The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “Nobody else ever goes there?”

  “For generations we controlled the mines. During the Soviet war we sold lapis lazuli to buy guns. The mines were under my sway and that of my forefathers. Our word was law. We banned anyone from going to the old workings on pain of death. It was what my grandfather wanted. It is only since the rise of the Taliban that our control has slackened, as we have had to look elsewhere, to defend our villages like the one being attacked now across the valley. Even so I am certain they are undisturbed. It is only the lower shafts now that produce the high-grade lapis. And nobody who lives in these mountains climbs higher than they absolutely need to. Up there you will find only death.”

  While he was talking the others filed out behind. There was a whinnying from somewhere below, then a strange bellow and a stomping of hooves. Katya caught her breath. “You have the akhal-teke!”

  Rahid stared at her. “You know,” he said quietly. “Of course. You told me. Your Kazakh family.”

  “No other horse makes a sound like that,” she said, her voice halting. “The war-cry of the akhal-teke.”

  “They run wild in the valley. This is one of the last places where they are kept pure. That’s one reason why we keep outsiders away.”

  “You breed them?” Costas said.

  Rahid paused, then looked at him. “I am the direct male heir of Qais Abdul Rashid, progenitor of all the Pashtun tribes,” he said. “He in turn was descended from the clan who lived in this valley from before the time of Alexander the Great. My ancestors bred the akhal-teke for the First Emperor of China, Shihuangdi, after his warriors came here looking for them.”

  Katya stared at him, stunned. “Your clan are imperial horse-breeders,” she said. “We thought they had all passed into history.”

  “We are the last. Ours are the final remaining purebreds.”

  “Do you still heed the call?” Katya said quietly. “Do the warriors still come?”

  “A Pashtun’s word is his oath. My ancestor gave it sixty-six generations ago.”

  “When was the last time they came? Has Jack told you I think we are being followed?”

  “The oath was one of secrecy.”

  “I sensed the akhal-teke near the lake at Issyk-Kul,” Katya murmured. “I heard that noise, and smelled something. There was a presence nearby.”

  “Our oath was to Shihuangdi, and to those who can prove to us that they are his eternal guardians.”

  “The Brotherhood of the Tiger,” Costas said.

  Katya pulled out a photograph from her front pocket. “You mean those who can show you this. The tattoo.”

  Rahid remained silent, staring at the valley. There was a sudden tension in the atmosphere. Jack shot Costas a warning look, and Katya saw it. She put away the photo and confronted Rahid. “You know the Brotherhood is corrupted. He who controls it now has been tempted, and rules as if he is the reincarnation of Shihuangdi himself In doing so he has broken his oath to the emperor. The oath of your clan is no longer binding.”

  Rahid looked at her silently, and then spoke. “Two weeks ago, a group came to the valley from a mining company, claiming I owed them allegiance. Eight men, prospectors. They wanted me to take them to the lapis lazuli mines.”

  “A mining company,” Jack murmured. “Chinese?”

  “INTACON.”

  Jack drew in his breath. “What did you do?”

  “I told you what we do.” Rahid gestured at the rifle in Jack’s hands. “My ancestor swore an oath to the emperor, to the true Brotherhood, not to these animals. I killed them all.”

  “And the other one?” Jack said quietly. “The one who followed them, who is there now? Waiting for us?”

  Rahid touched the rifle, and stared at Jack. “Your enemy is my enemy. God be with you. Inshallah.”

  Jack looked him hard in the eyes, and understood. Through the entrance passageway they heard the staccato noise of distant gunfire, and then the bellow of the horse, a strange, unnerving sound. Katya still seemed distracted by it, disturbed. “Can I touch it?” she said. “I haven’t touched one since I was a child.”

  Rahid shook his head. “Not now. When you return. When you bring that rifle back, with one round missing.” He looked at Jack, then pointed at the path toward the mountains. “That’s your route.”

  Jack held out his hand. “Tashakkurr. I owe you.”

  Rahid shook it. “It’s our code. Pashtunwali. Hospitality to travelers.”

  “But not all of them,” Costas said.

