The Tiger Warrior (40 page)

Katya got up. She turned to Costas, and gave him a steely look. “Time to go. And to find out about the Brotherhood of the Tiger. The modern version.”

Jack grinned at Costas. “You ever been to Afghanistan?”

T
HIS IS THE PILOT SPEAKING. WE’RE ENTERING AFGHAN
airspace now.”

Jack shifted and stretched, then pressed the control to raise his seat to the upright position. He was in the forward cabin of the IMU Embraer jet, and he had spent the last three hours fitfully sleeping, two and a half of them on the tarmac at Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan while they waited for the optimum time for departure. The flight to Feyzabad in northeast Afghanistan was only an hour and a half, and the captain had wanted to arrive at dawn and return to Bishkek as soon as they had off-loaded. An airport in Afghanistan was no place to linger, even an airport under nominal ISAF control, and the Embraer would be fueled up to return from Bishkek to pick them up as soon as the call went in.

Jack had a sketch of the inscription in the jungle tomb clutched in his hand. He looked down and saw the Latin word.
Sappheiros
. In antiquity, that meant lapis lazuli, and that could only mean the lapis mined in the forbidding Koran Valley, high in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. One strand of the ancient treasure trail had pointed across the lake of Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan toward the eastern shore, to the place where Jack had begun to think a boat might have gone down in a storm two thousand years ago. The other strand led deep into the heart of Afghanistan, their route now.

Jack looked at the words of the inscription again.
Hic iacet Licinius optio XV Apollinaris Sacra iulium sacularia, in sappheiros nielo minium. Alta Fabia frater ad Pontus ad aelia acundus
. Here lies Licinius,
optio
of the 15th Apollinaris legion. Guardian of the celestial jewel, in the dark
sappheiros
mines. The other is with Fabius, brother, across the lake toward the rising sun. So Licinius had not taken his jewel south with him into the jungle. The
vélpu
, the sacred bamboo tube of the Kóya, the safeguard taken by Howard and Wauchope from the
muttadar
, may have been sanctified by its association with the
raumana
, the one who had come to the jungle and died in the shrine. But the bamboo tube had contained only a phantom treasure. The real treasure had been hidden somewhere out here, in the wilds of Afghanistan, during Licinius’ escape south from the lake. It was somewhere in the lapis lazuli mines, where the precious veins of blue had been worked since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.

Jack remembered what he had been thinking when he had dozed off. The valley with the mines was on a route south from Lake Issyk-Kul to India, toward the community of Roman traders half a world away that had been Licinius’ destination. Licinius might have guessed that the warriors pursuing him were after what he had taken off the Sogdian. He might have seen the odds stacked against him and decided to stash the jewel. He might have known the value of what he had taken. Perhaps the Sogdian had spoken to him of it, told him of its power if it were to be reunited with the other jewel, the one taken by Fabius across the lake. Maybe the Sogdian had spoken in desperation, hoping his life would be spared. Or maybe he had warned Licinius, told him something that made him want to be rid of his treasure. Maybe he had been told that he would be pursued relentlessly, and that the mines were the only place the jewel could be safely concealed, where the power of the crystal would be absorbed into the rock of its source. Only there, perhaps, it would no longer attract those who would come after him, who would hunt him like the tiger, as if they had some sixth sense for it.

Jack slid out into the aisle, slipped on his boots and made his way aft into the main cabin, where several window blinds were open on the port side. The pilot had taken a counterclockwise route over Tajikistan to approach Feyzabad from the west, and Jack could see the faint glimmerings of dawn over the Pamir Mountains and the bleak wasteland of the Taklamakan Desert beyond. He leaned over the seats and stared at the awesome mountain landscape below. It was a place where the obstacles to human existence appeared insurmountable, yet for those who endured it the reward was to live halfway to heaven. He stood back and made his way down the aisle to the others. Altamaty and Pradesh were sitting beside each other, talking in Russian. Jack sat opposite and poured himself a coffee from the trolley. Costas had been with them when Jack had gone to lie down, describing in detail the layout of his beloved engineering wing at the IMU campus in Cornwall. Costas had gone away to sleep as well, and Jack saw that the other two men had been poring over diving equipment catalogs from the onboard library.

Jack was itching to be underwater again. He thought of Rebecca. She had spent half an hour with him on the tarmac at Bishkek, running through notes she had made on Wood’s
Source of the River Oxus
. She had given Jack the book and hugged him before being whisked off toward the lake in the U.S. Marine Apache helicopter. Jack smiled at his last image of her, in a flight helmet surrounded by four burly U.S. Navy SEALs. She had been loving every second of it. If all went according to plan, they would be back together on the eastern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in less than twenty-four hours, and by then the IMU equipment ordered by Costas would have been air-freighted in. The ruins submerged in the lake were tantalizing, and might be one of the greatest Silk Road finds ever. The lake had also been traversed by boats carrying traders, and there was always the possibility of a wreck. Jack thought of Fabius and the fate of the Romans who had rowed for their lives toward the east. He glanced at Katya, who was sitting by herself a few rows ahead, staring out of the window. They might also find petroglyphs underwater, if the boulders extended into the lake. There was a major collaborative project in the offing. He could see himself spending more time out here. He looked out of the window, and remembered where they were heading.
If they made it through the next twenty-four hours
.

