David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

“What we’ll see? A layer of brown, then darker brown. It becomes warmer, then hot. We start to glow. Then some Russian mobster fishes us out and sell us to terrorists as components of a dirty bomb.”

Jack grinned. “The geologists say the lake is gradually emptying, you know.”

“Emptying?”

“It’s always been a mystery where all the glacial runoff goes, pouring down those slopes from the Tien Shan. The lake’s like a huge ornamental pond, which the fountains never seem to fill up. It’s as if somewhere in the depths there’s a giant plug.”

“That’s another reason not to dive here. I’m not going to be sucked into some black hole.”

“Speaking of black, did you know they say the Black Death came from here?”

“What?”

“The Black Death. The plague. Sometime in the fourteenth century, carried along the Silk Route on the backs of rats.”

“You’re kidding me. The Black Death. From this lake. The one I’m about to go swimming in.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Personally I think it’s another myth, created to keep people away from this place. All the more reason to explore it, if you ask me.”

“Hawaii,” Costas muttered, raising his hands in prayer. “Why is it that every time there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, you make me go through another nightmare?”

Jack slapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. “Because you’re my dive buddy. And I need you to watch out for me.”

The boat was on idle now. Jack sniffed the air. It was an unexpected smell, not the usual slightly rank odor of a lakeshore, but the scent of herbs, of lavender, of crushed dry leaves. The wind here came powerfully from the west, sweeping across the water like an army of ghosts, but the smell held the exotic fragrance of the east. On the shore Jack had glimpsed distant ramparts, the minaret of a fallen mosque, toppled by an earthquake, and he sensed a handhold from over the mountain pass, from the foothills of China beyond. The western end of the lake, where they had met Katya and Altamaty among the petroglyphs, was a place of desolation, a place people only passed through by necessity; but here to the east there was permanence, a place people had chosen to settle, Han traders of antiquity, Sogdian, Mongolian followers of Genghis Kahn and Dungan Muslims, expelled from the western fringes of China within living memory.

One of the crewmen made his way toward them from the deckhouse. “We’ve been in contact with shore. The seismic readout remains unaltered, but it’s still condition orange. The navy divers have been clearing a collapsed jetty, which is why the Zodiac’s been delayed. They hope to be heading out here in about fifteen minutes. We’re over the GPS coordinates now. The advice is not to go in, but if you have to, do it now. Keep at least ten meters above the seafloor. And avoid any deep gullies. I repeat, the advice is not to go in.”

“Advice understood, Brad,” Costas said, struggling into the strap of his cylinder backpack. The crewman moved over to help him. “Jack and I have dived into a lava tube, you know,” he said, gasping. “Into a live volcano. In Atlantis.”

“Yeah? Cool.”

“No. Hot.” Costas peered up at the crewman, who pointed skeptically into the water. They had spent most of the voyage together in the deckhouse talking about torpedoes and radiation leaks. “Don’t say it, Brad,” Costas said. “Just don’t say anything at all.”

“I was just going to say good luck, sir.”

“Sir again,” Costas grumbled. “Me, sir?”

“Lieutenant-commander, U.S. Navy, as I recall,” Jack said.

“A nuts-and-bolts man. Just one of the guys. And I never pulled rank.”

“That’s because you’re a born leader, and everyone always listens to you,” Jack said, pushing his shoulder.

“Everyone except you.”

“I don’t need to listen. I just follow.” Jack slapped Costas’ back, then nodded at the crewman, who eased down the mask on Costas’ helmet, snapping closed the locks, and then did the same for Jack. Both men ran through their life support systems, checking the computer screen readout inside their helmets, then double-checked each other. The crewman put up a splayed hand and pointed at his watch. Jack nodded at him. Five minutes to go. The engine revved slightly, and he felt the boat move as they repositioned. For a few moments before activating his intercom Jack was completely cut off All he could hear was his own breathing, the pounding of his heart, a slight ringing in his ears, a legacy of gunfire. He thought again of Wauchope, and then of the Romans. Maybe one of the legionaries had survived too, made it ashore, escaped east over the saddle of the mountains toward Chryse, the land of gold. Maybe it was Fabius himself Jack wondered whether they would ever know. He had only his instinct to go on, and that told him the story did not end in the waters here.

Jack looked down and saw the layer of reflection again, like quicksilver. He shook away the thought and switched on his intercom. Costas gave him the thumbs-down signal, and Jack repeated it. He felt the suck of the air from his regulator, and checked his gauge readout again. They slipped over the side together. Jack dropped down, under the surface, then floated back up again. He was in his element and was coursing with excitement. He suddenly knew they were in the right place. It was his instinct again. He glanced at Costas, who was bobbing in the water looking at him. Jack put his hand on his buoyancy valve, and pressed the intercom. They always said it. It was their ritual. Their good-luck talisman. He grinned at Costas. “Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

Three minutes later they had descended more than twenty meters below the surface. There was no sign of the bottom, but Jack knew from his compass that they were facing the landward side of the lakebed as it sloped up to the shoreline half a kilometer to the east. To begin with the water had been remarkably clear, and Jack had rolled over and seen the dark shape of the boat’s hull above, the figures of the two crewmen visible in wavering outline as they peered over the side. He rolled back again just as they hit a thermocline, indiscernible inside his E-suit but registered in a change in temperature on the readout inside his helmet.

“It’s getting colder. This might not be radioactive soup after all,” he said on the intercom.

“Just as long as all this seismic activity hasn’t stirred up anything,” Costas replied, his voice tinny with the increased pressure. “Like they said, whatever’s down there is probably best left undisturbed.”

“I’ll remind you of that next time we see something that needs to be defused.”

They continued down. Below the thermocline the visibility dramatically reduced, a result of particulate gray and brown matter in the water. Jack sensed a darkness underlying the gloom below them. He flicked on his headlamp but instantly regretted it, dazzled by the glare off the suspended particles in the water. He switched it off again, and blinked as his eyes readjusted to the gloom. He checked his depth readout. Thirty-five meters. Suddenly it was there, a gray, featureless plain about eight meters below them, gently undulating up the slope. “I take back what I said about radioactivity,” he murmured. “Looks like something killed this place dead.”

He neutralized his buoyancy two meters above the bottom, careful not to stir it up with his fins. “That’s nowhere near as solid as it looks,” Costas said. “With all this seismic activity, it’s soup. Close your eyes, drop down and you wouldn’t know you’d gone into it. After a while it’d become glutinous, and you’d be stuck. Only consolation is your body wouldn’t be eaten by marine borers. Even they wouldn’t live here.”