Pyramid

CHAPTER 18

Jack stepped out on to the helipad beside Qaitbey Fort a little over six hours after leaving Rebecca in Jerusalem. The paradrop from the Israeli Air Force Hercules had gone without a hitch, and minutes after being picked up from the Mediterranean by a Zodiac from Sea Venture, he had been strapped into the Lynx helicopter for the eighty-mile flight due south to Alexandria.

The city was still under its elected administration but now close to anarchy, and they had decided to fly in at night under the radar screen in order to minimize the chances of interference from any Egyptian police or coastal surveillance units that might remain functional. As Jack ducked away from the rotor downdraft, he saw a small stack of crates beside the edge of the helipad. He knew from the pilot that they contained the final batch of material from the institute, and that the next scheduled flight of the helicopter out of here would be its last. It would carry Hiebermeyer and Aysha to safety with their last precious records from Egypt.

Across the harbor, the first glow of dawn silhouetted the disk shape of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the streaks of pastel red lit up the water and the bobbing rows of fishing boats moored across the basin. It seemed a timeless scene, yet Jack knew it was an illusion. He walked through the fort entrance into the courtyard and saw Costas, who had preceded him from Sea Venture by several hours and was crouched over several large kit bags. He gestured for Jack to come over.

“Everything’s ready. Two E-suits, and two oxygen rebreather backpacks with double cylinders, giving us about five hours’ endurance. We also have the first two prototypes of my new UPD-4 underwater propulsion device, able to go underwater or skim along the surface. It’s the only way we’re going to get three kilometers underground from the river edge to the pyramid plateau, assuming we can even get through the tunnel entrance.”

“Has Lanowski gotten us some coordinates?”

“He’s inside waiting to tell us.”

“And the kit bags?”

Costas jerked his head toward the harbor. “Aysha’s uncle Mohammed has a motorized felucca. He and his son are coming any time now to take the bags and stow them out of sight. He’s going to take us up the Nile past Cairo to our insert point. We’ll be travelling in daylight, but that means we’ll be less conspicuous among the other daytime traffic on the river than we would be at night. It’ll give us a chance to get some rest before the night ahead.”

“What’s our departure time?”

“He wants to leave at 0800. That’s two hours from now. The Lynx is scheduled to leave later in the morning to give Maurice and Aysha a chance to do a final shutdown on this place, but that might be ramped forward if things heat up.”

“Is that likely?”

“There’ve been shootings and explosions through the night. Mostly it’s been gangs of local men taking on the extremists who have been embedded here and making their presence known over the past few days. But there are additional gunmen poised to take over in the event of a coup. I’ve just spoken to Ben on the satellite phone, and the latest intel is that there’s a forward camp just inside the Libyan border comprising several hundred men with pickup trucks, almost certainly tasked to take Alexandria. They’ll be joined by much larger groups heading up from Sudan toward Cairo. The Egyptian military has been so extensively infiltrated by extremist sympathizers that it’s no longer an effective defensive force for the government. Once the gunmen arrive, all resistance will crumble and this place will go over to the dark side. It could happen at any time.”

“Did Ben say anything about the situation with the girl in Cairo?”

“He hasn’t been able to raise the antiquities director or his intel contact in Cairo. The deadline for a response is 1230 this morning Egyptian time. It doesn’t look promising, Jack, but we have to hold on until then. I know that Aysha’s got another option.”

Jack grunted. “Okay. Let’s hear what Lanowski has to say.”

Costas took a swaddled package from the top of one of the kit bags and handed it to Jack. “Three extra magazines loaded personally by me, and the Beretta stripped and oiled. I’ve got a Glock and a few other goodies from Sea Venture. If we’re caught out, we can’t surrender to these people, Jack. By the time the coup’s in full swing, they won’t be taking any prisoners.”

Jack strapped on the holster, took out the Beretta, ejected and then replaced the magazine, pulled the slide to the rear and released it to chamber a round, and then replaced it in the holster. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move.”

Fifteen minutes later they stood with Aysha and Hiebermeyer behind Lanowski, who was sitting in front of the last remaining computer console in the operations room. Everything else was bare, the books and files and posters gone. All that remained beside the computer on the desk was an open briefcase and a satellite phone. Jack leaned over and stared at the image of the radiating Aten symbol from the plaque that Lanowski had just opened up on the screen. It showed the additional fragment with the line running to a point where the depiction showed the River Nile. “We’ve got a little over an hour before the felucca is ready,” he said. “I want everything you’ve got on those Nile coordinates, but before that I want a full operational briefing, everything we know about the archaeology under that plateau. This is the last chance we’ve got.”

Hiebermeyer unrolled a map from the briefcase showing the Giza plateau, the Nile, and the southern Cairo suburbs in between. “All right, Jack. During the 1980s an international company was hired to construct a new sewage system under the Giza suburb, to the south of old Cairo abutting the pyramid plateau. It was an unparalleled opportunity for archaeology, promising the kind of revelations we’ve seen in Athens with construction work in advance of the Olympics or in Istanbul with the new Bosporus tunnel terminus. But the need to get those sewers done was truly desperate, and corners were cut. We got a tantalizing glimpse of what might lie beneath, nothing more. I was a student at the time and managed to join the archaeological team monitoring the work.”

“Unofficially, as I recall,” Jack said. “Your supervisor wanted you to finish your doctorate, but you wanted a finger in everything going on in Egypt. The antiquities director at the time point-blank refused you a permit. Had your best interests at heart.”

“Not the way I saw it at the time,” Hiebermeyer said, shaking his head in frustration. “If I’d had another couple of hours out there, we might be a lot closer to our objective right now. I was appalled at how the investigation was shut down as soon as the construction work was finished and all the holes were backfilled. Today it’s all completely buried beneath the suburb that now laps the Giza plateau itself. But the night guard at the most interesting site was a friend of mine, and he let me inside on the final night before it was filled in. What I found was fascinating, though of course I couldn’t tell anyone about it as I was there illegally. At the time I had bigger fish to fry, or so I thought, and I set it aside in my mind. But it suddenly makes sense. This is huge, Jacob.”

Lanowski tapped a key, and an aerial photo of the Giza plateau appeared on the screen, showing the three pyramids and the Sphinx, the mass of lesser structures and excavated foundations in front of the Great Pyramid, and in the foreground the sprawling buildings of the modern suburb. Lanowski tapped again and the scene transformed into an isometric computer-generated image with a reconstructed overlay showing the plateau with the ancient structures intact. The modern suburb had disappeared, replaced by regular cultivated fields, and suddenly the jumble of ruins in front of the pyramids made sense, with rectilinear buildings, courtyards, and linked causeways. The most striking addition on the edge of the floodplain in front of the pyramids was a large man-made basin and a complex of canals, one of them leading to an irregular waterway about a kilometer east of the plateau that was clearly a branch of the Nile.

“Give us a rundown, Maurice,” Costas said.

“Okay. You’ve got the three pyramids, Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure, largest to smallest, north to south. They’re on the edge of a plateau called the Mokkatam Formation, a limestone ridge that rises at this point about fifty meters above the modern suburb. To the east of the plateau is the ancient floodplain of the Nile, to the west the open desert. The limestone is easily quarried and easily tunnelled. The plateau to the east of the Pyramid of Menkaure is completely free of ancient structures, leaving the raised plateau in front bare over almost a square kilometer until you drop down into the floodplain.”

“You mean where we would have been looking when we were suspended beneath the pyramid, facing east?” Costas asked. “Where we were looking down the blocked-up tunnel?”

Hieberemeyer nodded. “First, let’s look at what we can see aboveground. This image shows the plateau as it might have looked during the New Kingdom, about the time of Akhenaten, over a thousand years after the pyramids were built. Originally each pyramid would have been fronted by a mortuary temple, and then a further temple — really a kind of entrance portico — on the floodplain below. The two were joined by a causeway. But by the time of the New Kingdom, the mortuary complexes for the Pyramids of Menkaure and Khafre had been removed, and everything was focused on the structures associated with the Great Pyramid. By then, of course, the use of these structures as mortuary temples, to prepare the bodies of the pharaohs for the afterlife, was ancient history, and I mean really ancient history. People tend to think of Pharaonic Egypt as a continuum where everything can be lumped together, whereas in fact we’re dealing with a time span between the construction of the pyramids and the time of Akhenaten — similar to that between, say, the end of the Roman period and the present day. In such a huge expanse of time, we should expect monuments to change in meaning and function.”

Jack nodded. “So what began as communities of priests perpetuating the memory of the three individual pharaohs — Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure — becomes a unified cult of the ancient pharaohs, centering on the one complex associated with the Great Pyramid. The other temples become redundant.”

“And more than that,” Hiebemeyer enthused, “the entire cult could have become redundant.” He paused, standing back. “What is it that fascinates us most about the pyramids? It’s not so much the dead pharaohs, but the engineering marvel and the geometry of the alignments, the relationships in particular to the sun. Egyptians of the New Kingdom would have been as awestruck by these ancient monuments as we are today, and would have been well aware of the celestial alignments. They would have celebrated them. It’s my belief that the cult of the pharaohs would have been largely subsumed by a cult of the Sun, of Ra and the other sun gods, a transition that could have taken place already by the beginning of the New Kingdom.”

“And that brings us to Akhenaten,” Costas murmured. “And to how it was that plaques showing the Aten sun symbol could have been placed inside the burial chamber of Menkaure, something that would have been impossible while his cult was still alive.”

Hiebermeyer nodded, and pointed at the screen. “Let’s look at these structures in front of the Great Pyramid first. This is what was revealed during the sewer construction. What was officially revealed, that is. First, a mass of mud-brick buildings that was undoubtedly part of the town that sprang up to house the workers and then the priests who maintained the cult. Second, the remains of a huge mud-brick wall, the so-called palace. Third, the massive basalt revetment of the man-made harbor abutting the valley temple, joined to the Nile by canals wide enough to float barges with stone blocks up to the harbor and later for the ceremonial final boat journey of the dead pharaoh from the Nile to the mortuary temple.”

Costas pointed at a sinuous channel shown to the east of the harbor. “You mean here?”

“That’s the Bar el-Libeini, the projected line of a channel of the Nile in Old Kingdom times. Since then it’s silted up, and the main channel of the river has progressively migrated east, except in a few places where it has remained in more or less its ancient position. The man-made canals have also been lost, but they would have been huge engineering feats in their own right.”

“What all this shows,” Jack said thoughtfully, “is that the construction of some kind of passage between the Nile and the Giza plateau, an underground passage, would have been perfectly feasible, and our idea that those radiating lines on the Aten symbol might map out its course is within the realm of possibility.”

“More than that, Jack. It’s a dead certainty.”

“Go on.”

Hiebermeyer took a deep breath, steadying his excitement. “I’ve listed the official discoveries. Well, now for the unofficial ones.” He reached under the computer table, felt around for a moment, and then pulled out a book-sized slab of highly polished granite, the end of a hieroglyphic cartouche deeply cut in its surface. He placed it carefully on the table beside him and then swept his hand across the surface. “This has been my guilty secret for all these years. I’ve been waiting for the right time to reveal it, and this is it. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Costas peered at it. “There’s that bird, the Egyptian buzzard. And the mouth, the face, and the half sun. The rest I don’t recognize.”

Hiebemeyer’s voice was taut with excitement, and his hand was trembling as he traced out the hieroglyphs. “I found this that night in the trench beside the huge mud-brick wall. This is why I said the so-called palace; it’s because it wasn’t a palace. There are three certain words here. One is secrets. Another is writing. Another is storeroom, or repository. The only other person I’ve shown this to is Aysha, who happens to be my best hieroglyphics expert. She’s certain it means storeroom of written secrets.”

There was a stunned silence. “My God,” Jack whispered. “A library.”

Hiebermeyer stared at Jack, his face flushed. “I always objected to the word palace. A closer approximation would be monastery, a place where priests lived and worked. And just like medieval monasteries, the priestly colleges of ancient Egypt would have been repositories of knowledge. Do you remember the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta, where Solon the Greek heard the Atlantis story? By that stage, half a millennium after Akhenaten, the old knowledge had become fragmented, parcelled among many temples, jealously guarded by the priests and passed down only by word of mouth. The first Macedonian king of Egypt, Ptolemy I, tried to rectify that with his establishment of the great library at Alexandria, though by then much of the old knowledge had died after the closure of the last of the ancient temples. But I believe that he was inspired by a memory of a great centralized repository, a great library, that had existed far back in the glory days of the pharaohs, in the New Kingdom at the time of Akhenaten and his son, Tutankhamun.”

“And where better than at Giza,” Jack murmured. “The great center for the worship of the sun god during the New Kingdom, and before that of the earliest pharaohs. A place of continuous occupation by a priestly caste for over two thousand years, priests who could safeguard a repository of knowledge through the centuries.”

“And if this was a library, it could have been the earliest library on this scale anywhere,” Hiebermeyer exclaimed. “That mud-brick wall dates back to the Old Kingdom, to soon after the construction of the Great Pyramid, about 2500 BC. That’s over a thousand years before the heyday of the New Kingdom, before Akhenaten. Imagine what such a repository might have contained: all the knowledge passed down from Egyptian prehistory, from the time of the first hieroglyphic texts of the previous millennium as well as the oldest writings of Mesopotamia. And we’re not just talking about funerary texts, sacred mantras, Books of the Dead, and all the familiar religious tracts, but about material that predates and transcends all that: the earliest sagas and histories, accounts of exploration and discovery, lost medicinal knowledge. Ptolemy’s library at Alexandria would have been only a pale shadow of that.”

“But like Ptolemy’s library, it could have acted as a magnet for other collections, an accumulator,” Jack said, his mind racing. “I’m thinking about something else, Maurice, about the Minoan queen of Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, about your theory of her legacy in the bloodline that led to Akhenaten and the other great New Kingdom pharaohs. Maybe the Minoan legacy in Egypt wasn’t just about a dynasty and a mercenary army of amazons. Maybe it was far more profound than that, a legacy of preserved knowledge that passed to Egypt after the volcano of Thera destroyed Cretan civilization and the priests fled over the sea to the south from their ruined palaces.”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “Palaces, but not palaces. People have wondered about the function of the Minoan palaces ever since they were discovered, about the complexes of storerooms, about the labyrinth.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment. “Imagine what that might contain.”

“But then it was all lost,” Costas said.

Hiebermeyer tapped the screen where the image showed the empty limestone plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s still there. Maybe it went underground.”

Jack stared, his mind racing. Of course. “Ahkenaten’s City of Light,” he exclaimed. “It’s exactly what Akhenaten would do. He’s a pharaoh who’s created a whole new religion, who has built himself a new capital at Amarna, who has dedicated massive new temples at Luxor and Heliopolis. Refounding the library at Giza, removing it to a more secure location from that old mud-brick complex, bringing it under the aegis of his new cult center to the Aten and putting it underground would be completely in keeping with his vision. Jacob, can we see your plan again?”

Lanowski tapped a key, and the image transformed to the Aten symbol from the plaques with the pyramids behind, transposed on the actual topography of the plateau. “It fits exactly,” Jack said. “The central sun symbol falls exactly on the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, the place from which the rays emanate. That’s got to be it.” He glanced at Costas. “That must be what we saw down in the tunnel under the pyramid.”

Costas nodded. “Lit up by sunlight coming through those air shafts in the pyramid, reflected off polished basalt mirrors that magnified it somewhere deep beneath the plateau.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Now for the egress point of that tunnel on the Nile.”

Lanowski reeled off a twelve-figure set of coordinates. “That pinpoints it to within twenty meters. I simply superimposed the image of the plaque on a modern map, maintaining the exact alignments of the pyramids.”

Costas peered at the map dubiously. “You really think it can be that accurate?”

Hiebermeyer and Lanowski both turned and stared at him. Jack put a hand on his shoulder, grinning. “You want to watch what you say. We’re outnumbered by Egyptologists here.”

“I think,” said Lanowski slowly, eyeing Costas, “given that the ancient Egyptians were able to align a pyramid with geometrical precision, if they really intended this to be a map, then we can trust them.”

Costas raised his hands. “I was only asking. Mea culpa.”

Lanowski tapped a key, and a satellite image of Lower Egypt came into view. The Nile Delta and Cairo were clearly visible above the belt of green that marked the course of the river through the desert. He tapped repeatedly, coming closer and closer to a point on the Nile to the south of Cairo. “Google Maps is still down for Egypt, but I kept open the link to Landsat that my friend at Langley sent me when I was researching the Red Sea chariots site. Take a look at this. My coordinates come out almost exactly on this ruined structure half fallen into the Nile. Aysha?”

“My research shows that it’s early nineteenth century, thought to have been built by Napoleon’s forces when they took Egypt,” she said. “It would have been a ruin by the time Corporal Jones and Chaillé-Long and the French diver undertook their foray in 1892. There’s nothing else like it on that stretch of the west bank of the Nile. There’s no doubt that this is the fort they saw and that Howard Carter mentioned in his diary entry. The entrance to Akhenaten’s tunnel should lie somewhere very close to that spot.”

“Bingo,” Lanowski said quietly.

Jack’s excitement was mounting. “Good work, Jacob. Now let’s do some geomorphology on this. We need to be thinking about the water level.”

“I’m already there,” Lanowski replied, his eyes gleaming. “Obviously, there’s the issue of changes in the course of the Nile over three thousand years. But this is one of those places where the position of the bank has been almost static, as we can infer from the discovery of the tunnel entrance apparently below the modern bank of the river.”

“It might not have been chance,” Costas said thoughtfully. “Akhenaten’s engineers must have known their river intimately. If they were going to build a tunnel entrance, they’d have chosen somewhere stable.” He glanced at Jacob. “After all, these were the guys who built the pyramids. You said it.”

Lanowski turned to Costas, his face suffused with pleasure. “Very good, Costas. You’re learning.”

“What about the river level?” Jack asked.

“The latest sedimentological research suggests that the New Kingdom floodplain was lower than has generally been believed, though of course we have to factor in the annual flooding and lowering of the Nile that’s now controlled by the Aswan Dam. My calculations suggest that a tunnel built into the bedrock at that point could have been dry for part of the year, and partly flooded for the remaining months when it might have been navigable.”

“You mean an underground canal,” Jack said. “Something that would have allowed barges to be poled or wall-walked right up to the pyramid plateau.”

“Exactly. We’ve already seen a precedent for it in the canals and artificial harbors dug for each of the pyramids when they were constructed, only they were aboveground.”

“But our tunnel doesn’t lead to a mortuary temple,” Hiebermeyer added.

“What about the present water level?” Jack asked.

“My model suggests that the tunnel will be completely submerged, though it may well rise once it reaches the plateau. It will connect with passageways and chambers that have always been above the water level and remain dry today. Ground-penetrating radar survey in the past has revealed nothing like this under the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, but that may only reflect the limitations of the technology. It would be possible for the roof of the chambers to be many meters deep, beyond the range of the radar, but for the chambers still to be above the water table. And there’s no doubt that they exist. You and Costas saw through to some kind of space when you were under the pyramid.”

“I just hope you can break through from the Nile,” Lanowski said. “When that French diver blew his way in over a hundred years ago, he may have caused a rock slide.”

“We can’t know that until we get there,” Jack said, squinting at Costas. “And my colleague usually has a few bits and pieces up his sleeve.”

“C5,” Costas said. “A diver’s best friend. I used it to liberate a few slabs from Sea Venture’s armaments store.”

Hiebermeyer was still staring at the screen. “Do you really think you can make it? I mean, more than three kilometers through that tunnel, completely underwater?”

Costas nodded. “Physically, yes. As long as the tunnel is clear beyond the entrance, as long as our scooters work, and as long as our rebreathers hold out.”

“But?”

“I can’t help thinking of those who have gone before us. The only ones we know about were the Caliph Al-Hakim and Corporal Jones. The first is apparently dead somewhere down there, and the other one was seriously unhinged by the experience. And our first foray under the pyramid was hardly auspicious. We saw the light once, but maybe that’s all the pharaoh will allow us.”

Lanowski glanced at him. “You’re in the wrong movie, Costas. This isn’t the one with the curses, the flesh-eating scarabs, and the zombie mummies. Akhenaten ditched all the old religion, remember? He was above all that.”

Costas gave him a wry look. “Yeah, and this is the one with the extremist fanatics, the public executions, and impending Armageddon. Given the choice, I think I’d take swarms of locusts and come-alive mummies over that.”

Aysha’s phone hummed, and she took it out of her pocket. “We’ve got reception back. It won’t last, so let me check on the latest.” She tapped the screen, waited, stared at the image that came up, and then scrolled quickly down. “You need to see this, all of you. It’s on the news, now. Our time may be tighter than we thought.”

