Pyramid

CHAPTER 1

Jack Howard sank slowly into the depths of the Red Sea, injecting a blast of air into his stabilizer jacket and reaching neutral buoyancy only inches above the seabed. Ahead of him the sand shimmered with the sunlight that streamed down from the surface some thirty meters overhead, blocked only by the shadow of the dive boat at the edge of his field of vision. For a few moments he hung there, barely breathing, perfectly at one with the sea.

When Jack dived he was always seeking the past, in shipwrecks, in sunken ruins, in humble scraps of evidence or fabulous treasures, some of them dating back to the dawn of recorded history. And yet for him the experience of diving was all about the present, about the heightened awareness and rush of adrenaline that came when every breath was precious and your life depended on it. In more than thirty years of diving, he had never lost that feeling, from his first dives as a boy through his academic training as an archaeologist and his time as a navy diver to his years with the International Maritime University on expeditions that spanned the globe. It was the same allure that had drawn men to the sea for millennia, men whose past receded with the shoreline, their future hemmed in by the vagaries of storm and wreck, whose survival could be measured only as far as they could see ahead. For Jack it was intoxicating, his lifeblood. He knew that even if he found nothing this time, the dive would revitalize him, would push him forward to try again, never to give up as long as the past beckoned him to explore its deepest secrets.

He stared around him. To his left a cliff rose steeply up the western shore of the gulf, the rock furrowed and worn. To his right the seabed dropped off to the abyss at the center of the gulf; the slope was punctuated by the heads of coral that rose out of the sand like giant mushrooms. He strained his eyes, scanning the seabed: still nothing. And yet his gut feeling told him to carry on, an instinct borne of more than thirty years of underwater exploration in which he had rarely made a bad call and had never given up while the window was still open. For three days now, he and Costas had dived repeatedly along this coast, covering more than a kilometer of seabed, and Jack was determined to use every last second of dive time available to them. The prize that he knew lay somewhere out there was big enough to justify the risk they had taken coming here, and they might never again have a chance like this.

A voice crackled in his earphones, the familiar New York accent clear even through the intercom. “Jack. It’s my worst nightmare.”

Jack turned, seeing the sparkling veil of exhaust bubbles at the edge of his visibility some thirty meters upslope, exhaled by the diver kneeling on the seabed beneath. Costas Kazantzakis had been Jack’s constant dive companion for almost twenty years now, ever since they had first met and come up with the idea of an institute for exploration and research. Costas had learned virtually everything he knew about archaeology from Jack, who in turn had come to rely on his friend for engineering expertise and general practical know-how. Jack remembered the last time he and Costas had dived together in the Red Sea, almost five years before. Then, they had been seeking a fortune in gold lost in a Roman ship trading out to India. They were following clues in fragments of an ancient merchant’s guide found by their colleague Maurice Hiebermeyer in a desert excavation. Now, five years later, they were again following clues in ancient writing, but instead of a newly discovered text, it was one of the greatest works of literature ever known, its words and verses pored over and memorized by millions. And what was at stake was not just a treasure in artifacts but the truth behind one of the oldest adventure stories ever told, a foundation myth in one of the world’s great religious traditions, yet a tradition that may have been torn apart by an event of unimaginable destruction at this very spot over three thousand years ago.

Jack tapped his intercom. “What is it?”

“Two sea snakes. Right in front of me, Jack, swaying, working out which bit of my neck to lick. Just like those snake batons from the tomb of Tutankhamun that gave me the jitters in the Cairo Museum. It’s the undead, come back to haunt me for violating the temple we found under the Nile.”

“Those weren’t snakes, Costas. They were crocodiles. A temple to the crocodile god, Sobek.”

“They’re all friends, right? Crocodile gods, snake gods. Violate one, you violate all of them. Right now I wish I’d never gotten involved with archaeologists.”

“Remember our cover, Costas. We’re here to photograph the wildlife. Our dive boat captain’s probably watching us through his glass-bottomed bucket right now. You need to look the part, but just keep your distance.”

“Don’t worry. Every great explorer has their phobia, Jack. Mine’s just become sea snakes.”

“Yeah, along with, at the last count, rats, skeletons, and anything decayed. Especially mummies.”

“Don’t mention mummies, Jack. Just don’t go there.”

“That’s why I brought you here, remember? To get away from all that. You’re always at me about wanting more down time, and now you’ve got it. A holiday on the Red Sea, and still you complain.”

“Jack, holiday means sun lounger under a parasol, gin and tonics, the occasional splash in the sea, delightful female company. It doesn’t mean another Jack and Costas against-the-clock hunt for some lost archaeological treasure. It doesn’t mean the entire Egyptian security service on our tails, our lives dependent on some dodgy dive boat captain who probably moonlights as a pirate. And just to cap it off, a major war about to start overhead.”

“You love it, Costas. Admit it.”

“Yeah, right. Like I love being licked by sea snakes.”

“How’s your air?”

“A hundred bar and counting. Enough for half an hour at my depth, twenty minutes where you are.”

“Okay. You see that triple coral head about twenty meters in front of me? At my four o’clock from that, about twenty meters down the slope, there’s a cluster of smaller coral heads I want to look at. There’s something strange about them. That’s as far as we’re going to get on this dive.”

“Roger that, Jack. Wait there while I take a picture.”

Jack stared, riveted by the scene. For a long time it had been thought that the Red Sea was fatal for sea snakes, it being too saline for them to be able to filter out enough of the salt to make the water drinkable. But reports of sea snakes in the Red Sea had circulated among divers for several months now, and fishermen had brought in several specimens. The captain of the dive boat had spoken of it to Jack the night before, telling him of turbulence he had seen on the surface of the sea at night, patches of disturbed water and phosphorescence that looked like feeding schools of fish but he thought were actually writhing schools of snakes. In the Indian Ocean they were known to rise to the surface to drink freshwater after a rainstorm, and he thought that they had reached the northern limit of their tolerance at the entrance to the Gulf of Suez, where the sea becomes even more saline, and were congregating there in a desperate attempt to find drinkable water. They seemed to be drawn in large numbers to a few places where the water was fresher. Jack had pointed to a desert spring that trickled down the cliff face to the beach at this spot, and he had thought there might be other freshwater up-wellings below the seabed near the shoreline.

Jack watched Costas reach out and turn the camera on himself and the snakes, and then he pressed his intercom. “You might not want to alarm them. I’d keep the flash off if I were you.”

“You know how I feel about snakes, Jack. I’m trying not to shake all over. I just need one selfie to show that I’ve overcome my fear.”

“Did you hear what our captain said about the snakes last night?”

“I heard the word snake, and then I put on my headphones. I didn’t want any bad dreams on our final night here.”

“He said the ones he’s seen are Pelamis platurus, the yellow-bellied sea snake.”

“Got it. Black body, yellow belly. They look kind of Egyptian, the sort of thing you’d see swirling around Tutankhamun in his tomb.”

“Just don’t get bitten.”

“Don’t say that, Jack. I thought sea snakes were pretty passive.”

“Not when they’re thirsty. And these snakes might be a little deranged. They shouldn’t really be in the Red Sea, and they’ve swum in the wrong direction if they want to find water that’s less saline. The Gulf of Suez would be a death zone for them.”

“Okay, Jack.” Costas slowly withdrew the camera. “Give me the lowdown. You should have warned me earlier.”

“I didn’t want to break the spell.”

“That’s done.”

“Progressive flaccid paralysis, leading to muscle breakdown, renal failure, and death. Get bitten out here, and you’re a goner.”

“Great.” Costas sounded distant, and he had gone still in the water. “Any suggestions?”

“You remember that spring we saw above the cliff face? The outflow should be coming into the sea just opposite you. If you slowly ascend and the snakes stay with you, they might sense the freshwater and swim toward it, away from you.”

“Got it.” Costas slowly reached toward the valve that bled air into his buoyancy compensator. One of the snakes slid under his jacket, came out through the neck opening, and coiled itself around Costas’ hand, hovering over his fingers, its mouth open. Costas had stopped exhaling, and for a moment there was no movement. Jack felt his own breathing lessen, as if he too were worried that the snake might be disrupted by his exhaust bubbles. He watched, his heart pounding, barely believing what might be about to happen. After all they had been through, it seemed absurd that a chance encounter with sea life could put an end to everything, but it was an occupational hazard as dangerous as anything else. He held his breath, staring. A few seconds later the snake slid over Costas’ mask and then uncoiled above him, looking toward the surface, its mouth opening and closing. Costas pressed the valve and slowly began to ascend, his legs motionless, letting the buoyancy do all the work. After about five meters both the snakes uncoiled and swam up toward the surface, rising on the mass of bubbles from Costas’ exhaust. He watched them swim toward shore on the surface, sinuous black shapes silhouetted by the sunlight, and then he bled air from his jacket and swam toward Jack.

Jack turned to face ahead, regulating his breathing until he was hanging almost motionless in the water. He thought about what Costas had just said. A war about to start. He stared north along the slope to a rocky promontory that marked the limit of their survey area. Earlier that day an Egyptian navy patrol boat had told the dive boat captain in no uncertain terms that he must not stray into the military zone that lay beyond the promontory. Tensions between Egypt and Israel were higher than they had been for decades, with the Middle East closer to a meltdown than it had been since the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The extremist hold on Iraq had been tightening again; only Iran remained a beacon of stability, ironically courted by the West after years of standoff. To the north of Israel, the true intentions of the extremists who had flocked into Syria during the civil war had become clear, with their attention turning from fighting the regime to sending rockets and suicide bombers across the Israeli border. To the south, the Israelis had watched the political turmoil in Egypt with dismay, as the newly installed Islamist regime was now itself threatened by extremists, a faction whose sympathies lay more with the extremists in Syria and Iraq than with the interests of the Egyptian people. Most worrying, it had become clear that the Egyptian army, in the past a force for moderation, had been infiltrated to the highest level by officers in the extremist camp, a process that had been going on in secret for years.

