The Tiger Warrior Part 11

"Don't let him whisk you off into the jungle," Jack said. "If you've got that tiger magic in you, we may need it too."

Costas shook hands with the man, pointing at the gourd approvingly. Jack followed, holding the line to the boat, and Pradesh joined them, handing the toddy-tapper the Roman coin. The man packaged it carefully in his little leather pouch, and tied it to his loincloth. "He doesn't seem to be fazed by the chopper," Costas said.

"Some of them are used to it. The Chinese aren't the first prospecting team to come up here. There have been others, multinationals. Sometimes the Koya are contracted to work as guides. The prospectors pay them in bricks of has.h.i.+sh - it's the mining companies' way of giving something back, showing they really care."

Jack turned toward the toddy-tapper, thought for a moment then took off the Nikon binoculars he had slung around his neck. He had seen several of the Koya eyeing them with curiosity earlier on. They would be of little use on the trip into the confines of the jungle. He pa.s.sed them over. The man took them, handling them with care, looked closely at the lenses and the mechanism, then handed them back. He bowed his head to Jack, and spoke a few words to Pradesh.

"He said, if you have no need of them, then neither does he. He said he can see as far as he needs to."

Jack looked hard at the man, and slowly nodded. "Fair enough."

"Anthropology 101, Jack," Costas murmured.

Jack raised his eyebrows. "Yes?"

"Don't mess with the natives."

"Thanks, engineer."

Pradesh pointed at the helicopter. They hurried back down to the boat. He and Costas stood on either side, and Jack threw the painter line over the bow.

"Okay," Pradesh said. "Good to go?"

Costas stared at him, then at Jack. "You said it."

Jack slung his old khaki bag over his shoulder, reaching in to feel the Beretta in its holster. Something was going on, something bigger than he had imagined. He thought of Katya, and suddenly needed to talk to her. He glanced at his watch. Only four hours before the Lynx was due to pick them up from Rajahmundry and take them back to Seaquest II.

Costas glanced into the darkness of the jungle, then pointed at the pendant around Pradesh's neck. "I was wondering," he said. "Got any more of those tiger claws?"

Pradesh glanced at him, and began heaving at the boat. "You don't need one, remember? You've eaten tiger food. But don't worry. I won't walk you into a fire-fight. If there's any sign of trouble, my two sappers will shoot to kill."

"Sounds like a plan," Costas said. "Jack?"

"Let's do it."

Look below us now. Quick, before they vanish. In the jungle."

Jack peered out of the open side door of the helicopter, feeling the downdraft of the rotor against his helmet. Costas did the same on the other side. At first they saw nothing but the lushness of the jungle, draped over the rugged contours of the hills like a thick pile carpet. Then Jack realized there was movement in the gloom below the canopy, a ripple like a spreading shadow, as if the G.o.davari River behind them had burst its banks and was tumbling through the ravines and gullies of the jungle. He saw individual black shapes in the lead, pounding through the jungle clearings. He heard nothing except the helicopter, but he sensed a rumble like thunder, the sound of a herd of bison as they rolled through the jungle toward some unknown destination.

"They're gaur," Pradesh said through the intercom from the co-pilot's seat. "The Koya fear them almost as much as the tigers. With a herd this size around, that's another reason for avoiding the jungle path and taking the helicopter."

Jack leaned back inside. He and Costas were strapped into the door seats facing aft, and Jack held on to the mounting where the door gun would once have been. The helicopter was an old Huey, ex-Indian army but now used as a workhorse for supplying remote villages in the jungles of the Eastern Ghats. It had been out of the question for Pradesh to request a helicopter from his own unit, with markings that would have alarmed the Koya and the Maoist terrorists, and the IMU Lynx looked too much like one of the machines that brought in the mining prospectors. But Jack felt they were adequately protected for the mission at hand, a quick foray that Pradesh hoped would take them less than two hours, so they could be out before sunset. On the fold-down seats opposite were two of Pradesh's sappers, cheerful men from the Madras Engineering Group a.s.sault Company. Each had a weapons case strapped down on the floor in front of them. Jack looked at their faces, at the moustaches and fierce eyes, and wondered if they too had ancestors who had been up here before, men who might have been with his own great-great-grandfather on the jungle path below them on that fateful day in 1879.

"We're only ten minutes away now," Pradesh said. "The clearing with the shrine is ahead of us, and the village of Rampa is about a kilometer to the east, where you can see the smoke rising above the jungle." The two sappers quickly opened their weapon cases, taking out AK-74 a.s.sault rifles and pus.h.i.+ng in the banana-shaped magazines. They c.o.c.ked the rifles and held them on their knees, muzzles facing outward. One of them motioned for Jack and Costas to slide their seats along the floor runnels toward the center of the cabin, away from the open doors. Pradesh leaned around, checking that they had moved. "Just in case we encounter any incoming rounds," he said. "According to the Koya we just spoke to, the clearing hasn't been used as a regular camp by the Maoists for some time now, but the Koya have been too fearful to go there themselves. They said the Rampa villagers heard a lot of shooting on the day the Chinese mining prospectors went there. There's no telling what we'll find."