CHAPTER 19

Aysha propped her phone on the computer so they could all see the screen, and Hiebermeyer sat forward. He gripped the armrests of his chair, his knuckles white with tension. “It’s from Al Jazeera, their Arabic service,” Aysha said. “It’s live.”

Jack leaned over and stared. Above the footer with breaking news was a scene that looked like the aftermath of a terrorist attack, the foreground filled with flashing lights and emergency vehicles in front of a high perimeter fence. The headline said “Giza, live.” The camera zoomed in beyond the fence to the looming forms of the three pyramids. Suddenly there was a white flash in front of the smaller of the pyramids, and then another. “That looks like white phosphorus, probably grenades,” he murmured. “Phosphorus won’t bring anything down, but if they use it on the pyramids, it’ll blacken the stone and make them seem as if they’re on fire.”

“It’s a portent of what’s to come,” Hiebermeyer muttered. “Next time they’ll pack the burial chambers with high explosive.”

“Isn’t that our pyramid?” Costas said. “The Pyramid of Menkaure?”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “The one that Saladin’s son tried to dismantle in 1196, so they’re taking up where he left off. Look what the new report says. They’ve been chanting ‘Saladin, Saladin.’ They may be threatening to do this to the smaller pyramid now, but next time it’ll be the Great Pyramid.”

Aysha switched on the speaker and listened intently to the report, in Arabic. “Apparently it’s the same militant cleric who’s been threatening this ever since the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001,” she said, switching the sound off again. “It seems that his thugs managed to break their way through the perimeter fence about an hour ago in a convoy of pickup trucks, and now they’re in an armed standoff with the police at the entrance to the plateau. The police have no interest in a firefight, and anyway their senior officers have been infiltrated by the extremists, just like the army. As for our beloved antiquities director, Al Jazeera has managed to track him down at home halfway through packing to leave. He was a political nobody before the current regime came into power, and I expect right now he’s bitterly regretting having accepted the position. With the media spotlight on him, he’s been forced to return to the ministry in Cairo, where I don’t imagine he’ll last long.”

“I’ve read the Qur’ān right through,” Lanowski said, shaking his head. “There’s nothing in there about ordering the destruction of monuments or statues just because they predate Mohammed.”

“The glory of Allah shines through everything from creation to the present day, including all the marvels of ancient Egypt,” Aysha said quietly. “To suggest that it does not do so for history before Mohammed is wrong. These people are the enemy of true Muslims.”

The TV camera refocused to show the shady figures in front of the trucks that were parked in a line just inside the entrance to the Giza plateau. “Take a look at the gunmen,” Costas said. “They’re all wearing black headbands.”

“They call themselves the new followers of the Mahdi,” Aysha said. “Al Jazeera says they’ve been training in secret camps in Sudan and Somalia for months now. Many are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, with close ties to the extremists now operating in Syria against Israel. For the first time since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, since Yemen and Somalia, we’re looking at an extremist group about to stage a coup to take over a country. They’ve been planning this for over a century, ever since Lord Kitchener desecrated the Mahdi’s tomb outside Khartoum after he’d defeated the dervish army at the Battle of Omdurman. Intelligence analysts at the time knew that Omdurman was a hollow victory, and now it’s come back to haunt us.”

“And archaeology is being used as the tinderbox,” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not just as a tinderbox. Look at what’s happening. The West proved powerless to prevent the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and now we watch helplessly while the greatest antiquities of Egypt are threatened. The forces behind this are about to pull off an extraordinary publicity stunt. How better to show the weakness of the West? Archaeology, the West’s fascination with ancient Egypt, is about to become a pawn in the hands of the extremists. What we are seeing is a gesture of contempt, not only to the West but also to the people of Egypt who have made archaeology their livelihood and the basis for their sense of national identity. A little over two centuries after Napoleon arrived with his team of cartographers and scholars, Egyptology is about to be extinguished.”

Lanowski put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Not for you it won’t be. Not for any of us here, or for the millions around the world who follow your work. You’ve got a lifetime ahead of you putting together everything you’ve gotten out of Egypt. There will be books, films. The whole incredible story of Akhenaten, for a start, when we finally get to the bottom of it. I’ll be there with you.”

Aysha put a finger to her lips and gestured toward Hiebermeyer, who had turned away from them. She leaned down and whispered to him, kissing his forehead and brushing his cheek. As she did so, the image on her phone changed from the pyramids to another view, the headline reading “Cairo Museum under threat.” The live streaming showed the museum behind a line of bonfires; in front of them men in black headbands were chanting and praying.

Hiebermeyer turned, took a deep breath, and stared at the image. “Mein Gott,” he said. “It truly begins.” He got up and turned around, his face drained.

“Jacob was right,” said Jack. “You may have to hang up your trowel for a while, but now is the time for ideas. After all, a few days ago, after your find of that carving in the tomb in the mummy necropolis, you handed me the best proof I could want that the Egyptian New Kingdom came about as a result of influence from Minoan Crete.”

Hiebermeyer suddenly bristled. “I did what? I said nothing of the sort. A gaggle of bare-breasted Minoan amazons cavorting around in chariots in the desert does not amount to cultural influence.”

“Prove it. And prove to me that the Egyptians travelled farther than the Greeks, in the Mediterranean, around Africa, even across the Atlantic. Go out and find the sites. That is, if they exist.”

“Oh, they exist.” Hiebermeyer was positively glaring at him now. “You know they exist. I’ll prove it to you. Just wait.”

Jack gripped his shoulder. “That’s the Maurice I know.”

Lanowski scuffed the floor with his feet and raised his hand, coughing.

“What is it, Jacob?” Costas asked cautiously.

“Permission to join the team,” he said.

“You’re already part of the team,” Jack said. “And a highly valued member. You’ve proved it yet again today.”

“No, I mean the real team. The expedition. You and Costas.”

“Come again?”

“You’re going to need someone else topside. Mohammed and his son will have their work cut out for them managing the felucca. I’ve already been out with them in the harbor and seen what it’s like. You’ll need someone else to manage GPS position finding and to help with equipment. And Mohammed’s English isn’t that great. I speak pretty reasonable Arabic.”

“You speak Arabic?” Costas murmured. “Of course you speak Arabic. I should have guessed.”

Jack eyed him. “There’s a big risk factor. You know that.”

Lanowski raised his arms in the air, looking exasperated. “The last big risk I took was when I turned down a tenured professorship at MIT for what amounted to a technician’s job at IMU. My friends thought I’d finally flipped. All hope of the Nobel Prize went out the window. What attracted me to IMU was the chance to combine my, well, genius with hands-on archaeology, something I’d dreamed about since first being fascinated by Egyptology as a kid. And I’ve been part of this project from the get-go. And show me a Jack Howard project that doesn’t involve big risks. Real risks.”

Jack glanced at Costas, who cracked a smile. “I guess we could use the odd genius.”

Jack pursed his lips. “You’d be our man on the felucca. Shore excursions are strictly off-limits. Okay?”

Lanowski punched the air. “Thank you, Jack. You won’t regret it.”

“One question,” Costas said, putting up his hand. “About our shore excursion. Assuming we make it out alive, how do we get picked up?”

Lanowski took a black object the size of small alarm clock out of his pocket. “Obviously you’ll be on your own underground, and the mobile network around Cairo will probably be completely dead by then. You’ll have a satellite phone, but the most reliable device is going to be this little gizmo.”

Costas peered at it. “A beacon?”

“You got it. Switch this on anywhere, and your GPS coordinates will be transmitted instantly via satellite to Sea Venture.”

Costas looked uncertain. “Our people won’t risk flying in a helicopter to pick us up on land. One thing the extremists have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is how easy it is to shoot down helicopters. You can see shoulder-launched SAMs among those trucks in the Al Jazeera report, some of them looking very like Stingers.”

Aysha looked at him. “Our plan is for you to get out the way you got in. Mohammed and his son, and now Jacob too, will be waiting on the Nile in the felucca. Wherever you egress, your plan should be to make your way to the nearest point on the riverbank and activate the beacon. Sea Venture will pass on your GPS coordinates via satellite phone to Jacob. After they pick you up, the felucca will sail north of the Nile Delta far enough out to sea for the Lynx to extract you without danger of attack.”

“We may well have to go through Cairo to get back to the river,” Costas said.

“That’s a risk you’ll have to take,” said Aysha. “There are still going to be Westerners there: journalists, some diplomats, the usual vultures who show up during a coup thinking they’ll be in pole position to score lucrative deals with a new regime. But the first target for the extremists is likely to be members of the existing government, many of them Muslims. They might even want Western journalists there to report on it. It’s afterward when there are gangs of blood-crazed gunmen roaming the streets that you’d be in the most trouble. We’ll just have to hope that they’re still preoccupied with the purge when you arrive. You’ll never succeed in being inconspicuous, so you need to look self-confident, assertive. I take it you’d strip off your E-suits to the clothes you’ve got on now. And I may be on the ground to help.”

Jack stared at her. “What do you mean, on the ground?”

Aysha gave him a steely look. “It’s about Sahirah, the Egyptian girl. The deadline Ben set on Seaquest for a response from the antiquities director is only a few hours away. We’ve just seen on the newscast that he’s more concerned with saving his own skin right now. But something else has happened, Jack. One of the extremists who now effectively runs the judiciary saw that Sahirah had been arrested in connection with a visit to a synagogue. As a result he’s had the charge against her changed from the lesser one of antiquities theft to the worst crime of all in their books, apostasy. She won’t be given a chance to deny it. And even if the antiquities director were to intervene, there would almost certainly be no clemency.”

Jack pursed his lips. “I take it you have a contingency plan.”

“Do you remember the beggar outside the synagogue when we went in to see Maria? I told you that he was in fact my cousin Ahmed, the former Egyptian special forces soldier. What you weren’t to know is that he’s also Sahirah’s boyfriend. He and several of his former army friends think that in the confusion of the coup they’ll be able to get into the ministry building and find her. I’m going to Cairo to meet up with them.”

“You mean they’re planning to shoot her out?” Jack said.

“There may be no other choice.”

“Good people are going to get killed.”

“It’s going to be a bloodbath anyway, Jack. All we can do is try to save a few lives.”

“What’s our rendezvous point in the city to meet up with you?”

“The synagogue. If you have to come through Cairo and can’t safely get to the river, make your way there and activate the beacon. I’ll be in satellite phone contact with Sea Venture as well. I can help to guide you.”

Jack looked at Lanowski. “Make sure you keep that beacon safe.”

“I’ve got two of them. One for me, the other for you.”

Costas peered closely. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Jacob? I tell you about everything I’m working on.”

Lanowski looked hesitant. “Well, it was going to be a birthday surprise for you. For today. Rebecca told me.”

Jack looked at Costas. “For today? Today is your birthday?”

The building vibrated from an explosion somewhere near the harbor, the detonation followed by the ripping sound of machine-gun fire. Costas jerked his head toward the door, his face grim. “I don’t think today is one for any kind of celebration.”

Jack pointed to the fragment of ancient masonry beside the computer, the find that Hiebermeyer had made years before in the sewage pipe excavation beside the pyramids. “Don’t forget that, Maurice,” he said. “If Costas and I get nowhere tonight, those hieroglyphs could be the only real proof we have for what lies under the plateau.”

“Maurice and I have everything,” Aysha said. “The First World War diary I found in the museum archives, the Geniza letter of Halevi, all the images and data from the mummy necropolis, everything.”

Jack reached out and shook Hiebermeyer’s hand. “Do you remember our old school motto? ‘Quit ye like men, be strong.’ We used to joke about it, but now is one of those times.”

Hiebermeyer tapped his head. “It’s all up here, Jack. I’m taking Egypt with me. I won’t let it go.”

The phone hummed, and Aysha picked it up and read a text. “That was my sister near Tantur, about eighty kilometers south of Alexandria. She says she’s just seen a convoy of trucks with gunmen racing up the highway. If Cairo falls, Alexandria won’t be far behind.”

Jack looked at his watch. “Okay. Time for us to go.”

Aysha nodded. “Mohammed has food and drink and sleeping bags on the felucca. All you need to do now is visit the washroom and say your prayers.”

Jack looked around the room. “Anything more we can do?”

“Everything’s on Sea Venture except what you can see here and the crates on the helipad.”

“Institute staff?”

“Anyone who wanted to leave has been airlifted out, along with their families. They’ll get refugee status in the UK.”

Jack turned to Costas and made a twirling motion with one hand. “We need to get the Lynx fired up.”

Costas unclipped the VHF radio from his belt and started walking to the door. “I’m on it.”

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. “We’ll help you get this remaining stuff to the helipad. It’s 0730 hours already, and Mohammed’s probably loaded up and waiting. We can get going early and give him a little leeway.” He turned to Lanowski, who had shouldered a small rucksack and had picked up a crate of books from the floor. “Jacob? You still on for this?”

Lanowski stared at him, his face pale but determined. “Roger that, Jack. I’m good to go.”

Forty minutes later Jack was crouched between the thwarts of the felucca, staring in horror at the scene that was unfolding around them. The explosion they had heard while they were in the operations room had been the first of a succession every few minutes along the harbor front, all of them car bombs. After the third one, Hiebermeyer had decided to bring forward his plans and evacuate the institute immediately. Aysha had left quickly with their driver for Cairo. She was shorn of anything associating her with a foreign institute and was dressed in a burkha with a face veil. A few minutes later Mohammed and his son had finished loading the felucca and poled it away from the quayside. Jack and Lanowski were sitting in the bow, and Costas was helping the boy to fire up the diesel engine. As it coughed to life, the noise was drowned out by the Lynx, which raised a dust storm around the fort as the pilot held the aircraft poised for departure. Jack had watched as Hiebermeyer ran out of the fort with his briefcase and rucksack, ducked down on the helipad while the crewman loaded the last of the crates, and then took the outstretched arms and jumped on board himself. He had turned for a last glimpse of Egypt as the helicopter rose, angled sharply, and then clattered off over the Mediterranean, soon leaving Alexandria and Egyptian airspace far behind and disappearing from view over the northern horizon.

For Jack it should have been a scene of almost unbearable poignancy, watching his friend in his trusty old shorts and boots, still streaked with dirt from his last excavation, leave his beloved Egypt perhaps for the last time. But any reflection was instantly cut short by a cacophony of gunfire and engine revving coming along the highway from the west, the first of the trucks screeching onto the quay mere minutes after the Lynx had taken off. One of them disgorged half a dozen gunmen, who raced up to the fort, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, one of them waving the black flag of the extremists. Within minutes they had entered the fort and raised the flag on a pole above the ramparts. Qaitbay Fort suddenly looked as it had been intended, a stronghold of medieval Islam, all indication of its use over the past few years as an archaeological institute obliterated.

Two trucks raced up to the fort and this time let off a cluster of handcuffed prisoners, all of them Egyptian woman in Western dress, the gunmen rifle-butting them into the courtyard. Seconds later there was an earsplitting clatter of gunfire and the gunmen reappeared, leaving one man at the entrance, and piling back into the trucks. Jack turned away, feeling numb, glad only that Maurice and Aysha had not witnessed what had just happened. As the felucca chugged out into the basin toward the sea, he steeled himself for more to come, keeping his eyes glued on the gunmen at the fort. Suddenly the air was rent by another explosion, deeper and more resonant than the others, and then a rushing noise and the sound of shattering glass. “My God,” Costas exclaimed. “They’ve torched the library.”

Jack spun around, staring at the far side of the harbor. A gas truck had been driven into the foyer of the Bibliotheca and exploded, its wrecked form lying upside down on the road in front. The huge disk shape of the Bibliotheca was wreathed in flame, like a burning sun rising from the eastern horizon. Jack could barely breathe; his mind was reeling. It was as if he had been transported back fifteen hundred years to an event that seemed fossilized in history, too awful to comprehend. But this was real, and happening before his eyes. For the second time in two millennia, the great library of Alexandria had been destroyed by religious extremists, by those who believed that knowledge was offensive to their god. Jack could hear the screams of people streaming out of the building, and bursts of gunfire from the trucks that had ranged up beside the wreck of the tanker, their machine guns trained on the steps and raking them every time another person appeared. It was not just the books that were anathema to the extremists; it was those who had read them as well. In that instant the frailty of civilization seemed laid bare, the foundations of wisdom as fragile as those of morality, with those who espoused it as vulnerable as the women who a few minutes before had paid for their freedom of expression with their lives.

Another burst of automatic fire rang out from near the fort, and Jack spun around. A truck with a gunman on the roof was hurtling along the edge of the harbor to the point closest to the felucca, no more than a hundred yards distant. It screeched to a halt. The gunman vaulted out of the rear and began to taunt a fisherman who was gathering up his net on the quay. The gunman was prodding him with the barrel of his Kalashnikov. The fisherman backed away, his hands in the air, gesticulating toward his family in a small car beside them. The gunman raised his rifle and shot him in the head, watched his body jerk back and fall into the harbor, and then ran along the quay looking for others.

Mohammed gestured frantically at Jack and Costas to get down. They dropped into the scuppers and crawled forward to where Lanowski was already lying under the deck in the bow of the boat, absorbed in checking the battery in one of the beacons. Jack looked back and saw Mohammed unfurl and raise a black flag in the stern, and then slowly swing the tiller to take them farther out into the basin toward the entrance. With any luck there would be more interesting and easier targets for the gunmen than a felucca setting out to sea, especially one that appeared to be sporting the flag of the extremists.

Jack drew himself up farther into the crawl space in the bow of the felucca, wedged his feet beside one of their kit bags, and pushed a sleeping bag forward as a makeshift pillow. He felt the bulge of the Beretta in the holster on his chest, and shifted slightly to make sure the grip was accessible in case it was needed. He could make out Lanowski and Costas lying in the gloom beside him, their faces etched with the reality of what they were undertaking. They all knew there was no going back now. Even if they had decided to abort, Jack would never have risked calling back the Lynx to a place that was crawling with trigger-happy gunmen who almost certainly had SAMs in their trucks. The only way ahead was the one they had mapped out, from one burning cauldron to another, but with a plausible exit strategy. They would stick to their plan.

Jack shifted again, trying to find a more comfortable position, and shut his eyes. He tried to forget what he had just seen, and to think instead of those who had gone before him down the Nile in search of fabulous discoveries, of the sand travellers of the past, those who breathed in the dust of the desert and felt the brush of the wind that blew from the pyramids. He thought of what could lie beneath, of sealed chambers full of treasures, of rows of pottery jars brimming with papyri that might contain all the lost wisdom of the ancient world.

The chug of the engine increased to a throb, and he felt the bow rise. He opened his eyes and peered through a crack in the planking, seeing the end of the quay and hearing the slap of the waves as they passed into open water. The engine began to vibrate badly, seeming to jar every bone in his body, and each slap of the waves felt like a body blow. The movement of the boat had released a rancid smell of fish from the scuppers, and wafts of diesel smoke erupted every few seconds from a hole in the engine. The great triangular sail would remain furled until they had traversed the coast and veered south into the Nile, where a good following wind might allow them to ease off on the engine.

He rolled over again and looked at Costas. He was splayed out on top of the kit bags, his mouth open and emitting snores, oblivious to everything around him, rocking to and fro with every shudder of the boat.

Jack swallowed hard. He was beginning to regret devouring the food that Mohammed had offered him on the quayside. He stared at the planks above him, wishing he could be outside and focusing on the horizon, and glanced at his watch. They had ten hours to go until they passed Cairo.

It was going to be a long day.

CHAPTER 20

It was dark by the time the felucca passed through the northern suburbs of Cairo, the lingering heat of the day tempered by a torrential downpour that had left a mist over the banks of the river. Earlier they had used the boat’s huge triangular lateen sail to make their way with the wind against the current, but with the city looming ahead Mohammed and his son had furled the sail and lowered the mast to make the boat less conspicuous and had fired up the old diesel engine again.

As they chugged past vessels heading north, Mohammed had exchanged a few words with their captains and learned that everyone who could was leaving Cairo by whatever means possible, by river or road or on foot, with groups of people even striking out across the desert with all they could carry to find a place to hide and wait out the worst of what was happening in the city.

There had been a tense half hour as they passed the center of the city and the walled enclosure of Fustat, Old Cairo, near the Ben Ezra synagogue, where Jack and Maria had explored the Geniza chamber only four days previously. Jack had tried to make out the medieval walls in the gloom and the mist, remembering that this was the place where he and Costas were due to rendezvous with Aysha before dawn and to find the felucca for their return journey up the Nile to the sea. Between now and then, they should finally have answered the question that had been eating at Jack for months now, ever since they had returned from their explorations in Sudan, since he and Costas had seen the shaft of light beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure. He glanced at Costas’ recumbent form beneath the foredeck of the boat, next to the spot where Jack had just spent several of the most uncomfortable hours of his life hidden from sight during the long daylight passage down the Nile. At least one of them would have had a good rest.

