David Gibbins - Pyramid

He strode into the dazzling light of the afternoon, and immediately spotted David and two of his men waiting beside a car on the far side of the square.

This was it .

Jack stepped out on to the helipad beside Qaitbey Fort a little over six hours after leaving Rebecca in Jerusalem. The paradrop from the Israeli Air Force Hercules had gone without a hitch, and minutes after being picked up from the Mediterranean by a Zodiac from Sea Venture , he had been strapped into the Lynx helicopter for the eighty-mile flight due south to Alexandria.

The city was still under its elected administration but now close to anarchy, and they had decided to fly in at night under the radar screen in order to minimize the chances of interference from any Egyptian police or coastal surveillance units that might remain functional. As Jack ducked away from the rotor downdraft, he saw a small stack of crates beside the edge of the helipad. He knew from the pilot that they contained the final batch of material from the institute, and that the next scheduled flight of the helicopter out of here would be its last. It would carry Hiebermeyer and Aysha to safety with their last precious records from Egypt.

Across the harbor, the first glow of dawn silhouetted the disk shape of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the streaks of pastel red lit up the water and the bobbing rows of fishing boats moored across the basin. It seemed a timeless scene, yet Jack knew it was an illusion. He walked through the fort entrance into the courtyard and saw Costas, who had preceded him from Sea Venture by several hours and was crouched over several large kit bags. He gestured for Jack to come over.

“Everything’s ready. Two E-suits, and two oxygen rebreather backpacks with double cylinders, giving us about five hours’ endurance. We also have the first two prototypes of my new UPD-4 underwater propulsion device, able to go underwater or skim along the surface. It’s the only way we’re going to get three kilometers underground from the river edge to the pyramid plateau, assuming we can even get through the tunnel entrance.”

“Has Lanowski gotten us some coordinates?”

“He’s inside waiting to tell us.”

“And the kit bags?”

Costas jerked his head toward the harbor. “Aysha’s uncle Mohammed has a motorized felucca. He and his son are coming any time now to take the bags and stow them out of sight. He’s going to take us up the Nile past Cairo to our insert point. We’ll be travelling in daylight, but that means we’ll be less conspicuous among the other daytime traffic on the river than we would be at night. It’ll give us a chance to get some rest before the night ahead.”

“What’s our departure time?”

“He wants to leave at 0800. That’s two hours from now. The Lynx is scheduled to leave later in the morning to give Maurice and Aysha a chance to do a final shutdown on this place, but that might be ramped forward if things heat up.”

“Is that likely?”

“There’ve been shootings and explosions through the night. Mostly it’s been gangs of local men taking on the extremists who have been embedded here and making their presence known over the past few days. But there are additional gunmen poised to take over in the event of a coup. I’ve just spoken to Ben on the satellite phone, and the latest intel is that there’s a forward camp just inside the Libyan border comprising several hundred men with pickup trucks, almost certainly tasked to take Alexandria. They’ll be joined by much larger groups heading up from Sudan toward Cairo. The Egyptian military has been so extensively infiltrated by extremist sympathizers that it’s no longer an effective defensive force for the government. Once the gunmen arrive, all resistance will crumble and this place will go over to the dark side. It could happen at any time.”

“Did Ben say anything about the situation with the girl in Cairo?”

“He hasn’t been able to raise the antiquities director or his intel contact in Cairo. The deadline for a response is 1230 this morning Egyptian time. It doesn’t look promising, Jack, but we have to hold on until then. I know that Aysha’s got another option.”

Jack grunted. “Okay. Let’s hear what Lanowski has to say.”

Costas took a swaddled package from the top of one of the kit bags and handed it to Jack. “Three extra magazines loaded personally by me, and the Beretta stripped and oiled. I’ve got a Glock and a few other goodies from Sea Venture . If we’re caught out, we can’t surrender to these people, Jack. By the time the coup’s in full swing, they won’t be taking any prisoners.”

Jack strapped on the holster, took out the Beretta, ejected and then replaced the magazine, pulled the slide to the rear and released it to chamber a round, and then replaced it in the holster. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move.”

Fifteen minutes later they stood with Aysha and Hiebermeyer behind Lanowski, who was sitting in front of the last remaining computer console in the operations room. Everything else was bare, the books and files and posters gone. All that remained beside the computer on the desk was an open briefcase and a satellite phone. Jack leaned over and stared at the image of the radiating Aten symbol from the plaque that Lanowski had just opened up on the screen. It showed the additional fragment with the line running to a point where the depiction showed the River Nile. “We’ve got a little over an hour before the felucca is ready,” he said. “I want everything you’ve got on those Nile coordinates, but before that I want a full operational briefing, everything we know about the archaeology under that plateau. This is the last chance we’ve got.”

Hiebermeyer unrolled a map from the briefcase showing the Giza plateau, the Nile, and the southern Cairo suburbs in between. “All right, Jack. During the 1980s an international company was hired to construct a new sewage system under the Giza suburb, to the south of old Cairo abutting the pyramid plateau. It was an unparalleled opportunity for archaeology, promising the kind of revelations we’ve seen in Athens with construction work in advance of the Olympics or in Istanbul with the new Bosporus tunnel terminus. But the need to get those sewers done was truly desperate, and corners were cut. We got a tantalizing glimpse of what might lie beneath, nothing more. I was a student at the time and managed to join the archaeological team monitoring the work.”

“Unofficially, as I recall,” Jack said. “Your supervisor wanted you to finish your doctorate, but you wanted a finger in everything going on in Egypt. The antiquities director at the time point-blank refused you a permit. Had your best interests at heart.”

“Not the way I saw it at the time,” Hiebermeyer said, shaking his head in frustration. “If I’d had another couple of hours out there, we might be a lot closer to our objective right now. I was appalled at how the investigation was shut down as soon as the construction work was finished and all the holes were backfilled. Today it’s all completely buried beneath the suburb that now laps the Giza plateau itself. But the night guard at the most interesting site was a friend of mine, and he let me inside on the final night before it was filled in. What I found was fascinating, though of course I couldn’t tell anyone about it as I was there illegally. At the time I had bigger fish to fry, or so I thought, and I set it aside in my mind. But it suddenly makes sense. This is huge , Jacob.”

Lanowski tapped a key, and an aerial photo of the Giza plateau appeared on the screen, showing the three pyramids and the Sphinx, the mass of lesser structures and excavated foundations in front of the Great Pyramid, and in the foreground the sprawling buildings of the modern suburb. Lanowski tapped again and the scene transformed into an isometric computer-generated image with a reconstructed overlay showing the plateau with the ancient structures intact. The modern suburb had disappeared, replaced by regular cultivated fields, and suddenly the jumble of ruins in front of the pyramids made sense, with rectilinear buildings, courtyards, and linked causeways. The most striking addition on the edge of the floodplain in front of the pyramids was a large man-made basin and a complex of canals, one of them leading to an irregular waterway about a kilometer east of the plateau that was clearly a branch of the Nile.