The Tiger Warrior

8

Bay of Bengal, India, present-day

Jack reached out with his left hand and pulled the tiller of the outboard engine toward him, bringing the Zodiac broadside-on to the shore and powering down the throttle. Ahead of them, somewhere behind the shoreline, lay the Roman site of Arikamedu. Romans, in southern India. It seemed virtually inconceivable, in a setting so completely at odds with all the preconceptions of classical history. Jack snapped back to reality. The wave they had been riding caught up with them in a burst of foam and wake, and the boat pitched sideways in the swell coming from the Bay of Bengal. Costas was sitting on the pontoon opposite him and Hiebermeyer and Aysha clung to either side farther forward. Rebecca was crouched in the bow holding the painter line, her dark hair streaming in the wind. They were all wearing orange IMU survival suits and life jackets. Jack peered at the palm-fringed beach, now only a few hundred yards distant, and saw where the swell rose over the shallows. He gunned the throttle and the sixty horsepower Mariner engine lifted them along the crest of a wave, pushing them back over deeper water as they headed south parallel to the coast and left the gray form of Seaquest II farther behind.

“That must be it, over there,” Costas shouted above the noise. He gestured toward shore with his GPS unit while holding on to the fixed rope around the pontoon with his other hand. “It looks like the river entrance.”

Jack nodded and powered down again, turning the bow toward land and maneuvering between two lines of breakers that marked the outer reef about two hundred yards offshore. The sea went calm, and he throttled back to idle. “We should be okay if we keep to the channel between the buoys, but keep a sharp eye out from the bow in any case.” Rebecca turned and made the okay sign at him. For the first time since leaving Seaquest II, Jack allowed himself to relax and look around. They had passed the harbor of Pondicherry and the ruins of the old East India Company fort some twenty minutes before, and were now off the dense green fringe that continued some two hundred miles farther to the southern tip of India, to the edge of the Palk Strait they had sailed through in Seaquest II earlier that morning. Jack increased the throttle slightly. They passed a lateen-rigged nava, a naked boy in the stern hanging on the arm of the rudder oar. A fisherman’s dark eyes followed Jack’s as they passed, yet he continued to throw out and draw in his net. Rebecca put her arm out to starboard and Jack pushed the tiller to port, seeing where the water became shallow. Their destination was barely distinguishable from the rest of the shoreline, a backwater that formed a placid channel into the sea, yet it led to one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in India. Jack had dreamed of coming here since childhood, and to the place in the jungle he planned to visit later. He was tingling with excitement. He glanced back at the nava, now framed by the expanse of the Bay of Bengal. The sun gave the water a steely hue, and it seemed sluggish, heavy like mercury, the reflection of the nava wavering in slow motion with the residue of the sea-swell.

Jack passed Costas the tiller, then swiveled around and faced the sun in the east, raising his head toward it and narrowing his eyes. That was the other extraordinary image from this place. Somewhere out there lay Chryse, the land of gold. Jack remembered the Periplus, words written two thousand years ago by a man who had been at this very spot, who had turned to the east as Jack had done, pondering what lay beyond. Jack squinted again at the nava. What had he seen, that Egyptian Greek who came here so long ago? Had he himself seen the kolandiophonta he wrote about in the Periplus, great ships that came down from the Ganges? Had he seen other ships that came across the ocean from Chryse, ships with towering braided sails and dragons in their bows, ships carrying bales of silk and untold finery, emissaries of a warrior empire as great as Rome itself?