  “No, not all of them. You’ve been lucky.” Rahid slapped Costas on the back. “Salaam. Go now.” He turned and disappeared over the ledge. A few moments later there was the sound of whinnying, then the clatter of hooves on shingle, receding down the slope. Then the noise was gone, and all Jack heard was a whispering of wind across the rock, a sharp, dry wind brought down from the peaks of the Hindu Kush. He slung the rifle over his left shoulder and squinted up the valley. He took the Beretta out of his bag and handed it to Costas. Pradesh slung his rifle and passed his revolver to Altamaty. They knew that Katya had her own sidearm. Costas snapped back the slider on the Beretta, cocking it, then eased the hammer to the safe position and tucked the pistol in the breast pocket of his coat. “I’m ready,” he said.

  “I’ll take point,” Jack said, walking forward.

  “No.” Pradesh niftily sidestepped Jack and took the lead, heading off up the path. Jack relented, and looked at his watch. “It’ll take two hours to get there, according to Rahid. That puts us at mid-afternoon. And that’s probably two hours Afghan time, for people who live in these mountains. The air’s pretty thin and we’re not acclimatized. We’d better get moving. We don’t want to be stuck up there after dark.”

  Costas pulled on a pair of fleece gloves. “Roger that.”

  JUST OVER TWO HOURS LATER JACK UNSLUNG THE rifle and sat on a rock, waiting for the others to catch up. The penetrating chill of the early morning had gone, but he knew that a few minutes sitting here and the cold would return with a vengeance, made worse by lack of sleep and food. He pulled his binoculars out and scanned the narrowing cleft in the mountains ahead, looking for signs of movement, the telltale flash of sunlight against metal. Still nothing. He tucked the binoculars away, and made a mental note to avoid using them again unless absolutely necessary. If he did have to use the rifle, he needed to be attuned to what he could see with the naked eye, to be able to judge distances, to sense the difference at a thousand yards between rock and animate form. He glanced at the ridge far above, squinting in the harsh sunlight. The valley had become narrower and higher as they had trekked farther into the mountains. The cleft ahead was no more than two hundred meters wide, bare rock and scree on both sides, the ground between dry and cracked. They had followed Rahid’s advice and kept to the upper path, a good hundred meters above the valley floor. Jack reached down and picked up a piece of rock. Despite the frigid air it was warm, baked by the sun. There was no blue in it, but it was jagged, fractured. The scree ahead could be mine tailings, debris from thousands of years of hacking and picking at the rock, by miners lighting fires to crack the stone and expose the veins of precious blue. Jack looked at the slopes again. It fitted exactly with the description in Lieutenant Wood’s book. He realized that he must be looking at the fabled lapis lazuli mines of Sar-e-Sang. His heart began to pound. This was it.

  The other four came up behind. Costas slumped down beside Jack, and Pradesh knelt back against a rock, his rifle on his knees. Altamaty pointed to a pall of dust above the valley floor, and Katya clambered up onto a rock to follow his gaze. Jack knew she had been looking out for the horses since they had left Rahid. They had seen none, but she had told Jack that Altamaty had seen signs that he’d been sensitized to by his nomad upbringing. Jack looked at the valley floor. He saw no horses, but he did see people, a man and a boy. They were standing in front of a tent that was stretched between boulders at the base of the opposite slope. They were bundled up in sheepskins, and wispy smoke
was rising in front of them. They were six hundred meters away, maybe seven hundred. Jack made a mental note of their size at that distance, and let his eyes dart up the slope behind them, looking at the boulders and ridges, at points of concealment, gauging the gradient of the scree and the increased distance as the slope rose toward the ridge some five hundred meters above.

  “Do we say hello?” Costas rubbed his mitts together against the cold, and shoved them in his fleece. “I like the look of that fire.”

