The Tiger Warrior

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.”

“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.

Costas nudged him. “One thing’s been bothering me, since Afghanistan,” he said. “We know what happened to Howard, but not Wauchope. In the lapis lazuli mine there was no sign of the sacred velpu, the bamboo tube you think they brought with them, taken years before in the jungle. Howard might have been grasping it when he fell, but then someone took it from him. If it was the bad guys, they may have found the jewel too, and the whole story would have been different. Shang Yong would have been sitting in his desert stronghold with the jewel of immortality stuck in his ceiling, planning world domination.”

Jack nodded. Since leaving Afghanistan his focus had been on Pradesh, as if his own survival instinct were being marshaled behind their friend. It was only with the assurance that Pradesh would pull through that he had begun to think of everything else, of the man he had shot, of the boy with the suicide bomb. For the man he felt indifference, for the boy a kind of numbness, as if he had seen the explosion on a news report. The shock of that death would sear into him, but not yet. The experience of confronting Howard’s body, his great-great-grandfather, was still vivid, as if he were living it now, too early for reflection. But the fate of Wauchope had preoccupied him as they had sailed across the lake, as he had thought of the convergence of all their routes, the Roman legionaries, Howard and Wauchope, all the Silk Road explorers, of themselves, all focused on that mystical spot over the horizon where the sun rose on Chryse, the fabled land of gold in the ancient Periplus.

He turned to Costas. “You remember Wood’s Source of the River Oxus , the book we used to locate the lapis mines?”

“Sure. With all the annotations from Howard and Wauchope.”

“One of their notes Rebecca pointed out was in the margin of the map at the beginning of the book. An arrow from the valley of the Oxus to the northeast, and the penciled name Issyk-Kul, underlined, beside the word Przhevalsky”

“That Russian explorer?”

Jack nodded. “Przhevalsky actually died here, of typhus in 1888. Rebecca did some research. It turns out he was in London before that, and gave a lecture in the same series at the Royal United Service Institution where Howard gave his talk on the Romans in south India. That was just before Wauchope returned from leave to his job with the Survey of India, and both he and Howard attended Przhevalsky’s lecture. It was about a rare breed of horses he had discovered in Mongolia, and he mentioned the blood-sweating horses. Then he talked of coming to this place, of the legendary treasures of the lake. He spoke of the Tien Shan range, of his explorations deep into the mountains. I think Wauchope would have been entranced by that, as a passionate mountaineer.”

“So that’s where you think Wauchope went?”

“Tien Shan means celestial mountains. From the Taklamakan Desert, they look closer to heaven than any of the peaks in China. The First Emperor was obsessed with those places, always trying to go as high as he could, to leave his proclamations. He must have looked to the Tien Shan when he sensed his own mortality.” Jack swept his arm to the west. “If Wauchope survived the mine, he may have retraced Licinius’ route and come toward Issyk-Kul, then made his way into the mountains. Maybe he was like the Romans, and felt he could never go back to his own world. Maybe he and Howard never had any intention of returning. Przhevalsky told of valleys that were not bleak and unforgiving like Afghanistan, but bountiful, lush, lost in time, like Shangri-la. Even if they didn’t find the jewels, those stories could have tempted them with something of what the legend of the celestial jewel seemed to offer.”

“Or they could have found the jewel in the mine. Wauchope could have gone back with it to the jungle. He could have put the jewel inside the bamboo tube and returned the sacred velpu to the Koya people. He could have found a way into the jungle shrine through the waterfall at the back, and hidden it there. Maybe inside Licinius’ tomb. What they’d done in the jungle in 1879 must have been on Howard’s mind in his final hours. That’s the time when people think of atonement, redemption. Wauchope may have made a promise to him at the end, and then carried it out. That’s the kind of thing friends do. They were soldiers, blood brothers. Like Licinius and Fabius.”

Jack squinted at Costas. “Yes. Maybe.”

“We’re almost there.” The boat slowed down, and began to trace a wide arc toward shore. “There’s something more immediate we need to discuss.”

“Go on.”

