Jack peered again. The hollow could have been anything. It could have been the shape of a clenched hand, retracted in death. It could have held another weapon, a sword perhaps. But it could have been something else. The shape of a bamboo tube, the sacred velpu, once held in that hand, now gone.
Jack swallowed hard. He was crying, and he did not know why. He took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled slowly, blinking hard. He thought about what he knew of the man, of his love for his children, his family. He hoped they had been there at the end. He hoped that whatever had tormented him, the anguish, the loss, had lifted from him here, in those final moments. He hoped he had found what he had been seeking all those years since the jungle, the greatest treasure imaginable.
Jack wiped his eyes, and looked up. There was a noise outside, pulsing into the cavern, the clatter of a helicopter coming up the valley. He heard a crunching of feet on the rock behind. Costas had left him alone with the body for a few minutes, but Jack had vaguely been aware of him skirting around and exploring the recess beyond. “I checked it out,” Costas said, his breath crystallizing in the shaft of sunlight coming from the entrance. “The mine extends about twenty meters farther on, then drops into a well about five meters deep. If this was where Licinius hid that stone, my guess is that’s where it would have been. There are ledges in the rock created by the ancient pick work, but I looked and there’s nothing loose. It’s as if someone has been in here and methodically worked through the entire place. If that jewel was here, it’s gone now.”
Jack cleared his throat, and pointed. His voice sounded hoarse. “Look at his hand, the empty one. It’s exactly as if he were holding a Koya bamboo velpu. I think they brought that with them, the one they had taken from the jungle all those years before, and now that’s gone too. And so is Robert Wauchope. There’s no sign of another body here. Maybe when they came here the velpu was empty, but when it was taken away it was heavy with a new weight. Maybe Wauchope took it from Howard’s grasp, and escaped from here. Maybe they really did find the jewel.”
Costas looked at Jack. “We’ve found what we came for, haven’t we?”
Jack said nothing. He reached into his bag, grasping what he had been tightly holding as he entered the chamber. “I know we have to go. Just give me a moment.”
“You want to be alone?”
“No. Stay.” Jack took out his hand and opened it. He was holding the little lapis lazuli elephant, John Howard’s childhood toy, worn smooth by years of little hands, played with by Jack himself when he was a boy. It had a sparkling ribbon tied around its neck, something Rebecca had put on it when she had taken it to her cabin on Seaquest II Jack squeezed the elephant tight. Lapis lazuli, born in this mountainside, now returned. He put it down, and pushed it toward the twist of rags, the empty outstretched hand, carefully, gently. It touched, and he left it there, pulling his hand away.
The helicopter thundered past again. Jack got up, and straightened his bag. He took a deep breath, exhaling one last time into the depths of the cavern, watching his breath crystallize and tumble into the darkness. He put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. He remembered Pradesh. It was time to go.
21
Two days later Jack sat in the stern of the U.S. Navy patrol boat as it sped across the still waters of Issyk-Kul, its wake cutting a great V across the surface of the lake. The view was stupendous. Issyk-Kul was the deepest mountain lake on earth, three thousand square kilometers in area, five times the size of Lake Geneva. To Jack the wake seemed like a giant arrow pointing east, a final thrust of the central Asian massif toward the deserts of China. To the south, the mountains that cradled the lake loomed fantastically out of the haze, a strip of snowy peaks that seemed detached from the earth, floating in midair like a mirage. To the west lay the boulder-strewn shoreline where he and Costas had met Katya and Altamaty three days before. They had left her there again that morning, recording the Roman burial site, before a helicopter would fly her out to meet them. There was one place Jack insisted they visit, beyond the lake, beyond the Taklamakan Desert near the end of the Silk Road. The visit would take a few days to set up, and meanwhile Jack was excited by the prospect of diving again for the first time since Seaquest II had left the Red Sea over a week earlier.
Jack thought again of Pradesh, of his gunshot wound in Afghanistan two days before. He would be in intensive care for weeks, but the prognosis was good. He was in the best possible hands at the U.S. medical facility at Bishkek, and would soon be sent to Landstuhl in Germany. After flying back with him from Afghanistan, Jack and the others had gone by helicopter to the lake to meet the patrol boat that had come out to join them from the old Soviet naval base on the eastern shore. Jack had wanted to travel the route the Romans under Fabius might have taken, east across the lake after Licinius had parted from them and fled south into the mountains. The patrol boat was now approaching the end of its journey, almost ten hours at maximum speed. It would have been an awesome endeavor two thousand years before for a few men in an open boat, already drained by the trek they had undergone since escaping from the Parthians at Merv. There was no way of knowing how far they had got, whether they had reached the eastern shore. Jack guessed they would have fought to the end, against the elements, against exhaustion, against the enemy who may have been awaiting their landfall. These were men who had been trained to confront every challenge head-on, who would fight to the last to uphold the honor of their legion, to earn the right to join the hallowed ranks of their brothers-in-arms who had gone before. And Fabius might not even have known he had the jewel, one of the pair, wrapped up in a bag of loot he had shared with Licinius. Jack peered into the steely waters, seeing only reflection, sky-colored, peppered with tiny clouds. Perhaps it really was here, lost in the wreck of their boat, just as he had seen it in his dream. The celestial jewel.
