Emerald

by Brian January

  When the transaction was completed, he shut the case and put his hand on the door latch. “I’ll let myself out.”

  Emerging onto the street, he closed the door, leaving the case on the seat behind him.

  The limo purred away from the curb.

  Watching the car disappear, Belisarius thought about the fortune he had amassed from the Vril bars over the years. For his own protection, he had secreted them in private warehouses and storage lockers all over Europe and refused to sell them to his unknown purchaser except one-at-a-time. That was his life insurance policy. The purchaser had no idea how many of the bars he owned, and there was no doubt that he wanted more.

  He always wanted more.

  Whoever the buyer was, it made good business sense to keep Belisarius alive.

  Standing for a moment at the curb, he let a self-satisfied smile pull at his lips. He had to assume the buyer was after the same goal as the Russians: the oil under the Arctic Ocean.

  The smile widened. They could do whatever they liked, for all he cared. But for himself, it was far more profitable to sell his goods and services to both sides.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Giza Plateau, Egypt

  COLD light from a spangle of constellations shone down from a blue-black sky, turning Khafre’s pyramid into a silhouetted black triangle and the desert plain into a limitless sheet of solid darkness. April had parked another rented Land Rover in the gravel lot near the pyramid complex. After Skarda had shown his permit to a guard, they’d skirted around the crumbling granite façade of the Temple of the Sphinx, moving west around the flank of the colossal statue of the human-headed lion.

  “The Sphinx was built by the Pharoah Khafre, one of the sons of Cheops, who himself built the Great Pyramid, the fourth king of the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom,” Flinders explained as she wobbled with unwieldy steps over the sand. Like Skarda and April, she was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and heavy boots. “He also built the second great pyramid on the Plateau. He was one of the first to incorporate the name of the sun god Re or Ra into his name as Re-Horakhty, meaning ‘Re-Horus of the Horizon’, the place where the sun rose every day in the eastern sky. This was his way of claiming descent from Re, who was conceived of at that time as the eye of the falcon-god Horus. So the Sphinx was carved in the image of Khafre as the manifestation of Re-Horakhty. That’s why the ancient Egyptian word for the Sphinx was shesepankh, which means ‘living image of’.”

  “Here’s something cool! The Sphinx is carved out of soft sandstone and would have eroded away long ago if it hadn’t been buried by the sand many times over the ages. When Napoleon found it in 1798, it was buried up to its neck! You see the nemes, the royal headdress up there? It once had a uraeus, the sacred cobra, carved as part of it, but it was used for target practice by the Turks. The nose is gone, too. Legend has it that Napoleon’s soldiers shot it off with a cannonball, but there are illustrations that date prior to the French invasion that show it noseless. The face also had a long, braided beard, worn away by erosion, and there are still traces of paint on the sandstone, proving that it had once been painted red, blue, and yellow.”

  “Is there any evidence for hidden chambers here?” Skarda asked.

  Flinders considered for a moment. “Well...that’s a good question. The problem is, all we have is anecdotal information from ancient sources and a lot of pseudoscientific speculation from our day. Take the age of the Sphinx, for example. There’s absolutely no doubt that it was built during Khafre’s reign about twenty-five hundred years ago. Yet there are all kinds of theories that it’s much older, mainly based on the weathering patterns of the limestone. Fifty million years ago, the Giza Plateau was a shallow sea, and as it receded, it left a shoal and a coral reef which turned into limestone bedrock. This is what the sculptors of the Sphinx used as a substrate. The limestone that composes the statue alternates between very hard and very soft layers, so, obviously, these layers will weather and erode at different rates accordingly. Now here’s what the dissenters say. There’s also a tomb erected by a nobleman named Debehen, built during the same time period as the Sphinx and virtually next door to it that shows a different pattern of weathering than the Sphinx. According to these theorists, if the tomb of Debehen and the Sphinx were really built at the same time, then they should show the same weathering patterns. Therefore, the Sphinx must be much older. But the truth is, Debehen’s tomb is significantly higher in elevation than the Sphinx and doesn’t share the same varying layers of hardness and softness. So that shoots down those theories!

  “But to answer your question, some recent evidence shows that the limestone bedrock on which the Sphinx is built is riddled with holes and caverns—so it could be very possible that there are natural chambers under the statue which ancient people shaped for their own ends. And ancient writers do speak of this. Herodotus, for example, wrote that the Egyptian priests talked about a series of chambers under the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and he said he had personally visited the Labyrinth near Lake Moeris, a massive complexof fifteen hundred underground rooms. The Greek philosopher Crantor corroborated this. The fourth-century BCE Syrian philosopher Iamblichus referred to an entrance between the paws of the Sphinx guarded by a bronze gate that led to subterranean galleries. The Roman natural historian Pliny wrote about a tomb and a great treasure deep below the statue and another Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, confirmed the existence of subterranean chambers that led to the interior of Khufu’s Pyramid, where ancient wisdom was supposed to have been stored prior to the great flood.”

  “Let’s hope they’re right,” Skarda said.

