Achtung Cthulhu: the Sleepers of Ephesus (Part III)

We return for the third and final part of our Achtung Cthulhu adventure. Let us first begin with Ismet Saka, who had returned to his student lodgings, where he started reading the book he had taken from the Armenian church. 

This turned out to be a relatively recent academic work by a Greek academic, called Snake Cults of Pre-Christian Asia, by Dr Kyriakos Pikramennos. Published in 1894, it mentioned snake worship in the Greek cities on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, including a cult called the Sons of Yig. It chronicled how the Greeks believed a race of serpents walked among them at times and lived in caves beneath the hills of Asia, able to pass themselves off as men. They also had the ability to hibernate for centuries.

Saka made some phone calls to contacts of his father in the local government in Istanbul and even managed to raise Igor Kulakov at the Soviet consulate. He learned that a naval exercise was being planned in the Black Sea on the next day, involving two Turkish warships, which would be a demonstration of some kind of new weapon to German observers. Kulakov told him 'Atticus Frith' had met with a German called Horst Klockner, who had recently arrived in Istanbul from Bulgaria. Exactly what they discussed remains a mystery.

Meanwhile, Henry ‘Hotspur’ Smythe-Barrington, the smuggler Turhan Demir, and the American archaeologist Marianne Chaste, decided to go and investigate the Serpent Column at the Hippodrome. They found the area unguarded, and the column itself had disappeared. Chaste spotted some markings in the dirt that looked like those that might have been left by a huge snake. The trio decided to follow them – great Track rolls here – and the trail led them to the waterfront. While they were musing what to do next, a huge metallic snake with glowing eyes and three heads reared out of the water and mesmerised Hotspur and Chaste, but luckily Demir reacted, slapping Hotspur and bringing him to his senses. The snake broke eye contact with Chaste to attack Demir, biting him quite severely. Chaste and Demir fled, while Hotspur shot at the snake, hitting it, but only dislodging a few scales. Then he too ran for it. The snake did not pursue, sinking beneath the waves of the Bosphorus.

Chaste performed first aid on Demir, but he was still bleeding, so the trio headed for a street doctor who treated Demir. While he was there, he received a call from Serdar Aydin, another former member of Pasha Cell, telling him Saka had been in touch with him and wanted to meet up. Demir sent one of his street urchins to collect a message from Saka, which revealed what the student had learned from his phone calls during the night. The boy was again dispatched to bring Saka back to the doctor’s house by a circuitous route. Saka noticed the child checking to make sure they were not being followed.

The consensus between the agents now was to take a closer look at the naval exercise on the morrow. Hotspur remembered seeing two Turkish destroyers in the Bosphorus the day before, a newer one, and an old pre-World War One vessel. Demir stopped by one of his warehouses to pick up some dynamite (sadly he had sold the Lewis gun recently) and they headed for the harbour, where he kept one of his smuggling boats.

As the sun came up over Istanbul, the agents motored north up the Bosphorus, and passing Lysander’s Tower, noticed there was no boat moored there. They decided to investigate. Landing at the tower, they proceeded down some steps to a door. Hearing voices in Turkish, and looking through the keyhole, they determined there were three Turkish soldiers present. Chaste decided to brazen it out, entering a room that looked like a bar or some kind of officers’ club. Three Turkish soldiers were drinking whisky and smoking. Chaste pretended to be a sight seer and the men ordered her to leave, but she offered them dollars if they would let her look around. Hotspur entered pretending to be her companion. The soldiers relaxed a little, and offered them a drink, but sent one of their number up to the tower to keep an eye out. They told Chaste and Hotspur the tower was being used by an American archaeologist and was technically off limits to the public.

Demir now entered and pretended to be a local tourist guide. The three got into their roles and posed as tourists having a look around. The soldiers left them to it. The place did look like nothing more than a bar, although they did discover one of the missing stone caskets in one room, with the lid off and nothing inside.

Hotspur noticed a draft while mooching around in what looked like a dusty library and discovered a secret door opening onto a study. Here the spies found a desk and a safe. Demir cracked the safe easily, and discovered it contained wads of German Reichsmarks along with bags of gold Roman coins. He decided to take them. On the desk were lading bills for two large crates that were shipped to Bombay three months previously.

Another door led off the room, and opening it, they saw stairs leading down into the darkness. Demir led the way down into a room that contained four more stone caskets, and four horrible mummies with serpent-like features, which proceeded to move against the Turk immediately. Demir kept his wits about him (good SAN check) and fled up the stairs, tossing some sticks of dynamite into the chamber. The explosion was enough to destroy a couple of mummies and bring the fragile ceiling down on the other two.

Up top Saka was posing as a boat boy and chatting to the guard who was keeping an eye out to the north. He learned the American archaeologist was away on a day trip. Then they felt the explosion under their feet, and the other spies appeared, yelling about a tragic accident. The soldier went down the steps to investigate, and the agents jumped into their boat and motored away from the tower.

The team spent most of the rest of the day motoring north up the Bosphorus, and eventually spotted the two destroyers cruising out into the Black Sea. They followed at a distance, keeping them under observation with binoculars. When the ships were almost out of sight of land, the older warship was seen to drop anchor, and its crew evacuated. Then a mysterious cloud formed in the sky above it, and lightning came out of it. Eventually a hole appeared in the spreading cloud and a vast and horrid entity emerged from it, larger than an aircraft carrier.

This was too much for Hotspur and Demir who lost their minds entirely. Demir began throwing dynamite sticks into the sea while Hotspur attacked Chaste and tried to strangle her. He then changed his mind and pulled his gun out, ranting about how they should kill themselves. Chaste pulled out her own Luger and scored three point blank hits on the Englishman, knocking him out of the boat and into the sea. 

Saka seized the controls of the boat and turned it towards the shore. Chaste noticed Demir babbling to himself as he went below, taking more dynamite out of his pockets. Prudently, Chaste and Saka both grabbed life rings and jumped into the sea, just before the boat – and Demir – blew up.

Floating in the water, Chaste and Saka were able to watch the vast alien entity consume the older warship entirely, before it retreated back into the strange cloud, which in turn gradually evaporated. Together they began paddling towards the land…