Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  He felt a searing pain in his lungs, as if a clamp were compressing his chest from all sides, tightening with every second that passed. Even if there had been air to breathe, he felt that his chest could never bear the expansion. The cold was shocking now, as cold as the Arctic Ocean, further paralyzing him. He knew he had little time, maybe half a minute, no more. He opened his eyes. For a few seconds he was distracted from the agony in his body as he concentrated on trying to see. He looked down, blinking against the blur. Directly below him it was pitch dark, an absolute darkness like he had never seen before. He had the sense that he was sinking into it, that he had plummeted below the final gloom of natural light. He knew that meant he was at least 120 meters deep, probably closer to 150 meters. For an instant the pain seemed to leave him and he felt himself holding Rebecca tight, a memory of a moment when he had felt that his life had been most worthwhile, a moment of utter contentment. He forced himself out of it, back to reality. He needed to remain focused for his final seconds, even if it meant excruciating pain. Costas.

  And then he saw it. A few meters below him, a suffused glow appeared, the emergency lighting of the submersible. He hit the cable and slid down it, the metal cutting into his exposed forearm. He crashed into the carapace of the submersible like an astronaut out of control on a spacewalk. He let go of the weight belt, which spun a crazy dance into the depths, disappearing out of sight below. He saw the recumbent form of Costas watching him through the viewing port of the bathysphere, his face distorted by the thick Perspex. He pulled himself over to the manifold linking the air cylinders together and found the wheel that opened the valve, seeing where it had been bent over by the cable falling on it. He pulled it anticlockwise. Nothing. He tried again, using every fiber of his being, every ounce of energy he had left. Still nothing. He suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to breathe, and began gagging, each reflex sending a jolt of pain through his lungs. He caught sight again of the face in the porthole. He could not give up now. He heaved one last time, and suddenly it gave way, cracking open. He spun the wheel around several times and pulled himself frantically down to the wheel that opened the double-lock chamber, spinning that too, feeling the hatch open inward and pulling himself inside, pushing it shut and slamming his hand down on the handle that opened the valve to fill it with air.

  A deafening hiss filled his ears, and the water in the chamber became a raging maelstrom, lit up by the orange glow of the emergency lighting. Seconds later his head was above water, and he was gasping, taking in huge lungfuls of air, shuddering as the oxygen coursed through him. He coughed hard and saw a fine mist of red, evidence of some respiratory tissue damage but not enough to indicate major barotrauma. He saw blood drip from his nose, and he tipped his head up. He glanced at his watch; it had been a little over four minutes since he had last looked at it on the deck of the ship just before jumping. The depth gauge on the casing of the chamber showed 275 meters, and was increasing rapidly. In the course of tangling with the submersible, he had dropped through the threshold of possibility for free diving. Another ten meters and he would probably have been gone. He had been lucky.

  The chamber emptied of water, the hissing stopped, and the hatch from the bathysphere clanged open. Costas’ head appeared through it. “Jack. Good of you to drop in.”

  Jack coughed again, his voice hoarse, distant sounding. “Don’t mention it.”

  “You okay?”

  Jack tipped forward, a finger pressed against his nose. “Could use a tissue.”

  Costas fumbled in the pocket of his overalls, leaned in, and passed over a scrunched ball of white. Jack took it, holding it cautiously. “Pre-used?”

  “Tried and tested.”

  Jack wet it, tore off a chunk, shoved it up his nostril, and held it there. He cautiously tipped forward again and saw that the bleeding had been stemmed. His breathing had nearly returned to normal, and he edged forward, noticing for the first time the gash like a deep rope burn on his left forearm where he had slid down the cable. Costas handed him a towel, a fleece, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. “My spare clothes. A little short and a little wide, but who’s looking. Once we get into the bathysphere, we’ll dig out the first-aid kit for that arm.”

  “You okay?”