Costas squinted at the water. “Have you noticed that when there’s a breeze, it hardly ruffles the surface?”

Jack nodded. “It makes the water seem sluggish, heavy, like molten metal.”

“It’s because the westerly wind is funneled upward as it approaches land. But did you see the shimmer on the surface a few minutes ago?”

Jack nodded. “Seismic aftershock?”

“Worse. Seismic labor pains. There’s been a big quake already, and there’s almost certainly another one coming. Today, maybe tomorrow. Not the ideal diving conditions, but it could be good for us. We’re looking at proximal and distal delta deposits, some glacial out-wash, incised by basinward-converging channels. A lot of piled-up silt.”

“You mean there could be a turbitude.”

“A deformation, a sediment slip. It could reveal those walls, if they exist. They could be visible one moment, and then poof, another tremor and another sediment slip, and they’re gone. We could be lucky. If there’s anything there, now might be the time to see it.”

“You remember the last time we were diving?”

Costas sighed. “Eight days ago. The Red Sea. Beautiful water, coral reefs. Paradise.” He paused. “Elephants. Underwater elephants.”

“That’s what I was thinking about. Your elephants. Did you ever hear the old Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant?”

Costas looked back bemusedly. “Three blind men are led to an elephant, not having been told what it is. One feels the tail, and thinks it’s a rope. One feels the trunk, and thinks it’s a snake. One feels a tusk, and thinks it’s a spear.”

“Remember how I nearly didn’t see that elephant on the seabed? I was too close to it. Remember that when we’re down there today.”

“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.”

Jack gazed at the sediment. “We’re hardly going to see anything ancient sticking out of this stuff, are we?”

“We might. The earthquake’s shaken it all up, and the silt that normally blankets the bedrock protuberances and other solid features may have slid down the slope. The brown haze in the water shows there’s been movement, a turbitude. But the shake-up also leaves everything unstable. There could be another mass of sediment farther up the slope ready to drop down and bury whatever might have been revealed.”

Jack looked around. “So the walls, the ravine, whatever it was Rebecca saw on the sonar readout, might actually be visible.”

“They did the sub-bottom profiler run more than twenty-four hours ago. According to the bearings I programmed into my computer, we should follow this contour for about fifty meters, toward the south. That should put us over the gully, directly opposite that creek on the shoreline. The old Soviet seismological reports put this contour at about the level of the shoreline two and a half thousand years ago. Everything upslope was dry land. They think there was a single event that put it all underwater, a violent localized quake about 2,200 years ago.”

They turned carefully and began to fin south, Costas in the lead. They were within a horizon of improved visibility, able to see five or six meters ahead, beneath the blanket of suspended sediment a few meters above them. Jack scanned the grayness below for anything solid, any protuberance. After about twenty meters Costas suddenly stopped finning. “I’ve got something,” he said. Jack came up alongside. The lake floor was more mottled, irregular. Jack gingerly put out a hand. It was hard clay, smearing his glove. “Looks like a ridge, coming out from shore,” he murmured. “It could be decayed mud-brick, but there’s no visible stonework, no masonry.”

“Check this out.” Costas fanned his hand over something embedded in the clay. Jack switched on his headlamp, and gasped in astonishment. “It’s a bronze handle,” he exclaimed. Costas pulled it out. The handle was attached to a disk about the size of a dinner plate. Jack took it, wafting away the adhering clay. “It’s a mirror,” he said. “The surface has oxidized green, but it’s intact.”

“Weird thing to find in this place,” Costas said.

Jack turned the object over. “Bronzes like this have been found along this shore before, hauled out by fishermen,” he said. “Mirrors, elaborate horse harnesses, cauldrons. It was what first excited the attention of the Russian, Przhevalsky. The objects were all like this, intact, very high quality workmanship, not the kind of things people usually throw away. Rumors spread of a sunken palace, a drowned city.”

“Or a tomb?” Costas said.

