“Watch for snakes,” Pradesh called out. Costas held up a long, decaying skin, shed from a cobra. “Got you.” He let it drop, swatted a mosquito and then picked something else up. “Check this out. Those Maoists had Kalashnikovs, and there are plenty of casings around. In fact, too many for what we’ve just had. It looks like they’ve used this place as a shooting gallery before, fairly recently to judge from the state of the brass. And look at this. It’s a much older casing. Looks like it was from an elephant gun. Big-game hunters, maybe. There are quite a few of these casings lying around too, but trampled into the ground. Must have been a long time ago.”
Jack joined him. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s a. 577, Snider-Enfield. The rifles the Madras Sappers had in 1879.”
“You’re kidding.” Costas picked up another, looked closely at the rim, then grunted. “Battlefield archaeology. They did it with cartridges from Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn. You can reconstruct fields of fire, the flow of the battle.” Costas got up, looking around. “Maybe this rock was where Bebbie met his end. Maybe this was where Howard and Wauchope found him. With the rock behind, it would have been the best shelter around, a defensive position against the rebels while Bebbie and the sappers waited for rescue.”
“I think I know what those three terrorists were doing when we surprised them,” Pradesh called out. “It wasn’t just a recce. They were cleaning up.” He had advanced around the back of the rock, his revolver at the ready. Costas and Jack cautiously followed. The jungle smell became stronger, mustier, different from the rusty smell of fresh blood around the bodies in the clearing. Jack knew what it was even before he rounded the corner. A mass of bones and ragged clothes had been pushed into a crevice in the rock. Some were bleached white, but there was still hair to be seen and the limbs were still articulated, with sinews between the joints. Pradesh peered closer, holding his nose, then stepped back, gasping for breath. “Well, that solves one mystery. These are our Chinese, the ones the Koya saw arriving three months ago. Look, you can see the word INTACON on their shirts. That’s the mining company. They must have been ambushed by the Maoists. That explains all the Kalashnikov cartridges.” He picked up a stick, and used it to lift a flap of clothing. “And look at this. Exactly as the Koya described.” It was a section of skin still intact on the arm of one of the skeletons. They could see the remains of a tattoo, probably what had preserved the skin. Jack felt a wave of apprehension. So far it had all been talk, speculation. This was real. The image staring out at them was smudged, half rotted away, but there was no doubt about it. A tiger tattoo.
Pradesh waved to the two sappers and pointed so they could see where the bodies were, and then put up six fingers and drew his hand across his throat. He got up, and Jack and Costas followed him back out into the clearing past the three fresh bodies. Suddenly there was an earsplitting crack. Flecks of blood flew off Costas’ shoulder, and Jack just had time to see one of the bodies with a pistol raised before Pradesh aimed and fired. The first round took off the top of the man’s head, sending brain and bone spattering behind. The man’s legs drummed against the ground, but he was already dead. Pradesh fired round after round, slowly and methodically, letting the big revolver return from the recoil and aiming carefully, reducing the man’s head to a bloody pulp. Jack reached out and held Pradesh’s arm in an iron grip, pulling it away. He fired once more, the last chamber, the bullet ricocheting off the rock behind. “Enough,” Jack said. Pradesh turned and stared at him, wide-eyed, enraged. Jack could smell the fresh sweat, the adrenaline. He eased his grip and stared Pradesh straight in the eyes. “You got him,” Jack said quietly. “For your father.” Jack quickly turned to check Costas, who was dabbing blood from a graze on his shoulder. He looked as imperturbable as ever. “You okay?”
Costas nodded, then turned to Pradesh. “Yeah. And thanks.”
Pradesh took a deep breath, nodded then went over and kicked the other two bodies, reloading his revolver as he did so. The two sappers kept their rifles trained on the bodies until he signaled them, and then they returned to the edge of the clearing where they had taken up position before, concealed beside the path entrance. Pradesh snapped his fingers, pointed two fingers at his eyes, tapped his watch and waved toward the jungle. One of the sappers held his rifle at the ready and disappeared down the path. “He’s doing a recce,” Pradesh said. “If those three Maoists were an advance party, the main group will be following them. They only ever use the existing paths. They’re not jungle people at all. The path comes from Chodavaram, past another of the Maoist hangouts. They move between places, a few nights here, a few there. They think they’re like Bollywood heroes, like Robin Hood. But they’re cowards and murderers and their ideology stinks. I loathe them.”