"So what's with Rampa village, the name?" Costas said.

"It's derived from Rama, the prince who became a focus for Hindu wors.h.i.+p," Pradesh replied. "According to the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic, Prince Rama traveled south from Oudh and spent ten years in exile in the jungle. The place we're going to, the shrine, has always been known as the temple of Rama."

Jack pressed the intercom on his helmet. "I've been thinking about that since we saw that Roman coin from the velpu. When the Romans were at Arikamedu, the most common local name for them was yavanas, westerners. But the name raumanas also crops up in Brahmin literature. It may just be coincidence."

"Come on, Jack," Costas said. "When have you ever believed in coincidences?"

"It's a fascinating possibility," Pradesh said. "As a Hindu, I took the Ramayana at face value. That seemed to account for it. But I know from my Koya ancestry that a shrine to Rama is completely at odds with jungle beliefs. They have no shrines to their G.o.ds, no holy sanctums, not even sacred colors. Their G.o.ds are all around them, pure immanence. As Hindus we accept stories of interlopers, as our religion is all-encompa.s.sing. But for the animist beliefs of the Koya, it's a different story. If it wasn't Prince Rama himself, it must have been an equally powerful presence who came here and left a mark."

"Maybe another interloper," Costas said.

"Okay. Here we are now." The helicopter slowed down, angled slightly to port and began to fly a wide circle around a misty patch in the jungle. Jack could see where they had flown up over a ravine, the rugged jungle flank rising up on either side over patches of dull red where the mud must have slipped during the monsoon. Through the dense foliage he could make out the flow of the stream that had carved the ravine, among jumbled ma.s.ses of boulders exposed in the bed. It was the only obvious route up from the river fifteen kilometers to the south-west, and it must have been where Howard and Wauchope came with their sappers in 1879. They would have been completely exposed to fire from above, and it was hard to see how they were not cut down by the rebels. But Jack remembered Pradesh's story of the bamboo velpu, Howard's promise to the muttadar. It was the only explanation for how they could have got through unscathed.

The downdraft from the rotor cleared a swathe through the air, and Jack could see where the stream skirted the east side of the clearing after disgorging from another tumble of boulders that had rolled down from the jungle flank beyond. He could see the trickling waterfall where the boulders extended out into the clearing. In front were three slabs of enormous size, one of them resting on the other two like a gigantic prehistoric lintel.

"That's the shrine," Pradesh said, pointing. "The entrance is under the lintel at the front, but it was sealed off by the earthquake after the two British officers came here, the day the most sacred velpu disappeared forever. My grandfather said the earthquake was retribution from the konda devata, the tiger spirit. The Koya were already terrified of this place - tigers come here to drink from the stream at night. After the earthquake, hardly any Koya ever came here again, even into the clearing."

"So how do we get inside?" Costas said.

"My grandfather said there was another entrance through the waterfall at the back. But you have to be very small, lithe. He said he had once done it as a boy, and seen terrifying demons inside. The Koya elders in Rampa village told the same story to their children. We sneaked up here at night, but the story of demons kept us all from trying to get inside."

"Waterfall archaeology," Costas said. "That's a new one on me."

Pradesh dangled a cord behind his seat. "There is another way."

Costas twisted around to look, his eyes suddenly gleaming. "Detonator cord! Now that's my kind of archaeology."

The pilot came over the center of the clearing, pointing the nose of the helicopter toward the boulders some fifty meters away. He leveled out and began to descend. The rotor had cleared away the mist below them but now kicked up a swirl of dust and leaves. Jack leaned toward the doorway to peer out. Suddenly there was a ma.s.sive clang and the helicopter lurched sideways, the edge of the door nearly hitting Jack's face. There were more clangs and the crack of gunfire, a jolting noise even through the headphones. The air was split by a series of violent snaps as bullets whizzed through the open doors of the helicopter, missing them by inches. Jack instinctively put his left arm out to keep Costas down. The pilot pulled up on the collective and the helicopter lurched up and away. Jack glimpsed figures below, three of them, in combat fatigues and red bandanas. The pilot leveled out again and the two sappers knelt beside the open door and shouldered their rifles. They opened fire on full automatic, pouring rounds down on their a.s.sailants. They stopped, looked out for a second, then fired three rounds each, aiming carefully this time. They snapped off their magazines and quickly reloaded. Jack saw the three figures lying sprawled in the dust, surrounded by dark red stains expanding into a puddle on the clearing floor.

"Maoists," Pradesh exclaimed. "My guess is, not a reception party for us though. There's no way they could have known we were coming. This was an advance party for a larger group, probably a few hours away in the jungle. They usually do their recce in threes. They panicked when they saw we were about to land."

"What do we do now?" Jack said, his heart still pounding with the adrenaline.

