The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  The PA system crackled again. “This is the captain. Estimated touchdown thirty-five minutes. We’re entering SAM missile range. We’ve armed the chaff dispensers. Just a precaution.”

  Costas grunted and checked his seat belt. “I got onto him about it when we landed at Bishkek. These ex-fighter jocks sometimes forget they’re flying a bus.”

  Jack turned to Katya. “This is the last chance before we hit the road. If there’s anything more to tell us, now’s the time.”

  Katya drank some water, then nodded. “Okay. The Brotherhood of the Tiger. In the late nineteenth century, at the time of the diplomat Wu Che, the one who attended John Howard’s lecture, the Brotherhood was one of many secret societies in China. But they were more secretive than most. Few other societies could claim an authentic lineage back to the First Emperor. And they never sought to expand their membership. The First Emperor had come from the Qin family, and as he rose to power he ennobled them, giving his brothers and cousins the land to rule as fiefdoms. Their pledge was to serve the emperor in life and in death. They took the names of their fiefdoms. There were twelve of them: the Xu, the Tan, the Ju, the Zhongli, the Yunyan, the Tuqiu, the Jiangliang, the Huang, the Jiang, the Xiuyu, the Baiming, and the Feilian. These were the original bodyguard. As each one died, the Brotherhood selected another from that clan to take his place. In time, the Brotherhood came to represent all the upper echelons of power in China. They were wealthy landowners, lords of their fiefdoms, but they were also generals, diplomats, ministers of state. All of them had been groomed from birth in the ways of the tiger warrior. Each clan provided a selection of boys ready for the next vacancy, trained in the martial arts, in the wielding of the great pata sword, in the art of becoming one with the akhal-teke, the blood-sweating heavenly horse. One of those would be chosen to enter the Brotherhood, to sit on the council of the twelve. The others would remain throughout their lives as his warriors, a murderous company of a hundred or more who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to defend the creed of the First Emperor. And the one who was chosen, the newest of the Brotherhood, became the tiger warrior. It was his role to ride at the head of that company. To execute the orders of the Brotherhood. That was his initiation. The diplomat Wu Che was from the family of Jiang, and he was one of the twelve. My father’s family, my uncle’s, was the Huang. I am descended from many of those who were chosen for the mantle of tiger warrior.”

  “And today?” Costas said. “Are we basically looking at organized crime?”

  Katya took a deep breath. “Their creed was to defend the emperor’s tomb. Until the rise of communism, they retained their land and privileges, and had no need of more wealth. For generations they were behind the scenes in Xian, army officers, counselors to the emperor, bureaucrats, always close to the great tomb whose mound loomed beside the city, ensuring its sacred status. They fostered all of the superstitions about tampering with the First Emperor’s legacy, superstitions that linger today even among Chinese archaeologists. They made sure that nobody ever dug into the tomb. And the Brotherhood were not thugs. The diplomat Wu Che was typical of the nineteenth century Brotherhood, a highly educated man, eager to represent China’s interests abroad. But that was when things began to change. For almost two thousand years the Brotherhood had been part of China’s enclosed society, cut off from the outside world since returning empty-handed after losing the trail of Licinius in the Indian jungle. Wu Che reopened that quest, and once again the Brotherhood was on the warpath. The quest rekindled into a passion, an obsession. He also did something else. Unwittingly, he provided them with a temptation, one that some in the next generation of the Brotherhood could not resist.”

  “Let me guess,” Jack murmured. “Opium.”

  Katya nodded. “Wu Che’s travels in India had been an attempt to uncover the extent of opium use, to pinpoint the suppliers, to persuade the British government to clamp down on the trade. His papers show that his concerns were moral, and went far beyond Chinese official interests. He visited the Rampa jungle a couple of years after the rebellion and saw the extent of opium addiction among the hill tribesmen, easy prey to dealers after the troops had left. He would have found a sympathetic ear in John Howard. And there was something else. As a diplomat in London, Wu Che inspected the opium dens that were springing up in the port cities of Europe. When he returned to China for the last time in the 1890s, he took with him a prodigious amount of research, a detailed account of opium use and supply in the western world. It could have been the basis for quashing the opium trade. But it was open to huge abuse. It was a blueprint for control of the trade.”

