“Ethan!” he called. “Tom! Hurry up! We’re here!”
There was no response.
“Ethan!” he shouted again.
Failing to get even a call back, Sam went below decks. In the cramped space below, he found Ethan and Tom fast asleep. Tom was lying on the chair, jacket huddled up as a makeshift pillow against the wall, and Ethan was just collapsed on the floor. Sam smiled. They’d all had a long night.
“Hey, wake up.” he said gently. Ethan jerked awake and Tom rolled over, grumbling. He flung an arm over his face.
“We here?” he mumbled.
“We’re here.” said Sam, more loudly. “We need to dive. Now.” Ethan stood up, the discipline of the watch deep in his DNA, used to the Navy SEAL call times. Tom was a little bit less disciplined, but wasn’t a complete slob. In moments, Sam succeeded in getting both of them to deck, where they stood blinking and looking more excited.
“Ah,” said Matthew when he saw the trio. “Ready to go? I’ll keep the Tahila waiting for you here. You take the zodiac and dive.”
“Thanks, Matthew.” Sam turned to Ethan and Tom, who were already pulling on their dry suits and had them loose around their waists. “Hop on. I’ll drive us while you two get dressed.”
Ethan and Tom clambered over the rail and onto the zodiac first. Sam unknotted the bowline in the rope keeping the boats together, tossed the end to Matthew, and quickly jumped on before the zodiac could float away. Sam revved the outboard and the military spec’d engine purred as smoothly as a new car. The zodiac jerked, then surged forward, cutting through the choppy water.
In minutes they’d reached the cataracts. Sam cut the motor and let it idle as he glanced at Ethan and Tom, who were just finishing putting on their suits. The Zodiac drifted toward the eastern bank of the river, settling next to a large boulder, where Sam quickly tied off.
“So now that we’re out here, how do we find the passageway?” Ethan adjusted his dive bag.
Sam grinned. “I thought that would have been obvious.”
Chapter Sixty
They squinted at the blue sky.
“It’s time dive,” Tom said as adjusted his suit and his mask. The gear muffled the last few words, but he knew that Sam would pick them up.
From beside him, Sam heard a snort. He turned to see Ethan fully suited up in the SCUBA gear save his mask which he now raised.
“You trying to get out of some work, here at the end of the line, Bower?”
Tom grinned. “You wish. Worried about looking like a girl in swimming lessons?”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “You want to say that again? Say it again. First in my class, second in my squadron, an….”
Sam cut him off. “Gentlemen, as much as I’d love to hear your pissing contest, we don’t have time for that.” He grinned at Ethan. “Look, Tom’s already swimming into the passageway.” Ethan swiveled his head and saw the tall figure of a man in a SCUBA suit paddling away into the darkness. Without a word, he sent a glance to Sam behind the mask, placed the regulator back in his mouth and flipped over the side of the boat. Sam pulled his own mask down and went in after him.
They followed Tom’s lead. It was Tom who, with Elise’s help, had painstakingly researched online sources for any information about the layout of the mines from the inside.
According to their findings, the tunnel was about fifty feet long. Now that they were inside, Sam discovered it was wide enough for all three of them. He turned on his flashlight and shined it ahead of him. The tunnels’ carved walls still showed signs of chisel marks from the mining excavation and before them it wound ever deeper into the ground.
Ethan turned to Sam in concern. “We’re not going to have enough oxygen,” he said through the radio of his full facemask.
Sam shook his head. “We’ll see how far we get. Treat it as a recon mission.” Ethan nodded. “If we can’t find any dry passageways, we’ll turn around and come back up.”
Sam turned back around, barely keeping up with Tom, who was eagerly swimming down the passageway. The passageway itself had flattened out, and now they were gliding along a flat floor.
Their voices echoed eerily from the regulators as they continued down the passageways. “What do you even think we’ll find?” Ethan kept pace easily next to Sam as they both followed Tom down the corridor.
“Honestly…” Sam called out to Tom ahead of him. “What do you think, Tom?”
