The Tiger Warrior (50 page)

Jack nodded. “It’s possible. And not just for concealed tombs, but also for very visible tombs, extravagant ones. For those tombs, it’s the exterior appearance that matters for posterity, for how later generations will see the dead. But the contents usually matter most for the deceased, their private insurance policy for the afterlife. So they can be concealed elsewhere, with the actual body. After all, even the Egyptian pyramids were robbed.”

“And the First Emperor’s tomb at Xian was robbed,” Costas murmured. “By the caretaker, if the jewel story is true.”

Jack stood up, peering at the shoreline. He looked for the Zodiac, for Rebecca, but there was still no sign. He sat down and began to pull the legs of his suit on. “So where exactly are we going in?”

Costas flipped over to another piece of paper on the clipboard. “I printed this off the navigational computer. About two o’clock from us now, half a kilometer out from shore. There’s a creek with a few buildings at the edge.”

Jack shielded his eyes. “I see it.”

“It’s where the profiler came up with that image of walls.”

“It fits with the old Soviet report?”

“It fits exactly with the story from Altamaty, recounted to me by Katya. And I can’t imagine Katya has anything to hide.”

Jack raised his eyebrows, and was silent for a moment. “Well, to reassure you, Altamaty also spoke with Rebecca, in Russian. He said the first reports of underwater finds at this spot came from the Russian explorers who reached this place in the nineteenth century. You remember Sir Aurel Stein, the Silk Route explorer? Well, there were Russians who jumped on that bandwagon too, sent out by the Moscow Geographical Society. It was like an archaeological version of the Great Game, Russians against British. Nobody knows for sure what the Russians found. Such a lot disappeared after the Russian Revolution. But we know that two Russian explorers came down here, Nikolai Przhevalsky and Piotr Semyonov Tianshansky. They’d both heard stories of sunken ruins, cities under the lake. When they came here, the place seemed possessed by it. Tianshansky had been to Venice and found a fourteenth-century map showing an Armenian monastery by the lake. The legend of the tomb of Genghis seems to have been local. Undoubtedly the Russians were fed what they wanted to hear, but they were also shown genuine artifacts that had been found by fishermen.”

“Then fast-forward through the Soviet period.”

Jack nodded, pushing his head through the rubber seal on his suit. “The explorers left, but the legends grew. Nazi fantasists thought this was the Aryan homeland, drawing on local legends that this was a place of purity, a kind of heaven on earth. Then in the 1950s the Soviets established their torpedo testing base here, and divers went into the lake for the first time. As we know, they found something while searching for a lost torpedo, and the Ministry of Interior Security became involved. That ended under Khrushchev in the early 60s as the Cold War heated up and attention was focused elsewhere. Then more years passed, more rumor, more legend. A professor in Bishkek started to talk about Atlantis. That’s when Katya’s father got interested.”

“The family connection. I knew it.”

“The professor was wrong, of course. And Katya’s father never made it here. This place was next on his wish list when we drew a line under his plans two years ago.”

“So what else does Altamaty know about what the Soviets found?”

“The records only give chart coordinates. There’s a huge amount of silt down there, and no record of whether they found the torpedo. But rumors began circulating in Karakol, the local town, where the Soviet personnel lived. They told of ancient walls under the silt, like the converging walls of a great entrance passageway, with Chinese-style carvings. In Karakol there’s a wooden mosque built about a hundred years ago by the Dungan Chinese, Muslims driven west by persecution in China. The mosque looks like a Chinese temple, with dragons on the cornice. The Dungans seem to have fueled the legend of Genghis’ tomb. Katya thinks it’s only a matter of time before the tourist department seizes on the idea and makes it into an embarrassing spectacle, with giant Soviet-style statues of Genghis Khan in the town square. She wants them to invest in the petroglyphs, the real archaeology out here, not some myth, and make that an international attraction.”

Costas folded the sheet over on his clipboard and showed Jack a printout. “Well, whatever it was the divers saw, it seems to fit with the sub-bottom profiler data. To begin with, the profiler just showed linear striations coming down from shore, river runoff eroded into the bedrock. It was Rebecca who first saw how regular one of the channels looked. Almost an upside-down V shape, converging into shore.”