  “We’re talking about the time of the rise of communism?” Costas asked.

  Katya nodded. “China was already fragmenting, and the republic was declared in 1912. The Nationalist Party had only a tenuous hold, and for years there was an uneasy alliance with the Communist Party. Much of the country was ruled by warlords. The abdication of the last emperor in 1912 marks the beginning of the modern Brotherhood of the Tiger. In the foundation mythology of the Brotherhood, the period of the Warring States had been followed by the rise of the First Emperor. They saw an analogue to this in what was happening around them in the 1920s and 1930s. It seemed as if a second coming of the emperor might be at hand. The foundation mythology began to twist, and new strands were fabricated. And something else happened. Their fiefdoms were lost, confiscated by the state. They needed another source of wealth.”

  “The opium trade,” Jack said.

  “Wu Che was murdered in 1912, a victim of the purge of the Chinese imperial court,” Katya continued. “His son succeeded him in the Brotherhood. For the first time, one alone threatened to rule the twelve. He inherited all of his father’s records, and built the largest, most secretive drug empire the world has ever known. British complicity in the opium trade had nearly ruined China in the nineteenth century, and he turned that on its head, using all the existing supply routes to feed more and more opium into the west, fueling the explosion in heroin use from the 1950s onward.”

  Costas jabbed his finger at the route map. “Afghanistan? The main supplier?”

  Katya nodded. “For centuries the Brotherhood had been sending warriors up here to get purebred horses. Training with the heavenly steeds had always been part of their creed, an essential rite of passage for any who might become one of the twelve. By the 1920s, the horse trade had become a cover for the narcotics trade. Opium was channeled south into India, west into Europe. The Brotherhood relocated its hub of operations outside China, first to Hong Kong and Malaysia and then in the west itself, in London and America. They integrated themselves easily enough, ostensibly the scions of wealthy expatriate Hong Kong and Singapore families who were educating their sons in the elite schools of Europe and America, becoming part of the capitalist infrastructure of the west.”

  “They must be on the radar screens somewhere, if the drug involvement was as big as you say it was,” Costas said.

  Katya gave him a wry look. “They were clever. They were not gangsters like other Chinese secret societies. To the Brotherhood, the opium trade was less a criminal enterprise than a kind of payback for western complicity in opium exported to China in the nineteenth century. They had a romanticized notion of fealty to China, to a China that was already ancient history. But it did not serve their creed to become part of the criminal underworld, and they moved out of the drug trade after the Second World War. They reinvested in mineral prospecting and mining. That proved hugely profitable after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The new central Asian republics proved a ripe picking ground for outside entrepreneurs. Their company, INTACON, became massively profitable and overshadowed the other business concerns of the Brotherhood.”

  “What about 1949?” Jack said. “Mao Ze-dong, the communist takeover? Order returns to China.”

  “Communism had been part of the force that pulled down the old world in which the Brotherhood had existed for centuries, taking their land. But 1949 also r
epresented the return of order over chaos, an analogue of the end of the Warring States and the rise of the Qin. The new certainty, the new control, was seductive to the Brotherhood. And the communist regime had its own power structure, its own hierarchy. The Brotherhood soon recovered their place in China, their watchful eye. They fueled the cult of Mao Ze-dong until it almost rivaled the cult of the First Emperor himself But with Mao’s death, they returned with renewed passion to the original creed.”

  “Cue the mythology,” Jack murmured.

  “According to wu di, the concept of non-death, they believe the First Emperor never left, but exists in a parallel world. They await a kind of folding of our reality into that world, the world of wu di. Only then will the emperor once again be able to impose his will on the universe. For the Brotherhood, this mystical hope became a fanatical dogma after 1912. Only with the merging of the two parallel worlds would order come again. They looked for signs in the ancient myth of the elemental powers. The First Emperor had risen under shuide, the power of water, overcoming the power of fire. The Brotherhood believe that the next age of the emperor will be heralded by the coming of siandhe, the power of light.”

