The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “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?”

  “What?”

  “The Black Death. The plague. Sometime in the fourteenth century, carried along the Silk Route on the backs of rats.”

  “You’re kidding me. The Black Death. From this lake. The one I’m about to go swimming in.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. Personally I think it’s another myth, created to keep people away from this place. All the more reason to explore it, if you ask me.”

  “Hawaii,” Costas muttered, raising his hands in prayer. “Why is it that every time there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, you make me go through another nightmare?”

  Jack slapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. “Because you’re my dive buddy. And I need you to watch out for me.”

  The boat was on idle now. Jack sniffed the air. It was an unexpected smell, not the usual slightly rank odor of a lakeshore, but the scent of herbs, of lavender, of crushed dry leaves. The wind here came powerfully from the west, sweeping across the water like an army of ghosts, but the smell held the exotic fragrance of the east. On the shore Jack had glimpsed distant ramparts, the minaret of a fallen mosque, toppled by an earthquake, and he sensed a handhold from over the mountain pass, from the foothills of China beyond. The western end of the lake, where they had met Katya and Altamaty among the petroglyphs, was a place of desolation, a place people only passed through by necessity; but here to the east there was permanence, a place people had chosen to settle, Han traders of antiquity, Sogdian, Mongolian followers of Genghis Kahn and Dungan Muslims, expelled from the western fringes of China within living memory.

  One of the crewmen made his way toward them from the deckhouse. “We’ve been in contact with shore. The seismic readout remains unaltered, but it’s still condition orange. The navy divers have been clearing a collapsed jetty, which is why the Zodiac’s been delayed. They hope to be heading out here in about fifteen minutes. We’re over the GPS coordinates now. The advice is not to go in, but if you have to, do it now. Keep at least ten meters above the seafloor. And avoid any deep gullies. I repeat, the advice is not to go in.”

  “Advice understood, Brad,” Costas said, struggling into the strap of his cylinder backpack. The crewman moved over to help him. “Jack and I have dived into a lava tube, you know,” he said, gasping. “Into a live volcano. In Atlantis.”

  “Yeah? Cool.”

  “No. Hot.” Costas peered up at the crewman, who pointed skeptically into the water. They had spent most of the voyage together in the deckhouse talking about torpedoes and radiation leaks. “Don’t say it, Brad,” Costas said. “Just don’t say anything at all.”

  “I was just going to say good luck, sir.”

  “Sir again,” Costas grumbled. “Me, sir?”

  “Lieutenant-commander, U.S. Navy, as I recall,” Jack said.

  “A nuts-and-bolts man. Just one of the guys. And I never pulled rank.”

  “That’s because you’re a born leader, and everyone always listens to you,” Jack said, pushing his shoulder.

  “Everyone except you.”

  “I don’t need to listen. I just follow.” Jack slapped Costas’ back, then nodded at the crewman, who eased down the mask on Costas’ helmet, snapping closed the locks, and then did the same for Jack. Both men ran through their life support systems, checking the computer screen readout inside their helmets, then double-checked each other. The crewman put up a splayed hand and pointed at his watch. Jack nodded at him. Five minutes to go. The engine revved slightly, and he felt the boat move as they repositioned. For a few moments before activating his intercom Jack was completely cut off All he could hear was his own breathing, the pounding of his heart, a slight ringing in his ears, a legacy of gunfire. He thought again of Wauchope, and then of the Romans. Maybe one of the legionaries had survived too, made it ashore, escaped east over the saddle of the mountains toward Chrysê, the land of gold. Maybe it was Fabius himself Jack wondered whether they would ever know. He had only his instinct to go on, and that told him the story did not end in the waters here.

  Jack looked down and saw the layer of reflection again, like quicksilver. He shook away the thought and switched on his intercom. Costas gave him the thumbs-down signal, and Jack repeated it. He felt the suck of the air from his regulator, and checked his gauge readout again. They slipped over the side together. Jack dropped down, under the surface, then floated back up again. He was in his element and was coursing with excitement. He suddenly knew they were in the right place. It was his instinct again. He glanced at Costas, who was bobbing in the water looking at him. Jack put his hand on his buoyancy valve, and pressed the intercom. They always said it. It was their ritual. Their good-luck talisman. He grinned at Costas. “Good to go?”