“I’m cutting the engine,” Costas said. “I don’t trust these shallows.” The clear water of the ocean had given way to a muddy brown as they entered the river outflow. Jack nodded, glancing at the laminated chart clipped on a board in front of them showing the location of the archaeological site. “It’s only a couple of hundred meters along the river, on the south side of the channel.” Costas raised and locked the engine on the transom, and then picked up a canoe paddle from his side of the boat. Jack took the other one, dipping the blade into the murky water, feeling its warmth. The only sound now was the distant roar of the breakers and the rustle of wind between the palms. They passed a sand spit that marked the river entrance, and entered a channel less than fifty meters wide. The riverbank was a patchwork of red and green, bursts of bougainvillea and the odd mangrove and lemon tree appearing between the coconut palms. It was suddenly hot, an intense, dry heat, and they both shipped their paddles and copied Hiebermeyer and the two girls, stripping down their survival suits to the waist. They drifted past a line of navas with drying fish strung from the rigging like lights, and then a group of bathing women and water buffaloes, seemingly oblivious to the fiddler crabs and mudskippers that crawled among them. It was a languid, timeless scene, yet one that was also fragile and ephemeral, in a place swept by cyclones and tsunamis, where the lasting achievements of civilization could only be established inland, beyond the danger zone. Jack thought again of the Periplus, and put himself in the mind of the author two thousand years before. It was not only the view to the east that was so beguiling. The view inland, beyond the fringe of palms, also held temptation, and fear. The first Greeks and Romans here were like the earliest European explorers, on the edge of the unknown, thousands of miles of jungle and mountain and desert. All they knew was that somewhere to the north were the lands that had been touched by Alexander the Great. But they had come here not to colonize or conquer but to trade-just as the Portuguese and French and British were to do fifteen hundred years later-with civilizations as old and sophisticated as anything in Egypt and the Mediterranean.

Jack gently paddled the Zodiac over to the opposite bank of the river, and they bumped into a small wooden jetty. A wiry, neatly attired man stood watching them, wearing sandals, shorts and an open-necked khaki shirt with the flashes of the Survey of India on his shoulders. Two other men came up and took the painter that Rebecca held out to them, and they helped her, Aysha and Hiebermeyer off the boat. They removed their survival suits, and without a word Hiebermeyer bounded off toward the edge of an excavation trench, hitching up his outsized shorts. Rebecca looked back at Jack, who waved her on, and she and Aysha hurried off to catch up. Jack smiled at the man as he and Costas climbed out onto the dock. “You must excuse my colleague. He gets tunnel vision when he sees a new excavation.”

The man clicked his heels and held out his hand. “Commander Howard. It is an honor to be making your acquaintance, sir.”

“Call me Jack. And I’m only a reservist.” He shook hands. “You’re Captain Pradesh Ramaya?”

“Indian Army Engineers, seconded to the Survey of India. I’m in charge of the underwater excavation.”

“Thanks for emailing the chart,” Jack said, stripping off the rest of his survival suit, revealing his khaki trousers. He picked up his old bag from the box in the bow of the boat and slung it over his shoulder, keeping the holster discreetly out of sight. He gestured beside him. “Costas Kazantzakis. Another old navy hand. Engineering too.”

“Aha!” Pradesh said, his eyes gleaming, shaking hands. “Which branch?”

“Submarine robotics,” Costas said. “Just a couple of years between grad school and meeting up with this character. And you can forget the old navy stuff. I hardly ever had to wear a uniform.”

Jack gave him a wry look. “Except when you took a gunboat up the Shatt al Arab during the first Gulf War.”

“They put me on an aircraft carrier. Complete waste of my skills. I was just killing time.”

“And winning a Navy Cross.”

“You can talk. Some reservist. Special Boat Service? Let me think. Those bits of ribbon on your uniform. South Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Adriatic…”

“The bits of ribbon the moths haven’t eaten, you mean. All ancient history.”

“It is a pleasure to meet two such distinguished warriors,” Pradesh said, grinning.

“Archaeologists,” Jack replied with a smile.

“Him, not me,” Costas retorted. “No way. I’m just his stooge. Along for the ride. For the treasure at the end.” He finished stripping off his suit, revealing the lurid Hawaiian shirt. Pradesh stared hard, and coughed. Costas looked at Jack defiantly, then at Pradesh. “You from these parts?”

“I’m from the Godavari River region, about two hundred miles north from here. Where we’re going after this.”

“When I called from Egypt to set up this visit, I had no idea there was any connection,” Jack said to Costas. “But when Pradesh emailed back and told me he was from the Madras Engineering Group of the Indian army based in Bangalore, I mentioned my great-great-grandfather.”

“The portrait of Colonel Howard holds an honored place in the regimental mess,” Pradesh said.

“Colonel?” Costas said. “I thought he was a lieutenant.”

“Later,” Jack said. “I’ll get to that.”

“And Colonel Wauchope is one of our most revered heroes,” Pradesh said. “His work with the Survey of India in the 1880s and 1890s helped to establish the frontier with Afghanistan. It is an honor to help you. The officers’ mess still toasts them on the anniversary of their disappearance.”