The engine revved down, and the warm water of the wake slopped up over the stern transom of the boat. The wind died away, and the air felt thin, cool. Looking back over the lake, Jack could see the shoreline disappearing off to the west, far enough to sense the curvature of the earth. He felt as if they had tipped the balance between east and west, and had reached a point where the Silk Road would channel travelers down the far slope of the mountainous plateau, into China. It was an illusion, with the death trap of the Taklamakan Desert beyond, but for travelers from the west the great mountain pass ahead might have been a sign of hope. Jack turned around, looking forward. Costas was still in the deckhouse where he had been since the morning, talking and peering at the navigation screens. Ahead of them, the shorelines of the lake were finally converging. Earlier, the lakeshore had seemed desiccated, eroded by the wind, but here the westerly wind that blew evaporation eastward had carpeted the ridges and valleys in olive-green. Nestled against the shoreline were buildings, drab concrete structures, the dilapidated remains of quays and jetties. As Jack watched, the surface of the lake shimmered and seemed to blur, and then was still again. He wondered if it was a seismic tremor. He looked at the shore again. Somewhere over there was Rebecca, with the IMU and U.S. Navy team. They had made a discovery already, the possible outlines of walls revealed by sub-bottom profiling. It was enough to give them a foothold on the archaeology of this place. Their job today was to check it out, before Katya joined them for the trip they had planned farther east over the mountain pass into China.
Costas swung back from the deckhouse and clambered over the diving gear stacked behind. He pulled two E-suits off the twenty-millimeter cannon behind the stern house and dropped one in front of Jack. “May as well suit-up now. We’re heading straight to the site. Rebecca and a couple of the team are coming out to us in the Zodiac. We’re going to be the first ones down.”
“Rebecca won’t be too happy about that.”
“This is no place for her first-ever dive. No way. I don’t trust lakes at the best of times, and this one should have a big red sticker on it.”
Jack sloshed some water from the scuppers over his hands.
“It’s slightly saline. That helps to cleanse it. And the lake bed’s two thousand feet deep in the center. Under a huge layer of silt. Anything toxic dumped out here’s likely to be well buried.”
Costas stopped pulling on his suit and looked incredulous. “You kidding? A Soviet submersibles testing site? We monitored these places when I was in the navy. You could almost warm your hands over the satellite images. And it didn’t have to be weapons or reactors. In the early days, the Soviets would happily have used chunks of uranium to power toothbrushes.”
“Altamaty told Katya that it was mainly torpedo testing out here, and whenever they lost one they went to huge efforts to find it. That’s where the first report came from of these walls underwater, the ones Rebecca thinks our team may have found again. Altamaty liberated some of the files in 1991 when he was on reserve duty at the base, when the Soviet Union was in meltdown. He said any lost torpedoes they couldn’t find were deemed unsalvageable and are probably best left where they are.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Costas grumbled, poking his head through the rubber neck in the suit. “Any more words of wisdom before we go radioactive?”
“Katya says the Kyrgyz see the lake as a sacred place, full of treasures. Some of them think Genghis Khan is buried here. Their sagas talk of a golden coffin set on a silvery sea. And they think there’s a sunken Nestorian monastery off the north shore. They think this place holds all the riches their ancestors saw pass along the Silk Road. But the waters are also sacred from before then. Some of the older Kyrgyz won’t even swim in it.”
“Sounds sensible to me.” Costas grunted, straining his hands through the rubber wrist seals. “In this case, I’ll go with the folk wisdom any day.”
“Some of the stories may be true. If you study the shoreline, you can see where the level of the lake has fluctuated. It’s a strange place. Hundreds of mountain streams empty into it, but hardly anything flows out. So the level of the lake goes up, or goes down when there are periods of high evaporation, like now. And on top of that, it’s in a major earthquake zone.”
Costas finished pulling on his suit and sat down, picking up a clipboard he had brought with him from the deckhouse. “I’ve got it here. The navy guys were briefed on it. At least three major quakes in recorded history, one about 250 BC, the Grigorevka, another 500 AD, the Toru-Aigir, and another 1475, the Balasogun, all probably eight to nine on the Richter scale, pretty hot stuff” He turned his back to Jack, arching his arms out to tense the shoulder zipper of the suit.
