David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack said nothing, but seemed to stare through Costas as they came up level, their masks almost touching. “Uh-oh,” Costas said. “I’ve seen that look before.”

Jack snapped out of his trance, looked up at the boat and then back at Costas, his eyes burning. “As soon as we’ve off-gassed and can fly, I’m going back to the institute in Alexandria.”

Costas peered at him. “You want to get under the pyramid again, don’t you?”

Jack stared at him. “Damn right I do.”

“What’s changed here?”

“It’s not because I think what we’ve found here will give us a glimmer of hope with the Egyptian authorities. If anything, the opposite. That’s why we’re keeping this discovery to ourselves until the time is right.”

“It’s crazy,” Costas said. “Apart from anything else, the press attention this would get around the world might just remind them of the huge tourist revenue they’re in the process of losing by shutting down archaeology in the country.”

“We’re talking about a regime whose ideologues might be about to wind the clock back to year zero. I think they couldn’t care less about tourist dollars.”

“That thug in the Antiquities Department might finally blow a fuse and deport us. It’s only the more moderate elements in government that might stop him from doing that. Anyway, events could be moving too fast for us. We might be flying back into an extremist coup, in which case we may as well just keep on flying.”

“That’s why time is of the essence. If we do still have time in Egypt, it might only be for days or even hours. Are you with me?”

Costas took a final few photos of the scene below, the outcrops now just dark smudges in the shimmer of sand. Jack looked up at the decompression stop, less than ten meters above, and saw the bar vibrate as another fast jet roared overhead. Costas peered again at him. “I know what’s happened. Maurice predicted it. He said that any hope that a discovery out here might allow you to leave Egypt satisfied was misplaced. He said it would just rekindle your desire to get to the bottom of our original quest.”

“Damn right it has,” Jack said.

“And make you take risks. Really big risks that could jeopardize your future and even your life.”

“Been there before.”

“Not like this,” Costas replied. “Maurice’s own words. He knows these people. This time we’re not just dealing with some maverick warlord. The antiquities director may be our bad guy of the moment, but when that coup happens he’ll be ousted by someone who’ll make the Taliban thought police look tame. Cut off his head, and another one will appear. This time we’re up against an ideology, an extremist movement that the world has been fighting since the days of the Mahdi in Sudan, and so far it’s been a losing battle.”

“All the more reason not to give up. You win the fight against ideology with ideas, not with hardware. That’s the lesson of history. If I can find a revelation from the past that adds ammunition to that battle, then it will be worth it.”

“That’s a tall order, Jack. This could just be the highest mountain you’ll climb.”

“You can walk away. I won’t hold it against you. I can go it alone.”

“As if.”

“Well?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jack said. “Submersibles. We’ll definitely need submersibles.”

“You making that up?”

“How else do we get into passages under pyramids too small to dive through?”

Costas narrowed his eyes. “Remote operated vehicles, autonomous android excavators?”

“You name it. Any gismo on the books. You just name it.”

“Little Joey Three, my latest submersible micro-robot? I haven’t told you about him yet. Lanowski and I were perfecting him in the IMU engineering lab just before I came out here. Amazing bionics.”

“Anything. It’s all yours.”

Costas shook his head. “So much for the beach holiday.”

Jack concentrated on his ascent. Costas had been right: a wing and a prayer . They had come here following a report of a find that had suddenly opened up another extraordinary possibility, another part of the trail they had been on for months now, from the ancient crocodile temple they had discovered on the Nile to the pyramids. It was a trail that shadowed one made over a hundred years before at the time of another conflict, the war against the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, a war that itself foreshadowed what was on the verge of happening in the Middle East today. Yet somehow Jack knew that the story of what had gone on in the nineteenth century had not yet been fully told, that somewhere in it there was another key to the quest ahead that needed to be found before they could take a new plunge into the unknown.

Jack looked down and saw that a thin black shape had emerged from the encased chariot wheel in the coral head they had examined. It was wavering like a stalk of sea grass in a current. Other dark shapes appeared from the surrounding heads, and one detached itself and began to move sinuously toward shore. They were sea snakes, ones that had clearly been dormant within the heads but had been disturbed by the divers’ exhaust bubbles and movement. Jack remembered the captain’s story of a swarm of snakes thrashing on the surface, and he began to see more of them now, rising from the coral heads farther down the slope and following the first one toward the place where the other two had apparently sensed the inflow of freshwater from the shore. He felt uneasy, as if by coming to this place they had disturbed something that should have been left alone, a secret that should have died with a pharaoh and his Israelite slave more than three thousand years ago. He saw Costas concentrating on the boat above them as he ascended, and decided not to tell him. There had been enough snakes for one dive, and they needed to look ahead.

Together they reached the metal bar of the decompression stop. Costas turned to him, hanging with one hand on the bar, putting his other hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Before we deactivate the intercom, there’s something I want to pass on. Maurice mentioned it to me just before we left, but we decided not to tell you straightaway, as we thought it would just fuel your frustration about not being able to get back under the pyramid. Apparently, when Aysha was rummaging in the museum, she also found a news clipping from before the First World War about some mad old mystic in Cairo who appeared from nowhere, claiming he was a former British soldier who had been sucked from the Nile into an underworld of mummies and the living dead. Something like that, anyway. Maurice thinks it’s a typical story made up at the time for credulous tourists, but Aysha thinks it’s so far out that there must be something to it. I think it’s that husband-wife rivalry thing again, and as you know, Aysha usually wins. Anyway, she’s following it up. There may be another entrance into our pyramid underworld, that’s all.”

Jack stared at him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He took one of the regulators hanging down from the dive boat, pressed the purge valve to see that the oxygen was on, and then took a final breath from his own regulator, sucking on empty. He pulled off the full-face mask, put the oxygen regulator in his mouth, and reached down to the front of his stabilizer jacket for his backup mask. He put it on and cleared it, and then watched Costas do the same. He breathed in deeply, feeling his entire body tingling, relishing the sudden lift that pure oxygen always gave him, as if it were cleansing his soul. He set the timer on his computer, beginning his countdown to surfacing and getting back on the trail they had left off under the pyramid.

He could hardly wait.