  “Good to go.”

  Three minutes later they had descended more than twenty meters below the surface. There was no sign of the bottom, but Jack knew from his compass that they were facing the landward side of the lakebed as it sloped up to the shoreline half a kilometer to the east. To begin with the water had been remarkably clear, and Jack had rolled over and seen the dark shape of the boat’s hull above, the figures of the two crewmen visible in wavering outline as they peered over the side. He rolled back again just as they hit a thermocline, indiscernible inside his E-suit but registered in a change in temperature on the readout inside his helmet.

  “It’s getting colder. This might not be radioactive soup after all,” he said on the intercom.

  “Just as long as all this seismic activity hasn’t stirred up anything,” Costas replied, his voice tinny with the increased pressure. “Like they said, whatever’s down there is probably best left undisturbed.”

  “I’ll remind you of that next time we see something that needs to be defused.”

  They continued down. Below the thermocline the visibility dramatically reduced, a result of particulate gray and brown matter in the water. Jack sensed a darkness underlying the gloom below them. He flicked on his headlamp but instantly regretted it, dazzled by the glare off the suspended particles in the water. He switched it off again, and blinked as his eyes readjusted to the gloom. He checked his depth readout. Thirty-five meters. Suddenly it was there, a gray, featureless plain about eight meters below them, gently undulating up the slope. “I take back what I said about radioactivity,” he murmured. “Looks like something killed this place dead.”

  He neutralized his buoyancy two meters above the bottom, careful not to stir it up with his fins. “That’s nowhere near as solid as it looks,” Costas said. “With all this seismic activity, it’s soup. Close your eyes, drop down and you wouldn’t know you’d gone into it. After a while it’d become glutinous, and you’d be stuck. O
nly consolation is your body wouldn’t be eaten by marine borers. Even they wouldn’t live here.”

  Jack gazed at the sediment. “We’re hardly going to see anything ancient sticking out of this stuff, are we?”

  “We might. The earthquake’s shaken it all up, and the silt that normally blankets the bedrock protuberances and other solid features may have slid down the slope. The brown haze in the water shows there’s been movement, a turbitude. But the shake-up also leaves everything unstable. There could be another mass of sediment farther up the slope ready to drop down and bury whatever might have been revealed.”

  Jack looked around. “So the walls, the ravine, whatever it was Rebecca saw on the sonar readout, might actually be visible.”

  “They did the sub-bottom profiler run more than twenty-four hours ago. According to the bearings I programmed into my computer, we should follow this contour for about fifty meters, toward the south. That should put us over the gully, directly opposite that creek on the shoreline. The old Soviet seismological reports put this contour at about the level of the shoreline two and a half thousand years ago. Everything upslope was dry land. They think there was a single event that put it all underwater, a violent localized quake about 2,200 years ago.”

  They turned carefully and began to fin south, Costas in the lead. They were within a horizon of improved visibility, able to see five or six meters ahead, beneath the blanket of suspended sediment a few meters above them. Jack scanned the grayness below for anything solid, any protuberance. After about twenty meters Costas suddenly stopped finning. “I’ve got something,” he said. Jack came up alongside. The lake floor was more mottled, irregular. Jack gingerly put out a hand. It was hard clay, smearing his glove. “Looks like a ridge, coming out from shore,” he murmured. “It could be decayed mud-brick, but there’s no visible stonework, no masonry.”

  “Check this out.” Costas fanned his hand over something embedded in the clay. Jack switched on his headlamp, and gasped in astonishment. “It’s a bronze handle,” he exclaimed. Costas pulled it out. The handle was attached to a disk about the size of a dinner plate. Jack took it, wafting away the adhering clay. “It’s a mirror,” he said. “The surface has oxidized green, but it’s intact.”