"We stick to the plan. You've seen what my two chaps can do. Chances are the rest of the Maoists are far enough away not to have heard the gunfire. Noise is quickly absorbed in the jungle. The pilot will drop us and then disappear south, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Maoists will be used to seeing this old bird flying to and from the villages with supplies."

Pradesh nodded at the pilot, who made a quick descent this time, bouncing the skids on the hard surface of the clearing. The two sappers were out before the helicopter had settled, kicking the three bodies and checking the perimeter. Jack and Costas unbuckled themselves and stepped out, ducking and running from the whirling rotor. Pradesh followed them, carrying his bag, then the engine revved up to a whine and the Huey rose in a cloud of dust, tilting forward as soon as it cleared tree height and heading off to the south. A few moments later the noise was gone. Jack stood up, shouldering his khaki bag and checking Costas. They took off their helmets and piled them together. The dust was settling on the three dead bodies a few meters away, sopping up the blood. Jack was still coursing with adrenaline. He could see that Pradesh was wired up too, his Magnum revolver held out in front of him, tense and poised like a hunting animal. The whole action had taken only a few seconds, but was replaying in Jack's mind in slow motion. It had happened to him before, when he had been inches from death. He glanced at Costas, who was walking toward a rock outcrop on the jungle fringe, about thirty meters from the entrance to the boulder shrine. The outcrop had evidently been used as a shelter, and the Maoists' rucksacks were there. Costas squatted down, peering at the bags, then at the ground.

"Watch for snakes," Pradesh called out. Costas held up a long, decaying skin, shed from a cobra. "Got you." He let it drop, swatted a mosquito and then picked something else up. "Check this out. Those Maoists had Kalashnikovs, and there are plenty of casings around. In fact, too many for what we've just had. It looks like they've used this place as a shooting gallery before, fairly recently to judge from the state of the bra.s.s. And look at this. It's a much older casing. Looks like it was from an elephant gun. Big-game hunters, maybe. There are quite a few of these casings lying around too, but trampled into the ground. Must have been a long time ago."

Jack joined him. "Well I'll be d.a.m.ned," he said. "That's a .577, Snider-Enfield. The rifles the Madras Sappers had in 1879."

"You're kidding." Costas picked up another, looked closely at the rim, then grunted. "Battlefield archaeology. They did it with cartridges from Custer's Last Stand at the Little Bighorn. You can reconstruct fields of fire, the flow of the battle." Costas got up, looking around. "Maybe this rock was where Bebbie met his end. Maybe this was where Howard and Wauchope found him. With the rock behind, it would have been the best shelter around, a defensive position against the rebels while Bebbie and the sappers waited for rescue."

"I think I know what those three terrorists were doing when we surprised them," Pradesh called out. "It wasn't just a recce. They were cleaning up." He had advanced around the back of the rock, his revolver at the ready. Costas and Jack cautiously followed. The jungle smell became stronger, mustier, different from the rusty smell of fresh blood around the bodies in the clearing. Jack knew what it was even before he rounded the corner. A ma.s.s of bones and ragged clothes had been pushed into a crevice in the rock. Some were bleached white, but there was still hair to be seen and the limbs were still articulated, with sinews between the joints. Pradesh peered closer, holding his nose, then stepped back, gasping for breath. "Well, that solves one mystery. These are our Chinese, the ones the Koya saw arriving three months ago. Look, you can see the word INTACON on their s.h.i.+rts. That's the mining company. They must have been ambushed by the Maoists. That explains all the Kalashnikov cartridges." He picked up a stick, and used it to lift a flap of clothing. "And look at this. Exactly as the Koya described." It was a section of skin still intact on the arm of one of the skeletons. They could see the remains of a tattoo, probably what had preserved the skin. Jack felt a wave of apprehension. So far it had all been talk, speculation. This was real. The image staring out at them was smudged, half rotted away, but there was no doubt about it. A tiger tattoo.

Pradesh waved to the two sappers and pointed so they could see where the bodies were, and then put up six fingers and drew his hand across his throat. He got up, and Jack and Costas followed him back out into the clearing past the three fresh bodies. Suddenly there was an earsplitting crack. Flecks of blood flew off Costas' shoulder, and Jack just had time to see one of the bodies with a pistol raised before Pradesh aimed and fired. The first round took off the top of the man's head, sending brain and bone spattering behind. The man's legs drummed against the ground, but he was already dead. Pradesh fired round after round, slowly and methodically, letting the big revolver return from the recoil and aiming carefully, reducing the man's head to a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp. Jack reached out and held Pradesh's arm in an iron grip, pulling it away. He fired once more, the last chamber, the bullet ricocheting off the rock behind. "Enough," Jack said. Pradesh turned and stared at him, wide-eyed, enraged. Jack could smell the fresh sweat, the adrenaline. He eased his grip and stared Pradesh straight in the eyes. "You got him," Jack said quietly. "For your father." Jack quickly turned to check Costas, who was dabbing blood from a graze on his shoulder. He looked as imperturbable as ever. "You okay?"

Costas nodded, then turned to Pradesh. "Yeah. And thanks."

