The Tiger Warrior

17

This is the pilot speaking. We’re entering Afghan airspace now.”

Jack shifted and stretched, then pressed the control to raise his seat to the upright position. He was in the forward cabin of the IMU Embraer jet, and he had spent the last three hours fitfully sleeping, two and a half of them on the tarmac at Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan while they waited for the optimum time for departure. The flight to Feyzabad in northeast Afghanistan was only an hour and a half, and the captain had wanted to arrive at dawn and return to Bishkek as soon as they had off-loaded. An airport in Afghanistan was no place to linger, even an airport under nominal ISAF control, and the Embraer would be fueled up to return from Bishkek to pick them up as soon as the call went in.

Jack had a sketch of the inscription in the jungle tomb clutched in his hand. He looked down and saw the Latin word. Sappheiros. In antiquity, that meant lapis lazuli, and that could only mean the lapis mined in the forbidding Koran Valley, high in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. One strand of the ancient treasure trail had pointed across the lake of Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan toward the eastern shore, to the place where Jack had begun to think a boat might have gone down in a storm two thousand years ago. The other strand led deep into the heart of Afghanistan, their route now.

Jack looked at the words of the inscription again. Hic iacet Licinius optio XV Apollinaris Sacra iulium sacularia, in sappheiros nielo minium. Alta Fabia frater ad Pontus ad aelia acundus. Here lies Licinius, optio of the 15th Apollinaris legion. Guardian of the celestial jewel, in the dark sappheiros mines. The other is with Fabius, brother, across the lake toward the rising sun. So Licinius had not taken his jewel south with him into the jungle. The velpu, the sacred bamboo tube of the Koya, the safeguard taken by Howard and Wauchope from the muttadar, may have been sanctified by its association with the raumana, the one who had come to the jungle and died in the shrine. But the bamboo tube had contained only a phantom treasure. The real treasure had been hidden somewhere out here, in the wilds of Afghanistan, during Licinius’ escape south from the lake. It was somewhere in the lapis lazuli mines, where the precious veins of blue had been worked since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.

Jack remembered what he had been thinking when he had dozed off. The valley with the mines was on a route south from Lake Issyk-Kul to India, toward the community of Roman traders half a world away that had been Licinius’ destination. Licinius might have guessed that the warriors pursuing him were after what he had taken off the Sogdian. He might have seen the odds stacked against him and decided to stash the jewel. He might have known the value of what he had taken. Perhaps the Sogdian had spoken to him of it, told him of its power if it were to be reunited with the other jewel, the one taken by Fabius across the lake. Maybe the Sogdian had spoken in desperation, hoping his life would be spared. Or maybe he had warned Licinius, told him something that made him want to be rid of his treasure. Maybe he had been told that he would be pursued relentlessly, and that the mines were the only place the jewel could be safely concealed, where the power of the crystal would be absorbed into the rock of its source. Only there, perhaps, it would no longer attract those who would come after him, who would hunt him like the tiger, as if they had some sixth sense for it.

Jack slid out into the aisle, slipped on his boots and made his way aft into the main cabin, where several window blinds were open on the port side. The pilot had taken a counterclockwise route over Tajikistan to approach Feyzabad from the west, and Jack could see the faint glimmerings of dawn over the Pamir Mountains and the bleak wasteland of the Taklamakan Desert beyond. He leaned over the seats and stared at the awesome mountain landscape below. It was a place where the obstacles to human existence appeared insurmountable, yet for those who endured it the reward was to live halfway to heaven. He stood back and made his way down the aisle to the others. Altamaty and Pradesh were sitting beside each other, talking in Russian. Jack sat opposite and poured himself a coffee from the trolley. Costas had been with them when Jack had gone to lie down, describing in detail the layout of his beloved engineering wing at the IMU campus in Cornwall. Costas had gone away to sleep as well, and Jack saw that the other two men had been poring over diving equipment catalogs from the onboard library.

