Ink (47 page)

he zeppelin glides down through cloud, through wisps of cloud, until the
S
city is unveiled ahead of them and to the south. It must be clear skies to the east, for the city shines, catching the low sun with that golden quality of morning light on sand and stone, bright against the dark clouds of retreating night; sharp shadows cut the jumble of walls and rooftops, and the streets seem little more than chinks of darkness from this distance. From this height, with only the muted thrum of the engines to break the silence of the gondola, he might almost imagine the Holy City a haven where all men—Christian, Mohammedan and Jew alike—must surely live in peace, leaving the warfare to more temporal institutions than religion. From this height, there are no lines dividing Turkish North from British South, no Jewish quarter here or Arab sector there. The city seems a crisp golden vision of harmony. Dawn in Jerusalem is a wonder to behold.

It's the 14th of September, 1929, three weeks since the Arab riots and the massacre in Hebron.

Pray God, Samuel wasn't in Hebron, he thinks.

Carter folds the newspaper on his lap and lays it on the empty seat beside him, rubs a smudge of ink from his thumb. The coming weeks will, he's quite certain, offer little rest and peace of mind during his furlough. One only has to read the headlines to know that the whole situation is a shambles. The very idea of a neutral Palestine, joint British-Turkish control; it's a joke, absurd.

The two Turks seated across from him look sullen and hostile. The Russian lounges in the far corner by the door, legs spread out and cap pulled down over his
face. Carter, sitting alone on his side of the cabin, finds the seating arrangement grimly amusing. The Russians in the Caucasus
here
, the British in Persia and Mesopotamia/jere, and the Turks, well, just where are the Turks positioning themselves these days? It's common knowledge that they're watching what happens in Georgia and Azerbaijan with great interest indeed, waiting to see if the Russians can consolidate their victory in Tbilisi.

A part of him wishes that right now he were back at the Front; he knows how desperate the situation is. Every day the Futurists push farther, and only the winter weather and the fractured support of their Cossack allies prevents them from breaking through. If the Futurists take Baku, everyone knows, then Yerevan is next. God, if they take Kurdistan, they could march right down the Euphrates to the ink fields of Mesopotamia.

Not that the Russians are the only threat. The Turks have never forgiven the British for the Uprising that lost them Kurdistan.
IfAtaturk were alive today
, you hear them say. It's no surprise the Young Turks aren't satisfied with this pared-down—albeit rejuvenated—Ottoman Empire; they're revolutionaries, and all revolutionaries are proud.
The Turks will stand beneath Mount Ararat again
, they mutter.

Yes, he thinks, the Russians
here
, the British
here
, the Turks
here.
All that's missing is ayoung Bedouin boy running wild around the middle of the cabin, firing his Lee-Enfield in the air—Faisal's Arabia.

The Ben-Abba Airfields north of the city come into sight, strangely modern in the primitive Palestinian wilderness. Fat cigars of air technology float, moored on slender metal berthing towers, high over the confusion of warehouses and hangars, passenger terminals out on the far edge toward the wells of the desert. Carter notes a few BOAC passenger ships, or here and there the colors of this nation's flag or that, but four out of five of the airships wear the black cross of Germany on their envelope, the heraldry of Deutschland International Airlines. Nobody makes airships like the Germans. Here and there among these cruisers outfitted for either passengers or cargo but generally of a size, a few slimmer shapes stand out, sleek and beautiful among their more rotund brethren, vessels of the vedette class built for high speeds and light cargoes. These ones will be carrying airmail, no doubt, but Carter is all too familiar with the other uses they can be put to; he saw that firsthand in Tbilisi. Nobody makes airships like the Germans, but nobody buys them like the Russians, like the damned Futurists.

He should be there with his men right now, Carter knows, his personal concerns set aside in this time of wars and pogroms. But this is a matter of honor. If
Samuel is still alive, he
will
find him. And if he is dead, as this von Strann fellow believes, then by God but Carter will bring his murderers to justice. He feels the letter from his old friend now where it sits in his breast pocket, like a dagger in his heart, or like the threat of one.

It's only the latest in a series that the old man's sent him over the years, increasingly bizarre, increasingly worrying, written in tones that range from utter despondency to fevered jubilation.
I've found what I was looking for… My hopes are crushed… This is the answer, Jack, you understand, the answer… Lost. Lost, God damn it. Every trace has been destroyed.
There was a time when Carter saw his old professor as a new Schliemann on the verge of unearthing Troy, a latter-day Champollion in that eureka moment of discovering the name of Ramses on the Rosetta stone, translating that first cartouche. But then…

Even as a student, before the Great War, he'd come to realize that Hobbs-baum's great success was in a past slipping away from him. For all the groundbreaking discoveries of his youth, Samuel was never the most political creature and academia remembered his present eccentricities more than his past glory. After the War he talked endlessly of the old days, names of old friends littering his conversations as if Carter would clearly recognize these strangers. His son had died in Flanders and somehow, Carter suspects, it is that loss that's been at the heart of all these years of wild-goose chases—the undiscovered city of Aratta, the true site of the mythical Kur—whatever it is the old man thinks he's looking for, perhaps beneath it all is a much simpler yearning.

Eight years ago, Carter almost joined him on his mad quest—he had the chance—and maybe if he had, he could have steered the old man back to a safe harbor. But we can't change the past, he thinks.

He feels the letter in his pocket, near his heart.

A STERLING FELLOW

Dear Jack
,
it begins.