Pradesh took a deep breath, nodded then went over and kicked the other two bodies, reloading his revolver as he did so. The two sappers kept their rifles trained on the bodies until he signaled them, and then they returned to the edge of the clearing where they had taken up position before, concealed beside the path entrance. Pradesh snapped his fingers, pointed two fingers at his eyes, tapped his watch and waved toward the jungle. One of the sappers held his rifle at the ready and disappeared down the path. "He's doing a recce," Pradesh said. "If those three Maoists were an advance party, the main group will be following them. They only ever use the existing paths. They're not jungle people at all. The path comes from Chodavaram, past another of the Maoist hangouts. They move between places, a few nights here, a few there. They think they're like Bollywood heroes, like Robin Hood. But they're cowards and murderers and their ideology stinks. I loathe them."

"So we see." Costas grunted, fis.h.i.+ng out a bandage sh.e.l.l dressing from Jack's bag and plastering it on his wound.

Jack put his hand on Pradesh's shoulder. "You okay?"

"Couldn't be better."

"You just killed a man."

"That wasn't a man. And it wasn't the first time. I've been in Kashmir. I shot a Pakistani army engineer who was trying to blow up a mountain bridge we'd just built. They shot at us, we shot at them. I did it for my men. I could have chosen to miss him, but I didn't. That time, I threw up. Not this time."

Jack nodded. He had made the same rationalizations himself, and he knew what Pradesh was doing. His ears were ringing, from the adrenaline and the gunfire. They needed to focus on their objective, to keep tight. He gestured toward the boulders where the water was cascading down into the stream. Pradesh took a deep breath, glanced at the corpses, then handed Jack his revolver. He opened his bag and took out a small slab of C-4 explosive wrapped in plastic, and the coil of detonator cord he had shown them in the helicopter. "The obstruction's one small boulder, lodged in the entrance pa.s.sage," he said. "If I can split it, we may be able to get in." He led them over the clearing to the entrance. The tumble of boulders extended at least fifteen meters out from the face of the waterfall. It looked like an ancient megalithic tomb, yet it was completely natural, the result of a ma.s.sive landslide far back in history that had eroded away and left the tumble of rock exposed. It was taller and wider than it had seemed from the helicopter, at least twice Jack's height at the entrance. The two ma.s.sive upright boulders and the lintel formed a pa.s.sage beneath, blocked up with the boulder Pradesh had described. Rock fragments were strewn on the ground in front. Pradesh knelt down and picked one up. "This is fresh," he said. "Someone's had a go at that boulder with a pick, pretty recently."

Costas knelt down beside him. "The Maoists?" Pradesh shook his head. "More likely the prospectors. The Maoists may have caught them in the act and gunned them down, or maybe the prospectors gave up here and tried to find another way in."

"Or it could have been Katya's uncle," Jack murmured.

"Whoever it was, it makes the job easier for us." Pradesh crawled in a few meters to the wedged boulder, and packed the explosive in a s.p.a.ce underneath. He pressed in the detonator cord, then wound off the spool and backed out of the entrance, carrying on across the clearing about ten meters to another large rock protruding from the jungle fringe. Jack and Costas followed him, and squatted behind the rock. Pradesh clipped on a small electronic detonator, then raised his arm in warning to the sapper who had been glancing at him from his position on the far side of the clearing. Pradesh looked at Jack and Costas, patting his ear with one hand. "Fire in the hole."

They crouched close together behind the rock with their hands over their ears. Pradesh clicked the detonator and a second later there was a crack and a thud. They looked up, and saw a cloud of dust at the pa.s.sage entrance. Pradesh leapt forward to inspect his work, waiting outside a few moments for the dust to settle before cautiously crawling in. "All I needed was enough explosive to crack the boulder," he said, his voice m.u.f.fled. "It's perfect."

"Nice job," Costas said, peering in behind.

"There's a hole about a meter square. It's wide enough even for you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Costas grumbled.

"It means you're invited in." Jack took his halogen diving flashlight from his bag, and knelt under the lintel. Pradesh was about six inches shorter than Jack, lithely built, and the hole was a little less generous than he had described. Jack eased himself over the jagged surfaces where the rock had cracked with the explosive, and pulled himself through the hole. The rock wall he felt beyond was smooth, and he knew he was inside the pa.s.sageway. He heard curses and grumbles as Costas followed, and then a ripping sound. "My s.h.i.+rt. My special Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt."

"I'll buy you another. When we get there." Jack held out his hand, and Costas grasped it, heaving himself through. Jack stumbled forward in the gloom behind Pradesh, seeing only a flickering pool of light in the darkness ahead. Jack lingered for a moment, glancing back through the hole into the jungle clearing. The setting sun flashed off the wet palm leaves on the far side, as if the jungle were suddenly ignited in flame. Jack could still see the sapper squatting against the rock halfway down the clearing, cradling his rifle, staring intently in his direction. He saw the bodies in the dust, and thought of Rebecca. Thank G.o.d he hadn't allowed her to come along. He had almost said yes. He glanced at his watch. They had an hour, no more. He turned back and looked into the darkness of the pa.s.sageway. He felt the rush of excitement he always felt at the threshold of the unknown. He put a hand on Costas' shoulder. He remembered Katya, his promise to find out what had happened to her uncle. She would be waiting. They needed to get cracking.