They had begun to pass amorphous shapes floating in the river that Jack knew must be bodies, but until now the city had been ominously quiet, with only the odd gunshot and distant scream. Then just before they reached Fustat, there had been the call to prayer, the muezzins and recordings from the minarets joining in the familiar cadences that seemed to undulate over the city, reaching a crescendo and then stopping suddenly. It had been more than a call to prayer; it had been a signal for the extremists. Seconds later the city erupted in gunfire and a cacophony of shrieking and yelling rising from all directions and echoing across the river. A long burst of automatic fire came at them from the east bank, the muzzle flashing like a distant jet of flame in the night, the bullets zipping overhead and several of them slapping into the side of the boat. Mohammed kept his nerve, staying in the central channel of the river, and the gunman soon turned his attention elsewhere, firing shorts bursts into groups of people who were running and tripping along the embankment.

Jack knew that people were dying now, by the scores if not the hundreds, and that before the night was out the river would run with blood. As the glow of fires began to redden the night, he cast his mind back to the descriptions of Khartoum in Sudan a hundred and thirty years before. It had been the first city on the Nile to fall to the extremists. Those who were watching from the river then must have seen similar sights. Despite all the advances in technology, in weaponry and in communications, when it came to the razing of a city and the destruction of its inhabitants, little had changed through history. It was reduced to the same individual acts of savagery and horror that were little different from the time when the forces of jihad had first swept west across Africa almost fifteen hundred years before, or when the Crusaders had done the same in the name of their own faith.

Jack huddled down again out of sight beneath the thwarts, watching the river through a slit in the planks. Soon the glow of Cairo was enveloped in darkness, and the sounds of gunfire receded into the night. He knew they must be nearing their destination, the ruined Napoleonic fort on the west bank of the river that Lanowski had identified as the point where the tunnel from the pyramid entered the Nile. He could see the screen of Lanowki’s computer now in the space in the bows opposite his own makeshift bed. A few moments later Lanowski emerged with his GPS receiver, his long lank hair coming out from under a woolen Jacques Cousteau hat and his face daubed black. Jack smiled to himself despite the grim scenes of the past hour. Lanowski had come into his own as IMU’s newest field operative, and he was clearly relishing it. He made his way up to Mohammed, exchanged a few words in Arabic, and then came back to Jack, crouching down and showing him the GPS readout and its convergence with the programmed position for the fort. “We’re less than a kilometer away,” he said quietly. “Time to wake Costas?”

Jack nodded. “We’ve got to get our equipment ready. We can’t afford to linger once we get there.”

“Roger that. Mohammed’s apprehensive about his return journey through the city. He thinks it’s only a matter of time before the gunmen find the police river launches and begin joyriding. He wants to be at his rendezvous point north of Cairo before that happens.”

Costas blearily raised himself, banged his head on the deck above him, fell back, and then eased himself out of the space feet first. He turned around and pulled out the two gear bags that had made up his bed, and then cracked opened a water bottle and drained it. “What’s our ETA?” he asked gruffly.

“About twenty minutes,” Lanowski said. “Time to saddle up.”

“Saddle up?” Costas rubbed his eyes. “Since when are we cowboys?”

“It’s what you said in that film. In the TV special about Atlantis. I watched it a couple of times to get the lingo.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay. We’re cowboys.” Costas swayed slightly. “I need some coffee.”

As if on cue, Mohammed’s son appeared with a tray of glasses of strong tea, and they each took one. Costas pulled out a bag of fat sandwiches and offered them around, taking a huge bite from one himself.

“Always the sandwiches,” Lanowski said keenly. “Always New York deli. That’s in the film too.”

“Yeah, well, life imitates art.” He swallowed and peered at Lanowski. “What’s with the commando paint?”

“You should see your faces. They’d stand out like beacons to anyone watching from the shore.”

Costas grunted, swallowed his last mouthful, wiped his hands, crouched down, and pulled his E-suit from his bag. “You help Jack on with his, and then you can zip me up. I’ve got a few additional bits and pieces I need to clip on.”

“A shame you lost your old boiler suit in that volcano.”

“Yeah.” Costas looked disconsolate for a moment. “It melted. I’ve kept the shreds of it in my cabin on Seaquest. It was great to wear that over my E-suit. I haven’t worked out how to carry tools properly since then.”

Lanowski ducked down and pulled a package out of his own bag and handed it to Costas. “I hope you don’t mind. I took a look at that old one in your cabin to get the size.” He tore open the plastic, and an immaculate blue boiler suit complete with outsized leg and arm pockets came tumbling out.

Costas stared. “Hey, Jacob. You’re the man.” He took the suit and held it out appreciatively. “It’s even the correct pattern, 1954 U.S. Navy submariner issue. Where the hell did you find this?”

Lanowski shrugged. “eBay, of course. You can find everything on eBay. I reckoned you were likely to ditch this one with your E-suit at the end of this mission, so I ordered two. There’s another one hanging up behind the door in your cabin.”

Costas looked at Jack, jerking a thumb at Lanowski. “This guy’s good. Really good. We should have him on all our dives.”

Lanowski glanced at his GPS receiver. “Time to saddle up. I mean it this time.”

Costas grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “Roger that.”

Twenty minutes later Jack was floating beside Costas on the starboard side of the felucca, the buoyancy in his E-suit holding him upright with his head and shoulders out of the water. Between them were the aquajets they planned to use to extend their exploration reach underwater. These compact propeller-driven units were capable of 2.5 horsepower with a battery life of up to three hours. The E-suit was an all-environment, Kevlar-reinforced protective shell developed at IMU and refined over the last ten years. It provided a dry interior with temperature control but gave the diver the agility of a wetsuit. Critical to its performance was the streamlined console on the back containing a breathing unit of choice, in this case a semi-closed-circuit oxygen rebreather ideal for maximizing bottom time in the shallow depths they were likely to encounter. The upper part of the console contained a computer that regulated oxygen output, monitored the diver’s physiology, and contained a two-way communication unit, all of it feeding into the helmet with a pivoting visor that was clamped on top of the E-suit. In a refinement since the early days, the helmet was now a closer fit to the head with a flexible neck made of the same material as the E-suit, allowing the diver to move almost without restriction. Jack loved the E-suit for the freedom it gave him, and for the adaptability that allowed them to use it in every conceivable environment, from the Arctic to the superheated water above an underwater volcano to the dive they were about to carry out now, into the murky depths of the Nile, searching for an ancient tunnel under the desert and what might lie beyond.

Lanowski’s head reappeared over the gunwale and he stared down at them. He had prepared a comprehensive equipment checklist on his computer, something that Jack and Costas usually winged, and had just finished running through it with them. Jack could feel the bulge under his E-suit where his Beretta was holstered, and the slight discomfort of the shirt and lightweight jacket, casual trousers, and leather shoes he was wearing under the suit. He was ready to walk out of his E-suit into the streets of Cairo. They had run carefully through every scenario, assessing the best plan of action. Everything depended on them finding the tunnel, being able to get into it, and then finding an egress point. If there was no tunnel below, they would abort the mission here and now. And if there was no egress point farther along the tunnel, they would hope to return to this point, stash their suits in the ruins of the fort, and make their way along the riverbank to the north. As Jack floated there beside the felucca, seeing nothing below, everything seemed to hang in the balance. The yawning uncertainty seemed to eclipse all the hours and days of speculation, the endless juggling of scenarios and possibilities that had filled his mind since finding this spot had become a reality.

Lanowski looked at Costas. “Double-check the two radio beacons.”

“Roger that. One to be activated when we exit, the other when we reach the Nile.”

“And the marker buoy?”

Costas patted the front pocket of the boiler suit he had donned on top of his E-suit. “Roger that. We release it here as soon as we know we can get inside the tunnel.”

“Is your GPS activated?”

“Roger. The in-helmet display will navigate to the precise fix you calculated for the tunnel.”

“Mohammed wants to stand off as soon as possible in the center of the river. He’s the world’s most level guy, as you could see from how cool he was going through Cairo, but he’s gotten twitchy. His son told me that this part of the river has a bad reputation among the felucca captains. They think it’s spooked. Apparently there are whirlpools, and some of the captains think they’re caused by river monsters. Probably nothing to worry about, just giant Nile carp inflated by rumor into monsters.”

“That’s bad enough,” Costas grumbled. “Those things have been known to pull fishermen under.”

“Or it could be crocodiles.”

“Or what?”

“Crocodiles,” Lanowski said distractedly, looking at his list again. “Apparently, they sometimes get this far. Mostly only small ones these days, but some big carcasses still get washed down. Sometimes they’re not carcasses. Sometimes they’re alive and snapping.” Costas groaned again. “That’s great. I thought we’d left all that behind at the crocodile temple in Sudan. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

“You’d still have volunteered,” Jack said. “You’d never have let me do this alone.”

Mohammed appeared beside Lanowski, looking anxious. “Okay, boys,” Lanowski said. “You’ve got to go. See you back on board in a few hours, inshallah.”

“Thanks, Jacob. Look after yourself. No shore expeditions, remember?” Jack turned to Costas. “Good to go?”

Costas made a diver’s okay signal. “Good to go.” They both shut their visors, and Jack felt the slight increase in pressure as the helmet sealed and the rebreather came online. A second later the in-helmet screen display activated to the left and right of his main viewport. It was a low-light readout that could show up to thirty variables, from carbon dioxide levels to pulse rate. He tapped the computer control inside the index finger of his left glove and reduced the display to the minimum, to show depth in meters, compass orientation, and external water temperature. He raised his right arm in an okay signal to Lanowki and Mohammed, then turned and did a thumbs-down signal to Costas. He descended two meters, bleeding off air manually from his suit and waiting for the automated buoyancy system to compensate. He pulled down the aquajet after him and waited while its computer altered the trim in the small ballast tanks on either side of the unit, an automated process that self-adjusted with depth to ensure that the scooter remained neutrally buoyant.

He switched on his helmet light but was dazzled by the reflection of particles in the water that reduced the visibility to almost zero. He switched it off and was again in blackness, the moonless night meaning that no light filtered down from the surface. As he stared out, he remembered the lines that Jeremy had read from Howard Carter’s diary, the account that Carter had heard from Corporal Jones of what went on here that night in 1892 when Colonel Chaillé-Long and the French diver had accompanied Jones to this very spot. He could well imagine the trepidation of the diver as he went down with his homemade gear, yet also his excitement at seeing that the valve and cylinder worked and at what he might discover on the riverbed below.

What had happened then was a mystery. All Jack knew for certain was that somewhere down there must lie the remains of that diver, and of the boat that had been sucked down by the same vortex that had taken Jones into an underworld that had sent him spiraling further on his own descent into madness.

Costas tapped him on the shoulder, and Jack could just make out the glow of the readout inside his helmet a few inches away. “Jack, testing intercom. Over.”

“Reduce the squelch level about twenty percent.”

“How’s that?”

“Good. Visibility’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen. We’re going to have to rely on the virtual terrain mapper.”

“Mine’s already on. It’s a revelation, Jack.”

Jack tapped his finger and a green isometric lattice appeared in front of his visor, gradually filling with detail as the multibeam sonar built into the top of his helmet mapped out the riverbed in front of them. The display provided a continuously adjusted virtual image with a time lapse of about half a second as new data streamed in. Jack was constantly amazed by the clarity of the images it produced, and this time was no exception. It was as if they were suspended in midair above a sharply angled scree slope some twenty meters from top to bottom. To the left the slope was covered with debris from the nineteenth-century fort, the building whose ruined form on the shore had been their way marker, the feature described by Corporal Jones to Howard Carter. To the right was a more regular shape about ten meters below the surface, an overhanging ledge about five meters across with another jumble of material below it, much of it larger, more regular blocks. The red tracking lines showing the GPS fix converged on his screen directly in front of the ledge. Jack’s heart began to pound. This could be it.

Costas dropped below, his aquajet held in front. “I’m activating my helmet camera and the recording function on the terrain mapper. That means everything we see will be recorded on the memory chip.”

“Check,” Jack said. “I’ve done the same.”

Jack felt something bump his fins, and a spectral form seemed to undulate across his terrain mapper. It filled the entire lower half of the screen and swayed from side to side, caught like a series of stills in a time lapse. “Did you see that?” he exclaimed. “I could swear something swam by. It seemed to be all tail.”

“No, I did not see it,” Costas said, his voice quavering. “I definitely did not see it. What I saw was a glitch in the mapper. This is reality, not a nightmare.”

“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Jack said. “A serpent off to join the party, heading to the hell of Cairo.”

“It never existed, Jack. You’ve just got a touch of Mohammed’s river fever.”

Jack held his aquajet by the handles on either side of the encased propeller housing, released the safety lock with his thumbs, and pulled the trigger. He felt the backflow of water course down his body. The jet had a deflector so that at full throttle it dropped just below the diver, keeping the flow of water from the propeller clear and unobstructed. Costas came alongside and they both gunned the jets forward. They quickly came to within a few meters of the GPS fix and then released the triggers.

Jack stared at the image on his terrain mapper, taking in the detail. It was astonishingly clear, as if he were looking at a wall of masonry on land with the naked eye. He remembered Lanowski’s model showing how the scour effect of the Nile at this point could have kept the submerged bank free from loose sediment, a phenomenon also manifest in the whirlpools and eddies that made Mohammed and his fellow felucca captains so apprehensive. And there was no doubt about it now. The block in front of him that had looked like a ledge was fixed into the bank, part of a larger structure rather than fallen masonry. It was clearly a lintel, a huge block that must have weighed ten tons or more. Below it on either side he could just make out two massive upright blocks, and between them a jumble of stone that had fallen in from the sides.

Jack did a double take, not entirely believing what he was seeing, swinging from left to right and back again to re-create the image on his terrain mapper. Exactly the same features came into view. He was absolutely convinced of it now. It was an entranceway, an ancient portal beneath the Nile. Its depth put it exactly on Lanowski’s prediction for the level of the Nile at low water in the second millennium BC, allowing a partly flooded channel to act as an underground canal beneath the desert, wide enough to take barges that could have been walked or poled along. He clicked on his headlamp, and as he came within inches of the lintel he began to make out the stone beyond the reflected haze of particles in the water, unmistakably the fine-grained red granite favored by the New Kingdom pharaohs as a prestige building material. He stared more closely. He realized that he was not just looking at a smoothed surface of granite. He was looking at hieroglyphs. He switched back to the terrain mapper, and suddenly there it was, the cartouche that had become etched in his mind over the last months, from the crocodile temple in Sudan, from the plaque they had found with the sarcophagus on the wreck, from Rebecca’s underground find in Jerusalem. He put out his hand and traced his finger over the bird at the beginning and the sheaf of grain at the end. He stared for a moment longer, mouthing the word Akhenaten.

Costas’ voice came through the intercom. “Jack, we’ve got a problem.”

“I’ve just found the hieroglyphs. We’re bang on target.”

“I mean down below the lintel,” Costas said. “I think I can see what happened back in 1892.”

Jack dropped a few meters below the overhanging block to where the terrain mapper showed Costas’ form above the pile of blocks between the uprights of the portal. In front of him he could see where the blocks filled the entrance, with cracks leading to deeper spaces beyond. Costas’ voice came on again. “I think the diver blew open the stone doors that once sealed off this entrance, and in the process caused the rockfall that’s blocked it up again for us. But there’s one spot where I think we might get through, directly in front of me now, where my terrain mapper shows a block that could be dislodged. With a little assistance.”

“Explosives?”

“C5. Always be prepared.”

“I was wondering about that bulge in the front of your boiler suit.”

“It’s our only option. We’ve got to try it.”

“Remember what happened in 1892,” Jack said. “We don’t want to create an explosive vortex and see our felucca sucked in.”

“I think that happened because the stone door was watertight and there was an air space in the tunnel beyond, so that when the doors blew the water poured in and created a whirlpool that must have pulled down their boat. My guess is that our diver was using some kind of waterproofed dynamite and probably didn’t really know what he was doing, using too much of it and creating a hole so large that the flow of water pushed those slabs open too quickly and created a lethal vortex. C5 is a far better explosive and much easier to position for maximum effectiveness with small quantities. I think I’ve got just about the right amount for the job.”

“Risk factor?”

“An underwater shock wave, but that should be mitigated by the pressure resistance of our E-suits.”

“Okay. Let’s do it.”

Costas drew a package out the bulge in the front of his boiler suit, swam forward, and pushed it into the crack. He worked it farther in for a few minutes and then pushed himself back out. “Okay. I’ve separated it into three charges, with individual detonators. They’re manual, and I’ve set the delay for two minutes. You good with that?”

“Roger. Go ahead.”

Costas finned into the crack again, and then pushed himself out. “Fire in the hole. Swim hard right.” Jack followed him along the face of the riverbank and came to a halt behind a rock that protruded between them and the likely blast radius. “Okay,” Costas said. “Now.” Three nearly simultaneous detonations shook the water, causing the rock to shift slightly and a pressure wave to pass through Jack’s body. Costas immediately swam back, and Jack followed. On his terrain mapper he could see the jerky image of rocks tumbling down to the base of the slope. Ahead of them a hole about a meter and a half across had opened up where the charges had been set. Costas poked his head through and then withdrew, detaching the marker buoy from the front of his suit and holding it out. “It’s clear. There’s open water beyond, presumably the tunnel. You good to go?”

Jack stared through, seeing only darkness. Releasing the buoy was the signal for Mohammed to leave, though it still left them the option of egressing this way if the tunnel beyond proved to be blocked. They should ideally do a recce before releasing the buoy, but he knew that by now Mohammed would be desperate to get back through Cairo before the river became a no-go zone. He turned to Costas. “Do it.”

Costas released the buoy, and a few seconds later Jack heard the throb of the boat’s diesel engine firing up. Mohammed must have been waiting with his hand poised over the starter. Costas immediately swam through the crack, and Jack followed, both pushing their aquajets in front of them. As they passed through the haze of silt created by the explosion, the external water temperature dropped by over ten degrees and the visibility opened up. The water was no longer clouded by river sediment. They panned their headlamps around and an extraordinary scene came into view. They had passed through a monumental entranceway, and ahead of them a tunnel with smoothed walls about five meters in diameter extended into the darkness as far as Jack could see. Below them the cascade of rock created by the explosion in 1892 lay over the hull of a wooden boat, so shattered that it was barely recognizable.

Jack remembered Corporal Jones’ account of that night. Chaillé-Long had clearly survived the sinking, somehow avoiding being sucked under and making his way to the riverbank, but the boat’s captain and any crew must have died almost instantly. Jones’ survival was little short of a miracle. He had been sucked through and rode the wave far down the tunnel, something that must have contributed to the haunted state of the man whom Howard Carter had met months later dazed and begging on the streets of Old Cairo.

Jack adjusted his headlamp beam and saw something metallic pinned under one side of the wreckage. “My God,” he exclaimed, his heart pounding. It was the diver. With some trepidation he finned closer, and brushed the silt from the man’s visor. The glass was corroded and opaque, but inside it he could see the amorphous fatty remains of a human face, the eye sockets filled with white matter. He realized that the rest of the man’s body must be in the same condition, held in place by the canvas suit and the straps of his equipment. He gently pushed the head to one side to look at the valve arrangement of the breathing apparatus. He glanced back at Costas. “You need to see this.”

Costas was preoccupied with his aquajet. “What is it?” he said.

“I’ve just met our French diver.”

“What do you mean, just met him?”

“He’s fully intact. I mean his equipment. What’s inside is pretty well preserved too. Adiposed.”

“I don’t want to see, Jack. I really don’t. That’s what we’ll look like a hundred years from now if we don’t get out of this place.”

“Fascinating equipment. Looks like a fully developed demand valve, fifty years before the Cousteau-Gagnan device.”

“1892,” Costas replied, still preoccupied. “France was the hotbed of diving invention, with Rouquayrol having developed compressed air cylinders and Denayrouze a reduction valve. It always amazes me that it took so long to mate them effectively and develop a proper automatic demand valve.”

“Imagine the military applications in the arms race leading up to the First World War.”

“That’s probably why it never saw the light of day. It was probably his only working example and he’d kept it secret. It was a highly competitive world.”

“You need to see it.”

“I’ll look at your pictures. After I’ve had several stiff drinks. Meanwhile we have a problem. My aquajet’s gone dead.”

The water suddenly shimmered, and out of instinct Jack powered forward into the tunnel. There was a dull rumble, and he was slammed by a violent surge in the water, tumbling him over on to his back. He quickly righted himself, checking his readout for any damage to his equipment, and looked back. He had guessed what had happened, and his fears were confirmed. The corpse had disappeared beneath a massive fall of rock and debris. Through the swirl of sediment that now filled the water, he could just make out their entry point, now completely blocked. He saw Costas recovering himself and finning back a few strokes, scanning the rockfall with his terrain mapper. “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” he announced. “My aquajet is now the least of our worries.”