“So we see.” Costas grunted, fishing out a bandage shell dressing from Jack’s bag and plastering it on his wound.
Jack put his hand on Pradesh’s shoulder. “You okay?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“You just killed a man.”
“That wasn’t a man. And it wasn’t the first time. I’ve been in Kashmir. I shot a Pakistani army engineer who was trying to blow up a mountain bridge we’d just built. They shot at us, we shot at them. I did it for my men. I could have chosen to miss him, but I didn’t. That time, I threw up. Not this time.”
Jack nodded. He had made the same rationalizations himself, and he knew what Pradesh was doing. His ears were ringing, from the adrenaline and the gunfire. They needed to focus on their objective, to keep tight. He gestured toward the boulders where the water was cascading down into the stream. Pradesh took a deep breath, glanced at the corpses, then handed Jack his revolver. He opened his bag and took out a small slab of C-4 explosive wrapped in plastic, and the coil of detonator cord he had shown them in the helicopter. “The obstruction’s one small boulder, lodged in the entrance passage,” he said. “If I can split it, we may be able to get in.” He led them over the clearing to the entrance. The tumble of boulders extended at least fifteen meters out from the face of the waterfall. It looked like an ancient megalithic tomb, yet it was completely natural, the result of a massive landslide far back in history that had eroded away and left the tumble of rock exposed. It was taller and wider than it had seemed from the helicopter, at least twice Jack’s height at the entrance. The two massive upright boulders and the lintel formed a passage beneath, blocked up with the boulder Pradesh had described. Rock fragments were strewn on the ground in front. Pradesh knelt down and picked one up. “This is fresh,” he said. “Someone’s had a go at that boulder with a pick, pretty recently.”
Costas knelt down beside him. “The Maoists?” Pradesh shook his head. “More likely the prospectors. The Maoists may have caught them in the act and gunned them down, or maybe the prospectors gave up here and tried to find another way in.”
“Or it could have been Katya’s uncle,” Jack murmured.
“Whoever it was, it makes the job easier for us.” Pradesh crawled in a few meters to the wedged boulder, and packed the explosive in a space underneath. He pressed in the detonator cord, then wound off the spool and backed out of the entrance, carrying on across the clearing about ten meters to another large rock protruding from the jungle fringe. Jack and Costas followed him, and squatted behind the rock. Pradesh clipped on a small electronic detonator, then raised his arm in warning to the sapper who had been glancing at him from his position on the far side of the clearing. Pradesh looked at Jack and Costas, patting his ear with one hand. “Fire in the hole.”
They crouched close together behind the rock with their hands over their ears. Pradesh clicked the detonator and a second later there was a crack and a thud. They looked up, and saw a cloud of dust at the passage entrance. Pradesh leapt forward to inspect his work, waiting outside a few moments for the dust to settle before cautiously crawling in. “All I needed was enough explosive to crack the boulder,” he said, his voice muffled. “It’s perfect.”
“
Nice job,” Costas said, peering in behind.
“There’s a hole about a meter square. It’s wide enough even for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Costas grumbled.
“It means you’re invited in.” Jack took his halogen diving flashlight from his bag, and knelt under the lintel. Pradesh was about six inches shorter than Jack, lithely built, and the hole was a little less generous than he had described. Jack eased himself over the jagged surfaces where the rock had cracked with the explosive, and pulled himself through the hole. The rock wall he felt beyond was smooth, and he knew he was inside the passageway. He heard curses and grumbles as Costas followed, and then a ripping sound. “My shirt. My special Hawaiian shirt.”
