Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  For Jack it should have been a scene of almost unbearable poignancy, watching his friend in his trusty old shorts and boots, still streaked with dirt from his last excavation, leave his beloved Egypt perhaps for the last time. But any reflection was instantly cut short by a cacophony of gunfire and engine revving coming along the highway from the west, the first of the trucks screeching onto the quay mere minutes after the Lynx had taken off. One of them disgorged half a dozen gunmen, who raced up to the fort, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, one of them waving the black flag of the extremists. Within minutes they had entered the fort and raised the flag on a pole above the ramparts. Qaitbay Fort suddenly looked as it had been intended, a stronghold of medieval Islam, all indication of its use over the past few years as an archaeological institute obliterated.

  Two trucks raced up to the fort and this time let off a cluster of handcuffed prisoners, all of them Egyptian woman in Western dress, the gunmen rifle-butting them into the courtyard. Seconds later there was an earsplitting clatter of gunfire and the gunmen reappeared, leaving one man at the entrance, and piling back into the trucks. Jack turned away, feeling numb, glad only that Maurice and Aysha had not witnessed what had just happened. As the felucca chugged out into the basin toward the sea, he steeled himself for more to come, keeping his eyes glued on the gunmen at the fort. Suddenly the air was rent by another explosion, deeper and more resonant than the others, and then a rushing noise and the sound of shattering glass. “My God,” Costas exclaimed. “They’ve torched the library.”

  Jack spun around, staring at the far side of the harbor. A gas truck had been driven into the foyer of the Bibliotheca and exploded, its wrecked form lying upside down on the road in front. The huge disk shape of the Bibliotheca was wreathed in flame, like a burning sun rising from the eastern horizon. Jack could barely breathe; his mind was reeling. It was as if he had been transported back fifteen hundred years to an event that seemed fossilized in history, too awful to comprehend. But this was real, and happening before his eyes. For the second time in two millennia, the great library of Alexandria had been destroyed by religious extremists, by those who believed that knowledge was offensive to their god. Jack could hear the screams of people streaming out of the building, and bursts of gunfire from the trucks that had ranged up beside the wreck of the tanker, their machine guns trained on the steps and raking them every time another person appeared. It was not just the books that were anathema to the extremists; it was those who had read them as well. In that instant the frailty of civilization seemed laid bare, the foundations of wisdom as fragile as those of morality, with those who espoused it as vulnerable as the women who a few minutes before had paid for their freedom of expression with their lives.

  Another burst of automatic fire rang out from near the fort, and Jack spun around. A truck with a gunman on the roof was hurtling along the edge of the harbor to the point closest to the felucca, no more than a hundred yards distant. It screeched to a halt. The gunman vaulted out of the rear and began to taunt a fisherman who was gathering up his net on the quay. The gunman was prodding him with the barrel of his Kalashnikov. The fisherman backed away, his hands in the air, gesticulating toward his family in a small car beside them. The gunman raised his rifle and shot him in the head, watched his body jerk back and fall into the harbor, and then ran along the quay looking for others.

  Mohammed gestured frantically at Jack and Costas to get down. They dropped into the scuppers and crawled forward to where Lanowski was already lying under the deck in the bow of the boat, absorbed in checking the battery in one of the beacons. Jack looked back and saw Mohammed unfurl and raise a black flag in the stern, and then slowly swing the tiller to take them farther out into the basin toward the entrance. With any luck there would be more interesting and easier targets for the gunmen than a felucca setting out to sea, especially one that appeared to be sporting the flag of the extremists.

  Jack drew himself up farther into the crawl space in the bow of the felucca, wedged his feet beside one of their kit bags, and pushed a sleeping bag forward as a makeshift pillow. He felt the bulge of the Beretta in the holster on his chest, and shifted slightly to make sure the grip was accessible in case it was needed. He could make out Lanowski and Costas lying in the gloom beside him, their faces etched with the reality of what they were undertaking. They all knew there was no going back now. Even if they had decided to abort, Jack would never have risked calling back the Lynx to a place that was crawling with trigger-happy gunmen who almost certainly had SAMs in their trucks. The only way ahead was the one they had mapped out, from one burning cauldron to another, but with a plausible exit strategy. They would stick to their plan.