A military coup now would not bring stability as it had done in the past, but it would provide clout for an extremist takeover. And everyone knew that if that happened, the Israelis would have no choice but to act. A war now would not be a lightning conflict as in 1973, brought to heel by superpower intervention, but a prolonged conflict, escalating into surrounding countries, into Libya, Somalia, and Iraq, drawing in Iran and Turkey. Outside powers would lack the strength to mediate a peace, their credibility undermined by the failed interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The war would start on the eastern frontiers of Egypt, in the skies above them now, and could turn into the cataclysm that everyone watching the Middle East had feared since the end of the cold war: a new kind of world war, one marked not only by a wildfire of conventional conflicts but also by unfettered terrorism, paralyzing the world and bringing fear to people in a way that had not been seen since the threat of a nuclear holocaust two generations before.

As if to underline his thoughts, the deep rumble of a low-flying jet coursed through Jack. It was one in a succession of warplanes that had been flying toward the Egyptian border over the past few hours. The captain of the dive boat had been jittery enough without the ultimatum from the patrol vessel, and he was now standing off from their anchorage point with his engine already fired up. Jack and Costas were here anonymously, posing as recreational divers, having chartered the boat with the cover of being photographers. The only way now that Jack could extend their time on-site would be for him to blow their cover and tell the authorities that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough discovery, but to do so would be to court disaster. The new antiquities director in Cairo was a political stooge and had been shutting down foreign excavations in Egypt on a daily basis. A month ago he had been enraged to discover that Jack and Costas had been exploring beneath the pyramids at Giza, had refused their request to clear the underground passage they had found, and had rescinded their permit.

Anything Jack tried now would almost certainly result in the International Maritime University being blacklisted in Egypt, his deportation, and the closure of all the remaining IMU projects in the country, as well as threatening Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, an affiliate of IMU. At this moment Maurice was working desperately to complete his excavation of the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum oasis, the culmination of a lifelong passion for Egyptology that might still produce astonishing finds. For him, every moment now counted just as it did for Jack, but Hiebermeyer’s entire soul and career were wrapped up in ancient Egypt, and Jack was not willing to risk his friend’s chance of bringing his excavation to some kind of completion. There was no leeway: This dive would be their last one on-site, with the chances of them ever returning overshadowed by the cloud that now hung over the entire Middle East, not just Egypt.

Jack closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in slowly and deeply, knowing that each draw on his tank now represented a final countdown to the end of the dive. Over the past few months in Sudan and Egypt, he had pushed the envelope further than he ever had done before, and he had raised more than a few eyebrows among the IMU board of directors. Officially Jack was IMU’s archaeological director and Costas its submersibles expert. When Jack had set up IMU fifteen years before, he had relinquished control to an independent board because he had seen too many institutes wobble under the control of a founding director who had put too many eggs in one basket. IMU projects were now spread around the globe, encompassing oceanography and geology as well as archaeology, and IMU acted as an umbrella for affiliated institutes, including Hiebermeyer’s beside the ancient harbor of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. One of the board’s remits was to rein in any project that had become a political flash point, potentially threatening IMU’s reputation and wider activities in the region. Through no fault of his own, Jack had endured the Sudanese authorities terminating his diving in the Upper Nile and had then experienced the barely contained furor over their pyramid exploration, setting him up against the same extremist element that had infiltrated the regimes in both countries. For some days now, Jack had wondered whether it would be the new Egyptian antiquity authorities or the IMU board of directors that would cause his final departure from Egypt. Either way, he knew his time was running perilously short.

Jack glanced at his wrist computer. There were still fifteen minutes of dive time left, precious moments in which he could push aside the modern world and focus all his being on the diving. For Jack, no amount of equipment preparation, of preparation of body and mind, of bringing a lifetime of experience to bear could guarantee his ability to see beyond the perimeter of his vision to what might lie ahead. Living for the moment was more than just an intoxication for him; it had become a tool of his trade, sharpening his senses and his acuity of observation, clearing his mind and allowing him to see more in a few moments on the seabed than he could do in hours on land. He stared down the slope and saw the seconds slipping away on his dive computer. He knew he was going to have to bring all that acuity to bear if they were to stand any chance of finding what all his instincts told him lay out there: a revelation that just might shake the foundations of history.

CHAPTER 2

Jack stared up at the hull of the dive boat some thirty meters overhead, watching as the captain gunned the engine to keep clear of the shore. Something nudged him.

“Jack.” He heard the suck of another regulator, and turned to see Costas hovering behind him. It was still a double-take to see him in rented scuba gear rather than the usual E-suit, an all-environment dry suit with Kevlar exoskeleton and an integrated re-breather that Costas had developed more than ten years before at the International Maritime University engineering lab in Cornwall. He had been constantly refining it since then. Out here anything with an IMU logo was going to attract unwanted attention. Even the full-face masks with intercom were a lucky find in the backroom of the dive operator they had decided to hire. All they had brought of their own was Costas’ photo rig and the GoPro camera he had strapped to his forehead. Yet Jack relished going back to basics, to the kind of equipment he had pored over in dive magazines as a boy. Sucking on a battered rental regulator gave him the same thrill he had felt when he did it on his first open-water dive all those years ago.

He steadied himself, injecting a small blast of air into his stabilizer jacket. “What is it?”

“Found something.”

Jack shook his head, staring back down the slope. The coral heads were shimmering with schools of fish, and in the distance he saw the flash of a whitetip reef shark. “Not yet. But I want to look at those outcrops down there. It means going a bit deeper, and I know we can’t risk extending our no-stop time with the boat having no recompression chamber. But even if we only have five minutes, that might be enough.”

“No. I mean I found something.”

Jack turned to him and caught his breath. Costas was kneeling on the sand holding an object in front of his camera. It was a rusty old rifle, the stock riddled with shipworms and the metal receiver caked with marine growth. Jack lifted it from him, staring at the distinctive magazine and bolt. “Lee-Enfield Mark III,” he said, turning it over, seeing the magazine cutoff and long-range volley sights. “First World War issue, early on, before 1916.”

Costas held up a rusted charger clip containing five staggered cartridges with rimmed bases. “There’s more where this comes from, Jack. Strewn down the slope behind me. It looks like the remains of several crates.”

“You sure?”

“All the same. Lee-Enfield rifles and .303 ammunition.”

Jack’s heart began to pound. Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Egyptian wife, Aysha, had been researching old archaeological reports in the Cairo Museum and had come across a diary written by an archaeologist friend of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had served alongside him as an intelligence officer during the First World War and had assisted with the Arab Revolt. Aysha had nearly put the diary aside when her eye was caught by a remarkable sketch, and she had read the accompanying entry. While loading arms from shore at a clandestine transit point in the Gulf of Suez, the dhow carrying the arms had capsized, and in the scrabble to recover what they could, the officer had pulled up something else from the shallows, something much older.

Jack had been at the institute in Alexandria when Aysha had shown Hiebermeyer the sketch, and had seen his jaw drop. With its curved shape, the object could have been medieval, perhaps Saracen, but there was one particular feature that had convinced Hiebermeyer that it was ancient Egyptian, dating no later than the end of the New Kingdom in the late second millennium BC; if so, it was a prestige object owned by someone of wealth and high rank. Jack had pinpointed the stretch of coast to within a few kilometers and was pondering how such an object could have been lost there, so far from the heartland of Egypt, when Costas had looked up from the submersibles manual he had been studying in a corner of the room and had recited a passage from the Old Testament Book of Exodus. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gone electric. For a few moments all Jack’s frustration at their unresolved pyramid quest had gone out the window. Any lingering sense that this new quest was deflecting his attention from the bigger prize, from what lay beneath the pyramid, was overcome as soon as he dropped off the boat for the first dive. Over the past three days, since discovering the site where the officer had reported the artifact, and then finding more evidence of that astonishing biblical event, the possibility of what lay buried in the seabed below them had eclipsed all other thoughts.

Jack stared ahead. The words that had been running through his head all through the dive surfaced again, and he spoke them slowly. “ ‘We bade Moses strike the sea with his staff, and the sea was cleft asunder, each part as high as a massive mountain. In between we made the others follow. We delivered Moses and all who were with him, and drowned the rest.’ ”

Costas swam alongside him. “Come again, Jack?”

“Do you remember in Alexandria quoting the Book of Exodus on pharaoh and the Egyptian chariots chasing the Israelites?”

“Advantage of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing. I know a lot about submersibles, and a lot about the Bible.”

“Well, my quote was from the Qur’ān, Al-Shu’Arā,’ The Poets.”

“Huh,” Costas replied. “Same prophet, same God.”

“And same pharaoh,” Jack replied. “That’s who ‘the others’ means in the quote. ‘Lord of the East and West, and all between.’ I don’t know about the parting of the sea, but we’re about to find out if the nub of the story is historical reality.”

“You think that pharaoh’s our guy? The one we were chasing in the desert? Akhenaten?”

Jack checked his contents gauge. He had only ten minutes of air left. He pointed ahead to the cluster of coral heads. “There’s only one way to find out. Let’s move.”

Jack powered ahead of Costas, finning hard as he dropped down to thirty-five meters depth, then forty. It was deeper than he had thought it would be, and they were going to have less time. The diffused light at this depth meant that the brilliant colors of the coral heads closer to shore had now been reduced to dark shades of blue, making it more difficult to distinguish any unusual features. With only a few minutes remaining, Jack’s thinking automatically switched to free-diving mode, as if he had taken a single breath of air on the surface and had to maximize every moment on the seabed. He reached a central point above the coral heads and sank to the sand. There was no question that the heads were unusual, almost as if they were lined in ranks extending down the slope, more densely concentrated than on the surrounding seabed. He began to look between them, finning quickly over the gaps, scrutinizing the sand for artifacts. Nothing.

He glanced back at Costas, who was a few meters upslope and shining the torch on his strobe array at one of the coral heads as he floated slowly around it. “I’ve drawn a blank,” Jack said. “There could be material under the sand, but it could be meters deep. I’m going to ascend slowly just in case a wider view gets anything, and then we’ve got to go.”