“I’ll buy you another. When we get there.” Jack held out his hand, and Costas grasped it, heaving himself through. Jack stumbled forward in the gloom behind Pradesh, seeing only a flickering pool of light in the darkness ahead. Jack lingered for a moment, glancing back through the hole into the jungle clearing. The setting sun flashed off the wet palm leaves on the far side, as if the jungle were suddenly ignited in flame. Jack could still see the sapper squatting against the rock halfway down the clearing, cradling his rifle, staring intently in his direction. He saw the bodies in the dust, and thought of Rebecca. Thank God he hadn’t allowed her to come along. He had almost said yes. He glanced at his watch. They had an hour, no more. He turned back and looked into the darkness of the passageway. He felt the rush of excitement he always felt at the threshold of the unknown. He put a hand on Costas’ shoulder. He remembered Katya, his promise to find out what had happened to her uncle. She would be waiting. They needed to get cracking.
12
Lake Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan
Katya Svetlanova leaned back against the boulder, shifted slightly to find a more comfortable position and stretched out her legs on the hard baked ground. She put down her digital SLR camera and tightened her long dark hair in the band behind her neck. She looked at the boulder beside her. Swirling forms had been carved into the rock-snow leopards, leaping ibex, a mysterious solar symbol. The carvings had once been painted in primal colors, in blood and ochre, but were now barely discernible, eroded by the wind and scorched by the sun. They had been carved more than two thousand years ago by the Scythian hunters who had roamed these steppelands, who had sat where she was and gazed out over the lake and the mountains. They were ancestors of the Kyrgyz who still lived up here, her own mother’s ancestors, nomads who knew the power of the shaman. It was a sacred place, a burial ground, where she could still sense the nomad smells of horses and mutton and sweat, yet it was also a place where others had passed through, extraordinary people-adventurers, traders, warriors, people from immeasurably far to the east and the west. Somewhere there must be an imprint of their passing. She had been photographing the carvings, taking advantage of the long shadows of the late afternoon. It had been a hard day, as every day was out here. Each new boulder offered the promise of an extraordinary discovery, yet the one she craved the most was still eluding her.
She swayed slightly, and the carvings came in and out of view, like a hologram. She was dead tired. It had been five relentless weeks, and now there were only a few days left. She remembered how long the great explorers of the Silk Route had spent searching for lost treasures-decades, a lifetime. Most never found what they had been seeking-fabled lost kingdoms, Alexander’s treasure, the Seventh Preciosity, treasures forever just beyond their grasp. Maybe the shamans were right, and this place truly was a heavenly domain, its greatest revelations only attainable to those who took one step farther into the afterlife. Maybe archaeology was really like this, and her time with Jack Howard and IMU hunting for Atlantis had been a magical whirlwind, seducing her into thinking that there was more to life than a career in the Institute of Palaeography in Moscow, studying other people’s discoveries. Jack had warned her, but she needed to find out for herself She needed to find out whether she had finder’s luck.
She took a deep swig from her water bottle, then looked down to where the remarkable blue water of Issyk-Kul lapped the rocky shoreline only a stone’s throw away. It was like an inland sea, stretching off to the Tien Shan Mountains to the south, their snowcapped peaks forming a breathtaking backdrop.
Somewhere beyond lay Afghanistan, the forbidding mass of the Hindu Kush Mountains, the passes that led down to India-the Khyber Pass to the east, the Bolan to the west. But the Tien Shan Mountains girt the lake like the battlements of some impregnable castle, and it seemed inconceivable that anyone should have passed through them. Always the eye was drawn east and west, along the Silk Road-the greatest trade route the world had ever known. To the east, the mountains dipped toward the Taklamakan Desert and the heartland of China, toward the fabled city of Xian. To the west, the route led through Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan and Persia, and then to the shores of the Mediterranean. As the setting sun cast a rosy tint across the lake, coloring it in streaks of red, Katya shifted around to look at the edge of the canyon that led up from the west to the lake. She always felt uneasy coming up that road, as she knew ancient travelers would have. It was a place her Kyrgyz grandmother had warned her about, haunted by demon-warriors on dark steeds who lurked in every ravine, ready to devour any traveler who strayed into their domain. Katya knew these nomad myths for what they were, folk memories of conquest and horror, of the Huns, the Mongols, human hurricanes that swept through from the east. They were her ancestors too, not of her mother but of her father. She had thought of him lately, the modern-day warlord, of seeing his violent death in the Black Sea two years before, with Jack at her side. She had tried to remember her father before temptation had caught him up and swept him away, like the tides of greed and war that had once coursed through these mountain passes. It was in her blood too, but she could not forgive him, and she knew the weight of this place lay in her search for redemption, in her yearning to find strength in her Kyrgyz ancestry, to hear the words of the shaman in these rock carvings.