  Jack shifted again, trying to find a more comfortable position, and shut his eyes. He tried to forget what he had just seen, and to think instead of those who had gone before him down the Nile in search of fabulous discoveries, of the sand travellers of the past, those who breathed in the dust of the desert and felt the brush of the wind that blew from the pyramids. He thought of what could lie beneath, of sealed chambers full of treasures, of rows of pottery jars brimming with papyri that might contain all the lost wisdom of the ancient world.

  The chug of the engine increased to a throb, and he felt the bow rise. He opened his eyes and peered through a crack in the planking, seeing the end of the quay and hearing the slap of the waves as they passed into open water. The engine began to vibrate badly, seeming to jar every bone in his body, and each slap of the waves felt like a body blow. The movement of the boat had released a rancid smell of fish from the scuppers, and wafts of diesel smoke erupted every few seconds from a hole in the engine. The great triangular sail would remain furled until they had traversed the coast and veered south into the Nile, where a good following wind might allow them to ease off on the engine.

  He rolled over again and looked at Costas. He was splayed out on top of the kit bags, his mouth open and emitting snores, oblivious to everything around him, rocking to and fro with every shudder of the boat.

  Jack swallowed hard. He was beginning to regret devouring the food that Mohammed had offered him on the quayside. He stared at the planks above him, wishing he could be outside and focusing on the horizon, and glanced at his watch. They had ten hours to go until they passed Cairo.

  It was going to be a long day.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was dark by the time the felucca passed through the northern suburbs of Cairo, the lingering heat of the day tempered by a torrential downpour that had left a mist over the banks of the river. Earlier they had used the boat’s huge triangular lateen sail to make their way with the wind against the current, but with the city looming ahead Mohammed and his son had furled the sail and lowered the mast to make the boat less conspicuous and had fired up the old diesel engine again.

  As they chugged past vessels heading north, Mohammed had exchanged a few words with their captains and learned that everyone who could was leaving Cairo by whatever means possible, by river or road or on foot, with groups of people even striking out across the desert with all they could carry to find a place to hide and wait out the worst of what was happening in the city.

  There had been a tense half hour as they passed the center of the city and the walled enclosure of Fustat, Old Cairo, near the Ben Ezra synagogue, where Jack and Maria had explored the Geniza chamber only four days previously. Jack had tried to make out the medieval walls in the gloom and the mist, remembering that this was the place where he and Costas were due to rendezvous with Aysha before dawn and to find the felucca for their return journey up the Nile to the sea. Between now and then, they should finally have answered the question that had been eating at Jack for months now, ever since they had returned from their explorations in Sudan, since he and Costas had seen the shaft of light beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure. He glanced at Costas’ recumbent form beneath the foredeck of the boat, next to the spot where Jack had just spent several of the most uncomfortable hours of his life hidden fr
om sight during the long daylight passage down the Nile. At least one of them would have had a good rest.

  They had begun to pass amorphous shapes floating in the river that Jack knew must be bodies, but until now the city had been ominously quiet, with only the odd gunshot and distant scream. Then just before they reached Fustat, there had been the call to prayer, the muezzins and recordings from the minarets joining in the familiar cadences that seemed to undulate over the city, reaching a crescendo and then stopping suddenly. It had been more than a call to prayer; it had been a signal for the extremists. Seconds later the city erupted in gunfire and a cacophony of shrieking and yelling rising from all directions and echoing across the river. A long burst of automatic fire came at them from the east bank, the muzzle flashing like a distant jet of flame in the night, the bullets zipping overhead and several of them slapping into the side of the boat. Mohammed kept his nerve, staying in the central channel of the river, and the gunman soon turned his attention elsewhere, firing shorts bursts into groups of people who were running and tripping along the embankment.