Lake Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan Katya Svetlanova leaned back against the boulder, s.h.i.+fted slightly to find a more comfortable position and stretched out her legs on the hard baked ground. She put down her digital SLR camera and tightened her long dark hair in the band behind her neck. She looked at the boulder beside her. Swirling forms had been carved into the rock - snow leopards, leaping ibex, a mysterious solar symbol. The carvings had once been painted in primal colors, in blood and ochre, but were now barely discernible, eroded by the wind and scorched by the sun. They had been carved more than two thousand years ago by the Scythian hunters who had roamed these steppelands, who had sat where she was and gazed out over the lake and the mountains. They were ancestors of the Kyrgyz who still lived up here, her own mother's ancestors, nomads who knew the power of the shaman. It was a sacred place, a burial ground, where she could still sense the nomad smells of horses and mutton and sweat, yet it was also a place where others had pa.s.sed through, extraordinary people - adventurers, traders, warriors, people from immeasurably far to the east and the west. Somewhere there must be an imprint of their pa.s.sing. She had been photographing the carvings, taking advantage of the long shadows of the late afternoon. It had been a hard day, as every day was out here. Each new boulder offered the promise of an extraordinary discovery, yet the one she craved the most was still eluding her.

She swayed slightly, and the carvings came in and out of view, like a hologram. She was dead tired. It had been five relentless weeks, and now there were only a few days left. She remembered how long the great explorers of the Silk Route had spent searching for lost treasures - decades, a lifetime. Most never found what they had been seeking - fabled lost kingdoms, Alexander's treasure, the Seventh Preciosity, treasures forever just beyond their grasp. Maybe the shamans were right, and this place truly was a heavenly domain, its greatest revelations only attainable to those who took one step farther into the afterlife. Maybe archaeology was really like this, and her time with Jack Howard and IMU hunting for Atlantis had been a magical whirlwind, seducing her into thinking that there was more to life than a career in the Inst.i.tute of Palaeography in Moscow, studying other people's discoveries. Jack had warned her, but she needed to find out for herself She needed to find out whether she had finder's luck.

She took a deep swig from her water bottle, then looked down to where the remarkable blue water of Issyk-Kul lapped the rocky sh.o.r.eline only a stone's throw away. It was like an inland sea, stretching off to the Tien Shan Mountains to the south, their snowcapped peaks forming a breathtaking backdrop.

Somewhere beyond lay Afghanistan, the forbidding ma.s.s of the Hindu Kush Mountains, the pa.s.ses that led down to India - the Khyber Pa.s.s to the east, the Bolan to the west. But the Tien Shan Mountains girt the lake like the battlements of some impregnable castle, and it seemed inconceivable that anyone should have pa.s.sed through them. Always the eye was drawn east and west, along the Silk Road - the greatest trade route the world had ever known. To the east, the mountains dipped toward the Taklamakan Desert and the heartland of China, toward the fabled city of Xian. To the west, the route led through Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan and Persia, and then to the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. As the setting sun cast a rosy tint across the lake, coloring it in streaks of red, Katya s.h.i.+fted around to look at the edge of the canyon that led up from the west to the lake. She always felt uneasy coming up that road, as she knew ancient travelers would have. It was a place her Kyrgyz grandmother had warned her about, haunted by demon-warriors on dark steeds who lurked in every ravine, ready to devour any traveler who strayed into their domain. Katya knew these nomad myths for what they were, folk memories of conquest and horror, of the Huns, the Mongols, human hurricanes that swept through from the east. They were her ancestors too, not of her mother but of her father. She had thought of him lately, the modern-day warlord, of seeing his violent death in the Black Sea two years before, with Jack at her side. She had tried to remember her father before temptation had caught him up and swept him away, like the tides of greed and war that had once coursed through these mountain pa.s.ses. It was in her blood too, but she could not forgive him, and she knew the weight of this place lay in her search for redemption, in her yearning to find strength in her Kyrgyz ancestry, to hear the words of the shaman in these rock carvings.

