kept was the gauntlet.”
“It seems strange that he took it,” Costas said. “This was a shrine of the Koya, and maybe the gauntlet had become one of their sacred objects, one of those velpus.”
“He and Wauchope were soldiers, remember? Soldiers first, engineers second, anthropologists a distant third. They’d been trained to fight with the sword. They’d have had their own weapons, but Howard reaches for another blade, even a broken one. If it came to a fight, they might have no time to reload their revolvers and two blades were better than one. It was little short of a miracle they’d made it this far without being cut down, and they’d have been pretty apprehensive. Howard had his own survival to think of, his own wife and child. Respecting the local culture would not have been high on their list at that point. They probably only had a short time in here, and the war drums would have been beating outside.”
“Like they are now, Jack.”
“Okay. Time’s up.”
“I spoke too soon. I should never do that.”
“What is it?”
“There’s an inscription. Where my hand was. I thought the rock felt pitted.”
They could hear the sound of the helicopter now, the noise throbbing through the chamber. Jack swung his flashlight to where Costas was pointing at the side of the tomb. To his astonishment he saw five lines, in Latin. He squatted down and read out the words:
HIC IACET LICINIUS OPTIO XV APOLLINARIS SACRA IULIUM SACULARIA IN SAPPHEIROS NIELO MINIUM ALTA FABIA FRATER AD PONTUS AD AELIA ACUNDUS HERE LIESLICINIUS, OPTIO OF THE 15TH APOLLINARIS LEGIONGUARDIAN OF THE CELESTIAL JEWELIN THE DARK SAPPHEIROS MINESTHE OTHER IS WITH FABIUS, BROTHER, ACROSS THELAKE TOWARD THE RISING SUN
“Sappheiros,” Costas exclaimed. “I remember that from the Periplus . Doesn’t that mean lapis lazuli?”
A voice bellowed down the passageway from outside. “Time to go!”
Costas swung the flashlight around the chamber one last time. There was another dark fissure at the back, where they had heard the sound of water trickling. He hesitated, then stumbled forward, holding the wall with one hand, and leaned through. For a few moments he was stock-still, the beam shining into the darkness. “Jack, it’s my worst nightmare. I think I can smell it. Get me out of here.”
There was another noise outside, the drumming of gunfire. Jack quickly joined Costas. He stared into the pool of light. At first it seemed like another sculpture, white, an extrusion of the rock. But this was different. He realized with horror what he was looking at. A human body. It was stretched out in the waterfall, the arms behind the back, the head tilted forward at a garish angle. The neck was reduced to bone and sinew. The face was grotesquely adiposed, unrecognizable. Costas swayed slightly, and Jack held him by the shoulder. He forced himself to look again. The head was held up by a noose, tied around a rock above the waterfall. It looked as if the man had died by slow hanging, left with just enough rope to stay alive as long as his feet could find some purchase on the rock. He could have survived like that for hours, even days. A scurry of black shapes left the legs, and Jack saw that the calves had been stripped almost to the bone. The man’s shirt had been eaten away, revealing the skin of his left shoulder. Then Jack saw it. He felt a cold certainty. It was a tiger tattoo. It was distinct from the ones they had seen on the bodies outside, more elaborate. He remembered what Katya had told him about her uncle’s tattoo. Then he realized. She had known they might find him like this.
“It’s Hai Chen,” he said hoarsely. “Katya’s uncle.” He swallowed hard. He had seen enough. There was another burst of automatic fire outside. He turned Costas around and pushed him back toward the chamber entrance. Jack glanced one last time at the sculpture on the wall. His mind was racing. Romans. Raumanas. Rama. A shrine of Rama. He saw the tall one, the legionary in the middle. Was that Fabius? He flashed his torch across the breastplate, the sword belt, the garlands. There was something he needed to see again. He had seen it before, but had dismissed it, some Roman Republican military decoration, lost to history. But now he knew what it was. A round shape, like a sun, with beams extending from it, carried inside a pouch on the legionary’s belt. A shape like a jewel. There was another bellow outside, another burst of gunfire. He took out his Beretta and cocked it. “Let’s get out of here.”
