requires only a little more lateral expansion to drop into the cavity. Any further operations can only be carried out at the most imminent risk to the miners”
He shut the book carefully and handed it to Jack, who slipped it into his khaki bag. Costas began to trudge up the pile of rock chippings, slipping back down with each step. “Well, it doesn’t sound less safe than anything else we’ve done today,” he muttered. “You say no one else comes up here?”
“That’s what Rahid told me. They think it’s haunted.” Jack followed Costas. He felt heavy, suddenly tired. Each step seemed a monumental effort, as if he were walking in deep snow. His feet slipped back on the rock chippings, and halfway up the mound it seemed as if he was going nowhere. He felt as if he were constantly striving for an objective that was just beyond his grasp, like in a dream. Finally he stood at the top of the mound of tailings, the roof of the cavern entrance within arm’s reach above him. Costas was ten meters or so ahead, inside the shaft below Jack, crouching down. Jack watched him take out a Mini Maglite and pan the light over the walls. The rock was dark, almost black. Jack remembered the description, the thick layer of carbon from the fires used over thousands of years by miners to crack open the veins of lazurite. He looked back at the entrance. He was not sure, but the light seemed to reflect a haze of blue off the walls, a blue like the azure of the sky. He turned back. Costas had advanced a few more steps down and was stooped over, close to the base of the mound where it sloped down into the cavern. He was motionless, staring hard at the chips of rock, shining the torch on one spot directly in front of him. He straightened, then looked back up. “Jack,” he said quietly.
“I’m here.”
There was silence for a moment. Costas cleared his throat. “That old Colt revolver of John Howard’s. The other one of the pair, the one you said his father had used in the Indian Mutiny.”
“Yes?” Jack’s voice felt disembodied, as if he were hearing himself speak from a long distance away.
“Do you know where it was made?”
Jack’s mind was a blank. He struggled to think. “It would have been Colt’s London factory. The address would have been stamped on the barrel.”
Costas got up, switched off the Maglite and made his way back to where Jack was standing. He looked him full in the face. “I know what Rahid found. I know why they never let anyone near this place.”
Jack put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. Costas offered him the Maglite, but Jack shook his head and reached deep into his bag, holding something tight. He left Costas, stumbling down, sliding on the rock chips, feeling where it was frozen underneath. He reached the spot where Costas had been, and dropped down on his knees. He let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. Then he saw what Costas had seen. It was half-buried in the tailings, but unmistakable. The revolver had been well-oiled so was not rusted, but had turned a deep plum color. He could see the address on the barrel. Col. Colt, London. The grip and the trigger guard were surrounded by rags, a coarse cloth, tightly wound. The fabric extended back under the rock chippings, then rose again in a mound, and then extended up again, a few feet away. The shape was symmetrical. Jack felt himself swaying. Two arms, outstretched. He looked at the other side. There was no pistol there, but a hollow where something had been, something that had once been grasped.
Jack peered again. The hollow could have been anything. It could have been the shape of a clenched hand, retracted in death. It could have held another weapon, a sword perhaps. But it could have been something else. The shape of a bamboo tube, the sacred velpu, once held in that hand, now gone.
Jack swallowed hard. He was crying, and he did not know why. He took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled slowly, blinking hard. He thought about what he knew of the man, of his love for his children, his family. He hoped they had been there at the end. He hoped that whatever had tormented him, the anguish, the loss, had lifted from him here, in those final moments. He hoped he had found what he had been seeking all those years since the jungle, the greatest treasure imaginable.
Jack wiped his eyes, and looked up. There was a noise outside, pulsing into the cavern, the clatter of a helicopter coming up the valley. He heard a crunching of feet on the rock behind. Costas had left him alone with the body for a few minutes, but Jack had vaguely been aware of him skirting around and exploring the recess beyond. “I checked it out,” Costas said, his breath crystallizing in the shaft of sunlight coming from the entrance. “The mine extends about twenty meters farther on, then drops into a well about five meters deep. If this was where Licinius hid that stone, my guess is that’s where it would have been. There are ledges in the rock created by the ancient pick work, but I looked and there’s nothing loose. It’s as if someone has been in here and methodically worked through the entire place. If that jewel was here, it’s gone now.”
Jack cleared his throat, and pointed. His voice sounded hoarse. “Look at his hand, the empty one. It’s exactly as if he were holding a Koya bamboo velpu. I think they brought that with them, the one they had taken from the jungle all those years before, and now that’s gone too. And so is Robert Wauchope. There’s no sign of another body here. Maybe when they came here the velpu was empty, but when it was taken away it was heavy with a new weight. Maybe Wauchope took it from Howard’s grasp, and escaped from here. Maybe they really did find the jewel.”
Costas looked at Jack. “We’ve found what we came for, haven’t we?”
Jack said nothing. He reached into his bag, grasping what he had been tightly holding as he entered the chamber. “I know we have to go. Just give me a moment.”
“You want to be alone?”
“No. Stay.” Jack took out his hand and opened it. He was holding the little lapis lazuli elephant, John Howard’s childhood toy, worn smooth by years of little hands, played with by Jack himself when he was a boy. It had a sparkling ribbon tied around its neck, something Rebecca had put on it when she had taken it to her cabin on Seaquest II Jack squeezed the elephant tight. Lapis lazuli, born in this mountainside, now returned. He put it down, and pushed it toward the twist of rags, the empty outstretched hand, carefully, gently. It touched, and he left it there, pulling his hand away.
The helicopter thundered past again. Jack got up, and straightened his bag. He took a deep breath, exhaling one last time into the depths of the cavern, watching his breath crystallize and tumble into the darkness. He put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. He remembered Pradesh. It was time to go.
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
