David Gibbins - Pyramid

“Roger. Go ahead.”

Costas finned into the crack again, and then pushed himself out. “Fire in the hole. Swim hard right.” Jack followed him along the face of the riverbank and came to a halt behind a rock that protruded between them and the likely blast radius. “Okay,” Costas said. “Now.” Three nearly simultaneous detonations shook the water, causing the rock to shift slightly and a pressure wave to pass through Jack’s body. Costas immediately swam back, and Jack followed. On his terrain mapper he could see the jerky image of rocks tumbling down to the base of the slope. Ahead of them a hole about a meter and a half across had opened up where the charges had been set. Costas poked his head through and then withdrew, detaching the marker buoy from the front of his suit and holding it out. “It’s clear. There’s open water beyond, presumably the tunnel. You good to go?”

Jack stared through, seeing only darkness. Releasing the buoy was the signal for Mohammed to leave, though it still left them the option of egressing this way if the tunnel beyond proved to be blocked. They should ideally do a recce before releasing the buoy, but he knew that by now Mohammed would be desperate to get back through Cairo before the river became a no-go zone. He turned to Costas. “Do it.”

Costas released the buoy, and a few seconds later Jack heard the throb of the boat’s diesel engine firing up. Mohammed must have been waiting with his hand poised over the starter. Costas immediately swam through the crack, and Jack followed, both pushing their aquajets in front of them. As they passed through the haze of silt created by the explosion, the external water temperature dropped by over ten degrees and the visibility opened up. The water was no longer clouded by river sediment. They panned their headlamps around and an extraordinary scene came into view. They had passed through a monumental entranceway, and ahead of them a tunnel with smoothed walls about five meters in diameter extended into the darkness as far as Jack could see. Below them the cascade of rock created by the explosion in 1892 lay over the hull of a wooden boat, so shattered that it was barely recognizable.

Jack remembered Corporal Jones’ account of that night. Chaillé-Long had clearly survived the sinking, somehow avoiding being sucked under and making his way to the riverbank, but the boat’s captain and any crew must have died almost instantly. Jones’ survival was little short of a miracle. He had been sucked through and rode the wave far down the tunnel, something that must have contributed to the haunted state of the man whom Howard Carter had met months later dazed and begging on the streets of Old Cairo.

Jack adjusted his headlamp beam and saw something metallic pinned under one side of the wreckage. “My God,” he exclaimed, his heart pounding. It was the diver . With some trepidation he finned closer, and brushed the silt from the man’s visor. The glass was corroded and opaque, but inside it he could see the amorphous fatty remains of a human face, the eye sockets filled with white matter. He realized that the rest of the man’s body must be in the same condition, held in place by the canvas suit and the straps of his equipment. He gently pushed the head to one side to look at the valve arrangement of the breathing apparatus. He glanced back at Costas. “You need to see this.”

Costas was preoccupied with his aquajet. “What is it?” he said.

“I’ve just met our French diver.”

“What do you mean, just met him?”

“He’s fully intact. I mean his equipment. What’s inside is pretty well preserved too. Adiposed.”

“I don’t want to see, Jack. I really don’t. That’s what we’ll look like a hundred years from now if we don’t get out of this place.”

“Fascinating equipment. Looks like a fully developed demand valve, fifty years before the Cousteau-Gagnan device.”

“1892,” Costas replied, still preoccupied. “France was the hotbed of diving invention, with Rouquayrol having developed compressed air cylinders and Denayrouze a reduction valve. It always amazes me that it took so long to mate them effectively and develop a proper automatic demand valve.”

“Imagine the military applications in the arms race leading up to the First World War.”

“That’s probably why it never saw the light of day. It was probably his only working example and he’d kept it secret. It was a highly competitive world.”

“You need to see it.”

“I’ll look at your pictures. After I’ve had several stiff drinks. Meanwhile we have a problem. My aquajet’s gone dead.”

The water suddenly shimmered, and out of instinct Jack powered forward into the tunnel. There was a dull rumble, and he was slammed by a violent surge in the water, tumbling him over on to his back. He quickly righted himself, checking his readout for any damage to his equipment, and looked back. He had guessed what had happened, and his fears were confirmed. The corpse had disappeared beneath a massive fall of rock and debris. Through the swirl of sediment that now filled the water, he could just make out their entry point, now completely blocked. He saw Costas recovering himself and finning back a few strokes, scanning the rockfall with his terrain mapper. “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” he announced. “My aquajet is now the least of our worries.”

Jack looked back to where he had been examining the diver. “There is some more bad news. My aquajet’s crushed under the rock. The propeller’s sheared off.”

“We can both use mine, though it will double the drain on the battery. That is, if it starts. I think the shock wave of our explosion knocked it off-line. I’m rebooting it now.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment and then looked back through the settling silt at the jumble of rock where the entrance had been. “No more C5,” Jack said.

“No more C5,” Costas repeated. “But you’d need a cruise missile to open up that entrance now.”

“What’s your predicted oxygen timeout?”

“Two hours and fifty-five minutes at my current breathing rate.”

Jack turned and stared down the tunnel. Two hours and fifty-five minutes, and at least five kilometers until the beginning of the Giza plateau, the point where the tunnel might rise above the waterline. There was no way they could make that distance, or even half of it, without the aquajet. The passage down the tunnel had been the biggest gamble of their plan, and the odds were now stacked dramatically against them. If Costas’ aquajet failed to start, or if it ran out partway along the tunnel, they would be doomed to an inevitable agonizing countdown, able only to swim forward in desperation until exhaustion overtook them and their oxygen ran out. Jack stared into the constricting walls of the tunnel and the black hole ahead. For the first time he felt a tightness in his chest, a pinprick of fear. They might not get out of here alive.

He swam over and grasped the right handle of the aquajet, and watched as Costas’ finger hovered over the trigger in front of the left handle. Everything now depended on what happened next. For a moment they hung there motionless, side by side, the aquajet held in front of them, aimed down a tunnel that right now seemed more forbidding than any they had ever dived down before. Their survival, even if they made it to the surface, was threatened by the apocalypse of biblical proportions that was now engulfing Egypt.

Costas pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled again. Still nothing . Jack stopped breathing. Costas held down the emergency start switch on top of the aquajet and pulled the trigger again. Suddenly it whirred to life, and Costas gunned it a few times. It moved them forward. He put it in neutral and held it firmly in front. “You ready for this?” he said. “Prepare for the ride of your life.”