  At this point they were close to the northern flank of the statue. To their left a restored causeway ran a hundred-and-fifty feet from the Valley Temple on the south side of the Sphinx to the Mortuary Temple in front of Khafre’s Pyramid. Skarda knew that Stephen Cowell had sunk his shaft into the bedrock between the rear of the Sphinx and the area known as “Campbell’s Tomb”, where earlier archaeologists had discovered other shafts.

  “There it is!” he called out, pointing. Starlight outlined a makeshift metal cage erected over a canvas tarp about ten feet square that had been staked into the sand.

  Dialing the combination on a padlock, he opened the entrance gate of the cage, standing aside as April came up next to him, shrugging off a collapsible rope ladder from her shoulder. He glanced at it ruefully. Cowell had said that the bottom of the shaft lay over a hundred feet down, so it wasn’t going to be fun descending a swaying ladder in pitch darkness.

  Quickly they pried off the stakes and lifted off the tarp, revealing a black square of darkness. April staked down the ladder and let the rungs unfurl over the edge.

  “I’ll go first,” she said. “Then Flinders in the middle, in case anything goes wrong.” Without hesitation she swung her legs over the side and disappeared.

  Flinders blew out a lungful of air. “I’ll say it again—how the hell did I get myself mixed up in this?”

  Grinning, he grabbed her hands, helping her over the side. Then he shouldered his pack and followed. An instant later deep darkness closed around him, seemingly untouched by the distant starlight. He shivered a bit as the warmth of the outside air gave way to a sepulchral coolness. Looking down, he could see the LED April had looped around her neck bouncing as she lowered herself rung by rung. Even though the stone wall seemed bone-dry, it smelled of ancient mold and must, causing him to hack out a cough.

  “Campbell’s Tomb was excavated in the 1830’s,” Flinders explained as she climbed down, placing each foot with deliberate care on the ladder rungs. She was talking to calm her nerves. “It was a shaft like this one, but shorter, maybe fifty feet. The archaeologists found three sarcophagi dating to the twenty-sixth Dynasty. It was common practice for well-to-do families or families of high officials connected with the king to bury their dead in deep shafts which were then filled up with sand to prevent tomb looting. More evidence that this whole plateau is littered with sha
fts and underground chambers eroded out of the limestone bedrock.”

  “Did they find any secret tunnels back then?” Skarda called down.

  “No, unfortunately.”

  Below their feet, April had reached bottom, unlooping the lamp from her neck and panning it around the chamber. Flinders jumped from the last rungs of the ladder, landing with both feet on a granite floor carpeted with a thick layer of ancient dust and sand.

  A few seconds later Skarda’s boots thumped on the solid floor. He thumbed on his own LED. The light outlined a low door cut into the south wall, surrounded by a carved red granite architrave.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Ducking under the lintel, he entered a low-ceilinged chamber about six feet wide by twenty feet long, hewn from the solid rock, its walls plastered and painted red. On the east wall three pillars carved from pink granite framed niches cut into the wall, empty and devoid of ornamentation. A group of alabaster jars sat in one corner. On a raised dais of rock rested two twelve-foot-long sarcophagi sculpted from white Turah limestone, their lids ajar. If mummies had lain in the burial chests, they had been removed long ago.

  But in one of the niches a lighter rectangle in the dust showed where some object had once lain.

  “This must be where Stephen found the box with the papyrus,” Skarda said. He swung around, crossing to the opposite wall. Here marks had been chipped into the plaster by a chisel or shovel. “This must be the false wall he was talking about. It looks like he made a couple of tries at getting through.”

  April moved up next to Skarda, hunkering down. From her pack she extracted a block of C-4 and cut it in half, pressing each chunk against the bottom of the wall about three feet apart.

  Flinders rushed up, laying a hand on Skarda’s forearm and staring up at him. “I know we need to do this. Just promise me,” she said, “when we can, we come back and explore these finds properly. This is so important.”

  “I promise,” Skarda said. “When this is over, the site will be all yours.”

  April finished pressing the C-4 into position. She inserted a blasting cap into each block. “Ten seconds!”

  Flinders yelped and they raced back through the doorway, slamming their backs against the protection of the outer walls. With a loud boom the explosive detonated, sending shattered stone crashing around the chamber. Smoke and dust poured past them through the open doorway.

  Plowing through the dense cloud, April waved her LED back and forth in front of her to carve a path to the false wall, her boots crunching over the limestone and plaster shards that littered the floor. At the bottom of the wall, a eight-foot triangle-shaped section of limestone had toppled forward amid smaller chunks of stone.

  At her heels, Skarda played his light over the smoking hole.

  Sand.

  Hard-packed, like a cement wall.

  Behind him, Flinders groaned in frustration.

  He glanced back and grinned at her, then coughed. “Well, nobody said this was going to be a piece of cake.”

  ___

  Fifteen minutes later they had cleared away the loose rubble by hacking at the plaster with collapsible shovels, enlarging the hole to open up most of the wall. Then they started in on the sand, working outward from the middle where they supposed a door might be. Once the shovels bit into it, the sand began to yield, breaking away in large flowing chunks that poured out onto the floor. But it wasn’t easy work. Sweat poured down Skarda’s face in the hot, arid atmosphere, and his shirt was quickly soaked.

