odd splash of light from vehicle headlamps, on the same route that Wood must have taken almost two centuries before. He closed the book. “The beauty of Wood’s account is that it predates the Great Game. To understand Afghanistan, you can go back to those travelers who came here before geopolitics came into play. Robert Wauchope in his notes at the end of this book says that, left to their own devices, the Afghans would shrug off all that history of outside interference in an instant.”
The PA system crackled again. “This is the captain. Estimated touchdown thirty-five minutes. We’re entering SAM missile range. We’ve armed the chaff dispensers. Just a precaution.”
Costas grunted and checked his seat belt. “I got onto him about it when we landed at Bishkek. These ex- fighter jocks sometimes forget they’re flying a bus.”
Jack turned to Katya. “This is the last chance before we hit the road. If there’s anything more to tell us, now’s the time.”
Katya drank some water, then nodded. “Okay. The Brotherhood of the Tiger. In the late nineteenth century, at the time of the diplomat Wu Che, the one who attended John Howard’s lecture, the Brotherhood was one of many secret societies in China. But they were more secretive than most. Few other societies could claim an authentic lineage back to the First Emperor. And they never sought to expand their membership. The First Emperor had come from the Qin family, and as he rose to power he ennobled them, giving his brothers and cousins the land to rule as fiefdoms. Their pledge was to serve the emperor in life and in death. They took the names of their fiefdoms. There were twelve of them: the Xu, the Tan, the Ju, the Zhongli, the Yunyan, the Tuqiu, the Jiangliang, the Huang, the Jiang, the Xiuyu, the Baiming, and the Feilian. These were the original bodyguard. As each one died, the Brotherhood selected another from that clan to take his place. In time, the Brotherhood came to represent all the upper echelons of power in China. They were wealthy landowners, lords of their fiefdoms, but they were also generals, diplomats, ministers of state. All of them had been groomed from birth in the ways of the tiger warrior. Each clan provided a selection of boys ready for the next vacancy, trained in the martial arts, in the wielding of the great pata sword, in the art of becoming one with the akhal-teke, the blood-sweating heavenly horse. One of those would be chosen to enter the Brotherhood, to sit on the council of the twelve. The others would remain throughout their lives as his warriors, a murderous company of a hundred or more who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to defend the creed of the First Emperor. And the one who was chosen, the newest of the Brotherhood, became the tiger warrior. It was his role to ride at the head of that company. To execute the orders of the Brotherhood. That was his initiation. The diplomat Wu Che was from the family of Jiang, and he was one of the twelve. My father’s family, my uncle’s, was the Huang. I am descended from many of those who were chosen for the mantle of tiger warrior.”
“And today?” Costas said. “Are we basically looking at organized crime?”
Katya took a deep breath. “Their creed was to defend the emperor’s tomb. Until the rise of communism, they retained their land and privileges, and had no need of more wealth. For generations they were behind the scenes in Xian, army officers, counselors to the emperor, bureaucrats, always close to the great tomb whose mound loomed beside the city, ensuring its sacred status. They fostered all of the superstitions about tampering with the First Emperor’s legacy, superstitions that linger today even among Chinese archaeologists. They made sure that nobody ever dug into the tomb. And the Brotherhood were not thugs. The diplomat Wu Che was typical of the nineteenth century Brotherhood, a highly educated man, eager to represent China’s interests abroad. But that was when things began to change. For almost two thousand years the Brotherhood had been part of China’s enclosed society, cut off from the outside world since returning empty-handed after losing the trail of Licinius in the Indian jungle. Wu Che reopened that quest, and once again the Brotherhood was on the warpath. The quest rekindled into a passion, an obsession. He also did something else. Unwittingly, he provided them with a temptation, one that some in the next generation of the Brotherhood could not resist.”
“Let me guess,” Jack murmured. “Opium.”
