Pharaoh

1

Jack Howard eased forward in the confined space of the submersible, raising himself on his elbows so that he could see through the forward porthole into the azure shimmer of the Mediterranean. The thick cone of Perspex was designed to withstand the enormous pressures of abyssal depth, and distorted the view around the edge so that the research vessel Seaquest II some twenty metres above appeared as a strange play of white superstructure and dark hull. But the view in the centre was undistorted, a tunnel of clarity that seemed to match the single-minded determination that had brought Jack this far. As he made out the slope of rock and sand on the seabed below, his heart began to pound with excitement. Somewhere out there lay one of the greatest lost treasures of antiquity. For a moment Jack saw the image he had seen in his dreams for days now: a black basalt sarcophagus rising stark from the seabed like the toppled statue of a pharaoh half buried in the desert sand. Only this was not a dream. This was real.

‘Jack. Shift over. I need space.’ There was a grunt and a muttered curse in Greek and a figure pushed himself forward on his back alongside him, staring at the tangle of wires that hung from the open control panel above them. Costas Kazantzakis moved with a deftness that seemed to belie his barrel chest and thick forearms, and his shorter frame was more suited than Jack’s to fit inside the submersible. Jack knew better than to break his concentration, and watched as Costas moved his hands swiftly over the panel, pulling out and plugging in cables. In the distorted reflection of the Perspex Jack saw his face superimposed on Costas’, his thick dark hair appearing above the other man’s grizzled chin, and for a moment it seemed as if they were conjoined, two bodies become one. They had been doing this together for almost twenty years now, and it sometimes seemed like that. He pushed himself forwards to give Costas more space, watching his eyes dart over the panel. Seeing Costas at work quickened Jack’s sense of excitement over the discovery that might lie ahead. Costas had been his main dive buddy from before he had founded the International Maritime University, and together they had logged thousands of dives on IMU projects around the world. This one promised to be up there with the best, providing Costas could work out a way of releasing the tethering line that held the submersible suspended below Seaquest II like a lure on a fishing line.

Costas turned to him. ‘You okay in here?’

Jack shifted again. ‘I’d be happier diving free outside. Six foot five is about a foot too long for this space.’

‘Once I get this thing running, it’ll seem like an extension of your body. You’ll forget the cramped space, I promise.’

‘How much longer?’

Costas gazed back up at the wiring. ‘I once stared at a control panel for eighteen hours. Then bingo, I got it.’

‘I thought a PhD from MIT in submersibles engineering would have eased you through a glitch like this.’

Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘And I thought a PhD from Cambridge in archaeology would make you an instant expert in everything. I’m trying to remember the number of times I’ve watched my air gauge drop to zero while waiting for you to fathom out some ancient inscription.’

Jack grinned. ‘Okay. Touché.’

‘Have patience,’ Costas muttered, staring up. ‘It’ll come to me.’

There was movement from the hatch to the rear compartment beyond Jack’s feet, and the third person in the submersible appeared, a short woman with dark curly hair and glasses wearing an IMU jumpsuit. Sofia Fernandez, a former Spanish navy medic who was now an archaeologist with the local Cartagena museum, had come on board as the official representative of the Spanish antiquities authority. She had only arrived on Seaquest II an hour before and Jack had never met her previously, but both men had immediately liked her. At the moment, all that concerned Jack was that she was small enough not to reduce his comfort level in the sphere below a tolerable level.

She pulled herself in, and sat in the driver’s seat. ‘What gives?’ she said.

‘Apologies for the glitch,’ Costas replied, looking at her ruefully. ‘This is a new submersible fresh out of the engineering department at IMU, and today is its first open-water test. I haven’t even given her a name yet. Seaquest II can only be here for a day or two, as she’s due back for a winter refit in England, and this was the only window I had to get this thing in the water to see how she behaves on a real operation.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask. Where did you get that accent? The sassy attitude. And don’t get me wrong. I like it.’

Sofia smiled. ‘From dealing with men like you. I was brought up in Puerto Rico by my American mother.’

‘But you ended up in the Spanish navy.’

‘I was a Spanish citizen because of my father, and the navy offered to pay my way through medical school in Seville.’

‘And now you’re an archaeologist.’

‘After my pre-med year the call came for medical personnel to join the Spanish contingent in Afghanistan, and I volunteered to go as a combat medic. After that, I decided I’d done my bit for medicine and it was time to move on. At med school I’d developed an interest in operation theatre tools for remote surgery, so I did a masters in robotics engineering.’

‘No way,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Right up my alley. We use the same basic technology for remote excavation from submersibles. We have got something to talk about during the long hours while I stare at this panel.’

‘Not long hours,’ Jack said firmly. ‘Short minutes.’

‘Well, my other fascination was archaeology, so I started over again and did a degree in anthropology and got the job at the Cartagena museum. My mother was a dive instructor in Puerto Rico and I’d dived almost before I could walk, so when I heard that you were planning to come to search for the wreck of the Beatrice off Cartagena, I couldn’t believe my luck.’

‘Combat medic, robotics engineer, archaeologist, diver,’ Costas said. ‘Sounds like a pretty good skill-set to me.’

‘Anyway, speaking of accents, what’s a Greek from the Kazantzakis shipping family doing with a New York accent? And best friends with a Brit?’

‘I went to school in Manhattan,’ Costas said. ‘And Jack’s only really a Brit in his ancestry. He was brought up in New Zealand and Canada before going to boarding school in England. So we’re international really. The International Maritime University. An international team of oddballs.’

‘That reminds me: a strange guy with long lank hair and a lab coat collared me topside before I got into the submersible. I forgot to tell you.’

‘Oh God,’ Costas murmured, staring back at the panel. ‘Lanowski. What does he want?’

‘He said that although Kazantzakis thinks he knows everything about submersibles, he’s really a concepts man and is pretty useless on computer systems and circuitry. He said that because you agreed to be his best man, it showed that you were his friend now and would have no problem acknowledging his superior mental agility. I think those were his exact words.’

Costas grimaced. ‘He’s got it in for me because when he and his glamour-model wife got married in our top-end submersible, the trim was wrong.’

‘Correction,’ Jack said. ‘You sabotaged the trim so that they would get married at the bottom of the Marianas Trench instead of just below the surface.’

‘It was a great opportunity to test the new pressure hull,’ Costas said defensively. ‘It was the only reason I agreed to be his best man.’

‘This gets better,’ Sofia said. ‘Lanowski has a glamour-model wife and they got married underwater. Let me guess, they met online and it was love at first sight?’

‘You bet. Love of submersibles at first sight. She loves really big submarines.’

‘Uh-huh. And don’t tell me, she has a PhD too?’

‘Submersibles nanotechnology. Flying tiny drone submersibles into the abyss. Lanowski loves her for it.’

‘I’m sure he does.’

Costas put out his hand resignedly. ‘Okay, what did he give you?’

Sofia passed over a crumpled piece of paper. ‘He said it’s a circuit diagram. He scribbled it down while I kitted up.’

Costas flattened the paper and stared at it. ‘Why oh why didn’t he show me this earlier?’ he groaned.

‘He said he was giving you the time to work it through yourself and realise you were never going to get there.’

Costas reached up, pulled out one cable and plugged in another. A red light began to flash on the panel. ‘Okay. We’ve got maybe half an hour while the system reboots.’ He leaned back against the Perspex dome and looked at Jack. ‘Which gives you just enough time to fill me in on exactly what we’re doing here. I missed your briefing topside because I was down here apparently failing to spot what Lanowski knew all along. So what do we know about our target?’

Jack did not relish the idea of a further half-hour swaying in the submersible under Seaquest II, and he welcomed Costas’ request. He reached over and clicked on his laptop, lifting it and turning the screen towards the other two. ‘It’s a fantastic story,’ he said. ‘Of all the artefacts looted by European travellers to ancient lands, this one is probably the most extraordinary. In 1837, a British army officer named Richard Vyse and an engineer named John Perring used gunpowder to blow their way into the main burial chamber of the pyramid of Menkaure at Giza. Inside it they found a great basalt sarcophagus and a wooden coffin. After an incredible effort inching the sarcophagus along the entrance shaft, Vyse and his Egyptian workers managed to get it out of the pyramid and down to Alexandria, where it was loaded on to the Beatrice. She set sail, and was recorded leaving Malta on the thirteenth of October 1838. That was the last anyone ever heard of her.’

‘Do we know what the sarcophagus looked like?’

‘There’s an illustration in Vyse’s book.’ Jack clicked on the laptop and an image came up. ‘Basalt, two and a half metres long, almost a metre high and a metre wide. There were no hieroglyphs, but you can see it had carved decoration, in the style of an ancient Egyptian palace facade. It’s one of the most important pieces of Old Kingdom sculpture.’

‘So what do we know about the Beatrice?’ Costas asked.

Jack clicked, and another image came up. ‘This is a facsimile page from Lloyd’s Register of 1838. The owner and captain was a man called Wichelo, and the ship was built in 1827 at Quebec in Lower Canada. You can see she’s described as a snow – a type of brig – and was bound from Liverpool for Alexandria in Egypt on the outward leg of her last ever voyage.’

He tapped the keyboard again. The image changed to an old painting of a ship anchored close to shore, its sails furled but the British Red Ensign flying from its stern.

‘This is by Raffaello Corsini, a painter based in Ottoman Turkey, and shows Beatrice in 1832 in the Bay of Smyrna – modern Izmir in Turkey. At this point she’s a brig, meaning two square-rigged masts, fore and main, with a big fore-and-aft sail at the stern hanging from a boom stepped to the mainmast. Sometime between that date and 1838 she was converted to a snow, which meant that a small mast was stepped into the deck immediately abaft the mainmast as a more secure way of flying the fore-and-aft sail.’

‘She must have been a pretty good runner to merit the upgrade,’ Costas said.

Jack nodded. ‘Those were the days when merchant ships were designed to outrun pirates and privateers. People look at an image like this painting and are surprised to be told it wasn’t a warship.’

‘Any guns?’

‘Good question. You can see the single row of eight gun ports along the side. They could be painted on, of course, but I think they’re real.’

‘Guns mean a greater chance of seeing the wreck on the seabed, right?’ Sofia asked.

‘Right,’ agreed Jack. ‘In the Mediterranean, any exposed hull timbers would have been eaten by the Teredo navalis shipworm, and without big metal artefacts like guns we might not see anything.’

‘What was her condition recorded in the 1838 Register?’ Costas asked.

Jack reduced the image so they could see the register again. ‘First grade, second condition. The little asterisk means that she’d undergone repairs, in this case replacement of the wooden knees holding up her deck timbers with iron girders.’

Costas pursed his lips. ‘Even large iron girders are unlikely to survive after almost two hundred years in seawater. Sofia’s right. We’re looking for guns.’

‘Not forgetting eight tons of sarcophagus,’ Jack said.

‘What about the wrecking?’ Sofia said. ‘How did you pin it down to this place?’

Jack paused. This was the revelation that had brought them here, that had preoccupied him for weeks now. He looked at Sofia keenly. ‘I said that the departure of Beatrice from Malta was the last anyone ever heard of her. Well, we now know that’s no longer quite true. There have always been rumours that the ship went down off Cartagena, but they’ve never been substantiated. Then a couple of months ago IMU was contacted by a collector of antiquarian books on Egyptology who thought I might be interested in his copy of Vyse’s Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. Here’s what Vyse says about the loss of the sarcophagus: “It was embarked at Alexandria in the autumn of 1838, on board a merchant ship, which was supposed to have been lost off Cartagena, as she was never heard of after her departure from Leghorn on the twelfth of October that year, and as some parts of the wreck were picked up near the former port.”