Jack was itching to be underwater again. He thought of Rebecca. She had spent half an hour with him on the tarmac at Bishkek, running through notes she had made on Wood’s Source of the River Oxus. She had given Jack the book and hugged him before being whisked off toward the lake in the U.S. Marine Apache helicopter. Jack smiled at his last image of her, in a flight helmet surrounded by four burly U.S. Navy SEALs. She had been loving every second of it. If all went according to plan, they would be back together on the eastern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in less than twenty-four hours, and by then the IMU equipment ordered by Costas would have been air-freighted in. The ruins submerged in the lake were tantalizing, and might be one of the greatest Silk Road finds ever. The lake had also been traversed by boats carrying traders, and there was always the possibility of a wreck. Jack thought of Fabius and the fate of the Romans who had rowed for their lives toward the east. He glanced at Katya, who was sitting by herself a few rows ahead, staring out of the window. They might also find petroglyphs underwater, if the boulders extended into the lake. There was a major collaborative project in the offing. He could see himself spending more time out here. He looked out of the window, and remembered where they were heading. If they made it through the next twenty-four hours.

Costas came stumbling down the aisle and slumped into the seat beside Jack. He looked out of the window, and Jack followed his gaze. They could clearly make out the ripple of hills and valleys and stretches of snowcapped peaks. Costas flipped open the monitor from his armrest and activated the map. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ve passed over the border into Afghanistan. Can’t be much more than half an hour to go.”

“You can just make out the Panjshir Valley,” Jack said. “It’s shrouded in mist with peaks on either side, stretching off to the east. It’s the valley of the fabled river Oxus, the river that marked the eastern edge of Alexander the Great’s expedition. Five hundred miles west from here it flows into the Aral Sea, a lake. On the way it passes Merv, where Crassus’ legionaries were imprisoned. The escaped Romans may have come this way, but faced with the wall of mountains to the east they may have veered north on the spur of the Silk Road that led through Kyrgyzstan past Lake Issyk-Kul.”

“And Howard and Wauchope?” Costas said. “Is this where they ended up, after they disappeared into Afghanistan in 1908?”

Jack pursed his lips. “They were experienced enough to make it this far. Both men knew the Afghan border region well from their army postings. Wauchope had actually been into Afghanistan before, during the second Afghan war.”

“The medal Pradesh had, with the elephant?” Costas said.

Jack nodded. “That was in 1879, just before he joined Howard in the jungle. It was the time of the Great Game, the standoff between Britain and Russia. It was a decade of heroic defeats. Custer’s Last Stand against the Sioux, 1876. The British defeat by the Zulus, at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, 1879. Then the battle of Mai-wand in Afghanistan, in 1880. Almost a thousand British and Indian troops died on the plain outside Kandahar, fighting to the last. The Afghans desecrated the bodies just as the Sioux and the Zulu did. Thirty years before, during the first Afghan War, the British Army of the Indus had been massacred as they retreated toward the Khyber Pass, with only one British survivor making it out. These were painted as heroic failures, boosted in popular imagination to extol the virtues of the warrior. Many of the British officers had been steeped in chivalry. I have a complete set of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, signed by John Howard. He’d lived in that world as a boy, and subscribed to a new edition in the 1880s, as if he were trying to recapture the romance that was knocked out of him after he experienced the brutal reality. And the British should have known better with Afghanistan. They’d had men there from early on, explorers like John Wood. They knew the problems of the terrain, and they knew the people.”

“What was the situation in 1908?”

“Uneasy peace. Afghanistan was still a no-go zone. The trek up here from Quetta would have taken Howard and Wauchope weeks, even months. For provisions they would have been reliant on the goodwill of the people they came across. Wauchope had much experience with the border tribesmen, but there would have been lengthy negotiations, social niceties to be observed, diversions as their guides took them around the territories of feuding warlords. Once they got to the Panjshir Valley, if they did, they would have been on their own. Winter was probably setting in, and it would have been an arduous trek into the mountains to get to where I think they were going.”

Pradesh had been listening intently, and leaned forward. “What makes you so sure this was the place?”

“Because the Panjshir Valley is the route to the lapis lazuli mines,” Jack said.

“Of course,” Pradesh murmured. “Sappheiros, lapis lazuli. They’d seen that in the inscription in the jungle years before, and were looking for the place where you think Licinius hid the jewel.”

Jack angled the map screen from Costas’ armrest so they could all see it. He pointed at a series of ridges leading south from the main valley. “Here, deep in the Hindu Kush range. The mines are located in a narrow mountain valley. There are about twenty shafts, some of them open for thousands of years. The lapis lazuli decorating King Tut’s coffin in Egypt came from here, traded west over a thousand years before the Romans came this way.”

“Romans?” Costas said. “I thought it was just one, Licinius.”