“That’s my gut instinct,” Jack said. “But these finds don’t fit with the story of Genghis Khan. Mongol tombs were concealed, discreet. And I don’t think a Mongol warlord would have had grave goods like these, mirrors, cauldrons. It doesn’t add up. But I’ll wager this must have been thrown up out of a burial site by the earthquake, something pretty prestigious. That would explain the past finds too. And these are not the result of tomb robbing in antiquity, when this slope was still dry land. Tomb robbers don’t abandon valuable items like this.”

Costas pointed to where fine lines of incision were visible on the handle, swirling shapes and bulbous eyes. “The decoration reminds me of that halberd Katya found in the Roman burial on the other side of the lake. It looks the same, Chinese.”

“I agree,” Jack replied. “The local population here includes those displaced Muslim Chinese from the fringes of the Taklamakan Desert, and there were earlier migrations, Uighurs. This mirror looks more than two thousand years old, but back then this end of the lake would have been a cultural melting pot, a staging post between west and east. Prestigious Chinese artifacts could have found their way here. But I don’t think that accounts for these finds. Stuff like this wouldn’t just be tossed into the lake. These people were traders.”

Jack put down the bronze, and Costas placed a miniature electronic beacon beside it. Jack took the lead this time, finning along the forty-meter depth contour. The visibility was still only a few meters, but it was enough to see that the ridge of clay curved around to his left, and the lakebed dropped off to the right. “An erosion channel,” Costas said from behind. “This must be the edge of the gully that leads down from the creek, cutting a ravine into the lakebed. It’s consistent with the profiler readout. It should be dropping down ten meters deeper, and be twenty meters or so across. I think it’s normally smothered in sediment, but the earthquake’s shaken it away. This must be the converging feature Rebecca saw on the printout, that looked so promising. Maybe not man-made after all.”

“I want to look a bit farther. Just to make sure.”

“The mirror’s a great find, Jack. We can surface with it like a pair of treasure hunters. Rebecca will be thrilled.”

Jack was already finning ahead. “I’ve just got a feeling about this.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a feeling too,” Costas replied urgently. “And it’s a bad one. Did you see that?” There was a shimmer in the water, then a shudder. “Jack, there’s a wall of sediment about three meters above you. It’s where the turbitude slipped down that revealed the channel. Any moment it’s all going to come down. We need to get out of here. Now.”

Jack looked up, saw the darkness of the sediment wall, then looked down again. He was motionless, spread-eagled above the lake floor. The shudder had lifted a veil of silt that had obscured his vision almost completely. The glow from the headlamp behind him diminished as Costas began to ascend. Jack knew Costas would remain a few meters to one side until he was certain Jack was following. He flicked on his own headlamp, so Costas could see him, and looked at his compass readout. He had come far enough. There was nothing more to be seen. “Roger that,” he said. He reached for the buoyancy control on his E-suit. Costas was right. This was no place to die.

There was another shimmer in the water. Jack was suddenly wary, feeling that he himself was an active part of the forces around them, that his own movement could trigger the next quake. He looked down at the buoyancy valve on the front of his suit, checking that it was clear of sediment that might jam it open. It was a design glitch he had noticed before. He would have a word with Costas about it. He kept his right hand over the valve, then raised his head. His helmet bumped against something. He rolled over and looked up, seeing only the reflection off sediment. It would be unlike Costas to be so close overhead when he knew Jack was ascending. It must be something else. He rolled back, and felt forward with his left hand. It was a solid object, angled out of the lakebed toward him. It felt like a tree trunk. He suddenly remembered the lost torpedo. But this was wrong. The surface was like bark on an old maple, thickly segmented. He felt his way up with both hands, to where it angled above him. If it was an old tree trunk, it was hoary, twisted, with the remains of branches on either side. He felt the top. The trunk narrowed, then came out again before ending, like a bulbous growth.

Jack froze. He had seen something.

“You okay? You stopped.” Costas’ voice came harshly over the intercom.

Jack’s voice faltered. “I’ve got something.”

“Drop it. You need to get out of there. Now.”

“Roger that.” There was another shimmer, and the suspended sediment that had obscured his visibility suddenly flashed away, like a school of tiny fish. There was a moment of total clarity. Jack could see it clearly now.