‘But that’s not all,’ he continued. ‘And that’s not why the man contacted me. It was because in his copy, on the page where Vyse mentions the loss of the Beatrice, was an interleaved sheet containing hand-written latitude and longitude co-ordinates and a couple of transit bearings from precisely the position we’re at now. They were taken by someone who knew what they were doing, a trained seafarer, from a boat over the spot. The sheet was unsigned, but the giveaway was the ex libris plate at the front of the book, with the name Wichelo.’

‘No kidding!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘The ship’s master, the one named in the Lloyd’s Register? So he survived the wrecking?’

‘So it seems. He must have come to this spot again to take transits, in a local boat. That’s perhaps where the rumours of the wreck originate. But there’s no record anywhere else of his survival. He seems to have disappeared from history.’

‘Maybe he knew there’d be an insurance claim, and he’d be found liable,’ Costas said.

‘How can we know that?’ Sofia asked.

‘Well, let’s think of what we’ve got here. Beatrice was a cargo ship, but not a specialised stone carrier. Looking at the details in the register, we see she’s got a fourteen-foot beam, fully laden. Where does the captain put the sarcophagus? On the deck, confident that those new iron knees will hold the weight.’

Jack nodded. ‘So confident that he fails to calculate the instability of a ship of that size with an eight-ton stone sarcophagus laden so high above the keel.’

‘She’s a good runner, but not as manoeuvrable against the wind as other ships,’ Costas said thoughtfully. ‘She leaves Malta in mid October, the beginning of the winter season, a time when storms and squalls become more common. That was the captain’s first mistake. Add to that the uncharted reefs of a shoreline like this one, and a ship blown north-west off its intended route towards the Strait of Gibraltar is heading for disaster.’

‘Especially if she was so poorly laden,’ Jack said, tapping a key again. ‘Lanowski’s done a simulation. Take a look at this. You can see the ship sailing west from Malta, and all is well. The prevailing wind is from the north-east, and the captain decides to sail with the wind on his starboard beam, west-north-west, in order to avoid being blown into the north African shore. He turns with the wind towards Gibraltar when the Spanish coast hoves into view, but he’s come too close to the shore and has forgotten how sluggish the cargo makes the ship. He realises his mistake and tries to veer south back into the open sea with the wind now on his port aft quarter, but it’s too late. A sudden squall, a big inshore wave, and the sarcophagus slips, then the ship heels over and is gone, probably so fast that the crew would hardly have known what was happening.’

Costas nodded. ‘So she sinks close to shore but in deep water, here where the bottom shelves off rapidly to abyssal depth. If she’d been in shallow water there would have been some attempt at salvage, and perhaps more survivors. But if she sank like a stone, at least we should have a fairly well-contained wreck site.’

‘Trickier to find, though, without a wide debris field.’

‘We’ve got the magnetic anomalies from Seaquest II’s run over the sector this morning,’ Costas said. ‘One of them will come up trumps.’

‘Fingers crossed,’ Jack said.

‘Lucky Jack,’ Costas replied, smiling at Sofia. ‘Jack’s luck is better than any science.’

Jack closed the computer. ‘I keep thinking of the captain, Wichelo, perhaps the only survivor, a man afraid of creditors and claimants or overcome with shame, knowing he’d never be trusted again with a cargo, deciding to disappear and change his name and start a new life.’

‘But not too ashamed to record the location and put it in this book, perhaps many years later when he could use his original name again,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe an old man wanting to tie up loose ends, recording the location for someone to find.’

Sofia turned and eyed Jack shrewdly. ‘Let me get this right. The idea that the Beatrice was wrecked somewhere off Spain has been floating around for years, but nobody’s ever been allowed to search for it inside Spanish territorial waters. Even the Egyptian Antiquities Service with all its wealthy international backers fails to get permission. But then Jack Howard finds some clue to the whereabouts of the wreck, picks up the phone and hey presto, green light.’

Jack shrugged. ‘Our record speaks for itself.’

‘We’re archaeologists, not salvors,’ Costas said, still eyeing the control panel. ‘Everything we find in territorial waters goes to a local museum, and everything in international waters to our museum at Carthage or to the IMU campus in England. We fund the entire process of conservation and display. Our commercial wing makes a healthy income from our films and from sales of equipment developed in our engineering facility, but we operate on an endowment, which means there’s no need to make a profit. We’ve got a hell of a benefactor.’

‘I read about him on the website,’ Sofia said. ‘Efram Jacobovich, the software tycoon.’

‘He’s also why we’re test-driving this submersible,’ Costas said. ‘One of his companies does deep-water mineral extraction, small quantities of rare minerals around hot-air vents, and they use the same robotic manipulator arms that we’ve developed for excavation. Their success makes Efram richer and he increases our endowment. So you see, everything’s linked.’ He stared again above him, a puzzled look on his face, his voice trailing off as he spoke. ‘A bit like the wiring in this control panel. All linked somehow. I wish I could work out how Lanowski got that right.’

Jack smiled at Sofia. ‘That clear it up for you?’

Costas coughed. ‘And in this case, there was the small matter of Jack’s girlfriend.’

Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas. ‘Not girlfriend. Colleague.’

‘Right.’ Costas grinned at Sofia. ‘Her name’s Dr Maria de Montijo. She’s head of the Oxford Institute of Epigraphy and an adjunct professor of IMU. She’s been with us on a number of expeditions. Her mother also happens to be the Spanish Minister of Culture.’

‘Of course,’ Sofia said. ‘My boss. So, the old boys’ network.’

‘The old girls’ network.’

‘Problem is, Maria always comes up with the goods but Jack never commits in return. Too busy diving with his buddy Costas.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Jack said, ‘how are we coming along?’

Costas peered at Sofia. ‘Now that I know you’re an engineer too, can I ask you to help?’

‘Fire away.’

‘We’ve got to manually disengage the cable tethering us to Seaquest II. The lever’s the red one labelled “tether” in the ceiling of the double-lock chamber. I need to be here with my hands on about four switches to allow it to unlock. You’ll need to shut the chamber door behind you to get at the lever. A red light will fire up beside it when I’m ready. It’ll be no more than a couple of minutes. Can you do it?’

‘Sure. No problem.’ She slid off the chair and disappeared back through the hatch, and they heard the clang of the chamber door shutting behind her. Costas quickly turned to Jack. ‘Okay. Spill it.’

Jack stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on, Jack. I know that look. What’s going on?’

Jack cleared his throat. ‘We’re searching for one of the greatest archaeological treasures of all time. We’re doing our job.’

‘That’s just it. Doing our job. It’s not enough, is it? Okay, an Egyptian stone sarcophagus, covered with carvings. And not just any old sarcophagus. The sarcophagus of a pharaoh, from one of the pyramids at Giza. That’s big-time. I mean, really big-time. But to get you this fired up, there just has to be more.’

‘The sarcophagus would be one of the greatest Egyptian finds since King Tut’s tomb. Even including all of Maurice’s discoveries.’

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Maurice Hiebermeyer. He’s the missing link. Last year at Troy he found that Egyptian sculpture with the strange hieroglyphic inscriptions and the sculptor’s name he recognised. Before you could say golden mummy, he’d shot down to Akhenaten’s city at Amarna beside the Nile, digging around for something he’d seen before. And then quick as a flash he was in the Nubian desert, and then back in Egypt up to his neck in a pyramid. It’s not like Hiebermeyer to flit around like that. Once he’s got his nose stuck in a site, he stays there until it’s done. And not just any old pyramid. The pyramid of Menkaure at Giza, precisely the place where Vyse found the sarcophagus. You’re on a trail, aren’t you, Jack? What we’re doing today, whatever we find, this isn’t just about that sarcophagus. There’s a bigger prize.’

Jack was silent for a moment, then he turned to Costas, his face an image of suppressed excitement. ‘Right at the moment it could all be a house of cards. We need one more crucial clue. And I don’t want to upset your plans for some R and R on the beach tomorrow at Cartagena.’

‘I knew that was never going to happen,’ Costas said resignedly. He shook his head, then jerked his thumb towards the porthole. ‘The clue you need. Is it out there? In the wreck?’

Jack gave him a steely look. ‘Maybe. Just maybe.’

Costas turned back to the panel and flipped the switches. A few seconds later there was a shudder and the submersible seemed to drop in the water, then it pitched and yawed like a boat bobbing in the waves. Costas quickly got up and sat in the pilot’s seat, one hand over the control stick and the other on the throttle. Sofia re-emerged and slid down in front of the Perspex screen beside Jack. They heard the whine of the electric motor, and then felt the submersible steadying itself in the water. Jack stared again into the blue. There might be nothing down there but bare rock and sand, but Costas was right about one thing. He had always been lucky when it came to archaeology, and he felt it now. He just knew there was something there that would change history for ever.

Costas followed Jack’s gaze through the porthole. ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ he murmured.

Jack glanced at him. ‘I was just thinking that. About the ancient statue of a pharaoh broken and half buried, just like that sarcophagus somewhere down there.’ He turned to Sofia. ‘It’s from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”.’

She was quiet for a moment, and then recited: ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Costas turned to her. ‘You read poetry?’

‘Always been a passion.’

Costas looked back at the porthole. ‘Me too.’

‘There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Costas Kazantzakis.’

Jack grinned, staring back at Costas’ dishevelled hair and unshaven face. ‘There’s a lot that meets the eye.’

There was a final jolt, and then they were as one with the sea. Jack could sense it as if he himself had been released into the depths where he belonged, free at last from the sense of confinement. Costas looked at him, his hands on the controls. ‘We’re good to go.’

Jack pointed into the abyss. ‘Go for it.’

2

Almost an hour after the submersible had separated from the tethering cable, Costas feathered the controls and brought it down with a soft bump on the sandy seabed some eighty metres below the surface of the Mediterranean. Sofia had moved back from the porthole to the co-pilot’s seat, and had been sharing the controls with Costas as they followed the programmed course between the magnetic anomalies located by Seaquest II during her survey run a few hours earlier. Jack had remained glued to the porthole the entire time, his excitement rising and falling each time they had approached a rusty pile of metal and then been disappointed; one had been modern building debris dumped in the sea, another a small coastal freighter with a deck gun of First World War vintage, perhaps the victim of a U-boat attack. The fourth anomaly had seemed the most promising, with right-angled features in the magnetometer readout that could have been the iron knees added during the repairs to the Beatrice in the 1830s, but as they approached, they had seen that it was the remains of a ditched aircraft, a German Heinkel 111 perhaps downed during the Spanish Civil War. Jack stared out at it now as the silt settled around their landing site, and felt his heart sink. The decay in the metal showed how little might survive of the iron elements of a ship sunk a century earlier, and the deep sand that had covered half of the plane could have completely swallowed up the Beatrice’s guns and the sarcophagus, leaving nothing to see above the desolate seabed that stretched out around them and sloped down into the abyss.

‘What do you think, Jack? Is that the end of the road?’ Costas said.

