David Gibbins - Pyramid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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