It was a human head.

It was a statue, made of stone, larger than life, leaning out over the lake floor. He stared at the face. It was like a death mask, the eyes nearly shut, the mouth drawn back in a grimace. High cheekbones, flat nose, thin moustache hanging down, braided. The words of the Kyrgyz legend flashed across Jack’s mind. A golden coffin set on a silvery sea. But that was about Genghis Khan. He had dismissed the story. Had he been so wrong? He looked again. What had felt like bark were scales of armor, segmented, overlapping. And he saw that the statue was cradling a sword, a great straight blade, finely shaped out of the stone. It had a long, rounded guard at the hilt, concealing the hand completely. Jack looked back up at the face, and then realized what he had seen. Not a hilt. A gauntlet. He hardly dared believe his eyes. He sank down, and looked closely. It was all there: the feline ears, the almond-shaped eyes, the grimacing mouth where the blade protruded. Jack stared in astonishment at the sculpted figure leaning over him.

A gauntlet sword.

A tiger warrior.

Jack looked up. He could just make out Costas a few meters above, releasing a marker buoy. There was a distant roaring in his ears, a noise that sounded like it came from the bowels of the earth, mixed with the sound of a boat engine. He saw the wall of silt behind the statue, and realized how close he had been. Now it was happening again. The silt was shimmering, blurred. He realized he was being pushed by some force in the water down the slope. He was suddenly over the edge of a black pit, the sides extending off into the swirling silt beyond. The shudder ended, and he sank down. He was fifty meters deep now. He could see where the pit had once been completely buried, where the earthquake had cracked open the hard clay surface and revealed a hollow space beneath, now almost choked with silt. He saw something white in his headlamp. It was a skull. A human skull. And then he saw more. There were skulls everywhere, human skulls, rows of them, eye sockets empty, jaws hanging down, dislocated, some lolling to left or right. Below the skulls were flashes of green and brown. He sank down farther, into a space in the pit, until he could see more. There was no doubt about it. The green-brown was metal, bronze. Segmented armor. Rows of skeletons, a whole regiment of them, buried upright in a pit, wearing segmented bronze armor. Ancient Chinese armor. He looked again, scarcely believing what he was seeing. Each skeleton had the remains of a rope around its neck, perfectly preserved in the freshwater of the lake. They were an army for the afterlife. An army who had gone willingly to their deaths.

Jack’s mind was racing. The statue, the warrior, must be a guardian. He looked again at the skulls, rapidly disappearing beneath a cascade of silt. The words of an ancient chronicler flashed through his mind. The hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wonderful objects, were brought to fill up the tomb. He looked up the slope at the statue, just visible in the gloom. Then he realized. The tiger warrior was not a guardian. He was an executioner. Jack looked back at the skulls. These were the true bodyguard, the loyal soldiers, the retainers, those who had built the tomb and brought the body, who had devoted themselves to the whims of their leader, who had sworn to protect the secret, sworn an oath that had failed to protect them. They were not a willing army for the afterlife. They were the victims of mass murder. They had been murdered not to satisfy the vanity of one who believed he would rule forever, but to satisfy the hunger for immortality of those who thought they were his most trusted lieges, the warriors whose guardianship of the secret would assure their power for all eternity. Suddenly Jack knew for certain. Rebecca had been right. There was something here, something in the darkness beyond, something so astonishing he could scarcely believe it. The secret of the First Emperor’s tomb.

Suddenly it was happening again. Something was sucking him down. He began finning, kicking hard. For the first time on the dive he felt the icy grip of fear, as if there were some empty space in the macabre army reserved for him, for having dared to see what he had seen. He was going nowhere. He realized that the entire lakebed was moving, sliding down the slope. The statue and the pit had vanished. A massive surge threw him sideways, pushing him away from the gully. Then he was miraculously clear, floating above the storm of sediment, bathed in sunlight. He saw Costas only a few meters away. The intercom indicator inside his helmet was flashing red, and he realized that it must have failed. He flashed an okay signal to Costas with his hand, then saw Costas do the same. He looked down again, breathing hard, waiting for his pulse to slow before ascending.

