Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  ‘A mortuary complex?’ Jack said. ‘A city of the dead?’

  ‘That’s what I’d have guessed,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘The ultimate preparation for the afterlife, like King Tut’s tomb but on a grand scale, a labyrinth of chambers under the pyramids. But I think it was more than that. I think Akhenaten envisaged the site of the pyramids as the main temple to the Aten. I think this underground place wasn’t shrouded in darkness like a lost tomb. I don’t think this was a city of the dead. I think this was a city of the living. A city of light.’

  ‘How do we get to it?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Do you remember the image of the smaller of the three pyramids on Corporal Jones’ plaque? It showed a line descending from the centre of the pyramid into the ground. As soon as Jack sent me that image from his aunt’s house, I was back here like a shot. I realised what something else I’d discovered while I was looking at those granite cartouches was all about. Or rather, something else that Little Joey discovered.’ He pointed to the tent set up beside the parked vehicles. ‘Follow me.’ He led them over, glanced at his watch, and then scanned the plateau in the direction of Cairo to the east. Jack knew that he was looking out for the telltale pall of dust from an approaching vehicle; they needed it to be their IMU equipment arriving from Alexandria and not a security convoy from the Egyptian authorities.

  Hiebermeyer ducked inside the tent and Jack followed, the others coming behind. He gestured towards a laptop open on a table surrounded by a jumble of wiring and control panels. The screen showed a frozen image of an interior space, with a dark cylindrical shape in the background and a metallic articulated arm in front. Costas leaned forward, staring. ‘That’s Little Joey!’ he exclaimed.

  Lanowski beamed at Costas. ‘I stripped her down so that she could get into the really narrow spaces. The way you’d configured her, she wasn’t going anywhere we wanted.’

  Costas turned his head slowly and stared at him. ‘You did what?’

  Lanowski beamed at him again. ‘This is a previously unknown passageway. I found it using the echo-sounder, and then we unblocked it and sent in the robot.’

  ‘It’s a shaft that lets in sunlight to the antechamber,’ Hiebermeyer added, his voice tinged with excitement. ‘It was when I saw the intensity of the beam and its direction that I realised we were on to something new. It shone down on to a slab of granite on the floor, one that Vyse seems to have left undisturbed, distracted perhaps by the discovery of the sarcophagus chamber. Little Joey triggered something and the slab slid aside. It’s like a well, with perfectly smooth sides, and the beam of light reflected off a polished surface and then far down into the depths. At the bottom is water, Jack. Water. That’s why you’re here. I believe that whatever lies below us was not only lit up by the light of the Aten, the beam of the sun streaming through the temple, but was also a place of underground canals linked to the Nile and therefore to the Nile’s source, the place in the desert far to the south that Akhenaten saw as the birthplace of the sun god.’

  ‘We’ll need climbing gear for that shaft,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘We’ve set up a wooden frame with a fixed belay rope to allow a descent. If you can get down there with diving equipment, we can see what lies at the bottom.’

  Jack stared at the screen, his mind racing. ‘What about Little Joey? She can operate underwater, can’t she?’

  Hiebermeyer coughed. ‘We’ve had a slight hitch.’

  Costas reached over and wiggled the control handle. The image on the screen remained frozen. He narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘You’ve got her stuck, haven’t you?’

  Lanowski opened his arms. ‘If I hadn’t streamlined her, she’d never have got into that passageway and we wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘And she’d never have got jammed.’ Costas stared at the jumble of cable around the computer. ‘I knew I should never have trusted anyone else with my toys. It’s going to take me a while to sort this out. The first thing is to get inside and try to free her physically.’

  ‘No time for that now,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘I’m expecting a visit from the Egyptian security chief any time. As far as they’re concerned, we’re just doing a visual evaluation of the new passageway. I need to get you and Jack into that pyramid with your equipment before they arrive.’

  ‘How did you get the security people to keep their distance until now?’ Jack asked.

