The Tiger Warrior (20 page)

Through the pounding rain and drumbeats they heard the sharp crack of Snider rounds, then screams. Howard took a deep breath. At least the rebels would not be able to use their matchlocks in the rain. An immense crash suddenly shook them, not thunder this time but the reverberations of an earthquake. They braced themselves. Somewhere behind them was the sound of falling rock, and the boulder above them seemed to shift. Howard remembered the roar of the tiger, and wondered whether it was out there, waiting. He remembered his son.
He remembered what he had done
. He cocked his revolver and held the sword at the ready. For a split second he felt detached from his own body, as if he were standing back and watching the two of them go forward, disappearing through the veil of rain into history. He took a deep breath, and glanced at Wauchope. “Let’s do it.”

Bay of Bengal, India, present-day

J
ACK REACHED OUT WITH HIS LEFT HAND AND PULLED
the tiller of the outboard engine toward him, bringing the Zodiac broadside-on to the shore and powering down the throttle. Ahead of them, somewhere behind the shoreline, lay the Roman site of Arikamedu.
Romans, in southern India
. It seemed virtually inconceivable, in a setting so completely at odds with all the preconceptions of classical history. Jack snapped back to reality. The wave they had been riding caught up with them in a burst of foam and wake, and the boat pitched sideways in the swell coming from the Bay of Bengal. Costas was sitting on the pontoon opposite him and Hiebermeyer and Aysha clung to either side farther forward. Rebecca was crouched in the bow holding the painter line, her dark hair streaming in the wind. They were all wearing orange IMU survival suits and life jackets. Jack peered at the palm-fringed beach, now only a few hundred yards distant, and saw where the swell rose over the shallows. He gunned the throttle and the sixty horsepower Mariner engine lifted them along the crest of a wave, pushing them back over deeper water as they headed south parallel to the coast and left the gray form of
Seaquest II
farther behind.

“That must be it, over there,” Costas shouted above the noise. He gestured toward shore with his GPS unit while holding on to the fixed rope around the pontoon with his other hand. “It looks like the river entrance.”

Jack nodded and powered down again, turning the bow toward land and maneuvering between two lines of breakers that marked the outer reef about two hundred yards offshore. The sea went calm, and he throttled back to idle. “We should be okay if we keep to the channel between the buoys, but keep a sharp eye out from the bow in any case.” Rebecca turned and made the okay sign at him. For the first time since leaving
Seaquest II
, Jack allowed himself to relax and look around. They had passed the harbor of Pondicherry and the ruins of the old East India Company fort some twenty minutes before, and were now off the dense green fringe that continued some two hundred miles farther to the southern tip of India, to the edge of the Palk Strait they had sailed through in
Seaquest II
earlier that morning. Jack increased the throttle slightly. They passed a lateen-rigged
nava
, a naked boy in the stern hanging on the arm of the rudder oar. A fisherman’s dark eyes followed Jack’s as they passed, yet he continued to throw out and draw in his net. Rebecca put her arm out to starboard and Jack pushed the tiller to port, seeing where the water became shallow. Their destination was barely distinguishable from the rest of the shoreline, a backwater that formed a placid channel into the sea, yet it led to one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in India. Jack had dreamed of coming here since childhood, and to the place in the jungle he planned to visit later. He was tingling with excitement. He glanced back at the
nava
, now framed by the expanse of the Bay of Bengal. The sun gave the water a steely hue, and it seemed sluggish, heavy like mercury, the reflection of the
nava
wavering in slow motion with the residue of the sea-swell.

Jack passed Costas the tiller, then swiveled around and faced the sun in the east, raising his head toward it and narrowing his eyes. That was the other extraordinary image from this place. Somewhere out there lay
Chrysê
, the land of gold. Jack remembered the
Periplus
, words written two thousand years ago by a man who had been at this very spot, who had turned to the east as Jack had done, pondering what lay beyond. Jack squinted again at the
nava
. What had he seen, that Egyptian Greek who came here so long ago? Had he himself seen the
kolandiophônta
he wrote about in the
Periplus
, great ships that came down from the Ganges? Had he seen other ships that came across the ocean from
Chrysê
, ships with towering braided sails and dragons in their bows, ships carrying bales of silk and untold finery, emissaries of a warrior empire as great as Rome itself?

“I’m cutting the engine,” Costas said. “I don’t trust these shallows.” The clear water of the ocean had given way to a muddy brown as they entered the river outflow. Jack nodded, glancing at the laminated chart clipped on a board in front of them showing the location of the archaeological site. “It’s only a couple of hundred meters along the river, on the south side of the channel.” Costas raised and locked the engine on the transom, and then picked up a canoe paddle from his side of the boat. Jack took the other one, dipping the blade into the murky water, feeling its warmth. The only sound now was the distant roar of the breakers and the rustle of wind between the palms. They passed a sand spit that marked the river entrance, and entered a channel less than fifty meters wide. The riverbank was a patchwork of red and green, bursts of bougainvillea and the odd mangrove and lemon tree appearing between the coconut palms. It was suddenly hot, an intense, dry heat, and they both shipped their paddles and copied Hiebermeyer and the two girls, stripping down their survival suits to the waist. They drifted past a line of
navas
with drying fish strung from the rigging like lights, and then a group of bathing women and water buffaloes, seemingly oblivious to the fiddler crabs and mudskippers that crawled among them. It was a languid, timeless scene, yet one that was also fragile and ephemeral, in a place swept by cyclones and tsunamis, where the lasting achievements of civilization could only be established inland, beyond the danger zone. Jack thought again of the
Periplus
, and put himself in the mind of the author two thousand years before. It was not only the view to the east that was so beguiling. The view inland, beyond the fringe of palms, also held temptation, and fear. The first Greeks and Romans here were like the earliest European explorers, on the edge of the unknown, thousands of miles of jungle and mountain and desert. All they knew was that somewhere to the north were the lands that had been touched by Alexander the Great. But they had come here not to colonize or conquer but to trade—just as the Portuguese and French and British were to do fifteen hundred years later—with civilizations as old and sophisticated as anything in Egypt and the Mediterranean.

