David Gibbins - Pharaoh

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

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

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

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

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

‘Roger that.’

‘Hold fast. Over and out.’

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

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

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

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

‘Sounds like an IMU project,’ Sofia said.

‘Watch this space,’ Jack replied.

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

‘Excellent,’ Jack murmured. ‘ Excellent. ’

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

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

‘Anyway, why “Oh God”?’ asked Sofia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Got you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You go anywhere interesting?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘When this is all over.’

‘That’s what you always say.’

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

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

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

‘You’re talking about my oldest friend.’

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

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

Sofia grinned. ‘Let’s hear it.’

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

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

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

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