Tom had stopped up ahead in the passageway and was now staring at something into the distant dark. Sam and Ethan quickly caught up and joined his friend. “What did you find?”
Tom gestured to the passageway. “See there how the dark looks a little different and it goes up and up?” Tom swam forward and pointed up. “I think there’s a dry hallway up ahead. Let’s go check it out.”
The trio quickly swam up until the water became too shallow to swim well. The light of the flashlight distorted, indicating a surface just up ahead. Sam paddled, then broke the surface. He shined the light around. They had emerged into a small circular chamber full of water, which fed into a hallway. Sam was sure now that the passageway had been intentionally designed this way.
He pulled himself to his feet and took off his flippers and mask. The water reached his ankles. Beside him, Ethan and Tom did the same.
Ethan shook out his wet hair. “You know more than I do, boys. What’s coming up?”
Tom gestured to the hallway before them. “According to the plans I was looking at, there should just be another chamber right up ahead.” He grinned. “Should we go see if the tales are true?”
They sloshed their way down through the passageway. The walls were covered by mysterious Egyptian markings that Sam had only seen in books before. Sam saw images depicting all kinds of scenes: some depicting a parade next to a line of temples, marching through a city’s street. Others were more surprising, showing a shining disk above a pyramid.
“Do these mean anything?” Sam touched the wall. Though he tried to keep it out of his voice, awe filled his words, the weight of history hanging over his head.
“Of course they do.” Ethan spoke surely, much to Sam’s surprise. He’d never thought Ethan to be much of a scholar. “But it would take a full research team years to decode them all. I thought we were only interested in one thing.”
Sam nodded. Excitement sang in his veins as the full weight of what he was seeing fully sank in. This was the gateway of the ancient library of the pharaohs that had been lost to the centuries. What else would he find within these walls?
Sam shook his head. As much as he wanted to take their time and study everything on these walls, the ancient history and artistry they depicted, everything else would have to wait.
They were confronted with a short horizontal passage. They tipped their heads back and stared.
Ethan pointed. “There,” he said, his flashlight sweeping the damp stone and the symbols. “That.”
Faintly visible in the roof was an opening, with barely enough room for a man.
Ethan grinned in triumph. “That’s it!” He scrambled up a pile of rubble and hauled himself through. Sam shouted up.
“What do you see?”!
Ethan’s legs dangled and his voice echoed as he reported back.
“Empty passage at a right angle to the one you’re in now,” he said. “It’s got wooden doors, another passage parallel to… and it’s filled with mud and stone! It’s not just random, it’s deliberate!” His voice rose in excitement. “I think this is it! Why else would they go through all this trouble to-”
But Sam shook his head.
“It’s a decoy. If you look around you’ll find another one. A second one in this roof. The whole pyramid is circled by these passages.”
But now Ethan shook his head again. “They’re open. The doors up here. They’re open. Didn’t Tom say the burial chambers were up here? Somewhere?”
Tom called up. “They say the real entrance to the burial chamber is even more carefully concealed
- between the decoy shafts and… is there an alcove? The right thing is opposite the alcove.”
Ethan kicked as he looked around. “Alcove, check!” he shouted down. He twisted around and back to the men below. “What are you waiting for? Aren’t you coming up?”
Sam and Tom looked up and climbed up after Ethan. They pulled their way through.
The chamber was not tall enough to stand upright, but as he crouched, panting from the climb, he saw Ethan was right. The doors that led away were open. He exchanged an excited glance with Tom.
“Let’s go.”
Ethan stepped out of the way and let Sam go through before him.
He emerged into a massive chamber, big enough to stand. Sam stood in awe.
The burial chamber he was standing in glowed with a lambent gleam of quartz and well-polished limestone that gleamed even with the dust.
The ceiling was made of three quartz slabs that made Sam suddenly very aware how much stone they were standing under and that the pyramid above them was crumbling.