“Wrong, Jack.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“I mean, wrong. It’s not buried. It was once buried, but now it’s all around us. Get over here.”

Costas began taking photos, the strobes flashing as fast as they could recharge. Jack glanced at the warning light on his dive computer, and then finned over toward him. “I see coral,” he said. “An unusual amount at this depth, but that’s it.”

Costas switched off the torch on his strobe array, and the brilliant colors that had been lit up in the artificial light were reduced to blue. He pointed to a complex growth of coral at the base of the head. “Now look.”

Jack stared hard, dropping down in front of a jumble of coral that extended out in front of the head. It reminded him of marine growth on the decayed iron structure of modern wrecks, preserving shapes that would otherwise have disintegrated. He remembered the clandestine First World War shipment at this spot; they might be looking at other material that had fallen off the dhow and become encased in coral after a century underwater.

He shifted slightly sideways, and then he saw it. “A wheel,” he exclaimed. “I can see the spokes of a wheel, and the curved line of the rim.”

“Not just one wheel, Jack. There’s another one on the opposite side. And there’s a curved surface in between them, and a shape like a coral-encrusted pole sticking out front.”

Costas dropped behind Jack, taking pictures of him in front of the head. Jack stared in astonishment. “My God.”

There was no doubt about it. He was looking at the preserved form of a chariot encased in coral. “The wheel,” he said hoarsely. “The spacing of the spokes suggests a six-spoke wheel, typical of the New Kingdom. I think we just hit pay dirt.”

“Bingo,” Costas said. “Congratulations, Jack.”

“You spotted it.” Jack twisted around, staring. There were dozens of them, hundreds, a cascade of chariots down the slope. He turned back to the one in front of him. The flash of the strobe revealed an unusual color, a shimmer of pale gold emerging from the sand at the base of the head. “Good God,” he exclaimed.

“What is it?”

“Get close up and photograph it. There’s about a ten-centimeter-square section of gold there, maybe electrum.”

“I can see a wing,” Costas muttered, the strobe flashing. “The end of a wing.”

“It’s the falcon-god Horus,” Jack exclaimed. “Wait till Maurice sees that. The symbol of a pharaoh.”

“It can’t get much better than this, Jack.”

Jack pushed off, rose above the coral head, and scanned the others. “I’m trying to understand how this happened. How these chariots were preserved like this.”

“I’ve got it. Think bodies at Pompeii, Jack. Bodies preserved as hollow casts in the volcanic ash as it solidified over them. Check out the base of that coral head: You can still see traces of the mud that once encased the chariots, now rock-hard. You remember this morning we were scanning the cliff from the dive boat, thinking how unstable it looked? I think those chariots came hurtling over the cliff and caused a massive landslide, enveloping them in earth and debris as they fell to the seafloor. The material in that cliff may contain a volcanic dust like the pozzolana of the Vesuvius area, something that caused the mud to solidify underwater.”

“Got you,” Jack said. “Like hydraulic concrete.”

“Exactly. The hardened masses were buried in sand, but as that shifted with the current over the centuries the masses were exposed, some of them resisting erosion long enough for coral to form and preserve them in the way we see them today. That one with the gold fronting happened to be eroded in such a way that the coral formed over those features just as the mud casing was about to wash away completely, so the features of the wheels and pole are preserved in the shape of the coral. The other masses we can see are probably shapeless lumps now, but raise them to the surface, fill them with plaster, break them open, and hey, presto, you’ve got a pharaoh’s chariot army reborn.”

Jack remembered the lines of the Book of Exodus that Costas had quoted a few days before: and the Egyptians pursued, and were in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horsemen, his chariots and his horsemen…and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea…And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them. He felt a huge rush of excitement, and punched the water. His dive computer began beeping, indicating that he was now at his no-stop limit. “Time to go. We’ve done all we can here. A fantastic result.”

“A few more pictures, Jack. Be with you in a moment.”

Jack glanced at his contents gauge. He was well into the red, with only twenty bar remaining. He knew that if he breathed hard now, he would soon feel the resistance of an emptying tank. He needed to relax, to moderate his breathing but keep it at a normal rate in order to expel as much nitrogen as possible as he ascended. He finned off the seabed, his hand ready on the vent on his stabilizer jacket in order to expel air as it expanded, to keep his rate of ascent no faster than the speed of his exhaust bubbles. The one thing they could not afford was a decompression incident, with the nearest chamber hours away. He looked up, aiming at the metal bar suspended ten meters below the boat as a decompression safety stop. He saw the two hanging regulators from cylinders of pure oxygen on the boat that would help to flush the nitrogen further. With Costas now having exceeded the no-stop time for his depth, they had all the more need of the oxygen now.

Jack looked down as he rose and saw the repeated flash from Costas’ strobes as he took as many photographs as he could, finning quickly between the outcrops and dropping deeper to get the best angles. Along with the video from the GoPro camera on his forehead, the images should give them all they needed for a press release that would astonish the world. Jack was already running through the timing; the release could be only after Maurice had wound up his Faiyum excavation, as even with the euphoria of discovery and Egyptian archaeology once again at center stage, the new antiquities director would be bound to pick at the fact that he and Costas appeared to have carried out an archaeological project without his authorization. The fact that they left the site undisturbed and had been within their legal rights as recreational divers, with even the dive boat under surveillance from the Egyptian navy, would carry little weight. Jack knew that he would have to ensure that all IMU assets were out of Egypt before the storm broke.

By then Hiebermeyer’s institute would probably have been forcibly closed anyway, and a fresh outburst from the antiquities director would have no effect on the prognosis for future excavation permits, which were already as bleak as they could be. Better by far that Jack give the board of directors what they needed to ensure that IMU’s departure from Egypt was accompanied by a major archaeological revelation, and not overshadowed by a political firestorm. It would be better still if Maurice was able to add to it with a last-minute discovery of his own from the mummy necropolis, something that Jack now hoped for fervently as he looked ahead to the next hours and days.

Jack’s mind returned to the past, to the trail of discovery that he had come out here to follow. He thought of the pioneers of archaeology — amateurs, surveyors, soldiers, those who had traveled to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century seeking what he and Costas had just found, proof beyond reasonable doubt of the reality behind the Bible. Yet he had begun to feel that history had judged those men wrongly, had focused too much on their Christian zeal and their role as imperialists rather than their wider humanity. He thought of the group of officers he had been shadowing as he followed the trail of Akhenaten through the desert of Sudan to the pyramids at Giza, and he remembered what Costas had said: one prophet, one god. Perhaps for those men, the story of Akhenaten, of his conversion to the worship of the one god, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was about more than just biblical reality. These were men who in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan had come up against the terrifying rise of jihad, and who also knew the extremism that could be preached by followers of their own religion, not least among the zealots and missionaries they had seen in Africa. Perhaps their true zeal had been to reveal the single unifying truth behind both traditions. Perhaps their quest had been fuelled by the burning desire for discovery that drove Jack, but also by an extraordinary idealism. Then, as now, anything that could throw the spotlight on the similarities, on the common tradition, might push the world back to reason, might strengthen the common ground and force the extremists to the margins. Jack stared back down at the receding forms of the chariots on the seabed, and he felt another surge of adrenaline. He was back on track again, taking up where those men had left off. Archaeology had more to offer than just the thrill of discovery, far more, and the dark cloud over Egypt and the Middle East made it all the more imperative that he do everything in his power to see this one through. He would not let it go.

Costas’ voice crackled through the intercom. “A wing and a prayer, Jack.” He came up alongside, showing where his contents gauge was nearly at the bottom of the red. “Are we done here now? I mean in Egypt? We can’t do better than this.”

Jack said nothing, but seemed to stare through Costas as they came up level, their masks almost touching. “Uh-oh,” Costas said. “I’ve seen that look before.”

Jack snapped out of his trance, looked up at the boat and then back at Costas, his eyes burning. “As soon as we’ve off-gassed and can fly, I’m going back to the institute in Alexandria.”

Costas peered at him. “You want to get under the pyramid again, don’t you?”

Jack stared at him. “Damn right I do.”

“What’s changed here?”

“It’s not because I think what we’ve found here will give us a glimmer of hope with the Egyptian authorities. If anything, the opposite. That’s why we’re keeping this discovery to ourselves until the time is right.”

“It’s crazy,” Costas said. “Apart from anything else, the press attention this would get around the world might just remind them of the huge tourist revenue they’re in the process of losing by shutting down archaeology in the country.”

“We’re talking about a regime whose ideologues might be about to wind the clock back to year zero. I think they couldn’t care less about tourist dollars.”

“That thug in the Antiquities Department might finally blow a fuse and deport us. It’s only the more moderate elements in government that might stop him from doing that. Anyway, events could be moving too fast for us. We might be flying back into an extremist coup, in which case we may as well just keep on flying.”

“That’s why time is of the essence. If we do still have time in Egypt, it might only be for days or even hours. Are you with me?”

Costas took a final few photos of the scene below, the outcrops now just dark smudges in the shimmer of sand. Jack looked up at the decompression stop, less than ten meters above, and saw the bar vibrate as another fast jet roared overhead. Costas peered again at him. “I know what’s happened. Maurice predicted it. He said that any hope that a discovery out here might allow you to leave Egypt satisfied was misplaced. He said it would just rekindle your desire to get to the bottom of our original quest.”

“Damn right it has,” Jack said.

“And make you take risks. Really big risks that could jeopardize your future and even your life.”

“Been there before.”

“Not like this,” Costas replied. “Maurice’s own words. He knows these people. This time we’re not just dealing with some maverick warlord. The antiquities director may be our bad guy of the moment, but when that coup happens he’ll be ousted by someone who’ll make the Taliban thought police look tame. Cut off his head, and another one will appear. This time we’re up against an ideology, an extremist movement that the world has been fighting since the days of the Mahdi in Sudan, and so far it’s been a losing battle.”

“All the more reason not to give up. You win the fight against ideology with ideas, not with hardware. That’s the lesson of history. If I can find a revelation from the past that adds ammunition to that battle, then it will be worth it.”

