The Tiger warrior jh-4

by David Gibbins

  “An early Imperial denarius,” Jack said, taking the coin and looking at it closely. “Not gold like the wreck coins, but silver. It’s very worn, but the portrait’s early Augustus, no doubt about it. Amazing.”

  “They’re found all across southern India,” Pradesh said. “We have a numismatist at Arikamedu who’s making an exhaustive study of them. She knew about John Howard, as his boyhood collection of Roman coins from India was bequeathed to the Survey of India by his daughter. The coins are usually mint, uncirculated. They were exported by the Romans as bullion. This one was worn because it must have been handled for generations by the Koya, probably as an ornament, before it gained sacred status and was hidden away as a velpu. The toddy-tapper said that portrait was an image of Rama. He’s watching us with eagle eyes over there. I’ve got to return it before we go.”

  “Rama,” Jack mused. “Anything else?”

  Pradesh squatted down. “There is something else. And it’s disturbing.” He paused. “The man, Hai Chen, arrived here just before the monsoon broke, and wanted to cover as much ground as he could before the jungle became impassable. They sent him with a guide to Rampa village, and from there he went on alone to see the shrine. None of the Koya would go there with him.”

  “The cave you were talking about?” Costas said.

  Pradesh nodded. “And then a few days later, others came, also like this.” Pradesh drew his eyes back with his fingers.

  “More Chinese,” Jack said.

  Pradesh nodded. “But they were different. There were seven of them, and they came by helicopter. They said they were mining prospectors. They were aggressive. The villagers were very apprehensive. They’d had prospectors out here before from the mining companies, and the Koya hate them. The hills around here are rich in bauxite and the whole area is under threat. But there was something that especially terrified them. The men had tattoos on their forearms, all identical-it was an image of a tiger.”

  “A tiger,” Jack repeated.

  “The toddy-tapper was petrified. He thought the konda devata had come to punish him for revealing his velpu to Hai Chen. He still thinks they’re lurking in the jungle around the village, waiting for the moment to strike. And he has good reason to be apprehensive.”

  Jack felt suddenly uneasy. “Go on.”

  “These prospectors’ approach to information gathering was slightly different. They grabbed one of the children, a little girl, and held a gun to her head. They wanted to know where the other Chinese man had gone. The anthropologist.”

  “And the toddy-tapper told them.”

  Pradesh nodded. “That was over three months ago. The Maoists came here and told them not to go near the shrine. They’re used to the Maoists telling them to stay away from their camps, and the shrine’s pretty well taboo for the Koya anyway. But this time it was different. After the disappearance of the Chinese anthropologist, the toddy-tapper knew something else had gone on. Evil spirits had been awakened.”

  “What’s the problem with sending in police troops?” Costas said. “Sounds like enough justification now.”

  Pradesh shook his head. “Nobody in government’s going to buy this story. There’s still an ingrained contempt for the tribals among the lowlanders who make up most of the regional government and judiciary, and if any word leaked out that they’d been harassing prospectors solely on the basis of a story from the Koya there’d be hell to pay. There are powerful elements in government who would happily see the tribals dispossessed and these hills turned into a gigantic strip mine. The financial stakes are huge. Military intervention could only come on the back of Maoist violence in the jungle, and the Maoists are usually careful to avoid that. The jungle is their safe house. My father was murdered by the Maoists in Dowlaiswaram, not up here. If the Maoists shoot at troops it becomes a federal matter, and the next thing you know there would be helicopter gunships hosing down the jungle. Turning this place into a version of the Vietnam War will not help the tribal peoples. You have to tread very carefully. Officially, I’m here on holiday and the two chaps from our assault company who will be with us in the chopper are private bodyguards, employed by you.”

  “And what you really want to do is kill the Maoists yourself, in your own time,” Costas said quietly. “For your father.”

  Jack glanced at Pradesh, who looked at the ground, saying nothing.

  “And what about the anthropologist, Hai Chen?” Costas said.

  Pradesh shook his head. “Not a sign of him since then.”