"Katya!" A rangy figure appeared above the boulders a hundred yards away. "We're ready." She sprang to her feet, waved and picked up her camera. She loved seeing Altamaty, his bounding enthusiasm. She had not yet told him what she was really after up here. She was still wary of goalposts, uncertain what failure could do to her. But she suddenly felt revitalized. Standing up, she could see the enormity of their task, a sea of boulders stretching for kilometers along the sh.o.r.e of the lake, and extending for hundreds of meters up the mountain slope where they had been dislodged and brought down over the centuries by flood and earthquake. She and Altamaty had doc.u.mented almost three hundred carvings already, yet there were dozens of square kilometers still to explore, each boulder to be painstakingly examined, half of them requiring excavation from the rock-hard earth. Maybe she had bitten off more than she could chew. She remembered Jack again, his offer of a research position at IMU. She would have complete freedom, unlimited resources and could continue to be based out here. But she was the only one in the Inst.i.tute in Moscow who could stand up for her colleagues against the bureaucracy and corruption. She was her father's daughter - her father of the old days, the professor and art historian who had founded the Inst.i.tute. In truth her feelings had been too raw, and she had found it impossible to accept anything from Jack. Her father had become everything she stood against, a scion of the antiquities black market, a warlord who had taken on the trappings of his ancestors. He had become her enemy, and Jack had destroyed him. But she still had a fire within her, the fierce loyalty of a daughter, the tribal bonding of a warrior clan. Seeing Jack at the Transoxiana conference three months before had brought it all back. She needed to find her own peace before she took any outstretched hand.

She slung her camera, and began scrambling over the boulders. She remembered something else Jack had told her. You need luck, but you also need to take risks, to be willing to put everything behind a gut instinct. For Jack that meant committing research s.h.i.+ps, his team, Costas, all the paraphernalia of underwater exploration. She looked at the boulders extending in every direction like a giants' cemetery, and at her little tent by the lake. Out here she needed a small army of fieldworkers, and a camp like a military forward operating base. She stopped and took a deep breath. Maybe the time had come to accept that offer. She had not let herself down. She and Altamaty had done all they humanly could. She needed to contact Jack anyway, to find out if he had made any progress in locating her uncle in the jungle. She had been nagged by anxiety for weeks now, and she needed to know. And she wanted to hear his voice. She would set up the satellite phone that evening.

An engine coughed to life and settled into the chugging rumble of a diesel four-cylinder. Katya crested a rise and saw Altamaty ahead, his cholpak felt hat bobbing above the boulders. He was sitting astride their sole piece of mechanical equipment, a venerable British Nuffield tractor that had somehow found its way up from India into central Asia, part of a reinvigorated Silk Route trade that had come with the fall of the Soviet Union. Katya had become quite fond of it, despite the roar and the belches of black smoke. It was their warhorse, and as long as it fired up there was still hope. She jumped from rock to rock and came down in the small open s.p.a.ce in front of the tractor, holding up her hand to Altamaty as she cast an eye over the chain and protective leather strap that extended from the tractor's bucket around a half-buried boulder. It had become their end-of-day ritual: Altamaty would maneuver the tractor to a promising boulder they had flagged earlier, near one of the rough tracks that ran up from the lake. She eyed today's candidate. In this case, the boulder that needed moving had fallen against a promising stone, and the s.p.a.ce between had filled with hard earth which Altamaty had spent most of the afternoon digging out to get the chain around the rock.

Katya squatted down, inspecting the chain and the horsehide wrapped around it to protect the surface of the rock. The horsehide was getting frayed, but would be fine for today. Providing the chain held. She looked at the slack line of links leading to the tractor. Altamaty had salvaged the chain from an old patrol boat rusting in the shallows nearby, a legacy from the time when the Soviets had used the lake as a secret naval testing base. He had trained here himself as a marine conscript in the 1980s before being sent to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He said he trusted old Soviet technology more than he did new Russian, even if it was rusty. Katya had to take his word for it. She stood, gave him a thumbs-up then retreated a safe distance over the boulders. She crouched behind one. Altamaty crouched too, behind a barrier of salvaged metal plates he had rigged in front of the steering wheel as protection if the chain should break. Katya put up her hand as a signal, then let it drop. She ducked her head and crossed her fingers. It was like scratching a lottery card each time, and usually about as successful. But this could be the one. They were close to the western defile, the eroded canyon that led up to the lake. If they were ever going to find an inscription from a traveler this would be the place, where the caravans would rest and recuperate, not up the slope where most of the Scythian petroglyphs had been found.

She shut her eyes tight. She heard Altamaty put the tractor in reverse gear, slowly lower the throttle lever until the engine was a roaring crescendo and then gently release the clutch. The entire surface of the ground seemed to throb. She opened her eyes and watched the tractor inch backward, a meter, then two. It came to a halt, and reared upward until the front wheels were off the ground, and then the noise abated and it lurched back down. Altamaty stood up and waved. Katya got to her feet, and saw that the boulder had been pulled upright, jamming against another rock to its rear. There was no way of pulling it out farther. But the rock they were trying to uncover looked accessible, covered only by a layer of loose dirt. Altamaty pulled on the hand brake, leaving the engine in idle, and jumped down with a trowel and brush in his hands. By the time Katya came over he was already in the hole cleaning the rock. It had clearly once been upright, and been pushed over by the boulder they had just moved, probably dislodged in a flash flood. She saw that the exposed surface was flat, at least a meter across in both directions. She held her camera at the ready. It looked perfect. But she steeled herself for disappointment. Her colleagues at the Inst.i.tute had told her it was a wild-goose chase. Bactrians and Sogdians, the traders who pa.s.sed through here, did not even carve stone inscriptions. But then she remembered Jack. He said you had a feeling, impossible to describe. She crossed her fingers tight.