“He was alone when he came to hide the jewel, after he’d fled south from Issyk-Kul,” Jack said. “But for him to know how to reach the mines, I think the band of escaped legionaries must have come in this direction during their trek from Merv into central Asia. The Panjshir Valley may have been where they were forced north, toward Kyrgyzstan. If you read Wood’s Source of the River Oxus, you realize why. The mountains he describes at the eastern end of the valley sound like the end of the world, utterly impassable. But before turning away and going north, the Romans could have got far enough up the valley to hear of the fabled mines, maybe even to see them. If Licinius had been told by the Sogdian to take the jewel there, he would have known where to go.”

Katya slipped into the seat in front of Pradesh. “And when he reached the jungle, he didn’t need to leave a treasure map,” she said. “All he had to inscribe on his tomb was the word for lapis lazuli. Everyone in India knows that lapis comes from Afghanistan. Everyone in Afghanistan knows it comes from the Panjshir Valley. And someone in the valley can always point you in the direction of the mines, where a miner might even show you the shaft that produces the darkest blue, the nielo. But it’s like telling people about Shangri-la, because in truth hardly anyone would dream of going there, and anyone who did might stand little chance of survival. It was a prize that was only ever going to tempt the desperate, or fools. Or romantic old soldiers like Howard and Wauchope, with a yen for adventure.”

“How sure are you that Howard and Wauchope were on this trail?” Costas asked.

Jack pointed at the book. “Lieutenant John Wood, Bengal Navy. A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus. This was Howard’s own copy, pored over by him, full of annotations. I found it in the lower drawer of that chest of family papers you saw in my cabin in Seaquest II, bundled up as if it were something he treasured but didn’t want anyone else to see. The section on the Panjshir Valley and the lapis mines is so densely covered with notes that it’s virtually indecipherable.”

“And there are notes in another hand too,” Costas said, peering at the book.

“Robert Wauchope,” Jack said. “I saw some of his manuscript papers in the India Office Library in London, and confirmed the handwriting.”

“Odd that they didn’t take the book with them, on their final journey,” Costas said.

“They probably knew it by heart. And they would only have taken the bare minimum with them. Nobody wants to lug books around the Hindu Kush.”

“But you say it contains clues for us.”

“We’ve got Rebecca to thank for that. While we were at Issyk-Kul she had her head down, deciphering the notes. She thinks she’s found clues to the mine entrance they were aiming to reach, among the many shafts in the mountainside.”

“She’s a great researcher,” Costas said.

“She’s got a fine eye for detail, and the patience for it. She’s got a lot of her mother in her.”

“Have you told her that?” Katya asked.

“When the time’s right. It’s still too raw.”

“I’ll talk to her. We have that in common. Losing a parent violently. When you want me to.”

Jack nodded, and looked out of the window. They were dropping in altitude now, and the aircraft was below the level of the mountain peaks on either side of the valley. He could see occasional twinkling from houses and the odd splash of light from vehicle headlamps, on the same route that Wood must have taken almost two centuries before. He closed the book. “The beauty of Wood’s account is that it predates the Great Game. To understand Afghanistan, you can go back to those travelers who came here before geopolitics came into play. Robert Wauchope in his notes at the end of this book says that, left to their own devices, the Afghans would shrug off all that history of outside interference in an instant.”

The PA system crackled again. “This is the captain. Estimated touchdown thirty-five minutes. We’re entering SAM missile range. We’ve armed the chaff dispensers. Just a precaution.”

Costas grunted and checked his seat belt. “I got onto him about it when we landed at Bishkek. These ex-fighter jocks sometimes forget they’re flying a bus.”

Jack turned to Katya. “This is the last chance before we hit the road. If there’s anything more to tell us, now’s the time.”