  The thudding of a helicopter filled the air, drowning out the drumbeat from the edge of the jungle. Pradesh took out his radio receiver and spoke rapidly in Hindi. The helicopter reared up over the river and backed off, dropping down on the opposite sandbank. Pradesh waved at the toddy-tapper, who was gesticulating at the helicopter. “I told them to land on the other side of the river. The Koya deserve some leeway after the last time one of these landed here. And we don’t want them losing control and rushing us.”

  Jack peered at the dancers. “They look a little too far gone to notice.” He stood up and walked back across the sand to where he had tied the painter line. Costas marched off, gourd in hand, to where the toddy-tapper was standing. “I’m just going to say good-bye to my new friend.”

  “Don’t let him whisk you off into the jungle,” Jack said. “If you’ve got that tiger magic in you, we may need it too.”

  Costas shook hands with the man, pointing at the gourd approvingly. Jack followed, holding the line to the boat, and Pradesh joined them, handing the toddy-tapper the Roman coin. The man packaged it carefully in his little leather pouch, and tied it to his loincloth. “He doesn’t seem to be fazed by the chopper,” Costas said.

  “Some of them are used to it. The Chinese aren’t the first prospecting team to come up here. There have been others, multinationals. Sometimes the Koya are contracted to work as guides. The prospectors pay them in bricks of hashish-it’s the mining companies’ way of giving something back, showing they really care.”

  Jack turned toward the toddy-tapper, thought for a moment then took off the Nikon binoculars he had slung around his neck. He had seen several of the Koya eyeing them with curiosity earlier on. They would be of little use on the trip into the confines of the jungle. He passed them over. The man took them, handling them with care, looked closely at the lenses and the mechanism, then handed them back. He bowed his head to Jack, and spoke a few words to Pradesh.

  “He said, if you have no need of them, then neither does he. He said he can see as far as he needs to.”

  Jack looked hard at the man, and slowly nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Anthropology 101, Jack,” Costas murmured.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “Don’t mess with the natives.”

  “Thanks, engineer.”

  Pradesh pointed at the helicopter. They hurried back down to the boat. He and Costas stood on either side, and Jack threw the painter line over the bow.

  “Okay,” Pradesh said. “Good to go?”

  Costas stared at him, then at Jack. “You said it.”

  Jack slung his old khaki bag over his shoulder, reaching in to feel the Beretta in its holster. Something was going on, something bigger than he had imagined. He thought of Katya, and suddenly needed to talk to her. He glanced at his watch. Only four hours before the Lynx was due to pick them up from Rajahmundry and take them back to Seaquest II.

  Costas glanced into the darkness of the jungle, then pointed at the pendant around Pradesh’s neck. “I was wondering,” he said. “Got any more of those tiger claws?”

  Pradesh glanced at him, and began heaving at the boat. “You don’t need one, remember? You’ve eaten tiger food. But don’t worry. I won’t walk you into a fire-fight. If there’s any sign of trouble, my two sappers will shoot to kill.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Costas said. “Jack?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  11

  Look below us now. Qu
ick, before they vanish. In the jungle.”

  Jack peered out of the open side door of the helicopter, feeling the downdraft of the rotor against his helmet. Costas did the same on the other side. At first they saw nothing but the lushness of the jungle, draped over the rugged contours of the hills like a thick pile carpet. Then Jack realized there was movement in the gloom below the canopy, a ripple like a spreading shadow, as if the Godavari River behind them had burst its banks and was tumbling through the ravines and gullies of the jungle. He saw individual black shapes in the lead, pounding through the jungle clearings. He heard nothing except the helicopter, but he sensed a rumble like thunder, the sound of a herd of bison as they rolled through the jungle toward some unknown destination.

  “They’re gaur,” Pradesh said through the intercom from the co-pilot’s seat. “The Koya fear them almost as much as the tigers. With a herd this size around, that’s another reason for avoiding the jungle path and taking the helicopter.”