If you are reading this letter, the time I feared has come. I will be gone by now and can only pray von Strann was able to get this letter into your hands. It may be that the full circumstances of my disappearance are a mystery to the Baron, and I regret that I can offer little explanation at this point; this communique may be intercepted and we cannot afford the perils of indiscretion. Believe me, Jack, this is a matter of deepest import, and you must put aside all thoughts of our friendship; yes, I knowyou, Jack, and this is not the time for per
sonal vendettas. The future of the world—the past, the present and the future of this world—hang in the balance and I hope, I know, that you can bring us through. I pray that this letter reaches you and I urge you, Jack, to make all speed to Palestine, to von Strann. I know your feelings about the Prussians, Jack, but he is a good man, an artist not a warrior, and you must trust him implicitly. You may have to trust him with your very life before all this is over. May the Lord have mercy on us all, Jack. The enemy is not what we thought.

Samuel

And then there's the notebook that came with it, with pages which read, once you decipher Hobbsbaum's shorthand, like articles drafiedfor the history books:

… around this time von Strann crossed paths with none other than Mad Jack Carter, on leave from the Caucasian Front and recently arrived in Palestine in search of Hobbsbaum.

Jack Carter. Leaving aside the fantasies of recent Hollywood movies little is known with any real certainty about Captain Jack Carter prior to his famous victories in Kurdistan. We know that he studied under Hobbsbaum at Oxford, but there is no record of him at Eton, where he claimed to have been schooled beforehand. We know that he joined the army at the outbreak of World War I using a forged birth certificate, rising through the ranks at a remarkable rate, gaining his first commission in the field at the age of nineteen, captain by the age of twenty-one. But while such a speedy elevation through the ranks (at a time when officers with blood other than blue were rare) might well suggest some sort of secret patron pulling strings behind the scenes, the rumors that he was the illegitimate son of this or that duke all appear quite unsubstantiated. Scores of historians have failed entirely to trace his mother with any certainty, let alone his father. Von Strann's biographer, Golding, even goes so far as to suggest that Carter started the rumors himself in an attempt to mask quite humble origins.

But whether “Carter” was his mother's name or his father's trade, by all accounts, this young blood was a soldier first and foremost—the Sword of Yerevan no less—and one has to wonder what he would have made of an elegant and effete aristocrat like the Baron von Strann. And, indeed, vice versa. By the time that circumstances brought von Strann and Carter together, the latter must have been the very embodiment of everything the Prussian aristocrat and pacifist both loved and hated.

Carter remains in his seat, reading this utterly disquieting sign of Hobbsbaum's madness. The shorthand is so cramped it's almost illegible…but not quite. He almost wishes that it was…

A letter written by his superior, Major Hamilton,
it says
, to the Persian viceroy prior to Carter's citation for the VC. reveals, perhaps, the most we know about Jack Carter as a man, describing him as “a sterling fellow, his only flaw the recklessness of youth.” For the fearlessness with which Carter personally held off the enemy at the Battle of Majkops, allowing every man of his command to escape, Major Hamilton “can only commend him in the highest terms, foolhardy as his action was. When one looks into his eyes, one senses that he acts not just with passion, but with a razor-edged understanding of the situation. I do believe he is exactly the kind of chap the Empire needs.”

But in many ways Carter's army career is even more of a mystery than his life prior to enlisting. We know that he spent three years leading a mixed guerrilla force of British soldiers and Kurdish and Armeni tribesmen against the Turks, across what is now northern Iraq, that his routing of the Turkish Nationalist forces at Karadut on the slopes of Nemrut Dag may well have been a turning point in the uprising which resulted in Free Kurdistan. We know of his five years as a military attache in the service of the shah of Persia, another five leading a new guerrilla force of British, Kurds, Armenis and Azeris against the Futurist forces now pressing down on their Asian fronts in the Caucasus, reclaiming the territories lost to them in the chaos after Stalin's death …

And Carter remembers
squatting on the barren mountainside of Nemrut Dag, scree slipping underfoot as he sheltered behind the massive stone head of the fallen statue of King Antiochus, aiming the Lee-Enfield and knowing that if they did not hold… knowing that behind him old men and women and children sat cowering in fear against fallen walls and piles of rocks engraved with ancient Greek inscriptions while their village burned down below.
It will be a massacre
, he had reported back, begging for more troops, more ammunition, more supplies, as the Turks swept their eastern territory free of the “undesirables.”

“The Armenis are a filthy people, Carter Bey,” his lieutenant Mehmet had said. “They are only being moved—”

“And the Turks one day will say the same about the Kurds,” Carter had said.

Mehmet had stood there, eye-to-eye with him, for what seemed forever, and Carter remembers knowing, somehow knowing that this moment meant the world. A line in the sand, he had thought, a line in the sand. All it takes is one good man.

“Very well, Carter Bey,” Mehmet had said. “We will save the filthy Armenis.”

Sunlight flashes off the silver skin of a moored zeppelin, catching his eye.

“An awkward situation, no?” says the Russian. “But we are not at war here, are we, Captain? Shall we not be … civil with each other out of deference to our hosts?”

Carter keeps his head turned to the window—has done since Damascus, when he wasn't making a show of reading the newspaper. The Baghdad-Damascus leg of the journey was quite pleasant, but now… he can't say he's happy sharing the cabin with an officer of the infamous Black Guard. The most reviled of Russia's echelons, the Black Guard are the worst sort of Cossacks in his opinion, turncoats against their tsar and their countrymen, the most vicious devotees of revolutionary Futurism. He's no stranger to this type of man; he's heard the stories of internment centers in the heart of Europe, of the pogroms and so-called purification. He's seen for himself what the Futurists have done in Russia; God, even the savages of Africa would balk at such inhuman acts.