“Right.” Jack yanked the zipper shut and slapped Costas’ back. “The second of those, AD 500, might coincide with the sunken Christian monastery story. But the legend of Genghis Khan doesn’t fit. Genghis died in the thirteenth century AD. His successors were notoriously secretive about his tomb, murdering everyone they encountered during the funerary procession. According to Mongol ritual, horses would have trampled over the site to conceal it. But I think the tomb was where history says it was, at a place called Burqan Qaldun in Mongolia, hundreds of miles to the east of here.”
“What about decoys?” Costas said. “I mean, deliberately misleading stories. If they were so secretive, maybe they spread stories of the tomb being in different places. Hence the legend here.”
Jack nodded. “It’s possible. And not just for concealed tombs, but also for very visible tombs, extravagant ones. For those tombs, it’s the exterior appearance that matters for posterity, for how later generations will see the dead. But the contents usually matter most for the deceased, their private insurance policy for the afterlife. So they can be concealed elsewhere, with the actual body. After all, even the Egyptian pyramids were robbed.”
“And the First Emperor’s tomb at Xian was robbed,” Costas murmured. “By the caretaker, if the jewel story is true.”
Jack stood up, peering at the shoreline. He looked for the Zodiac, for Rebecca, but there was still no sign. He sat down and began to pull the legs of his suit on. “So where exactly are we going in?”
Costas flipped over to another piece of paper on the clipboard. “I printed this off the navigational computer. About two o’clock from us now, half a kilometer out from shore. There’s a creek with a few buildings at the edge.”
Jack shielded his eyes. “I see it.”
“It’s where the profiler came up with that image of walls.”
“It fits with the old Soviet report?”
“It fits exactly with the story from Altamaty, recounted to me by Katya. And I can’t imagine Katya has anything to hide.”
Jack raised his eyebrows, and was silent for a moment. “Well, to reassure you, Altamaty also spoke with Rebecca, in Russian. He said the first reports of underwater finds at this spot came from the Russian explorers who reached this place in the nineteenth century. You remember Sir Aurel Stein, the Silk Route explorer? Well, there were Russians who jumped on that bandwagon too, sent out by the Moscow Geographical Society. It was like an archaeological version of the Great Game, Russians against British. Nobody knows for sure what the Russians found. Such a lot disappeared after the Russian Revolution. But we know that two Russian explorers came down here, Nikolai Przhevalsky and Piotr Semyonov Tianshansky. They’d both heard stories of sunken ruins, cities under the lake. When they came here, the place seemed possessed by it. Tianshansky had been to Venice and found a fourteenth-century map showing an Armenian monastery by the lake. The legend of the tomb of Genghis seems to have been local. Undoubtedly the Russians were fed what they wanted to hear, but they were also shown genuine artifacts that had been found by fishermen.”
“Then fast-forward through the Soviet period.”
Jack nodded, pushing his head through the rubber seal on his suit. “The explorers left, but the legends grew. Nazi fantasists thought this was the Aryan homeland, drawing on local legends that this was a place of purity, a kind of heaven on earth. Then in the 1950s the Soviets established their torpedo testing base here, and divers went into the lake for the first time. As we know, they found something while searching for a lost torpedo, and the Ministry of Interior Security became involved. That ended under Khrushchev in the early 60s as the Cold War heated up and attention was focused elsewhere. Then more years passed, more rumor, more legend. A professor in Bishkek started to talk about Atlantis. That’s when Katya’s father got interested.”
“The family connection. I knew it.”
“The professor was wrong, of course. And Katya’s father never made it here. This place was next on his wish list when we drew a line under his plans two years ago.”
“So what else does Altamaty know about what the Soviets found?”
“The records only give chart coordinates. There’s a huge amount of silt down there, and no record of whether they found the torpedo. But rumors began circulating in Karakol, the local town, where the Soviet personnel lived. They told of ancient walls under the silt, like the converging walls of a great entrance passageway, with Chinese-style carvings. In Karakol there’s a wooden mosque built about a hundred years ago by the Dungan Chinese, Muslims driven west by persecution in China. The mosque looks like a Chinese temple, with dragons on the cornice. The Dungans seem to have fueled the legend of Genghis’ tomb. Katya thinks it’s only a matter of time before the tourist department seizes on the idea and makes it into an embarrassing spectacle, with giant Soviet-style statues of Genghis Khan in the town square. She wants them to invest in the petroglyphs, the real archaeology out here, not some myth, and make that an international attraction.”
Costas folded the sheet over on his clipboard and showed Jack a printout. “Well, whatever it was the divers saw, it seems to fit with the sub-bottom profiler data. To begin with, the profiler just showed linear striations coming down from shore, river runoff eroded into the bedrock. It was Rebecca who first saw how regular one of the channels looked. Almost an upside-down V shape, converging into shore.”
“So it was Rebecca who actually spotted this? She didn’t tell me that.”
&nb
sp; “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.
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