Jack got up on all fours, crawled around and sat back in the narrow space between the two seats, staring up at the computer screen above the porthole that displayed the bathymetry around them. He pointed to an area in the outer part of the bay, beyond the line of the coast. ‘I think it’s out there,’ he said. ‘I think that’s where Beatrice was more likely to have been exposed to a sudden squall from the north-east. I think we’ve been looking too close inshore.’

Costas magnified the image. ‘That’s more than eight hundred metres deep,’ he exclaimed.

‘Is that a problem for the submersible?’

‘It’s stretching the envelope for her first sea trials.’

‘But it could be done.’

‘Sure. The real problem is the inky blackness at that depth. Seaquest II hasn’t yet done a magnetometer sweep or a sonar survey of the sector. We’d be blundering round in the dark.’

Jack clicked on the intercom and spoke to the submersible control room on Seaquest II, where the crew had been monitoring their progress. ‘Patch me through to Captain Macalister, please.’

A voice with a strong east-coast Canadian accent crackled through the speaker. ‘Macalister here. What’s your status?’

‘We’re waiting on you. There’s that final deep-water sector at the head of the bay. If you can do a magnetometer run over it, at least we can cross it off the list.’

‘We discussed that, Jack. You were going to check out the anomalies we’d found and leave the rest for next year.’

‘I agreed with you then, but down here, now that we’ve got the submersible fine tuned and running, I feel differently. You know what happens when we leave things for next year. Something else always comes up, another project, other priorities. And it’s been a couple of years since IMU hit it big-time. We could do with a major discovery, and this one would be front-page news. I’d love to see that happening now.’

‘All that concerns me is the safety of the ship and the submersible. You remember the weather prediction? Since you went underwater the south-easterly’s really picked up, and my meteorology officer thinks it’s going to reach at least force 6 overnight. It is the beginning of November, after all, the start of the bad time in the Mediterranean. I’m beginning to understand how the master of the Beatrice must have felt at this time of year. It’s a pretty jagged shoreline, and we’re less than a kilometre away.’

‘Understood,’ Jack said. ‘It’s your call.’

‘Give me a moment. Over.’

Jack held the handset, waiting. Suddenly everything seemed precarious. What had seemed a dead certainty when he had seen Captain Wichelo’s wreck co-ordinates and then the apparent magnetometer matches had now become a mathematical improbability. He had always told students working with IMU that a square-kilometre search area on the surface should be regarded as the equivalent of at least ten square kilometres underwater; distortions of perspective, variegated seabed topography and the difficulties of interpreting visual and remote survey data all made the apparently straightforward task of criss-crossing a given area that much more difficult when confronting the realities of the seabed. Perhaps he had been too cocky, too confident of his luck, and was having a dose of his own medicine. He found himself holding his breath, waiting for Macalister’s reply, and remembered what he had said to Costas about how it was all a house of cards. If they failed to come up with the goods here, then the entire trail that he and Hiebermeyer had been on, a trail still so elusive that it seemed to come in and out of focus like the anomalies on the seabed, might collapse and disappear. What had seemed like links in a chain of evidence would become isolated fragments of archaeological data, destined to be shelved or slotted into some other story.

He realised that he was drumming his fingers against the console, and stopped himself. He desperately wanted this to work out. He had promised Maurice that he would search every square inch of seabed within Wichelo’s co-ordinates for the Beatrice, and a promise like that between the two men was a matter of honour: they had never let each other down in all the years since they had first shared their passion for archaeology as boys.

The audio crackled. It was Macalister. ‘Okay, Jack. I’ve conferred with my officers and we can do it.’

Jack bunched his free hand into a fist. Yes. He clicked on the receiver. ‘We’ll hold our position here until you’ve finished.’

‘We’ll be over a kilometre away from your position, which means you will no longer have the safety net of the tethering line to fall back on, or the support divers. If you have any problem, you’ll have to blow the ballast tanks and make an emergency ascent. You’ll be able to get away in the inflatable, but the submersible might be a write-off, tossed inshore to the rocks. That has to be your call.’

Jack glanced at Sofia and at Costas, who both nodded. He clicked on the handset again. ‘We’re good with that. The submersible’s my responsibility.’

‘Okay. Without the tethering cable we can’t stream our magnetometer and sonar data to you, so you’ll be in the dark until we’ve finished. We should be done within an hour.’

‘Roger that.’

‘Hold fast. Over and out.’

A red light flashed beside the main computer screen. Costas clicked on the mouse, and grunted. ‘An email reached us before the tether was released, but has only just popped up. It’s from Maurice Hiebermeyer.’

Jack looked up. ‘I told him he could be with us live while we searched the seabed. Can you get him on Skype?’

‘Apparently not. The message was sent via Aysha, from somewhere in the Nubian desert just south of the Egyptian border.’

‘They’ve been excavating there,’ Jack said. ‘I haven’t visited the site yet, but it sounds amazing. Pharaonic-period forts as well as material from the British campaigns of the Victorian period. Last year the Egyptians dropped the water level behind the Aswan Dam enough to reveal the upper levels of the forts, so it was a chance for the first excavation since they were inundated in the 1960s. There’s still a lot underwater, though.’

‘Sounds like an IMU project,’ Sofia said.

‘Watch this space,’ Jack replied.

Costas had been reading the message. ‘Oh God. The reason Aysha sent it was that Maurice is back in the pyramid of Menkaure again. Apparently some string-pulling and returned favours has resulted in the Egyptian Antiquities Authority appointing him official inspector for the restoration work at the site, a rare honour for a foreigner.’

‘Excellent,’ Jack murmured. ‘Excellent.’

‘Care to share the excitement?’ Costas enquired, peering at him.

‘I’ll let Maurice do it when he’s ready. If he finds what I hope he’ll find.’

‘Anyway, why “Oh God”?’ asked Sofia.

Costas sounded anguished. ‘Because he’s got Little Joey, my special robot, with him. To keep Maurice happy, I agreed to have Joey flown out to Alexandria, but I never expected him to get permission to take it into the pyramid. Now he wants the activation code.’

‘And you’re going to give it to him,’ Jack said firmly. ‘He needs the robot to explore the narrow shafts in the pyramid. You spent hours showing him how it works. You can’t be there every time someone wants to use one of your creations.’

‘My favourite robot,’ Costas said sadly, slowly tapping out a sequence of letters and numbers and then clicking the send icon, ensuring that it would be delivered when they were re-tethered to the ship. ‘I’ll never see it again.’

Sofia looked at him. ‘Wasn’t Little Joey the robot who made the ultimate sacrifice at Atlantis last year, when the volcano erupted? There’s a full obituary by you on the IMU website.’

‘Ultimate sacrifice,’ Costas repeated, looking at her appreciatively. ‘I like that. At least you are on my wavelength.’

Jack spoke with gravity in his voice. ‘This one’s Little Josephine. Little Joey’s sister.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Got you.’

‘That pyramid’s a long way from the Nubian desert, where he was yesterday,’ Costas said.

Jack nodded. ‘I always worry about him when he goes south of Egypt. He’s like a Victorian explorer on the Nile, with absolutely no sense of his own vulnerability and more than a few strongly voiced opinions. If he doesn’t stumble into a holy war, he’s likely to start one. That whole region’s becoming a powder keg again.’

Sofia shook her head. ‘For me, that’s someone else’s war. I’ve had enough of jihad for one lifetime.’

‘I can appreciate that,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve got the greatest respect for navy medics, whatever country they serve.’

‘Thanks. That means a lot.’ She looked at Jack. ‘I read your bio on the IMU website. Royal Navy commander?’

Jack shrugged. ‘Just in the reserves, before starting my doctorate. I wanted all the diving experience they could offer, so I started in mine warfare and clearance before moving on to the Special Boat Service.’

‘You go anywhere interesting?’

‘A few hot spots, but Kazantzakis here is the real navy guy.’

Costas snorted. ‘No way. Not like you two. You’ve both been in at the sharp end. I’m just a submersibles geek. I needed a job after MIT.’

‘You mean the US Navy head-hunted you. Engineer lieutenant commander. And what about that Navy Cross?’

‘I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

Jack looked at Sofia. ‘USS Madison. You remember the suicide bomb attack?’

Sofia regarded Costas with amazement. ‘You were there?’

‘All I did was pull a few guys out. I could free-dive deeper than anyone else on the ship that day, so I could reach them. I hate the fact that I couldn’t get them all; that’s why it’s not in my bio.’

‘He may look like a beach bum whose only fitness activity is to raise a cocktail glass, but Costas comes from generations of Greek sponge divers. He drops like a stone and can hold his breath for two minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Ah,’ Costas said, lying back and closing his eyes. ‘The beach. Gin and tonics.’

‘When this is all over.’

‘That’s what you always say.’

Sofia turned to Jack. ‘The German, Hiebermeyer. I’ve seen a couple of your TV specials. He’s the substantial guy with the baggy shorts and the little round glasses? Always with that younger woman, the Egyptian. Was she the one who sent the email?’

‘That’s Aysha, his wife,’ Jack said. ‘Used to be a student of his. She does hieroglyphics and inscriptions; he does the digging. They’re a great team.’

‘Never did understand what she saw in him,’ Costas said, a glint in his eye.

‘You’re talking about my oldest friend.’

Costas gave him an exaggerated crestfallen look. ‘What about me?’

‘Maurice and I bonded at boarding school. You and I were thrown together ten years later inside a very small recompression chamber. For eight long hours.’

Sofia grinned. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘I’d just come out of the navy and was about to return to Cambridge to finish my doctorate. Costas was working as a submersibles engineer at the US naval base at Izmir in between graduate studies at MIT. I’d heard about a possible Bronze Age wreck to the north-west of Izmir, so I got my gear, hired a fisherman and his boat and went to check it out.’

‘Alone,’ Costas said. ‘To seventy-five metres. On compressed air.’

‘I found the wreck: rows of oxhide-shaped copper ingots in the blue haze below. The doctor at the base said it was wishful thinking, a hallucination brought on by nitrogen narcosis. But I know what I saw. Of course nowadays I’d use mixed gas or an oxygen rebreather. I’d never take that kind of risk again.’

Costas’ jaw dropped. ‘Did I just hear that? How many times have I stopped you going too deep since then?’

Jack looked serious. ‘Not since I became a father.’

‘I saw the photos on the bridge,’ Sofia said. ‘She looks like a chip off the old block. She must be what, eighteen?’

‘Next month,’ Jack said. ‘But I’ve only known her for five years. Her mother and I split before she was born and she kept Rebecca secret from me – for Rebecca’s safety, and probably mine too. She was from a Mafia family and there was a vendetta. It’s a long story, but Rebecca has come out of it strong and I can’t imagine life without her now. When she’s not at school, she’s a full member of our team.’

‘I look forward to meeting her,’ said Sofia. ‘So what about Costas? The recompression chamber?’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I ran out of air and had to come up a little quickly. It was only a niggle in my elbow and a bit of dizziness, but I knew it was the bends and could get a lot worse. Luckily the fisherman had a decent radio, and there was a US Navy helicopter on search-and-rescue exercises only a few miles away.

‘Anyway, they got me into the chamber, and there was this slightly overweight sweaty guy surrounded by a jumble of electronics and tools he’d insisted on taking inside to play with. I spent the next eight hours holding bits of wire for him.’

‘Yeah,’ Costas said. ‘But we cooked up the idea of the International Maritime University, and here we are today.’

‘So what were you doing there? In the chamber?’