  “I was nearly gone, Jack. Seeing stars.” He jerked his head at the emergency oxygen bottle attached to the casing beside him. “Couldn’t risk using that because the air cutoff meant there was a pressure buildup inside the bathysphere, enough to make pure oxygen toxic. But it’s back to normal now.”

  Jack rubbed the towel on his hair, feeling the ache in his head from the cold. “What’s our status?”

  “We’re going to the bottom, Jack. When you opened the valve, it filled the bathysphere. We’ve got enough air for at least six hours. But there’s still a problem with the pipes to the ballast tanks. Right now I just have to concentrate on maintaining life support and keeping the sub stable and upright. Once we get within fifty meters of the seabed, I’ll activate the vertical water thrusters to soften the landing. If the vectored thrusters work as well, they might give us enough power to hop around like a big bug on the seabed, but not to rise more than a few meters without draining the battery.”

  “How close will we be to the sarcophagus?”

  “We should be dead on target.”

  “Comms?”

  “Dead as a dodo. The fiber-optic cable was severed. We have no way of communicating with the surface.”

  “But they could still brake the cable before we hit the seabed.”

  Costas shook his head. “Too much of it has been paid out. The weight of that amount of cable as well as the dead weight of the submersible would be too much by now for them to be able to halt the fall. The only way of repairing the winch will be to let the cable uncoil completely after having secured the upper end with the old derrick, and then attempt to repair the fault in the winch machinery. I was never happy with that new derrick, Jack. Too many corners were cut to get this show ready in time for the media, who now look as if they might not get a show at all. But we’ve got the best people topside, including the engineer from the shipyard who installed it, and with any luck we’ll be back on track soon. The biggest danger is the cable spooling off entirely and falling on us, two tons of metal dropping a thousand meters at about fifty meters a second, like a gigantic whip. If that happens, this submersible will become the second sarcophagus down there.”

  “Meanwhile they’ll be sending down an ROV.”

  “It’ll be on its way as we speak. My guys in the engineering lab will be onto it.”

  “Okay.” Jack eased out of his wet clothes, realizing that he was shivering uncontrollably. He had hardly noticed it in the euphoria of survival, but now he felt the cold ache all over his skin, adding to the residual pain he felt in his chest. He towelled himself down as well as he could, pulled on Costas’ clothes, and followed him through the hatch into the bathysphere, sliding down into the copilot’s seat beside Costas. He leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. “I never thought I’d be happy to be in a confined space, but this is that time.”

  “Seat belts on, Jack. Brace yourself.”

  Jack strapped himself in and watched Costas activate the thrusters. The three portholes in front of them showed pitch black. The external lights were still off. The depth gauge showed 820 meters, then 840. The thrusters came to life, slowing down the submersible and forcing Jack up in the seat against his belt. Costas activated the multibeam sonar, and a high-definition image appeared on the screen in front of them as it swept the seabed some eighty meters below. It revealed undulating sediment and then the familiar outline of the shipwreck, the scatter of guns clearly visible and the sarcophagus standing stark in the center, where the pit had been dug around it preparatory to lifting.

  Costas flicked on the external strobe array, revealing a shimmer of reflected particles through the portholes, and then he took the joystick in his right hand while keeping his left on the water jet throttles.
“Easy does it,” he muttered to himself. “I need to pull us a fraction off the vertical of the cable to avoid landing right on top of the sarcophagus. The vectored thrusters aren’t responding, but I should be able to do it by reducing the flow through the port-side vertical thrusters while keeping the starboard ones on full throttle.”

  Jack could feel the vibration of the water jets on one side of the submersible, and watched the altitude gauge, measuring their height above the seabed. At twenty-two meters he could see a hint of something through the forward viewing port, and suddenly he was seeing the shipwreck, the dull green of brass guns covered with verdigris poking out of the sediment. Above the breech of one of them, he could see the distinctive heart-shaped bale mark of the East India Company, a little detail he had not noticed before when he had studied photos of the wreck. It opened up a small unexplained byway in the history of the ship that sent a frisson of excitement through him. And then with a soft explosion of sediment they came to a halt, 934 meters beneath Seaquest and the surface of the Mediterranean.