  “Let’s hope this is just a plug,” he said, breathing heavily. “Otherwise it’s going to take weeks!”

  Flinders’ job was to clear away the conical mounds of sand that were piling up at the base of the wall. She was trying her best, but the work was quickly tiring her.

  April’s shovel flashed in the lamplight and struck deep. “Getting a hole!” she called out.

  Skarda aimed his lamp, seeing a ragged black aperture widening under her shovel strokes. Stepping close beside her, he joined in, hacking at the sand. Soon they had widened a three-foot-wide rectangle, big enough for Skarda to crawl through. April scraped away more sand, then aimed her flash into the dark hole and squinted inside.

  She turned back to the other two. “Copper handles. Just like the altar.”

  Skarda peered into the cavity. The hole they had dug ran about three feet deep, ending in a block of limestone from which the handles protruded.

  “We’re still going to have to clear the rest of the sand,” April told him.

  It was almost an hour later when April finally clawed the last of the sand away with her fingers while Skarda and Flinders trained their lamps inside the hole. Then she crawled partway into the opening, reaching out with both hands to turn one handle up and the other down. She backed out quickly.

  Stooping, Flinders waited as a rough grating sound rose to their ears. Then the plug rolled back along its shaft as if pulled by cables from the other side. It crashed against an unseen stone floor on the opposite side of the wall.

  Skarda thrust his head into the opening, making out a squarish shaft just big enough to accommodate the width of his shoulders. The shaft ended in an open space beyond the reach of his light.

  Lowering herself to her hands and knees, April crawled inside. He watched her progress, her lamp casting a jerking cone of light in front of her. At the end, she halted, panning her light around the next chamber.

  “It’s okay,” she called out, and dropped through.

  Skarda followed behind Flinders, worming through the constricted tunnel as fast as he could. When he had squeezed through the opening, he jumped down and straightened, seeing what looked like an antechamber with straight vertical walls smoothed with plaster and painted a bright red, like the previous room. On the southern wall another doorway opened to a staircase disappearing into the gloom. April moved toward it.

  Caked with centuries of sand and dust, the stone steps canted downward at a forty-five degree angle. To Skarda, the passageway seemed more devoid of light than the tomb above, but he knew this was just an illusion caused by the low ceiling and the rough walls that hemmed him in on both sides. The stairs seemed interminable, leading them deeper under the bedrock of the Plateau. The stench of fetid air overpowered his nostrils.

  When he estimated they were at least a hundred and fifty feet below the level of the desert, the staircase leveled out into a short lobby, where a high rectangular doorway opened onto a narrow corridor paved with limestone blocks, leading east. Skarda followed the women into the passageway, panning his light back and forth. Here the foul air clotted his nostrils even more forcefully. He was finding it harder to breathe and his heart hammered in his chest. They passed another open doorway that opened onto a chamber where niches held massive sarcophagi of red granite and basalt and the walls were painted with brightly-colored scenes of the occupants of the crypts as they had been in daily life.

  The corridor led them onward, passing more open rooms and sarcophagi. At times the passageway cut north at a perpendicular angle, then straightened out again; at times it advanced into staircases that twisted up toward the surface.

  Skarda calculated that by now they had to be in the vicinity of the great paws of the Sphinx, perhaps even directly under them. But with no visual clues, it was only guesswork. They moved on, their footsteps sending up eerie echoes, muted by centuries of dust. Then up ahead, the corridor ended unexpectedly. April’s beam picked out a doorway at least twelve feet high, whose lintel was carved with intricate lotus blossom patterns, ibises, and hieroglyphs.

  Flinders stopped to study them. “These are proto-Dynastic,” she said, her voice tingling with excitement. She pointed. “There it is! The glyph for Djehuty! I think we’ve found it!”

  From inside the doorway April’s voice echoed. “Park.”

  He stepped into the chamber. April’s lamp pierced through the darkness, picking out the impassive features of the statue of a man, twice as big as life-size, sit
ting on a throne carved out of white marble, his hands crossed over his chest. His head had been modeled to appear shaven and his deep-set eyes stared out over a long, hooked nose.

  Behind them Flinders gasped. She raced for the statue, crouching to examine the long lines of glyphs carved into the base of the throne.

  Skarda gazed around the room in wonder. It was massive, with walls and floor constructed of slabs of white marble that reflected lamplight back to him in the spaces free of dust. The top of the vaulted ceiling, upheld by thick marble columns marching in rows on the four sides of the hall, was lost to his sight in gloom The capital of each column had been carved with exquisitely detailed lotus flowers and papyrus reeds. More carved figures, eerily life-like and foreboding, stood in scooped niches between each of the columns.

  “It smells like a museum,” April muttered.

  Flinders turned her head. “This is the same script that was on the pillars,” she called back to them. “It’s Djehuty, all right. It basically tells the same story of the flooding of the Euxine Lake and the flight to Egypt.”