Jack coughed. ‘He’d spent too long monitoring the effect of pressure on some submersible component he was developing. Only instead of watching it from the outside, he’d gone into the chamber to cuddle it during its ordeal.’

‘I had to hold it together with my hands. It was too complex for clamps.’

‘What was it?’ Sofia said.

Costas looked at her shrewdly. ‘A coupling joint for an external manipulator arm. Later I developed it at IMU and it’s now standard on all our equipment.’

‘What’s the pressure rating?’

‘Two thousand metres ocean depth. It could be more except for the internal gyro, which is a little sensitive. But that’s what allows us to use the arm as a virtual excavator, with the finesse of a human hand.’

Sofia gestured at the porthole, where the submersible’s external arm array was visible. ‘I know how you could use it down to five thousand metres.’

Costas looked astonished. ‘No way. No way. What’s the gyro?’

‘A Universal Electrics SPC-100, with some modifications. You remember I said I had a flirtation with robotics engineering? It was my masters project.’

‘You’re kidding me. Can I see it?’

‘I can talk you through it now.’

Jack gave an exaggerated groan. ‘How long am I stuck here with you two?’

A red light flickered on the console. ‘I think you’re in luck, Jack. It’s Macalister.’

The familiar voice came crackling over the intercom. ‘Okay, Jack. We’ve done two half-kilometre sweeps across the head of the bay, and we’ve got a result. The magnetometer revealed a scatter of small linear anomalies over an area of flat sandy seabed the size of a tennis court, and the sonar showed a hump in the sediment that might be rectilinear. It’s at eight hundred and sixty-two metres depth, about a kilometre and a half from you at compass bearing 034 degrees. We’re holding position offshore above the anomaly so we can tether up to you and watch what you find on the video screen. Acknowledge.’

‘Roger that.’ Jack clicked the intercom to continuous so that the control room on Seaquest II could hear everything that went on, and turned to Costas, his throat dry with excitement. ‘I think we’re in business.’

Forty minutes later, they had reached a depth of seven hundred metres, having dropped down the slope at an angle of more than forty-five degrees. On the way they had passed huge outcrops of rock and dramatic slopes of sediment that had tumbled down the edges of the rocks like scree on a mountainside, until the dwindling light made it impossible to make out more than the twenty metres or so of seabed revealed in the cone of light from the submersible’s external strobe array ahead of them. Costas had been letting the computer steer the submersible towards a locator beacon at the bottom of the tethering line hanging below Seaquest II, and suddenly they saw it, a flashing red light in the inky blackness ahead. As they came to within a few metres, he activated the manipulator arm and extended the pincers at the end of it around the cable, and then let the automated program articulate the arm backwards and slot the cable into its aperture above the double-lock chamber. The blank monitor beside the navigational screen above the console suddenly came to life, an image crowded with the faces of the crew, who were staring down at them. The crew moved aside and the white-bearded Macalister appeared, the gold braid of a captain visible on the epaulettes of his naval sweater. Jack did a thumbs-up, and Macalister nodded curtly. ‘Let’s hope this is it,’ he said. ‘The weather’s worsening up here by the minute, and it’s going to be hard enough hauling the submersible into the ship’s docking bay as it is. We can’t afford more than a few minutes at the target, just enough for a positive identification.’

‘Roger that,’ Costas said.

‘Who’s operating the external video camera?’ Jack said.

A girl’s face appeared, her long dark hair tied back, wearing the new pair of glasses that made her look uncharacteristically studious, Jack thought. She waved, and blew him a kiss. ‘Hi, Dad. Maria sends her love. She met me at Madrid airport on the way here. As you know, we’re all supposed to be going climbing in the Pyrenees next week. She’d really like to hear from you.’

‘Good,’ Jack said, slightly discomfited. ‘Great. Later. What I need you to do now is concentrate completely on that console. The camera’s mounted on the end of the manipulator arm, and your job is to control it so that Costas and Sofia and I can focus on what we actually see outside. You got that?’

‘Roger that, Dad. Good to go.’

Sofia grinned. ‘Like a chip off the old block, as I said.’

Costas flipped a switch. ‘Rebecca, you have control of that arm.’

They watched out of the porthole as the end of the arm rose up from the equipment array below the strobes. It turned the camera towards them, the lens staring into the porthole like the outsized eye of some abyssal fish, and then it waved from side to side and turned forward.

Jack looked at the monitor and saw that Rebecca had gone from the image and been replaced by another figure, a man with long lank hair, wearing a lab coat. He lifted a small portable blackboard into view and tapped it, his face flushed with enthusiasm. ‘Hey, Costas. Glad to see we got the submersible going. You and I. When you’re back topside, I’ve made some time to give you the lowdown on submersible circuitry. I’ve tailored it specially for you. A kind of idiot’s guide.’

‘Thanks, Jacob,’ Costas said between gritted teeth. ‘Really appreciate it.’

‘Any time,’ Lanowski replied cheerily, and disappeared.

Costas shook his head. ‘What a guy.’

‘But you love him really,’ Sofia said.

‘We all love him,’ Costas said, gripping the controls. ‘Okay. All eyes on the prize. I’m going in.’

Jack slid back to his original position lying on his front with his face to the porthole. Costas gunned the submersible forward, and Jack watched the digital depth gauge beside the porthole drop below eight hundred metres. Ahead of him the seabed began to level out, but still there was nothing to see except empty sand and the occasional flash of a reflected eye as some creature strayed into the cone of visibility in front of the submersible, into light of an intensity that nothing down there would ever have experienced before. Costas slowed the submersible right down, and Jack watched the manipulator arm arch some five metres ahead with the camera roving from side to side like some giant insect searching the sea floor. ‘We should be there now,’ Costas said.

Jack peered ahead. Still there was nothing. And then a huge hollering and whooping erupted from the crew crowded around the video screen on Seaquest II. Jack quickly glanced back at the screen, and saw that Rebecca had positioned the camera directly above the shape of a cannon lying half buried in the sediment. She had spotted it at the furthest swing to port of the manipulator arm, and Costas quickly brought the submersible about to aim in that direction. Then they saw another gun, and another. Had Rebecca not seen the first one, they would probably have missed the site entirely and gone off into the abyss, realising their mistake too late for another search. Jack felt a surge of pride: she might well have saved the day. ‘Good work, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Now let’s gently hose down that first gun and have a look at it.’

They watched as the water jet located about two thirds of the way up the manipulator arm uncurled itself and looped down like a snake to blow a gentle jet over the gun, dispersing the sediment over the breech and revealing corroded metal. Macalister was the resident naval ordnance expert, and he immediately piped up. ‘No doubt about it, it’s a nine-pounder, a so-called long nine,’ he said, his voice edged with excitement. ‘Typical of the guns you’d have found arming merchant ships in the Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century.’

There was another noise from the crew, more of a gasp, and Sofia joined in. ‘Look, Jack. There it is. It’s fantastic.’

She and the crew were watching video from the camera, but Jack was looking at the real scene through the porthole, a few metres behind them. He stared into the gloom, seeing more guns but nothing else. And then he spotted it. Directly ahead, the sediment had formed a hump in the seabed. In the centre, almost completely buried, was a rectilinear stone sarcophagus, its lid shifted and much of the sculpted sides buried, but still unmistakable. It was just like the image in Jack’s dreams. They had found the sarcophagus of Menkaure.

‘Congratulations, Jack,’ said Macalister, the sound of whistling and clapping coming from the crew behind him. ‘A marvellous end to the season.’

‘Congratulations to everyone,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘A team effort, as always.’

Costas drove the submersible a few metres forward and then rose above the sarcophagus so that it was clearly visible. The ten or twelve guns that poked out of the sand around it formed the ghostly outline of a ship. There was nothing else to be seen, just the stone and the guns, and for a moment Jack thought how the sediments of the seabed were like the sands of the desert; how they seemed to reduce the evidence of human endeavour to its bare essentials, to its boldest statements and nothing else. The sea floor was a place that made the efforts to tame it seem minuscule and arrogant; a place whose elemental clarity attracted certain men on a quest for revelation, from the time when the world was beginning to rediscover ancient Egypt, and from deepest antiquity almost five thousand years before, the time of the first pharaohs and the pyramids.

Macalister’s voice crackled again. ‘Okay, Costas. We’ve got a two-metre swell on the surface. I’ve asked Rebecca to relinquish control of the manipulator arm and shut it down. We’ve got all the imagery we need. You need to ascend.’

‘Roger that,’ Costas said. ‘Blowing tanks now.’

Jack slid back to the console, flipped off the audio feed to the ship to keep their conversation to themselves and looked at Costas. ‘Can you override the system so that I can control the arm?’

‘You heard Macalister,’ Costas said. ‘Remember your end of the bargain.’

‘It’d only be for a few minutes. If you shut off the video stream to the ship, they wouldn’t know we were still using it. As far as Macalister is concerned, we’d be ascending.’

Costas paused, and then shook his head. ‘Okay, Jack. You have the con.’

Jack jumped back to the space between the seats and grasped the handle that controlled the manipulator arm. He arched the arm over the lid of the sarcophagus, to the gap where the lid had slid sideways and the interior of the coffin was revealed, and dropped the camera down towards the triangular hole. He had guessed that it might be just large enough, and he had been right. The camera disappeared inside. He activated the powerful miniature light array surrounding the camera, but all he could see on the video screen was sand, a close-up view of the sediment that evidently filled the sarcophagus. He moved the camera from side to side, but still there was nothing. ‘Come on, Jack,’ Costas said. ‘One more minute, max.’

He took hold of the handle that controlled the water jet, and aimed the nozzle through the hole, switching the jet to its most powerful setting. There was nothing to lose, and nothing inside the sarcophagus after all this time that would be delicate enough to be damaged. For a second or two the camera would be in the eye of the dust storm created by the water jet, and he might just see something before the silt clouded the image.

He pressed the trigger. The image exploded into a maelstrom of sand, obscuring everything.

And then he saw it.

For a second it was there, the image of a pharaoh, wearing a crown and a skirt but with an oddly shaped physiognomy: a protruding belly and a jutting chin. Beside him was his consort, a queen with shapely breasts and hips, her hair over her shoulders. The pharaoh was leaning over something as if he were creating it, lines forming a matrix like a labyrinth or a maze, a pyramid in the centre, and over it all the rays of the sun, shining from a disc above. And then the image was gone, lost in the swirl of sediment. ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Jack.

‘What the hell was that?’ Costas said.

‘Do you remember Captain Wichelo’s interleaved sheet in his copy of Vyse’s book? You wondered whether there was something else I wasn’t telling you. Well, that was it. Wichelo mentioned a stone plaque that Vyse had packed in the sarcophagus, something he’d found inside the pyramid. That pharaoh’s not Menkaure; it’s Akhenaten, and his wife Nefertiti. Wichelo said that Vyse called the carving “the City of Light”.’

‘Did you get photos?’

‘At least one. I need to email it to Maurice. This will astonish him.’

‘Then the sooner we leave here, the better.’ Costas pulled a lever to blow air into the ballast tanks, and they began to ascend. Jack kept peering down, watching the sarcophagus as it disappeared into the inky blackness, and then settled back to study the images he had taken.

‘That’s a hell of a manipulator arm,’ Sofia said.

‘Thanks,’ Costas replied ‘You should come to the IMU engineering lab. Really. I can show you a lot more like that.’

‘Come and have dinner with me in Cartagena tonight. After I call the Minister of Culture and tell her about this.’