Altamaty stood up, his back to her, blocking her view. She put her right hand on his faded old combat jacket. She realized she was bunching it up, holding it tight in her fist. For a moment they were still. Then she realized he was trembling, shaking. She had held him before, but never felt this. He was laughing. She relaxed completely, all the tension gone, let her hand drop, grinned insanely and began to shake with laughter herself, the first time since she could remember. Something had let go inside her, and she had not even seen the rock yet. Altamaty turned, and she saw his craggy, handsome face beaming at her. "I'm not a scholar of Latin," he said in Kyrgyz. "And I've never been west of Afghanistan, but when I was a boy I read all the books I could find on the Romans. I recognize that."

She followed his finger, then gasped and put her hand back on his shoulder, steadying herself She knelt down, and looked hard. She remembered Jack again. Those first few moments are crucial. You might never see it again. Forget the euphoria. Be a scientist. With the sun low in the sky the contrast was perfect, and even the slightest undulation on the surface of the rock was visible. She quickly took a dozen photographs, using three different settings. She remained stock-still, fearful that the image would disappear. It was an eagle. She pulled a clipboard out of her bag, and flipped through the pages until she found the right one. She was looking at a drawing made by her uncle in a cave in Uzbekistan, more than four hundred kilometers to the west of here. Beside the drawing was Jack's handwriting, notes made when they had pored over the drawing at the conference three months ago. She looked at the stone again, and back at the clipboard. There was no doubt about it. It was the same. Carved by the same hand. She stood up, staggering slightly. "I've got to go back to the yurt," she said, her voice shaking. "I need to get to the satellite phone."

"What is it?" Altamaty said. "What have we found?" She looked at his weatherworn features, the beguiling blue eyes. She hugged him tight for a moment. She could smell his sheepskin jerkin, the tang of sweat, feel his stubble against her cheek. She felt extraordinarily good. She let go, and shouldered her bag. She also felt extraordinarily tired. She needed to make that call before she collapsed. But she wanted Altamaty to hear it first. "In all of your reading about the Romans," she said, "did you ever come across the story of Cra.s.sus' lost legionaries?"

Jack glanced back one last time through the entrance of the cave into the jungle clearing, and then flashed his torch over the wall of the tunnel. There was just enough room for him to stand upright behind Costas and Pradesh. He saw the dark green of algae, and maroon streaks that could have been some other form of growth. There was a strong smell of damp and decay, mixed in with odors that had crept in from the jungle outside. Pradesh aimed his flashlight along the wall ahead of them, then drew back, gasping. A garish shape had come into view, carved into the side of the boulder on their left, its head at their level. It was a fearsome demon, with popping eyes, a hooked beak and deadly fangs. Jack stepped up, panning his flashlight. "Incredible," he murmured. "It's got wings, like a griffin. I'd have said this was Persian, or carved by someone who'd spent a lot of time staring at images like this. Pradesh, I know ancient Indian sculpture is a pa.s.sion of yours. Got any ideas?"

Pradesh touched the stone. "I persuaded my engineering tutors it was a good way of studying lithics technology, but really I was just as interested in the art." He stared at the demon. "It's a generic form. There's a lot in common between Persian and Indian art. But there's something distinctive about this, confident, not quite like anything I've seen before. You may be right. It could have been done by someone familiar with Persian monumental sculpture, maybe from the Parthian period."

Costas put his hand cautiously on the bulbous eye, then quickly removed it. "No wonder the Koya never came in here," he murmured.

"Now look at the scene behind it," Pradesh said.

Jack peered at the wall beyond the demon's tail, angling his light. He saw more carving. It was shallow, but the image was clear. He drew in his breath sharply. It was some kind of narrative scene, with many human figures. He saw heads on poles, decapitated, with knives suspended beneath them. People were tied in front. Below them was a mottled strip of dull red, speckled with pyrites, evidently a mineral extrusion in the rock. It was as if the sculptor had positioned his image above the mineral to take advantage of it, to make it appear like a pool of blood. Human blood. There was no doubt about it. "A sacrificial scene," he murmured. "A meriah sacrifice."

Pradesh nodded. "Yet not carved by a native. There was never any tradition of stone carving among the Koya. And look. There are older carvings underneath."

Beneath the image, faintly, Jack could see another carving, much older, only discernible as he angled the flashlight to and fro. It was a cl.u.s.ter of concentric circles, about a meter across. In the center were four small parallel lines extending from a line like the head of a garden rake. It looked as if it should be symmetrical, with the same rake shape on the other side, but the superimposed carving of the sacrificial scene had obscured it. Pradesh looked closely. "The symbol of the labyrinth," he murmured. "They're found elsewhere in India and in central Asia, some in caves like this. The oldest ones are Neolithic, at least five thousand years old. Most of them have a stylized rectilinear shape in the middle, but I've never seen one as complex as this."