  Jack knew that people were dying now, by the scores if not the hundreds, and that before the night was out the river would run with blood. As the glow of fires began to redden the night, he cast his mind back to the descriptions of Khartoum in Sudan a hundred and thirty years before. It had been the first city on the Nile to fall to the extremists. Those who were watching from the river then must have seen similar sights. Despite all the advances in technology, in weaponry and in communications, when it came to the razing of a city and the destruction of its inhabitants, little had changed through history. It was reduced to the same individual acts of savagery and horror that were little different from the time when the forces of jihad had first swept west across Africa almost fifteen hundred years before, or when the Crusaders had done the same in the name of their own faith.

  Jack huddled down again out of sight beneath the thwarts, watching the river through a slit in the planks. Soon the glow of Cairo was enveloped in darkness, and the sounds of gunfire receded into the night. He knew they must be nearing their destination, the ruined Napoleonic fort on the west bank of the river that Lanowski had identified as the point where the tunnel from the pyramid entered the Nile. He could see the screen of Lanowki’s computer now in the space in the bows opposite his own makeshift bed. A few moments later Lanowski emerged with his GPS receiver, his long lank hair coming out from under a woolen Jacques Cousteau hat and his face daubed black. Jack smiled to himself despite the grim scenes of the past hour. Lanowski had come into his own as IMU’s newest field operative, and he was clearly relishing it. He made his way up to Mohammed, exchanged a few words in Arabic, and then came back to Jack, crouching down and showing him the GPS readout and its convergence with the programmed position for the fort. “We’re less than a kilometer away,” he said quietly. “Time to wake Costas?”

  Jack nodded. “We’ve got to get our equipment ready. We can’t afford to linger once we get there.”

  “Roger that. Mohammed’s apprehensive about his return journey through the city. He thinks it’s only a matter of time before the gunmen find the police river launches and begin joyriding. He wants to be at his rendezvous point north of Cairo before that happens.”

  Costas blearily raised himself, banged his head on the deck above him, fell back, and then eased himself out of the space feet first. He turned around and pulled out the two gear bags that had made up his bed, and then cracked opened a water bottle and drained it. “What’s our ETA?” he asked gruffly.

  “About twenty minutes,” Lanowski said. “Time to saddle up.”

  “Saddle up?” Costas rubbed his eyes. “Since when are we cowboys?”

  “It’s what you said in that film. In the TV special about Atlantis. I watched it a couple of times to get the lingo.”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay. We’re cowboys.” Costas swayed slightly. “I need some coffee.”

  As if on cue, Mohammed’s son appeared with a tray of glasses of strong tea, and they each took one. Costas pulled out a bag of fat sandwiches and offered them around, taking a huge bite from one himself.

  “Always the sandwiches,” Lanowski said keenly. “Always New York deli. That’s in the film too.”

  “Yeah, well, life imitates art.” He swallowed and peered at Lanowski. “What’s with the commando paint?”

  “You should see your faces. They’d stand out like beacons to anyone watching from the shore.”

  Costas grunted, swallowed his last mouthful, wiped his hands, crouched down, and pulled his E-suit from his bag. “You help Jack on with his, and then you can zip me up. I’ve got a few additional bits and pieces I need to clip on.”

  “A shame you lost your old boiler suit in that volcano.”

  “Yeah.” Costas looked disconsolate for a moment. “It melted. I’ve kept the shreds of it in my cabin on Seaquest. It was great to wear that over my E-suit. I haven’t worked out how to carry tools properly since then.”

  Lanowski ducked down and pulled a package out of his own bag and handed it to Costas. “I hope you don’t mind. I took a look at that old one in your cabin to get the size.” He tore open the plastic, and an immaculate blue boiler suit complete with outsized leg and arm pockets came tumbling out.

