David Gibbins - Pyramid

It felt good to be alive .

Twenty minutes later Jack finished wrapping a bandage around his forearm and stared out the front viewing port at the sarcophagus. Inside it he knew lay the plaque they had discovered on their dive to the wreck three months previously, something that Colonel Vyse must have found inside the pyramid and included as an added extra for the British Museum when he consigned his cargo to the Beatrice that day in 1837 in Alexandria harbor. It was not the plaque they had seen that had spurred Jack to come back here, as they had been able to record all the surviving carving three months earlier, but rather the hope that they might find the fragment a meter or so across that had been missing from one corner, the sharp edges suggesting that the break had been recent rather than ancient and might have taken place during the wrecking. The plaque had shown the Aten sun symbol superimposed on a plan of the pyramids at the Giza plateau, with the orb of the Aten in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure and the radiating lines extending eastward toward the site of modern-day Cairo and the Nile. There was a chance, just a chance, that the missing fragment might show the intersection of the thickest radiating line with the river at a point just south of modern Cairo, the clue that Jack needed to the location of another entrance into the underground complex that he and Costas had seen from beneath the pyramid.

Jack glanced across at Costas, who was absorbed in a mass of wiring that he had disengaged from the upper casing of the bathysphere. Jack tapped the viewing port. “Come and look at this. Tell me I’m seeing things.”

Costas grunted, left a pair of miniature pliers dangling from a wire, and slid over beside Jack. “What are you looking at?”

“About two meters in front of us, at eleven o’clock, nearly abutting the sarcophagus. Just visible sticking out of the silt.”

Costas pressed his face against the middle of the glass. “Doesn’t look like ship structure or fittings. Looks like it might be stone.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s off-white, like marble.”

“The missing fragment of the plaque?”

“Any chance of getting the manipulator arm to work?”

Costas jerked his head back toward the dangling mass of wires. “Not a chance, Jack. We’ve got life support, that’s all. Somehow when that coil hit the sub, it short-circuited the main electronics board. It’s more than I can fix down here.”

Jack stared at the few centimeters of white stone visible in the silt. So near, yet so far . It was close enough that he felt he could almost reach out and grab it, yet he may as well be trying to touch ice on Mars. He took a deep breath, feeling the ache in his lungs. He would have to wait and see where they stood with the excavation, whether the backup submersible or remote-operated vehicle could examine his find, something that would take precious time that he could ill afford if he were to return to Egypt before the country went into meltdown.

A swirl of sediment filled his view, and in the distortion through the left side of the port he saw a commotion on the seafloor. Apart from a few diaphanous fish, he had seen little sign of life in the desolation outside, and he peered with some curiosity, expecting something larger. Suddenly an eye appeared only inches away, staring directly at him, luminous, blinking, the size of a baseball. He jumped back, startled, and then saw the flexible metallic neck. “Costas, we’ve got a friend.”

Costas slid back alongside him. “Joey!” he exclaimed excitedly, putting his hand against the Perspex. “I knew he’d come. Good boy.”

The eye retracted, looking down, and a manipulator arm came into view and pivoted at the elbow and wrist. It had five metallic digits just like a human hand. Behind it Jack could see the yellow carapace covering the batteries and electric motor that powered the water jets, and an array of tools that Costas and his team had built into it, all of it operated from the surface via a fiber-optic cable that was just visible trailing off above. The forefinger of the hand pointed down at a tablet-sized LCD screen on the front of the ROV just below the manipulator arm, and Jack could just make out letters appearing on it, distorted through the Perspex cone of the viewing port. Costas pressed his face against the center of the cone, where there was the least distortion, and after a minute or so he rolled over and turned back to Jack.

“Joey’s inspected the manifold, and everything looks okay. They can’t reconnect our communications cable, so it’s going to have to be done the old-fashioned way, with written messages. The problem with the derrick was an electronic switch override, which the engineer has replaced. They’re currently recoiling the cable on the spool and expect to be ready to retrieve us in about twenty minutes. The recompression chamber is prepped and the medical team is waiting. You’re supposed to breathe pure oxygen.”

“I’m fine,” Jack said. “Tell them there’s no evidence of barotrauma.”

“You know what the medicos are like. And Joey’s watching.”

Jack grunted, pulled the oxygen mask from the emergency bottle beside his seat, cracked the valve, and pressed it against his mouth and nose. “Okay?” he said, his voice muffled.

Costas turned back to read the screen. “Meanwhile, Joey’s going to carry on snaking the hawser under the sarcophagus, the job we were meant to be doing. Now that they know we’re safe and sound, they’re going to carry on with the plan. As soon as we’re back on deck, the cable will be dropped again for Joey to attach to the hawser. Fortunately the media people haven’t yet been allowed out, so they’ll have no idea what’s happened, other than a small delay. They’ll be told that the decision was made to use the ROV rather than the manned submersible because Joey’s manipulator arm was better up to the task than the arms on the submersible. Which happens to be true.”

Jack stared out of the viewing port beside him at the white form of the sarcophagus. The fragment of stone protruding from the silt was only about a meter from Joey. He sidled over to the main port beside Costas, and pointed exaggeratedly at it. The eye looked at him and cocked sideways, and the hand twisted around with the palm up, as if questioning. Jack dropped the oxygen mask, picked up a pencil and notepad and quickly scribbled on it, and then pressed the pad up against the window. The eye slowly scanned the paper, and Jack turned to Costas. “If we’ve got twenty minutes, that might be just enough time for Joey to see whether that slab is the missing fragment.”

The screen on the ROV began scrolling out letters again, and Costas pressed his face against the Perspex to read it. “The ROV operator is under strict orders from Captain Macalister to focus on the task at hand. Under no circumstances is he to let Dr. Howard divert Joey to dig a hole somewhere else.”

“You try. Doesn’t Joey have a mind of his own?”

Costas scribbled on the pad and pressed it against the window. Joey read it, flexed his hand, looked up and around as if to check that he was not being watched, and then backed off slowly. “I think I got a result,” Costas said. “I told him he wouldn’t get a treat unless he obeyed you.”

“You mean the ROV operator, or Joey?”

Costas grinned, and they both stared out the port. As Joey turned toward the sarcophagus, they could see his entire form. Unlike the box shape of most ROVs, Joey had a tapering body and an extended tail that flexed as he swam, providing improved hydrodynamics and stability while he was working on the seabed. With his second manipulator arm now extended, he looked like an outsized prehistoric scorpion. He angled gracefully through the water and came to a halt just above the protruding stone. The eye extended ever farther on its mount, snaking around and down and peering at the slab from every angle.