  “The eagle has landed,” Costas said, releasing the controls.

  The veil of sediment dropped, and the white form of the sarcophagus came into view only a few meters in front of the strobe array. Jack could clearly make out the architectural style of the carving, a geometric pattern that made the sarcophagus one of the greatest exemplars of sculpture from the Egyptian Old Kingdom, at the time of the building of the pyramids. For almost two hundred years, the only image that the world had seen of the sarcophagus had been a woodcut in Colonel Vyse’s account of his excavations. It showed the sarcophagus inside the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Menkaure. Now it was in front of them, looking almost as if it had been designed to be in this place, unaffected by the forces of nature that were steadily eroding and crumbling the wreck around it.

  Costas tried the controls again. “They’ve gone dead. I can’t move them. That coil must have caused more damage than I thought.”

  “So we’re not going anywhere. No big bug hopping on the seabed.”

  Costas shook his head and lay back, stretching. “All we can do now is wait.” He reached down into a paper bag on his side. “Brought lunch with me. Didn’t have time topside. Sandwich?”

  Jack felt as drained as he had ever felt, bone tired and aching all over, and he knew that when they surfaced, the medicos on Seaquest would want to give him a thorough road check. But meanwhile he was famished, and the idea of a picnic with his best friend trapped inside a submersible almost a kilometer deep in the abyss did not seem such a bad plan at all. He took the sandwich, and they ate together, occasionally swigging from a water bottle that Costas had placed between them. As Jack sat there munching, staring at one of the greatest archaeological discoveries they had ever made, he knew there was nowhere at this moment that he would rather be.

  It felt good to be alive.

  —

  Twenty minutes later Jack finished wrapping a bandage around his forearm and stared out the front viewing port at the sarcophagus. Inside it he knew lay the plaque they had discovered on their dive to the wreck three months previously, something that Colonel Vyse must have found inside the pyramid and included as an added extra for the British Museum when he consigned his cargo to the Beatrice that day in 1837 in Alexandria harbor. It was not the plaque they had seen that had spurred Jack to come back here, as they had been able to record all the surviving carving three months earlier, but rather the hope that they might find the fragment a meter or so across that had been missing from one corner, the sharp edges suggesting that the break had been recent rather than ancient and might have taken place during the wrecking. The plaque had shown the Aten sun symbol superimposed on a plan of the pyramids at the Giza plateau, with the orb of the Aten in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure and the radiating lines extending eastward toward the site of modern-day Cairo and the Nile. There was a chance, just a chance, that the missing fragment might show the intersection of the thickest radiating line with the river at a point just south of modern Cairo, the clue that Jack needed to the location of another entrance into the underground complex that he and Costas had seen from beneath the pyramid.

  Jack glanced across at Costas, who was absorbed in a mass of wiring that he had disengaged from the upper casing of the bathysphere. Jack tapped the viewing port. “Come and look at this. Tell me I’m seeing things.”

  Costas grunted, left a pair of miniature pliers dangling from a wire, and slid over beside Jack. “What are you looking at?”

  “About two meters in front of us, at eleven o’clock, nearly abutting the sarcophagus. Just visible sticking out of the silt.”

  Costas pressed his face against the middle of the glass. “Doesn’t look like ship structure or fittings. Looks like it might be stone.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s off-white, like marble.”

  “The missing fragment of the plaque?”

  “Any chance of getting the manipulator arm to work?”

  Costas jerked his head back toward the dangling mass of wires. “Not a chance, Jack. We’ve got life support, that’s all. Somehow when that coil hit the sub, it short-circuited the main electronics board. It’s more than I can fix down here.”

  Jack stared at the few centimeters of white stone visible in the silt. So near, yet so far. It was close enough that he felt he could almost reach out and grab it, yet he may as well be trying to touch ice on Mars. He took a deep breath, feeling the ache in his lungs. He would have to wait and see where they stood with the excavation, whether the backup submersible or remote-operated vehicle could examine his find, something that would take precious time that he could ill afford if he were to return to Egypt before the country went into meltdown.