Jack looked back to where he had been examining the diver. “There is some more bad news. My aquajet’s crushed under the rock. The propeller’s sheared off.”

“We can both use mine, though it will double the drain on the battery. That is, if it starts. I think the shock wave of our explosion knocked it off-line. I’m rebooting it now.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment and then looked back through the settling silt at the jumble of rock where the entrance had been. “No more C5,” Jack said.

“No more C5,” Costas repeated. “But you’d need a cruise missile to open up that entrance now.”

“What’s your predicted oxygen timeout?”

“Two hours and fifty-five minutes at my current breathing rate.”

Jack turned and stared down the tunnel. Two hours and fifty-five minutes, and at least five kilometers until the beginning of the Giza plateau, the point where the tunnel might rise above the waterline. There was no way they could make that distance, or even half of it, without the aquajet. The passage down the tunnel had been the biggest gamble of their plan, and the odds were now stacked dramatically against them. If Costas’ aquajet failed to start, or if it ran out partway along the tunnel, they would be doomed to an inevitable agonizing countdown, able only to swim forward in desperation until exhaustion overtook them and their oxygen ran out. Jack stared into the constricting walls of the tunnel and the black hole ahead. For the first time he felt a tightness in his chest, a pinprick of fear. They might not get out of here alive.

He swam over and grasped the right handle of the aquajet, and watched as Costas’ finger hovered over the trigger in front of the left handle. Everything now depended on what happened next. For a moment they hung there motionless, side by side, the aquajet held in front of them, aimed down a tunnel that right now seemed more forbidding than any they had ever dived down before. Their survival, even if they made it to the surface, was threatened by the apocalypse of biblical proportions that was now engulfing Egypt.

Costas pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled again. Still nothing. Jack stopped breathing. Costas held down the emergency start switch on top of the aquajet and pulled the trigger again. Suddenly it whirred to life, and Costas gunned it a few times. It moved them forward. He put it in neutral and held it firmly in front. “You ready for this?” he said. “Prepare for the ride of your life.”

Jack took a deep breath. “Time to go.”

CHAPTER 21

Forty minutes later Costas eased off on the throttle of the aquajet and they slowed down to swimming speed, allowing Jack to relax his grip on the handle and focus more on the tunnel around them. The most telling feature so far had been a line of foot-sized indents carved into the side walls at intervals of about a meter and running the entire length of the tunnel from the outset.

Jack had recognized the indents not from ancient parallels but from the Black Country in England, where he had once explored an underground canal from the time of the Industrial Revolution and seen where the bargemen had lain down and walked their vessels along the walls of the canal. The same had happened here, three thousand years earlier, only the Egyptians with their engineering exactitude had provided their bargemen with secure footing along the entire length of the canal. For Jack it was confirmation that this was indeed a passageway for boats to make their way between the Nile and the Giza plateau, with the Nile at low water lapping just below the level of the footings.

The tunnel could have accommodated vessels up to three meters in beam and one and a half meters in draft, large enough for the type of river barges that plied the surface canals to the pyramids during their construction. They had been hauled by teams of oxen and slaves plodding along the towpath just like those English canal boats of the nineteenth century that Jack had examined.

Costas reduced the speed by a further setting and Jack felt the wake wash forward, his legs dropping with the reduced momentum. He could see nothing but the receding darkness of the tunnel ahead, and he felt a niggle of unease again. “Do we have a problem?”

“I’m trying to reduce the drain on the battery. We’re not at critical yet, but it’s showing the orange warning light.”

“What do you make of our position?”

“In the absence of GPS reception down here, we can only go by dead reckoning. The tunnel has maintained a straight course almost exactly due west, bearing toward the southern end of the Giza complex in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, just as Lanowski mapped it. And the aquajet’s computer calculates a lapsed distance of four point three kilometers. That puts us a kilometer or so from the point where Lanowski thought the tunnel could break above the water level.”

“If the tunnel links to the complex we saw from beneath the pyramid, then it has to rise above the water level,” Jack replied. “The intensity of light we saw reflected through that shaft in the pyramid could only have come from mirrors set up in dry spaces, as refraction through water couldn’t have produced anything so bright.”

“We have to hope that the other radiating arms on that map represent tunnels that are above water too. Otherwise we’re dependent on finding an exit from the main complex, and if that means the shaft we saw from beneath the pyramid, then we’re going nowhere. The shaft had been filled with masonry so that the aperture for the light was a slit less than half a meter high. There’s no way we’re getting through that.”

“While you were in never-never land today on the felucca, Lanowski and I worked up a best-fit CGI for what might lie ahead of us. The plaque from the shipwreck, the one that shows the Aten symbol superimposed on the Giza plateau and the desert, had a total of eight arms radiating southeast to northeast toward the Nile, all of them extending out from the sun symbol that we imagine represents the central complex below the plateau. Our tunnel is the second arm from the bottom, the one running nearest to due east. We guessed that two of the other arms might also represent actual tunnels or canals and not just be symbolic depictions. One of them must be the aboveground canal used during the months of the year when the Nile was in full spate, when the tunnel we’re in would have been completely submerged and unusable. We think the above-water channel may well have been the canal already in existence from the time of the pyramid construction, adapted and perhaps strengthened by Akhenaten’s engineers.”

“You mean the canal from the Nile to the artificial harbor that was dug in front of the pyramid, beside the mortuary temple?”

“Right,” Jack replied. “Each of the pyramids originally had one. All trace of the above-water canal from the Pyramid of Menkaure has been lost beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo, but we think it’s likely to be the next radiating line of the Aten symbol to the north of us, at an arc of thirty degrees from our tunnel and reaching the Nile about two kilometers north of our entry point. But it’s the line above that one that interests us most. When Lanowski superimposed the depiction from the plaque on the modern map, keeping to the exact alignment of the pyramids, not only did our line end up exactly at the Napoleonic fort, but the line two up from that, the one I’m talking about, abutted the river directly opposite Fustat, Old Cairo.”

“Which didn’t exist in antiquity,” Costas said.

“Not as we see it now. But knowing about the masonry block with the Akhenaten cartouche found in 1892 by those Royal Engineers officers beside the synagogue confirms what Maurice has long suspected, that the other blocks of that date found in the medieval walls of Fustat were not all reused from Akhenaten’s great temple at Heliopolis, to the northeast of Fustat, but included material from a structure whose remains lie beneath the boundaries of medieval Fustat itself. If you extend the Aten line across the river, it points almost exactly to the site of the synagogue.”

“So you think all these features from Akhenaten’s building program were interconnected — the Heliopolis temple, the structure under the synagogue, and this complex in front of the pyramids.”

“The Egyptians were really into alignments, right? It’s the kind of thing you can do in the desert over long distances, by line of sight. Maurice thinks that this was intimately tied up with worship of the sun, and that the Aten symbol with its very precise radiating lines suggests a particular fascination for Akhenaten himself. Maybe the passion for geometry that shows in the planning of his capital at Amarna should lead us to look for the same kind of grandiose conception here. With polished stone surfaces you can make the rays of the sun link together distant places, something that we might see in microcosm in the mirrors that we know must direct the light beneath the plateau. But Lanowski and I concluded that the line leading to Fustat may well represent another real tunnel, one likely to be above the flood level of the Nile so that it could be used all year round. The tunnel we’re in now and the above-water canal were used mainly for barging in building materials and other goods, at low water and high water, respectively. The tunnel from Fustat might have been some kind of processional way for priests and even the pharaoh himself.”

“Whoa.” Costas put the aquajet in neutral and pointed to the wall on his side. A flight of narrow rock-cut steps led upward to an aperture in the ceiling. “That’s exactly what I’ve been expecting,” he said. “While you had your head down earlier as we were going at full throttle, I saw several small dark openings in the ceiling that must once have been ventilation shafts, long ago blocked by sand and rockfall. This one looks more like a service entrance, something you’d expect partway along a tunnel of this length.” He released the handle of the aquajet, rose to the ceiling, and poked his head into the hole. “No good for us. It’s completely filled with a jumble of rock.”

“You sure?”

“I wouldn’t even want to try. Pulling out one of those rocks might create an instant rockfall and bury us.”

Jack stared at the steps, his mind racing. “I’m thinking of our eleventh-century caliph Al-Hakim. He disappears somewhere around this part of the desert, and then eight hundred years later Corporal Jones reappears after his own little adventure in this place wearing the ring that Howard Carter recognized as the signet of the caliph. Maybe Al-Hakim stumbled across this entrance and literally fell through it. I’m imagining him coming back here again and again, night after night, exploring ever farther into the tunnel, able to do so because the Nile was at low water when he was out here. And then one night he finds something inside, something so revelational that it makes him determined that his next visit will be his last one, that leads him to walk away from his day job once and for all. So he leaves his bloody clothes elsewhere in the desert to suggest that he’s been robbed and murdered, exactly the fate that those around him would have expected for a not very popular caliph wandering alone in the desert at night, and then he comes down here and finds a way of sealing himself inside by triggering a rockfall.”

“If he did that, he might have caused us another problem I’ve just spotted.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take a look ahead.”

Jack turned away from the steps and stared down the tunnel. He finned forward, and out of the darkness his beam began to reflect off irregular rock, quickly revealed as a fallen jumble that blocked the tunnel. It had been their unspoken fear from the outset. Costas powered ahead, leaving Jack with the aquajet, and came to a halt at the top of the pile, where there was a visible crack between the rocks. Costas reached in his arms and pulled, dislodging a block and sliding it out under him. “Watch out,” he exclaimed. The block slid down the pile to the floor, and was followed by several more as he dug his way deeper in. After a few minutes he pulled himself in entirely and disappeared, and then his headlamp beam reversed and shone back at Jack, momentarily dazzling him. “Okay,” Costas said. “If I can get through, then you should have no problem. But I can’t take out anything more. Everything in the jumble below those blocks that I shifted is way too big even to budge.”

Jack swam up to the crack, leaving the aquajet to be pulled through afterward, and eased his way into the hole. Costas was considerably bulkier than Jack was but surprisingly agile, and with his greater length Jack found it difficult to angle himself through the final part of the gap that Costas had created. Finally he was through, and he immediately turned around to retrieve the aquajet, reinserting himself in the crack and reaching for it. He caught hold of one of the handles and pulled it as far as he could, but it quickly became jammed. He pushed himself out and turned to Costas, who was hovering alongside. “I can’t get the aquajet through. There’s absolutely no way. It’s the shield around the propeller.”

Costas pulled himself in the hole to have a look, and he grunted and cursed as he tried every angle. He pushed himself out, breathing noisily. “It was nearly out of juice anyway. It was probably going to give us only another five hundred meters or so.”

“We have another problem. I noticed it only when we slowed down.”

“You mean my leak?”

“It must have been caused by that rockfall that sealed us in at the entrance. There’s a dent in your pack and a stream of bubbles from the manifold. I’d have to remove the cover to take a look.”

“Don’t even try. It might just make it worse. My helmet display told me about it when it happened, but there was nothing I could do about it, and I didn’t see any point in mentioning it. With the aquajet online, I calculated that I should still be able to make the likely length of the tunnel with oxygen to spare.”

“And now?”

“Twenty-five minutes of oxygen left. Almost a kilometer of tunnel. We’re going to be buddy-breathing.”

Jack focused on their training. One of the safety features of the IMU rebreather was an inlet on the manifold that allowed a hose to be attached from another rebreather so that the oxygen supply could be shared. He stared at the manifold, looking for the outlet. He suddenly felt cold in the pit of his stomach. It was gone. He looked quickly around, but he knew he was not going to find it here. There was no way he could attach his hose into Costas’ rebreather now, no way they could share gas. He dropped down alongside Costas and looked at him. “We’re not buddy-breathing. The inlet for the hose is gone. It must have been struck during the rockfall and popped off.”

Costas looked back at him, his face drawn. “I’ve got my portable emergency bottle, and I can use yours. That’s a further ten minutes each.”

“That means having to take off your helmet. Tell me when your carbon dioxide level reaches critical. I won’t be able to help you if you’ve blacked out.”

“Roger that. Let’s go.”

Costas powered ahead again, trailing bubbles behind him. Jack followed, watching his own oxygen consumption rise as he began to exert himself for the first time since entering the tunnel. He was finning hard to keep up. Suddenly everything they had talked about, the prospect of what might lie ahead, was blanked out of his mind, and all he could think about was the next few minutes. It felt horribly like the final countdown of a condemned man. He remembered four days earlier seeing Costas semiconscious in the submersible as he reached it on his free dive, and the huge relief when he had opened up the jammed air valve and seen his revived face at the door of the double-lock chamber. This time there could be no quick solution, no instant reprieve. Once the emergency air had run out, there would be nothing Jack could do except watch Costas drown. If that happened, life as he knew it would be over. Every second now counted.

After fifteen minutes Costas slowed down, his breathing hard and fast. “Okay, Jack. Ten minutes of oxygen left on my readout.”

“Roger that. Less than five hundred meters to go now.” As they swam forward, the tunnel ahead seemed to be surrounded by a golden glow, a ring of shining yellow that separated itself in the center of the tunnel as they came closer. It was a huge torque of gold shimmering in their headlamps, each arm ending at the top in a finial in the shape of a serpent’s head. On either side of it, the tunnel opened out and split into two parallel channels separated by a row of rock-cut columns that extended from the golden ring as far as they could see. “This is what we want,” Jack said, desperately hoping he was right. “This is the beginning of a dock complex that would have allowed barges to arrive on one side while others waited on the opposite side for departure, ready to head back toward the Nile. The wharf can’t be far ahead.”

“Snakes, Jack. I just can’t get away from them. You remember the Red Sea?”

“I remember the image of those sea snakes you sent Maurice’s boy. That made his day.”

“The sonar can see farther ahead than our eyes, and I don’t see anything yet.” Costas swam through the ring and Jack followed him, brushing against the gold. If it was solid, it was far larger than any golden object ever recovered in Egypt, an extraordinary testament to the wealth and vision of the pharaoh who had built this place.

He followed Costas into the left-hand passage, still seeing nothing ahead to suggest a surface to the water. A few minutes farther on, Costas stopped finning and sank slowly to the floor of the tunnel. “I’ve reached critical, Jack. I’m beginning to feel like I did in the submersible. A little dizzy and out of breath. I need you to get my helmet off now.”

Jack sank down beside him and saw Costas’ bluetinged lips through the visor, his eyes dulled. He unclipped the emergency air unit from the thigh pocket on Costas’ right leg. It was a miniature cylinder about fifteen centimeters long with a mouthpiece in the middle. He twisted it to crack open the valve, pressed the purge button to test it, and saw a blast of bubbles. He put it in Costas’ hand and then placed his own hands on the locking levers on either side of his helmet. “The water’s twelve degrees. You ready?”

Costas’ voice sounded distant. “You know, Jack, I could really do with one of those sandwiches now. Promise me you’ll have them if I go. I can’t bear to think of them wasted.”

“We’ll have them together. A picnic on the beach. You ready?”

“I meant to say, Jack. About everything. You know.”

“I know. Me too. Keep focused.”

“Camera. Keep my camera. And my headlamp.”

Jack unlocked and snapped the unit off the top of Costas’ helmet and wrapped the straps around his wrist. “Done.”

“Now, Jack. Now.”

Jack quickly snapped open the locking clamps, twisted the helmet and lifted it off, and pushed it out of the way behind the backpack. Costas had shut his eyes tight against the shock of the water, but he immediately put in the mouthpiece and took a breath. He reached down and took his spare mask out of his other thigh pocket, pressed it to his face, pulled the strap over the back of his head, and cleared the mask, giving Jack the diver’s okay signal as he did so. Jack remembered that they could no longer talk, that all he could do if the terrain mapper showed signs of the surface ahead would be to gesture. He unclipped the straps of Costas’ backpack and pushed it off, freeing him of the helmet and all encumbrances, and then took out his own emergency air and cracked it open. He held it ready to hand to Costas when the first one ran out. He had no idea what he would do then, when there was nothing more, when Costas began to breathe in water and convulse. He had seen it enough times to know that drowning was not the easy death that people imagined, but tormenting, horrible, like a slow hanging, the victim conscious for a few moments of terrible pain and sometimes taking minutes to die. He forced himself ahead, powering after Costas. All he could do now was hope.

A little over five minutes later, Costas put up his right hand, still finning hard, and Jack put his emergency air into it. Costas sucked the last of his own, spat it out, and put Jack’s in. He took a deep breath and powered on ahead. At this rate of breathing, he had only six, maybe seven minutes left. Still there was nothing on the terrain mapper. Jack hardly dared glance at the timer on the readout inside his helmet. Five more minutes had gone. There could be less than two minutes left. His heart began to pound, his mouth was dry. This was not happening.

And then he saw it. Fifty, maybe sixty meters ahead, the tunnel seemed to slope up. A few moments later he was absolutely sure of it. He finned as hard as he could, drawing parallel with Costas and turning to him, gesturing forward with a sloping motion with one hand and opening all five fingers of the other to show the distance. Then he realized that he was no longer seeing exhaust bubbles. Costas had taken his last breath. He spat out the mouthpiece, put his head down, and swam as fast as he could. They were so close now that Jack readied himself to pull Costas along if he became unconscious, knowing that there might be a glimmer of hope that he could be saved if he could pull him to the surface in time.

Then, miraculously, he saw the unmistakeable glimmer of surface water in his beam, and seconds later they exploded through, Costas gasping and coughing, floating on his back and breathing heavily. Jack panned his beam around, seeing a slope leading up to some kind of entranceway, and beside them a wharf that surrounded the end of the channel, evidently the ancient dock. He glanced at the external sensor array to check the air quality, and then unlocked and wrenched off his helmet, relishing the cool air on his face and taking a few deep breaths. He turned to Costas. “You okay?”

Costas was still floating on his back, his arms and legs outstretched. “Okay,” he said, his breathing becoming normal. “But hungry. Really hungry.”

Jack sniffed the air tentatively. “Extraordinary smell,” he said.

Costas heaved himself over and hauled himself partway up the slope. “That, my friend, is the smell of ancient Egypt. And from where I am, it smells good. Very good.”

“Interesting,” Jack said, peering back inside his helmet. “My readout shows a slightly lower than normal oxygen content.”

“We know of only one open ventilation point, the shaft under the pyramid where the light got through. And we don’t know yet whether that links to this tunnel.”

“I smell jasmine, thyme, acacia. Almost a hint of incense, and a definite odor of organic decay.”

“Must be something recent,” Costas said, struggling out of his fins. “Rats, maybe. This is a good place for rats.”

“Rats and little fish in the canal. That’s what Jones survived on. When he wasn’t eating mummies.”

“No way. You don’t know that.”

“That’s what Howard Carter’s diary entry said. After weeks down here Jones was desperate, and opened up some coffins. It must have been like eating dessicated old wasp’s nests. With eyes and teeth.”

“Don’t, Jack. Just as I was about to have lunch.”

“It’s midnight. And we didn’t bring a picnic.”

Costas patted the bulge in the front of his boiler suit. “Oh yes we did.”

“You didn’t really bring sandwiches.”

“What do you think I was doing while I was waiting for you to come from Jerusalem? Took over the entire galley on Sea Venture. Brought my own ingredients, air-freighted out from my favorite deli in Manhattan. The one I always tell you I’m going to take you to one day. Gino’s, where you can get a haircut and a shave while you wait. You think you’ve gone to heaven.”

“Okay,” Jack said, grinning and helping Costas to his feet. “We’ll have lunch. But let’s find a way out of this place first, right? Otherwise we might be rationing your very special sandwiches over a very long time, and looking for alternative food sources?”

A little fish flapped out of the water where it lapped at the edge. Slimy looking and with bulging eyes, it was the only other living thing they had seen since leaving the Nile. Costas contemplated it with a distasteful look on his face, and then edged it back in with his foot. “I don’t like the sound of that at all,” he said. “Not at all.”

“You need more rest?”

Costas shook his head, checking the waist strap on his boiler suit and easing the constriction of the E-suit on his neck. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Jack stared up the slope. “Roger that.”

CHAPTER 22

Jack removed the headlamp console from his rebreather backpack, handed Costas’ back to him, and then eased off the backpack and laid it with his helmet on the sloping floor. There were still over two hours of breathing time left in his cylinder, but with Costas on empty and no way of buddy-breathing, he was not going to carry on alone if they came to another underwater passage. After what had just nearly happened to Costas, and Jack’s reaction to it, they were either getting out of here together or not at all.

They both unwound the straps from the back of the lamp consoles and put them on their heads, first checking that the integrated miniature video cameras were still recording. With the backpack air-conditioning unit removed, the E-suits might become uncomfortably warm, but at the moment that was better than being chilled, and the Kevlar would afford protection against bumps and scrapes along the way. Whatever lay in store for them now, Jack knew it was unlikely to be an easy walk-through. And being in a breathable environment did not mean that an escape tunnel out toward Cairo somewhere ahead was still anything more than a shaky hypothesis.