  Jack shook his head. “Rahid said not to. When the miners come up here they use dynamite, and some of the people who’ve been attracted to work for them also work for the Taliban during the off-season when the miners have gone, making IEDs. That’s probably what they’re doing here now. It’s too cold for mining and there are crops to harvest in the valleys. The Taliban like having their bombmakers up here because if something goes wrong, if there’s an accident, nobody knows or cares. The bombs are mostly carried out to be used in Kabul and the south, but the Taliban in Feyzabad have recently put a bounty on killing westerners and these people up here might be tempted to use one on us. They have no land, no other income. And for desperate people, suicide bombing has become an easy route to paradise. We need to be careful.”

  “Won’t they see our weapons?” Costas said.

  “Everyone carries guns out here,” Katya said. “They’ll probably think we’re prospectors. Others have come up here before.”

  “Including the one who’s after us.”

  “He’ll be invisible,” Katya said. “He’s a sniper. That man and the boy will have seen us by now, but not him.”

  “Let’s take a look again at that passage in Wood’s account,” Costas said. “We need to get our bearings and keep moving.” His teeth were chattering, and Pradesh passed over the thermos of tea he had made beside the jeep. Costas gratefully took it, unscrewing the top. While he poured himself a cup, Jack took out Source of the River Oxus and read out a marked page:

  “Where the deposit of lapis lazuli occurs, the valley of the Kokcha is about 200 yards wide. On both sides the mountains are high and naked. The entrance to the mines is in the face of the mountain, on the right bank of the stream, and about 1500 feet above its level. The formation is of black and white limestone, unstratified, though plentifully veined with lines. The summit of the mountains is rugged, and their sides destitute of soil or vegetation. The path by which the mines are approached is steep and dangerous”

  Costas finished his tea and passed the thermos back to Pradesh, peering at the route ahead. “Steep and dangerous,” he muttered. “You can say that again.”

  “You can see some of the mineshaft entrances along the slope ahead of us, on our side of the valley,” Katya said. Jack slung his rifle and stood up. He felt the cold now, touching his core. This place had stark beauty, but also raw danger. A place that gave no quarter. He climbed up beside Katya on the rock, and followed her gaze. Above the mine tailings he could see the entrances to the shafts, at least half a dozen of them, black holes in the rock. Somewhere higher up were the ones they sought, three of them close to the ridge. “If Howard and Wauchope came here, they would have had no idea which shaft contained what they were seeking.”

  “You mean the jewel,” Costas said. “The lapis lazuli one.”

  Jack nodded. “The only clue we know they had was the inscription from the jungle shrine, implying that Licinius had hidden his treasure somewhere up here in the mines, on his way south from the Silk Road toward India. Howard and Wauchope could have been here for days, searching all of the mine shafts. We should appear to do what they did. We don’t want to give any clue that we know where we’re going. If this is who Katya thinks it is and he’s got his rifle with him, a beeline straight up to the shaft at the top identified by Rahid may be the last trek any of us takes.”

  “So what happens if he does rumble us?” Costas said. “He’s not going to let us walk away from here.”

  Jack climbed off the rock. “Altamaty came up here once when he was a captive of Rahid, and remembers a couple of sangars made by the mujahideen, crude revetments of piled stone used as protection against air attack. Pradesh and I discussed this on the way up here. He’s going to find one of them, and set himself up with his rifle. The sangars are about midway up the slope. Below that are the main shafts, the ones that are still mined. Katya and Altamaty, I suggest you explore those. Costas and I are going to climb above Pradesh, looking for those three upper shafts. Our sniper will be somewhere on the opposite side of the valley, with the best field of fire for the entire slope. If we split up, Altamaty and Katya below, Pradesh in the middle, and Costas and me above, then it divides his attention. He doesn’t know yet which one is his target, and he can’t concentrate on who may be targeting him. If he is here, he’s seen us and knows that two of us have rifles.”

  Costas turned to Jack. “So what exactly are we looking for?”

  “Rahid said it’s up there. He seemed to know what I was after.”

  “Any detail? Like a treasure map?”

  “He told me what I needed to know. All he said was that it’s in the central cave. He went in there as a boy. Nobody else goes there. They think it’s spooked.”

  “Oh, great.” Costas paused. “If he found the jewel, wouldn’t he have taken it? Or given us more detail, like told us where in the mineshaft to look?”

