David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

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.

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.”