Katya drank some water, then nodded. “Okay. The Brotherhood of the Tiger. In the late nineteenth century, at the time of the diplomat Wu Che, the one who attended John Howard’s lecture, the Brotherhood was one of many secret societies in China. But they were more secretive than most. Few other societies could claim an authentic lineage back to the First Emperor. And they never sought to expand their membership. The First Emperor had come from the Qin family, and as he rose to power he ennobled them, giving his brothers and cousins the land to rule as fiefdoms. Their pledge was to serve the emperor in life and in death. They took the names of their fiefdoms. There were twelve of them: the Xu, the Tan, the Ju, the Zhongli, the Yunyan, the Tuqiu, the Jiangliang, the Huang, the Jiang, the Xiuyu, the Baiming, and the Feilian. These were the original bodyguard. As each one died, the Brotherhood selected another from that clan to take his place. In time, the Brotherhood came to represent all the upper echelons of power in China. They were wealthy landowners, lords of their fiefdoms, but they were also generals, diplomats, ministers of state. All of them had been groomed from birth in the ways of the tiger warrior. Each clan provided a selection of boys ready for the next vacancy, trained in the martial arts, in the wielding of the great pata sword, in the art of becoming one with the akhal-teke, the blood-sweating heavenly horse. One of those would be chosen to enter the Brotherhood, to sit on the council of the twelve. The others would remain throughout their lives as his warriors, a murderous company of a hundred or more who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to defend the creed of the First Emperor. And the one who was chosen, the newest of the Brotherhood, became the tiger warrior. It was his role to ride at the head of that company. To execute the orders of the Brotherhood. That was his initiation. The diplomat Wu Che was from the family of Jiang, and he was one of the twelve. My father’s family, my uncle’s, was the Huang. I am descended from many of those who were chosen for the mantle of tiger warrior.”

“And today?” Costas said. “Are we basically looking at organized crime?”

Katya took a deep breath. “Their creed was to defend the emperor’s tomb. Until the rise of communism, they retained their land and privileges, and had no need of more wealth. For generations they were behind the scenes in Xian, army officers, counselors to the emperor, bureaucrats, always close to the great tomb whose mound loomed beside the city, ensuring its sacred status. They fostered all of the superstitions about tampering with the First Emperor’s legacy, superstitions that linger today even among Chinese archaeologists. They made sure that nobody ever dug into the tomb. And the Brotherhood were not thugs. The diplomat Wu Che was typical of the nineteenth century Brotherhood, a highly educated man, eager to represent China’s interests abroad. But that was when things began to change. For almost two thousand years the Brotherhood had been part of China’s enclosed society, cut off from the outside world since returning empty-handed after losing the trail of Licinius in the Indian jungle. Wu Che reopened that quest, and once again the Brotherhood was on the warpath. The quest rekindled into a passion, an obsession. He also did something else. Unwittingly, he provided them with a temptation, one that some in the next generation of the Brotherhood could not resist.”

“Let me guess,” Jack murmured. “Opium.”

Katya nodded. “Wu Che’s travels in India had been an attempt to uncover the extent of opium use, to pinpoint the suppliers, to persuade the British government to clamp down on the trade. His papers show that his concerns were moral, and went far beyond Chinese official interests. He visited the Rampa jungle a couple of years after the rebellion and saw the extent of opium addiction among the hill tribesmen, easy prey to dealers after the troops had left. He would have found a sympathetic ear in John Howard. And there was something else. As a diplomat in London, Wu Che inspected the opium dens that were springing up in the port cities of Europe. When he returned to China for the last time in the 1890s, he took with him a prodigious amount of research, a detailed account of opium use and supply in the western world. It could have been the basis for quashing the opium trade. But it was open to huge abuse. It was a blueprint for control of the trade.”

“We’re talking about the time of the rise of communism?” Costas asked.

Katya nodded. “China was already fragmenting, and the republic was declared in 1912. The Nationalist Party had only a tenuous hold, and for years there was an uneasy alliance with the Communist Party. Much of the country was ruled by warlords. The abdication of the last emperor in 1912 marks the beginning of the modern Brotherhood of the Tiger. In the foundation mythology of the Brotherhood, the period of the Warring States had been followed by the rise of the First Emperor. They saw an analogue to this in what was happening around them in the 1920s and 1930s. It seemed as if a second coming of the emperor might be at hand. The foundation mythology began to twist, and new strands were fabricated. And something else happened. Their fiefdoms were lost, confiscated by the state. They needed another source of wealth.”

“The opium trade,” Jack said.

“Wu Che was murdered in 1912, a victim of the purge of the Chinese imperial court,” Katya continued. “His son succeeded him in the Brotherhood. For the first time, one alone threatened to rule the twelve. He inherited all of his father’s records, and built the largest, most secretive drug empire the world has ever known. British complicity in the opium trade had nearly ruined China in the nineteenth century, and he turned that on its head, using all the existing supply routes to feed more and more opium into the west, fueling the explosion in heroin use from the 1950s onward.”