‘Tonight. Sure. Cool.’ Costas looked slightly flummoxed, and then smiled at her. ‘Yeah. I’d really like to. That’d be great.’

Jack tore his eyes away from the screen and turned around. ‘I hate to throw a spanner in the works, but we might just have to go somewhere else this evening.’

‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said. ‘I should have seen this coming. Sorry, Sofia. I think it’ll have to wait.’

‘No problem. I’m going to have my hands full anyway documenting this and filing my report for the Ministry. They’re going to want a press release, pronto. I think they’re really going to make a major deal out of this, and it’ll be my big break. It’ll be great for news of an underwater discovery off Spain to be about archaeology rather than some rip-off treasure-hunters who think they can hoodwink us into believing that they’re archaeologists. This could lead to a lot more IMU involvement in Spain, and I’d love to push for that. But I’ll be waiting for you. And I won’t take no for an answer.’

‘Roger that, Sofia. I’ll be back. Meanwhile we’ll liaise with the Spanish Civil Guard and have round-the-clock protection over the site.’

‘You’ve got it. They’re on standby already.’

Jack tapped on the intercom. ‘Is Captain Macalister there?’

‘I hear you, Jack.’

‘Is the Lynx helicopter ready?’

‘As you requested. And the IMU Embraer jet is at Cartagena airport. The crews aren’t yet on standby, as you weren’t sure whether you’d need them.’

‘Well I need them now. We’re leaving this evening.’

‘Where to, Jack?’ Costas asked. ‘Sun, sand and martinis?’

‘Lots of sun, lots of sand, not so sure about the martinis. We’re going to a place impossibly far removed from here, but linked to it by that.’ He pointed at the image of the figure from the plaque, frozen in blurry outline on the video screen. ‘By Akhenaten.’

‘About my guess earlier that there was more there than meets the eye. Game on?’

Jack pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know. There’s a lot more to fathom out. A lot of threads to follow. But I think if we stick with it, this could be the greatest adventure yet. The biggest prize.’

‘Well?’

Jack grinned at him. ‘Okay. Yes. Game on.’

‘Where?’

‘You ever ridden a camel before?’

‘Oh no. Not camels.’

‘We’re going to the Nubian desert. To the Sudan.’

3

Jack held on to the door handle on the passenger side of the Toyota four-wheel drive as it hurtled at breakneck speed down the highway through the desert of northern Sudan, passing a convoy of army trucks that honked at them in unison, the moaning sound trailing off quickly as they sped by. Costas was in the back seat, leaning over and holding the keffiyeh scarf that he had been attempting to wrap around his head in Arab fashion, but which was being blown off by the hot wind coming through the open windows. The car was being driven by Ibrahim al-Khalil, a former Sudanese naval officer who was now IMU’s representative in Sudan. Ibrahim normally led an ongoing project searching for ancient wrecks along the Red Sea coast of Sudan, but had been called in at short notice to liaise with Jack for the Nile dive they had planned for today. He was one of IMU’s best divers, and Jack would trust him with his life underwater; that, and the stress for Ibrahim of working in the pirate-infested waters off eastern Sudan, allowed Jack to forgive him the adrenalin burst that clearly took over when he got behind the wheel of a car, even though they had no deadline and less than twenty kilometres to go. Not for the first time in over thirty years as a marine archaeologist, Jack felt less safe travelling to the dive site than he ever did underwater.

He forced himself to forget the road and review the journey so far. He and Costas had left Seaquest II in the harbour at Alexandria and flown in the ship’s Lynx helicopter to Cairo, where IMU’s Embraer 190 jet had been waiting to fly them to the Sudanese border town of Wadi Halfa in the Nubian desert. Some eight hundred kilometres south of Cairo they had flown over the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser, the vast reservoir more than five hundred kilometres long that had begun to fill up after the first stage of the dam was completed in 1964. As a small boy, Jack had been riveted by a National Geographic article that showed the huge engineering project to relocate the ancient Abu Simbel temples above the rising waters of the lake, and he had asked the captain to fly over the artificial hill where the four colossal statues of Ramses the Great sitting side by side were just visible from twenty thousand feet. He had dreamed of diving deep below the waters of the lake to the original temple site, and imagined swimming through the cavernous chambers that lay behind the facade; in the aircraft he found himself running swiftly through the logistics of an IMU project to take a film crew to the site. He had sensed something else, gazing down at the temple for the first time from the air, so high that he could see the curvature of the earth through the dust haze on the horizon. The temple was among the most impressive monuments of ancient Egypt, built by Ramses the Great in the thirteenth century BC to intimidate the people of Nubia, yet from Jack’s vantage point the statues seemed merely to emphasise the impossibility of controlling this place and the puny efforts of any army to conquer the desert.

At Wadi Halfa they had been met by Ibrahim, who had cleared them through the formalities necessary to bring diving equipment across the Egyptian border. Jack had never before worked in Sudan, and his only personal contact other than Ibrahim was an old Sudanese friend from the Royal Naval College who was now deputy commander of the Sudanese air force and who had generously agreed to loan them the use of an air force Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter to take their gear from Wadi Halfa to Maurice Hiebermeyer’s excavation site near Semna on the Nile, some thirty kilometres to the south. All that Hiebermeyer had told him was that they would be looking for structures of pharaonic date submerged since the 1960s, and he had imagined a straightforward dive requiring little more than standard IMU scuba equipment; if they needed more sophisticated gear, they could always request it from Seaquest II. While they were waiting at the airport for the paperwork to be finished, Costas had fired up the compact diesel air compressor and filled their four twelve-litre air tanks so that they would be good to go on arrival at the site.

They had loaded everything on board the helicopter and then set off in the Toyota towards the modern highway that ran the length of the Nile towards Khartoum. The helicopter would not be able to depart from Wadi Halfa for another few hours, and Jack had wanted to see the desert from the perspective of the soldiers and adventurers who had come this way when the only transport was on the ground, by foot or camel. He had been fascinated to drive through Wadi Halfa itself, a staging post for generations of British soldiers who had campaigned in the desert: the relief expedition sent to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum in 1884; the army led by Lord Kitchener to exact revenge against the Mahdist forces fourteen years later; the soldiers who had garrisoned Egypt and the Sudan against the Ottoman Turkish enemy during the First World War; and then another generation who had been here during the Second World War. Jack knew that this modern history lay over another history of successive campaigns, beginning almost four thousand years earlier, when the pharaohs of ancient Egypt had attempted to bring the Nubian desert and the fabled kingdoms that lay to the south under their control, and had started to search for the gold ore deposits that were the source of their wealth. As the Toyota sped south, he had begun to sense the reasons why those campaigns seemed always to have been rebuffed, and why the Egyptians had never brought this land under their heel. The Nile to the north was surrounded by fertile flood plains of verdant green, but here it was a ribbon of silver through a wasteland of red, the gorge too deep and the cliffs too high for the adjacent desert ever to be irrigated during the annual flood that was the lifeblood of Egypt to the north. People had always lived here – fishermen, boatmen, farmers on the few patches of lowland where the river water could be hauled out with shaduf water-lifting devices, and nomads of the desert wadis and oases – but the Nubian desert could never sustain the concentrated population of the Nile valley in Egypt, and the people here would be as difficult to control as the sand and dust of the desert itself.

The Toyota slowed down, mercifully, and Ibrahim swung the wheel and engaged the four-wheel drive as they began to wend their way along a bumpy track towards the Nile a kilometre or so to the west. Costas leaned forward from the back seat and tapped his shoulder. ‘I’ve been thinking of our dive. How much deeper do you think Lake Nasser made the Nile at this point?’

‘We call our end of it Lake Nubia,’ Ibrahim replied. ‘A small but mostly amicable dispute with Egypt.’

‘Okay. Lake Nubia. How deep?’

Ibrahim pulled the Toyota around a pothole and then took one hand off the wheel, fumbling in the glove compartment in front of Jack and pulling out a small folder, which he passed back to Costas. ‘Take a look at the first paper. It’s an offprint from the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of 1903. The author was a British geologist who studied the narrowest point of the Semna cataract at low water when the rocks on either side were exposed, at the place we’re going to now. He dropped a plumb line into the torrent and got twenty-three metres. He then looked at marks on the cliff made by the ancient Egyptians to show maximum high water when the Nile was in flood, and they were some twelve metres above the level of the river at maximum spate in the late nineteenth century, showing the amount of riverbed erosion that had occurred over three thousand years. All I know for sure is that those marks are now submerged, and the present level of the river caused by the Aswan dam is well above that, perhaps ten or fifteen metres.’

Costas whistled. ‘That makes at least fifty metres depth to the base of that channel, maybe sixty. It’s a good thing we brought our mixed-gas gear.’ He flipped the pages and unfolded a plan showing the cataract. ‘What about this pool below the channel?’

‘As far as I know, nobody’s ever sounded it. In pharaonic times and during the British expedition in 1884 it was a kind of a harbour, where the boats coming up from Egypt offloaded their goods for the trek across the desert. When I came here to do a recce for your visit, Maurice and I talked to some fishermen from the local village of Kumna. They confirmed the British army engineer reports that the pool is incredibly calm in the centre and on the west side, so the torrent must drop in an underwater current that sweeps around the east side, below where we’re heading now. They say that whereas the riverbed elsewhere through the cataract is scoured clear of sediment by the current, in the centre of the pool it’s covered by metres and metres of mud. Apparently the current does strange things, whirling around, and that animals that fall into the pool are sucked down into the mud, never to be seen again. They all know the story of the leviathan of the Old Testament, the terrifying river monster, and they think that this was its birthplace, the place that the ancient Egyptians believed was the dark pool that wells up from the underworld, from which evil sprang. The locals never swim or fish there. One old man told us that a giant immortal crocodile lurks deep in the mud, ravenous and unrequited ever since the ancient Egyptians stopped feeding it slaves.’

‘Oh no,’ Costas moaned, shutting the folder. ‘I’d forgotten. They have crocodiles in the Nile, don’t they? Jack, why didn’t you remind me?’

‘Crocodylus niloticus,’ Jack said. ‘It’s in the name. Pretty obvious.’

‘I don’t always think in Latin.’

‘Okay. We’re here.’ Ibrahim pulled the Toyota to a halt, leaving the engine running. ‘I’m going back to the road to wait for the helicopter. We chose a landing spot about a kilometre to the south so the dust from the downdraught doesn’t mess up the archaeological site. Once Maurice has shown you around, you could walk out to meet me.’

Jack felt the shaking in his bones beginning to subside. ‘Walking would be good,’ he said.

There was a bump against the back window, pushing the Toyota sideways. ‘Or take the camel,’ Ibrahim said.

‘What camel?’ Costas asked.

‘That one.’ He turned round and pointed to the window. Costas sprang sideways, staring at it. A large face was looming beside him, its huge hooded eyes staring, its jaw moving from side to side. ‘Are camels another favourite of yours?’

‘Childhood trauma,’ Costas said. ‘My parents took me on a trip to Jerusalem, and a camel giving tourist rides on the Mount of Olives spat on me.’

‘Actually, it’s not spit. It’s regurgitated food.’ Ibrahim craned his neck around, grinning at Costas. ‘Anyway, you’ve got a keffiyeh. It’ll take to you like a native.’