“That’s a tall order, Jack. This could just be the highest mountain you’ll climb.”

“You can walk away. I won’t hold it against you. I can go it alone.”

“As if.”

“Well?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jack said. “Submersibles. We’ll definitely need submersibles.”

“You making that up?”

“How else do we get into passages under pyramids too small to dive through?”

Costas narrowed his eyes. “Remote operated vehicles, autonomous android excavators?”

“You name it. Any gismo on the books. You just name it.”

“Little Joey Three, my latest submersible micro-robot? I haven’t told you about him yet. Lanowski and I were perfecting him in the IMU engineering lab just before I came out here. Amazing bionics.”

“Anything. It’s all yours.”

Costas shook his head. “So much for the beach holiday.”

Jack concentrated on his ascent. Costas had been right: a wing and a prayer. They had come here following a report of a find that had suddenly opened up another extraordinary possibility, another part of the trail they had been on for months now, from the ancient crocodile temple they had discovered on the Nile to the pyramids. It was a trail that shadowed one made over a hundred years before at the time of another conflict, the war against the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, a war that itself foreshadowed what was on the verge of happening in the Middle East today. Yet somehow Jack knew that the story of what had gone on in the nineteenth century had not yet been fully told, that somewhere in it there was another key to the quest ahead that needed to be found before they could take a new plunge into the unknown.

Jack looked down and saw that a thin black shape had emerged from the encased chariot wheel in the coral head they had examined. It was wavering like a stalk of sea grass in a current. Other dark shapes appeared from the surrounding heads, and one detached itself and began to move sinuously toward shore. They were sea snakes, ones that had clearly been dormant within the heads but had been disturbed by the divers’ exhaust bubbles and movement. Jack remembered the captain’s story of a swarm of snakes thrashing on the surface, and he began to see more of them now, rising from the coral heads farther down the slope and following the first one toward the place where the other two had apparently sensed the inflow of freshwater from the shore. He felt uneasy, as if by coming to this place they had disturbed something that should have been left alone, a secret that should have died with a pharaoh and his Israelite slave more than three thousand years ago. He saw Costas concentrating on the boat above them as he ascended, and decided not to tell him. There had been enough snakes for one dive, and they needed to look ahead.

Together they reached the metal bar of the decompression stop. Costas turned to him, hanging with one hand on the bar, putting his other hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Before we deactivate the intercom, there’s something I want to pass on. Maurice mentioned it to me just before we left, but we decided not to tell you straightaway, as we thought it would just fuel your frustration about not being able to get back under the pyramid. Apparently, when Aysha was rummaging in the museum, she also found a news clipping from before the First World War about some mad old mystic in Cairo who appeared from nowhere, claiming he was a former British soldier who had been sucked from the Nile into an underworld of mummies and the living dead. Something like that, anyway. Maurice thinks it’s a typical story made up at the time for credulous tourists, but Aysha thinks it’s so far out that there must be something to it. I think it’s that husband-wife rivalry thing again, and as you know, Aysha usually wins. Anyway, she’s following it up. There may be another entrance into our pyramid underworld, that’s all.”

Jack stared at him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He took one of the regulators hanging down from the dive boat, pressed the purge valve to see that the oxygen was on, and then took a final breath from his own regulator, sucking on empty. He pulled off the full-face mask, put the oxygen regulator in his mouth, and reached down to the front of his stabilizer jacket for his backup mask. He put it on and cleared it, and then watched Costas do the same. He breathed in deeply, feeling his entire body tingling, relishing the sudden lift that pure oxygen always gave him, as if it were cleansing his soul. He set the timer on his computer, beginning his countdown to surfacing and getting back on the trail they had left off under the pyramid.

He could hardly wait.

CHAPTER 3

The man in the dark cape struck a match and raised it to his cigar, cupping his hand to prevent the flame from being seen by anyone who might be passing along the riverbank. Around him the waters of the river were barely discernible, a swirling miasma veiled by a thin mist; the abandoned fort on the embankment was still invisible despite the captain of the boat jabbing his finger into the darkness and assuring them that it was a mere stone’s throw away. They had deliberately chosen a moonless night for their venture, and without a navigating lantern their voyage upriver had seemed a blind man’s gamble at best. But the captain had raised the huge triangular sail of the felucca and brought them unerringly past the city, using the northerly breeze to sail against the current and bring them to the narrow strip of cultivated floodplain beyond the southern outskirts that fronted the desert. They had left the putrid odor of the Cairo waterfront behind, and now the river smelled musty, like an old camel. The captain had bent the tiller while his boy ran along the spar and furled the sail. For what seemed an age now, they had drifted silently, letting the eddies push them slowly into the river shore.

The man strained his eyes into the darkness, still seeing nothing, having no recourse other than to trust the skill and knowledge of the captain. He took a deep draw on his cigar, clenching it in his teeth while he exhaled the sweet smoke into the darkness, trying to calm his excitement. In daylight, if they were in the correct position, he would be able to see the pyramids of Giza just above the horizon to the west, and in front of him the ruined river fort that they had visited on foot the day before. Somewhere below, somewhere under the riverbank, lay the key to the greatest undiscovered prize in Egyptology, greater even than the lost city of Amarna or the tombs of the Valley of the Kings; something that would cap his years of adventure in Africa and allow him to return home in triumph across the Atlantic to the destiny that had seemed marked out for him, the highest offices in the land now surely within his grasp.

Something bumped the boat, knocking him momentarily off balance. He peered over the bow, seeing a small swell on the surface of the river, doubtless marking some fetid unpleasantness beneath. With the annual Nile flood only now abating, they had encountered all manner of flotsam on their trip upstream, from the washed-away wooden structures of riverside shaduf irrigation pumps to the bloated carcasses of cows. Most remarkable had been a rotting fishing net tangled up with empty wooden cartridge boxes marked “Gordon Relief Expedition,” the detritus of a botched conflict eight years before that had taken all this time to wash its way down from the former war zone in the Sudan. The boxes had seemed archaeological, artifacts from another era, and yet Egypt, the world even, was still gripped in the aftershock of General Gordon’s death at the hands of the Mahdi army in Khartoum, and the ignominious British failure to retain Sudan. In Egypt the British were bent on revenge, and in Sudan, the Mahdi army on jihad, which threatened to sweep across North Africa and the Middle East as it had done more than a thousand years before, drawing the West into a conflict that would make the wars of the Crusades seem like child’s play.

Seeing those cartridge cases had made him ponder his own role in the affair. He had been one of a group of American officers restless after the Civil War who had crossed the Atlantic seeking excitement in Africa, and had been employed by the Khedive of Egypt. From being a captain in the 11th Maryland Regiment of the Union army, a veteran of Gettysburg, and a personal acquaintance of General Grant, now President Grant, he had become a lieutenant colonel in the Khedive’s service, and then chief of staff to Gordon after the British general had been appointed governor of equatorial Sudan. With his exotic surname, Chaillé-Long, a legacy of his Huguenot French ancestry, and the manners of a southern gentleman, he had seemed a cut above the other American officers and had quickly found favor as a kind of honorary European. He had at first struck up a cordial relationship with Gordon; despite being born on a Maryland plantation, he had joined the Union army opposed to slavery, and had been more than willing to assist Gordon in his effort to eradicate the slave trade in the Sudan. Their relations became strained only when Chaillé-Long realized the futility of that enterprise and the impossibility of working under such a man as Gordon. They were broken entirely after the Khedive appointed Chaillé-Long to travel deep into Africa to conduct a treaty with the king of the Ugandans, on the way becoming a celebrated explorer whose name now stood alongside those of Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley.

In 1877 he had returned to America in high esteem, newly decorated by the Khedive with the Order of the Medjidieh, acclaimed as the first American to stand on the shores of Lake Victoria. With Gordon still in charge, the Sudan had been closed to him, but he had seen the future in international law, and after a degree at Columbia had set up a practice in Alexandria in Egypt. In 1882 he had earned the approbation of the State Department by taking over the U.S. Consulate during the British naval bombardment of the city that preceded their military conquest of Egypt, the circumstance that led to direct British involvement in the Sudan and the debacle of the relief expedition in 1885.

After that, Egypt too had seemed closed to him. And yet here he was again, drawn back not by the promise of military glory or exploration but by something else, by unfinished business from his time under Gordon in the 1870s. A few of them had become party to another enterprise, one that had begun with a small circle of British officers around Gordon obsessed with uncovering the truth of the Old Testament. Their quest to find out more had led them on a trail of discovery that had brought him to this place now on the eve of his final planned departure from Egypt. He was hoping to show something to the world arising from those years that was not tainted by the guilt and dishonor that pervaded the failure to rescue Gordon.

The boat bumped again, more jarringly this time. There was a commotion from the hold opening in the center of the deck, and a voice with an English accent cursing. “God damn you. God damn your eyes.” Another man spoke, higher pitched, in French, remonstrating angrily, followed again by the first voice. “I didn’t mean you, Guerin. I meant the spanner, God damn it. The one I just dropped.”

Chaillé-Long took out his cigar and peered into the hold. “Keep your voice down, Jones. We’re close enough to shore that we might be overheard.”

Jones’ head and shoulders appeared out of the opening, and he spoke in Arabic to the captain. After listening to the reply, he turned around, his bearded face scarcely visible in the darkness. “Don’t worry yourself, Colonel. The captain says there’s nobody along the shoreline. The fishermen don’t bother to come this far along the bank when it’s pitch dark, when there’s no moon. They’re terrified of slipping into the whirlpools that appear during the flood and being sucked down by the monsters they think lie beneath. Nile perch, no doubt, some of them of prodigious size, though who knows what else swims in this river. Even the captain and his boy are afraid. It’s only your gold that’s brought them here, and you’ll probably have to cough up more of it to make them stay. So I can curse and swear as much as I like.”

“In my experience of English soldiery, Corporal Jones,” Chaillé-Long drawled, “that could keep us occupied to dawn and beyond.”

