David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack looked at his watch. “Okay. Time for us to go.”

Aysha nodded. “Mohammed has food and drink and sleeping bags on the felucca. All you need to do now is visit the washroom and say your prayers.”

Jack looked around the room. “Anything more we can do?”

“Everything’s on Sea Venture except what you can see here and the crates on the helipad.”

“Institute staff?”

“Anyone who wanted to leave has been airlifted out, along with their families. They’ll get refugee status in the UK.”

Jack turned to Costas and made a twirling motion with one hand. “We need to get the Lynx fired up.”

Costas unclipped the VHF radio from his belt and started walking to the door. “I’m on it.”

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. “We’ll help you get this remaining stuff to the helipad. It’s 0730 hours already, and Mohammed’s probably loaded up and waiting. We can get going early and give him a little leeway.” He turned to Lanowski, who had shouldered a small rucksack and had picked up a crate of books from the floor. “Jacob? You still on for this?”

Lanowski stared at him, his face pale but determined. “Roger that, Jack. I’m good to go.”

Forty minutes later Jack was crouched between the thwarts of the felucca, staring in horror at the scene that was unfolding around them. The explosion they had heard while they were in the operations room had been the first of a succession every few minutes along the harbor front, all of them car bombs. After the third one, Hiebermeyer had decided to bring forward his plans and evacuate the institute immediately. Aysha had left quickly with their driver for Cairo. She was shorn of anything associating her with a foreign institute and was dressed in a burkha with a face veil. A few minutes later Mohammed and his son had finished loading the felucca and poled it away from the quayside. Jack and Lanowski were sitting in the bow, and Costas was helping the boy to fire up the diesel engine. As it coughed to life, the noise was drowned out by the Lynx, which raised a dust storm around the fort as the pilot held the aircraft poised for departure. Jack had watched as Hiebermeyer ran out of the fort with his briefcase and rucksack, ducked down on the helipad while the crewman loaded the last of the crates, and then took the outstretched arms and jumped on board himself. He had turned for a last glimpse of Egypt as the helicopter rose, angled sharply, and then clattered off over the Mediterranean, soon leaving Alexandria and Egyptian airspace far behind and disappearing from view over the northern horizon.

For Jack it should have been a scene of almost unbearable poignancy, watching his friend in his trusty old shorts and boots, still streaked with dirt from his last excavation, leave his beloved Egypt perhaps for the last time. But any reflection was instantly cut short by a cacophony of gunfire and engine revving coming along the highway from the west, the first of the trucks screeching onto the quay mere minutes after the Lynx had taken off. One of them disgorged half a dozen gunmen, who raced up to the fort, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, one of them waving the black flag of the extremists. Within minutes they had entered the fort and raised the flag on a pole above the ramparts. Qaitbay Fort suddenly looked as it had been intended, a stronghold of medieval Islam, all indication of its use over the past few years as an archaeological institute obliterated.

Two trucks raced up to the fort and this time let off a cluster of handcuffed prisoners, all of them Egyptian woman in Western dress, the gunmen rifle-butting them into the courtyard. Seconds later there was an earsplitting clatter of gunfire and the gunmen reappeared, leaving one man at the entrance, and piling back into the trucks. Jack turned away, feeling numb, glad only that Maurice and Aysha had not witnessed what had just happened. As the felucca chugged out into the basin toward the sea, he steeled himself for more to come, keeping his eyes glued on the gunmen at the fort. Suddenly the air was rent by another explosion, deeper and more resonant than the others, and then a rushing noise and the sound of shattering glass. “My God,” Costas exclaimed. “They’ve torched the library.”

Jack spun around, staring at the far side of the harbor. A gas truck had been driven into the foyer of the Bibliotheca and exploded, its wrecked form lying upside down on the road in front. The huge disk shape of the Bibliotheca was wreathed in flame, like a burning sun rising from the eastern horizon. Jack could barely breathe; his mind was reeling. It was as if he had been transported back fifteen hundred years to an event that seemed fossilized in history, too awful to comprehend. But this was real, and happening before his eyes. For the second time in two millennia, the great library of Alexandria had been destroyed by religious extremists, by those who believed that knowledge was offensive to their god. Jack could hear the screams of people streaming out of the building, and bursts of gunfire from the trucks that had ranged up beside the wreck of the tanker, their machine guns trained on the steps and raking them every time another person appeared. It was not just the books that were anathema to the extremists; it was those who had read them as well. In that instant the frailty of civilization seemed laid bare, the foundations of wisdom as fragile as those of morality, with those who espoused it as vulnerable as the women who a few minutes before had paid for their freedom of expression with their lives.

Another burst of automatic fire rang out from near the fort, and Jack spun around. A truck with a gunman on the roof was hurtling along the edge of the harbor to the point closest to the felucca, no more than a hundred yards distant. It screeched to a halt. The gunman vaulted out of the rear and began to taunt a fisherman who was gathering up his net on the quay. The gunman was prodding him with the barrel of his Kalashnikov. The fisherman backed away, his hands in the air, gesticulating toward his family in a small car beside them. The gunman raised his rifle and shot him in the head, watched his body jerk back and fall into the harbor, and then ran along the quay looking for others.

Mohammed gestured frantically at Jack and Costas to get down. They dropped into the scuppers and crawled forward to where Lanowski was already lying under the deck in the bow of the boat, absorbed in checking the battery in one of the beacons. Jack looked back and saw Mohammed unfurl and raise a black flag in the stern, and then slowly swing the tiller to take them farther out into the basin toward the entrance. With any luck there would be more interesting and easier targets for the gunmen than a felucca setting out to sea, especially one that appeared to be sporting the flag of the extremists.

Jack drew himself up farther into the crawl space in the bow of the felucca, wedged his feet beside one of their kit bags, and pushed a sleeping bag forward as a makeshift pillow. He felt the bulge of the Beretta in the holster on his chest, and shifted slightly to make sure the grip was accessible in case it was needed. He could make out Lanowski and Costas lying in the gloom beside him, their faces etched with the reality of what they were undertaking. They all knew there was no going back now. Even if they had decided to abort, Jack would never have risked calling back the Lynx to a place that was crawling with trigger-happy gunmen who almost certainly had SAMs in their trucks. The only way ahead was the one they had mapped out, from one burning cauldron to another, but with a plausible exit strategy. They would stick to their plan.

Jack shifted again, trying to find a more comfortable position, and shut his eyes. He tried to forget what he had just seen, and to think instead of those who had gone before him down the Nile in search of fabulous discoveries, of the sand travellers of the past, those who breathed in the dust of the desert and felt the brush of the wind that blew from the pyramids. He thought of what could lie beneath, of sealed chambers full of treasures, of rows of pottery jars brimming with papyri that might contain all the lost wisdom of the ancient world.