Costas detached the hose from the hydration pack on the left side of his E-suit and took a deep draw on it, patting his boiler suit as he did so to check that everything was there and still in place. He paused for a moment, delved deep into the front pocket, and removed a watertight bag. He unzipped it, grasped the sandwich inside, and took a huge bite. He munched noisily and swallowed as he replaced the bag. “It was going to be my dying thought, and now it’s my kiss of life. Thank you, Gino.” He took another mouthful of water and stowed the tube. Then he panned his headlamp beam over the top of the ramp. “You think that’s the way to go?”

“We don’t have any choice,” Jack replied. “There’s an identical ramp at the end of the channel parallel to us, just visible through the columns, but it joins up to the single passageway ahead. My guess is that it will lead first to some kind of boat stowage facility, probably linked to the artificial harbor that we know was associated with the Old Kingdom mortuary temple. The space we saw lit up from beneath the pyramid three months ago lies somewhere between the edge of the pyramid and the harbor site. We have to hope there will be some kind of entrance to it ahead.”

Costas nodded and then heaved himself upright. “If it had been daytime, we might have seen reflected light coming through those shafts leading from the pyramid. I assume that’s what allowed the caliph Al-Hakim and then Corporal Jones to see their way around this place. As it is, there isn’t even a moon tonight.”

Jack stared ahead, reciting. “ ‘Omens of fire in the chariot’s wind, pillars of fire in thunder and storm.’ ”

“Come again?”

“Something I remembered when I mentioned our chariot discovery in the Red Sea to you a few minutes ago. When I told Maria about our discovery, she quoted those lines to me from another of the medieval Geniza poets, Yannai. His imagery comes from the Book of Exodus.”

“The burning bush, the mountain on fire,” Costas replied. “I had to learn all that stuff backward when I was a boy. I used to think ancient Egypt was a vision of hell.”

“It’s not just ancient Egypt now. You should have seen Cairo when we came through it this evening on the felucca.”

“Are you thinking of the pyramids? That CNN footage we saw in Alexandria?”

Jack nodded. “You’re right that we won’t be seeing sunlight down here. But we may see another kind of light reflected in those mirrors. Akhenaten’s City of Light won’t be illuminated by the rays of the Aten, but it might be lit up by something he would have thought unimaginable, by fires that may as well be drawn straight from the biblical image of hell. The reflection from a burning pyramid is not a way marker that any archaeologist would wish to follow, but if it’s there, it might be all we’ve got to go on.”

The ramp sloped up at an angle of about thirty degrees until it reached a platform some five meters above the level of the water. From there it became a rectilinear tunnel about four meters across and three meters high, wide enough for the two of them to proceed side by side. Jack paused to adjust the angle of his camera while Costas carried on ahead, his beam reflecting off the polished veneer of granite that lined the lower part of the walls. About ten meters ahead Costas stopped and peered closely at the side of the tunnel, then he pressed his hands against it.

“Jack, this is interesting. It’s been plastered over. It’s—”

There was a sudden bellow and the sound of collapsing masonry, and Costas was gone. Jack stared aghast, and then quickly made his way forward. Where Costas had been standing was a jagged hole about the size of a small door. He approached it and leaned forward into the chamber that had been revealed. That air inside was dry and aromatic, and made his eyes smart. He blinked hard, coughed, and then saw Costas’ headlamp beam coming from somewhere below, apparently stationary and at an odd angle. For an instant Jack had a yawning feeling of fear. They had basic medical kits inside their E-suits but nothing to treat major trauma other than blood coagulants and shell dressings. If Costas was seriously injured, there was little he could do for him and no way of calling in help.

He pulled himself carefully through the hole and peered below, his heart pounding. “Costas, are you all right? Talk to me.”

There was no response, and Jack held his breath. Then the beam from below shifted slightly, and he heard a grunt and a mumbled curse. “Fascinating,” Costas said. His voice sounded impossibly distant, as if coming from deep inside a chasm.

“What’s fascinating? Are you all right?”

“Never seen anything quite like it. Sewn joinery, each timber individually shaped. Amazing technology.”

Jack stared out beyond Costas, and gasped as he realized what he was looking at. It was a huge rock-cut chamber at least ten meters across, the size of a giant water cistern. At the bottom was a mass of timber, disarticulated and carefully laid out. Costas’ beam was coming from beneath a section of stacked planking close to the corner of the chamber beneath him. Jack watched as Costas began to extricate himself. He looked up, shading his eyes against Jack’s beam, his face white with plaster dust. “What do you make of it, Jack? A nautical archaeologist’s dream, or what?”

“It’s fantastic,” Jack enthused. “The chamber must have been airtight before you broke through, preserving all those timbers like that. There’s another of these boat pits still unopened in front of the Great Pyramid, known as a result of archaeologists pushing a fiber-optic camera down into it. Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve just fallen into the dismantled funerary barge of the Pharaoh Menkaure, the boat that took his body down the canal from the river to the harbor and the funerary temple. And you’re right, the joinery is sewn planking. Actually an incredibly robust technique that could produce a hull well up to sea travel, though this is a ceremonial riverboat. You can make out the raking stem and stern timbers, the oars, the fine woodwork of the deckhouse. Amazing.”

As Jack was talking, Costas clambered to his feet and then made his way across to the far side of the chamber, carefully avoiding causing more damage to the timbers. Jack could see that he was heading toward another aperture in the wall, and he watched him crouch down and crawl in until only his feet were visible. There was another sound of collapsing masonry, a small cloud of dust, and then silence, followed by violent coughing. A few moments later Costas’ face reappeared, and he beckoned. “Jack, you really need to see this.”

Jack stepped through the jagged hole and peered over the side. It was about three meters to the chamber floor, and he did not want to risk a broken limb. He stared across. “Is it that good?”

“That good, Jack. You’re not leaving without seeing this. Trust me.”

“All right. I’m on my way.” He found a lip of rock, jammed his fingers into it, and swung out over the edge. Then he lowered himself until he was hanging above the floor. He looked for a landing point and then let himself go, falling into the dust and narrowly missing the edge of the pile of planks. He got up, flexed his legs, and then stepped over the wood toward Costas, who had backed out of the hole to give Jack space to get through.

“It’s another chamber,” Costas said. “At least twice as big as this one. Prepare to be amazed.”

Jack ducked down and crawled in, trying not to scrape his back against the top of the hole. His headlamp beam caught timbers, the joinery visible; they were clearly more boat elements. He pulled himself out of the hole and moved aside to let Costas follow. Then he squatted on the floor of the chamber and aimed his beam upward for a better view.

An astonishing sight met his eyes. Instead of dismembered timbers, it was an intact vessel, the flush planks of its bow only inches from his face. He reached out and touched it, feeling a frisson of excitement. The timbers were covered with pitch, and as Jack eased forward he knocked a pot on the floor that contained a congealed black mass, presumably the source of the material. He shifted to the left and saw a pile of planks and a bronze adze beside a section of the hull that was evidently being repaired. The edges of the timbers showed where they had been sewn together with some form of cord as well as joined with wooden mortise and tenon. Jack stood up carefully, raising himself until his head was just above the gunwale, and panned his beam over the entire vessel.

“See what I mean?” Costas said, standing beside him. “Looks like old Menkaure took a whole fleet with him to the afterlife.”

Jack shook his head. “This isn’t Menkaure. This vessel is characteristically Late Bronze Age, dating more than a thousand years later. And it’s not a river barge. This is a full-blown seagoing ship.”

“No kidding.” Costas stood on a stone block beside Jack, allowing him to see in at Jack’s level. “My God. I see what you mean. Deckhouse at the back rather than the center, wide beam, deck planking. And that’s a mast, stepped down, and stern steering oars. A cargo ship?”

“Do you remember first seeing the timbers of our Minoan wreck off the north coast of Crete ten years ago, where we were excavating when Maurice found the Atlantis papyrus? It’s taken most of the last decade to conserve and record the timbers, but I reviewed the final report just before coming out here. This boat is astonishingly similar in almost every detail. This isn’t an Egyptian ship. It’s a Minoan ship, or at least one built to Aegean specifications or by a Minoan shipwright.”

“How do you know the date?”

“See the row of empty jars in the hold?”

Costas peered over. “Aha. Early amphoras. Like on our Minoan wreck.”

“Canaanite jars,” Jack said. “Second half of the second millennium BC, fifteenth, maybe fourteenth century BC. And I can see a so-called pilgrim flask beside the deckhouse, a typical Aegean pottery oil container you see on Egyptian wall paintings depicting trade with Aegean merchants.”

Costas stepped off the block, eased his way around Jack, and came to the prow of the hull. “Take a look at this. It’s got an evil eye.”

Jack dropped down and moved alongside Costas, then stepped back against the wall for a better view. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “That clinches it. Fantastic.”

“Talk to me, Jack.”

“Look closely. That’s not an evil eye. It’s the Aten, the sun symbol. If you look really closely, you can see it’s even got the radiating lines etched into the planks.”

“Akhenaten?”

“It could only be. It’s the first certain evidence we’ve had of him since that hieroglyphic cartouche at the entrance to the tunnel on the Nile.”

“What’s the Aegean connection?”

“You remember Maurice showing us the Aegean mercenaries he identified on the tomb painting from the mummy necropolis?”

“Who could forget it. The bare-breasted amazons.”

“Well, I think that dynastic marriage in the fifteenth century BC with a Minoan queen brought the Egyptians more than just a ready army of mercenaries. One of the few technologies the Egyptians lacked was seagoing ships, apart from vessels used on the Red Sea that look more like strengthened river craft.”

“Was this a war harbor?” Costas suggested. “A secret naval base?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack murmured. “Not exactly. These aren’t warships; they’re not galleys. They’re also not deep-bellied merchantmen. They’re more like passenger transport vessels, definitely designed for deep-sea sailing with room for plenty of provisions.”

“Ships of exploration?” Costas suggested.

Jack stared, his mind racing. It was possible. “This boat looks as if it was abandoned hastily in the middle of a refit, with tools still left lying around.”

Costas had moved out of sight beyond the prow. “Take a look around the corner, Jack. There’s an empty berth, and in front of it a ramp leading down to where we think the artificial harbor must have abutted this part of the plateau, the exit now completely sealed in.” Jack followed him through and stared at the open space, at the wooden formers that looked as if they had been hastily cast aside. He shook his head, astonished. “One pharaoh goes in dead, another one comes out alive.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just another hypothesis. A best-fit scenario. We know that Menkaure came here dead, probably already embalmed, ready for the rituals of the mortuary temple and then interment in his sarcophagus in the pyramid. What we don’t know yet for sure is how this place figured in Akhenaten’s journey over a thousand years later. Nobody has ever conclusively identified his tomb or his mummy. One possibility is that he may be buried here, and that was what this underground construction was really all about, but my instinct says no. I see this, whatever he built here under the plateau, his City of Light, as something that he saw through to completion and then sealed up before departing.”

“Maybe he mocked it up for any suspicious observers as if he were constructing a funerary complex, a pretty normal thing for a pharaoh to do, when in reality he was planning to do a runner,” Costas suggested. “Maybe that was his final opt out. Come up here as if dead, in a funerary barge like the pharaohs of old, but instead of going to the afterlife he leaves very much alive on a vessel equipped for a long sea voyage.”

“It’s possible. The ship that’s still here was abandoned in the middle of refitting, as if it too had been intended for departure but there was no time to make both vessels ready. Akhenaten must have known his life was in danger. A man like the caliph Al-Hakim, who had done beneficent things, had perhaps endowed some kind of library or seminary at this spot, but had made mortal enemies in the old priesthood for his desecration of their temples and banning of their rituals. Maybe departure was his only option once he had achieved his ambitions and seen the Israelites safely resettled in Canaan.”

“Have you voiced this idea to Maurice?”

“He says that for a man who founded a new religion, created a new capital city, and seems to have engineered the destruction of his entire chariot army to let the Israelites escape, anything is possible. Akhenaten was ancient Egypt’s wild card.”

“Just as long as he took Nefertiti with him too.”

Jack looked at the ship again, making sure his camera took in as much as it could of the astonishing sights around him. It was as if they had walked into an ancient Egyptian shipyard while the workers were out on a lunch break. He turned back to Costas. “Okay. Definitely worth it. Where do we go from here?”

Costas nodded back the way they had come. “The passageway from the wharf carried on beyond the point where I broke through into these chambers. There might once have been entrances from these sheds into a complex under the plateau, but if so they’ve been sealed up. We could spend hours sounding out the plaster on the walls and not find them. Every entrance seems to have been sealed up, as if this whole place had been mothballed. That might fit in with your theory.”

Jack followed Costas back through the ship chambers and clambered up the jumble of fallen masonry where they had entered. He heaved Costas up on his shoulders and then strained as he took Costas’ outstretched arm and hauled himself into the passageway. He suddenly felt exhausted and woozy, as if he had experienced a rapid loss of blood pressure, and he leaned against the wall of the passageway and took a drink from his hydration pack. He realized that he had not drunk anything since they had passed beyond Cairo, and he made a mental note to keep hydrated.

He pushed off and followed, his unsteadiness having passed. Ahead beyond the western limit of the boat chambers he could see Costas’ beam waver, and then stop. As he neared he could see that the passageway had ended, carrying on only as an aperture at head level about half a meter high and a meter wide that extended into the darkness as far as their beams could penetrate. He remembered three months before, staring down a similar slit from under the pyramid, looking in exactly the opposite direction to their position now. Somewhere between the two was the space that had been lit up so brilliantly by the light that had come down through the pyramid.

He refused to think that that was the end of the road, that what they had seen was no more than a reflection from further tunnels and ventilation shafts. What they had found already had been extraordinary, but there had to be more, a central hub to the radiating passageways indicated on the plaque, something set farther back under the plateau directly ahead of them now.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Costas said.

“I’m thinking that if there’s another chamber ahead, it must have been accessible from this tunnel if it was used to bring in building materials and workers. But maybe once the work was completed, this tunnel was shut off except for this aperture, with the entrance to the chamber then becoming the hypothetical processional way that we think might be represented by that other arm of the Aten heading toward Fustat.”

“You mean our hypothetical egress tunnel.” Costas crouched down at the corner of the tunnel and peered closely at the gaps where the slabs of granite abutted one another. “You’re right, Jack. Under the veneer I can see the edges of blocks of masonry. The Egyptians were past masters at this, weren’t they? Creating burial chambers and then devising ingenious ways of blocking them off to deter tomb robbers. Look at all those obstructions that Colonel Vyse had to blow his way through to reach the sarcophagus in the Pyramid of Menkaure. Somebody was doing the same kind of thing here.”

“Only I don’t think what lies beyond here was a burial chamber.”

“Maybe not. But I have a horrible feeling that there’s one right here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Beside the floor, Jack. Look down to where I am. There’s a really bad smell coming from it.”

Jack followed Costas’ gaze and knelt in front of an irregular hole that looked as if it had been punched through a plastered space between two slabs of granite. He saw something, reached in, gingerly pulled it out, and held it under his beam. It was a human hand, a very old human hand, mummified and nearly skeletal. He held it out to Costas. “Ever wanted to shake hands with a mummy?”

“I knew it. We weren’t going to go underground in Egypt without finding mummies. No way.”

“I think we might just have found Corporal Jones’ larder.” Jack carefully replaced the hand, took a deep breath, and poked his head partway into the hole. He panned his beam around and revealed a carved-out annex the size of a small bedroom. It was a charnel house, filled with a mass of disarticulated mummies and mummy parts, bedded down in a great mass of feathery material that looked like pieces of mummy wrapping and shredded human skin. He looked for anything diagnostic, and then saw a fragment of wooden coffin casing, its edges gnawed away but part of the painting and hieroglyphs on the surface just visible. He pulled his head out and sat back against the wall of the tunnel, gasping for breath, his eyes smarting from the dust.

“Well?” Costas said. “Is there a passageway?”

Jack shook his head, and coughed. “What we’ve got in there,” he said, “is a giant rat’s nest.”

“Not caused by Corporal Jones after all?”

Jack nodded, coughing again. “Him too. I’m sure of it. I think he took his cue from the rats. They must have gnawed out a small entrance from this passage, and Jones in his desperate hunt for food must have seen it and enlarged it. There’s more damage in there than rats could cause, and more bits missing. Originally that chamber was stuffed full of intact mummies, but they’re not from the time of Akhenaten. The one fragment of decorated coffin I saw was definitely Old Kingdom, almost certainly from the time of Menkaure. What I think we’ve got here is a secondary burial, mummies probably of viziers and minor officials involved in the construction of the pyramid, cleared out of their tombs by Akhenaten’s workmen to make way for something bigger. It makes sense that the original tombs should have been under the plateau in front of the pyramid. If they were removed and maybe extended to make a larger chamber, then that’s a promising sign.”

“If we could get through.” Costas eased himself up, looking back distastefully at the hole where the withered fingernails of the hand were poking out. Jack followed suit, and they both peered down the aperture at the end of the tunnel.

“It could be done,” Jack said after a moment. “Al-Hakim and Jones must have crawled down there, as we haven’t seen any way ahead other than this.”

“I know what would have drawn them on,” Costas said. “I think this was a light shaft, like the one under the pyramid. Even at night if there was a moon, they would have seen some light ahead, enough to tempt them to try their luck at getting through. After all, by this stage if they were trapped down here, they wouldn’t have had anything to lose.” He glanced back again at the hand. “Other than Jones, leaving his mummy larder behind.”

“Do we risk it, or double-check for entrances elsewhere?”

“We could do a recce.”

“What do you mean?”

A chirping sound came from the bulge in the front of Costas’ boiler suit, and then it moved. Jack jumped back, startled, but then he relaxed slightly, shaking his head. “You brought along a little friend, didn’t you?” Costas unzipped the top of his boiler suit and a little mechanical eye on a stalk peered out, followed by two miniature robotic hands that slowly reached up and grasped the edges of the suit. “I couldn’t leave Little Joey behind, could I?” Costas said, gently stroking the neck behind the eye. “Not after Big Joey had all the fun at the wreck site.”

“I worry about you sometimes. Aysha thinks you’d be a great dad to living, sentient human beings.”

Little Joey seemed to bristle, and cocked his eye at Jack. “Careful what you say,” Costas said. “He’s very sensitive.” He reached in, took the robot out, and placed it on the ledge at the beginning of the aperture. Then he pulled out a radio control unit and strap-on virtual goggles. “He’s programmed to be reactive to his environment. Because of what we tend to do, I’ve made him fully sensitized to tunnels and the kind of archaeological features we’ve encountered in the past. He’s like a robotic tomb raider. I’ll send him down that tunnel now and he’ll stop and report back anything unusual.”

“How does he do that?”

“He’ll tell us. You’ll see.” Costas reached under the tail of the robot and activated a switch. Like its larger counterpart, Little Joey was shaped like a scorpion, with four legs on either side, the single eye on its stalk and two flexible arms, only it was no bigger than a large rat. Costas lifted it and aimed it down the tunnel. But it leapt up, assumed its original sideways position, and looked back at Costas. Then it leapt around again and aimed itself down the tunnel. “He’s very independent,” Costas said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t like to be shown what to do. Always has to try it himself first.”

“Just like children,” Jack said thoughtfully. “That’s what you’d discover if you had them. Like a certain teenager we know.”

Little Joey suddenly scurried off down the aperture, his lights showing as pinpricks in the darkness, and came to a halt perhaps ten meters ahead.

“Dead end?” Jack asked.

Costas hunched over the radio. “It means he’s seen something, but we won’t know until I’ve booted the system up and he can react. Once that’s done I’ll be able to put on the goggles and see what he sees. It’ll take a few minutes.” Costas stood back, took a deep breath, and wiped the back of his hand over his face, blinking hard.

“You okay?” Jack said.

“Beginning to feel the effect. Nothing serious, yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some basic science, Jack. Those extremists at the pyramid were spraying it with some kind of fuel, right? We saw those tanker trucks on the CNN report. It must have been a pretty well-planned operation.”

“They’ve been threatening it for years. Nothing about this coup is spur of the moment. They’re taking up where the Mahdi left off in 1885.”

“Well, spraying fuel and igniting it is how you get a stone building to look as if it’s burning. The biblical burning bush is thought to have been based on something similar in appearance, where in some conditions the gas exuding from certain desert species could be ignited to give the appearance of a bush wreathed in flame but not actually burning. Some of that fuel is likely to have entered the pyramid through the shafts that were used to bring light to this underground complex. The fuel will be burnt out long before it reaches us, but that’s not the problem. The problem is what I experienced firsthand during that terrorist strike on my destroyer in the Gulf, when I was trapped by fire belowdecks in the engine room before I managed to escape and help with the rescue.”