“The valve of the diving cylinder is jammed,” Jones said, and he ducked down again. There was a sound of scrabbling in the bilges, and then he reappeared. “I’ve found the spanner, Allah be praised. But I’m going to have to strike the valve to open it, and that sound would wake up all Cairo. I’ll need to muffle it.” He paused, looking up. “Toss me your scarf, would you, old boy?”

Chaillé-Long drew himself up and snorted. “I will not give you my scarf. It is the purest cashmere, direct from my fournisseur in Paris.”

“I don’t care if it’s rat skin. I never took you for a dandy, Chaillé-Long, but now I’m wondering. How did an American get a name like that anyway?”

“Not all Yankees are Irish, despite the prejudicial views of you English. My great-grandfather was French, from a landed family under the old regime. And before you call me a dandy, I will have you remember that I was a captain in the army of the North at the Battle of Gettysburg, and after that a colonel in the Khedive’s Sudanese army, chosen for the task by your revered General Gordon, no less.”

Jones narrowed his eyes and stared at him. “Well, if you were good enough for old Charlie Gordon, God rest his soul, I suppose you’re good enough for me. But I still need your scarf.”

Chaillé-Long snorted again, paused, then unlooped the scarf from his neck and dropped it into the opening. A few moments later there was a sound of dull thumping, of metal against metal, and then a sharp hissing noise that stopped as abruptly as it had started. “Done,” Jones called up. “That’s the breathing device prepared. As soon as the captain gives the word, Monsieur Guerin will be ready to go. We will help him to kit up.”

Fifteen minutes later Jones lit the small gas lamp inside the hold and then turned it down so that the glow would be invisible beyond the boat. He had known Guerin for only a few hours, since the man had joined them from the Cairo dock with his secret crate of equipment, and until now it had been a matter of fumbling around in the dark as he had helped to unbox and assemble the contraption.

Guerin had come straight from the harbor of Alexandria, where he had intended to dive on the ruins of the Pharos, the great lighthouse from antiquity, but Chaillé-Long had seen him there and diverted him to their present purpose. Now for the first time with some semblance of light, Jones was able to see it: a bulbous cylinder containing compressed air, above that a complex attachment of pipes and hoses to regulate the supply of air to the diver, and attached to that a face mask with a glass plate and beneath it the mouthpiece. Jones remembered the course in submarine mine-laying and demolition that he had been obliged to take as a recruit at the Royal Engineers depot at Chatham. His greatest fear had been confined spaces, followed closely by being underwater, and he had been petrified that the instructor would select him to demonstrate the bulky hard-hat diving gear in the murky depths of the River Medway. Earlier, in the barracks, the corporal in charge had regaled them with lurid tales of divers being sucked up into their helmets when their tenders on the surface had forgotten to keep the pump going. As it was, the luckless recruit who was selected on the river that day had come up unconscious and blue, temporarily overcome by carbon dioxide.

Jones squatted in the scuppers of the boat and peered more closely. The gear they had on the Medway had been helmet-diving equipment, in use for more than half a century; Guerin’s contraption was very different. He pointed at the regulating valve. “Does the diver introduce air manually by opening and shutting the valve with each breath, or is it automatic?”

The Frenchman thrust his head through the neck hole in the suit and shot him a sharp glance. “You know something of diving technology, mon ami?”

Jones started to speak, and then checked himself. Only Chaillé-Long knew anything of his army background, and it was best it stayed that way. “From watching salvage divers on the docks at Portsmouth, when I was a boy growing up there,” he replied. That much was true; he had seen divers raising guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s sunken warship, which had been deemed a hazard to the ever-larger naval ships that plied the Solent. “But of course they were only using Mr. Siebe’s hard-hat equipment.”

“Then, mon ami, you will have seen how impossible it is,” Guerin exclaimed, straining as he tried to poke his fingers though the hand holes, his arms outstretched and his fingers working vigorously against the rubber. Finally his left hand broke through, and he used it quickly to pull through the other hand. “Premièrement, it is too heavy for the diver even to stand upright out of the water, firstly because the helmet must be strong enough to withstand the external pressure at depth, and therefore be a great weight of bronze, and secondly because the diver must wear yet more weight underwater to keep the helmet down because, despite its weight out of the water, it becomes almost buoyant underwater when filled with air.” His face reddened and his veins bulged where the rubber seal constricted his neck. “Deuxièmement,” he continued more hoarsely, “the diver must remain upright on the bottom to prevent the helmet from flooding and himself from drowning, and thus limiting his usefulness for jobs requiring any, how can I put it, finesse. Troisièmement, he is tethered to the surface by the air hose, so he has even less freedom of movement underwater, and he is entirely dependent for his survival on the man pumping the air down to him.”

“And fourthly,” Jones said, remembering the recruit on the Medway, “he risks blackout from carbon dioxide poisoning if he fails to manually open the valve and expel the exhaled air from his helmet.”

“Precisely. Précisément. You have it.” Guerin got up, climbed out of the hold, and lurched and fell backward. He was caught just in time by Chaillé-Long, who steered him to a plank that served as a bench. The Frenchman thrust his fingers into the neck seal to pull it open, gasping as he relieved the pressure. “I assure you, mes amis,” he said even more hoarsely, his face running with sweat, “this constriction is relieved underwater, but it is necessary to keep the suit watertight.”

“Well, I for one am mighty relieved to hear it,” said Chaillé-Long, looking at the man dubiously and then at the river. “We shall need to secure that contraption on your back and get you in the water once our captain has steered this benighted craft to shore.”

Guerin nodded, his face now looking drained. “Un moment, monsieur, while I recover my composure.” He gestured at the equipment and then looked at Jones. He was suddenly beaming. “It is, as I believe you have correctly surmised, an automatic valve, the first-ever demand valve. When the diver breathes in, the cylinder releases a lungful of air, regulated through the device on the valve.”

“Tried and tested, I presume?” said Chaillé-Long, taking the butt of his cigar from his mouth and tossing it into the river.

“Monsieur Denayrouze has been developing a similar device, and Monsieur Rouquayrol has been making cylinders strong enough to hold more air,” he replied, his eyes narrowing. “But their régulateur is inferior to mine, requiring the diver to open the valve manually each time he needs air.”

Chaillé-Long looked at him shrewdly. “Are you in competition with these other gentlemen?”

“It is why I have had to be so secretive. And there is something else, mon ami. This device would revolutionize underwater warfare. Divers could swim freely to attach mines beneath enemy ships’ hulls, wreaking havoc. One day wars will be fought underwater, you know. The world’s navies would clamor for it.”

“It is a good thing, then, that when I needed a diver for our enterprise, I was not obliged to employ these other gentlemen, and you were at hand.”

“A matter of good fortune that I had travelled to Alexandria intending to test my prototype, first in the ancient remains of the harbor and then on the wreck of the Oceanus in Aboukir Bay, where it blew up in 1798 during the Battle of the Nile. In these days of the British Empire, people have forgotten the role of Napoleon in opening up ancient Egypt to the world, and my discovery of the wreck would have been pour la France.”

“You mean it would have brought you the fortune in gold coin that is said to lie in her hold?”

Guerin shrugged theatrically. “An inventeur needs his income, monsieur. How else does he buy his matériel?”

“So, you do not selflessly give your endeavors to la France, then?”

Guerin eyed Chaillé-Long. “Do you work for the United States of America, monsieur, or for yourself?”

The ghost of a smile passed Chaillé-Long’s lips. “It sounds as if you are embarked upon a profitable enterprise.”

“Now you understand how it is that I have not been able to test my equipment like this before. I could not risk prying eyes seeing it.”

Chaillé-Long gave the man a wry look. “I am grateful to you for answering my question in so direct a fashion.” He put his hands on his hips, surveying the shore that was just coming into view, a dark bank several boat lengths away. “Now, are we ready?”

Jones eyed Guerin. “Do you have your lamp?”

“Mais oui,” the Frenchman replied exuberantly, lifting an open-fronted metallic box the size of a kerosene lamp but containing an opaque glass ball. “Another one of my inventions. It contains a battery and an electrical filament. The opaque glass keeps the light from shining too strongly, as the glare off the suspended particles in the water would obscure my view. I have tested it myself to a depth of ten meters off the Marseilles docks.”

“You are indeed an entrepreneur,” Chaille-Long murmured. “If liberté, fraternité et égalité are in truth not your master, then you and I could do business.”

Guerin looked at Jones, his eyes glinting. “And you, monsieur, for your part, you have les explosifs?”

Jones carefully lifted up an oiled tarpaulin beside the hatch and revealed a small wooden box attached by a coiled cable to a plunger. “Borrowed from the Royal Engineers depot in Cairo,” he said. “Security there is not what it used to be. The box contains eight one-pound sticks of dynamite, packed in petroleum jelly for waterproofing. The cable is two hundred feet long, and the charge should be waterproof down to a depth of thirty feet. If the captain can hold us at that distance from the riverbank, the boat should survive the detonation unscathed.”

Guerin stared hesitantly at the box. “That is, if I find what you are after, and have occasion to lay the charge.”

“I have spent weeks triangulating this exact position from the pyramids, transposing the ancient plan on the most up-to-date topographical maps prepared by the Ordnance Survey.”

The Frenchman tweaked his mustache. “More équipage liberated from the Royal Engineers, I surmise? And you found a theodolite too? You are a man of many skills.”

Jones coughed. “Let’s just say I’ve had some training.”

Guerin’s eyes twinkled. “Do you mean in larceny, mon ami, or in the military sciences?”

Jones pointed at the riverbank looming out of the darkness. It was held off by the captain’s boy with a pole. A cascade of bricks and mortar lay embedded in the bank, and above it they could make out the ruined walls and gun embrasure of the fort. “There it is,” Jones exclaimed, his voice hushed. “This was the feature that coincided precisely with my measurement, the place I told the captain to find. When I came here in daylight, I also measured the movement of water along the shore. It’s outside the main river current, but there are strong eddies, enough to keep river silt from accumulating or mud from building up too deeply. Monsieur Guerin, I believe you will be in with a very good chance.” He looked up at Chaillé-Long. “Are you up to getting your hands wet, Colonel?”

