David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack turned to face ahead, regulating his breathing until he was hanging almost motionless in the water. He thought about what Costas had just said. A war about to start . He stared north along the slope to a rocky promontory that marked the limit of their survey area. Earlier that day an Egyptian navy patrol boat had told the dive boat captain in no uncertain terms that he must not stray into the military zone that lay beyond the promontory. Tensions between Egypt and Israel were higher than they had been for decades, with the Middle East closer to a meltdown than it had been since the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The extremist hold on Iraq had been tightening again; only Iran remained a beacon of stability, ironically courted by the West after years of standoff. To the north of Israel, the true intentions of the extremists who had flocked into Syria during the civil war had become clear, with their attention turning from fighting the regime to sending rockets and suicide bombers across the Israeli border. To the south, the Israelis had watched the political turmoil in Egypt with dismay, as the newly installed Islamist regime was now itself threatened by extremists, a faction whose sympathies lay more with the extremists in Syria and Iraq than with the interests of the Egyptian people. Most worrying, it had become clear that the Egyptian army, in the past a force for moderation, had been infiltrated to the highest level by officers in the extremist camp, a process that had been going on in secret for years.

A military coup now would not bring stability as it had done in the past, but it would provide clout for an extremist takeover. And everyone knew that if that happened, the Israelis would have no choice but to act. A war now would not be a lightning conflict as in 1973, brought to heel by superpower intervention, but a prolonged conflict, escalating into surrounding countries, into Libya, Somalia, and Iraq, drawing in Iran and Turkey. Outside powers would lack the strength to mediate a peace, their credibility undermined by the failed interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The war would start on the eastern frontiers of Egypt, in the skies above them now, and could turn into the cataclysm that everyone watching the Middle East had feared since the end of the cold war: a new kind of world war, one marked not only by a wildfire of conventional conflicts but also by unfettered terrorism, paralyzing the world and bringing fear to people in a way that had not been seen since the threat of a nuclear holocaust two generations before.

As if to underline his thoughts, the deep rumble of a low-flying jet coursed through Jack. It was one in a succession of warplanes that had been flying toward the Egyptian border over the past few hours. The captain of the dive boat had been jittery enough without the ultimatum from the patrol vessel, and he was now standing off from their anchorage point with his engine already fired up. Jack and Costas were here anonymously, posing as recreational divers, having chartered the boat with the cover of being photographers. The only way now that Jack could extend their time on-site would be for him to blow their cover and tell the authorities that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough discovery, but to do so would be to court disaster. The new antiquities director in Cairo was a political stooge and had been shutting down foreign excavations in Egypt on a daily basis. A month ago he had been enraged to discover that Jack and Costas had been exploring beneath the pyramids at Giza, had refused their request to clear the underground passage they had found, and had rescinded their permit.

Anything Jack tried now would almost certainly result in the International Maritime University being blacklisted in Egypt, his deportation, and the closure of all the remaining IMU projects in the country, as well as threatening Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, an affiliate of IMU. At this moment Maurice was working desperately to complete his excavation of the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum oasis, the culmination of a lifelong passion for Egyptology that might still produce astonishing finds. For him, every moment now counted just as it did for Jack, but Hiebermeyer’s entire soul and career were wrapped up in ancient Egypt, and Jack was not willing to risk his friend’s chance of bringing his excavation to some kind of completion. There was no leeway: This dive would be their last one on-site, with the chances of them ever returning overshadowed by the cloud that now hung over the entire Middle East, not just Egypt.

Jack closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in slowly and deeply, knowing that each draw on his tank now represented a final countdown to the end of the dive. Over the past few months in Sudan and Egypt, he had pushed the envelope further than he ever had done before, and he had raised more than a few eyebrows among the IMU board of directors. Officially Jack was IMU’s archaeological director and Costas its submersibles expert. When Jack had set up IMU fifteen years before, he had relinquished control to an independent board because he had seen too many institutes wobble under the control of a founding director who had put too many eggs in one basket. IMU projects were now spread around the globe, encompassing oceanography and geology as well as archaeology, and IMU acted as an umbrella for affiliated institutes, including Hiebermeyer’s beside the ancient harbor of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. One of the board’s remits was to rein in any project that had become a political flash point, potentially threatening IMU’s reputation and wider activities in the region. Through no fault of his own, Jack had endured the Sudanese authorities terminating his diving in the Upper Nile and had then experienced the barely contained furor over their pyramid exploration, setting him up against the same extremist element that had infiltrated the regimes in both countries. For some days now, Jack had wondered whether it would be the new Egyptian antiquity authorities or the IMU board of directors that would cause his final departure from Egypt. Either way, he knew his time was running perilously short.

Jack glanced at his wrist computer. There were still fifteen minutes of dive time left, precious moments in which he could push aside the modern world and focus all his being on the diving. For Jack, no amount of equipment preparation, of preparation of body and mind, of bringing a lifetime of experience to bear could guarantee his ability to see beyond the perimeter of his vision to what might lie ahead. Living for the moment was more than just an intoxication for him; it had become a tool of his trade, sharpening his senses and his acuity of observation, clearing his mind and allowing him to see more in a few moments on the seabed than he could do in hours on land. He stared down the slope and saw the seconds slipping away on his dive computer. He knew he was going to have to bring all that acuity to bear if they were to stand any chance of finding what all his instincts told him lay out there: a revelation that just might shake the foundations of history.

Jack stared up at the hull of the dive boat some thirty meters overhead, watching as the captain gunned the engine to keep clear of the shore. Something nudged him.

“Jack.” He heard the suck of another regulator, and turned to see Costas hovering behind him. It was still a double-take to see him in rented scuba gear rather than the usual E-suit, an all-environment dry suit with Kevlar exoskeleton and an integrated re-breather that Costas had developed more than ten years before at the International Maritime University engineering lab in Cornwall. He had been constantly refining it since then. Out here anything with an IMU logo was going to attract unwanted attention. Even the full-face masks with intercom were a lucky find in the backroom of the dive operator they had decided to hire. All they had brought of their own was Costas’ photo rig and the GoPro camera he had strapped to his forehead. Yet Jack relished going back to basics, to the kind of equipment he had pored over in dive magazines as a boy. Sucking on a battered rental regulator gave him the same thrill he had felt when he did it on his first open-water dive all those years ago.