He shut his eyes. He had seen something else. Something in the split second of that jolt. Something that had flashed into view while the sediment was sucked off the lakebed in a swirling vortex. He had seen walls, great stone walls, lining the sides of a passageway, converging at a dark entranceway in the side of the slope, sealed in with more stone. He opened his eyes. He was sure of it. He thought of what else he had seen down there, what he had touched. He looked up toward the surface, through water that was now sparklingly clear. They were less than twenty meters deep, and he was sure he saw the wavering line of snowy peaks to the south, cutting through the silvery reflection of sunlight on the surface. The words of the Chinese chronicler came into his head again. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtse, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth. Then he realized. There, in the tomb at Xian, it had all been artifice. Here, below the celestial mountains, where the lake was liquid like mercury, it was all real. Here, where the realm of heaven was on the horizon to be seen, and the orb of the earth and the heavens could truly be the domain of one emperor.

One emperor. Jack was barely breathing now. Not Genghis Khan. An emperor far greater than that. An emperor of all that is known under heaven.

Shihuangdi. The First Emperor.

Jack remembered the Sogdian, the man whose act more than two thousand years before had led them to this place, a man whose very existence was part surmise, part reality. Had they been right about him? Had he really stolen the celestial jewel from under the noses of the tiger warriors at Xian? Or had he been fulfilling a promise, one the first caretaker had made to the dying emperor, to take the jewel from Xian to this place, the real tomb? Had the emperor lost trust in the tiger warriors? Had he foreseen the future, seen how his legacy would be usurped by those who would profess to protect it? Had the brotherhood of the tiger been living a lie, propped up by murder, a fantasy of guardianship that had only ever been about their own greed and power?

Jack thought of the celestial jewel, the elusive treasure that had brought them on this extraordinary journey. Had the jewel been installed above the empty casket under Mount Li, a priceless heart of the emperor’s dream they would be sworn to protect, yet which one day a descendant of the caretaker would spirit away and try to take to its rightful place? Jack remembered Katya’s uncle, the story of the tiger warriors told by Katya herself, streams of knowledge that seemed to come from some reservoir deep in the past, exactingly remembered, passed down from generation to generation. Jack thought of Katya again. Had there been one among the Brotherhood, one entrusted by Shihuangdi, he who trusted so few, to keep the eyes of the others away from the truth? Had they lived a lie for sixty-six generations, protecting a tomb at Xian that one among them always knew was empty? Had Katya’s uncle been after the jewel not just to keep it from Shang Yong, but to bring it secretly here? Jack thought of something Katya had said about her uncle. He was grooming me. Had she told them the whole story? Who was the caretaker of the tomb now?

His intercom crackled. “Jack. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“I’ve been shouting myself hoarse. You need a ten minute decompression stop. The surge might have pressurized the water and put you beyond your no-stop time.”

“Five minutes at twenty meters, five at ten.”

“Roger that.”

“The intercom interference must have been electromagnetic.”

“I’ve been worried about that. The quake might have dislodged that lost torpedo, and reactivated something in the electronics.”

“We’ll want to cordon off the area,” Jack said. “This whole sector of coast becomes a no-go zone. That’s our condition for working with NATO and the Russians. We’ll fund the whole cleanup operation, put the Russians through any underwater training program they want. Once everything’s ready, two years, maybe three years down the line, we’ll initiate the search. Nobody goes in the water before then. Health and safety.”

“Right, Jack. As if health and safety’s ever been high on your list. So what exactly did you find down there? I take it we’re looking at more than a bronze mirror.”

“Is this a secure channel?”

“A closed system. Just you and me. The navy boat didn’t have the right receiver and we couldn’t get one freighted out in time.”

Jack cleared his throat. “I found a statue and some bones.”

“I said, what did you find, Jack?”

“That’s what I saw for certain. That’s what I touched.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I might have found a tomb.”

“Genghis Khan?”

“Not sure. We need more to go on.”

“You didn’t find the jewel? The other one. The peridot.”

