamethrowers.”

  “But the Byzantine Greeks deployed it in a different and, in some ways, more potent form twelve hundred years ago.”

  Philip shrugged. “I hardly see what Greek Fire has to do with the Maranatha text.”

  “The defenders of Constantinople used Greek Fire aboard their war vessels as a missile to be hurled from a catapult. By destroying the wooden fleets of the Muslim Arabs, Greek Fire blocked the spread of Islam into Europe. Rumors swirled among the ranks of the retreating Muslims that the Byzantine Greeks discovered the formula for their infernal fire encoded in the contents of the legendary Maranatha text. That is why, seven centuries later, when Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in the fifteenth century, bands of Muslim invaders turned over every stone in the city to find it.”

  “But the text, I take it, was not to be found,” Philip said guardedly.

  “No. During the siege, the Greeks had no choice but to turn to the Knights Templar to smuggle it out of the city to Rome, where it would be safely beyond the reach of the Ottoman Empire. But it never reached Rome. Instead, it ended up with the Freemasons at their Three Globes Lodge in Germany, founded to protect three golden globes from King Solomon’s temple. Two of those globes ended up with the American Freemasons, who buried them beneath Washington, D.C., at the founding of the United States of America. The third remained in Germany until Greece finally won its war of independence from Turkey in 1830 after four hundred years. The third globe, with the Maranatha text inside, was returned to its original home, a secret monastic order descended from the original Thessalonian church, whose members can trace their ancestry through the laying on of hands to the apostle Paul himself.”

  “An interesting tale, Commander.”

  “Yes, and I have another one for you,” Lloyd said. “This one took place a century later, during the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor in 1922. An aide-de-camp to Kemal-the great warrior Hadji Azrael, the Angel of Death-shocked the empire by laying down his sword, renouncing Islam, and embracing the Christian faith of his enemies.”

  Philip’s heart skipped a beat. Unconsciously, he placed his left hand over the large, ornate cross that hung from his neck.

  Lloyd continued, “There was a secret ceremony with the patriarch of the Eastern Church himself, the laying on of hands, and a new name for this once sworn enemy of Greeks, this killer of Christians. Ultimately, his orders sent him to the monastic order that guarded the legendary Maranatha text he once sought to destroy. He became its protector and wore a gold cross with a sapphire omega set in the center. The very one you seem to be wearing, Philip. Or should I say, Hadji Azrael?”

  3

  In his former days, Hadji Azrael would have known exactly how to deal with a man like Commander Lloyd of British Intelligence. The Englishman never would have been heard from again. But the Way of Christ demanded mercy. And so Philip reluctantly showed his visitor to the Archimandrite’s chambers, a sparse room with a hard bed and a rough-hewn table around which the three men sat on straw chairs.

  The Archimandrite eyed Lloyd and fingered his black worry beads. “How did you find us, Commander Ll
oyd?”

  “The Koutras family in Kastraki,” Lloyd explained in passable Greek. “They were hiding me from the Germans. Young Gregory knew the secret bridle path to the Taborian Light.”

  The Archimandrite turned to Philip, who nodded that this was probably the case.

  “I see, Commander,” said the Archimandrite. “And since when is British Intelligence so interested in spiritual things?”

  “It’s Hitler’s interest that concerns us, Archimandrite. Fact is, Greek Fire changed the course of history. Hitler believes it can do so again. Only this time it’s the modern fleets of the invading Allies he wants to burn before they land on the beaches of Nazi-occupied Europe.” Lloyd produced a document from inside his tunic. “This communique was intercepted between Ankara and Berlin. It’s a telegram from the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, to the Nazi foreign minister, Ribbentrop.”

  He handed the document to Philip, who looked it over carefully. It was an English copy of the German original and said that an SS general, a certain Ludwig von Berg, had discovered the location of the Monastery of the Taborian Light.

  This was terrible news, Philip realized, even worse than he had feared. It meant they must flee Meteora at once or risk having the Maranatha text fall into German hands. That must not be allowed to happen.