  Costas stared. “Hey, Jacob. You’re the man.” He took the suit and held it out appreciatively. “It’s even the correct pattern, 1954 U.S. Navy submariner issue. Where the hell did you find this?”

  Lanowski shrugged. “eBay, of course. You can find everything on eBay. I reckoned you were likely to ditch this one with your E-suit at the end of this mission, so I ordered two. There’s another one hanging up behind the door in your cabin.”

  Costas looked at Jack, jerking a thumb at Lanowski. “This guy’s good. Really good. We should have him on all our dives.”

  Lanowski glanced at his GPS receiver. “Time to saddle up. I mean it this time.”

  Costas grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “Roger that.”

  —

  Twenty minutes later Jack was floating beside Costas on the starboard side of the felucca, the buoyancy in his E-suit holding him upright with his head and shoulders out of the water. Between them were the aquajets they planned to use to extend their exploration reach underwater. These compact propeller-driven units were capable of 2.5 horsepower with a battery life of up to three hours. The E-suit was an all-environment, Kevlar-reinforced protective shell developed at IMU and refined over the last ten years. It provided a dry interior with temperature control but gave the diver the agility of a wetsuit. Critical to its performance was the streamlined console on the back containing a breathing unit of choice, in this case a semi-closed-circuit oxygen rebreather ideal for maximizing bottom time in the shallow depths they were likely to encounter. The upper part of the console contained a computer that regulated oxygen output, monitored the diver’s physiology, and contained a two-way communication unit, all of it feeding into the helmet with a pivoting visor that was clamped on top of the E-suit. In a refinement since the early days, the helmet was now a closer fit to the head with a flexible neck made of the same material as the E-suit, allowing the diver to move almost without restriction. Jack loved the E-suit for the freedom it gave him, and for the adaptability that allowed them to use it in every conceivable environment, from the Arctic to the superheated water above an underwater volcano to the dive they were about to carry out now, into the murky depths of the Nile, searching for an ancient tunnel under the desert and what might lie beyond.

  Lanowski’s head reappeared over the gunwale and he stared down at them. He had prepared a comprehensive equipment checklist on his computer, something that Jack and Costas usually winged, and had just finished running through it with them. Jack could feel the bulge under his E-suit where his Beretta was holstered, and the slight discomfort of the shirt and lightweight jacket, casual trousers, and leather shoes he was wearing under the suit. He was ready to walk out of his E-suit into the streets o
f Cairo. They had run carefully through every scenario, assessing the best plan of action. Everything depended on them finding the tunnel, being able to get into it, and then finding an egress point. If there was no tunnel below, they would abort the mission here and now. And if there was no egress point farther along the tunnel, they would hope to return to this point, stash their suits in the ruins of the fort, and make their way along the riverbank to the north. As Jack floated there beside the felucca, seeing nothing below, everything seemed to hang in the balance. The yawning uncertainty seemed to eclipse all the hours and days of speculation, the endless juggling of scenarios and possibilities that had filled his mind since finding this spot had become a reality.

  Lanowski looked at Costas. “Double-check the two radio beacons.”

  “Roger that. One to be activated when we exit, the other when we reach the Nile.”

  “And the marker buoy?”

  Costas patted the front pocket of the boiler suit he had donned on top of his E-suit. “Roger that. We release it here as soon as we know we can get inside the tunnel.”

  “Is your GPS activated?”

  “Roger. The in-helmet display will navigate to the precise fix you calculated for the tunnel.”

  “Mohammed wants to stand off as soon as possible in the center of the river. He’s the world’s most level guy, as you could see from how cool he was going through Cairo, but he’s gotten twitchy. His son told me that this part of the river has a bad reputation among the felucca captains. They think it’s spooked. Apparently there are whirlpools, and some of the captains think they’re caused by river monsters. Probably nothing to worry about, just giant Nile carp inflated by rumor into monsters.”