Chaillé-Long bristled. “I will have you know that I have survived pitiless rain, mud, misery, malaria, and the other dread fevers of the jungle in my years as an explorer of deepest Africa.” He pointed to a faint scar on his cheek. “This wound, as you will doubtless have wondered, I acquired fighting off the Bunyan warriors of Uganda, alone with my Reilly elephant gun, assisted only by two of my bearers with Snider rifles, together accounting for dozens of ’em.” He took off his silk gloves with a theatrical flourish. “I do believe, sir, that I am capable of dipping my hand in this river, however fetid and pestilential its waters may be.”

Jones glanced at Chaillé-Long as he squatted down beside him. He noted the silk top hat, the black cape with its crimson lining, the patent leather shoes. The war in Sudan had attracted all manner of mavericks, some of them genuinely capable, others charlatans, and had refracted their skills in the intensity of the struggle, sometimes brilliantly so. And then it had thrown them out at the other end, propelling some on to greater things and others back to the obscurity from which they had emerged. The American officers hired as mercenaries in the Khedive’s service had made the Egyptian army a force to be reckoned with, but it had included their share of tale spinners and egotists. Jones remembered one night by the Nile sitting with his officer, Major Mayne, and a group of other Royal Engineers officers and listening to them talk about Chaillé-Long and his exploits in equatorial Africa. He had been derided at the Royal Geographical Society for suggesting that Lake Victoria was only twelve miles across, having misidentified some islands as the opposite shore, and for trying to bribe a cartographer to make Lake Kyogo, on the Upper Nile, appear larger than it was, a blatant act of self-aggrandizement. It was also common knowledge that the wound on his face had not been caused by enemy fire but by his Sudanese cook, who had saved his life by shooting an attacking warrior with a revolver but in the process grazing Chaillé-Long on the face with the bullet.

Yet all the posturing and exaggeration was unnecessary. Chaillé-Long had indisputably gone farther south than any other foreigner in the Khedive’s service, showing the grit and determination so admired by the British and earning a letter of approbation from Gordon himself, published in the New York Herald. And he had no need to embellish his experience of fighting: Jones had respect for anyone who had been through the bloodbath of the American Civil War, and he knew that Chaillé-Long had been in at the sharp end. Beneath the foppery and affectation, he had seen the look in his eyes that he knew well from men who had faced death on the battlefield, and he had also seen the pearl-handled Colt revolver beneath the cape. Of one thing he was certain: Chaillé-Long was not a man to be trifled with, and Jones knew that, having made the decision to approach him in the first place, he was now committed to seeing this through with that man in the cape and top hat looming over him, whatever the outcome.

The captain of the boat whistled gently and pointed to the shore. Chaillé-Long waved back and drew himself up. “Now, Monsieur Guerin, if you will be so kind as to instruct us, Jones and I will assist you in donning your contraption. We have less than four hours until dawn, when we shall suddenly be conspicuous. We have no time to lose.”

CHAPTER 4

Half an hour later, Jones and Chaillé-Long watched as Guerin floated on the surface of the Nile, his underwater lamp lighting up a brown smudge of silt in the water around him. With some considerable effort they had heaved him off the side of the boat. Meanwhile the captain and his boy offset the balance on the other side by swinging the boom around and hanging out as far as they could from it without falling in. After they had slid Guerin into the water, trying to keep their splashing to a minimum, Jones had double-checked the regulator valve above the bulbous air tank on his back while Guerin had inspected his face mask for leaks.

There were thirty atmospheres in the tank, pumped into it by a steam compressor in some backstreet mechanical shop that Guerin had found in Alexandria, and Jones could only hope that there was more air than fumes in the mix. If all went well, he should have some thirty minutes at the depth that Jones had estimated for their target, about twenty-five feet below. Guerin had shown him the small safety shutoff he had devised for when the pressure reached ten atmospheres, indicating that it was time to surface but allowing him to open the flow again to breathe the final lungfuls of air from the cylinder before it emptied.

The regulator was hissing now, a froth of bubbles coming out with each exhalation. They watched as he vented the air bladder under his arms that had kept him afloat. As his head began to sink, Jones reached out and tapped it. “Bonne chance, my friend. Remember to drop your lead weights when you intend to ascend, or else you will never make it back up.” Guerin nodded, raised a hand in farewell, and dropped below the surface, the smudge of light quickly disappearing. After a few moments, only the bubbles from his exhaust betrayed his presence, along with the detonator cord that Jones fed out as Guerin descended. The cord was attached to the dynamite in a box on the front of his suit. “Damn it to hell,” Jones murmured. “I forgot to remind him to breathe out as he ascends.”

Chaillé-Long dabbed his wet forearms with his handkerchief and rolled his sleeves back down. “Breathe out? Why should he need reminding of that, might I enquire?”

“Because the instinct underwater is to hold your breath,” said Jones. “We were taught that in diving class at the Royal Engineers School at Chatham. If you hold your breath while ascending, you get something called an embolism.”

Chaillé-Long snapped shut his cuff links. “And what might that be?”

“Your lungs rupture like an overfilled balloon.”

“Surely Monsieur Guerin would know of such things.”

“Monsieur Guerin is more an engineer than a diver, more a theoretician than a practitioner.”

“Elegantly put, Jones. You are an educated man, I find, more so than I might expect from the ruffians I have seen in the rank and file of your army.”

“Educated, but not a gentleman. A benefactor who visited my orphanage paid for me to go to the Bluecoat School in Bristol. But I was too rebellious and knew I’d never be polished enough to be admitted to the Royal Military Academy, so at sixteen I ran away from the school and joined my father’s old regiment, the sappers and miners. They gave me some skills, but the rest is self-taught. I’ve always enjoyed reading. Done a lot of that over the past eight years, since the war.”

Chaillé-Long tucked his cloak under him and sat down on the bench on the foredeck. He adjusted his top hat, produced two cheroots from his waistcoat pocket, offered one to Jones, who declined it, and then lit the other one with a silver lighter, drawing deeply on it and crossing his legs. “I’ve wanted to ask you about that, Jones, now that we have some time on our hands. About the last eight years. About the officer who pointed you in my direction, Major Mayne.”

Jones was looking at Guerin’s bubbles, straining to follow them in the darkness as they advanced toward the shoreline and then seemed to veer a dozen or so yards to the north. The bubbles would be pulled farther along by the current as they rose, giving a misleading impression of the position of the diver, but even so Guerin would soon be reaching the limit of the detonator cable. Jones watched anxiously, checking that the plunger box was still secure where he had nailed it to the deck, but then saw with relief that the bubbles were returning along the shore in the direction of the boat. They were no more than fifty feet away now. He perched on the gunwale, still keeping an eye on them, and glanced at Chaillé-Long.

“Major Mayne. Finest officer I ever knew. Without him, I wouldn’t be here. He was the one who mentioned your name as one of Gordon’s confidants, and when I came to need a partner for this enterprise, you were the only one I could find of those officers still in Egypt. I took a risk in revealing what I did to you, but I knew you had money, and without gold to pay for a boat and a diver I was going nowhere.”

“What were you doing with Mayne in the desert?”

Jones paused, looking at him shrewdly. “He was a reconnaissance officer, and we carried out forays behind enemy lines. I was his servant, his batman.”

“You mean he was an intelligence officer. A spy.”

Jones paused again. “Not exactly. I cleaned his rifle once. It was a Sharps 1873, 45–70 caliber, with a telescope sight and heavy octagonal barrel. One of your American sharpshooter rifles.”

“Sharps 45–70?” Chaillé-Long exhaled a lungful of smoke. “Saw a man take out a buffalo with one at a thousand yards.”

“Well, I saw Mayne shoot a dervish across the Nile at over five hundred yards, and that was with a service Martini-Henry rifle,” Jones replied. “It was the finest shot I’ve ever seen, so who knows what he was capable of with the Sharps.”

Chaillé-Long knit his brows. “So, Mayne goes with this rifle on a mission to Khartoum, and a few weeks later Gordon is dead and, apparently, Mayne too, having disappeared and never been seen since?”

“That’s what I told you when we first met.”

Chaillé-Long cocked an eye at him. “All the most reliable accounts of Gordon’s last moments have him on the balcony of the Governor’s Palace, surrounded by dervishes, in full view, as it happens, from the other bank of the Nile — let’s say five hundred, six hundred yards distant, beyond the dervish encampment and where a sharpshooter might creep up and lie undetected, awaiting the right moment.”

“I know for a fact that Mayne met Gordon in Khartoum the morning of his death.”

“You know this for a fact? How so?”

Jones checked himself; he had revealed enough. “I’ve spent a lot of time amongst Arabs since then, and heard firsthand from men who were in Khartoum that day.”

“Was Mayne alone in his enterprise?”

Jones paused. “I did not see him depart for Khartoum from Wadi Halfa, where he went to be told of his mission by Lord Wolseley. I last saw him the day before on the Nile, where he left me with his belongings. That’s when he gave me the inscribed stone that he and his fellow officers had found in the crocodile temple beside the pool, with the radiating sun symbol of the pharaoh Akhenaten that he had recognized as the plan of something underground, with the three temples at Giza clearly shown.”

“The artifact that brought us here,” Chaillé-Long exclaimed, taking another draw. “The ancient map to something hidden beneath the very feet of all those many who have tramped the plateau of Giza seeking treasures, little knowing what might lie below.”

He clamped his cheroot hard, and then removed it and picked out a piece of tobacco from between his teeth. He looked to the deck, and then at Jones again. “Did the thought ever occur to you,” he said quietly, “that Gordon alive in the hands of the Mahdi would have been a grave embarrassment to the British, a death knell for the Gladstone government, a fatal dent in the prestige of the empire? Gordon alive, a Christian martyr abandoned to the forces of jihad, or Gordon alive, a willing partner of the Mahdi, a man so disgusted by the failure of his compatriots to rescue the people of the Sudan that he would cast his lot with the enemy? Would not such a man have been a prime target for assassination?”