  The Archimandrite must have sensed his distress, for he asked, “What is it, Philip?” When Philip told him that the Germans had located the Taborian Light, the old monk’s face turned white, and he crossed himself. “Lord, have mercy on us all!”

  Philip turned to Lloyd. “Who is this General von Berg, Commander?”

  “You mean the Baron of the Black Order?” Lloyd said. “Only the most dangerous man in the Third Reich, after Hitler and Himmler-and more cunning than both of them put together.”

  Philip passed the communique back to Lloyd, who pocketed it.

  “As you can see, Hadji Azrael, our interests are purely political,” Lloyd told him, patting the bulge in his tunic. “Churchill simply wants the Maranatha text out of Hitler’s reach for the rest of the war.”

  Philip wasn’t so sure. The communique contained several puzzling references to a microfilm of a first-century copy of the Maranatha text, a copy allegedly unearthed by British archaeologists in Palestine. As far as Philip knew, there was no such copy, only the original text now buried beneath the monastery’s crypt inside the Templar Globe. Obviously, there was more to this intrigue than Commander Lloyd of British Intelligence was telling them. “And what does Mr. Churchill propose, Commander?”

  “That I smuggle the text out of here on horseback to Kalambaka, hitch a ride on the Thessaly Railway to Volos, and then board a certain ship to neutral Istanbul. There I entrust the text to the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church himself for safekeeping until the end of the war.”

  Lloyd’s offer was too generous for Philip to believe. But he could see it made an impression on the Archimandrite, who began to nod as he worked his worry beads.

  “Surely, Archimandrite, you’re not seriously entertaining this stranger’s insane proposition?” Philip asked.

  The Archimandrite sighed. “Better the text be with the Patriarch than in the hands of the Antichrist.”

  That was presuming the text ever reached the Patriarch. Philip did not trust British Intelligence. Nor could he trust the judgment of his superior, who, never having killed a man, clearly was at a serious disadvantage. At times the Archimandrite seemed to forget that the heart of man was, above all else, cruelly deceptive and exceedingly wicked. But Philip, responsible for thousands of deaths, knew the human heart all too well.

  “I am bound by a sacred oath to protect the Maranatha text,” he said. “I must insist that I be the one to deliver it to the Patriarch.”

  The Archimandrite shook his head. “You know that is not possible. There is a death sentence on you the moment your feet touch Muslim ground. No, Philip. Brother Yiorgios will accompany Commander Lloyd to Constantinople.”

  Lloyd frowned. “Brother Yiorgios?”

  “Our silent brother,” said Philip, trying to conceal his bitterness. “We found him some months ago, roaming the hills not far from here, the last survivor of a monastery the Italians plundered. He has never said a word of that unspeakable evil. We put it all together when we saw his cassock and heard the reports.”

  “He keeps everything to himself,” said the Archimandrite, who raised an eyebrow at Philip. “An example to us all.”

  Philip added, “Vangelis insists he goes out at night into the woods to speak to the devil.”

  The Archimandrite dismissed the notion with a wave of his gnarled hand. “That one sees a devil behind every fig tree.”

  Seeing that his superior was not going to allow him to accompany Lloyd, Philip switched tactics. If reason failed to move the Archimandrite, then perhaps the unreasonable would smoke out the Englishman. “I say we burn the infernal text and be done with it.”

  “You would destroy God’s revelation?” The Archimandrite looked at Philip in horror. “Come to your senses, Philip!”

  “I’ve told you my suspicions, Archimandrite. Paul warned our forefathers to beware of any unsettling letter supposedly coming from him that talks about the Lord’s return.”

  “Just a bloody minute,” said Lloyd, his eyes shifting back and forth between Philip and the Archimandrite. “You don’t think the text is genuine?”

  “A genuine forgery,” Philip told him. “The Bible itself speaks of such a letter, one allegedly written by Paul that claims the last days have already come.” He looked the Archimandrite straight in the eye. “Perhaps the Maranatha text is the false report Paul mentions in his second letter to the Thessalonians, the very letter from hell he warns us to consider at our own peril.”