  “He told me what I needed to know,” Jack repeated. “I trust him.”

  “You think there’s something else up there.”

  Katya spoke quietly. “This isn’t just about what we find. This is about Shang Yong. He thinks we’re on the trail of the jewel taken by Licinius, that we’re going to lead him to it. That’s what the sniper wants to see. For years they thought the jewel was hidden in the jungle, ever since John Howard’s lecture in London when the story of the tomb reached the Brotherhood. And now they’re on the same trail as us, following the same clues. Even if they didn’t torture the knowledge out of my uncle before he died, they may have seen the inscription themselves, that word sappheiros, lapis lazuli. And this is where it ends. The tiger warrior kills us, or we kill him. If we succeed, Shang Yong’s power is broken. He only exerts power over the Brotherhood by force and intimidation. Without his henchman, the Brotherhood will rise against him, confront the corruption within. They will once again protect the eternity of the First Emperor, of Shihuangdi!’

  “And if we walk away now?” Costas said.

  “Then there will be another confrontation, and the odds against us will be even greater. If we let Shang Yong believe he has won, then his world will seem inviolable. For him, the celestial jewel is a state of mind. This is what my uncle feared the most. In Shang Yong’s re-creation of the First Emperor’s tomb, in his fantasy projection of the heavens, he’s halfway to believing that the jewel is already there, in its rightful place above him, giving him the immortality he craves. If we give up on the quest, then the delusion may become complete. We need him to believe that the jewel could still be found, to maintain the small doubt, the part of him still left that knows that what he has created is an illusion. We need to keep that door open. If he becomes locked inside his delusion, then the world becomes a much more frightening place. It will truly seem as if Shihuangdi has reawakened, and that is something we must do everything in our power to prevent. There is much more at stake here than an ancient lost jewel.”

  Jack’s eyes were like steel. He glanced at Katya, then up the valley. He slung his rifle and looked at his watch. “We’ve only got three hours of daylight left. Let’s move.”

  An hour later, Jack and Costas sat back against the rocky scree slope not far from the summit of the ridge, having followed a treacherous path up over ridges and sheer faces of fragile rock. They were high now, over twelve thousand feet, and Jack exhaled through his nose to equalize his ears. All the time they had been conscious that they were being watched, possibly through the sights of a rifle, but they had worked on the assumption that they would
only become targets once they had shown some evidence of reaching the end of their search. They were less than a hundred meters below the three mineshaft entrances that Rahid had told Jack to find. They dropped down into a gully formed by a bank of rocky mine tailings, concealing them from the opposite slope of the valley. Jack knelt down on the shingly rock and worked his way to the edge, the rifle beside him. He could see Pradesh in a depression in the shingle about a hundred and fifty meters below, his rifle positioned beside a rock. Somewhere far below were Katya and Altamaty, exploring the line of shaft entrances closer to the valley floor.

  “Shooting at ghosts hiding behind rocks on a hill,” Jack murmured.

  “What?”

  “A line from a British soldier of the first Afghan war,” Jack said.

  Costas settled down heavily on his front beside Jack, and rolled onto his elbows. He was panting, and his breath crystallized in clouds in the still air. “I should have brought my laser range finder.”

  “The Canadian rangers taught me to estimate distance on the tundra, where the white backdrop makes the target stand out. Their benchmark was the standard survey lot of a hundred acres. Each side’s just under seven hundred meters. It’s a distance people grow up with in Canada, as that’s how the land was parceled out. The rangers reckoned that was about the maximum distance for a .303 shot with the unaided eye. Beyond that, you stand little chance of making out a stationary human form, especially with a rocky backdrop like this.”

  “Unless you’ve got eagle eyes, like our opponent.”

  Jack looked at the altimeter on his watch. “I downloaded a topographical map before we took off from Bishkek. The distance from the valley floor to the top of the ridge is about five hundred meters. Lieutenant Wood got that right in 1836, fifteen hundred feet. We’re maybe a bit over a hundred meters below the ridge, and the slope we’ve come up must have averaged at least forty-five degrees.”