‘Rocket man, that’s what I’m going to call you,’ added Costas.
‘Apologies for the speed,’ Ibrahim said. ‘It’s a habit you pick up around here. I learned to do it when I was with a Sudanese naval attachment in Mogadishu. You go fast everywhere there, and avoid stopping at all costs.’
‘So what’s the lowdown here?’ Costas said, peering out of the closed window beside him.
‘There’s a local warlord who runs this district. His boys belt around in “specials” like those we used to see in Mogadishu, openly carrying AKs. It shouldn’t happen in Sudan any more, but it does. Basically they’re a continuation of the tribal fiefdoms that dotted this territory at the time the British arrived here, concentrating especially on these precious cultivable patches of land. Back in the old days, they made their loot from the slave trade. When you see how these places are run, you can understand how General Gordon found it so difficult to stamp it out. These days of course it’s drugs rather than slaves, and that’s why you don’t look over those mud-brick walls. It’s mostly poppies, but high-grade marijuana too.’
‘How does al’Ahmed fit in with this?’ Costas said. ‘The new official who got us here.’
‘Officially he’s a special appointee to oversee enhancement of the historical and archaeological evidence for Sudan in the period immediately before British rule, especially the era of the Mahdi, which is celebrated by many Sudanese as a time of independence between the Egyptian and the British regimes. That’s why he’s summoned you here, as a convenient way of getting the world’s top archaeological diving experts to have a look at the Abbas site. And he’s secured this area by promising police if needed. But you won’t be seeing any of those when we arrive, because unofficially his family controls most of these drug-producing areas, providing protection from inter-gang warfare and an assured market in return for a substantial cream of the profits, usually eighty per cent. One word from al’Ahmed and these people bow to his will. Those shifty young men you can see sitting on the wall ahead of us, the two with Kalashnikovs, those are our police. But we have to remember that al’Ahmed wears his official hat too and he has the authority to call in the real police if he decides he doesn’t need us any more.’
‘Great,’ said Costas, staring at the children who were banging at the door of the car. ‘Why do I have a bad feeling about this?’
Jack pursed his lips. He had felt uneasy all the way from Semna, and now, seeing this place and sensing the atmosphere, he was beginning to question his decision to agree to a visit. He looked at the riverbank a few metres ahead. ‘How far out is the wreckage?’
‘The most likely site’s about two hundred metres out, and thirty metres deep,’ Ibrahim replied. ‘It should be a quick dive straight from shore to see whether there’s anything worth looking at. We can be in and out within two hours and back on the road to Semna.’
Jack tapped the dashboard. ‘Okay. Let’s do it.’
‘Watch the kids.’
They all got out of the car at the same time, and were immediately swarmed by about a dozen children. Jack firmly pushed two boys away and prevented another from looping his finger around his watch. The two young men with Kalashnikovs sauntered over, and one of them raised his rifle in the air. There was a deafening crack and the children quickly dispersed, scattering into the irrigation ditches and alleys surrounding the fields. One of the men swaggered up to Jack and put out his hand, grasping Jack’s in an iron grip. ‘Hassid Saib told us to look after you, and we will. No more trouble from small boys, eh? Or we shoot them, see, like little pigs.’ The man aimed his rifle here and there, laughing, the other hand still firmly holding Jack’s. ‘You give us a little baksheesh, huh, and maybe we give you something from our fields, eh? You Americans always like our hashish.’
‘Nobody said anything about money,’ Costas said.
Ibrahim walked up to the man, and they spoke in Sudanese. He turned to Jack. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t anticipated this. Can you do a hundred dollars to share between them?’
‘Then no more?’ Jack said.
Ibrahim spoke again to the man. ‘If any more men come asking for money, they will shoot them.’
‘That’s not exactly what I had in mind,’ Jack said.
‘It’s posturing. I’d give him the money from our cashbox, but it’s best that he sees you doing it. He knows you’re the boss.’
Jack produced a roll of notes from his back pocket and handed it over. The man released his grip, smiled, and took out an enormous spliff from his front shirt pocket, licking one end and putting it in his mouth, then lighting it. He took a deep drag and passed it to Jack, who patted his chest and declined. Ibrahim spoke to the man again. ‘I told him it’s the diving. You should never smoke before a dive.’
‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s get moving.’ The two men sauntered back to their companions, split the roll of notes between them and resumed their seats on the wall, passing the spliff between them. Ibrahim opened the back of the Toyota and Jack and Costas quickly donned their equipment, then lumbered down to the shore and stepped into the muddy sludge on the edge. The river here was very different to Semna, more heavily silted and sluggish, and they were going to have a more difficult time seeing underwater. Jack pushed the men with guns from his mind and tried to focus on the excitement of being the first since 1884 to dive on the Abbas, with the possibility that they might find antiquities that had been left by the local salvors, who would have had little interest in them. He flipped down his visor, watched Costas do the same and then slipped into the water, swimming out on the surface until he reached a point close to the edge of a little island. The river bore little obvious resemblance to the descriptions of this place in 1884, when Colonel Butler of the river column had visited it and seen wreckage on the foreshore, but Jack and Ibrahim had compared a satellite image with the sketch maps from the time and estimated that a position about fifty metres off the southern tip of the island would land them on any wreckage, if it still existed.
He stopped in the water, gave an okay sign and a thumbs-down to Costas, and then raised his arm to signal their descent to Ibrahim on the shore. He could see that the men were now ranged along the bank; he watched as two more Toyotas hurtled into the parking place, screeched around and disgorged their occupants, all of them carrying guns. Jack remembered the murder of Colonel Stewart and his party on that fateful day when the steamer had run ashore here in September 1884, when a duplicitous local official had offered them hospitality and they had all been killed. Ibrahim was right. This was definitely not a good place. He turned to Costas, who was still on the surface, watching the shoreline as well. He clicked on his intercom. ‘Let’s get this done as quickly as possible. I want out of here.’
‘Roger that.’
Jack dropped below the surface. Seeing that the water visibility was no more than three or four metres, he swam close to Costas so that they were within visual range. He bled his buoyancy compensator and they quickly descended almost twenty metres to the river bottom, a dark brown bed of mud and sludge. ‘Compass bearing fifty-two degrees,’ he said, monitoring the directional readout data inside his visor. ‘We’ll do one transit for twenty metres, swim five metres south-west, do another transit, and call it a day if we don’t find anything.’
‘Let’s hope we do,’ Costas said. ‘I want to make this worthwhile.’
They began to swim slowly forward, three to four metres apart, scanning the riverbed for any anomalies. Almost immediately Costas sank down and pointed at a feature poking out of the sludge. ‘I may be wrong, but I think that’s a gun mounting,’ he said.
Jack swam over to take a look, suddenly excited again. ‘Probably a four-pounder, a typical deck gun for a steamer. That’s promising.’
‘Look ahead, Jack.’
Out of the gloom a large section of wooden planking came into view, curving round to a rudder and up to a railing that had rusty metal slabs attached to it, evidently armour plating. ‘That’s got to be it,�
�� Jack enthused. ‘Gordon had all of his river steamers armoured to the point where they became top-heavy, but it kept them pretty well protected from the Mahdi’s guns. You can see the dents of bullet impacts all over the place. This thing has really been through the wars.’
They swam through a gap in the frame and over the deck of the vessel. A good deal of planking had been removed and the deckhouse superstructure was largely flattened, but the vessel was in surprisingly good condition considering that it had been exposed to salvage at low water. Jack had to remind himself that he was no longer in seawater; that unlike the Beatrice in the Mediterranean this was a wreck where much of the wooden and metal structure could survive in the fresh water of the Nile in a good state of preservation. In the middle of the collapsed deck structure they swam over the large rotund mass of one of the boilers, collapsed sideways but remarkably intact. Jack stared at it, remembering how they had been a mixed blessing in 1884, providing steam power that made the boats the only screw-propulsion vessels on the upper Nile, but requiring such quantities of wood that they quickly outstripped the meagre local supply, forcing crews to demolish houses and even shaduf devices in their insatiable demand for fuel.