This could only be the burial chamber, Sam thought. Above he could barely make out two relieving chambers propped to form a pointed roof. An enormous arch of brick a full meter thick built over the pointed roof to support the core of the pyramid.
Sam and Tom and Ethan stared. They slowly paced the chamber. To Sam’s surprise, the room didn’t have any other entrances or exits. This was it.
The walls were decorated with elaborate pictographs, depicting the Black Pyramid in fading paint and carvings.
He stared in awe, yet he still didn’t understand. Wasn’t the labyrinth supposed to be below Hawara? This was not a maze. Not… anything. Just a chamber. Sam turned to Ethan and Tom. He felt like an idiot, but it had to be said.
“I thought there was a labyrinth. Where is the labyrinth?” He shook his head. “I thought it was buried under the Hawara Pyramid.”
He was surprised to find Tom shaking his head. “Let me run this theory past you. Just...hear me out.” He raised his hands in the dimness. “When Strabo referred to the expedition below Amenemhat III’s pyramid, he wasn’t referring to the Hawara Pyramid. We all thought that’s what he meant since it’s the more famous one, the stronger one.” He shook his head. “But I don’t think he was talking about the Hawara Pyramid. I think he was talking about the Black Pyramid.”
“Oh, no. You have got to be kidding me. Wait. Just wait.” Ethan held up his hands, then used them to scrub his dirty face and hair. “I thought the Black Pyramid was reduced to a bunch of mud?”
Tom nodded, his face a study in wry sympathy.
Sam’s shoulders slumped against the unavoidable weight of the words. It made sense, when he thought about it. He desperately wished it didn’t, but it did make a strange kind of sense. “So you’re saying the ancient maze that the entire world has been searching for- searching for centuries, no less- the one that holds invaluable treasures and the secrets of the ancients that could unlock the secrets to more secrets, is not given a fitting burial under a triumphant monument of stone.” He looked between them in despair, begging them to convince him otherwise. “It’s actually hidden under a crumbling mess of a pyramid? Under nothing but ruins?”
Tom nodded again.
Ethan shook his head in disbelief. “It doesn’t make sense.” He turned to Sam. “You told me this… what was his name? This historian guy?”
“Strabo,” Sam said.
“Strabo,” Ethan agreed. “Smartest man in history or something like that, first rate source, actually saw this labyrinth with his own eyes.” He glared at them with a touch of desperation in his eyes that Sam chalked up to the late hour and exhaustion. He couldn’t blame the SEAL, really. He felt pretty much the same. “How could Strabo, a world-renowned geographer, make such a mistake?”
Tom smiled, but it was wry. “Easy,” he said, tapping the floor. “He didn’t make a mistake..”
Sam finally understood. He put his head in his hands with a long moan. “Right. Damn. You’re saying he was being intentionally obtuse.”
Tom wiped his hands on his wetsuit. “I’m certain of it. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” He shook his head and slapped Sam on the back. “I think the whole damned thing was a ruse. Amenemhat knew that the Black Pyramid wouldn’t support the weight he was putting on it. I think he built the labyrinth in stealth first inside the mine shafts, and then, to deceive his own children, he secured it with the crumbling, failed wreck of his first pyramid. He even showed it to Strabo, who wrote about it, as being beneath Hawara to throw them off his track.”
“But… why?” Sam watched Ethan rummage around in the debris, then stop near a wall and pull out the old map they’d taken from the tour guide. He pressed the map and began to rub.
“I don’t know.” Tom threw up his hands. “Test their intelligence, maybe?”
“It doesn’t make any damn sense. I can’t believe we came all the way here for nothing. Now what? We go tomorrow night to the Black Pyramid? What’s left of it? Ethan!” he called over. “What are you doing?”
Ethan didn’t answer. Sam turned back to Tom, glaring. “This is bullshit.”
Tom spread his hands in sympathy. “I know. The only chance we have is to backtrack, go tomorrow to the Black Pyramid and start from the beginning again.”
A piece of paper fluttered between them. Tom broke off, staring at it. “What’s this?”
