right to join the hallowed ranks of their brothers-in-arms who had gone before. And Fabius might not even have known he had the jewel, one of the pair, wrapped up in a bag of loot he had shared with Licinius. Jack peered into the steely waters, seeing only reflection, sky-colored, peppered with tiny clouds. Perhaps it really was here, lost in the wreck of their boat, just as he had seen it in his dream. The celestial jewel.
The engine revved down, and the warm water of the wake slopped up over the stern transom of the boat. The wind died away, and the air felt thin, cool. Looking back over the lake, Jack could see the shoreline disappearing off to the west, far enough to sense the curvature of the earth. He felt as if they had tipped the balance between east and west, and had reached a point where the Silk Road would channel travelers down the far slope of the mountainous plateau, into China. It was an illusion, with the death trap of the Taklamakan Desert beyond, but for travelers from the west the great mountain pass ahead might have been a sign of hope. Jack turned around, looking forward. Costas was still in the deckhouse where he had been since the morning, talking and peering at the navigation screens. Ahead of them, the shorelines of the lake were finally converging. Earlier, the lakeshore had seemed desiccated, eroded by the wind, but here the westerly wind that blew evaporation eastward had carpeted the ridges and valleys in olive-green. Nestled against the shoreline were buildings, drab concrete structures, the dilapidated remains of quays and jetties. As Jack watched, the surface of the lake shimmered and seemed to blur, and then was still again. He wondered if it was a seismic tremor. He looked at the shore again. Somewhere over there was Rebecca, with the IMU and U.S. Navy team. They had made a discovery already, the possible outlines of walls revealed by sub-bottom profiling. It was enough to give them a foothold on the archaeology of this place. Their job today was to check it out, before Katya joined them for the trip they had planned farther east over the mountain pass into China.
Costas swung back from the deckhouse and clambered over the diving gear stacked behind. He pulled two E-suits off the twenty-millimeter cannon behind the stern house and dropped one in front of Jack. “May as well suit-up now. We’re heading straight to the site. Rebecca and a couple of the team are coming out to us in the Zodiac. We’re going to be the first ones down.”
“Rebecca won’t be too happy about that.”
“This is no place for her first-ever dive. No way. I don’t trust lakes at the best of times, and this one should have a big red sticker on it.”
Jack sloshed some water from the scuppers over his hands. “It’s slightly saline. That helps to cleanse it. And the lake bed’s two thousand feet deep in the center. Under a huge layer of silt. Anything toxic dumped out here’s likely to be well buried.”
Costas stopped pulling on his suit and looked incredulous. “You kidding? A Soviet submersibles testing site? We monitored these places when I was in the navy. You could almost warm your hands over the satellite images. And it didn’t have to be weapons or reactors. In the early days, the Soviets would happily have used chunks of uranium to power toothbrushes.”
“Altamaty told Katya that it was mainly torpedo testing out here, and whenever they lost one they went to huge efforts to find it. That’s where the first report came from of these walls underwater, the ones Rebecca thinks our team may have found again. Altamaty liberated some of the files in 1991 when he was on reserve duty at the base, when the Soviet Union was in meltdown. He said any lost torpedoes they couldn’t find were deemed unsalvageable and are probably best left where they are.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Costas grumbled, poking his head through the rubber neck in the suit. “Any more words of wisdom before we go radioactive?”
“Katya says the Kyrgyz see the lake as a sacred place, full of treasures. Some of them think Genghis Khan is buried here. Their sagas talk of a golden coffin set on a silvery sea. And they think there’s a sunken Nestorian monastery off the north shore. They think this place holds all the riches their ancestors saw pass along the Silk Road. But the waters are also sacred from before then. Some of the older Kyrgyz won’t even swim in it.”
“Sounds sensible to me.” Costas grunted, straining his hands through the rubber wrist seals. “In this case, I’ll go with the folk wisdom any day.”
“Some of the stories may be true. If you study the shoreline, you can see where the level of the lake has fluctuated. It’s a strange place. Hundreds of mountain streams empty into it, but hardly anything flows out. So the level of the lake goes up, or goes down when there are periods of high evaporation, like now. And on top of that, it’s in a major earthquake zone.”