Jack sank down to the silt, leaving Costas to explore the other side of the boiler, and looked around. It was immediately apparent that any attempt to discover smaller artefacts and spilled crates would require a major excavation project, with airlifts and dredges to remove the overburden of sludge that had buried much of the wreckage. If there were antiquities from Gordon’s collection here, they were unlikely to find them today. He tapped his intercom. ‘I think we’ve got the result we want. We found the wreck, it’s in good condition and it could be excavated.’
‘Jack, come round here.’ Costas had gone head first into a corroded hole in the deck below the boiler, leaving only his fins protruding. ‘There’s something wedged under the boiler plate. It’s a large slab of stone. I think it might have markings on it. Come down beside me and see if you can help me push it out.’
Jack swam round and squeezed through the hole, coming upright beside Costas. The slab looked perhaps a metre by a metre and a half in area, and about ten centimetres thick. He pulled himself past Costas, and inspected it as closely as he could. The edges were coarse and uneven, as if the slab had been hacked away from a larger piece. But the few centimetres of upper surface he could see were smooth and polished. He pushed his hand in further, and felt incised lines and a definite cartouche. There was no doubt about it. This was from an ancient Egyptian wall relief, far larger than any other that he knew of this far south in the Sudan, from a major temple or other monument. It looked as if it had been packed in multiple wrappings which had largely perished, leaving a compacted mass of burlap and cordage jamming the slab firmly beneath the boiler.
‘I don’t think we’re going to move it, Jack,’ Costas said. ‘I think this was deliberately wedged in here, by someone who wanted to hide it.’
‘That could only be Gordon,’ Jack said. ‘He might have been fearful of something this large being pilfered or damaged.’
‘It’s certainly kept it free from looting until now,’ Costas said.
‘Let me try to get closer,’ Jack said. ‘There’s a hieroglyphic cartouche in there, and I may be able to make it out.’ He wriggled past Costas and put his hand further into the gap over the slab, feeling more of it. He found the cartouche again, and felt it as if it were Braille, his eyes shut. His knowledge of hieroglyphics was not that of an Egyptologist, but he had learned to identify this one. ‘It’s our old friend Akhenaten,’ he murmured. ‘Now where does Gordon get a slab like this with Akhenaten’s name on it?’ He had a sudden hunch, and felt the lines that extended around the cartouche, imagining in his mind’s eye how they might cover the entire slab and a larger original depiction. He remembered the carving he had seen in that fleeting second in the wreck of the Beatrice, on the slab inside the sarcophagus. He was certain it was the same pattern. Then he remembered the depiction of Akhenaten in the crocodile temple, the missing slab in the centre that he was convinced was the key to understanding these images, to seeing them for what they really were. He pushed his hand in to a point where he felt the centre of the image might lie, but it was completely sealed beneath the packing material. ‘We’re going to have to come back,’ he said. ‘This is really important. As big as anything we’ve found yet.’ He withdrew his hand and pushed back from the wreckage, and then rose alongside Costas out of the hole. ‘I’m not saying anything about this to al’Ahmed. We’ll tell him about the wreck, which is supposed to be his main interest. If we talk about antiquities, then this site will be stripped bare before we’re back.’
‘If he sends down divers of his own, they’ll find this anyway,’ Costas said. ‘Keeping mum would just be staving off the inevitable.’
‘If we play our cards right, it’ll be us doing the excavation,’ Jack said. ‘Then we can reveal this find first to the Khartoum museum, and bring it up under controlled conditions so that nobody else walks away with it. Antiquities like this are worth millions and are used to lubricate drug deals. And we know al’Ahmed has a special interest in Akhenaten. He may even know about this slab and just be using us to find the wreck and establish its existence. We need to play a very careful game.’
The high-pitched whine of an outboard motor approached at high speed from some distance away. When it was over their location, it turned round and idled. ‘Sounds like a Zodiac-sized outboard, sixty or eighty hp,’ Costas said. ‘The only guys out here I can imagine having those will be the police. That’s encouraging if they’ve finally arrived, though I don’t want to ascend into a revving outboard if they’re other people who don’t know we’re here. I vote we swim up along the riverbed to shore.’
