Mystics and Warriors

By Michael Banister

Flor Benavides, whose Sephardic Jewish family had to flee Baghdad in the late 1940's, grew up in Chicago. When she was 10 years old, her older brother Idris returned to Chicago from an extended buying trip with four Persian friends throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. As a girl, Flor had loved Idris's stories of that trip, especially his description of the group's encounter in Malta with a mysterious, almost wizardly, man known as Shamsuddin. Fifty years later, Flor learned that Shamsuddin had joined forces with an underground Turkish political group known as Konrul. Turgut Evren, a Colonel in the Turkish Army, was a member of the group. Their sociopolitical aims were to undermine the Turkish government and to defeat the growing Kurdish separatist movement. When the Colonel learned of a sophisticated software program used to facilitate communication among satellite phones, he tried to have the software stolen. He hoped to use the software to break into the communication network used by Kurdish separatist groups. However, Shamsuddin had other planns for that software, and stole the software before Evren could get his hands on it. It was only a matter of time before Evren learned of Shamsuddin's ulterior motive. And when he did, you can be sure the outcome was bound to be deadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Banister
• Release date: May 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463315705

Book preview

Mystics and Warriors

By

Michael Banister

Published by Michael Banister

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 Michael Banister

Discover other titles by Michael Banister

Stolen Identity

(available at Smashwords and in print at most online retailers)

Spherical Astrolabe

Trial and Error

Visit my Smashwords author page at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Ringhiero

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Appearances are deceiving

Refuge in the redwoods

Intersecting journeys

Doctor and patient

Consul-General

A spy in the Consulate

Alchemy

Trouble for the Consul

Burglars and bombers

Expert witness

Meeting in the Redwoods

A plan is formed

Confrontation

About the Author

Chapter One: Appearances are Deceiving

June 2013

The Turkish soldier manning the checkpoint didn't look more than 19 or 20. One could reasonably assume that since he was an enlisted man assigned to an obscure post in southeastern Turkey, he was therefore an uneducated peasant. But one would be wrong. It would be a serious mistake to underestimate the soldier's sophistication or commitment to his job.

This particular soldier and his younger sister had grown up in the region. His father was an army colonel involved with the military's response to the troublesome Kurdish rebellion. When the boy graduated from the local high school, the colonel sent him to the military college in Istanbul. His sister accompanied him and enrolled in a secondary school for girls on Asian side of Istanbul’s Bosporus Strait.

In 2012, just as the two siblings were finishing up their second year in school (he in college, she in high school), their mother was murdered while on vacation in the beach resort town of Bodrum. The colonel, and his son and daughter, knew that the murder was in reality a political assassination.

Had the colonel's wife not been murdered last year, the colonel would still be in the region, prosecuting the anti-terrorist campaign to its fullest, and their son would most likely be doing his mandatory third-year service tour in one of Turkey’s more desirable locations.

However, the military brass in Ankara decided the colonel needed a few years out of the heat, and sent him to Los Angeles to act as an attaché at the Turkish Consulate there. His daughter decided to go with her father and finish her high school in Los Angeles. The colonel’s soldier son, however, elected to remain and do his yearlong tour as an enlisted man near where his mother was killed.

The checkpoint was operated out of the local telephone switching facility, which had been taken over for a couple of days by half a dozen enlisted men under the command of a sergeant. The rest of their unit was busy in the nearby town of Midyat, which was about a mile southwest from the checkpoint.

The soldier's orders were to stop every vehicle, without exception, coming in the direction of the town. He was to make a cursory visual check through the interior of each vehicle, and inform the driver that it would be necessary to take the alternate route around the town, which the driver could do at the fork in the road about 100 yards back before the checkpoint.

The soldier's most important job, however, was to ask a few questions of the occupants in order to determine their business in that God-forsaken, rebel-ridden corner of creation. Kurdish separatists infested the area, which was why the Turkish army was so busy keeping an eye on things. There were those in Turkish society, government and military who believed that not only must the army keep on eye on things in Kurdistan but that someone else must make sure the army did its job right.

That someone happened to be a clandestine organization called the Konrul, a right-wing ultra-nationalist group within the military seeking to eventually seize control of the Turkish government from its current masters in the moderate Islamist party under Erdoğan. It planned to do so by manipulating the Kurdish separatist activities into a situation requiring a virtual police state. At that point, the Konrul would be in position to take charge.

The young soldier was a member of the Konrul, as was his father, his sergeant in the nearby office, and many of the unit in the field and in the town. Membership in Konrul was limited to Turkish soldiers and officers, by invitation from other officers. It was not exactly a secret organization; at least its public purpose—promotion of Turkish culture and respect for its history—was not a secret. Its actual purpose was known only to those officers who created it and to those members of the military who the higher-ranking officers invited to join.