Costas and Jack opened their doors and got out. Ibrahim quickly drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving them beside the camel, which stood chewing its cud and staring into the middle distance as if nothing had happened. Jack breathed in, tasting the tang of the desert, and then shaded his eyes and looked towards the river, just visible beyond a ridge of sandstone about a hundred metres away. He could see a cluster of large tents and several parked vehicles a few hundred metres further away to the south, and guessed that the main area of excavations must lie between where they stood and the tents, behind another low ridge ahead. Maurice had warned him that the site might appear deserted; most of the team would be at the other excavation on the far side of the river, having cleaned up the trenches on this side in preparation for an inspection by the Sudanese antiquities people scheduled for later on today.

A figure suddenly appeared over the ridge, barrelling towards them. He was wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with desert goggles pushed up his brow, the tattered remains of an IMU T-shirt, ancient desert boots and a pair of outsized khaki shorts that Jack had given him years ago, a relic of the German Afrika Korps that he had found in a back-street market in Tunis. The shorts had a dangerous tendency to fly at half-mast, especially when Maurice was squatting down with a trowel, lost in enthusiasm. Jack looked hard, and heaved a sigh of relief. Maurice was wearing a garishly coloured pair of lederhosen braces, which were holding up the shorts. Aysha had sworn that she would only marry him if he did something about them, and Maurice had responded in flamboyant Austrian fashion. But Jack knew that the image of the reformed married man only went so far, and that very little else had changed.

He nudged Costas. ‘Don’t say anything.’

‘Why not? Somebody should. How can anyone take that seriously?’

Jack turned and gazed at him pointedly. Costas was wearing baggy shorts, an outsized Hawaiian flower shirt, aviator sunglasses and a precarious lopsided turban he had made up out of the keffiyeh scarf. ‘Have you looked at yourself recently?’

‘What?’ Costas pushed up his sunglasses and adjusted his turban. ‘Desert chic.’

‘Not. As Rebecca would say.’

‘She would never, ever diss Uncle Costas like that.’

Hiebermeyer bounded up, shaking hands with both of them and slapping Costas on the shoulder. He gently pulled the dangling end of the keffiyeh and the entire cloth unravelled and dropped around Costas’ neck. ‘Mein Gott,’ said Hiebermeyer, eyeing Costas critically. ‘You need to get yourself a stylist.’ He pursed his lips. ‘And Hawaiian is so out this year.’

‘What did you just say?’ Costas exclaimed, smoothing his shirt down and pulling off the cloth. ‘So out?’

‘Aysha’s sister runs an haute couture chain in Cairo. She keeps me abreast of the latest fashions. They’ve even employed me as a consultant, to develop a line of evening wear based on Nefertiti’s robes in the Akhenaten relief carvings we found at Amarna. It’s always good to diversify.’ He grinned at Costas, then turned and strode off through the wadi in the direction of the river. ‘Come on, you two. Too much to see, too little time. I’ve got the inspectors coming in a couple of hours.’

They followed quickly behind, barely keeping up.

‘And speaking of Akhenaten, Jack, that’s a fantastic discovery. Wunderbar. The sarcophagus of Menkaure. I can’t believe it, found after almost two hundred years. If you can raise it, I’m going to see whether I can have it put back in the pyramid. I was only there the other day. It’d be a logistical challenge, but it might be fun to see if I can get a team of Egyptian students to do it the authentic way, with ropes and logs. I’m into experimental archaeology like that at the moment. And that plaque. Marvellous. I showed the image to Aysha and emailed it to my team at the Institute in Alexandria. It looks like some version of the Aten symbol, but nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it. They’re doing a full database check against every known wall painting and carving to see if we can come up with a match. As a wedding present Lanowski gave me a program he’d developed based on fingerprint recognition technology used by the FBI in America. It’s revolutionised our study of Egyptian iconography. If we can’t find a match using that, it doesn’t exist.’

Costas stumbled up alongside him. ‘Lanowski gave you that as a wedding present?’

‘And this hat. A twelve-gallon hat from his home state. I always loved the cowboy stuff. He’s a good man. The best. Never appreciated him until he told me that Egyptology had been his passion before he turned to computer nanotechnology at the age of twelve. His new wife and Aysha get on like a house on fire. We’re planning a joint delayed honeymoon to the pyramids at Giza to test a new program he’s devised to study the alignments. It’s going to blow all that astrological nonsense out of the water.’

‘Hang on, Maurice. A joint delayed honeymoon? You and Lanowski? Something not quite right there.’

‘Everything right. It’s the dawn of a new era in Egyptology.’

Costas dropped back, shaking his head. Jack smiled to himself as they trundled forward. He loved being with Maurice when he was on a roll. He knew there would be a lot of discussion ahead about the shipwreck find, but now was clearly not the time.

They came to a halt on a ridge overlooking the river. Costas had recovered his elan, and slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. ‘Okay, Maurice. Give us the low-down.’

Hiebermeyer pointed to the river. ‘You have to imagine the Nile before the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960s caused the level of the water to rise, inundating all the features that made the Semna cataract so famous in history. Where we’re standing now would have been a cliff about forty metres above a wide pool at the base of the cataract. Above that the river was constricted within a narrow defile only about forty metres wide, bounded by large granite promontories that stuck out into the river on either side, almost damming it. During low water in the winter months the entire river was channelled through the constriction, pouring down from the rocky rapids to the south into the pool below us. You can get a great sense of its appearance and the drama of the place from sketches made by British officers when they were here in 1884.’

‘Come again?’ Costas said. ‘British officers?’

Jack turned to him. ‘During the expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. A British force camped here on their way upriver during the final weeks of December that year, as the level of the Nile was dropping.’

‘Okay. Got you. What I was reading in that book of yours on the plane.’

Hiebermeyer turned to the south, gesticulating grandly as he spoke. ‘To anyone coming here – the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British in 1884 – this place would have seemed like a gateway to another world, the last point you could reach before the cataracts ahead would force you to leave your boats and strike out across the desert. But the image of it as a portal to the riches of the south was only ever an illusion. Even today, standing here and looking south, it can seem a forbidding landscape, an endless expanse of desert with only jagged black basalt hills here and there to break the horizon. Imagine how it would have looked with the veil of spray rising above the cataract beyond that constriction and with a rolling tide of dust from the desert, and you can see why for a lot of people who came here, this place wasn’t a gateway but the last outpost of civilisation, the beginning of a no-man’s-land where many who ventured beyond never returned.’

‘So what’s the date of these ruins?’ Costas asked.

Hiebermeyer beamed at him. ‘Follow me.’ He bounded along the edge of the wadi to higher ground, where a rectilinear excavation had taken the overburden of sand and dust down to bedrock, revealing the lower courses of a small square structure in stone about three metres across. A tarpaulin lay over one edge, and Hiebermeyer leaned down and carefully removed it, his back to them. ‘Prepare to be amazed,’ he said.

Jack gasped at what had been revealed. It was a beautifully smoothed statue head of a pharaoh, life sized and broken at the neck. Above it, protruding from the wall, was a plinth with a pair of sculpted feet, in the same dark basaltic stone. The head was strikingly individualistic, with bulging eyes, sunken cheeks and a downturned mouth, the face of a hard man of war rather than the beatific image of youth so common among statues of the pharaohs. Jack stared at it, racking his brains, then remembered the report he had read from the first excavations that had taken place here back in the 1920s. ‘Sesostris III?’

Hiebermeyer raised his arms in mock despair. ‘Typical Jack Howard to choose the Greek name over the Egyptian one.’

Jack grinned at him. ‘You’ll never change me.’

‘One day, one day I’ll make you realise that ancient Egypt was the origin of Western civilisation, rather than that bunch of overwrought Greek muscle men in the Aegean and their mystical bards and philosophers, living up poles and in barrels.’

‘I thought excavating at Troy last year had won you over.’

‘Only because I proved that Troy had been ruled as an Egyptian vassal during the New Kingdom.’

‘If you hadn’t found those hieroglyphs of Akhenaten carved on the entrance passage into the underground chamber we discovered, you wouldn’t be here today. They specifically mentioned the Nubian desert and the fort at the cataract.’

‘I was coming here anyway,’ Hiebermeyer huffed. ‘Aysha had already agreed to conduct renewed excavations at Semna for the Sudanese government, who want to open up more sites along the Nile to attract tourists.’

‘Before we went to Troy, I distinctly remember Aysha saying that you had agreed to come here not to interfere with her site, but to look after the baby.’

Costas guffawed. ‘Dr Maurice Hiebermeyer, director of the Alexandria Institute of Archaeology, the world’s pre-eminent Egyptologist, forced to become a nursemaid. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.’

‘It was payback,’ Jack said, grinning. ‘For Maurice spending three months during her pregnancy sealed up inside the main chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza.’

‘You did what?’ Costas exclaimed.

Hiebermeyer looked defiant. ‘I’d been desperate to do it for years. It was a chance in a million, while the pyramid was closed to tourists for restoration work. For ages I’d wanted to see what the conditions would have been like for ancient artisans inside the tomb, to see whether it would have been too damp for wall painting. Experimental archaeology. Living in the past. I couldn’t turn it down.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Costas said.

‘Anyway,’ Hiebermeyer said, turning to Jack, ‘there’s nothing more important than my son. He’s the future director of the Institute, and I’ve already got him to trace hieroglyphs with his fingers.’

‘But he might be a marine archaeologist, specialising in ancient Greece,’ said Jack, a mischievous glint in his eye. ‘After all, I am his godfather.’

‘And so am I, remember?’ Costas said. ‘Last time I saw him, he gurgled just like a remote-operated vehicle itching to dive. I see a future submersibles engineer.’

Jack grinned. ‘Okay. Back to Sesostris III. Or should I say Senusret III?’

‘That’s better,’ Hiebermeyer said, squatting down beside the statue. ‘The fifth pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, ruling in the nineteenth century BC. He set up a string of forts and other defensive structures in the Nubian desert, with Semna as the hub. Most of the ruins around us here are from a fort dating to his time, and you can see a second fort on the opposite side of the river where the excavation team are concentrating their efforts today. Aysha thinks there was a garrison of perhaps five hundred men, as well as a workforce based on the riverbank, where there was probably a harbour structure for supply boats coming up the Nile from Egypt. Senusret presided over it all, or at least his statue did, from this shrine. It was a pretty belligerent enterprise, focused on presenting the strength of Egypt to the kingdom of Kush to the south. Senusret gave the forts aggressive names like “Destroyer of the Nubians”, but he doesn’t seem to have advanced further south than here, and the forts were abandoned soon after his reign.’

He took out his iPhone, pressed the screen and passed it to Jack. It showed a fragmentary papyrus document covered in cursive script, faded and illegible in places. ‘This is one of our best finds, from only two days ago, flown back immediately to the Institute in Alexandria for conservation. It’s one of the so-called Semna dispatches, and fits with others found in the temple of Ramses II at Thebes over a century ago. They’re administrative reports sent back to the pharaoh’s officials by the garrison commanders at the fort, and they mostly present a rosy picture, as if all the affairs of the pharaoh’s dominions are safe and sound. This one is different, and may reveal the truth.’ Hiebermeyer reached over and pressed the screen again, and a fragmentary translation came up:

On the fourth month of the second year… my troop, called Repeller of the Nubians, went out on patrol with food to the outpost of… but all there had been slain and mutilated; a great drumming was heard from the south, a wave of darkness descended, we heard the shrieks of the enemy and the lamentation of the women… we have returned to Semna, and the river descends in full fury, bringing with it the bodies stripped and mutilated of the other outpost garrisons at Akhet-re (?), Semionate and… I recognised my own brother among them… darkness descends again, the pool blackens and boils, the god snarls forth… All business affairs that take place here (Semna) are prosperous and flourishing.