  Jack leaned back inside. He and Costas were strapped into the door seats facing aft, and Jack held on to the mounting where the door gun would once have been. The helicopter was an old Huey, ex-Indian army but now used as a workhorse for supplying remote villages in the jungles of the Eastern Ghats. It had been out of the question for Pradesh to request a helicopter from his own unit, with markings that would have alarmed the Koya and the Maoist terrorists, and the IMU Lynx looked too much like one of the machines that brought in the mining prospectors. But Jack felt they were adequately protected for the mission at hand, a quick foray that Pradesh hoped would take them less than two hours, so they could be out before sunset. On the fold-down seats opposite were two of Pradesh’s sappers, cheerful men from the Madras Engineering Group Assault Company. Each had a weapons case strapped down on the floor in front of them. Jack looked at their faces, at the moustaches and fierce eyes, and wondered if they too had ancestors who had been up here before, men who might have been with his own great-great-grandfather on the jungle path below them on that fateful day in 1879.

  “We’re only ten minutes away now,” Pradesh said. “The clearing with the shrine is ahead of us, and the village of Rampa is about a kilometer to the east, where you can see the smoke rising above the jungle.” The two sappers quickly opened their weapon cases, taking out AK-74 assault rifles and pushing in the banana-shaped magazines. They cocked the rifles and held them on their knees, muzzles facing outward. One of them motioned for Jack and Costas to slide their seats along the floor runnels toward the center of the cabin, away from the open doors. Pradesh leaned around, checking that they had moved. “Just in case we encounter any incoming rounds,” he said. “According to the Koya we just spoke to, the clearing hasn’t been used as a regular camp by the Maoists for some time now, but the Koya have been too fearful to go there themselves. They said the Rampa villagers heard a lot of shooting on the day the Chinese mining prospectors went there. There’s no telling what we’ll find.”

  “So what’s with Rampa village, the name?” Costas said.

  “It’s derived from Rama, the prince who became a focus for Hindu worship,” Pradesh replied. “According to the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic, Prince Rama traveled south from Oudh and spent ten years in exile in the jungle. The place we’re going to, the shrine, has always been known as the temple of Rama.”

  Jack pressed the intercom on his helmet. “I’ve been thinking about that since we saw that Roman coin from the velpu. When the Romans were at Arikamedu, the most common local name for them was yavanas, westerners. But the name raumanas also crops up in Brahmin literature. It may just be coincidence.”

  “Come on, Jack,” Costas said. “When have you ever believed in coincidences?”

  “It’s a fascinating possibility,” Pradesh said. “As a Hindu, I took the Ramayana at face value. That seemed to account for it. But I know from my Koya ancestry that a shrine to Rama is completely at odds with jungle beliefs. They have no shrines to their gods, no holy sanctums, not even sacred colors. Their gods are all around them, pure immanence. As Hindus we accept stories of interlopers, as our religion is all-encompassing. But for the animist beliefs of the Koya, it’s a different story. If it wasn’t Prince Rama himself, it must have been an equally powerful presence who came here and left a mark.”

  “Maybe another interloper,” Costas said.

  “Okay. Here we are now.” The helicopter slowed down, angled slightly to port and began to fly a wide circle around a misty patch in the jungle. Jack could see where they had flown up over a ravine, the rugged jungle flank rising up on either side over patches of dull red where the mud must have slipped during the monsoon. Through the dense foliage he could make out the flow of the stream that had carved the ravine, among jumbled masses of boulders exposed in the bed. It was the only obvious route up from the river fifteen kilometers to the south-west, and it must have been where Howard and Wauchope came with their sappers in 1879. They would have been completely exposed to fire from above, and it was hard to see how they were not cut down by the rebels. But Jack remembered Pradesh’s story of the bamboo velpu, Howard’s promise to the muttadar. It was the only explanation for how they could have got through unscathed.

  The downdraft from the rotor cleared a swathe through the air, and Jack could see where the stream skirted the east side of the clearing after disgorging from another tumble of boulders that had rolled down from the jungle flank beyond. He could see the trickling waterfall where the boulders extended out into the clearing. In front were three slabs of enormous size, one of them resting on the other two like a gigantic prehistoric lintel.