“Fire consumes oxygen,” Jack murmured. “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“You remember the low oxygen readout you noticed after we surfaced? Ever since then, when I’ve exerted myself I’ve felt a little lightheaded. I put it down to the residual effect of carbon dioxide buildup during my final minutes on the rebreather, but this is a better explanation.”

Jack nodded. “That’s reassuring. I felt it a few minutes ago. I nearly blacked out.”

“Reassuring, but not. They’ll be jetting fuel continuously at the pyramid to maintain the spectacle, and that means more fuel getting down those shafts. With the outer surface of the pyramid wreathed in fire, the only way the burning fuel inside can feed its flames is by sucking up the oxygen from inside the pyramid, from the shaft, from the burial chamber, from the well we went down three months ago, and ultimately from every connected part of this underground complex. Slowly but surely, we’re being starved of oxygen.”

“How long, do you think?”

“Two or three hours, probably. Maybe less.”

“Well, we weren’t planning on lingering. If we’re in here much longer than that, we’ll never make our rendezvous with the felucca before dawn.”

“At least it means if we do get stuck down here, we won’t be around long enough to have to eat mummies.” Jack gave Costas a wan look. “I for one do not intend to suffocate because of some deranged extremist.”

“Amen to that. Let’s just hope Little Joey can save the day.”

They were interrupted by a chirping sound from down the aperture. Jack angled his headlamp beam and peered down. The robot was shaking and waving its arms as the eye looked back at them and then at the wall in front. “Something seems to be wrong,” he said. “Looks like a malfunction.”

Costas stared incredulously at Jack. “Malfunction? Little Joey? No way. He’s just excited. It means he really has found something. It shows that the system is coming online.” He picked up the mask, tried it on, and then removed it. “About a minute more, and then I can actually be Little Joey, real time. Lanowski calls it a mind-meld.”

Jack continued staring at the chirping and chattering apparition that was caught in his beam. “Is he really agitated? I mean, you must have programmed this.”

“It’s like a smoke alarm. He’s programmed to respond if he finds what I’ve asked him to look for. But he really has been acting like a wilful teenager recently. You think you’ve got problems with Rebecca. I left Lanowski alone with him in the engineering lab for half an hour a few weeks ago, and he hasn’t been the same since.”

“It’s stopped,” Jack said.

Costas put on the mask. “Eureka,” he murmured, manipulating the controls. “I’m looking through his eye, Jack. The shaft goes off to the right, and there it is, a very suffused red glow.”

Jack’s heart began to pound with excitement. “Can you get up to it?”

“I’m getting there now. About a meter to go. Okay. Looking out over a big room, circular, maybe twenty meters across. Recesses around the edge filled with jars. Holy cow. Holy cow.”

Jack could barely contain himself. He wanted to be there, to be where Costas was. Jars like that were exactly what Jones had described to Howard Carter. “What is it? What can you see?”

Costas seemed to be transfixed, his hand motionless on the control lever and his mouth wide open. He slowly let go of the control and took off the mask, his eyes staring into space, and then turned to Jack. “You remember those first ever pictures of King Tut’s tomb? You’re not going to believe what I’ve just seen.”

CHAPTER 23

Jack pushed ahead with his feet through the shaft, using his elbows and hands to pull himself along. He inched toward the halogen beam from Little Joey some five meters away where the shaft angled sharply to the right. The image he had seen from the robot’s camera confirmed beyond a doubt what lay around the corner, yet Jack refused to register it until he saw it with his own eyes.

He could hear Costas grunting and cursing where he had climbed in behind from the tunnel, his frame barely fitting into the shaft. They knew that they must be following in the path of Corporal Jones, and almost certainly the caliph Al-Hakim before that, taking the only passage left open when the ship sheds and the entrance tunnel had been blocked up in antiquity. They were crawling along a shaft that was part of the extraordinary network cut through the rock to reflect sunlight into the underground complex.

Jack paused, his breathing fast and shallow, remembering that the oxygen level would by now be seriously depleted and that he was not in the first stages of a panic attack. The turn in the shaft was only a few meters ahead. He watched as Little Joey used a miniature air jet to blow dust from a black basalt slab angled at forty-five degrees in the corner of the shaft. The basalt was polished to a glassy sheen and was clearly intended as a mirror.

Jack shut his eyes until the dust settled and then he saw it, the same extraordinary image they had seen through Little Joey’s eye a few minutes before, a glow of red as if he were looking through a slit into a furnace. His heart began to pound with excitement. He had dreamed of this for months, and now, incredibly, it was just within his reach, something that had seemed virtually impossible only a few days before.

Moments later he was around the corner pulling himself to the edge of the aperture overlooking the chamber. Little Joey clattered ahead and perched on the rim, chirping and shaking. The shaft had widened enough to allow Costas to heave himself alongside, his E-suit smeared with grime. As they panned their lights ahead, an astonishing scene met their eyes. They were on the edge of a huge circular space, perhaps twenty meters across and eight meters high where it rose to an apex. On the floor below the apex was an elevated dais capped by a rectangular altar or sarcophagus, its top above their line of vision. From the dais radiating outward on the floor were raised ridges terminating in carved hands, the unmistakable sign of the Aten, the sun symbol of Akhenaten. One of the arms pointed directly to the shaft they had come through and another to a second shaft visible to the left, coming from the direction of the pyramid. Costas gestured at it, his voice hushed.

“That shaft must be the one we were looking through three months ago from beneath the pyramid. You can see the light from the fire shining through, and reflecting off basalt mirrors around the walls. In daylight the reflection back would be dazzling, exactly as we saw it.”

“The light of the Aten, concentrated on this one spot,” Jack said. “It’s an incredible feat of precision, ancient Egyptian engineering at its best. Maurice would love it.”

Costas pointed to the opposite wall of the chamber. “That’s what we want to see, Jack. One of the arms, the longest one, is pointing to an open tunnel. Another one’s pointing to the wall just to the right of us that must lead to the ship sheds. You can see an area of plaster, clearly different from the polished rock veneer, and I bet that’s where the entrance remains sealed up. The entrance to the open tunnel looks as if it was once plastered over as well, and was broken into relatively recently.”

“Corporal Jones?” Jack suggested.

“He was a sapper, right? He would have had an eye for constructional detail. He would have been looking for a way out, just as we are. That is, when he wasn’t living in a twilight world of his own, crawling around here like the undead looking for tasty snacks. This place would have been pretty eerie at night with only moonlight reflecting through, enough to unhinge someone already halfway there and weak with hunger. It’s spooky enough in this light.”

“What’s your take on the orientation of that open tunnel?”

“It’s heading toward Cairo. It almost certainly corresponds to that line on the plan leading to Fustat. And it’s clearly above water level, a dry channel. It could be our ticket out.”

“If it’s not blocked by rockfalls.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“I need some time in here, Costas. We need to get as much as we can on video.”

“Thirty minutes, maximum. I can actually feel the air being sucked up that shaft by the fires on the pyramid. If we stay longer than that, we won’t have the energy to get far enough down that tunnel to get out, and then we end up in a terminal countdown.”

Little Joey chirped and sighed, almost an electronic moan, and the eye peered dolefully at Costas. “I know,” he said, stroking its neck. “Good boy. Very good boy.” He pressed something beneath the carapace, and Little Joey jumped slightly, and then settled down and purred. “I can’t give him a biscuit, but I can give him an electronic buzz. It means he’ll go to sleep happy. He might be holding the fort here for some time.”

Jack slithered around until his feet were hanging over the edge, and slowly lowered himself to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Thirty minutes. Keep your camera rolling.”

“Roger that.”

As Jack hit the floor he felt for his head camera, making sure it was at the right angle to catch everything he saw. He knew what he wanted to look at. It was what had set his pulse racing when he had heard Jeremy read Howard Carter’s account of what Corporal Jones had seen, and then a few minutes ago when he had looked at the video image relayed from Little Joey. It was what had been sitting in Hiebermeyer’s desk for all those years since he had found it in the excavation beside the plateau, the hieroglyphs that hinted at the truth behind Akhenaten’s City of Light. Jack glanced around the chamber. Akhenaten’s treasure was not to be another Tutankhamun’s tomb, not another trove of gold and jewels and precious artifacts. It was the greatest treasure of all. It was a treasure in words.

Costas dropped behind him and they slowly proceeded along the wall. At intervals of about five meters the rock had been carved into alcoves like the burial niches he had seen in Jerusalem with Rebecca, only here they were not designed for bodies. Each niche was filled with dozens of tall pottery jars, more than a meter high, almost all of them lidded and sealed with a mass of black resinous material. Those that were not lidded had been smashed open, their contents strewn over the floor, visible in front of three of the twelve alcoves that Jack had counted around the chamber. He squatted in front of the first and picked up a handful of material from among the pottery sherds, fragments of papyrus that crumbled to dust as he touched them. Costas thrust his hand deep into the base of one of the smashed jars still remaining in the alcove and came up with a handful of the same material. “My best guess?” he said, letting it drop between his fingers. “Corporal Jones, looking for food. He gave up at the third alcove once he realized that the contents were inedible.”

“What was inside,” Jack murmured, staring at the shreds in his hands, “was papyrus scrolls. This place is a library.” He got up, and did some swift arithmetic. “If there are twelve alcoves containing thirty jars each, and each jar contains four or five scrolls, that’s the best part of two thousand scrolls. That’s way more than you’d expect for a collection of religious tracts and Books of the Dead.”

“Check out the pots,” Costas said. “They’ve all got symbols on them painted in black. The pots in each alcove have the same principal symbol, but then above that, each pot has a unique additional symbol. From my memory of Lanowski’s attempt to teach me hieroglyphics, those upper symbols are numbers. So this must be some kind of cataloguing system.”

Jack brushed the dust from the symbols on one pot and then moved to the next alcove and did the same. “You’re right. Each alcove has an individual hieroglyph: a sheaf of corn in the first, a seated bird in this one, a half-moon in the next one along. I think they’re signifiers like our letters of the alphabet, part of the cataloguing system.”

“Sheaf of corn means religion, squatting bird means science, half-moon means medicine?” Costas said. “Something like that?”

Jack nodded, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were confronting. “Imagine what those could contain.”

“You know we can’t risk opening them, Jack. We have nowhere to take them, and they might just crumble to dust on contact with the air. Our job now is to see to it that this place remains secret until we can get back here with the biggest manuscript conservation team that Maria and Jeremy have ever assembled. Meanwhile our clock is ticking. I’m going to check out that dais in the center.”

Jack turned back to the pots and put his hand on one of them, struggling to contain his emotions. Costas was right, of course. It would be grossly irresponsible to tamper with them now. If there were huge secrets of science and medicine, the cures to diseases, then they could be lost in an instant; far better to leave them here in the hope that a return would be possible. But it went against his grain as an archaeologist not to at least see some writing, to record it with their cameras. Not to do so, to leave empty-handed, would be to leave something unsatisfied in his soul, a need for something tangible to make all the effort seem worthwhile.

Costas’ voice came from the dais. “It looks as if you might have been wrong about Akhenaten leaving here alive. Looks like we might just have solved the mystery of his burial place.”

Jack turned and mounted the steps, gasping in astonishment at the sight in front of him. In the middle of the chamber with the ridges in the floor radiating from it stood a huge sarcophagus in gold, larger even than the outer sarcophagus that had surrounded the mummy of Tutankhamun. The head was that of a man with a slightly upturned nose and almond eyes, reminiscent of Tutankhamun, his braided beard and headdress decorated with strips of faience and his eyes surrounded with inlays of niello to represent the lines of kohl. It was a face unfamiliar and yet familiar, the father of the pharaoh who had accidentally become the most famous in history and yet whose achievements were puny by comparison, cut off by death before he had even reached manhood. Jack knew who it was even before he had gazed down over the figure’s torso, over the crossed arms carrying the jewel-studded staff and ankh symbol, to the circular representation of the Aten with radiating arms that clinched the identity beyond any doubt. Akhenaten.

Costas was peering closely at the edge of the sarcophagus near the feet. “Fascinating,” he said. “The lid was originally sealed over with sheet gold, but then someone’s been around and scored it, cutting through to the crack between the sarcophagus and the lid. It’s been pushed slightly off center.”

Jack knelt down beside him, staring. “Corporal Jones again?”

“Maybe when he got hungry,” Costa suggested. “Before he found those other mummies.”

Jack heaved on the lid, suddenly feeling woozy as he did so, his heart pounding and his chest tight. He knew they were more than halfway through Costas’ predicted countdown before the oxygen level became critical. He pushed again, creating a crack just large enough for him to aim his beam inside. He panned it around, and then looked again. “I think Jones would have been disappointed. There’s nothing inside.”

“Ancient tomb robbers?”

Jack shook his head. “There’s no evidence I can see for robbers ever having gotten inside this chamber. When it was sealed up, that was it for over two thousand years. Ancient robbers would always leave the worthless debris behind, the mummy wrapping and bones, and they’d never have left without hacking off those parts of the sarcophagus that look like solid gold — the hand, the ears, the beard. No, this was empty from the outset.”

“Well, if Akhenaten could pull the wool over the Egyptians’ eyes about the real cause of the loss of an entire chariot army in the Red Sea, then I guess he could fake his own death.”

Jack stared at the face on the sarcophagus. It was Akhenaten as nobody had seen him before: not the elongated, misshapen pharaoh with the masklike visage, exaggerating his otherness, but instead Akhenaten the man, a fitting consort to the Nefertiti whose face had transfixed Jack a week before in the Cairo Museum. This was Akhenaten not as the world would know him but as he wished to be seen in the place of his greatest legacy, presiding not as a pharaoh but as a man over a treasure far greater than any of the riches that filled the tombs of his ancestors.

“Jack, take a look at what I’ve just found. These definitely aren’t ancient.”

Costas had followed one of the ridges to the edge of the chamber between the alcoves filled with jars, and was squatting down. Jack walked over and joined him. On a ledge in front of the wall were two tarnished medals, their ribbons faded and dirty but laid out as if they had been carefully arranged. Jack recognized them immediately as Victorian campaign medals. One was silver, showing the Sphinx with the word Egypt above and the date 1882 below, its ribbon made up of three blue and two white stripes. The other was a five-pointed bronze star with the Sphinx and the three pyramids in the center, also inscribed Egypt and 1882 but with the year in Arabic in the Muslim calendar at the foot and surmounted by a star and crescent. Jack carefully picked up the silver medal, wiped the rim, and inspected it closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “It’s our friend 3453 Corporal R. Jones, Royal Engineers. We meet at last.”

Costas picked up the star. “How did he get these if he’d basically deserted?”

“Look at the date, 1882,” Jack replied. “After Jeremy found that account in Howard Carter’s diary, he looked up Jones’ service record in the National Archives. It lists him as missing in action after the Battle of Kirkeban in February 1885, presumed killed. But it also shows that he’d first arrived in Egypt from India in 1882 as part of the expeditionary force sent to support the Khedive against an army uprising, but that soon became embroiled in the war against the Mahdi. So Jones had already had these two medals, the Egypt Medal and the Khedive’s Star.”

Costas examined the star, fingering the crescent on the clasp. “Ironic that British soldiers for years to come would have worn the symbol of Islam and the caliphate on their chests, after having fought a war that many would have seen as a latter-day crusade against the jihad.”

Jack put the Egypt Medal back, carefully laying the ribbon as he had found it. “That’s history for you. Never quite what it seems. Officially the British were fighting for the Khedive of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, the largest Islamic state the world has ever seen. And some among the officers, particularly those who had spent years in the Arab world, were sympathetic to aspects of Islam. Gordon and the Mahdi would have been an interesting meeting of minds, philosophically not that far apart.”

“Well, it’s pretty clear where Jones was coming from,” Costas said, pointing to the wall just to the right of the shelf with the medals. “Take a look at that.”

Jack shifted around and stared. The lower part of the wall was covered in an inscription, written in the neat, precise hand taught to all Victorian schoolchildren, with the subject matter that was often their sole source of simile and metaphor. Jack slowly read it out loud: “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’ ”

“ ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,’ ” Costas murmured. “The Twenty-third Psalm. He must have been awestruck by the appearance of the pharaoh, by the crossed rod and staff on the sarcophagus. Those medals with their images of the sphinx and the pyramids must have seemed like offerings to him, meant for this place.”

Jack took a few steps farther toward the open tunnel heading in the direction of Cairo, stepping over fragments of plaster that Jones must have dug out of the wall over the days it probably took him to open it up. Beneath the plaster he saw something else, a skeletal form. He stared at it and then gestured to Costas. “I think we might just have solved another mystery.”

Costas came over and then stopped abruptly. “I see bones. Don’t tell me. Not Jones’ final mummy feast.”

Jack shook his head. “This is the skeleton of someone who has lain down to die, or been placed in this position. Look at what he’s holding. It’s a little Arab dagger, beautifully engraved on the blade and embellished with gold. I think this is where Jones got his souvenir, that ring.”

“Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,” Costas murmured. “We knew he’d be in here somewhere. Do you think he was trying to escape too? Do you think Jones found his body, and then laid him out like this?”

Jack stared at the skeleton. “The medieval accounts suggest that he went alone at night into the desert on many occasions before disappearing for good, clearly faking his own death. I think after finding that entrance we passed in the tunnel, the partly collapsed ventilation shaft, and exploring this place, he eventually found the light shaft we came through and got into this chamber. Maybe seeing the sarcophagus did it for him, and he decided next time to come in here for good, never to go back.”

Costas sifted the dust on top of the bones. “Maybe he had delusions of grandeur. He could have been the one who tried to open the sarcophagus, not Jones. Look at the way he’s lying, with his arms crossed like that. Maybe he wanted to lie down inside the sarcophagus, to be Akhenaten.”

“Being a caliph was not that much different from being a pharaoh,” Jack murmured. “And Akhenaten isn’t the only ruler in history to want to get away from it all.”

Costas peered down where he had been sifting. “Look at this, Jack. He’s got something in his hands. It’s a small wooden frame containing a piece of papyrus, with text in hieroglyphs.”

Jack knelt down and peered at it, feeling a sudden rush of satisfaction. He had found his piece of text. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “But it must have some special significance to have been framed like that. Let’s make sure we both have detailed images.”

Costas followed after him, leaned over the hieroglyphs, and panned his camera slowly over the papyrus. “Okay,” he said. “That’s done.”

Jack gestured at the open tunnel in front of them. “Our time is nearly up.”

Costas nodded. “There’s one thing left to do. Little Joey.”

“You can’t take him with us.”

“I know. I’ve been dreading this. But I can switch him off. I can’t have him going mad in here like Jones.”

He made his way back to the shaft, and Jack turned to the nearest alcove and put his hand on one of the sealed jars. Costas came back and stood beside him. “Think of yourself as a caretaker of knowledge, Jack, just like those priests of Akhenaten who sealed this place up after he’d left. They were protecting it against Akhenaten’s enemies of the old religion who might have destroyed it, and now we’re protecting it against the modern-day forces of darkness. Akhenaten must have ordered this place to be sealed up in the hope that it would be discovered and revealed some time in the distant future, when the time was right. He left clues in those plaques that have taken all our combined intelligence and even a little bit of genius to work out. It’s almost as if he anticipated a time like ours when exploration like this would be possible, when people would be driven to seek the truth about the past. But the time’s not yet right, Jack. Akhenaten would not have wanted his legacy to be consumed by the fires that are raging above. Maybe the time will come in our lifetimes, or maybe this will be our legacy to pass on to Rebecca and her generation. But right now we’ve got the present to deal with. There’s a girl in Cairo who needs to be rescued, and a lot of people depending on us. It’s time to go.”

Jack pushed off from the jar, took one last look around, and put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. “Roger that. We move.”

Almost half an hour later Costas stopped jogging and bent down, his hand on his knees, panting hard. “We must be getting close to an exit, Jack,” he said, his face streaming with sweat. “It’s getting warmer. And I can smell it.”

Jack stopped beside him, wiping the sweat off his own forehead, and breathed deeply. He realized that he felt stronger, revitalized. Costas was right: They must be close to a source of fresh air. And the smell was unmistakable, a cloying tang of burning, a sharp reminder of what lay in store for them outside. They must be at least three kilometers beyond the Giza plateau by now, but the fire on the pyramids would send heat and the reek of burning fuel far over the desert, a smell that by now would be commingling with the reek and ash of fire from Cairo itself.

They began jogging again, and after a few minutes came to a rockfall that completely blocked the tunnel ahead. Costas crawled up the slope, pulling aside blocks of stone, working feverishly until he reached the top. A cascade of sand came down, and a new kind of light appeared, not the suffused red glow from the tunnel but a flickering darker red that bathed Costas’ face in a luminous glow. He disappeared upward and then reappeared, sliding down the sand until he was back beside Jack.

