David Gibbins - Pyramid

Costas’ voice sounded distant. “You know, Jack, I could really do with one of those sandwiches now. Promise me you’ll have them if I go. I can’t bear to think of them wasted.”

“We’ll have them together. A picnic on the beach. You ready?”

“I meant to say, Jack. About everything. You know.”

“I know. Me too. Keep focused.”

“Camera. Keep my camera. And my headlamp.”

Jack unlocked and snapped the unit off the top of Costas’ helmet and wrapped the straps around his wrist. “Done.”

“Now, Jack. Now .”

Jack quickly snapped open the locking clamps, twisted the helmet and lifted it off, and pushed it out of the way behind the backpack. Costas had shut his eyes tight against the shock of the water, but he immediately put in the mouthpiece and took a breath. He reached down and took his spare mask out of his other thigh pocket, pressed it to his face, pulled the strap over the back of his head, and cleared the mask, giving Jack the diver’s okay signal as he did so. Jack remembered that they could no longer talk, that all he could do if the terrain mapper showed signs of the surface ahead would be to gesture. He unclipped the straps of Costas’ backpack and pushed it off, freeing him of the helmet and all encumbrances, and then took out his own emergency air and cracked it open. He held it ready to hand to Costas when the first one ran out. He had no idea what he would do then, when there was nothing more, when Costas began to breathe in water and convulse. He had seen it enough times to know that drowning was not the easy death that people imagined, but tormenting, horrible, like a slow hanging, the victim conscious for a few moments of terrible pain and sometimes taking minutes to die. He forced himself ahead, powering after Costas. All he could do now was hope.

A little over five minutes later, Costas put up his right hand, still finning hard, and Jack put his emergency air into it. Costas sucked the last of his own, spat it out, and put Jack’s in. He took a deep breath and powered on ahead. At this rate of breathing, he had only six, maybe seven minutes left. Still there was nothing on the terrain mapper. Jack hardly dared glance at the timer on the readout inside his helmet. Five more minutes had gone. There could be less than two minutes left. His heart began to pound, his mouth was dry. This was not happening .

And then he saw it. Fifty, maybe sixty meters ahead, the tunnel seemed to slope up. A few moments later he was absolutely sure of it. He finned as hard as he could, drawing parallel with Costas and turning to him, gesturing forward with a sloping motion with one hand and opening all five fingers of the other to show the distance. Then he realized that he was no longer seeing exhaust bubbles. Costas had taken his last breath. He spat out the mouthpiece, put his head down, and swam as fast as he could. They were so close now that Jack readied himself to pull Costas along if he became unconscious, knowing that there might be a glimmer of hope that he could be saved if he could pull him to the surface in time.

Then, miraculously, he saw the unmistakeable glimmer of surface water in his beam, and seconds later they exploded through, Costas gasping and coughing, floating on his back and breathing heavily. Jack panned his beam around, seeing a slope leading up to some kind of entranceway, and beside them a wharf that surrounded the end of the channel, evidently the ancient dock. He glanced at the external sensor array to check the air quality, and then unlocked and wrenched off his helmet, relishing the cool air on his face and taking a few deep breaths. He turned to Costas. “You okay?”

Costas was still floating on his back, his arms and legs outstretched. “Okay,” he said, his breathing becoming normal. “But hungry. Really hungry.”

Jack sniffed the air tentatively. “Extraordinary smell,” he said.

Costas heaved himself over and hauled himself partway up the slope. “That, my friend, is the smell of ancient Egypt. And from where I am, it smells good. Very good.”

“Interesting,” Jack said, peering back inside his helmet. “My readout shows a slightly lower than normal oxygen content.”

“We know of only one open ventilation point, the shaft under the pyramid where the light got through. And we don’t know yet whether that links to this tunnel.”

“I smell jasmine, thyme, acacia. Almost a hint of incense, and a definite odor of organic decay.”

“Must be something recent,” Costas said, struggling out of his fins. “Rats, maybe. This is a good place for rats.”

“Rats and little fish in the canal. That’s what Jones survived on. When he wasn’t eating mummies.”

“No way. You don’t know that.”

“That’s what Howard Carter’s diary entry said. After weeks down here Jones was desperate, and opened up some coffins. It must have been like eating dessicated old wasp’s nests. With eyes and teeth.”

“Don’t, Jack. Just as I was about to have lunch.”

“It’s midnight. And we didn’t bring a picnic.”

Costas patted the bulge in the front of his boiler suit. “Oh yes we did.”

“You didn’t really bring sandwiches.”

“What do you think I was doing while I was waiting for you to come from Jerusalem? Took over the entire galley on Sea Venture . Brought my own ingredients, air-freighted out from my favorite deli in Manhattan. The one I always tell you I’m going to take you to one day. Gino’s, where you can get a haircut and a shave while you wait. You think you’ve gone to heaven.”

“Okay,” Jack said, grinning and helping Costas to his feet. “We’ll have lunch. But let’s find a way out of this place first, right? Otherwise we might be rationing your very special sandwiches over a very long time, and looking for alternative food sources?”

A little fish flapped out of the water where it lapped at the edge. Slimy looking and with bulging eyes, it was the only other living thing they had seen since leaving the Nile. Costas contemplated it with a distasteful look on his face, and then edged it back in with his foot. “I don’t like the sound of that at all,” he said. “Not at all .”

“You need more rest?”

Costas shook his head, checking the waist strap on his boiler suit and easing the constriction of the E-suit on his neck. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Jack stared up the slope. “Roger that.”

Jack removed the headlamp console from his rebreather backpack, handed Costas’ back to him, and then eased off the backpack and laid it with his helmet on the sloping floor. There were still over two hours of breathing time left in his cylinder, but with Costas on empty and no way of buddy-breathing, he was not going to carry on alone if they came to another underwater passage. After what had just nearly happened to Costas, and Jack’s reaction to it, they were either getting out of here together or not at all.

They both unwound the straps from the back of the lamp consoles and put them on their heads, first checking that the integrated miniature video cameras were still recording. With the backpack air-conditioning unit removed, the E-suits might become uncomfortably warm, but at the moment that was better than being chilled, and the Kevlar would afford protection against bumps and scrapes along the way. Whatever lay in store for them now, Jack knew it was unlikely to be an easy walk-through. And being in a breathable environment did not mean that an escape tunnel out toward Cairo somewhere ahead was still anything more than a shaky hypothesis.

Costas detached the hose from the hydration pack on the left side of his E-suit and took a deep draw on it, patting his boiler suit as he did so to check that everything was there and still in place. He paused for a moment, delved deep into the front pocket, and removed a watertight bag. He unzipped it, grasped the sandwich inside, and took a huge bite. He munched noisily and swallowed as he replaced the bag. “It was going to be my dying thought, and now it’s my kiss of life. Thank you, Gino.” He took another mouthful of water and stowed the tube. Then he panned his headlamp beam over the top of the ramp. “You think that’s the way to go?”