“So it was Rebecca who actually spotted this? She didn’t tell me that.”

“She’s modest. Like you.”

Jack raised his eyebrows. “She’s too busy being spoiled by a team of fifteen U.S. Navy SEALs, you mean.”

“Every one of them a gentleman.”

Jack looked serious. “I don’t want navy divers out here right now. Just us.”

“They’re too busy anyway. There are ticking time bombs in the old Soviet port area, abandoned hulls with nuclear reactors. Where we’re diving is officially a no-go zone. It’s going to take them months to decontaminate out this far. This is our show. Remember, the only reason those Soviet divers came out here was to hunt for a lost torpedo, and they didn’t find it.”

Jack reached into the lake to splash some water on his helmet. “The water’s warm. Just your cup of tea.”

“If it gets any warmer as we go down, I’m out of here faster than you can say Geiger counter.”

“That’s what we’ve got these suits for. You designed them.”

“We’re still going to need a full scrubbing down after this.”

“In Hawaii?”

Costas brightened. “That’s the first time you’ve come out with the word. Actually said it, without being prompted.”

Jack looked into the lake. In the bay the water was a brilliant blue, like lapis lazuli, like the aura that had emanated from the mine in Afghanistan where they had been two days before. But out here, away from the shore, it was different. The sun bore down directly overhead and bathed the water in an iridescent glow. Some quality of the water, or perhaps the sheer intensity of the sun, meant that the lake seemed to absorb the light and reflect it back a few meters below, as if a layer of liquid silver were floating just beneath the surface. He looked down, and could see no reflection of himself at all. The layer seemed real, like quicksilver spread up from some source below. Jack looked back at the shoreline opposite them. He saw a tall bird, a heron, standing stock-still at the entrance to the creek a few hundred meters away. It was serene, like a sculpture, then dipped its beak down into the water. Jack remembered his visit with Rebecca to the terracotta warriors exhibit in London a few months before, standing in front of an elegant bronze bird, which had once adorned a model shoreline inside the First Emperor’s tomb. Jack looked across to the line of mountains to the south, breathtaking in their grandeur, and raised his hand to shade his eyes, dazzled by the reflection off the snowy peaks that seemed to float above as if they were in some other dimension.

Costas nudged him. “One thing’s been bothering me, since Afghanistan,” he said. “We know what happened to Howard, but not Wauchope. In the lapis lazuli mine there was no sign of the sacred
vélpu
, the bamboo tube you think they brought with them, taken years before in the jungle. Howard might have been grasping it when he fell, but then someone took it from him. If it was the bad guys, they may have found the jewel too, and the whole story would have been different. Shang Yong would have been sitting in his desert stronghold with the jewel of immortality stuck in his ceiling, planning world domination.”

Jack nodded. Since leaving Afghanistan his focus had been on Pradesh, as if his own survival instinct were being marshaled behind their friend. It was only with the assurance that Pradesh would pull through that he had begun to think of everything else, of the man he had shot, of the boy with the suicide bomb. For the man he felt indifference, for the boy a kind of numbness, as if he had seen the explosion on a news report. The shock of that death would sear into him, but not yet. The experience of confronting Howard’s body, his great-great-grandfather, was still vivid, as if he were living it now, too early for reflection. But the fate of Wauchope had preoccupied him as they had sailed across the lake, as he had thought of the convergence of all their routes, the Roman legionaries, Howard and Wauchope, all the Silk Road explorers, of themselves, all focused on that mystical spot over the horizon where the sun rose on Chrysê, the fabled land of gold in the ancient
Periplus
.

He turned to Costas. “You remember Wood’s
Source of the River Oxus
, the book we used to locate the lapis mines?”

“Sure. With all the annotations from Howard and Wauchope.”

“One of their notes Rebecca pointed out was in the margin of the map at the beginning of the book. An arrow from the valley of the Oxus to the northeast, and the penciled name
Issyk-Kul
, underlined, beside the word
Przhevalsky”

“That Russian explorer?”