“Okay. We ditch our E-suits here. Keep your hydration pack, and give me your camera microchip. We’re in the desert maybe a kilometer away from the edge of the southern suburbs, and I can see a road to the west with abandoned vehicles. We might get lucky and find something still with gas.”

Jack unzipped the front of his E-suit, ducked his head and shoulders through, and quickly pulled the rest off. He straightened his jacket and trousers and then removed his headstrap and dismembered the camera. He watched as Costas took out one of the satellite beacons, activated it, and then pointed up. “We’ll have to block this entrance.”

“No problem. A shove of one rock up above and the whole thing will come tumbling down, followed by about ten tons of sand. Nobody walking by would ever guess.”

“What does it look like topside?”

Costas kicked off the feet of his E-suit, took out the Glock from its holster, checked it, and gave Jack a grim look. “You know those medieval images of hell? They always have it underground. Well, they got it wrong. Prepare yourself for just about the worst thing you’ve ever seen.”

CHAPTER 24

Jack stared in horror at the western horizon. The Pyramid of Menkaure was engulfed in flames, lighting up the Giza plateau like a vision of hell. Those who had been threatening it had finally gotten their way, picking up where the son of Saladin had left off in the twelfth century, only with powers of destruction that no medieval caliph could ever have envisaged. Jack felt the anger well up inside him, a rage against those who had orchestrated this. They claimed to be acting in the name of the one god, but in truth they represented no god. He looked down at the form that had followed him out of the tunnel entrance. He and Costas had just carried out one of the most extraordinary dives of their lives, and had uncovered the greatest treasure that any civilization could offer. He glanced at the flames again, this time feeling only a cold determination. He would not let the forces of darkness destroy the truth of history. He turned back and helped Costas to his feet. “This place is about to implode. If we don’t get out of here, nobody will ever know what we’ve found. Let’s move.”

A little over an hour later, they crouched behind a wall just outside Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, a stone’s throw from the Ben Ezra synagogue. After leaving the tunnel they had jogged in the darkness along a dusty track toward the lights of the city, both of them soon drenched in sweat in the humid air of the night. The smell of burning had been all around them, an acrid, cloying smell that became worse as they entered the outer sprawl of the city, making them cough and slow down. Partway along they had found an abandoned car with the key still in the ignition and had sped along a highway toward the Nile. They left the car once they had found a motorboat, which they used to cross the river to the eastern shore beside Fustat. The journey had been an eerie one, with hardly any other cars on the roads and only a few people to be seen, the rest probably cowering in their houses or caught up in what was going on in the city center. As they had come closer, the noise had become louder — chanting and wailing, shrieks and screams, long bursts of gunfire, and above it a constant call from the minarets around the city, their recordings sounding as through they had been put on a continuous loop by the extremist junta, who by now must have swept aside the last residues of legitimate government in Egypt.

Jack tried to ignore the noise as he stared along the alleyway ahead toward the entrance into Fustat, watching for gunmen and gauging the best time to enter. He took out his Beretta from the holster beneath his jacket, pulled back the slider partway to confirm that a round was chambered, and put the gun back in its holster. With the two extra magazines, he had forty-five rounds, hardly enough to put a pinprick in the side of the coup but giving him the option of self-defense if it came to it. He watched Costas check his Glock and then pull out the second transmitter beacon and place it behind the wall where it would be concealed from view but the satellite signal would be unimpeded. “Okay,” he said quietly. “It’s activated. That means Sea Venture will know we’re here.”

“Mohammed won’t be able to get his felucca this far south,” Jack said. “You can see that the river ahead of us is jammed with burning feluccas, and chances are the gunmen have gotten hold of the police patrol vessels and are raking any boat they see. We’ll have to rely on Aysha to get us out through the city to a rendezvous point farther to the north.”

“That could be like walking through the fires of hell,” Costas said.

“We haven’t got any choice.” Jack checked his watch. “It’s three fifteen. There’s about two hours of night left. We’re going to be far better off trying to do this under cover of darkness than waiting for the day, and we need to get to the rendezvous point at the synagogue. Let’s move.”

They got up and walked quickly to the entrance through the medieval wall into Fustat, and then ducked inside and came within sight of the synagogue precinct. There were more people now in the streets, clustered fearfully in doorways and dark alleys, and the gunshots were close enough in the still air to sound like sharp hammer blows, but still there were no gunmen to be seen. Jack stared at the synagogue and pursed his lips. “Aysha should have had our first beacon signal relayed to her by now, but I don’t see her there. It was always going to be a gamble, and maybe we just ran out of luck. All I can see is that Sufi sitting in front of the wall.”

A truck filled with jeering gunmen suddenly lurched into view on the cobbled street, roared past them in low gear and disappeared down another dark alley. Jack had flattened himself against the wall, and he felt his heart pounding. They had been in full view of the gunmen but had been ignored. “I think they’ve got other fish to fry,” he said, standing forward again and looking around. “Most of the noise is coming from the direction they were heading, where the alley opens out in front of a big mosque.”

“My God,” Costas whispered, his eyes glued on the synagogue. “The Sufi. It’s Lanowski. Only we would recognize him. I mean, instantly recognize him. He’s in double disguise, disguised as Corporal Jones disguised as a mystic. Genius, or mad.”

“I told him to stay with the felucca,” Jack muttered. “Something must have happened.” He turned to Costas, straightened his shirt and patted his hair. “We’re going to have to walk in the open now. We’ve got no choice, and we need to be confident about it. There are still going to be reporters and die-hards of the expat community here, and we need to look like them, as if we know what we’re doing.”

Jack felt himself beginning to sweat again in the tepid air. He took out the hydration pack that he had kept from his E-suit and offered it to Costas, who shook his head. “Still got some in my own,” he said. They both drank the remainder of the water pouches and discarded them. Jack peered at Costas. “Still got the camera microchips?”

“They’re zipped into my side pocket.”

Jack looked down, forcing himself to accept reality. “If it comes to it, you have to promise me that you’ll destroy them, right? If the bad guys get hold of those images and work out where we came from, then the world really will never know what we found. Maurice was right. There are going to be terrible scenes of destruction across Egypt, not only what we’ve already seen happening at Giza but also at Luxor, at the Valley of the Kings, scenes to make even the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas pale by comparison. The world had better get ready to weep.”

Costas straightened his jacket. “Let’s do it.”

They stepped out into the street and walked toward the mystic, stopping close enough to be heard. “Jacob,” Costas said quietly. “We see you.”

“Walk toward the alley where that truck went,” Lanowski replied, without moving or looking at them. “It might attract attention for me to join you, a Sufi with two Westerners, so I’ll be shadowing you. I had to come here to warn you that Aysha’s been delayed, but she will find us if we head slowly west. You’re conspicuous enough for her to see, Jack, because of your height.”

“Be careful, Jacob,” Jack said. “We’ll be going into a death zone.”

“I’ve seen it, Jack. I had to walk through it when Mohammed let me off from the felucca. Prepare yourselves for the worst. Now get moving. With any luck we’ll meet again at the felucca within the hour, and be out of here.”

Jack glanced left and right, and then hurried ahead as Lanowski had instructed. He led Costas through a dark cobbled alley about two hundred meters long and out into another square. This one was packed full of people, large milling groups with black-hooded gunmen sauntering among them, occasionally raising their Kalashnikovs into the air and firing a deafening blast. Jack held Costas back, unsure what to do. Ahead of them a cluster of women dressed in burkhas stood on the pavement, swaying and ululating, their heads covered except for a slit for their eyes. One of the women was frantically stripping off her tights beneath her burkha, the others closing in around her protectively. A gunman spotted her and rushed in, pulled her out screaming and sobbing, and dragged her toward an open area where three other women in Western dress lay sprawled in the dust surrounded by men with Kalashnikovs. Beside them an acacia tree in the middle of a small garden had been hacked down to a man-sized stump, and a few yards in front of it boys with wheelbarrows were dumping building debris brought from a structure that Jack could hear being demolished somewhere beyond. One of the men slung his rifle, picked up a brick, and hurled it with huge force at the stump. Jack stared at the scene, feeling a cold dread. “My God,” he said hoarsely. “It’s a stoning ground. They’re going to force those other women to stone those three to death.”

Another woman in a burkha came alongside them. “Don’t do anything, for God’s sake,” she said in a low voice. “If you try to intervene, you will be shot and I will be the next one to be put against that post.”

Jack stared at her. “Aysha.”

She said nothing, but steered them around a corner into another dark alley, quickly looking around. “Follow me,” she said urgently. “We haven’t got much time.”

“What’s going on?” Jack asked, hurrying after her.

“You’ve been incredibly lucky. About an hour ago the junta issued a fatwa against all Westerners except accredited journalists. Evidently the news hadn’t quite reached the gunmen who’ve seen you so far. Apparently it still matters to the junta for the world to see what they’re doing, though that won’t last long. Here, take these.” She steered them down the passageway and handed them each a ziplock bag. “Passports, press documentation. Take out the cards and hang them around your necks. You’re CNN journalists. The Cairo bureau chief is an old friend of mine, and he’s issued bogus accreditation to help some friends get out. These are the last two cards he had.”

“They’ll rumble that soon enough if Cairo is suddenly swarming with CNN journalists.”

“Hopefully we’ll be out of here by then. When I came to Cairo two days ago, I had to ditch the institute’s Land Rover in the northern suburbs, as it was too dangerous for me to be seen in it. The way to Alexandria is clogged with people fleeing the city. I’ll be coming out with you by river from a rendezvous point I agreed upon with my uncle about half a mile north of here.”

“Mobile phone networks? WiFi?”

“Everything’s down. The only contact with the outside world is by satellite phone, and I couldn’t risk being caught with one. They’re searching everyone. I was lucky to get here with those documents.”

“What’s the situation with Sahirah?” Jack said.

Aysha looked grim. “She’s still being held in the Ministry of Culture. They cleared out all the remaining staff yesterday. There have been mass trials and convictions of government people through the night. A lot of good people are going to die, Jack, a lot of good friends. Once they’ve dealt with that, they’ll turn their attention to Sahirah and any other prisoners still alive in the interrogation rooms.”

“Your cousin Ahmed, the ex — special forces man and his team?”

Aysha nodded. “It’s out of our hands now, Jack. If they can spring her, they’ll do it. If not, they’ll die trying.”

“What about Lanowski?” Costas said, jerking his head to the shuffling mystic following them a discreet distance behind.

“He volunteered to be your point of contact at the synagogue after I’d heard about the impending crackdown and knew I was going to be delayed getting those documents. I could only get two CNN passes. But he’s the least of my worries; he blends in just fine.”

“You won’t believe what we found,” Costas said.

“Don’t tell me. I don’t what to hear anything, just in case I’m interrogated.”

They came to the end of the alley and peered into another, much larger square with a columned structure in the center. The square seemed a maelstrom of activity, with eruptions of fire, the sound of falling masonry and bursts of automatic gunfire, and lines of black-clad men with Kalashnikovs encircling the perimeter.

“That’s the mosque of Amr ibn al-As,” Aysha said. “It’s the oldest mosque in Cairo, founded in AD 642. The extremists have taken it over as their spiritual focus. The original mosque where Abn al-As pitched his tent was made of palm trunks and leaves, and they’re planning to re-create that. The present mosque is made of reused columns and blocks from ancient Egyptian sites that they regard as non-Islamic. And beyond that they’ve created an execution ground. The gunmen have already begun dragging people there from the government buildings, the Ministry of Culture first. They seem to have the greatest contempt for the Antiquities Service.”

“It’s a cold calculation,” Jack said. “They’ve used the moderate regime as a stepping-stone over the last months, sweet-talking men like our beloved antiquities director and promising him big rewards, but now that the coup has happened it’s a different story. They want moderates to see that only a strict regime is possible and that any who fail to follow them will pay the price.”

Aysha peered out at the square. “You’re going to see some terrible sights, but you must keep your cool. Do not, I repeat, do not try to intervene.”

“You mean we’re going through that?” Costas said, sounding horrified.

“You’re reporters, right? Reporters don’t slink around in back alleys. They go to where the action is. You’re going to walk right past that crowd and then on toward Salah Salem Street beyond. I’ll make my own way and rendezvous with you there.”

“Won’t you be safer sticking with us?” Costas said.

She shook her head, replacing her head veil so that her face was concealed except the slit for her eyes. “From now on any Egyptian seen helping reporters is going to be targeted, especially a woman. They’ll assume I’m using you as a means of escape.”

An ear-piercing shriek rent the air behind them, followed by the sound of wailing. There was another shriek, cut short by a burst of gunfire. Jack remembered the face of the young woman he had seen sprawled on the ground. That girl had a father and a mother somewhere; she could have been Rebecca, anyone. Aysha saw him staring, and touched his arm. “I call on all Muslims in Egypt and all other faiths to defeat this evil and bring an end to it,” she said. “In Egypt the people will prevail.”

“Amen to that,” Costas said.

A call to prayer suddenly filled the air, crackling out from loudspeakers mounted on a pickup truck that was slowly circling the square.

“Okay,” Aysha whispered. “Walk out now. Don’t even look at me as I leave.”

She was gone, and without thinking Jack did as she instructed, Costas following close behind. Lanowski was nowhere to be seen, but Jack could not afford to track him now. Everyone in the square was kneeling toward the east and praying, following the instructions of the recording from the vehicle. Two of the gunmen saw them and jumped upright, but backed off when Jack walked brazenly forward and thrust the press ID at them. About fifty yards farther on they passed the place where the façade of the mosque was being hacked down and the boys had been picking up rubble to take to the stoning ground. Abruptly the prayer ended and the vehicle sped off, and everyone jumped to their feet. Jack kept pressing on, veering sideways to avoid a crowd of people and the gaze of more gunmen whose eyes were following them.

He reached the northwest corner of the perimeter wall around the mosque, about halfway to the street exit that Aysha had indicated. He took a deep breath as he and Costas rounded the corner into an open space about fifty yards across surrounded on three sides by dense throngs of men and on the other by the perimeter wall of the mosque. By skirting the wall they had walked straight into the gaze of the onlookers, but they were not the main focus of attention. In the center he caught sight of a line of kneeling men, and then saw the flash of a sword. He forced himself to look forward, to focus on getting through. He remembered the image of the burning pyramid; he had thought that was as bad as it could get, but now he realized that it was merely a grim portent. Already another line of men were being led out, kicked and rifle-butted by the gunmen as the swordsman walked back to his starting point, his blade dripping with blood.

Jack reached the onlookers and forced an opening, with Costas following close behind. From his height he could see above the throng to where a further group was being escorted from a street into the square, providing the executioner with a continuous line of victims, the women among them forcibly separated and led in a separate group toward the stoning ground. Many of the men were well dressed but already dishevelled and bloody, some of them pleading and praying as soon as they began to realize what was about to happen to them.

Jack suddenly remembered what Aysha had said: the Ministry of Culture. That was who these people were. Then his heart lurched. The Ministry of Culture included the Antiquities Department. He pressed through the throng, staring at them. He was sure that he recognized some of the faces, inspectors and dirt archaeologists who had been the mainstay of Egyptian archaeology for years, friends and colleagues who had worked alongside Hiebermeyer at the mummy necropolis, at their excavation of the Roman port on the Red Sea, at the crocodile temple site beside the Nile in Sudan. Jack was suddenly conscious of his own visibility, hoping that none of them would see him. He felt as if he were betraying them, but there was nothing he could do. To be recognized now for who he was would be the death knell for him and for Costas. He forced himself to think of what they were doing, taking away a last hope for Egyptology and the achievements of those people, something that might just give the world a legacy of Egypt other than the images of medieval horror they were witnessing now.

They were nearly through the area, but the swaying momentum of the crowd was forcing them close to the line of prisoners. Jack pressed against the crowd to push away from them, but to no avail. There was another eruption of yelling and chants from behind them, and the line of prisoners shuffled forward. He held his Press ID forward and tried to keep his head down, focusing his mind solely on the open street ahead, moving toward the line of gunmen who formed a cordon around the outer perimeter of the crowd.

For a fleeting moment he made eye contact with one of the prisoners. It was an overweight man, balding, dishevelled, his hands tied behind his back, with gunmen holding him on either side. Jack’s mind froze. He had met the man only once, an imperious audience of a few minutes in the ministry after he and Hiebermeyer had been made to wait for hours. It was the antiquities director. Jack pushed past, holding his breath. There were only a few yards to go before they were out of the throng and on the street. There was still a chance he had not been recognized. He pressed on, pulling Costas close behind him.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the line behind him and he heard a shrieking voice, the high-pitched voice he remembered from the audience in the ministry. Jack knew enough Arabic to understand what he was saying. “It is Jack Howard, the archaeologist Jack Howard. He is a blasphemer, a destroyer of sacred works. Arrest him!”

Jack glanced over his shoulder and saw the man struggling to point toward him, his eyes wide and panic-stricken. And then one of the gunmen slammed his rifle butt into the man’s face, thrusting his lolling head back as he was carried forward in the line. Jack grabbed Costas, ducked down, and pushed through the cordon. “Come on. Our cover’s been blown. We’ve got to run.”

They rushed forward past the clusters of people heading toward the square and then ducked down an alley to the left. Jack had no idea where they were going; this was pure survival. Seconds later he heard booted feet pounding down the alley behind him, and a crack of rifle fire. Two men holding Kalashnikovs appeared out of nowhere in front. He and Costas barrelled through them, sending both men sprawling. Jack stumbled, snatching up one of the rifles as he did so, and pushed Costas ahead. “Run,” he yelled. “Run.” He turned, firing a burst into the air above their pursuers, his hands jarring with the clacking of the bolt. Chunks of brick and masonry fell from the upper story where the bullets had hit the wall, but still the men kept coming. One of them fired back, the bullets striking the walls of the alleyway ahead and filling the air with dust. Jack lowered the rifle, holding the wooden barrel guard to stop it from jumping, and fired a long burst into his attackers, seeing several of them jerking and falling. Another man lunged toward him only yards away. He pulled the trigger again, but the bolt was open; the magazine was empty. He threw it down, pulled out his Beretta, and turned to run, seeing Costas in the dust ahead. A rifle cracked deafeningly behind him, and the air was filled with shrieking and yelling.

Suddenly he was knocked sideways and sent sprawling in the dust. Then he was raised onto his knees and pushed against the alley wall, his arms pulled savagely behind his back and his wrists tied. Someone pulled him up by his hair and dragged him along, slamming him against the wall. The pain from his hair was eye-watering, but he was too dazed to care. He saw Costas alongside him, spitting blood from his mouth, and was conscious of a circle of gunmen forming around them, Kalashnikovs raised.

Somebody, a leader in the group, was talking, too fast for Jack to understand, but he guessed that their lives were in the balance. He stared at the intricate pattern in the granite of the wall in front of him, trying to focus on that, and breathed in deeply through his nose, smelling the dust and stone. He caught Costas’ eye, but they both knew better than to talk. Each knew what the other was thinking. After more than their share of near-misses underwater, of danger they accepted as part of their calling, it seemed a perversity of fate that they should die like this, in a squalid execution in a back alley of Cairo. Jack felt numb; all emotion seemed to have drained from him in the square. The argument behind them stopped, and there was a silence. Suddenly there was a deafening rip of gunfire, and chips flew off the rock above his head. Jack was thrown forward against the wall, and felt a hammer-blow of pain in his right arm. His knees give way, and he fell, seeming to fall a long way as if he were going far beneath the ground, back to that place from which he and Costas had just emerged, into a well of blackness. Then nothing.

CHAPTER 25

Jack recovered consciousness moments later as he was being hauled to his feet. He was aware of Costas alongside him as the two of them were shoved ahead by the gunmen down the alley. Costas already had his hands zip-tied behind his back, and Jack felt his own arms being pulled roughly together, causing a jolt of pain to course through him from the bullet wound in his right shoulder. His arm was dripping with blood, and out of instinct he played it up, bending over and yelling with pain each time they tried to pull it back. Someone shouted in Arabic and they relented, tying his wrists in front of him instead. At the end of the alley they were hustled into the back of a pickup. They were made to lie facedown and had hoods pulled over their heads. Jack braced himself as the truck revved up and screeched down the road. He was trying to keep his head from banging where it had been bruised when he hit the wall in the alley and been knocked out momentarily.