  “Perhaps, Philip,” said the Archimandrite, suddenly sounding tired beyond his considerable years. “But how can you be sure?”

  “The very nature of this text contradicts Paul’s repeated warnings to us not to entangle ourselves with endless timetables and futile speculations. Can’t you see, Archimandrite? There is something very diabolical about this text. Death surrounds it! Look what it does to men.”

  Philip was pointing to Lloyd, who at first was startled by the gesture but soon found his tongue and turned everything Philip had said to his advantage.

  “Archimandrite, if what Hadji Azrael says is true, then you must help us,” he argued with rising passion. “If you don’t, if the Maranatha text should fall into Hitler’s hands, you will fan into flame the all-consuming fires of Armageddon. And if Jesus Christ should come back today or in a thousand years, it will be you who must stand alone before His throne of judgment with the innocent blood of millions of women and children on your hands. And these words of mine will judge you when they are replayed for all to hear. How will you account for yourself?”

  It was a dirty trick that had its desired effect on the Archimandrite. The mere thought of what Lloyd said seemed too great a burden for the old monk to bear. His shoulders drooped, and a faraway look filled his eyes. “Yes,” the Archimandrite repeated with resignation, “better the text be in the hands of the Patriarch than the Antichrist.”

  Philip could not believe this was happening. “But, Archimandrite-”

  The 34th Degree 11

  “The matter is settled, Philip.” The Archimandrite grasped his rough wooden cane and rose slowly to his feet. “Brother Yiorgios will accompany Commander Lloyd to Constantinople. The Patriarch will decide what should be done with the Maranatha text.”

  “The prime minister’s sentiments exactly,” chimed Lloyd, grinning in triumph as he looked at Philip.

  Philip stared at the floor, unable to suppress the restlessness in his heart. “To let the text leave this monastery is to open up a Pandora’s box of evil,” he warned. “Who knows where it could end?”

  It was a question that neither the Archimandrite nor Lloyd was able to answer, for at that moment Brother Vangelis burst through the d
oor.

  “Germans!” he cried, out of breath. “Coming up the hill!”

  4

  It was a sight Philip had to see with his own eyes from the monastery’s watchtower: The Death’s Head battalion must have started for the Taborian Light that morning, having shaken the dust of the nearest town, Kastraki, off their jackboots. What was once a sleepy village nestled a thousand feet below the towering rock formations of Meteora was now a pillar of black smoke rising up behind the twenty-four SS paratroopers as they converged on the granite summit.

  They were far closer than Philip had imagined just a moment ago.

  He knew they had come off their conquest of Crete, these Fallschirmjager in field-gray uniforms and rimless steel helmets. Hand-picked by Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler himself, they were the pride of the Waffen SS. These days found them loose on the Greek mainland, clearing the mountains of partisans and performing special missions for Himmler’s second in command, the mysterious SS general Ludwig von Berg.

  Leading the way up was the Baron of the Black Order himself, handsome and wholly evil. One hand held a Schmeisser machine pistol, the other a leash with a terrified Gregory Koutras straining at the end. The boy tried to shout a warning. Von Berg yanked hard on the leash, choking off his cries.

  Philip was no stranger to the art of war and the effects of military regalia. But even he felt a chill at the sight of Ludwig von Berg marching toward the monastery in his smartly tailored black dress uniform, black boots, and black leather accessories. Above his sleeve’s cuff title was the diamond-shaped SD patch of the Sicherheitsdienst, or SS intelligence service, which meant he was the worst of the lot. Flanking him were two Fallschirmjager, with their machine pistols.

  The Baron of the Black Order looked younger than his reputed age of forty and radiated venal power. Glints of gold hair were visible beneath his black cap, and his clean-shaven cheeks tapered down to a twisted smile. His beaklike nose and upper lip, in particular, gave him the air of a predator. But it was his eyes that dominated his appearance, those clear blue eyes with a gaze that could pierce armor plating.