Jones kept his eyes glued on the waters below the riverbank. “Thoughts are for officers, Colonel. I’m just a lowly sapper.”

Chaillé-Long thought for a moment, shook his head, then flicked his butt into the river. He leaned back and smiled. “But not any longer, it seems. You say you’ve been associating with Arabs. Tell me, Jones, are you a deserter?”

Jones coughed. “Before Major Mayne left on his mission to Khartoum, he arranged for me to return to the railway construction unit that I’d been working with when I first arrived in Egypt after service in India. He thought railway construction would be safer and would see me through the campaign. He was probably right, but as far as I could see, neither the railway nor the river expedition were ever going to reach General Gordon in time, so I tossed a coin and stayed on the river. Everything was going swimmingly until the Mahdi’s boys finally caught up with us at a place called Kirkeban and there was a terrible twenty-minute battle. One moment I was bayoneting and bludgeoning dervishes, and the next thing I knew I was floating down the river all alone, with only the corpses of my mates for company. I fetched up at the same pool where the major had found the crocodile temple and the clue in the inscription that he gave me for safekeeping. I stayed there for days, weeks, living off abandoned supplies. I’d been knocked on the head and was half-crazed. We’d heard rumors of a giant crocodile in the pool, and I became obsessed with the idea of catching it, conceiving all manner of devices to do so. The Leviathan, we’d called it, after the biblical monster. Then Kitchener and his camel troops arrived, and seeing them put some sense into me. You know Kitchener?”

Chaillé-Long nodded. “Rising star of the Egyptian army. The man who has sworn to avenge Gordon.”

“I heard him say it. That he’d kill a dervish for every hair on Gordon’s head. But I knew that could only be a long time in the future. It was Kitchener himself who told me that Gordon had been killed and that the British force was retreating back to Egypt and abandoning the Sudan to the Mahdi. It was then that I knew that Major Mayne wouldn’t be coming back, that it was a forlorn hope for me to wait for him. Then just before we reached the British camp at Abu Halfa, on the Egyptian border, I gave Kitchener the slip. I remembered what had happened after the battle of Kirkeban, and how it would look with me having disappeared. An army recovering after defeat is always looking for scapegoats and is never generous to soldiers they think have done a runner. I’d been cashiered before, out in India, even made sergeant once before being reduced. I was too cocky for my own good, mostly, with too many opinions for certain officers to stomach. But this time it was more serious. I didn’t fancy having survived the dervishes at Kirkeban only to face a firing squad of my own mates at Abu Haifa.”

“That was more than eight years ago,” Chaillé-Long said. “What have you done since then?”

Jones peered at him and stroked his stubble. “Master of disguise, I am. That’s what Major Mayne used to call me. Within days of our reconnaissance missions behind dervish lines, I’d look the part, with a beard and a turban. My mother was Anglo-Indian, the daughter of a British soldier and a Madrassi woman, so I’m naturally dark skinned. I knew enough Madrassi to pass myself off as an Indian, and enough Arabic from Major Mayne and our time in the desert to get by. I learned to live like an Arab, to blend into the folds of the desert and the crowded souks of Cairo, to live without being noticed.”

“And you read books. You learned about the ancient Egyptians.”

“I joined with the fellahin, who are used as laborers on digs, and found work at Giza, clearing out the pyramids. I went to Amarna and became foreman of a French excavation there. No questions were ever asked; I looked the part of an Arab, and with my engineering skills I could do the job well. I spent days in the Cairo Museum, working from cabinet to cabinet, memorizing everything I saw. I learned to read hieroglyphics.” Jones lowered his voice. “I learned everything I could about him.”

“Him?”

Jones leaned forward, almost whispering. “Long-face. That’s what the Canadian Indians called him. We had them with us on the Nile expedition, you know, voyageurs, brought over from Canada by Lord Wolseley to navigate the boats. On the way up they’d stopped at Amarna and seen the crumbled statues of the pharaoh who had built the city, that strange face with the big lips. In the Mohawk language they called him Menakouhare, long-face. The name stuck with me.”

“You mean Akhenaten.”

“The Sun Pharaoh,” Jones said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Father of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. The one who went south to the desert as Amenhotep the fourth, high priest of the old religion, and came back as Akhenaten—He through whom the Light shone from the Aten, the Sun God. He went south with his wife, Nefertiti, and his companion Moses, the former slave who had the same revelation and took away his vision of the one god to his people. They were in the crocodile temple, the one Mayne found beside the pool on the Nile. I saw it myself, steeled myself to go inside in the weeks I spent there alone after the battle, when my mind was unbalanced. I saw the wall carving, with Menakouhare at the head of the procession, the Aten symbol before him. I saw the gap where Mayne had taken the plaque that I showed you. Akhenaten had his vision in the desert, but his City of Light was not to be there. It was to be here, out of sight and hidden in the heartland of ancient Egypt. And we will be the first in three thousand years to see it.”

Chaillé-Long put his hand on his hip and eyed Jones keenly. “When we have made our great discovery, you and I will be much in demand. We will be on the front page of the New York Herald and the Illustrated London News, and around the world. People still reeling from the death of General Gordon, from his neglect, I say neglect, will see our triumph as his apotheosis, as proof that he was in Khartoum for a higher purpose, not only to succor the people of Sudan but also to safeguard the clues to a discovery that will be for the enlightenment of mankind. I have little doubt that on my return I will be called to the House of Representatives, even the Senate. You should come with me, Jones. America is a place for a man like you. There are railways to be built, rivers to be dammed. With my connections and good word, I can propel you on a path to riches and fame, unfettered by the barriers of class and etiquette of your own country that keep men like you in the gutter.”

Jones turned to watch Guerin’s bubbles, the detonator cord still slack in his hands. The lofty intentions, the talk of taking the world by storm, of business collaborations with Guerin, could all be a smoke screen, a play by a man who when the time was right, when the discovery was certain, could as easily sweep others aside and take all the glory for himself. Jones did not know whether the style of the man in front of him was that of a true gentleman or merely a veneer of decency. He had seen what war did to men, and civil war was the worst, war that pitted brother against brother, men who after that could plumb no greater depths. The America that Chaillé-Long spoke of was a place where ambition might know no bounds, but only in the shattered morality that was the aftershock of the Civil War. He had heard stories of latter-day robber barons carving out fiefdoms for themselves in the West with the Colt and the Winchester. It would be an easy matter on a night like this when the time was right for a man like Chaillé-Long to use that revolver beneath his cloak to dispose of them all — a British army deserter long thought dead, an obscure French inventor who seemed intent on keeping his very existence secret, a Nile riverboat captain and his boy — adding a few more to the cargo of unidentifiable corpses swept down annually by the Nile into the swamplands of the delta.

Jones too had been hardened by killing, but not at the expense of his own soldierly brand of morality. As a soldier he had been a maverick, constantly pressing against authority, an enlisted man with the wayward thinking allowed only to officers. Yet not for the first time he found himself missing the army, the moral certainty of those who worked and fought for one another. Out here, in the world beyond the army, he had discovered that the only person you could rely on was yourself, but in so doing all your flaws and weaknesses became sharply defined, and the personal demons kept at bay in the army rose up to do battle for your soul and mind when there were no others to discipline and protect you.

But he had laid a smoke screen of his own, and had not told Chaillé-Long everything. In the last eight years he had learned to move in the shadow lands, to bend the truth to his purposes. He knew what had happened to Mayne; he had guessed who had ordered it. Chaillé-Long was right: Gordon had become a liability, but so too would be the one ordered to carry out the deed, a deed so shocking to public sentiment that word of it must never be allowed to leak out. And Mayne had not gone to Khartoum alone, but with his friend, his blood brother from their service together years earlier on the Red River expedition in Canada, a voyageur named Charrière. After Jones had left the crocodile pool with Kitchener, they had ridden out into the desert to join the route back from Khartoum to the Egyptian border, and Jones had been astonished one night to see a form he recognized as Charrière slip by, heading north. Jones followed him to Wadi Halfa, where he had seen Charrière go alone into Lord Wolseley’s tent. It was then that he knew what Charrière had done. Wolseley had been a patron and benefactor to the Mohawk Indians since he had first employed their services in Canada; Charrière would be beholden to him, and was someone who would disappear back to the forests of Canada as silently as he had crossed the desert from Khartoum, trusted never to tell anyone what he had done.

And there was something else that Jones had not told Chaillé-Long. It was not only the plaque from the crocodile temple that had given him the clue to this place. That night at Wadi Halfa he had risked all and crept into Charrière’s tent while he was with Wolseley. In Charrière’s bag he had found Gordon’s journal of his final days in Khartoum, something that he must have entrusted to Mayne, that Charrière must then have taken from him but clearly decided not to show to Wolseley. In the frantic few seconds in the tent, he had seen an incredible drawing inside the back cover of the journal, something that had etched itself on his mind. It was another clue to Akhenaten that Gordon himself had uncovered, a more detailed version of the plan on the plaque. It too showed the Aten sun symbol, the lines radiating off from the center with the cluster of three squares showing the Giza pyramids at one corner. Jones had hastily copied down a series of hieroglyphic cartouches that Gordon had inscribed at the bottom of the page, and then packed the diary away in the bag and fled into the night.

It was Gordon’s sketch that had been his biggest revelation and had allowed him to understand the plaque. One day several years later while working with the fellahin at Giza, he realized that the three small squares exactly mapped the relationship of the pyramids on the plateau. He was then able to use the sketch and the plaque to triangulate their position at the river from the pyramids by following one of the radiating lines from the sun symbol that he believed represented underground passageways. Finding what lay beneath became an obsession for him, not because he was drawn by a promise of ancient riches but because it was about discovering a truth that seemed to give a nobility of purpose to their enterprise in the desert, something that could exonerate Mayne, even Gordon, that would stand in stark contrast to the grim reality of failure and dishonor in their avowed reason for being there. In his fevered imagination, gripped once again by the same mania that had enveloped him at the crocodile pool, he had even felt himself on the same elevated mission as Gordon in Khartoum, as someone who had thrown away all the shackles to the outside world and his past life in order to devote himself to a higher purpose.