He forced himself to assess the situation. His right arm was still functional, but he could feel the stickiness of the blood on his hand and the numbness where shock was still overriding the pain of the wound. He knew that they had been reprieved, that someone had stayed their execution; there was some small hope in that. It was not the way of the extremists to carry out mock executions, so someone among the gunmen must have seen something, perhaps their CNN press cards, and ordered his men to fire high. Where they were going now was anyone’s guess, back to the killing ground of the square, perhaps, to face the judgment of someone higher up the chain of command, or to some hidden place to await an ignominious end, to join the many like the girl Sahirah who had already been arrested by extremist sympathizers before the coup, and would provide another wave of victims as the gunmen finished their first round of executions and swept through the city looking for more. Jack was thankful that Aysha and Lanowski had not been with them in the alley; he desperately hoped that they had not tried to follow but had made their own way to the felucca to make good their own escape.

The truck screeched to a halt and they were bundled out of the back, up a shallow flight of steps into a large space that echoed with shouts and commands in Arabic, and then up a flight of stairs, along a corridor, through some doors, and into a smaller space, where they were roughly forced to a halt. Jack’s hood was pulled off, and he blinked hard, looking around. He was standing beside Costas in an office of a minor government functionary by the look of it, with a desk and filing cabinets and a glass screen to the corridor outside. Two gunmen with wispy beards and black headbands loitered outside the door, and another two were inside the room facing them. One of them let his rifle hang on its sling, pulled some leaves from a bag, and began chewing on them, and the other asked for some, in English with a broad Yorkshire accent. Jack stared at the man with contempt. He knew that the gunmen included radicalized Western sympathizers, just like the other extremist groups elsewhere. Jack glanced at the gunmen in the corridor, and then back at the two who were chewing khat; they would be the easiest to deal with if the opportunity arose.

Another man walked into the room; he was short and dapper with a thick beard, and wore a white robe beneath his ammunition vest. He was carrying Jack’s Beretta with the spare magazines and Costas’ Glock, and placed them on the desk. He clicked his fingers at the two men, who slung their weapons on their backs and came up behind and frisked Jack and Costas. Jack could smell the khat on their breath, and stale sweat. They found nothing, and Jack saw that the zip pocket where Costas had put the camera microchips was open and empty. He must have destroyed and ditched them back in the alley as the gunmen were closing in. Jack could barely think about that now; his arm was beginning to throb and he felt faint. The small man perched on the edge of the desk, picked up the Beretta, turned it over, put it down again, and then gestured at the press card still hanging around Jack’s neck.

“We have been coming across quite a few of these.” His English was accented but educated. “If they are being carried by Egyptians, we shoot them on the spot. You are the first Western imposters.”

“We’re not imposters,” Costas protested. “We’re journalists.”

“If you carry these false cards, you must have something to hide. You are spies.”

“We’re journalists. Read the accreditation.”

“You are spies.” The man was becoming heated. “Zionist spies.”

Jack thought quickly. The truth might be the best option. “Okay. A friend arranged the cards for us. We’re archaeologists, making our way back to Alexandria.”

“You are lying. You are Zionist pigs.”

“I’m Jack Howard, and this is Costas Kazantzakis. The antiquities director shouted my name in the square. We’re from the International Maritime University. Look us up online.”

“We have no use for the Internet.”

“Except to show videos of executions,” Costas muttered. “And burning pyramids.”

The man stared venomously at Costas, and then turned to Jack. “I will tell you why our forces are in Cairo.” He pointed to a poster on the glass partition, one that Jack had seen gunmen plaster on walls as they had come through the city. It showed an old black-and-white photo of a whitewashed tomblike structure, the Islamic crescent above it, with words in Arabic lettering below. The man continued: “A hundred and twenty years ago General Kitchener swore that he would avenge the death of General Gordon in Khartoum by killing an Arab for every hair on Gordon’s head. He had his vengeance at the Battle of Omdurman, but then he went too far. He desecrated the Mahdi’s tomb, tossing out the Sufi’s relics and parading his head in front of his men. When that happened we swore our own vengeance, and now we are having it. History has come back to haunt you, to haunt all who stand in our way.” He picked up the Glock and waved it at Costas. “Kneel, infidel.”

Costas remained impassive, and the man gestured again. One of the gunmen chewing khat came behind Costas and kicked him below the knees. He fell heavily but then pushed himself back up off the floor and knelt.

Jack felt paralyzed. “He’s Greek,” he said. “He couldn’t possibly be an Israeli spy.”

“Show me his papers then. No passport? Then he is a spy. You will watch him die, and then it will be your turn.”

He raised the Glock to Costas’ forehead and pulled the trigger. In that split-second Jack remembered that the Glock was security imprinted, that it recognized only Costas’ fingerprints. It was a manufacturer feature that Costas had wanted removed, but had not gotten around to doing. The man tried again, and again nothing. He threw it down in disgust. There was a sudden screaming in the corridor and a burst of gunfire, and the two gunmen who had been outside the door disappeared. Jack lunged forward, grabbed the Beretta off the desk, and fell backward, emptying all fifteen rounds into the three men in the room. The man on the desk crashed back against the glass partition with blood pumping from a hole in his throat, and the other two dropped instantly with multiple wounds to the chest and head. Jack scrambled up, ejected the magazine and loaded another from the two on the table, chambered a round, and shot the small man in the head. He put down the Beretta, picked up a knife from the slew of blood on the floor and quickly cut the tie between Costas’ wrists, and then held out his arms while Costas did the same for him. They both grabbed their pistols and spare magazines, dropped down together beside the doorway, and huddled out of view. The two gunmen who had been outside were sprawled motionless in the corridor in a pool of blood, and a ferocious gun battle was raging in the direction of their entrance from the lower floor.

“I know where we are,” Jack said, shouting above the noise. “It’s the Ministry of Culture. You can read it on the label on the desk. This is where they’re holding the girl Sahirah, and where Aysha’s cousin Ahmed was going to try to break her out. Chances are that’s what all this gunfire is about. He’s ex — Egyptian special forces, trained with the SAS, and knows what he’s doing. Now’s the time I would have chosen for an assault if I were in his shoes, while most of the focus among the gunmen is on the executions in that square.”

There was a sudden clatter of boots down the corridor and the sound of doors being kicked open, followed by bursts of gunfire. Seconds later two men in civilian clothes with Egyptian paratrooper M4 carbines rushed in, weapons levelled. Taking in the scene, they saw that Jack and Costas were still alive and aiming at them. Neither of the men was wearing the black headband of the gunmen, and both looked Egyptian. Jack dropped the Beretta and waved the press card at them. “CNN,” he shouted. “Journalists.”

Another man came in, glanced at them, and gestured to the others to lower their weapons. “Dr. Howard,” he said, crouching down. “Remember me? Aysha’s cousin Ahmed. We’re in here to find Sahirah.”

Jack raised himself as he picked up the Beretta. “Where’s Aysha?”

“I sent her on to the felucca. She’s gone with your friend the Sufi.”

Jack closed his eyes. Thank God for that. He helped Costas up, and then turned to Ahmed. “I can help you,” said Jack. “I’ve been in here before, when I came with Aysha’s husband to see the antiquities director. He made us wait for hours, and I went down to the archaeological conservation labs. Aysha told me that’s where they’re holding prisoners. The previous regime turned the labs into interrogation chambers. I can lead you there.”

“Okay,” said Ahmed. “We’ve cleared this corridor and the ground floor. There are probably still gunmen in the basement. But we don’t have much time. Someone will have reported back to the commanders in the square, and they’ll probably send a couple of truckloads of gunmen here. I came in with only five guys, and one’s already down.”

“What if there are other prisoners still alive?” Costas asked. “Sahirah was probably one of many.”

Ahmed shook his head. “We get her out first. Anyone else waits inside until we’re sure we’ve cleared the building. If there are many of them and we try to get them out together, it will be chaos and a massacre.”

Jack heaved Costas to his feet, grimacing from his wound, and then approached the door with the Beretta held ready. He glanced back at Ahmed. “You good to go?”

“On your six.”

Jack nodded, turned, and stepped cautiously into the corridor, peering left and right, and then made his way quickly to the stairway and down to the entrance foyer. Bodies were strewn everywhere, and Jack saw Ahmed’s other two men guarding the street entrance. He could orientate himself now and turned along a ground-floor corridor through a swinging door and down a flight of stairs to the basement level. The labs lay through two more doors ahead and were visible through the glass partition. He turned to the others, putting a finger up for quiet, and slowly opened each door in turn. He led them forward until they all stood silently in the corridor outside the labs. The walls were still covered with archaeological posters, one showing artifacts from the travelling Tutankhamun exhibition, the same poster that Hiebermeyer had in the institute in Alexandria. Another advertised a forthcoming conference on the Cairo Geniza, with a section of medieval manuscript text in Arabic prominently displayed beneath it.

Jack turned to the first of the labs and slowly raised himself until he could see through the glass partition that divided it from the corridor. The scene inside was like something from a horror film. The lights were off, but he could see a body strapped to a chair, with electrical wires attached to its hands. Another body was suspended from a hook that had once been used to raise heavy artifacts onto the lab bench. A terrible stench came through the cracks around the door as he passed it. Neither of the bodies had been a woman, and he turned back to Ahmed, who was crouched behind him, and shook his head. He moved forward to the next lab, crawled along to the door, and slowly raised himself up, holding out his hand for the others to wait. He was expecting the worst, but this one was different. The lights were on, bright florescent bulbs used for archaeological work, and he could see that the lab was filled with crouching people, perhaps twenty-five to thirty of them, their hands behind their heads and their faces down. Against the back wall were two gunmen with black headbands, chewing khat and fingering their Kalashnikovs, evidently left to guard these people while a decision was made about what to do with them.

Jack slowly dropped down and turned his back to the door. It was impossible to make out any faces, but if Sahirah were alive and in the labs, this was the only place where she could be; there were no other rooms. He looked at his Beretta, his hand stuck with his own congealing blood to the grip, and opened the slide to check that a round was chambered, letting it back silently against the spring. He ejected the magazine, checked it, and slid it back in again until it clicked in place. He looked back at Ahmed and Costas and the other two, putting his fingers to his eyes and pointing toward the door, holding up two fingers, and then raising his hand for them to stay where they were. If one of them tried to come up to him and dropped his weapon or made any other noise, it might provoke the gunmen to open up inside, causing carnage. Jack slowly turned toward the door and shuffled back a meter or so, keeping low so that he was invisible from inside, holding the Beretta out in front of him with both hands. He would have to ignore the pain in his shoulder when he struck the door. He closed his eyes and counted down. Three. Two. One.

He leapt up and crashed into the door, pushing it hard against the people squatting inside, turned to the left and fired twice in quick succession, hitting both gunmen in the head, the blood and gray matter splattering against the wall behind as they crumpled to the floor. The crack of the Beretta had deafened him, and for a moment he sensed only the smell of the smoke curling up from the muzzle. The people began to look up at him, their faces contorted with fear, the men with days of stubble and the men and women alike streaked with dirt and dried blood. A figure stood up and detached herself from the rest, a young woman, and lurched toward him, falling into his arms. He realized that he was shaking her by the shoulders, the pistol still in his left hand, trying to snap her out of her shock, shouting at her to pull herself together. He had never spoken to her before, had never even seen her except in Rebecca’s photograph, but in that split second she was all that mattered to him. His hearing came back, a hiss and then a roar that became yells and screams and gunshots, and he heard himself shouting at her. “We’ve come to get you out of here. Stay close behind me. Everyone else has to remain here until the building is clear. You tell them.”

Sahirah turned and spoke quickly in Arabic, her voice shaky and hoarse, repeating herself more loudly as several men got up and tried to push themselves toward the door until others pulled them down. Jack turned back, holding her wrist with his right hand and the Beretta with his left. Two gunmen rushing down the corridor were cut down in a hail of fire from Ahmed and his men, the bullets smashing through the glass screens and pinging off the pipes overhead. Jack crouched down, the girl behind him, and poked his Beretta into the corridor. A voice yelled her name, and Ahmed showed himself at the end of the corridor, his M4 aimed. Jack pushed her ahead and turned back, emptying his Beretta down the other end of the corridor where more gunmen had been shooting at them. He dropped the magazine, inserting the last one and releasing the slide, and then followed Sahirah and Ahmed. He was conscious of Costas ahead of him, and Ahmed’s men firing bursts behind them as they ran. Seconds later they were outside, running down an alley toward a street. As they turned the corner, a pair of pickup trucks hurtled by, the gunmen aboard oblivious to them, heading in the direction of the execution ground in Fustat.

Ahmed pulled Sahirah under an archway and the rest came after him, Jack following. One of the men spoke rapidly in Arabic to Ahmed, who bowed his head briefly and put a hand on the man’s shoulder before turning to Jack. “We’re down to three men. We lost another in the foyer. But there are others like us around the city, pockets of fighters. Every able-bodied Egyptian man has done military service and knows how to use a rifle, and they’ll start coming to us now. That bloodbath in Fustat is going to work against the extremists, a sign of weakness, not strength. While they’re focused on executions, we’re going back into the ministry to kill any others in there and collect their weapons and ammunition, and get those other people out. Now is the time to rally resistance, not later when the gunmen have come down off their high and begun to establish order.”

“I take it you’re not coming with us.”

Ahmed gave him a bleak look. “What would you do in my position? Even if there is Western intervention, it will be too late to save most of my family and friends. This is my country, and I haven’t seen an Egyptian face among the gunmen. I will stay and fight.”

Ahmed turned to Sahirah, embracing her. He released her and peered out into the street. “It’s about three hundred meters to the river. I’ll hold this position until we see you safely on the felucca. Then I’m back inside to help my men get those people out. Walk quickly, but don’t run.”

Costas turned to Ahmed and clasped his hand. “God be with you.”

He nodded, squeezed Costas’ hand and released it, and glanced again at Jack. “And with you too, my friends. Now go.”

Dawn was just breaking as the felucca finally motored clear of the last dilapidated dwellings of northern Cairo, the way ahead of them now clear through the delta toward the sea. It had been a tense hour since they had scrambled on board, with gunmen in trucks careering along the banks and firing bursts into the air. But Ahmed had been right; all attention appeared to be focused on the feeding frenzy in the center of the city. Lanowski had been in satellite contact with Sea Venture and the IMU security team, who had modified the extraction plan in the light of the events of the past twenty-four hours. With the Egyptian air force dysfunctional and the extremists having no air capability, the Israelis had total air superiority over northern Egypt and the Sinai. Ben had liased with their contacts in the Israeli Defense Force and arranged for air cover for a revised helicopter extraction deep within Egypt, only a few kilometers ahead of them now on the east bank of the Nile. Not for the first time Jack was grateful to David Ben-Gurion, whose reserve rank in the IDF had allowed him to pull off something that would never have been officially sanctioned. Israel would undoubtedly maintain her presence in the air over Egypt to secure a buffer zone, but her ground forces were needed to the north and east, where the threat of invasion was greatest by organized, well-equipped forces rather than ragtag gunmen in pickup trucks. Any hint of intervention by Israel in Egypt would only provoke the crisis further, leading to all-out war and extreme acts of terrorism not only against Israel but also against the Western powers, which were perceived to be her allies.

Mohammed slowed the engine and veered the felucca closer to shore, his son making ready the boarding plank. Jack shifted from where he had been lying and looked at his upper right arm. The bullet had glanced off the bone, leaving a gaping exit wound but no apparent damage to major blood vessels. Aysha had done her best to patch it up, cleaning it and applying a shell dressing, but there were no painkillers in the first-aid kit strong enough to have much effect, and there was nothing more to be done until they reached Sea Venture and her bolstered medical team, already on standby to receive Sahirah and any others escaping Egypt who might need assistance.

Aysha clambered over the thwarts to him now, leaving Sahirah with a water bottle looking out over the Nile. “How is she?” Jack said quietly.

“Physically, it’s nothing more than bruises, dehydration, and exhaustion. Mentally she’s obviously traumatized, and desperately worried about Ahmed. She knows his chances are slim.”

“She doesn’t have to worry about her own future. We’ll see to that.”

“How’s Costas?”

Jack jerked his head toward the space under the bow where they had hidden away on the voyage toward Cairo the day before. “The first thing he did was to burrow in his kit bag for some sandwiches he left there. A reserve supply, apparently. Ever since then he and Lanowski have been in there hunched over something technical on the computer. Costas is a rock. Guys like him don’t get traumatized.”

“That’s why you love him, isn’t it?”

Jack paused, the pent-up emotions of the last twenty-four hours suddenly welling up. He swallowed hard, looking away. “Not the word I’d use.”

“No, of course not. Men like you don’t. But you know what I mean.”

Jack took a deep breath. “We just look after each other, that’s all.”

She held his arm. “And you, Jack? You’ve seen some terrible things. You’ve killed people. Don’t tell me that will all wash over you.”

“It won’t. But I’ve been here before. I’ll be fine.”

The felucca came alongside the riverbank, and the plank was laid ashore and tied to the gunwales. Jack gestured at Mohammed. “What will your uncle do?”

“He’ll go back to Alexandria. He’s not like Sahirah, not like me, people who can carve out lives for themselves anywhere in the world. Mohammed is a Nile fisherman and a felucca captain, and his whole life is here. If people like Mohammed were to leave Egypt, then it truly would cease to exist. They are her past, and her future.”

“If there is one.”

“There will be. Inshallah.”

“And you, Aysha?”

Her face hardened. “If it hadn’t been for my son and Maurice, I’d have been with Ahmed right now killing extremists. But I’ll never turn my back. One day the flag will fly again over our institute in Alexandria. You’ll see.”

The boy jumped ashore, laying the plank and holding the bow by the painter. Aysha got up and led Sahirah across to the plank, and Jack followed, pausing to shake hands with Mohammed and his son. He was followed by Costas and Lanowski, who brought the two empty kit bags, Lanowski’s laptop, and any other evidence of their presence with them. Jack crouched down on the riverbank, picked up a handful of dust from the ground, and let it fall through his fingers. “So near, and yet so far.”

“What do you mean?” Costas said.

Jack peered up at him. “You and I know what we saw, but the rest of the world will only be able to take it on our word. It could be a lifetime before anyone gets the chance to explore where we went again.”

Costas went rigid, and put up a finger. “Ah. I nearly forgot.”

“What is it?”

He dug in his pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in tissue. “Two microchips, from your camera and mine. All the video we took.”

Jack stared, stunned. “Where did you hide that?”

“You don’t want to know. It was in the alley just before we were captured. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. Must have looked pretty odd to anyone watching. But there was no way I was going to ditch those chips after all we went through. No way.”

Jack stood up, suddenly more elated than he could remember ever feeling. “Costas, you know sometimes I really do…appreciate you. Yes, that’s the word. Appreciate. Brilliant. You just tied a big red bow around this whole project.”

Costas pushed the package back into his pocket and zipped it up. “Glad to be of service.” He pointed into the air. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

Two Israeli Air Force F16s streaked far overhead, and in the distance Jack could see the Lynx swooping in low from the north, the sound of its rotor reverberating off the waters of the Nile. He shook the rest of the dust from his hand and stood up. “That was quite a night,” he said.

“And now a new day dawns.”

“Yes, it does.” Jack turned and watched Aysha and Sahirah slowly make their way from the felucca to the landing site, followed by Lanowski. “You know that feeling when you’ve been weighed down by a big project, a really important one, and it’s gone on and on because you’ve wanted to get it right, and then finally you’ve nailed it and it feels as if the whole world has lifted off your shoulders?”

“It makes everything ahead seem that bit more exciting. The little things. A holiday on the beach. Gin and tonics. Sandwiches.”

“The big things. That Phoenician shipwreck off Cornwall. They really were the first Europeans to reach America. Whatever did happen to Akhenaten?”

“Some downtime with Maria? A little holiday with your daughter?”

“That too.”

Lanowski came over to them, his robe and artificial beard removed but his face still darkened with polish. “Well, boys,” he said, holding up one hand palm out. “Did we do it, or what?”

Costas high-fived him, and Jack put a hand on his shoulder. “You made the team, Jacob. Good work.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask.” Lanowski squinted into the dust, watching the helicopter begin its descent. “Is it always like that? I mean, the bad stuff? The present day?”

“Not always,” Jack said, following his gaze. “Sometimes, the adventure’s all in the past.”

“I think,” Lanowski said, putting a finger to his lips and furrowing his brow, peering at Jack, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but I think I’d prefer that.”

Jack suddenly felt dead tired; he was feeling the pain in his arm continuously now. He nodded slowly. “Wouldn’t we all.”

They crouched against the downdraft of the rotor, waiting until the Lynx had landed and powered down. Lanowski hurried off to help Sahirah and Aysha on board, and Costas got up, holding the rim of his hat against the dust. “I had a brainstorm just now in the boat about Little Joey,” he said, his voice raised against the noise. “Well, it was Lanowski, actually. It was about the microprocessor for the robotics, and also a small problem with how he swims. If you want a state-of-the-art robot to explore that Phoenician wreck, look no further than our new creation, Little Joey Four.”

Jack cracked a smile. “The big things.”

“You got it. Come on, Jack. Time to let Egypt go.”