  Jack stared at Katya. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why the pair of jewels are so important. The power of light.”

  Katya nodded. “It was the diplomat Wu Che who reawakened the legend of the lost jewel from the tomb, the celestial jewel, whose two parts would combine to shine a dazzling light on the tomb of the emperor and breach the barrier of wu di. Only when the jewel is found can siandhe begin, the age of light.”

  “And when is this supposed to happen?” Costas asked.

  “For the First Emperor, shuide was associated with the number six, as well as with winter, darkness, harshness, death. The Brotherhood is twelve, a multiple of six. They came to believe that the age of light would begin in the sixty-sixth generation after the tomb was sealed.”

  “Let me guess,” Costas murmured. “That would be the current generation?”

  Katya nodded. “That’s why this has all heated up now. My uncle confided everything in me. He knew I was intimate enough with the history of the Brotherhood to share his fears, and he also knew the archaeological trail he was on would need someone with expertise to match his own. He’d groomed me for it. He had great faith in me. He knew time was against him, but I never thought it would end so soon.” Katya looked down for a moment, then carried on. “My uncle took up where Wu Che left off. But when he realized that the celestial jewel might actually be found, he began to fear the consequences. A decade ago, the Brotherhood lost the representative of the Feilian clan, who suddenly died. He was succeeded by his son, Shang Yong. China was changing again. Communism was eroding, capitalism was in. Some profited hugely, many did not. In Russia, some look back on the time of the czars as a kind of mythical golden age. In China, they look back to the First Emperor. Shang Yong was part of this, though at the same time profiting hugely from the new opportunities. My uncle saw disturbing signs in Shang Yong. His family, the Feilian, controlled INTACON. With the increase in the wealth of the company, Shang became a megalomaniac. He turned the Brotherhood into his own council of war. It was he who took INTACON into exploitative mining, on aboriginal lands around the world. One of those areas was the Rampa jungle of eastern India. A huge fortune was to be had in strip-mining the jungle for bauxite. My uncle vehemently opposed the scheme. He was a committed anthropologist and a humanitarian, one of the Brotherhood who had not let the creed consume him. From the start he had opposed the ascendancy of Shang. My uncle had been naïve, and only realized the danger too late. By the time he told me the full story, he was a hunted man.”

  “And he paid the ultimate price,” Jack murmured.

  “So just like the diplomat Wu Che, he unwittingly opened a can of worms,” Costas said slowly. “Wu Che handed the Brotherhood the opium trade. Your uncle reopened the quest for the jewel, but also led them to a place where another treasure trove was to be found, in mining the jungle.”

  “That was something else that dawned on my uncle too late,” Katya said. “And I fear he may even have entered into negotiations with the Maoist rebels. It would have been an act of desperation, but there may have been nobody else to turn to with the government about to draw up a contract with INTACON and the Kóya people powerless to resist. It would have been suicidal for him, but then he knew he was under a death sentence anyway. And I know he had rejected the Brotherhood. He saw the creed moving from the First Emperor to Shang Yong himself, as if Shang were seeing himself as emperor, as Shihuangdi, born again.”

  “So where is Shang Yong based?” Jack asked.