‘Pretty grim stuff,’ said Jack, pursing his lips. ‘All was definitely not prosperous and flourishing.’

‘That’s probably why this dispatch wasn’t sent in the end,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘I think it was written after the commander came back from a particularly arduous reconnaissance patrol, and then a few days later he thought better of it and binned it. To present anything other than a rosy picture was perhaps to risk his own neck, even though this makes it clear that naming the fort “Destroyer of the Nubians” was wishful thinking. It’s impossible to date precisely, but my guess is this was written soon after the death of Senusret, who seems to have been the only one who could hold things together down here. Shortly after that the forts were abandoned, perhaps overwhelmed by the dark force the commander describes here.’

Jack stared again at the statue. ‘That face reminds me of another pharaoh, with similar features.’

Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. ‘You mean Amenhotep IV, who became Akhenaten. He lived more than five hundred years after Senusret during the New Kingdom. He was another individualist, and may even have modelled his statues on those of Senusret, perhaps to show continuity in this place with a feared pharaoh of the past, but also because he was attracted by Senusret’s individuality, by how he seemed to have broken the mould. Akhenaten was trying to do the same throughout his younger life, culminating in his obsession with the cult of the Aten and his attempt to convert Egypt to faith in the one God. To me he’s the most fascinating of the pharaohs, and seeing that inscription at Troy awoke a desire I’ve always had to come down here and trace his quest into the Nubian desert. He had the same determination as Senusret, but was a different kind of warrior: a seeker of truth rather than a king bent on conquest.’

Hiebermeyer paused, looking at them both expectantly, and Jack returned his gaze. ‘I know that look. The statue’s great, but what have you really found?’

Hiebermeyer seemed to hurl himself out of the trench and disappeared over the rocky plateau behind them. Jack and Costas followed, coming down in a wide gully bound on either side by ridges some three to four metres high. One section of the far ridge had been excavated down to bedrock, and Hiebermeyer was already inside the trench, gesturing for them to come over. They followed him and squatted down on the edge as he clambered down a wooden ladder and made his way across to the base of the rocky bank. He picked up a piece of shaped stone and held it up so they could see it. ‘This is green schist, part of a saddle quern, a grinding stone. We’ve found lots of fragments of broken querns in this trench.’ He put the stone down, and then pointed to a section of the trench that had been left unexcavated, a layer of dust and sand filled with white chips and whitish streaks in the dust. ‘That’s what they were doing. Grinding down stone.’ He searched the exposed face of the bank and pulled out a fist-sized lump of rock, turned it over and inspected it, then dropped it and pulled out another, repeating the inspection. He nodded to himself, and then tossed it to Jack. ‘What do you make of this?’

Jack caught the rock and turned it over in his hands, Costas peering alongside. It was cloudy quartzite, streaked with dark green and sparkly mineral inclusions. Costas lifted up his sunglasses and looked more closely. He pointed to a streak of colour in the rock. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

Jack held the quartz up to the sunlight. The streak of colour shimmered and sparkled, and he saw another vein on the other side. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he murmured. ‘It’s gold.’

Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. ‘It’s all along the edge of the wadi. There’s a vein of it running through the metamorphic rock that makes up much of this plateau. There are ancient excavation pits all along the wadi to the south. This was a gold mine.’

Costas took the stone from Jack and stared at the streak of yellow. ‘Is this what really drew Senusret here?’ he asked.

Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘This gully seems to have been deepened by Senusret’s quarrymen cutting blocks from a sandstone deposit that ran along the centre, in the process exposing the metamorphic gneiss on either side. But our geologists think that it was only after a few centuries of erosion that the quartz veins would have been exposed. The gold workings were ancient Egyptian, but later than the Middle Kingdom.’ He picked up the fragment of quernstone again, then walked up to Jack and handed it to him. ‘Turn it over.’

Jack did as he was instructed, feeling the gritty surface of mineral inclusions that would have made the rock so abrasive. He caught his breath as the base was revealed. In the centre were twin cartouches surmounted by royal symbols, and above them the crocodile hieroglyph of a pharaoh. The forename and name contained within the cartouches were clearly visible, with distinct symbols: the scarab and sun in one, the ibex in the other, with other symbols clustered around. They were the same cartouches he and Costas had seen three days before inside the sarcophagus at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

‘Even I recognise those,’ Costas said. ‘It’s Akhenaten.’

Hiebermeyer was flushed with excitement. ‘You’ve got it. Here he is again. Gold mining would have been tightly controlled by the pharaoh’s overseers, so even the grinding querns were stamped with his official cartouche.’

‘Do you think that’s what brought Akhenaten here?’ Costas said. ‘Not some mystical revelation in the desert, but the lure of gold?’

Hiebermeyer knitted his brows. ‘That’s what I’d assumed, but then Aysha made me think otherwise. She believes that after Senusret abandoned this place and retreated north, these forts would have become forbidding places to the ancient Egyptians, ruins haunted by the ghosts of soldiers who had failed to broach the desert, places that may even have been cursed. For Akhenaten to have persuaded a force of soldiers to return here might have taken a special incentive, perhaps a discovery he himself had made when he came here alone as a rebellious teenager before becoming pharaoh, the expedition when he may have first experienced the revelation that drew him back a few years later. Perhaps the gold they found here secured the loyalty of his soldiers and helped them to overcome their fear. We know he was successful, because enough of a workforce came with him to build a temple complex at Sesebi, near the third cataract to the south of here. That’s the only temple of Akhenaten previously known in the Nubian desert.’

‘You say previously,’ Jack said, eyeing Hiebermeyer. ‘Have you got something more up your sleeve?’

‘Well, it might soon be up your sleeve. With the help of IMU equipment.’

Costas sprang up. ‘You mean diving? I’m ready.’

‘There’s some other stuff first.’ Hiebermeyer turned to Jack, beaming. ‘How’s your Victorian military archaeology these days?’

Jack peered back at him, and suddenly felt himself course with excitement. Since boyhood, he had been fascinated by the weapons and wars of the Victorian period, and during holidays from boarding school, when Hiebermeyer had stayed with him at the family home, he had dragged him to the range as he test-fired every antique military rifle and musket that had been accumulated by his ancestors over the years. He stood up, and grinned. ‘That sounds right up my street. Lead on.’

4

Hiebermeyer led Jack and Costas along the ridge beside the Nile to an awning over a trestle table covered with plastic finds trays. He picked out an object and handed it to Jack. It was a spent rifle cartridge, the brass blackened with age; the shape was distinctively bottle necked, with a wider lower body than most modern rifle cartridges, and the primer was dented where it had been struck by the rifle’s firing pin.

Costas peered at it. ‘I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. It looks as if it could take out an elephant.’

‘It’s a Martini-Henry cartridge, .577 necked down to .450 for the bullet,’ Jack said. ‘It was the last of the big British black powder cartridges, designed to put down a fanatical enemy running at you at full tilt. Even so, there are many accounts of tribesmen out here taking multiple hits and still charging screaming into the British lines with their spears levelled and swords raised.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Probably spurred on by the fact that there was no provision for treating the wounded in the Mahdi’s army, and death in battle for a jihadist guaranteed an exalted place in heaven.’

‘How closely can you date this?’ Costas asked Jack.

‘The Martini-Henry was the main British service rifle from the early 1870s until 1888. To be archaeological about it, there’s a terminus post quem in the fact that this particular cartridge is drawn brass, essentially a modern-style cartridge. The earlier cartridges of rolled brass foil were found to be deficient during the Zulu War in 1879, and were replaced soon after that. Given what we know about the chronology of British military deployment in the Sudan in the 1880s, I have no doubt that this cartridge dates from the time of the Gordon relief expedition of 1884 to 1885.’

‘I can be even more specific,’ Hiebermeyer said. He rummaged in a satchel on the table and pulled out a battered book, opening it at a marked page. ‘This is Colonel William Butler’s Campaign of the Cataracts: Being a Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884 to 1885. The relief force under General Wolseley was divided into a river column and a desert column, with most of the effort until quite late in the campaign, really too late to save Gordon, being put into the river column. The plan was to drag over eight hundred whaleboats up the Nile against the flow through the cataracts. Once they had reached open water, they were to be filled with British troops and used to break through the Mahdist lines besieging Khartoum.’

‘Come again?’ Costas said. ‘Dragging boats against the flow of the river, for hundreds of miles? What was wrong with going across the desert?’

‘Exactly the question that many asked at the time, not least Gordon himself,’ Jack said. ‘Wolseley had done something similar in Canada in 1870 when he took an expedition up the Red River against a rebellion led by Louis Riel, a mixed-blood Métis. The expedition was a remarkable success and ended without bloodshed after Riel capitulated. Wolseley conducted much of his subsequent campaigning career by precedent, and the Nile expedition was to be his tour de force. He even brought over the same Canadians he’d used on the Red River expedition, including more than fifty Mohawks from the Ottawa valley, as well as west African Kroomen from the Gold Coast, because he had campaigned there against the Ashanti in 1873 and had admired their boating skills.’

Costas shook his head. ‘It’s hard to know who was more unhinged, Gordon in Khartoum going stir-crazy, or Wolseley insanely dragging boats upriver to rescue him.’

Jack gave a wry smile. ‘By the time the river column reached this point, Wolseley had finally been persuaded to create a separate camel corps to advance across the Bayuda desert and cut out the bend of the Nile, and it was that force that finally did reach Khartoum in the steamers that Gordon had sent downriver to wait for them.’

‘But too late,’ Costas said.

Jack nodded. ‘By two days. But there have always been bigger questions about the expedition, about whether Wolseley ever realistically intended to relieve Gordon. He and his superiors in Cairo and London seem to have convinced themselves that Gordon had gone off on a loop of his own, that he had become insane. But I’ve never really bought that. Gordon was certainly an individualist, to put it mildly, but he was also an exceptional administrator and a committed Christian. He was horrified by the plight of those besieged in Khartoum, who had come to rely on him for the dispersal of food and medicine, and he refused to leave them. The idea that he was a self-appointed messiah may even have been encouraged by the government in London, who knew they could never rescue him and were apprehensive about losing face. There must have been those who would rather he died and became a martyr, especially with the fear that he might be captured by the Mahdi and paraded in front of the world, a complete humiliation for the British.’

Costas gestured at Hiebermeyer’s book. ‘So what happened at this place?’

Hiebermeyer checked his notes. ‘The river column reached Semna on the twenty-third of December 1884.’ He took out a folded photocopied sheet from the book. ‘Here’s the official War Office report: “At the head of this rapid is the great ‘Gate of Semna’, a narrow gorge between two rocky cliffs, partly blocked by two islands about equidistant from the shores and from each other. Through the three passages thus formed, the whole pent-up volume of the Nile rushes as through a sluice gate.”’ He pulled out another folded sheet and passed it to Costas. ‘And that’s a contemporary print from the Illustrated London News, based on a sketch sent to them by an anonymous officer. You can see the central channel, and the ropes used by the Royal Navy sailors to haul up the boats, with the voyageurs paddling and steering them. It shows what a monumental task this would have been. The river column was encamped here for several days, waiting for the boats to come up from the previous stretch of rapids and then for them to be taken one by one up through that narrow defile, now completely submerged by the effect of the Aswan dam.’