Costas jabbed his finger at the route map. “Afghanistan? The main supplier?”

Katya nodded. “For centuries the Brotherhood had been sending warriors up here to get purebred horses. Training with the heavenly steeds had always been part of their creed, an essential rite of passage for any who might become one of the twelve. By the 1920s, the horse trade had become a cover for the narcotics trade. Opium was channeled south into India, west into Europe. The Brotherhood relocated its hub of operations outside China, first to Hong Kong and Malaysia and then in the west itself, in London and America. They integrated themselves easily enough, ostensibly the scions of wealthy expatriate Hong Kong and Singapore families who were educating their sons in the elite schools of Europe and America, becoming part of the capitalist infrastructure of the west.”

“They must be on the radar screens somewhere, if the drug involvement was as big as you say it was,” Costas said.

Katya gave him a wry look. “They were clever. They were not gangsters like other Chinese secret societies. To the Brotherhood, the opium trade was less a criminal enterprise than a kind of payback for western complicity in opium exported to China in the nineteenth century. They had a romanticized notion of fealty to China, to a China that was already ancient history. But it did not serve their creed to become part of the criminal underworld, and they moved out of the drug trade after the Second World War. They reinvested in mineral prospecting and mining. That proved hugely profitable after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The new central Asian republics proved a ripe picking ground for outside entrepreneurs. Their company, INTACON, became massively profitable and overshadowed the other business concerns of the Brotherhood.”

“What about 1949?” Jack said. “Mao Ze-dong, the communist takeover? Order returns to China.”

“Communism had been part of the force that pulled down the old world in which the Brotherhood had existed for centuries, taking their land. But 1949 also represented the return of order over chaos, an analogue of the end of the Warring States and the rise of the Qin. The new certainty, the new control, was seductive to the Brotherhood. And the communist regime had its own power structure, its own hierarchy. The Brotherhood soon recovered their place in China, their watchful eye. They fueled the cult of Mao Ze-dong until it almost rivaled the cult of the First Emperor himself But with Mao’s death, they returned with renewed passion to the original creed.”

“Cue the mythology,” Jack murmured.

“According to wu di, the concept of non-death, they believe the First Emperor never left, but exists in a parallel world. They await a kind of folding of our reality into that world, the world of wu di. Only then will the emperor once again be able to impose his will on the universe. For the Brotherhood, this mystical hope became a fanatical dogma after 1912. Only with the merging of the two parallel worlds would order come again. They looked for signs in the ancient myth of the elemental powers. The First Emperor had risen under shuide , the power of water, overcoming the power of fire. The Brotherhood believe that the next age of the emperor will be heralded by the coming of siandhe, the power of light.”

Jack stared at Katya. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why the pair of jewels are so important. The power of light.”

Katya nodded. “It was the diplomat Wu Che who reawakened the legend of the lost jewel from the tomb, the celestial jewel, whose two parts would combine to shine a dazzling light on the tomb of the emperor and breach the barrier of wu di. Only when the jewel is found can siandhe begin, the age of light.”

“And when is this supposed to happen?” Costas asked.

“For the First Emperor, shuide was associated with the number six, as well as with winter, darkness, harshness, death. The Brotherhood is twelve, a multiple of six. They came to believe that the age of light would begin in the sixty-sixth generation after the tomb was sealed.”

“Let me guess,” Costas murmured. “That would be the current generation?”

Katya nodded. “That’s why this has all heated up now. My uncle confided everything in me. He knew I was intimate enough with the history of the Brotherhood to share his fears, and he also knew the archaeological trail he was on would need someone with expertise to match his own. He’d groomed me for it. He had great faith in me. He knew time was against him, but I never thought it would end so soon.” Katya looked down for a moment, then carried on. “My uncle took up where Wu Che left off. But when he realized that the celestial jewel might actually be found, he began to fear the consequences. A decade ago, the Brotherhood lost the representative of the Feilian clan, who suddenly died. He was succeeded by his son, Shang Yong. China was changing again. Communism was eroding, capitalism was in. Some profited hugely, many did not. In Russia, some look back on the time of the czars as a kind of mythical golden age. In China, they look back to the First Emperor. Shang Yong was part of this, though at the same time profiting hugely from the new opportunities. My uncle saw disturbing signs in Shang Yong. His family, the Feilian, controlled INTACON. With the increase in the wealth of the company, Shang became a megalomaniac. He turned the Brotherhood into his own council of war. It was he who took INTACON into exploitative mining, on aboriginal lands around the world. One of those areas was the Rampa jungle of eastern India. A huge fortune was to be had in strip-mining the jungle for bauxite. My uncle vehemently opposed the scheme. He was a committed anthropologist and a humanitarian, one of the Brotherhood who had not let the creed consume him. From the start he had opposed the ascendancy of Shang. My uncle had been naive, and only realized the danger too late. By the time he told me the full story, he was a hunted man.”