“I didn’t find the jewel. But it may be the right place. If Fabius and the others did reach the eastern shore of the lake and then went down in a storm, this is about where the wreck would have ended up. Everything they carried with them might still be here, somewhere in the silt below us now. Or Fabius may have escaped and taken it with him, into China toward Xian.”

“Back toward the First Emperor’s tomb.”

“To the place that history calls the First Emperor’s tomb.”

There was a brief silence. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I only saw it for a second. Less than a second. But I’m sure of it.”

Costas checked the old Rolex diving watch he wore over his suit and gave a thumbs-up. Jack repeated the gesture, and watched the depth gauge inside his helmet as they rose ten meters. Their buoyancy systems automatically adjusted to neutral and Costas turned to face Jack. “So, how are you going to explain to your daughter that she’s been responsible for one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made, something that could change the perception of Asian history, but that we’re going to say nothing about it and instead talk about a torpedo, or if pressed maybe mumble something about Genghis Khan?”

“I don’t want to tell anyone. For the reason you just said. Asian history. There’s too much at stake. A whole national myth. Right now, the Chinese might need that myth, the myth of the First Emperor’s tomb at Xian, the myth of untold wealth buried with their greatest ruler. Revealing the truth might unleash a dangerous unfolding of control in China.”

“You don’t believe that. I’ve never known you to leave treasure unexcavated because you’re worried about a national myth.”

“Okay, I just want to wait until the seismic activity quiets down. That can take a couple of years out here. And that should give us time to develop equipment for getting through a mountain of lake sediment. Give you time, I should say.”

“I was blueprinting a new sub-bottom excavator in my mind while you were ferreting around down there. I knew you’d got something, and that we’d be back. So what about Rebecca?”

“Two, maybe three years down the line. When we’re ready to come back here. Then I’ll tell her what I saw. I’d rather her first big discovery wasn’t one that might upset the entire world order.”

“Kids know everything. She’ll be onto you as soon as she sees that look in your eyes. And show me one of our discoveries that didn’t upset the course of history. If she sticks around, she’s going to have to get used to that. She’ll be up there on the boat by now,” Costas added. “I bet you tell her, the moment we surface.”

Jack looked up. They had only a few minutes now. He tasted a hint of salt from the lake. He remembered something Katya had told him, an old Kyrgyz legend about how the nomads kept the spirits of their ancestors at bay by weeping into the lake, along the shoreline beside the carved stones that marked their passing. If the mourners wept, the waters would rise around the ghosts, and they would drown. But now there were too few mourners, too few left to remember. Jack had seen the boulders left dry by the receding shoreline, the stain of a watermark meters above. Now the mountains themselves needed to mourn, to release meltwater in torrents, to keep the spirit below them at bay, the spirit of Shihuangdi, the First Emperor.

Jack thought about where they were again, the fabled Silk Road. A place swept by the divine wind, where little is left except myth and legend, stories that still adhere only because they are so light and insubstantial.

But not here. Not underwater. This was real.

There was another tremor, more violent this time, and a darkness swept over the lakebed below them, obscuring it completely. Jack checked his computer. It was time to go. Costas jerked his thumb upward. Jack looked up, and saw the shadow of the patrol boat, and moored beside it the Zodiac, its outboard directly overhead. A cluster of faces was visible over the stern of the patrol boat, around the ladder where Costas was already beginning to ascend, but a solitary face was peering down at him over the side of the Zodiac. The hulls were like dark clouds, but the faces reflected off the silvery surface of the water like stars, the brightest one directly above him. Jack rose up and broke surface, then flipped up the visor from his helmet and held on to the side of the Zodiac, looking up at the face with sunglasses and long dark hair gazing down at him. He kicked up and peered over the top of the pontoon, seeing that they were out of earshot of the others. He dropped down again and gestured for Rebecca to come closer. He snorted into the water and cleared his throat. He was as excited as he had ever been in his life.

“You remember our trip to the terracotta warriors exhibit in London?” he said. “Well, you are not going to believe what we’ve just found.”

“Try me, Dad.”