Costas came stumbling down the aisle and slumped into the seat beside Jack. He looked out of the window, and Jack followed his gaze. They could clearly make out the ripple of hills and valleys and stretches of snowcapped peaks. Costas flipped open the monitor from his armrest and activated the map. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ve passed over the border into Afghanistan. Can’t be much more than half an hour to go.”

“You can just make out the Panjshir Valley,” Jack said. “It’s shrouded in mist with peaks on either side, stretching off to the east. It’s the valley of the fabled river Oxus, the river that marked the eastern edge of Alexander the Great’s expedition. Five hundred miles west from here it flows into the Aral Sea, a lake. On the way it passes Merv, where Crassus’ legionaries were imprisoned. The escaped Romans may have come this way, but faced with the wall of mountains to the east they may have veered north on the spur of the Silk Road that led through Kyrgyzstan past Lake Issyk-Kul.”

“And Howard and Wauchope?” Costas said. “Is this where they ended up, after they disappeared into Afghanistan in 1908?”

Jack pursed his lips. “They were experienced enough to make it this far. Both men knew the Afghan border region well from their army postings. Wauchope had actually been into Afghanistan before, during the second Afghan war.”

“The medal Pradesh had, with the elephant?” Costas said.

Jack nodded. “That was in 1879, just before he joined Howard in the jungle. It was the time of the Great Game, the standoff between Britain and Russia. It was a decade of heroic defeats. Custer’s Last Stand against the Sioux, 1876. The British defeat by the Zulus, at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, 1879. Then the battle of Mai-wand in Afghanistan, in 1880. Almost a thousand British and Indian troops died on the plain outside Kandahar, fighting to the last. The Afghans desecrated the bodies just as the Sioux and the Zulu did. Thirty years before, during the first Afghan War, the British Army of the Indus had been massacred as they retreated toward the Khyber Pass, with only one British survivor making it out. These were painted as heroic failures, boosted in popular imagination to extol the virtues of the warrior. Many of the British officers had been steeped in chivalry. I have a complete set of Sir Walter Scott’s
Waverley Novels
, signed by John Howard. He’d lived in that world as a boy, and subscribed to a new edition in the 1880s, as if he were trying to recapture the romance that was knocked out of him after he experienced the brutal reality. And the British should have known better with Afghanistan. They’d had men there from early on, explorers like John Wood. They knew the problems of the terrain, and they knew the people.”

“What was the situation in 1908?”

“Uneasy peace. Afghanistan was still a no-go zone. The trek up here from Quetta would have taken Howard and Wauchope weeks, even months. For provisions they would have been reliant on the goodwill of the people they came across. Wauchope had much experience with the border tribesmen, but there would have been lengthy negotiations, social niceties to be observed, diversions as their guides took them around the territories of feuding warlords. Once they got to the Panjshir Valley, if they did, they would have been on their own. Winter was probably setting in, and it would have been an arduous trek into the mountains to get to where I think they were going.”

Pradesh had been listening intently, and leaned forward. “What makes you so sure this was the place?”

“Because the Panjshir Valley is the route to the lapis lazuli mines,” Jack said.

“Of course,” Pradesh murmured.
“Sappheiros
, lapis lazuli. They’d seen that in the inscription in the jungle years before, and were looking for the place where you think Licinius hid the jewel.”

Jack angled the map screen from Costas’ armrest so they could all see it. He pointed at a series of ridges leading south from the main valley. “Here, deep in the Hindu Kush range. The mines are located in a narrow mountain valley. There are about twenty shafts, some of them open for thousands of years. The lapis lazuli decorating King Tut’s coffin in Egypt came from here, traded west over a thousand years before the Romans came this way.”

“Romans?” Costas said. “I thought it was just one, Licinius.”

“He was alone when he came to hide the jewel, after he’d fled south from Issyk-Kul,” Jack said. “But for him to know how to reach the mines, I think the band of escaped legionaries must have come in this direction during their trek from Merv into central Asia. The Panjshir Valley may have been where they were forced north, toward Kyrgyzstan. If you read Wood’s
Source of the River Oxus
, you realize why. The mountains he describes at the eastern end of the valley sound like the end of the world, utterly impassable. But before turning away and going north, the Romans could have got far enough up the valley to hear of the fabled mines, maybe even to see them. If Licinius had been told by the Sogdian to take the jewel there, he would have known where to go.”

Katya slipped into the seat in front of Pradesh. “And when he reached the jungle, he didn’t need to leave a treasure map,” she said. “All he had to inscribe on his tomb was the word for lapis lazuli. Everyone in India knows that lapis comes from Afghanistan. Everyone in Afghanistan knows it comes from the Panjshir Valley. And someone in the valley can always point you in the direction of the mines, where a miner might even show you the shaft that produces the darkest blue, the
nielo
. But it’s like telling people about Shangri-la, because in truth hardly anyone would dream of going there, and anyone who did might stand little chance of survival. It was a prize that was only ever going to tempt the desperate, or fools. Or romantic old soldiers like Howard and Wauchope, with a yen for adventure.”

“How sure are you that Howard and Wauchope were on this trail?” Costas asked.

Jack pointed at the book. “Lieutenant John Wood, Bengal Navy.
A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus
. This was Howard’s own copy, pored over by him, full of annotations. I found it in the lower drawer of that chest of family papers you saw in my cabin in
Seaquest II
, bundled up as if it were something he treasured but didn’t want anyone else to see. The section on the Panjshir Valley and the lapis mines is so densely covered with notes that it’s virtually indecipherable.”