“And he paid the ultimate price,” Jack murmured.

“So just like the diplomat Wu Che, he unwittingly opened a can of worms,” Costas said slowly. “Wu Che handed the Brotherhood the opium trade. Your uncle reopened the quest for the jewel, but also led them to a place where another treasure trove was to be found, in mining the jungle.”

“That was something else that dawned on my uncle too late,” Katya said. “And I fear he may even have entered into negotiations with the Maoist rebels. It would have been an act of desperation, but there may have been nobody else to turn to with the government about to draw up a contract with INTACON and the Koya people powerless to resist. It would have been suicidal for him, but then he knew he was under a death sentence anyway. And I know he had rejected the Brotherhood. He saw the creed moving from the First Emperor to Shang Yong himself, as if Shang were seeing himself as emperor, as Shihuangdi, born again.”

“So where is Shang Yong based?” Jack asked.

“In the Taklamakan Desert, on the other side of the Tien Shan Mountains,” Katya replied. “A hundred thousand square kilometers of shifting sands and utter desolation, scarred by ferocious winds. For travelers going east on the Silk Road, the Taklamakan was the last great obstacle before dropping down into central China and reaching the end of the road at Xian, source of the silk and site of the First Emperor’s tomb. Anyone who strayed into the desert risked being lost forever, and anyone who controlled the desert strongholds could prey at will on the caravans skirting its fringes. The desert remains one of the last great lawless tracts on earth. Even the communists couldn’t control it. There are many ruined fortresses half-buried in sand, built beside oases long ago swallowed up. Shang Yong set himself up in one of these, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road. He’s built an airstrip and begun to convert the place into his own fantasy world. For the Brotherhood, the Taklamakan has always had huge symbolic significance, a bastion against the world outside, a place where they could seem to uphold the emperor’s claim that there was nothing beyond. For Shang Yong, the desert is also a perfect headquarters for INTACON’s mining enterprises in central Asia, in the Tien Shan and Karakoram Mountains. And my uncle knew more. INTACON prospectors have found evidence of huge oil reserves under the desert itself. The Taklamakan has become Shang’s fiefdom. And it’s no longer inward-looking. Shang threatens to control the whole of the western part of China, and to exert a frightening influence on the world outside.”

“So that’s what your uncle was really onto,” Jack murmured.

“What do you mean about a fantasy world?” Costas said.

Katya paused. “That’s where the real significance of the jewel, the real danger, comes into play. For the last meeting of the Brotherhood that my uncle ever attended, he was flown to the desert headquarters. In the center of the ruins lay a domed structure, a former Nestorian church. He was ushered down a ramped passage and through great bronze doors. He sat in near darkness at a low table with the other eleven, Shang Yong at the head. What my uncle saw inside stunned and horrified him. It was instantly recognizable from the Records of the Grand Historian. Shang Yong had re-created the First Emperor’s tomb inside the church. For the old Brotherhood, that would have been unimaginable heresy. Above them was the dome of the heavens, and on either side were rivers and mountains and palaces. Beyond that were images of the terracotta warriors. He said it was like sitting in a planetarium, with the latest CGI and holographic technology, even the sounds of water and wind, the baying of horses. Over the days he was there he realized that Shang Yong was spending more and more time alone in the chamber. My uncle had worried about Shang as a boy. He had been addicted to computer games, to the world of instant gratification and utter certainty, a world where morality and humanity are irrelevant. My uncle realized that Shang Yong had moved from being a player in front of a screen to being inside the game itself, part of it.”

“Computer whiz kids who barely know reality from fantasy,” Costas murmured. “Who grow up and make fortunes and think they can take that extra step the boy in the basement can’t, and walk into the screen, into a world they think they can control completely in a way they can never control reality.”