Jack gently paddled the Zodiac over to the opposite bank of the river, and they bumped into a small wooden jetty. A wiry, neatly attired man stood watching them, wearing sandals, shorts and an open-necked khaki shirt with the flashes of the Survey of India on his shoulders. Two other men came up and took the painter that Rebecca held out to them, and they helped her, Aysha and Hiebermeyer off the boat. They removed their survival suits, and without a word Hiebermeyer bounded off toward the edge of an excavation trench, hitching up his outsized shorts. Rebecca looked back at Jack, who waved her on, and she and Aysha hurried off to catch up. Jack smiled at the man as he and Costas climbed out onto the dock. “You must excuse my colleague. He gets tunnel vision when he sees a new excavation.”

The man clicked his heels and held out his hand. “Commander Howard. It is an honor to be making your acquaintance, sir.”

“Call me Jack. And I’m only a reservist.” He shook hands. “You’re Captain Pradesh Ramaya?”

“Indian Army Engineers, seconded to the Survey of India. I’m in charge of the underwater excavation.”

“Thanks for emailing the chart,” Jack said, stripping off the rest of his survival suit, revealing his khaki trousers. He picked up his old bag from the box in the bow of the boat and slung it over his shoulder, keeping the holster discreetly out of sight. He gestured beside him. “Costas Kazantzakis. Another old navy hand. Engineering too.”

“Aha!” Pradesh said, his eyes gleaming, shaking hands. “Which branch?”

“Submarine robotics,” Costas said. “Just a couple of years between grad school and meeting up with this character. And you can forget the old navy stuff. I hardly ever had to wear a uniform.”

Jack gave him a wry look. “Except when you took a gunboat up the Shatt al Arab during the first Gulf War.”

“They put me on an aircraft carrier. Complete waste of my skills. I was just killing time.”

“And winning a Navy Cross.”

“You can talk. Some reservist. Special Boat Service? Let me think. Those bits of ribbon on your uniform. South Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Adriatic…”

“The bits of ribbon the moths haven’t eaten, you mean. All ancient history.”

“It is a pleasure to meet two such distinguished warriors,” Pradesh said, grinning.

“Archaeologists,” Jack replied with a smile.

“Him, not me,” Costas retorted. “No way. I’m just his stooge. Along for the ride. For the treasure at the end.” He finished stripping off his suit, revealing the lurid Hawaiian shirt. Pradesh stared hard, and coughed. Costas looked at Jack defiantly, then at Pradesh. “You from these parts?”

“I’m from the Godavari River region, about two hundred miles north from here. Where we’re going after this.”

“When I called from Egypt to set up this visit, I had no idea there was any connection,” Jack said to Costas. “But when Pradesh emailed back and told me he was from the Madras Engineering Group of the Indian army based in Bangalore, I mentioned my great-great-grandfather.”

“The portrait of Colonel Howard holds an honored place in the regimental mess,” Pradesh said.

“Colonel?” Costas said. “I thought he was a lieutenant.”

“Later,” Jack said. “I’ll get to that.”

“And Colonel Wauchope is one of our most revered heroes,” Pradesh said. “His work with the Survey of India in the 1880s and 1890s helped to establish the frontier with Afghanistan. It is an honor to help you. The officers’ mess still toasts them on the anniversary of their disappearance.”

“They
both
disappeared?” Costas exclaimed to Jack. “You mentioned that Howard disappeared, but
both
of them?”

“Later.” Jack put a hand on Pradesh’s shoulder and pointed to a cache of diving equipment under an awning a few meters down the shoreline. “I’m itching to see what you’ve been doing here. We’ve only got an hour and a half before the helicopter arrives.”

Forty-five minutes later Jack stood up from the work-table under the awning and put down his pencil. He and Costas had been taken on a quick tour of the land excavation, passing a trench where Hiebermeyer and the two girls were kneeling on the baked mud and troweling away along with a group of Indian archaeology students. They had returned to the tent with the diving equipment, and Jack had been making notes on the site plan. He turned to Pradesh. “The Roman material is eroding out into the riverbed. Where Hiebermeyer was troweling just now looks like the edge of a large mud-brick warehouse, but my guess is at least half of it is gone. You’ve got two or three meters’ water depth, and below that many meters of buried sediment. It’ll be filled with artifacts, but none of it stratified. With the equipment you’ve got, you’re going to have a big problem excavating it. That’s where we can help.”

“We’ve tried using a dredge pump, but the hole fills up immediately and the divers can’t see a thing.”

“Costas?” Jack said.

Costas snapped shut his radio receiver outside the tent. He came in, raising his sunglasses and wiping the sweat off his brow. “We’re good to go. We can use
Seaquest II’s
big pontoon boat to bring the gear in over the shallows.”

Jack leaned over the plan, and tapped his pencil at various points. “We suggest you establish a floating caisson, a cofferdam, to enclose an area of riverbed abutting the land site,” he said. “You discharge sieved sediment outside the caisson, meaning the water inside remains clear. We have a piece of a kit designed by Costas that we first used in the Black Sea, like a gigantic cookie cutter you place on the area of sediment to be excavated, five meters square. It has an integral dredge pump and can be built up as you excavate deeper, with the pipe outlet on shore where the sediment can be sieved for small finds and organic material. I’ll have a couple of our technical people stay here with your team as advisors.”

“Because Jack and I are going to Hawaii,” Costas murmured.