David Gibbins - Pharaoh

Costas watched Hiebermeyer’s shorts sink dangerously below his waistline, and then stared as he hitched them up and tightened the lederhosen suspenders. He shook his head. ‘Well, if Aysha can deal with you, she can deal with any man.’

Aysha waved dismissively. ‘Maurice is a piece of cake. Dangle an Egyptian mummy in front of him, and he’s putty in my hands.’

‘Even a crocodile mummy?’

‘Just one mummy,’ Hiebermeyer said, gazing fondly at Aysha and the baby, then glaring at Costas. ‘Just remember, not all the crocodiles around here are mummified.’

Costas suddenly looked dismayed, and Jack grinned. ‘While the inspection’s going on, my aim is to be underwater. It’s always the best place to be.’

Costas looked doubtfully at the river. ‘ Usually the best place to be.’ He checked his iPhone. ‘Huh. A message from Sofia.’

‘She reminding you about that dinner date?’ Jack said.

‘She says she’s sending you her draft of the press release on the Beatrice for your approval. And she’s come up with a name for the submersible: Nina . It was one of Columbus’ ships; apparently its master was an ancestor of Sofia’s. It means “girl”. I like it. She wants us to do more exploration in the Americas.’

Aysha peered at him. ‘Who’s Sofia?’

‘Oh, just a friend.’

‘A dinner-date friend?’

‘I’ve sent her a picture of me with Ahren.’

‘Whoa,’ Aysha said. ‘That’s diving in at the deep end.’

‘Just showing her my friends.’

Aysha smiled. ‘You know how to touch a lady’s heart.’

Costas paused. ‘Will Sofia think I’m hitting on her?’

‘Well, are you?’

‘She and Costas met in a submersible,’ Jack said. ‘They plummeted to the depths together.’

‘You were there too, Jack!’ Costas exclaimed.

‘So, you’re taking a page right out of Lanowski’s book,’ Hiebermeyer said, smiling at Costas.

‘I’d rather not take anything out of Lanowski’s book,’ he muttered.

Hiebermeyer slapped him on the back. ‘You ever need any advice on the man stuff, you come to me.’

‘Yeah, you and Lanowski both,’ Costas said glumly.

‘He’d be more than happy to help out, I’m sure,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘We could do the male bonding thing, a weekend maybe, and combine it with the two-day seminar I know he’s itching to give you on submersible circuitry. Or is it three days? He’s told me all about it. I think he called it an idiot’s guide. I might even sit in on it myself. I could learn a few things.’ He beamed at Jack mischievously.

‘I think you’ve just been had,’ Jack said, turning to Costas. ‘No more jokes about his shorts, maybe?’

‘No way,’ Costas said, suddenly determined, giving Hiebermeyer a steely look. ‘From now on, it gets serious.’

Jack grinned, and then his phone rang. He answered it quickly. ‘That was Ibrahim. He’s got the equipment stowed in the Toyota ready to drive to the river’s edge. Time to saddle up.’

‘What do you mean, saddle up ?’

‘I thought we’d take a camel ride to get there. Immerse ourselves in desert culture before we immerse ourselves in the Nile. The full Sudan experience.’

Costas stared at the camel, which had ambled over to the plateau and was gazing at him dolefully. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘That thing’s got it in for me.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ Aysha said. ‘If you mount it while it’s lying down, you won’t have to go anywhere near its orifices.’

Costas looked at the camel, than back at the river. ‘Camel, crocodile. Camel, crocodile. Camel. Crocodile.’

Hiebermeyer thrust a picture he had been carrying of a Nile crocodile in front of Costas. ‘Snap,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, snap?’

‘I mean snap, the card game. If you don’t get on the camel now, I’ll put another picture on this one and then when you get in the water, snap .’

‘ Snap ,’ Costas repeated feebly. ‘Okay. I get it. Crocodiles. A really bad joke. You can make up for it by helping me get up on this camel. Where’s yours, Jack?’

Jack pretended to look shocked. ‘Oh, I’m not getting on a camel. No fear. I’ll be walking far ahead, at the end of a very long lead.’ He took a deep breath and turned to the others. ‘Good luck with the inspection, Aysha. I thought I’d been pretty well everywhere, but I’ve never dived in the Nile. I’m itching to get in.’

He turned and peered again at the plateau beside the river where the temple lay concealed. Only a few hours earlier, he had been flying over the Abu Simbel temple beside Lake Nasser, imagining diving into the submerged chambers in the cliff face where the statues of Ramses the Great had once stood. That would have been a remarkable dive, for the haunting atmosphere rather than the possibility of new discoveries; before the Aswam dam, the inner chambers at Abu Simbel had been above the level of the Nile and had been scoured by treasure-hunters and archaeologists for generations. Here, though, it was different. The temple at Semna had never been explored, and may have been sealed up for millennia. They might be like Carter and Carnarvon in the tomb of Tutankhamun, entering a space that had been undisturbed since the time of the pharaohs, except underwater and with dangers that made the curse of the tomb seem lame. But they had dived on the very edge of possibility before – into an iceberg, down mine shafts, above a live volcano – and Jack would confront the risks here as he had done then, with Costas to keep him from straying too far into the unknown. He felt the adrenalin pumping already. This could be the dive of a lifetime. If they could get inside.

He looked at Costas. ‘You good to go?’

Costas picked up the camel’s lead and handed it to him, a doleful expression on his face. ‘All I ever wanted to do was build submersibles. And here I am about to ride a camel across the desert in the Sudan, and then get eaten by crocodiles. And don’t say it,’ he said, glancing at Hiebermeyer. He shook his head again, and then turned to Jack, cracking a smile. ‘But you know I’ll follow you anywhere, Jack. Even on a camel. And in answer to your question, yes .’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m good to go.’

Jack slipped into the water at the edge of the river and felt the wonderful sense of relief he always experienced at the beginning of a dive, when the weight of his equipment disappeared and all he could think about was the excitement ahead. The submersible two days before had been a different kind of thrill, but only because the extraordinary allure of their prize had allowed him to overcome his dislike of confinement in small spaces and his yearning for the freedom he was about to experience now. He had been looking forward to diving again since he had last donned equipment more than a month ago at the IMU training facility in England, and the fact that this was his first ever dive in the Nile meant that the adrenalin was pumping at an even higher rate than usual. He looked at Costas, who was floating beside him with his visor already shut and his headlamp on. They were wearing all-environment e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced drysuits with fully integrated buoyancy and breathing systems controlled by computers built into the back of their helmets. The contoured backpacks contained three high-pressure cylinders filled with gas tailored for each dive, in this case air for the main part of the dive, a helium–oxygen mix for the deeper part and pure oxygen for decompression during their ascent, all of it attuned to a dive with a predicted depth of over sixty metres and a duration of at least an hour. They had no safety backup, but the equipment had been tried and tested in extreme conditions, and they both knew they could rely on each other’s skill-set and the mutual trust they had built up over the years.