  ‘I told them that Little Joey found a keg of gunpowder rammed into a crack above the entrance to the antechamber.’

  ‘Gunpowder?’ Costas said incredulously. He pointed at the cylindrical shape visible on the screen. ‘Is that what that is?’

  ‘It’s covered in black dust, the exuviae of insects and bats,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘But the wood of the barrel’s perfectly preserved.’

  ‘Standard early-nineteenth-century excavation technique,’ Jack said. ‘That’s how Vyse explored the interior of the pyramids. He blew his way through them.’

  Costas gestured at the vertical gash up the north side of the pyramid, and then at the fragmentary remains of blocks tumbled below on the desert floor. ‘Looks like someone had a good go at it there.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘You’re right, but not using gunpowder. That was the sultan Saladin’s son in the twelfth century, at the time of the crusades. He ordered the pyramids to be destroyed, but this was as far as they got before giving up.’

  ‘Why destroy the pyramids?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Same reason the Taliban ordered the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘Saladin’s son decided that the pyramids were against Islam. There’s been a threat from extremist groups in Egypt to carry on where he left off. The Egyptian government are taking it seriously.’

  Costas looked sceptically at the pyramid. ‘That would take a small thermonuclear bomb. One for each pyramid.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s a well-known fact that extremist groups by now have collected enough fissile materials from the former Soviet Union to make several devices big enough to do this kind of damage. It may seem like an extravagant waste of resources when they could bomb London or New York, but the analysts I’ve spoken to think otherwise. Destroy the pyramids and you destroy Egypt’s tourist economy. The radioactive fallout over the suburbs of Cairo wouldn’t necessarily turn the Egyptian people against the extremists, but with the right rhetoric it might make them feel that they had suffered the wrath of Allah for not having bowed to the cause before now. Egypt is already tottering towards becoming an Islamist state, and this could make it a fundamentalist one. With Egypt gone, the next in line would be Sudan and Somalia, and then Libya and Tunisia and Algeria. There would be a nuclear war in the Middle East, and Israel would be obliterated. The extremists would therefore gain far more for the cause of jihad by blowing up the pyramids than by setting off their bombs in a Western capital.’

  ‘Got you,’ Costas said. ‘So that explains the new perimeter fence being built around the plateau.’

  ‘It also explains why this is the last chance we’re ever likely to get for a look inside the pyramid. The whole of the Giza plateau is coming under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defence, rather than the Antiquities Authority. From now on, it’ll take an act of God to allow anyone to ferret around in places where a bomb might be concealed.’

  ‘What about our friend al’Ahmed from the Sudan?’ Costas asked. ‘He seemed to be after the same thing that we are. Jack read me a passage from General Gordon’s final journal volume about how the Mahdi as a young man found a temple by the Nile with that plaque of Akhenaten inside, the one that Gordon took and we located in the wreck of the Abbas. If al’Ahmed’s knowledge of the plaque goes back to the Mahdi, and if his divers manage to get it out of the wreck, he may by now have seen a depiction of the pyramid similar to the one that brought us here.’

  Jack pursed his lips. ‘I think t
he depiction in the crocodile temple and the one in the Nile temple found by the Mahdi were identical. The clue for us was the missing slab from the crocodile temple that showed the pyramid, whereas the other temple depiction may have been intact. If that also showed the clear image of the three temples at Giza, then al’Ahmed would be hot on this trail as well.’

  Aysha looked at Jack. ‘Ibrahim flew out from Wadi Halfa this morning to help get your gear together on Seaquest II for today’s dive. You wanted to get him out of the Sudan, and we did it in the nick of time. The IMU Lynx did a covert pick-up near the border and was chased by Sudanese police helicopters. I managed to collar him at Alexandria before I drove here, and he said that as of yesterday there had still been no diving on the Abbas, but that a team was being assembled. They’d needed to find Sudanese navy divers who were competent with the IMU equipment they confiscated from you. So I don’t think al’Ahmed is on our trail yet, though it can only be a matter of time. His family business is based in Egypt and he can pull strings here as well. It’s another reason why we wanted you and Costas here as quickly as possible, before someone in the Egyptian government who al’Ahmed can bribe decides to pull the rug from under us.’