14
The man with the rifle could see the two figures by the lakeside clearly now, motionless among the boulders near the shore, framed by the Tien Shan Mountains to the east, the edge of the celestial empire itself He had been watching them all afternoon, waiting for the sun behind him to lower, to accentuate the forms, but before the shadows were too long. He had learned everything he could about their behavior, watched every intimate movement, just as his grandmother had taught him to do. The tall one, the man, was awkward, angular, given to sudden movements and gestures, especially when he was working the tractor. But he was also given to watching the woman when she was hunched over, scraping and brushing, photographing. When he did that, the tall man was still for many minutes, sometimes half an hour or more, as if he did not want the woman to know he was watching. The man with the rifle curled his lip. The Kyrgyz were steppe nomads like his own ancestors, but nomads who had given up the ways of the warrior and become little better than sheep. He despised them. He wished he could target the man first, but the woman was the priority. He shifted his gaze to her. She was raven-haired, finely built, the Lycra tight against her thighs as she squatted down, athletic but curvaceous. She aroused him, and that increased his fervor. Her clan had strayed. The Brotherhood would exact its retribution.
The light was perfect now. He looked up at the line of snowcapped mountains across the lake, and then let his eyes drop back to the two figures. Always start at the horizon, his grandmother had taught him, and then everything will fall into place. He remembered her face, the handsome Kazakh features that had adorned postage stamps and murals across the motherland, the very picture of the Zaitsev Soviet march of progress. Only her unit of production had been death. Her master had called her Zaichatel, “little hare,” but the Germans called her Todesengel, the angel of death. Her tally at Stalingrad had been in the hundreds. Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. He remembered what she had told him on her deathbed, high in the mountains on the Chinese border, their homeland. She had told him that by the end, she had not killed for a cause. She had killed because it was what she did. She had seen that in his eyes too, as he looked down on her, devoid of emotion, only wanting to take up where she had left off.
He had her rifle now. He pushed himself back, lying on his front in the rocky hollow on the ridge. He opened up the long brown package beside him, the leather cover still supple after seventy years, impregnated with gun oil. He lifted out the rifle and cradled the forestock in his right hand, careful not to touch the scope. He brushed his left hand over the wood below the receiver, touching the dents and scars of war, wounds that had strengthened the weapon, not diminished it. The female Soviet snipers always gave their weapons names. Fire dragon, she had called it. He looked at the markings on the metal. Mosin-Nagant, 1917, made under contract in Williamsburg, Maryland. His grandmother had laughed at the irony of it, during the long years of the Cold War when she had trained generations of snipers to take on the Americans. But she had said the instruments of death held no allegiance. At her own death he had taken it from her, and he had come to know it as he knew himself She had said that each kill was like an act of passion with a lover, and the more he fired it the more he would know its needs, and the more it would become part of his very soul.
He opened the bolt, touching the fresh sheen of oil on the receiver. He took two cartridges from a leather pouch. He had hand-loaded them himself, using the same batch of primers, the same powder, measuring the loads to the microgram. She had taught him that too. He had polished the bullets until they gleamed. He pressed the cartridges into the magazine then pushed the bolt forward and down, chambering one round. He slowly raised the muzzle on the small sandbag wedged beside the boulder, careful not to press down on the end of the barrel, then edged himself forward on his elbows and knees, holding the butt against his shoulder. He had smeared chalk and dirt on his face, and there was nothing reflective on the rifle. He would be in visible against the setting sun. He saw the two figures again. 880 meters. He sensed it. That was his gift. He dialed in the scope, adjusting the turrets for windage and elevation. The air was thin, and there was little wind. The target was downslope, and gravity would pull the bullet down. He had already compensated for that, adding one eighth to the distance. He had seen a shimmer of air around the tractor engine, the optical distortion. He would aim a meter to the left of the woman’s
