David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

He glanced at the open drawer. On one side was a small stack of leather-bound books and a notebook, with the same handwriting on the spines. On the other side were two box files containing a mass of papers, letters, manuscripts, some of it material Jack had barely begun to delve into. And between were the artifacts he had just been unwrapping. He took out a small red box containing a brass pocket telescope, the ivory surround of the cylinder shrunk with age. For the thousandth time since he had been a boy he extended the telescope to its full length, only a few inches, and peered through it. And just as he always did, he tried to imagine what John Howard had seen through it on that fateful day in the jungle. Jack shut his eyes, closing his mind off from the present, then opened them again, but the view remained the same. Yet he knew he was on the cusp of it now, only a helicopter trip away from the place where the history that he had spent years trying so hard to imagine might finally come to life.

“Cool telescope.” Rebecca had come quietly into the room and was standing beside Jack. He passed it to her, and she peered through it. “That was your great-great-great-grandfather’s,” he said. “He brought it back from India, where he used it in a war in the jungle not far from the Roman site we’re visiting tomorrow morning.”

Rebecca looked at the pictures. “That’s him, isn’t it, and his family? I can see you in him. I can really feel his presence, holding this. Whenever we do school trips to museums, I always want to touch things. I got into a lot of trouble at the Metropolitan Museum once. They don’t have to be great works of art, just little things. They seem to take me back into the past.”

Jack smiled at her. “Look around this room. There are artifacts from almost every expedition I’ve been on. Most of them are little things, just as you say, shards of pottery, worn old coins. But they’re what makes it real for me. When I sit here and write, I always have something in my hands.”

“Uncle Costas says you’re a magpie. He says you’re really a treasure hunter.” She passed back the telescope and traced her finger over the coat of arms carved into the front of the chest, an anchor over a shield with the Latin words Depressus Extollor carved underneath.

Jack laughed. “Uncle Costas had better watch what he says.”

“Uncle Costas says that without him, you’d be going nowhere in a rowboat.”

“And without me, Uncle Costas would be sailing a desk to nowhere in some technology park in California.”

“No, he says without you, he’d be on holiday in Hawaii.”

“Ever since we planned the Pacific trip, he’s had Hawaii on the brain. Everything else on the way, Egypt, India, is just a distraction, and he’s tolerating it only because I’m his dive buddy and I save his life occasionally.”

“We’ve already talked about it. He says he’s giving you two days, and then he’s going to ask to be dropped at the nearest international airport. He needs a week before we arrive to get everything set up for the submersible testing.”

“He means he needs a week to test the lounge chairs at Waikiki. He’s just a beach bum.”

At that moment Costas bounded in, wearing a garish flowery shirt over baggy shorts, with wraparound sunglasses pushed up his forehead. “Aloha!”

“Aloha!” Rebecca replied, grinning mischievously at Jack.

“Thought I may as well get ready,” Costas said. “We may not have time to change.”

“I hear you,” Jack said.

Costas spied the object Jack had just finished unwrapping. “An elephant! I was getting withdrawal symptoms.”

Jack passed it over, and Costas held it up carefully to the light. “It’s made of lapis lazuli,” Jack said. “The same stone as that fragment you found at Berenike. It’s the highest grade too, from the mines in Afghanistan. You can see the sparkle of pyrites in the layers of blue. It’s been handled a lot, played with. It was among my great-great-grandfather’s possessions, given to him when he was a child. He had wanted to give it to his own son, his firstborn, on his second birthday. But that never happened.”

“It’s beautiful,” Rebecca said reverently, taking it from Costas and stroking the trunk. “Can I have it? I mean, can I borrow it and keep it in my cabin? It’s kind of a shame to have it stuffed away in that old chest.”

Costas wagged a finger at Rebecca. “Careful what you say about that chest. It follows him everywhere. It makes him feel like an old sea dog. Whenever he’s got some downtime, he comes and sits with it.”

Hiebermeyer and Aysha came in, and they all sat down on the chairs Jack had arranged in an arc around the chest. Costas peered in the open drawer and gestured at another object inside, an old revolver. “The Wild West?”

Jack gave a wry smile. “Right period, wrong continent. The period we’re talking about, the 1870s, saw major international confrontations-the Franco-Prussian War which nearly destroyed Europe, the Afghan War which brought Britain head-to-head with Russia. But it was also a flashpoint for colonial conflict. Within a few years you’ve got Custer’s Last Stand in America, the Zulu War in South Africa, and jungle rebellion in India. And in each case it’s unclear which side got off best.”

“Your ancestor John Howard,” Aysha said, as Costas carefully lifted the revolver out of the drawer to inspect it more closely. “He was a British army officer?”

Jack nodded. “Now that we’re all here, I want to tell you about him. In 1879 he was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, recently posted out to India as a subaltern in the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners. That was one of the premier regiments in the Indian army, based in Bangalore in south India but used on expeditions all around India and the frontiers. They were surveyors and builders, but they also trained as infantry, so were about the most useful troops around. Each of the ten companies had two British officers and several British NCOs, but the sappers were all Madrasis, including the native officers-the jemadars and subadars- and the native NCOs, the havildars and naiks. The Madrasis were proud men, a warrior caste. For a young British officer, service with a regiment like the Madras Sappers was about the best experience of soldiering you could have. Lieutenants commanded companies and the senior subalterns had the responsibilities a major would have today. All of the Royal Engineers officers had gone through the equivalent of a graduate degree program in engineering before coming out to India.”

“India must have been a shock to the system coming from cold and drizzly England,” Costas said.

Jack shook his head. “Not for Howard. He’d been schooled in England, but he was born in India in 1855 just before the Indian Mutiny, in the final years of the East India Company before the British crown took over. His father had been an indigo planter in Bihar, on the border with the Himalayas and Tibet, and his grandfather had been a colonel in the East India Company army. So India was in his blood. That helps to explain how he survived the jungle conditions of his first active deployment.”

“This place we’re going to,” Costas said.

“After more than two decades of peace following the mutiny, India was heating up,” Jack said. “There was war again in Afghanistan, for the first time in forty years. Most of the Madras Sapper officers were deployed there, but not Howard. The reason was another conflict, a tribal uprising that flared up in 1879 in the jungle of the northern Madras presidency, in the foothills of the Eastern Ghats Mountains along the Godavari River.” Jack pointed at the map above his desk. “Ever since the mutiny, the Indian government had put down any hint of internal uprising with an iron fist. A brigade-sized expedition was dispatched to the jungle, including two companies of sappers. But these revolts were regarded as civil disturbances, so there was little military glory and no medals for officers despite the hard campaigning involved. And this revolt, called the Rampa Rebellion after the local district, dragged on for almost two years, longer than the entire Afghan campaign. Howard was there almost from beginning to end.”