“Katya!” A rangy figure appeared above the boulders a hundred yards away. “We’re ready.” She sprang to her feet, waved and picked up her camera. She loved seeing Altamaty, his bounding enthusiasm. She had not yet told him what she was really after up here. She was still wary of goalposts, uncertain what failure could do to her. But she suddenly felt revitalized. Standing up, she could see the enormity of their task, a sea of boulders stretching for kilometers along the shore of the lake, and extending for hundreds of meters up the mountain slope where they had been dislodged and brought down over the centuries by flood and earthquake. She and Altamaty had documented almost three hundred carvings already, yet there were dozens of square kilometers still to explore, each boulder to be painstakingly examined, half of them requiring excavation from the rock-hard earth. Maybe she had bitten off more than she could chew. She remembered Jack again, his offer of a research position at IMU. She would have complete freedom, unlimited resources and could continue to be based out here. But she was the only one in the Institute in Moscow who could stand up for her colleagues against the bureaucracy and corruption. She was her father’s daughter-her father of the old days, the professor and art historian who had founded the Institute. In truth her feelings had been too raw, and she had found it impossible to accept anything from Jack. Her father had become everything she stood against, a scion of the antiquities black market, a warlord who had taken on the trappings of his ancestors. He had become her enemy, and Jack had destroyed him. But she still had a fire within her, the fierce loyalty of a daughter, the tribal bonding of a warrior clan. Seeing Jack at the Transoxiana conference three months before had brought it all back. She needed to find her own peace before she took any outstretched hand.
She slung her camera, and began scrambling over the boulders. She remembered something else Jack had told her. You need luck, but you also need to take risks, to be willing to put everything behind a gut instinct. For Jack that meant committing research ships, his team, Costas, a
ll the paraphernalia of underwater exploration. She looked at the boulders extending in every direction like a giants’ cemetery, and at her little tent by the lake. Out here she needed a small army of fieldworkers, and a camp like a military forward operating base. She stopped and took a deep breath. Maybe the time had come to accept that offer. She had not let herself down. She and Altamaty had done all they humanly could. She needed to contact Jack anyway, to find out if he had made any progress in locating her uncle in the jungle. She had been nagged by anxiety for weeks now, and she needed to know. And she wanted to hear his voice. She would set up the satellite phone that evening.
An engine coughed to life and settled into the chugging rumble of a diesel four-cylinder. Katya crested a rise and saw Altamaty ahead, his cholpak felt hat bobbing above the boulders. He was sitting astride their sole piece of mechanical equipment, a venerable British Nuffield tractor that had somehow found its way up from India into central Asia, part of a reinvigorated Silk Route trade that had come with the fall of the Soviet Union. Katya had become quite fond of it, despite the roar and the belches of black smoke. It was their warhorse, and as long as it fired up there was still hope. She jumped from rock to rock and came down in the small open space in front of the tractor, holding up her hand to Altamaty as she cast an eye over the chain and protective leather strap that extended from the tractor’s bucket around a half-buried boulder. It had become their end-of-day ritual: Altamaty would maneuver the tractor to a promising boulder they had flagged earlier, near one of the rough tracks that ran up from the lake. She eyed today’s candidate. In this case, the boulder that needed moving had fallen against a promising stone, and the space between had filled with hard earth which Altamaty had spent most of the afternoon digging out to get the chain around the rock.
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