  A swirl of sediment filled his view, and in the distortion through the left side of the port he saw a commotion on the seafloor. Apart from a few diaphanous fish, he had seen little sign of life in the desolation outside, and he peered with some curiosity, expecting something larger. Suddenly an eye appeared only inches away, staring directly at him, luminous, blinking, the size of a baseball. He jumped back, startled, and then saw the flexible metallic neck. “Costas, we’ve got a friend.”

  Costas slid back alongside him. “Joey!” he exclaimed excitedly, putting his hand against the Perspex. “I knew he’d come. Good boy.”

  The eye retracted, looking down, and a manipulator arm came into view and pivoted at the elbow and wrist. It had five metallic digits just like a human hand. Behind it Jack could see the yellow carapace covering the batteries and electric motor that powered the water jets, and an array of tools that Costas and his team had built into it, all of it operated from the surface via a fiber-optic cable that was just visible trailing off above. The forefinger of the hand pointed down at a tablet-sized LCD screen on the front of the ROV just below the manipulator arm, and Jack could just make out letters appearing on it, distorted through the Perspex cone of the viewing port. Costas pressed his face against the center of the cone, where there was the least distortion, and after a minute or so he rolled over and turned back to Jack.

  “Joey’s inspected the manifold, and everything looks okay. They can’t reconnect our communications cable, so it’s going to have to be done the old-fashioned way, with written messages. The problem with the derrick was an electronic switch override, which the engineer has replaced. They’re currently recoiling the cable on the spool and expect to be ready to retrieve us in about twenty minutes. The recompression chamber is prepped and the medical team is waiting. You’re supposed to breathe pure oxygen.”

  “I’m fine,” Jack said. “Tell them there’s no evidence of barotrauma.”

  “You know what the medicos are like. And Joey’s watching.”

  Jack grunted, pulled the oxygen mask from the emergency bottle beside his seat, cracked the valve, and pressed it against his mouth and nose. “Okay?” he said, his voice muffled.

  Costas turned back to read the screen. “Meanwhile, Joey’s going to carry o
n snaking the hawser under the sarcophagus, the job we were meant to be doing. Now that they know we’re safe and sound, they’re going to carry on with the plan. As soon as we’re back on deck, the cable will be dropped again for Joey to attach to the hawser. Fortunately the media people haven’t yet been allowed out, so they’ll have no idea what’s happened, other than a small delay. They’ll be told that the decision was made to use the ROV rather than the manned submersible because Joey’s manipulator arm was better up to the task than the arms on the submersible. Which happens to be true.”

  Jack stared out of the viewing port beside him at the white form of the sarcophagus. The fragment of stone protruding from the silt was only about a meter from Joey. He sidled over to the main port beside Costas, and pointed exaggeratedly at it. The eye looked at him and cocked sideways, and the hand twisted around with the palm up, as if questioning. Jack dropped the oxygen mask, picked up a pencil and notepad and quickly scribbled on it, and then pressed the pad up against the window. The eye slowly scanned the paper, and Jack turned to Costas. “If we’ve got twenty minutes, that might be just enough time for Joey to see whether that slab is the missing fragment.”

  The screen on the ROV began scrolling out letters again, and Costas pressed his face against the Perspex to read it. “The ROV operator is under strict orders from Captain Macalister to focus on the task at hand. Under no circumstances is he to let Dr. Howard divert Joey to dig a hole somewhere else.”

  “You try. Doesn’t Joey have a mind of his own?”

  Costas scribbled on the pad and pressed it against the window. Joey read it, flexed his hand, looked up and around as if to check that he was not being watched, and then backed off slowly. “I think I got a result,” Costas said. “I told him he wouldn’t get a treat unless he obeyed you.”

  “You mean the ROV operator, or Joey?”