Costas reached out and touched the carving. He looked intently at Jack. "Correct me if I'm wrong."

"Incredible," Jack whispered. "The Atlantis symbol." He had been staring at it the day before, on the front cover of the monograph in his cabin on Seaquest II. He panned the light to and fro. It created a bizarre image, almost holographic, with the labyrinth appearing and disappearing beneath the shocking images of sacrifice. He wondered whether those who had carved the age-old symbol of a founder civilization were themselves interlopers, witness to primeval scenes of horror that some later artist would one day carve over their sacred symbol, half-obliterating it. The superimposition seemed to draw the ancient image closer, make it real. A labyrinth, hot with human blood.

"There's more. Lots more." Pradesh advanced cautiously down the pa.s.sageway, his shoulders stooped, and then squatted down about five meters ahead of them. Jack and Costas joined him, and watched as he panned his light over the walls. "It's the same style as those sacrificial images, but we're not looking at a narrative here," he said. "There's a lingam, a phallus, the symbol of s.h.i.+va. And on the opposite wall you can see a coiled cobra, its head facing the entrance, its tongue flickering out. That could be a Hindu symbol too, but snake-G.o.ds are also relics of pre-Aryan cults. Remember back at Bebbie's monument, the fear the Koya had of the giringar, the cobra spirit of the jungle? This carving would have put the fear of the G.o.ds in them. I think these two carvings were gateway guardians, to keep people out."

They advanced a few meters beyond the carvings, and Pradesh stopped again, moving his light over the ceiling. It was painted deep blue, in places thick like lacquer, elsewhere patchy where the pigment had crumbled away. "The color of s.h.i.+va," Pradesh murmured. "In Hindu imagery, blue signifies eternity." He reached up and touched the rock, and then rubbed his fingers where some of the pigment had come away. "It's lapis lazuli. That's what they used to make blue pigment. They ground it up to make a paste. You'd never have seen anything as precious as lapis from Afghanistan traded up here in the jungle, so the artist must have brought it with him."

Jack reached up and put his palm on the ceiling, on a patch where the blue was still as thick as enamel. He remembered what his grandfather had told him about the little carved elephant in his chest of family artifacts. Pradesh had said it too. Lapis lazuli, the color of immortality.

They moved on. The pa.s.sageway opened up into a chamber, about eight meters across. It was covered with carvings, an extraordinary jumble of human and animal forms, strange symbols and monstrous beings. Pradesh panned his flashlight around. "I recognize some of these. There's Vishnu, striding across a wall, vanquis.h.i.+ng a demon. And Parvati, wife of s.h.i.+va, with her enraptured gaze, picked out in red. And Padmapani, bearer of the lotus, with her swaying torso. She's supposed to radiate serenity, tranquility."

"And an elephant," Costas interrupted excitedly, pointing at a pillar carved as a trunk, with bulbous eyes and flapping ears at the top. "Odd though," he said. "With those ears, I'd swear that was an African elephant, not Indian. The type more familiar to someone in the ancient world of the Mediterranean, who'd maybe seen them in the amphitheater in Rome."

Pradesh nodded, then pointed at two other pillar carvings alongside. "Those are Buddhist stupas, with bulls on top. And there's another one, with a spoked wheel. And look at the wall behind us. Crowded figures, bodhisattvas, enlightened beings, turbaned, be-jeweled, moustached. And check out the grotesque dwarflike creatures. They're male yaksas and female yaksis figures, nature deities of the ancient religions, much older than Hinduism. The large one that looks like a Buddha is Kubera, a yaksa who was venerated as the G.o.d of wealth, the guardian spirit of treasure."

"It's all carved by the same hand," Jack said, looking around. "The same style, the same techniques."

"The figures are familiar to me, but the style isn't," Pradesh murmured. "I haven't seen anything like this in southern India."

"It's reminiscent of Gandharan art," Jack said. "The art of ancient Bactria, the kingdom founded by Alexander the Great's successors in Afghanistan. A fusion of Indian and Greek styles."

"But here, it's not so much a fusion of styles," Pradesh added. "It's a fusion of Indian images with a foreign style. It's as if someone from a completely different artistic tradition is trying to copy what he's seen in India, maybe in Persia too, but using his own techniques and conventions."

Jack traced his fingers over the elephant trunk. "This is technically skilled work, but not distinguished. If I were to make a comparison with the Graeco-Roman world, I'd say it was done by a jobbing sculptor, the kind who did sarcophagi, household altars, inscriptions, routine architectural decoration. An artisan more than an artist."

"There's something not right in all this," Pradesh said, looking around.

"You mean the whole place is out of sync with the jungle?" Costas said. "I was thinking that. What you were saying earlier. The spirits, the G.o.ds of the jungle. The Koya have no need to represent their G.o.ds. They see them already."

"That's one problem. But even if you buy into the idea that all this Hindu and Buddhist and animist wors.h.i.+p did happen here, it's still not right."

"Go on," Jack said.