“They both disappeared?” Costas exclaimed to Jack. “You mentioned that Howard disappeared, but both of them?”

“Later.” Jack put a hand on Pradesh’s shoulder and pointed to a cache of diving equipment under an awning a few meters down the shoreline. “I’m itching to see what you’ve been doing here. We’ve only got an hour and a half before the helicopter arrives.”

Forty-five minutes later Jack stood up from the work-table under the awning and put down his pencil. He and Costas had been taken on a quick tour of the land excavation, passing a trench where Hiebermeyer and the two girls were kneeling on the baked mud and troweling away along with a group of Indian archaeology students. They had returned to the tent with the diving equipment, and Jack had been making notes on the site plan. He turned to Pradesh. “The Roman material is eroding out into the riverbed. Where Hiebermeyer was troweling just now looks like the edge of a large mud-brick warehouse, but my guess is at least half of it is gone. You’ve got two or three meters’ water depth, and below that many meters of buried sediment. It’ll be filled with artifacts, but none of it stratified. With the equipment you’ve got, you’re going to have a big problem excavating it. That’s where we can help.”

“We’ve tried using a dredge pump, but the hole fills up immediately and the divers can’t see a thing.”

“Costas?” Jack said.

Costas snapped shut his radio receiver outside the tent. He came in, raising his sunglasses and wiping the sweat off his brow. “We’re good to go. We can use Seaquest II’s big pontoon boat to bring the gear in over the shallows.”

Jack leaned over the plan, and tapped his pencil at various points. “We suggest you establish a floating caisson, a cofferdam, to enclose an area of riverbed abutting the land site,” he said. “You discharge sieved sediment outside the caisson, meaning the water inside remains clear. We have a piece of a kit designed by Costas that we first used in the Black Sea, like a gigantic cookie cutter you place on the area of sediment to be excavated, five meters square. It has an integral dredge pump and can be built up as you excavate deeper, with the pipe outlet on shore where the sediment can be sieved for small finds and organic material. I’ll have a couple of our technical people stay here with your team as advisors.”

“Because Jack and I are going to Hawaii,” Costas murmured.

Pradesh coughed, glancing at the shirt. “So I see. Holiday?”

“Work,” Jack said.

Pradesh looked out at the river. “I’m extremely grateful,” he said. “Even the smallest find at this site is worth its weight in gold. And the riverbed could be our treasure trove. Now, please excuse me for a few minutes while I let my people know.” He hurried off to a group of divers organizing equipment on the jetty, and Jack turned toward the main excavated area of the site. What had the author of the Periplus seen when he had disembarked here at this spot, two thousand years ago? It was a jungle clearing on a riverbank, an area smaller than a soccer pitch. In his mind’s eye Jack saw mud-brick walls, narrow alleys, flat-roofed warehouses; a line of Roman amphoras along the wharfside, crates of red-glazed pottery from Italy. Arikamedu was like Berenike on the Red Sea, functional to the point of impoverishment, with no temples, no mosaics-a bartertown on the edge of the unknown, yet a place that belied the enormous value of the goods that passed through it; every scrap of pottery preserved unique evidence for one of the ancient world’s most extraordinary endeavors.

“Jack!” Hiebermeyer came bounding up, followed by Aysha and Rebecca. He was pouring sweat. “You remember at Ostia, the port of Rome? The Square of the Merchants, with all the little offices? That’s what we’ve got here, this warehouse building. It’s like a stable, with each stall being for one merchant, one firm. And you won’t believe whose office we’ve just found. Aysha spotted it.”

An Indian student came up with a finds tray. Aysha carefully took a plastic bag from it and extracted a worn pot sherd. “It’s local, south Indian manufacture of the late first century BC.”

“There’s graffiti on it,” Jack said.

Aysha nodded. “It’s Tamil. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.” Her voice was tight with excitement. “It’s the same name as a Tamil graffito we found on the sherd in the merchant’s house at Berenike. The name of a woman, Amrita.”

“And now look at the other sherds,” Hiebermeyer said, picking one out and showing it to Jack. “The pottery’s central Italian, from a wine amphora. Recognize the writing?”

“Numbers,” Jack murmured. “They’re ledgers, accounts. What you’d expect.” He saw some words in Greek. He suddenly gasped. “I recognize the style. Look, the way the letters are sloped. It could be the same hand as the sherds you found at Berenike with the Periplus text!”

Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically, then pointed at the excavation. “Here’s what I see. We don’t know his name, but let’s call him Priscus. He’s sitting over there in his office with his wife, Amrita. They’re a husband and wife team. She’s local, perfect for business contacts over here, and her family keeps an eye on their office when they’re back in Egypt. You remember we suspected our man was a silk merchant, maybe with a sideline in gems? Well, look at these Greek words. That’s serikon, silk. The numbers must be grades, quantities, prices. And look at this one. Sappheiros. That’s a Greek word for lapis lazuli. It’s the word the author of the Periplus uses. In antiquity, that can only mean the lapis mined in the mountains of Badakhshan, in Afghanistan.”

“You mean this stuff,” Costas said, pulling out a piece of shimmering blue stone from his shorts pocket, holding it in front of them.

Hiebermeyer gasped. “That’s the piece you found at Berenike! We can’t take you anywhere! What is it with divers?”

“Well, Jack does it sometimes,” Costas said, his expression deadpan. “I just borrowed it. For good luck, until we get to Hawaii. Then you can take it back.”

Jack suppressed a smile. “Anything else, Maurice?”

Hiebermeyer snorted at Costas, then turned to Rebecca. “Well, your daughter has just won her archaeological credentials,” he said. “It was during those few minutes we spent troweling with the students. She has finder’s luck.”

“That sounds familiar,” Jack said. Rebecca opened her hand and showed him a perfect olive-green gem, uncut but brilliantly reflective in the midday sun.

“Peridot,” Jack exclaimed, taking the gem from her and holding it up. “From St. John’s Island, near Berenike. Costas and I flew over it on the Red Sea just a few days ago. So you think our man was exporting this from Egypt?”

“And trading it for silk,” Aysha said. “Looking at this gem, you can see why peridot might have fascinated the Chinese. It’s like refined jade.”

“The warrior empire,” Jack murmured, holding the piece up to the sun, looking at the green light cast on his other hand.

“What do you mean?” Costas said.

“Just an image I had,” Jack explained. “An image of Chinese ships, of warriors coming from the east. But this makes it real.”

“And it closes the loop,” Hiebermeyer said. “Rome, Egypt, India, lapis lazuli from the mines of Afghanistan, the Silk Route, the fabled city of Xian. Five thousand miles of contact, linking the two greatest empires the world has ever known.”

Costas took the gemstone from Jack. He held it toward the sun, with the piece of lapis lazuli in his other hand. The light flashed through them and they seemed to glow together, as if they were enveloped in the same ball of incandescence. He held them closer together, and then flinched, moving them apart. “Hot,” he said.

“Probably a focusing effect, like a magnifying glass, concentrating the light,” Pradesh said, rejoining the group. “There have always been stories of gemstones doing this, a plausible result of refraction. One of my professors at Roorkee University specialized in it. But I’ve never heard of peridot and lapis lazuli interacting like this before, especially uncut stones. An interesting research project.”

“You’re welcome at the IMU engineering lab anytime,” Costas said enthusiastically, handing the peridot back to Rebecca and pocketing the lapis lazuli. “But you’d soon get bored with gemstones. There’s some incredible underwater robotic stuff I’ve just been working on. A lot of military applications, right up your street I’d imagine.”

“Really?” Pradesh said. “Tell me more.”

“Plenty of time for that later,” Jack said, shielding his eyes and spying the Lynx helicopter coming in low over the shoreline from Seaquest II He felt the excitement well up inside him. “Are we ready?”

Pradesh nodded, and pointed at two men in jeans and T-shirts with rucksacks and G3 automatic rifles. “A couple of my sappers,” he said. “I don’t want to aggravate the tribals by showing up in the jungle with soldiers, but there’s a very real threat from Maoist insurgents. I don’t want to be responsible for the disappearance of the world’s most famous underwater archaeologist.”

“And his sidekick,” Costas added.

Rebecca looked dolefully at Jack, holding up the peridot. “If I’ve earned my credentials like Hiemy says, does that mean I can come along now too?”

“Not this time.” Jack eyed Hiebermeyer. “But Hiemy might let you drive the Zodiac back. Slowly.”

“Oh, cool.” She put the stone back in the finds tray and clapped her hands.

Jack grinned, and made a whirling motion with his fingers to Costas. “Good to go?”

“Good to go.”