Jack nodded. “Przhevalsky actually died here, of typhus in 1888. Rebecca did some research. It turns out he was in London before that, and gave a lecture in the same series at the Royal United Service Institution where Howard gave his talk on the Romans in south India. That was just before Wauchope returned from leave to his job with the Survey of India, and both he and Howard attended Przhevalsky’s lecture. It was about a rare breed of horses he had discovered in Mongolia, and he mentioned the blood-sweating horses. Then he talked of coming to this place, of the legendary treasures of the lake. He spoke of the Tien Shan range, of his explorations deep into the mountains. I think Wauchope would have been entranced by that, as a passionate mountaineer.”

“So that’s where you think Wauchope went?”

“Tien Shan means celestial mountains. From the Taklamakan Desert, they look closer to heaven than any of the peaks in China. The First Emperor was obsessed with those places, always trying to go as high as he could, to leave his proclamations. He must have looked to the Tien Shan when he sensed his own mortality.” Jack swept his arm to the west. “If Wauchope survived the mine, he may have retraced Licinius’ route and come toward Issyk-Kul, then made his way into the mountains. Maybe he was like the Romans, and felt he could never go back to his own world. Maybe he and Howard never had any intention of returning. Przhevalsky told of valleys that were not bleak and unforgiving like Afghanistan, but bountiful, lush, lost in time, like Shangri-la. Even if they didn’t find the jewels, those stories could have tempted them with something of what the legend of the celestial jewel seemed to offer.”

“Or they could have found the jewel in the mine. Wauchope could have gone back with it to the jungle. He could have put the jewel inside the bamboo tube and returned the sacred
vélpu
to the Kóya people. He could have found a way into the jungle shrine through the waterfall at the back, and hidden it there. Maybe inside Licinius’ tomb. What they’d done in the jungle in 1879 must have been on Howard’s mind in his final hours. That’s the time when people think of atonement, redemption. Wauchope may have made a promise to him at the end, and then carried it out. That’s the kind of thing friends do. They were soldiers, blood brothers. Like Licinius and Fabius.”

Jack squinted at Costas. “Yes. Maybe.”

“We’re almost there.” The boat slowed down, and began to trace a wide arc toward shore. “There’s something more immediate we need to discuss.”

“Go on.”

Costas squinted at the water. “Have you noticed that when there’s a breeze, it hardly ruffles the surface?”

Jack nodded. “It makes the water seem sluggish, heavy, like molten metal.”

“It’s because the westerly wind is funneled upward as it approaches land. But did you see the shimmer on the surface a few minutes ago?”

Jack nodded. “Seismic aftershock?”

“Worse. Seismic labor pains. There’s been a big quake already, and there’s almost certainly another one coming. Today, maybe tomorrow. Not the ideal diving conditions, but it could be good for us. We’re looking at proximal and distal delta deposits, some glacial out-wash, incised by basinward-converging channels. A lot of piled-up silt.”

“You mean there could be a turbitude.”

“A deformation, a sediment slip. It could reveal those walls, if they exist. They could be visible one moment, and then poof, another tremor and another sediment slip, and they’re gone. We could be lucky. If there’s anything there, now might be the time to see it.”

“You remember the last time we were diving?”

Costas sighed. “Eight days ago. The Red Sea. Beautiful water, coral reefs. Paradise.” He paused. “Elephants. Underwater elephants.”

“That’s what I was thinking about. Your elephants. Did you ever hear the old Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant?”

Costas looked back bemusedly. “Three blind men are led to an elephant, not having been told what it is. One feels the tail, and thinks it’s a rope. One feels the trunk, and thinks it’s a snake. One feels a tusk, and thinks it’s a spear.”

“Remember how I nearly didn’t see that elephant on the seabed? I was too close to it. Remember that when we’re down there today.”

“What we’ll see? A layer of brown, then darker brown. It becomes warmer, then hot. We start to glow. Then some Russian mobster fishes us out and sell us to terrorists as components of a dirty bomb.”

Jack grinned. “The geologists say the lake is gradually emptying, you know.”

“Emptying?”

“It’s always been a mystery where all the glacial runoff goes, pouring down those slopes from the Tien Shan. The lake’s like a huge ornamental pond, which the fountains never seem to fill up. It’s as if somewhere in the depths there’s a giant plug.”

“That’s another reason not to dive here. I’m not going to be sucked into some black hole.”

“Speaking of black, did you know they say the Black Death came from here?”