  “That’s the shrine,” Pradesh said, pointing. “The entrance is under the lintel at the front, but it was sealed off by the earthquake after the two British officers came here, the day the most sacred velpu disappeared forever. My grandfather said the earthquake was retribution from the konda devata, the tiger spirit. The Koya were already terrified of this place-tigers come here to drink from the stream at night. After the earthquake, hardly any Koya ever came here again, even into the clearing.”

  “So how do we get inside?” Costas said.

  “My grandfather said there was another entrance through the waterfall at the back. But you have to be very small, lithe. He said he had once done it as a boy, and seen terrifying demons inside. The Koya elders in Rampa village told the same story to their children. We sneaked up here at night, but the story of demons kept us all from trying to get inside.”

  “Waterfall archaeology,” Costas said. “That’s a new one on me.”

  Pradesh dangled a cord behind his seat. “There is another way.”

  Costas twisted around to look, his eyes suddenly gleaming. “Detonator cord! Now that’s my kind of archaeology.”

  The pilot came over the center of the clearing, pointing the nose of the helicopter toward the boulders some fifty meters away. He leveled out and began to descend. The rotor had cleared away the mist below them but now kicked up a swirl of dust and leaves. Jack leaned toward the doorway to peer out. Suddenly there was a massive clang and the helicopter lurched sideways, the edge of the door nearly hitting Jack’s face. There were more clangs and the crack of gunfire, a jolting noise even through the headphones. The air was split by a series of violent snaps as bullets whizzed through the open doors of the helicopter, missing them by inches. Jack instinctively put his left arm out to keep Costas down. The pilot pulled up on the collective and the helicopter lurched up and away. Jack glimpsed figures below, three of them, in combat fatigues and red bandanas. The pilot leveled out again and the two sappers knelt beside the open door and shouldered their rifles. They opened fire on full automatic, pouring rounds down on their assailants. They stopped, looked out for a second, then fired three rounds each, aiming carefully this time. They snapped off their magazines and quickly reloaded. Jack saw the three figures lying sprawled in the dust, surrounded by dark red stains expanding into a puddle on the clearing floor.

  “Maoists,” Pradesh ex
claimed. “My guess is, not a reception party for us though. There’s no way they could have known we were coming. This was an advance party for a larger group, probably a few hours away in the jungle. They usually do their recce in threes. They panicked when they saw we were about to land.”

  “What do we do now?” Jack said, his heart still pounding with the adrenaline.

  “We stick to the plan. You’ve seen what my two chaps can do. Chances are the rest of the Maoists are far enough away not to have heard the gunfire. Noise is quickly absorbed in the jungle. The pilot will drop us and then disappear south, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Maoists will be used to seeing this old bird flying to and from the villages with supplies.”

  Pradesh nodded at the pilot, who made a quick descent this time, bouncing the skids on the hard surface of the clearing. The two sappers were out before the helicopter had settled, kicking the three bodies and checking the perimeter. Jack and Costas unbuckled themselves and stepped out, ducking and running from the whirling rotor. Pradesh followed them, carrying his bag, then the engine revved up to a whine and the Huey rose in a cloud of dust, tilting forward as soon as it cleared tree height and heading off to the south. A few moments later the noise was gone. Jack stood up, shouldering his khaki bag and checking Costas. They took off their helmets and piled them together. The dust was settling on the three dead bodies a few meters away, sopping up the blood. Jack was still coursing with adrenaline. He could see that Pradesh was wired up too, his Magnum revolver held out in front of him, tense and poised like a hunting animal. The whole action had taken only a few seconds, but was replaying in Jack’s mind in slow motion. It had happened to him before, when he had been inches from death. He glanced at Costas, who was walking toward a rock outcrop on the jungle fringe, about thirty meters from the entrance to the boulder shrine. The outcrop had evidently been used as a shelter, and the Maoists’ rucksacks were there. Costas squatted down, peering at the bags, then at the ground.