Sam leaned over Tom’s shoulder as he snatched the paper off of the damp ground. “What the hell is this?”
Ethan put his thumbs in his pants. “Looks like some kind of map.” He gestured behind him. “Found it on the wall over there, looked familiar, so I scribbled it down while you old farts were bickering like two little ladies.” He smirked. “Sorry about the paper choice. Didn’t have any ancient papyrus on me at the time. Hopefully that will do.” His voice changed, a little more serious. “I mean it. Hopefully you can make it out on top of the new map. It’s the only paper I had. Do any of you have something better…”
Sam waved him down with a frown. “Hush. I can’t look if you’re yammering like that. Shut up and let me see.”
He studied the paper in the dim light. If he squinted past the modern depictions of the pyramid’s interior, it did look like a map. At the very least it looked like more than they had before.
A hell of a lot more, actually.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, turning to Ethan, to find the boy watching him anxiously and trying to hide his nerves. “Aren’t you just a first-class thief?”
Chapter Sixty-One
Sam turned his attention to the map again, drawn to its secrets.
Despite the dangers of handling it, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. He couldn’t wait to get it back to the Tahila where they could analyze it properly. He’d look at it then with Elise’s skills, too, he consoled himself. But now… at least he deserved a peek.
Sam held the map closer to the flashlight and studied it. It was intricate, but complex, and frustratingly familiar. But still… Sam shook his head.
“I feel like this whole thing was a waste of time. I feel like it should make sense… but…” He threw up his hands, trying to keep his voice low across the open water. “I can’t really tell what this is leading to.”
His confidence was starting to fall. All the work they’d done to get inside the pyramid, the unexpected surprises that they’d suffered and overcome… Was it really worth diving after this map - merely just a bunch of symbols on brown paper – or had this trip all been in vain?
“Maybe we need to decipher it. Like a code,” Ethan took the map back and studied it in the light of the flashlight as Tom navigated the choppy water, steering them back to the Tahila. He jerked his chin at them.
Sam said, “Pass it over. To be honest, I feel like an expert in that. After looking through all these hieroglyphics in these pyramids, I think I have a rough idea of what this means.”
Ethan snorted. “Sure.”
Tom made a fa
ce at Ethan and took the map from Sam.
He bent his big body over the tiny parchment. “Come on! Isn’t it obvious? This thing here, means...” Finally, he gave up and shook his head. “You know what? Never mind. This isn’t some sort of code. This looks like an awfully drawn map. You can’t even tell what that is,” Tom said, pointing to a cluster of circles at the center of the map.
Giving up, Tom made his way back to the walls of the cave, reading through the thousands of symbols that decorated the stony confinements.
Sam and Ethan kept staring, looking at it from the top, the bottom, upside down, and even tried shining the flashlight on it from different angles.
Nothing happened. The map’s secrets stayed hidden.
Suddenly, the sound of an engine began to grow louder. It was definitely from outside the cave.
Making eye contact with Tom, Sam knew exactly what was happening.
“Looks like we’ve got company.” Tom’s eyes showed fear but also determination as he quickly opened his backpack, withdrew a gun, and enclosed the rest of his belongings back in the bag. “Let’s give them a welcome.”
“No.” Sam slapped the gun away. “None of us are prepared for a proper welcome party. Let’s get out of here.” He looked at Ethan. “Now!”
With Tom leading the group through moss and rock, the sounds of the engine grew louder and louder.
It only meant one thing…
They were in trouble.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Even as they scrambled to pack up their belongings into the bags on their backs, Sam couldn’t help but appreciate the raw power behind the engines fast approaching them.
“You hear that?” Sam asked as Ethan attempted to stuff a small generator back into his camo backpack.
Tom looked up with a look of infinite exasperation. “I think we both hear it, Sam. That’s why I’m packing up. Why I’m packing up, at least. It would be great if you could help me out with this.” He threw Sam a flashlight, which bounced off his chest and rolled into a dip in the mossy rocks.
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