David Gibbins - Pyramid

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your lungs rupture like an overfilled balloon.”

“Surely Monsieur Guerin would know of such things.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know this for a fact? How so?”

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

“Was Mayne alone in his enterprise?”

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

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

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