Jack nodded, and they set off underwater. After about a hundred metres the riverbed rose to less than ten metres depth, and then it became too shallow to justify remaining submerged. The sound of the outboard was still some distance away, over the site, and it seemed safe to ascend. Costas gave the thumbs-up sign, and they both rose together, face to face, only a stone’s throw from shore.
Jack knew something was wrong even before they broke surface. Pulsating orange lights seemed to revolve in the water, and they heard a loudspeaker in Sudanese. Three police cars with flashing lights were parked beside the Toyota, and the inflatable suddenly revved up and gunned towards them, sweeping round dangerously close and coming to a halt. Two policemen in combat gear were sitting at the back carrying assault rifles, and in between them a Sudanese man in a suit and tie with a police badge on his belt stood up with his hands on his hips, staring at them. Jack flipped back his visor. ‘Do you speak English? Is there a problem?’
The man shook his head and motioned them to shore. Costas was already struggling out of the sludge, and Jack joined him. Unclipping their helmets, they walked into a blaze of lights. Jack shaded his eyes, spotting Ibrahim sitting in a car with a policeman taking some form of statement. ‘Ibrahim! What’s going on?’
A policeman moved up to him and raised his rifle, and Jack immediately put his hands up, followed by Costas. He felt his harness being roughly unclipped and his backpack drop to the ground. Someone grabbed one wrist and then the other, handcuffing them behind his back. He could see that Costas was receiving the same treatment, and they were both pushed forward into the glare. ‘What the hell is going on?’ Jack said angrily to the nearest policeman. ‘Why are we being arrested?’
Ibrahim appeared in front of him, followed by two policemen. ‘Listen to me, Jack. They’re not going to arrest me. I’m going to drive back to Semna immediately. They’ve stripped the car and taken your mobile phones, everything. I’ve seen this before. All you’ll get back when they dump you across the Egyptian border will be your passports. But I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Why are we being arrested?’ Jack said. ‘What for?’
A policeman stood between Ibrahim and Jack, patting a truncheon, but Ibrahim spoke
to him quickly in Sudanese and the man stepped aside grudgingly, a scowl on his face. Ibrahim turned to Jack. ‘I’m not supposed to be talking to you. You’re not supposed to have contact with anyone until you cross the border. Once you remove all of your gear they’ll blindfold you and take you in separate cars. Nobody will tell you anything. But you’ve been arrested for diving on an archaeological site without a permit, and for attempting to steal antiquities. That carries a statutory sentence of ten years. You’re getting off lightly.’
‘But we had a permit,’ Jack exclaimed.
‘We had permission, not a permit. There was nothing on paper. Everything was at the whim of al’Ahmed, and he’s clearly decided to revoke his support. It was always going to be a risk.’
‘We find it for him, and then he deports us,’ Jack said. ‘It was a setup.’
‘Be cool, Jack. And you too, Costas. Go with the flow and don’t provoke them. You can shout as much as you like after you’ve crossed the border. But one thing you can be sure of is that you won’t be allowed back in the Sudan while this man holds the strings of power in the antiquities department.’
20
Khartoum, 25 January 1885
Major Edward Mayne lay against the crumbling mud-brick wall of the fort, peering through his telescope over the Nile at the low buildings of the city some eight hundred yards away. He took a deep breath, then dropped his head down and swallowed hard to stop himself from retching. They had smelled the city from miles off, an occasional waft in the air, then a rancid backdrop that had tainted every breath, and finally the sickening, honey-sweet smell that assailed him now, a stench of decay combined with the fetid odour of the river, which was too sluggish to wash away the filth that oozed into it, leaving it mouldering and fly-ridden on the mudbanks that lined the shore. From a distance they had seen flocks of vultures wheeling over the city, and as they approached they watched the birds drop down and pull indescribable trophies from the river mud – lumps of gristle and strings of bones barely hanging together – and fly off with them to their desert feasting grounds to the west. Four weeks ago at the cataract he had mused on the fact that they were drinking water that had flowed past here, past Gordon, but now it made him sick to his stomach. He had known that Khartoum would be a city on its last legs, a place of starvation and disease and death, but nothing could have prepared him for this.
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