  ‘But he’s not a fundamentalist,’ Costas said. ‘He’s not going to want to destroy this place.’

  ‘He’s an Islamist, and would ally himself with extremist groups if it furthers his interests,’ Aysha said. ‘But his focus is the same as ours. He wants to find Akhenaten’s City of Light. And we want to get there before he does. There may be something there just as potent for the future of world order as the fate of the pyramids, and we want to make sure it stays out of his control. We need to see what lies underneath the pyramid now.’

  ‘One question,’ Costas said. ‘What about that keg of gunpowder?’

  ‘I managed to uncoil the fuse, which is hanging down into the antechamber. You can still smell the sulphur on it.’

  Lanowski put a finger up, said, ‘Ah’, and then poked around in his lab coat pocket, producing a cheap orange lighter. He tested it, and threw it to Costas. ‘I bought this off a little boy at the entrance to the site. I felt sorry for him. I knew it would have a use.’

  Costas lit it and stared at the flame. ‘What exactly are you suggesting, Jacob?’

  ‘Well, Colonel Vyse did pretty well with it, didn’t he? Found a lot of stuff. Maybe he was on to something in that passageway.’

  Costas took his thumb off the lighter, thought for a moment and slowly nodded. ‘I’d have to get Little Joey out first, of course. What do you think, Jack?’

  Jack glanced at Sofia. ‘I don’t expect anyone’s mentioned it to you. Put Costas anywhere within sniffing distance of explosives and he’s gone.’

  Sofia marched up to Costas, took the lighter and tossed it back to Lanowski. ‘I have a better idea,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you use this to light the barbecue we’re going to have on the beach when this is all over. The party that Jack always promises Costas.’

  ‘The party that never happens,’ Costas said glumly. ‘Because there’s always some other fabulous treasure to discover.’

  Two Range Rovers came barrelling down the track towards them in a cloud of dust, pulling to a halt at the end of the walkway into the pyramid. Jack saw Ibrahim get out of the first vehicle, and an IMU helicopter crewman he recognised from Seaquest II. He put his hands on his hips and turned to the others, a steely look in his eyes. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The gear’s arrived. Let’s get this show on the road.’

  27

  ‘Jack! Hold tight!’

  A huge thud resounded through the burial chamber of the pyramid, shaking the condensation off the stone walls of the shaft where Jack was suspended precariously on a rope. He spun crazily around, kicking off the walls to stop himself from crashing into them, holding on to the rope that tethered him to the wooden frame they had set up over the top of the shaft. He raised the visor of his helmet and looked up, tasting the moisture in the air and seeing the wavering beam of Costas’ headlamp almost twenty metres above him. ‘What the hell was that?’ he yelled, his voice booming up the shaft.

  ‘It was in the entrance tunnel,’ Costas called down. ‘A giant stone slab dropped into it about five metres up from the burial chamber. It was deliberate, an ancient booby trap. One of those devices to deter tomb robbers. You must have triggered something on the way down.’

  Jack tried to slow his swinging, and looked at the curious arrangement of stone slabs about five metres above him that stuck out of the sides of the shaft like the spokes of a wheel, leaving an aperture in the centre just big enough for him to drop through. He remembered feeling a slight give in the stones as he stood on them. He had studied the elaborate traps that the pyramid builders had set around the burial chambers; it was conceivable that those stones had triggered an alignment in the masonry that caused the slab to drop. But this trap was not simply to deter tomb robbers. He stared down, his headlamp beam reflecting off the smooth walls that dropped to a shimmering pool of water some ten metres below. It was to protect access to something infinitely more valuable, to a treasure that made the adrenalin course through Jack as it did when he knew he was on the brink of a great discovery.