Costas finished pulling on his suit and sat down, picking up a clipboard he had brought with him from the deckhouse. “I’ve got it here. The navy guys were briefed on it. At least three major quakes in recorded history, one about 250 BC, the Grigorevka, another 500 AD, the Toru-Aigir, and another 1475, the Balasogun, all probably eight to nine on the Richter scale, pretty hot stuff” He turned his back to Jack, arching his arms out to tense the shoulder zipper of the suit.
“Right.” Jack yanked the zipper shut and slapped Costas’ back. “The second of those, AD 500, might coincide with the sunken Christian monastery story. But the legend of Genghis Khan doesn’t fit. Genghis died in the thirteenth century AD. His successors were notoriously secretive about his tomb, murdering everyone they encountered during the funerary procession. According to Mongol ritual, horses would have trampled over the site to conceal it. But I think the tomb was where history says it was, at a place called Burqan Qaldun in Mongolia, hundreds of miles to the east of here.”
“What about decoys?” Costas said. “I mean, deliberately misleading stories. If they were so secretive, maybe they spread stories of the tomb being in different places. Hence the legend here.”
Jack nodded. “It’s possible. And not just for concealed tombs, but also for very visible tombs, extravagant ones. For those tombs, it’s the exterior appearance that matters for posterity, for how later generations will see the dead. But the contents usually matter most for the deceased, their private insurance policy for the afterlife. So they can be concealed elsewhere, with the actual body. After all, even the Egyptian pyramids were robbed.”
“And the First Emperor’s tomb at Xian was robbed,” Costas murmured. “By the caretaker, if the jewel story is true.”
Jack stood up, peering at the shoreline. He looked for the Zodiac, for Rebecca, but there was still no sign. He sat down and began to pull the legs of his suit on. “So where exactly are we going in?”
Costas flipped over to another piece of paper on the clipboard. “I printed this off the navigational computer. About two o’clock from us now, half a kilometer out from shore. There’s a creek with a few buildings at the edge.”
Jack shielded his eyes. “I see it.”
“It’s where the profiler came up with that image of walls.”
“It fits with the old Soviet report?”
“It fits exactly with the story from Altamaty, recounted to me by Katya. And I can’t imagine Katya has anything to hide.”
Jack raised his eyebrows, and was silent for a moment. “Well, to reassure you, Altamaty also spoke with Rebecca, in Russian. He said the first reports of underwater finds at this spot came from the Russian explorers who reached this place in the nineteenth century. You remember Sir Aurel Stein, the Silk Route explorer? Well, there were Russians who jumped on that bandwagon too, sent out by the Moscow Geographical Society. It was like an archaeological version of the Great Game, Russians against British. Nobody knows for sure what the Russians found. Such a lot disappeared after the Russian Revolution. But we know that two Russian explorers came down here, Nikolai Przhevalsky and Piotr Semyonov Tianshansky. They’d both heard stories of sunken ruins, cities under the lake. When they came here, the place seemed possessed by it. Tianshansky had been to Venice and found a fourteenth-century map showing an Armenian monastery by the lake. The legend of the tomb of Genghis seems to have been local. Undoubtedly the Russians were fed what they wanted to hear, but they were also shown genuine artifacts that had been found by fishermen.”
“Then fast-forward through the Soviet period.”
Jack nodded, pushing his head through the rubber seal on his suit. “The explorers left, but the legends grew. Nazi fantasists thought this was the Aryan homeland, drawing on local legends that this was a place of purity, a kind of heaven on earth. Then in the 1950s the Soviets established their torpedo testing base here, and divers went into the lake for the first time. As we know, they found something while searching for a lost torpedo, and the Ministry of Interior Security became involved. That ended under Khrushchev in the early 60s as the Cold War heated up and attention was focused elsewhere. Then more years passed, more rumor, more legend. A professor in Bishkek started to talk about Atlantis. That’s when Katya’s father got interested.”