  “In the Taklamakan Desert, on the other side of the Tien Shan Mountains,” Katya replied. “A hundred thousand square kilometers of shifting sands and utter desolation, scarred by ferocious winds. For travelers going east on the Silk Road, the Taklamakan was the last great obstacle before dropping down into central China and reaching the end of the road at Xian, source of the silk and site of the First Emperor’s tomb. Anyone who strayed into the desert risked being lost forever, and anyone who controlled the desert strongholds could prey at will on the caravans skirting its fringes. The desert remains one of the last great lawless tracts on earth. Even the communists couldn’t control it. There are many ruined fortresses half-buried in sand, built beside oases long ago swallowed up. Shang Yong set himself up in one of these, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road. He’s built an airstrip and begun to convert the place into his own fantasy world. For the Brotherhood, the Taklamakan has always had huge symbolic significance, a bastion against the world outside, a place where they could seem to uphold the emperor’s claim that there was nothing beyond. For Shang Yong, the desert is also a perfect headquarters for INTACON’s mining enterprises in central Asia, in the Tien Shan and Karakoram Mountains. And my uncle knew more. INTACON prospectors have found evidence of huge oil reserves under the desert itself. The Taklamakan has become Shang’s fiefdom. And it’s no longer inward-looking. Shang threatens to control the whole of the western part of China, and to exert a frightening influence on the world outside.”

  “So that’s what your uncle was really onto,” Jack murmured.

  “What do you mean about a fantasy world?” Costas said.

  Katya paused. “That’s where the real significance of the jewel, the real danger, comes into play. For the last meeting of the Brotherhood that my uncle ever attended, he was flown to the desert headquarters. In the center of the ruins lay a domed structure, a former Nestorian church. He was ushered down a ramped passage and through great bronze doors. He sat in near darkness at a low table with the other eleven, Shang Yong at the head. What my uncle saw inside stunned and horrified him. It was instantly recognizable from the Records of the Grand Historian. Shang Yong had re-created the First Emperor’s tomb inside the church. For the old Brotherhood, that would have been unimaginable heresy. Above them was the dome of the heavens, and on either side were rivers and mountains and palaces. Beyond that were images of the terracotta warriors. He said it was like sitting in a planetarium, with the latest CGI and holographic technology, even the sounds of water and wind, the baying of horses. Over the days he was there he realized that Shang Yong was spending more and more time alone in the chamber. My uncle had worried about Shang as a boy. He had been addicted to computer games, to the world of instant gratification and utter certainty, a world where morality and humanity are irrelevant. My uncle realized that Shang Yong had moved from being a player in front of a screen to being inside the game itself, part of it.”

  “Computer whiz kids who barely know reality from fantasy,” Costas murmured. “Who grow up and make fortunes and think they can take that extra step the boy in the basement can’t, and walk into the screen, into a world they think they can control completely in a way they can never control reality.”

  Katya nodded. “Exactly. In Shang Yong’s mind, it was an extension of the concept of wu di, the com mingling of the worl
ds of the living and the dead that would come with the age of light, with the celestial jewel. But it was as if he had already found a portal to that other world. My uncle knew that the powers of the jewel might prove no more than a figment of myth, but for Shang Yong it could still have terrifying potency. If he believed that the jewel was the final key to his apotheosis, to some kind of melding with the First Emperor, then it might propel him into a terrifying megalomania. That’s what frightened my uncle the most. That’s when he determined to keep his research secret from others in the Brotherhood and try to discover the jewel himself.”

  “But Shang Yong already knew,” Jack replied. “Your uncle would survive only as long as it took him to find the place where he thought the jewel was hidden.”

  “So who’s the guy you think is shadowing us?” Costas said.

  Katya stared at him. “You told me what the Kóya had seen in the jungle,” she replied. “Seven men from INTACON went in, one came out, armed with a scoped rifle. He was the initiate. The murder of my uncle was his test. He has now become one of the Brotherhood. By tradition, when one of the Brotherhood strayed, he and his immediate family were eliminated. His replacement in the twelve came from another family in the same clan, chosen for their martial prowess by the other eleven in the Brotherhood.”

  “And this new one is the tiger warrior,” Jack said quietly.

  “A twisted version. A psychopath. And he has a particular speciality. His grandmother was a Kazakh Red Army sniper during the Second World War, one of those who chalked up hundreds of kills. He learned everything from her. He’s a professional, and honed his art in Bosnia, Chechnya, Africa. His count may even exceed hers by now. He uses her old Mosin-Nagant rifle.”