  He stared back up. ‘So we’re trapped?’ he yelled.

  ‘You got it. That slab must weigh ten tons. And the light shaft above the chamber isn’t even wide enough to let in a pigeon.’

  ‘At least nobody can follow us inside.’

  ‘That’s great, Jack. Really reassuring. Makes spending the rest of eternity entombed like a mummified pharaoh really worthwhile.’

  ‘Keep focused,’ Jack shouted back. ‘We’re doing what we came here to do. This shaft must lead to some other access point.’

  He looked down again, searching for the glow from the chemical lightstick he had dropped into the water at the bottom of the shaft, but it was gone. He pulled another out of the thigh pocket on his e-suit, cracked it and dropped it, watching the green glow tumble down and then splash into the water, revealing the shimmering sides of the shaft and then disappearing too, somewhere far deeper. He looked at the electronic display inside his helmet, checking that the air supply in the streamlined console on his back was still full, and monitoring the temperature inside his suit. He had told Costas to focus, but he was the one who needed to focus more, and Costas knew it. The intercom had failed to work inside the shaft, and when he had shut his visor he had been sealed off completely. He realised how much he had come to rely on Costas beside him, his companion for more than twenty years on countless dives into caves and mine shafts and other enclosed spaces. But this time Jack would have to confront his greatest fear on his own, his fear of being closed in, of finding no way out.

  He felt his heart pound, and his breathing quicken, and he stared down again into the water. There was nothing visible yet, nothing to confirm his hunch. All he had to go on was instinct born of years of luck and intuition. He had to summon up all of his determination and keep going down the shaft until he knew the truth. He concentrated on that objective as he looked down, feeling the belay clamp on his harness, jigging his body up and down to test his weight against the rope. As his beam played on the surface of the water, he saw something bubble up, like a ghostly exhalation from three thousand years before, a waft that made his nostrils tingle. It was a familiar odour, a recent one, but he could not pin it down.

  Costas shouted from above. ‘You smell that?’

  ‘It’s come up through the water,’ Jack yelled back. ‘Must be some kind of natural gas, methane maybe. We should use our breathing gear.’

  ‘It smells just like the Nile,’ Costas yelled back.

  Jack remembered. Of course. It was the distinctive smell of the Nile through Cairo, a river whose man-made canals had once lapped the pyramids, but which was now almost three kilometres distant. He suddenly remembered the story of the wild man who had a
ppeared out of nowhere in the streets of Cairo in the 1890s, with hair and beard down to his chest like a holy man, showing everyone who would listen to him a Royal Engineers cap badge and a corporal’s chevrons, claiming that he had been a British soldier captured by the Mahdi; he said that he had escaped and come to Cairo with knowledge of an ancient underground city beneath the modern streets, but had become trapped there and survived for years eating scraps of ancient mummies and rats and fish from the river. Could it be true? Jack thought hard: fish from the river. Could the water below be an ancient channel from the Nile? If so, it was their way out. And it was the way to a discovery that would astonish the world.

  He shouted up the shaft. ‘Oh, by the way. My aunt Margaret has a book for you. A copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.’

  ‘I know,’ Costas bellowed down. ‘Rebecca gave it to me.’

  ‘You didn’t need to be worried, you know. About me, I mean. But I appreciate it.’

  ‘It’s what friends are for.’

  Jack looked down, dazzled by the glare. ‘I’m not so sure now, though.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, about the quest. This looks like it might be a one-way ticket.’

  ‘Come on, Jack. It can’t be as bad as that crocodile pool. That was the entrance to the underworld. This is the City of Light. And you’re about to go diving again. You love it.’

  Jack looked down, feeling his heart race with excitement. It was true. He loved it. He looked up at Costas. ‘Okay. I’m going in. Open the slab to let the light in.’