“The army doctor said that if it had been an explosive bullet or a fifty-caliber Browning round, he’d have been dead on impact. He said that when the bullet hit Pradesh it was subsonic and must have been fired from an incredible distance, apparently from an old rifle. It was only one inch from the heart. He’d never seen anything like it.”
“And he’ll never see it again,” Costas murmured.
“How’s his archaeology reading getting on?” Jack said.
“He’s lapping it up. He wants more. He said he was already seeing the Roman finds from Arikamedu in a new way, as evidence of trade, society, beliefs, Roman, Egyptian, Indian, his own history. He’s itching to get back there.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Jack murmured.
“And Altamaty?” Jack glanced at Katya.
“He’s staying with Pradesh until they fly him out. Pradesh is trying to teach him English. They get on like a house on fire. Altamaty even brought him a doggie bag of mutton stew. He says it’ll cure anything.”
Costas cleared his throat. “Well, Jack. Maybe you’d like to join them. Maybe you’d like to eat some more sheep’s lip.”
Rebecca looked incredulous. “What?”
“It’s true,” Costas said. “In Kyrgyzstan, when we first met Altamaty. He ate sheep’s lip. Your dad ate sheep’s lip.”
“Oh my God.”
“I had to,” Jack protested. “If I hadn’t, it would have been deeply offensive. Altamaty would never have spoken to me again.”
“I thought you hated mutton.”
“It’s the only food I can’t eat.”
“Couldn’t you have chosen some other bit? Did it have to be, like, lip?”
“I had no choice.” He eyed Katya despairingly. “It had to be lip.”
“I have got,” Rebecca said quietly, “the grossest dad. Ever.”
Jack grinned. “We need to show Pradesh and Altamaty the ropes. A crash course at the IMU campus, and some onboard experience with our research vessels. I need to talk to the commandant of the Madras Engineering Group to arrange a secondment. Pradesh’ll need recuperation leave anyway and the campus in Cornwall is perfect. As for Altamaty, his training can be part of our funding for the underwater work at Issyk-Kul and the petroglyph research project. We can put temporary staff there while he’s away.”
“That would be wonderful,” Katya murmured. “The funding.”
“It’s what I promised,” Jack replied. “You may well find me back up there again soon.”
“If Altamaty’s away, Katya will definitely need company,” Rebecca said. Costas coughed, and Rebecca continued. “When Costas finally teaches me to dive, in Hawaii, which he’s promised to, I’m going to teach Altamaty all the English words for the equipment so he can order everything he needs from the IMU technical people without having to go through Costas. I told him Costas is a great guy, but usually he’s obsessed with some new submersible or whatever, and if Altamaty wants stuff he should come to me.” She leaned over and gave Costas a doe-eyed look.
“Good to see you’re on top of things, Rebecca,” Jack replied, raising his eyes at Costas.
“And the trouble with you, Dad, is that you hop from one adventure to the next. That’s what Hiemy told me. You know, back in Egypt. He says that when he finds something, he sticks with it, teases out every possible scrap of information from the site. Obsessively.”
“Tell me about it,” Costas muttered.
“He says that he, Professor Hiebermeyer, is the true archaeologist. He said that when he found those fragments of pottery with the Periplus on them, he deliberately put them aside, didn’t allow himself to get ex cited.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “He was on the phone to me in about ten seconds. You remember, Costas? He even came to visit us when we were digging up Istanbul harbor looking for the Jewish menorah. I was the one who was too busy. Sticking with my project.”
“He said that if he hadn’t spent months painstakingly excavating that Roman house by the Red Sea, this whole adventure would never have taken off He said he always did the real work while you were off searching for the Holy Grail or something. He said it was like Star Trek, you’d gone over to the dark side. I said it was Star Wars, not Star Trek. I don’t think he’d ever seen either of them. He said you’d become a treasure hunter, and he was only saying this because you still have potential, and it’s for your own good.”
“I think,” Jack murmured, suppressing a smile, “I might need to have a word with old Hiemy.”
“Don’t worry,” Rebecca replied. “Aysha’s on the case. She says what he needs is a family. Kids, you know. She says she’s working on it.”
Costas nearly choked. “Working on it.”
“Day and night,” Rebecca said.
“Lucky old Hiemy,” Jack said.
“And my next project is going to be south India,” Rebecca said assertively.
“Your next project is school,” Jack said.
“Ever since seeing all that stuff in the old chest, all our family history, I’ve become fascinated by it,” Rebecca said, looking at Jack. “Pradesh has offered to take me to that jungle shrine, to see the carvings for myself He thinks the next step is to get inside that tomb. See what’s in there. He says that now the Indian government is sending in the sappers to build more roads, actually finishing several of the traces that were made by Howard and his men all those years ago.”
“What about INTACON?” Costas asked. “And Shang Yong? Has terminating the sniper in Afghanistan finished him, Katya?”
She spoke quietly. “Without his henchman, the Brotherhood will disown him. But they will cling to their belief that they protect the legacy of Shihuangdi, and his tomb.”
“And how long will that last?” Costas asked.
“The legacy of the First Emperor is safe, for now.”
Jack looked hard at Katya, then turned again to Costas. “INTACON was owned by Shang Yong himself, and has been shut down. Pradesh reported back to his headquarters at Bangalore as soon as we got out of the jungle. He got a rap on the knuckles for going into bandit country without authority and taking those two sappers with him, but the colonel immediately dispatched an air assault company. The firefight with the Maoists was the excuse they needed to go in with an iron fist.”
“Pradesh says the Indian government has withdrawn all mining contracts from the jungle districts,” Rebecca said. “What we’ve set in motion could be the first big break for the jungle people, but Pradesh is worried that the withdrawal is only temporary and there’s still a battle to be fought. We need to show them there’s more revenue to be made from adventure tourism than allowing foreign companies to strip-mine the jungle. Pradesh says it depends on how deep the corruption is. Government officials can get bigger payoffs from mining multinationals than they can from start-up eco-tourism companies.”
“You should work for an NGO, Rebecca,” Katya said, smiling.
“I was going to talk to Dad about that. You know, giving IMU another face. It isn’t the first time your discoveries have opened a can of worms. And we can’t just walk away and pass on the problems to someone else.”
“When you do go to the jungle,” Jack said, “I’ve got something for you to return.”
“The tiger gauntlet?”
Jack nodded. “We can’t return the sacred velpu, as we don’t have it,” he said. “But the gauntlet had been in that shrine for two thousand years, and was venerated by the Koya too, as the weapon brought to them by Rama, the god who had once lived among them. It may not be the jewel of immortality, but it might just give them an edge. You can do it for your great-great-grandfather.”
“Maybe it’ll mean closure for him, at last,” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“Katya was talking to me about it just now, while we were walking up here,” she said. “About my mother. About how we can never second-guess grief, how we should never let anyone tell us how it will pan out. Howard