Jack leaned over and examined the print. ‘The detail on these drawings is astounding. It’s easy to forget the training in draftsmanship and survey these officers had, especially the engineers. This looks good enough to be used for range-finding.’

Costas took the cartridge from Jack and peered at it. ‘So we’ve got a guy up here shooting a Martini-Henry rifle, probably one day in December 1884. Is there a chance he was one of the enemy, the Mahdi’s men? In Afghanistan, the tribesmen were good at getting hold of British rifles from battlefields and by stealing them, and their own gunsmiths were skilled at making copies. I remember seeing a photograph in the news a couple of years ago of a cache of arms seized by US Marines from the Taliban, and as well as old Lee-Enfields there were a couple of Martini-Henrys.’

Jack shook his head. ‘The Sudanese tribesmen hadn’t yet had the opportunity. They’d first encountered the British army less than a year before, and even though the battles were generally bloody stalemates, the British were left in control of the battlefields and were careful not to lose their arms. The Egyptian army as well as the Sudanese irregulars under Gordon were armed with Remington rifles; thousands of these were captured after the first big battle against the Mahdi in late 1883. Some of the Egyptian soldiers spared by the Mahdi, those who promised to convert to his cause, served as musketry instructors and even produced halfway-competent snipers. The Remington took a .43 calibre round, so that would have been a further disincentive to acquiring Martini-Henrys, as they used different ammunition.’

Costas looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Where exactly did you find this?’

Hiebermeyer straightened up and pointed. ‘About fifty metres to the west, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the river. Let’s go there now.’ Jack and Costas followed him, making their way over the bare sandstone and igneous rock and then through a shallow dusty gully full of dried-up camel dung that led to the cliff. They stopped beside a freshly excavated square about three metres across where the bedrock had been completely exposed, along with the lower courses of a finely constructed masonry wall that blocked off access to the cliff face to the south-west. Hiebermeyer jumped into the trench, moved aside a measuring rod and squatted by the wall, pointing at the worked stone. ‘This is part of the fort complex built by our friend Senusret in the early second millennium BC. It’s the final part of the lookout he ordered constructed on either side of the cataract. There were further outposts to the south, as we saw in that papyrus dispatch, but I think a veil of mist rose above that torrent in the river and beyond was a land of darkness, a place they feared.’

‘The British in the river column must have begun to feel the same,’ Jack said. ‘This was their biggest obstacle so far, and everything ahead must have seemed almost insurmountable. They hadn’t experienced battle yet, but they’d begun to encounter the odd dervish sharpshooter.’

‘You’ll be interested to see where I found the cartridge.’ Hiebermeyer vaulted out of the trench and on to the ancient wall, and then disappeared over the other side only a few metres from the cliff edge. The other two followed and joined him in a pit about four metres across and two metres deep in the centre, eroded around the sides but clearly man-made. The edge forming a parapet beside the cliff had been excavated down to bedrock in a section about three feet wide, exposing the construction sequence. Hiebermeyer got inside and turned around so he was facing the other two, and pointed at the section. ‘Here you can clearly see the pharaonic wall, in five surviving courses. This was a blockhouse attached to the larger complex we were standing in earlier, overlooking the river. But above the masonry you can see unworked slabs of gneiss and smaller stones, as well as compacted clay that must have been brought up from the river shore. There’s clearly an amount of wind-blown fill inside the pit, but as you’ve seen, there isn’t much sand in this part of the desert and certainly not enough to explain that material on top of the wall. I have no doubt it was built up by the British in 1884.’

Jack looked around. ‘It’s a sangar,’ he murmured. ‘That’s a Pashtun word the British picked up in Afghanistan, meaning a protected built-up pit, basically a firing position or sentry post.’ He shaded his eyes and scanned the far bank of the river, where a group of Hiebermeyer’s team could be seen excavating another complex of ruins. ‘My guess is that there would also have been one of these on the other side, and that they were temporary sentry posts established above the pool while the column was camped here during December 1884.’

‘The sentry post on the other side also served as a heliograph station,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘We found smashed glass from the reflective mirror, which must have been damaged while they were putting it up or taking it down.’

Jack continued to gaze at the cliffs opposite, moving slightly so that he was looking south-west. ‘If I were a dervish sharpshooter, I’d be in the rocks over there, above the gorge,’ he said, pointing. ‘That would give me a clear line of sight to the work being carried out on the river, as well as to this sangar. The distance to here is four hundred, maybe four hundred and twenty yards, within range of a Remington.’

‘And presumably of a Martini-Henry, from this side,’ Costas said.

‘Could you do it, shoot accurately at this range?’ Hiebermeyer said, looking at Jack.

‘I’ve had a go with a Martini-Henry, 1883 vintage,’ Jack said. ‘It’s difficult as the sights take a lot of getting used to, but it could be done. I’ve shot accurately at this range before with a Lee-Enfield, no problem.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ Costas said, squinting at Hiebermeyer. ‘Four years ago, in the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan, when Jack used an old British rifle loaned to him by an Afghan warlord to take out a guy who’d been stalking us.’

Jack continued staring at the cliffs, saying nothing. Hiebermeyer leaned over a finds tray and picked up a labelled plastic bag with a small lump in it, then pointed at the other debris in the tray. ‘This material came from inside the pit, and shows that British soldiers were here for some time, several days at least. You can see the rusted lid from a tin of army-issue bully beef, and the paper wrapper from a package of Wills tobacco. Of course the conditions here are as elsewhere in the desert, and organic material survives very well.’ He handed Costas the bag. ‘Take a look at this.’

Costas peered at the lump bemusedly and then handed it to Jack, who opened up the bag and carefully rolled it out on to his hand. ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. ‘It’s a spent bullet, only partly compacted, so fired from a considerable range, conceivably from those cliffs opposite. And that’s a little bit of fabric with it. This bullet went through a clothed human body.’ He weighed it in his hand, and then peered closely at it. ‘This isn’t heavy enough for a Martini-Henry bullet, but I’d swear it’s from a Remington. The base is still intact, so we’ll be able to measure it.’

‘Already done,’ Hiebermeyer said, beaming. ‘I’ve got an electronic caliper measurement of .445 inch, just right for .43 calibre Remington. The bullet wasn’t loose in the pit but had penetrated the clay on the side of the sangar. Fortunately I was here supervising when it was revealed and I had the student stop excavating while the bullet was still in situ so that I could measure the angle of trajectory. You’re right, Jack. It had been fired from the opposite cliff and had penetrated the sangar below the maximum possible line of sight of the shooter, so was coming in on an arching trajectory. I used a laser rangefinder and got a range of four hundred and thirty-five yards to an opening on the upper ridge where a sniper could have been positioned. I then did a little research of my own with a friend in Germany who is a military re-enactor, and he told me that the drop of a bullet from a regulation Remington cartridge in dry desert conditions over that distance would be about twenty-nine inches. That allowed me to find the exact spot on the opposite cliff where the sniper sat when he took the shot that hit the British soldier.’

‘And the spot where the sniper may have died,’ Jack said.

‘How can you know that?’ Costas asked.

Jack picked up the Martini-Henry cartridge again, and turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Did you find any more of these?’

Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘That came from where you’re standing, and we swept the entire sangar with a metal detector. My friend told me that the British generally didn’t collect their cartridges after use. Any expended cartridges here would probably quickly have been trampled into the dust underfoot, and not been visible to locals who might have come scavenging this place afterwards.’

Costas looked around. ‘Yet if this was a sentry post, there’d be at least a couple of guys here at any one time, and if they were being sniped at, you’d expect them to fire a barrage of rounds at that cliff.’

Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘I think there was someone here who knew his business, and got them to hold their fire. I think he was a skilled sharpshooter himself. He would have known he had only one chance before his opponent moved. One shot, one kill.’

‘One down on each side,’ Costas said. ‘Even score, nobody wins.’

Jack looked pensively back at the cliff. ‘A single sniper up in those cliffs could have held back the British column for hours, inflicting officer casualties and battering the morale of exhausted men who must already have been questioning the worth of what they were doing. So despite the casualty here, I think that if the dervish sniper was killed, then it was one up for the British.’

Hiebermeyer replaced the finds tray and stood up. ‘Except that two men were killed that day in this sangar.’

Jack stared at him. ‘How do you know?’

Hiebermeyer made his way out of the section and into the pit, and then leapt up on the wall again. ‘This is where it gets really fascinating, because what we’ve found takes us back from 1884 almost three thousand years. But before then, we’re going to meet up with Aysha and hear her take on all this. After all, it is her site.’

Jack climbed up to the rim of the sangar and stared to the south. He could hear the helicopter drumming along the course of the Nile, and he wondered how much deeper the echo would have sounded a hundred and thirty years earlier, before the Aswan dam had been constructed and the river level raised. He looked into the waters now, imagining the gorge as it had been then: the rocks with the torrent in between, the boats queuing up awaiting their turn to be hauled through the cataract, the shouts and singing of the men below, British and Canadian, west African and Egyptian and Sudanese. He turned back and looked at the sangar again, and thought about how thin the veil of dust was that lay over the detritus of the past in the desert, how quickly it reduced everything to the same level: the remains from that day in 1884 could be as old as the ancient Egyptian walls that surrounded them. Yet the absence of any overburden, of any stratigraphy, also meant that the past was immediate, and he could almost put himself back there on that fateful day, hear the screams of the soldier who had been hit and lay dying in the dust in front of him, and see the man with the rifle who had lain against the parapet and fired at the far cliff. In the blink of an eye their modern clothes could become the khaki of a hundred and thirty years earlier, and in another blink the skirts and sandals of the ancient Egyptian soldiers who had manned this outpost three thousand years before that, all of them sharing the same apprehension about what lay through the pall of dust beyond the horizon to the south.

He took a deep breath, smelling the tang of the desert and the acrid odour of camel dung, even imagining he had caught a sulphurous whiff of gunpowder. He felt as if another deep breath would suck in that veil and he would take the past within himself and step out into that day in December 1884. For a few moments he had not only seen the sharpshooter but become one with him, focused on the only things of importance at that moment: the balance of the rifle, the view through the sights, the measured pace of his breathing, the touch of his finger on the trigger. Jack wondered who the man had been, whether he would ever know his name.

He took a water bottle from his leg pocket, unscrewed the top and offered it to the other two. Costas took a mouthful, and then Jack drained the rest and replaced it in his pocket, screwing back the top as he did so. The drumming of the helicopter became a roar as it settled into its landing site, the whirling of its rotor blades just visible through the storm of dust created by the downdraught. It powered down, and Jack turned to the others. ‘I’ll give Ibrahim about an hour to offload the equipment with the crewmen. It’s his operation and I don’t want to interfere. But as soon as he calls through, I’m on to it. I’m itching to dive.’

‘Roger that,’ Costas said.

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Does that give us enough time?’

Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I hope so. There are rogue elements in the regime here who could shut us down at any moment. There’s a lot simmering just beneath the surface in the Sudan: warlords, fundamentalism. We’re just trying to pack as much as we can into every day while we’re still able to work here.’

‘Where’s Aysha?’

‘At the Senusret shrine. Once we’ve talked to her, I’ll finish showing you what we’ve found. It’s fabulous stuff, one of the most exciting discoveries ever made in Egyptology. Follow me.’