Katya nodded. “Exactly. In Shang Yong’s mind, it was an extension of the concept of wu di, the com mingling of the worlds of the living and the dead that would come with the age of light, with the celestial jewel. But it was as if he had already found a portal to that other world. My uncle knew that the powers of the jewel might prove no more than a figment of myth, but for Shang Yong it could still have terrifying potency. If he believed that the jewel was the final key to his apotheosis, to some kind of melding with the First Emperor, then it might propel him into a terrifying megalomania. That’s what frightened my uncle the most. That’s when he determined to keep his research secret from others in the Brotherhood and try to discover the jewel himself.”

“But Shang Yong already knew,” Jack replied. “Your uncle would survive only as long as it took him to find the place where he thought the jewel was hidden.”

“So who’s the guy you think is shadowing us?” Costas said.

Katya stared at him. “You told me what the Koya had seen in the jungle,” she replied. “Seven men from INTACON went in, one came out, armed with a scoped rifle. He was the initiate. The murder of my uncle was his test. He has now become one of the Brotherhood. By tradition, when one of the Brotherhood strayed, he and his immediate family were eliminated. His replacement in the twelve came from another family in the same clan, chosen for their martial prowess by the other eleven in the Brotherhood.”

“And this new one is the tiger warrior,” Jack said quietly.

“A twisted version. A psychopath. And he has a particular speciality. His grandmother was a Kazakh Red Army sniper during the Second World War, one of those who chalked up hundreds of kills. He learned everything from her. He’s a professional, and honed his art in Bosnia, Chechnya, Africa. His count may even exceed hers by now. He uses her old Mosin-Nagant rifle.”

“A sniper’s rifle is like an artist’s favorite brush,” Jack murmured. “An old Soviet bolt-action can kill as well as the latest Barrett.”

“One question,” Costas said. “Your family’s been part of this since the time of the First Emperor. Sixty-six generations. How do we know you’re not one of the bad guys?”

Katya cast him a baleful look. “Because they murdered my uncle. Because there are no others in my family. Because of a pledge my ancestors made more than two thousand years ago. And because the creed of Shang Yong has nothing to do with that history. It’s an abomination. And because he will try to kill me-and all of us-as soon as we lead him to the jewel. It’s as simple as that.”

“So this valley we’re heading to,” Costas said, looking at Jack. “Sounds like sniper alley. Do we get any ISAF protection?”

“You could have a battalion of special forces up there combing the slopes, rangers, SAS, and they still wouldn’t see a sniper that good,” Jack replied.

Pradesh had been listening quietly, and glanced at Costas. “Jack and I have talked about this. If we want ISAF help to hunt one man and a rifle, that’s a no go. Up here some of the local warlords are strong enough to confront the Taliban themselves. The ISAF commanders know that’s the way forward. Let the warlords get on with it themselves, and don’t make yourself their enemy too. The Taliban murdered and raped their way through here when they were in power, and Afghans have long memories. So we’ll only get limited reactive assistance or medevac. Once we pass through the air-base at Feyzabad, we’re on our own until we meet this former mujahideen chap Altamaty knows, the local warlord. Then we have to run the gauntlet of a couple of villages where there might be Taliban infiltrators, and there’s always the possibility of IEDs, suicide bombers. But if Altamaty really can get the warlord on our side, that’s a big step forward.”

“What’s our cover story?” Costas asked. “Aren’t they going to assume we’re CIA or something?”

“Film crew,” Jack said. “We’re following the exploration of John Wood in 1836 in search of the source of the river Oxus. We’ve even got the battered old book for authenticity.”

“Sounds like a dream project of yours, Jack,” Katya said.

“One day.” Jack flashed her a smile. “I’d love to. When the fighting’s over.”

Costas peered at the map. “What’s the place with the mines called again?”

“The Koran Valley,” Jack said.

The aircraft banked to port, and they heard the rumble of the undercarriage lowering. Altamaty had been staring out of the window, but turned as Jack spoke, hearing the word. He looked at Katya, and spoke softly:

“Agur janub doshukh na-kham buroZinaar Murrow ba janub tungee Koran”

Costas turned to her. “Meaning?”

She gave him a steely look. “It’s Pashtun. Something Altamaty learned when he was captured by the mujahideen up here. If you wish not to go to destruction, avoid the narrow valley of Koran”

The plane bounced on the runway. “Perfect,” Costas grumbled. “Another choice holiday hot spot.”