There was a brutal pacification campaign going on, and this particular soldier was to keep nosy outsiders (or interested insiders) away for the next day or so. A little before noon, the soldier observed a tan Peugeot approaching. It came to a stop, and the soldier walked up to the driver's side window. Two men sat in the front seat, dressed in the conservative attire of Muslim clergy. Prohibited by law from wearing Persian or Arab style robes, the clergy in Turkey wore western clothing like everyone else. But they wore distinctive caps, which identified them as clergy.

These two men, however, struck the soldier as being out of place. Although they claimed to be Istanbul Turks temporarily attached to the large main Al-Jummah Mosque in the city of Mardin some 25 kilometers away, they didn't quite have the Istanbul Turkish accent down pat. They sounded more like Kurds who were trying very hard to pass themselves off as Istanbul Turks.

The soldier was relieved to find that he would have something interesting to do this afternoon. Please get out of the car, gentlemen, and make yourselves comfortable in the shade over there. I must take a look through your car. Just doing my job.

The two occupants of the car smiled nervously as they exited and walked over to the small building. They watched impassively while the soldier started with a methodical search of the trunk. The younger of the two men licked his lips when he saw the soldier pull out a small suitcase and attempt to open it.

Please, gentlemen, can one of you open this? I need to take a quick look inside.

The younger man walked back to the car, taking out his wallet as he did so. He retrieved a small key and handed it to the soldier. The soldier steadied the suitcase on the roof of the car, unlocked the suitcase and opened it. Expecting to see clothes or other personal effects inside, the soldier was surprised to see that the case was divided into two compartments. One compartment held a laptop computer. The other compartment contained something the soldier had never seen before. It was a two-piece device of durable plastic. It was about 7 square inches, an inch thick, and imprinted with a label that said iSat Hub.

The soldier smiled, lifted out the iSat Hub and said, Would one of you mind showing me how this thing works? We can go inside the office and sit down.

The older cleric spoke. Well, I can tell you what it is right here. It really is quite simple. It's just a satellite hook-up for this small personal computer. Out here in the countryside, we have very few options for connecting to the Internet. The cleric reached into the briefcase, removed the laptop and motioned for the soldier to hand him the hub.

The soldier put his hand on the cleric’s arm to stop him. But I want to see it in action and I want us to be comfortable. Come inside. The soldier put the laptop and iSat Hub back inside the suitcase and closed it. Turning his back on the two men and walking towards the building, the soldier realized he took a risk he probably shouldn't have.

The two men followed the soldier inside. They all sat around a small cafe-type table and the soldier told the younger man to take the two items out of the suitcase and turn them on.

After turning on the laptop, the younger man took hold of the iSat Hub and rotated part of it upward, explaining that it was an antenna. When the laptop came to life, it quickly went through a few seconds of diagnostic checks and the flat screen showed the familiar Windows desktop. The soldier spent half minute or so in silence examining the icons on the screen.

What other software and applications does it have? It had been almost six months since the soldier had had his hands on a computer of any kind, let alone so high-tech as this little baby.

Just these, the usual suite of applications like word processor, spreadsheet, database.

My brother-in-law in Ankara has a desktop, nothing as fancy as this. What does the Al-Jummah Mosque need a laptop with a satellite transceiver for? Or is this your personal computer?

No, this belongs to the congregation. We're both assistants to the head Imam. We use the laptop for a variety of tasks. On this particular business trip to Midyat, we have a series of meetings lined up and will be using the word processor and spread sheet program to take notes, produce reports and the like.

Even to an unsophisticated soldier of solid Anatolian peasant stock, that story would not have passed muster. Anyone who was acquainted with mosques and clerics would be aware that religion in Turkey inhabited a world of decrepit old buildings and poverty-stricken staff wearing threadbare suits. Turkey had taken a very clever tack in the 1920s when it nationalized the mosques and put the clergy, their salaries and their budgets under government control. Holding the purse strings was a very good way to weaken opposition.

The soldier set the iSat Hub next to the laptop and began fooling around with it. This thing must have cost a fortune. I wasn't aware that mosques had that kind of disposable income. The soldier pushed a button on the side of the iSat Hub, which caused a small indicator light to come on.

The two clerics couldn't figure out whether the soldier was curious, suspicious or excited by their expensive little gadget. The older man decided the soldier merely wanted to play and learn a little about computers in order to alleviate the boredom of stopping cars on a hot, dusty Anatolian road.

Normally, such a machine as this would be way beyond the means of a congregation, even as large and affluent one as ours in Mardin. The older man could see that his effort in buying time might work, as he figured out the rest of what he would say on the fly. "However, one of our congregants recently returned from an extended business trip to Indonesia,