Katya nodded. “Wu Che’s travels in India had been an attempt to uncover the extent of opium use, to pinpoint the suppliers, to persuade the British government to clamp down on the trade. His papers show that his concerns were moral, and went far beyond Chinese official interests. He visited the Rampa jungle a couple of years after the rebellion and saw the extent of opium addiction among the hill tribesmen, easy prey to dealers after the troops had left. He would have found a sympathetic ear in John Howard. And there was something else. As a diplomat in London, Wu Che inspected the opium dens that were springing up in the port cities of Europe. When he returned to China for the last time in the 1890s, he took with him a prodigious amount of research, a detailed account of opium use and supply in the western world. It could have been the basis for quashing the opium trade. But it was open to huge abuse. It was a blueprint for control of the trade.”
“We’re talking about the time of the rise of communism?” Costas asked.
Katya nodded. “China was already fragmenting, and the republic was declared in 1912. The Nationalist Party had only a tenuous hold, and for years there was an uneasy alliance with the Communist Party. Much of the country was ruled by warlords. The abdication of the last emperor in 1912 marks the beginning of the modern Brotherhood of the Tiger. In the foundation mythology of the Brotherhood, the period of the Warring States had been followed by the rise of the First Emperor. They saw an analogue to this in what was happening around them in the 1920s and 1930s. It seemed as if a second coming of the emperor might be at hand. The foundation mythology began to twist, and new strands were fabricated. And something else happened. Their fiefdoms were lost, confiscated by the state. They needed another source of wealth.”
“The opium trade,” Jack said.
“Wu Che was murdered in 1912, a victim of the purge of the Chinese imperial court,” Katya continued. “His son succeeded him in the Brotherhood. For the first time, one alone threatened to rule the twelve. He inherited all of his father’s records, and built the largest, most secretive drug empire the world has ever known. British complicity in the opium trade had nearly ruined China in the nineteenth century, and he turned that on its head, using all the existing supply routes to feed more and more opium into the west, fueling the explosion in heroin use from the 1950s onward.”
Costas jabbed his finger at the route map. “Afghanistan? The main supplier?”
Katya nodded. “For centuries the Brotherhood had been sending warriors up here to get purebred horses. Training with the heavenly steeds had always been part of their creed, an essential rite of passage for any who might become one of the twelve. By the 1920s, the horse trade had become a cover for the narcotics trade. Opium was channeled south into India, west into Europe. The Brotherhood relocated its hub of operations outside China, first to Hong Kong and Malaysia and then in the west itself, in London and America. They integrated themselves easily enough, ostensibly the scions of wealthy expatriate Hong Kong and Singapore families who were educating their sons in the elite schools of Europe and America, becoming part of the capitalist infrastructure of the west.”
“They must be on the radar screens somewhere, if the drug involvement was as big as you say it was,” Costas said.
Katya gave him a wry look. “They were clever. They were not gangsters like other Chinese secret societies. To the Brotherhood, the opium trade was less a criminal enterprise than a kind of payback for western complicity in opium exported to China in the nineteenth century. They had a romanticized notion of fealty to China, to a China that was already ancient history. But it did not serve their creed to become part of the criminal underworld, and they moved out of the drug trade after the Second World War. They reinvested in mineral prospecting and mining. That proved hugely profitable after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The new central Asian republics proved a ripe picking ground for outside entrepreneurs. Their company, INTACON, became massively profitable and overshadowed the other business concerns of the Brotherhood.”
“What about 1949?” Jack said. “Mao Ze-dong, the communist takeover? Order returns to China.”
“Communism had been part of the force that pulled down the old world in which the Brotherhood had existed for centuries, taking their land. But 1949 also represented the return of order over chaos, an analogue of the end of the Warring States and the rise of the Qin. The new certainty, the new control, was seductive to the Brotherhood. And the communist regime had its own power structure, its own hierarchy. The Brotherhood soon recovered their place in China, their watchful eye. They fueled the cult of Mao Ze-dong until it almost rivaled the cult of the First Emperor himself But with Mao’s death, they returned with renewed passion to the original creed.”
“Cue the mythology,” Jack murmured.
“According to wu di, the concept of non-death, they believe the First Emperor never left, but exists in a parallel world. They await a kind of folding of our reality into that world, the world of wu di. Only then will the