He was barely out of this state, in the grips of the deep melancholia that followed, when he had been begging near Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and had overheard guests mentioning Chaillé-Long and his law practice in Alexandria. Jones had already realized that he was going to have to enlist the help of others with money if he were ever going to get to the bottom of the mystery. Then, less than a month ago, he had experienced another astonishing revelation. He had learned hieroglyphics specifically to translate the cartouches that he had copied from Gordon’s journal. He had learned to recognize the royal cartouche of Akhenaten, one of the three in the journal, but the other two had defeated him. And then he had a blinding revelation. The symbols for the Aten, for sun and light, did not mean sunlight after all but something more down to earth and far more astonishing. This place he was searching for was not just a holy sanctum of a new religion; it was a treasure-house, yet a treasure that few Egyptologists would ever have imagined possible even in their wildest dreams.

Jones had not yet told Chaillé-Long because he could not calculate the effect that such a revelation might have on the man — and the actions he might take as a consequence. He was fearful also of word leaking out. Cairo eight years after the war was seething with men of loose purpose drawn by tales of ancient riches to be discovered; they had subverted their passion for war by an obsession with tombs and pharaohs. Until Guerin returned from his dive with word that they were in the right place, his revelation would remain a secret known to him alone, preserved only on a crumpled piece of paper concealed in his belt and in a journal that he presumed by now had disappeared with Charrière beyond knowledge, somewhere on the far side of the world.

Chaillé-Long stood up and consulted his fob watch. “He’s been down half an hour now,” he said. “He must be up soon.” Jones stood up as well and scanned the water. He realized that he was now able to see more clearly. Looking over the riverbank, he could just make out the distant triangles of the pyramids at Giza caught in the first red glow of dawn.

His heart began to pound. This was it.

CHAPTER 5

The boat lurched and then trembled again, as if something were bumping along the side. “What’s that infernal knocking?” Chaillé-Long said. The boy ran over to look, and Jones followed his gaze. Something big was floating just under the surface, heaving upward and bobbing in the current, its form indiscernible beneath the muddy water. Whatever it was had caught the boat and was pulling it out into the current, forcing the captain to push bodily against the tiller to keep the vessel beam-on to the shore. Jones felt the detonator line tighten, but there was still no sign of Guerin’s light coming up in the water. The captain shouted at the boy in high-pitched Arabic, gesturing frantically with one free hand at the long wooden pole lying just inside the gunwale. The boy picked it up and lowered the end with the iron hook over the side, holding it upright and walking it along to find the obstruction. The boat veered farther into the current, its deck angled down amidships on the port side; the captain was fighting a losing battle with the tiller. He waved wildly with his free hand for Chaillé-Long and Jones to remain where they were on the starboard side to keep the port rail from going under.

The boy stopped, and then heaved the pole with all his might. Suddenly the boat lurched upright, its deck now level, and the pole angled back to horizontal. The hook had caught in a tendril that had pulled up from the main mass of the object, which was now detached from the boat and floating free. The boy stumbled forward and fell to his knees as he tried to free the pole. The captain shouted again in Arabic, and Jones saw the danger of the boy being pulled overboard. He leapt on him, still holding the detonator cord, pinned the boy’s legs against the deck, and grasped the pole. He tried to yank it backward and forward to release the hook, but to no avail. As he made one last desperate attempt, the object reared up and became visible in an eddy. It was pitching and rolling as the water swirled around it.

Jones stared in horror, transfixed. The boy had gone white, and the captain had dropped to his knees wild eyed, sobbing, and beseeching Allah. A smell, suppressed by the river while it was underwater, now rose from the object as it rolled on the surface. The smell was of colossal, all-encompassing decay. Jones felt sick to his stomach; it was his worst nightmare come true. It was a crocodile. Or rather, it was the putrefied, long-dead carcass of a crocodile, its giant skeleton flecked with tendrils of white and gray, just enough organic matter to have kept it afloat on its final voyage from whatever pool it had inhabited somewhere far upriver.

“God protect me.” Jones’ breathing quickened, and he grasped his hands around the detonator cord, trying to stop them from shaking. Chaillé-Long must not see. He flashed back to his state of mind beside the crocodile temple eight years ago. He must not sink into that madness again. He had convinced himself that his obsession with the Leviathan had been delirium brought on by his head wound, something he had snapped out of with the arrival of Kitchener and his camel troops. But suddenly that rationality disappeared, and he felt as if he were being drawn back there again. With all the fiendish contraptions he had devised, all that his engineering knowledge could spirit up, the dynamite, the trip-wire guns, had he truly killed the sacred crocodile of the pool, a crocodile whose long-dead carcass had now caught up with him? A fear began to grip him, a fear that he knew could become panic, spreading to all his other dark places, to the fear of confined spaces, of being trapped underground, a fear that he had last felt in the gloomy basement rooms of the Cairo Museum among the rows of decaying mummies. It was as if the demons of his own underworld were released again, clawing at him and beckoning him down into the portal that lay somewhere beneath them now, the entrance to a world of the dead that lay just below the riverbank.

The detonator cord suddenly yanked him back to his senses. Chaillé-Long was lifting up the underwater lamp, its power virtually expended. Guerin had surfaced on the side of the boat opposite the carcass, his mask and hood stripped off. He was panting and wheezing. “Préparez le plongeur,” he gasped. “The charge is laid.” Jones lurched over and gripped the handle of the plunger, winding it hard to generate enough electricity to set off the charge. Something inside him, a voice from his army training long ago, told him that this was wrong, that he should prepare the plunger only an instant before setting it off. They still had to hear from Guerin about what he had found. But the winding focused him, and gave a reason for his shallow breathing. He left the plunger ready and crawled over to the side of the boat. Guerin was fumbling with something in his suit, but he looked up at the other two, his eyes feverish and bloodshot. “I found it. Half an hour of digging, and I exposed the lintel. It bears this inscription.” He heaved up a wooden slate with a hieroglyphic cartouche scratched on it. Jones took it, his hands shaking now with excitement. “My God,” he said hoarsely. “Look, Colonel. I was right. It’s the royal cartouche of Akhenaten.”

Chaillé-Long raised himself up and stood above the two men, one thumb hitched in his fob pocket, the ivory grip of his pistol clear to see. “I do believe, gentlemen, we have come up trumps.”

“There’s a stone door below the lintel, and it’s closed,” Guerin gasped, grimacing in evident pain. “And the charge is laid against it. But, mes amis, I should warn you…” He coughed violently, swallowed, and coughed again. “I should warn you,” he said, wheezing, “if the tunnel beyond is not flooded, there will be un vortex, and if we blow open the door, there may be something of, how do you say, a whirlpool.”

Chaillé-Long looked disdainfully at the captain, who was sitting huddled with the boy beside the tiller, apparently still praying. “Well, I understand that people are used to whirlpools along this part of the river. A little disturbance might knock some sense into those two. And at any rate,” he said, picking up a distended pig’s bladder, which was normally used as a fishing float, “I for one am prepared for a swim if it comes to that.”

The boat lurched again. Jones could not bring himself to look back over the other side. Guerin reached up with one hand and held the gunwale. “What was that?”

Chaillé-Long shrugged. “Some more floating debris in the water, no doubt. Nothing to concern yourself about, my friend.”

Jones knelt over the plunger, protecting the handle from any knocks, and looked at him. “There’s something more I should tell you. About what’s down there. I mean what’s really down there. What Akhenaten built under the pyramids.”

“I know enough,” Chaillé-Long said imperiously, glancing again at his watch. “We have found what we came for.” The boat seemed to rise slightly and then slide out into the river current, tightening the detonator cord. “You must detonate that charge now, Jones.”

Guerin looked up. “Do it, mon ami. I’m far enough away to be safe.”

Jones shook his head. “You know nothing about explosives, Guerin. About underwater shock waves.”

Guerin coughed. A great gob of blood came up, and he retched. He gasped over and over again, bringing up a bubbling red froth each time. “He’s had an embolism,” Jones exclaimed, peering up at Chaillé-Long. “The shock wave would surely kill him now. We need to get him on board.”

“Depress the plunger, Jones. The boat is pulling the detonator cord and the charge away from the riverbank, and this is our last chance. Your last chance.” Chaillé-Long was behind him, his voice cold. Suddenly a huge lurch rocked the boat, and he was thrown sideways. As he spun around, he saw Chaillé-Long lose his balance, stagger backward and then fall forward, landing heavily on the plunger. The boat swung into the current, pulling the detonator cord and plunger into the water, leaving Guerin floating in a bloody froth toward the shore. Suddenly the river in front of him erupted in a boiling mushroom of water, sending ripples of shock through the boat and across the river. Seconds later it was followed by a dull boom, and then an extraordinary sound, quite unlike any underwater explosion Jones had ever heard, seemingly coming from far off under the riverbank. He remembered Guerin’s warning, and suddenly realized what it was: an echo coming from a hollow chamber, a dry passage running deep under the desert. Whatever lay beyond that portal was no simple chamber but a long passage, large enough to consume a giant torrent of water if the charge had succeeded in blowing open the stone entrance.

For a moment all was calm. Guerin was floating in the water, unconscious or dead. Chaillé-Long lay sprawled on the deck, groaning and clutching his makeshift pig-bladder float. The captain and his boy were nowhere to be seen. And then, slowly at first but with increased violence, the water in front of him started to swirl around like a giant sinkhole, taking the boat with it. Jones could do nothing but kneel in horror at the gunwale, watching the center of the swirl as it plummeted deeper and deeper into the vortex, seeing the boat drop below the surface of the river. He saw Guerin’s body swirled out of sight, sucked down. And then for a fleeting moment he saw what Guerin had seen, a stone portal, a flashing image of pillars and a hieroglyphic inscription, and a dark passage beyond. Then he felt the boat splinter around him, and he himself was hurtling forward on a torrent of water, unable to breathe or hear, seeing only blackness beyond.