Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  “That’s bad enough,” Costas grumbled. “Those things have been known to pull fishermen under.”

  “Or it could be crocodiles.”

  “Or what?”

  “Crocodiles,” Lanowski said distractedly, looking at his list again. “Apparently, they sometimes get this far. Mostly only small ones these days, but some big carcasses still get washed down. Sometimes they’re not carcasses. Sometimes they’re alive and snapping.” Costas groaned again. “That’s great. I thought we’d left all that behind at the crocodile temple in Sudan. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

  “You’d still have volunteered,” Jack said. “You’d never have let me do this alone.”

  Mohammed appeared beside Lanowski, looking anxious. “Okay, boys,” Lanowski said. “You’ve got to go. See you back on board in a few hours, inshallah.”

  “Thanks, Jacob. Look after yourself. No shore expeditions, remember?” Jack turned to Costas. “Good to go?”

  Costas made a diver’s okay signal. “Good to go.” They both shut their visors, and Jack felt the slight increase in pressure as the helmet sealed and the rebreather came online. A second later the in-helmet screen display activated to the left and right of his main viewport. It was a low-light readout that could show up to thirty variables, from carbon dioxide levels to pulse rate. He tapped the computer control inside the index finger of his left glove and reduced the display to the minimum, to show depth in meters, compass orientation, and external water temperature. He raised his right arm in an okay signal to Lanowki and Mohammed, then turned and did a thumbs-down signal to Costas. He descended two meters, bleeding off air manually from his suit and waiting for the automated buoyancy system to compensate. He pulled down the aquajet after him and waited while its computer altered the trim in the small ballast tanks on either side of the unit, an automated process that self-adjusted with depth to ensure that the scooter remained neutrally buoyant.

  He switched on his helmet light but was dazzled by the reflection of particles in the water that reduced the visibility to almost zero. He switched it off and was again in blackness, the moonless night meaning that no light filtered down from the surface. As he stared out, he remembered the lines that Jeremy had read from Howard Carter’s diary, the account that Carter had heard from Corporal Jones of what went on here that night in 1892 when Colonel Chaillé-Long and the French diver had accompanied Jones to this very spot. He could well imagine the trepidation of the diver as he went down with his homemade gear, yet also his excitement at seeing that the valve and cylinder worked and at what he might discover on the riverbed below.

  What had happened then was a mystery. All Jack knew for certain was that somewhere down there must lie the remains of that diver, and of the boat that had been sucked down by the same vortex that had taken Jones into an underworld that had sent him spiraling further on his own descent into madness.

  Costas tapped him on the shoulder, and Jack could just make out the glow of the readout inside his helmet a few inches away. “Jack, testing intercom. Over.”

  “Reduce the squelch level about twenty percent.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Good. Visibility’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen. We’re going to have to rely on the virtual terrain mapper.”

  “Mine’s already on. It’s a revelation, Jack.”

  Jack tapped his finger and a green isometric lattice appeared in front of his visor, gradually filling with detail as the multibeam sonar built into the top of his helmet mapped out the riverbed in front of them. The display provided a continuously adjusted virtual image with a time lapse of about half a second as new data streamed in. Jack was constantly amazed by the clarity of the images it produced, and this time was no exception. It was as if they were suspended in midair above a sharply angled scree slope some twenty meters from top to bottom. To the left the slope was covered with debris from the nineteenth-century fort, the building whose ruined form on the shore had been their way marker, the feature described by Corporal Jones to Howard Carter. To the right was a more regular shape about ten meters below the surface, an overhanging ledge about five meters across with another jumble of material below it, much of it larger, more regular blocks. The red tracking lines showing the GPS fix converged on his screen directly in front of the ledge. Jack’s heart began to pound. This could be it.

  Costas dropped below, his aquajet held in front. “I’m activating my helmet camera and the recording function on the terrain mapper. That means everything we see will be recorded on the memory chip.”

  “Check,” Jack said. “I’ve done the same.”

  Jack felt something bump his fins, and a spectral form seemed to undulate across his terrain mapper. It filled the entire lower half of the screen and swayed from side to side, caught like a series of stills in a time lapse. “Did you see that?” he exclaimed. “I could swear something swam by. It seemed to be all tail.”

  “No, I did not see it,” Costas said, his voice quavering. “I definitely did not see it. What I saw was a glitch in the mapper. This is reality, not a nightmare.”

  “Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Jack said. “A serpent off to join the party, heading to the hell of Cairo.”

  “It never existed, Jack. You’ve just got a touch of Mohammed’s river fever.”

  Jack held his aquajet by the handles on either side of the encased propeller housing, released the safety lock with his thumbs, and pulled the trigger. He felt the backflow of water course down his body. The jet had a deflector so that at full throttle it dropped just below the diver, keeping the flow of water from the propeller clear and unobstructed. Costas came alongside and they both gunned the jets forward. They quickly came to within a few meters of the GPS fix and then released the triggers.

  Jack stared at the image on his terrain mapper, taking in the detail. It was astonishingly clear, as if he were looking at a wall of masonry on land with the naked eye. He remembered Lanowski’s model showing how the scour effect of the Nile at this point could have kept the submerged bank free from loose sediment, a phenomenon also manifest in the whirlpools and eddies that made Mohammed and his fellow felucca captains so apprehensive. And there was no doubt about it now. The block in front of him that had looked like a ledge was fixed into the bank, part of a larger structure rather than fallen masonry. It was clearly a lintel, a huge block that must have weighed ten tons or more. Below it on either side he could just make out two massive upright blocks, and between them a jumble of stone that had fallen in from the sides.

  Jack did a double take, not entirely believing what he was seeing, swinging from left to right and back again to re-create the image on his terrain mapper. Exactly the same features came into view. He was absolutely convinced of it now. It was an entranceway, an ancient portal beneath the Nile. Its depth put it exactly on Lanowski’s prediction for the level of the Nile at low water in the second millennium BC, allowing a partly flooded channel to act as an underground canal beneath the desert, wide enough to take barges that could have been walked or poled along. He clicked on his headlamp, and as he came within inches of the lintel he began to make out the stone beyond the reflected haze of particles in the water, unmistakably the fine-grained red granite favored by the New Kingdom pharaohs as a prestige building material. He stared more closely. He realized that he was not just looking at a smoothed surface of granite. He was looking at hieroglyphs. He switched back to the terrain mapper, and suddenly there it was, the cartouche that had become etched in his mind over the last months, from the crocodile temple in Sudan, from the plaque they had found with the sarcophagus on the wreck, from Rebecca’s underground find in Jerusalem. He put out his hand and traced his finger over the bird at the beginning and the sheaf of grain at the end. He stared for a moment longer, mouthing the word Akhenaten.

  Costas’ voice came through the intercom. “Jack, we’ve got a problem.”

  “I’ve just found the hieroglyphs. We’re bang on target.”

  “I mean do
wn below the lintel,” Costas said. “I think I can see what happened back in 1892.”

  Jack dropped a few meters below the overhanging block to where the terrain mapper showed Costas’ form above the pile of blocks between the uprights of the portal. In front of him he could see where the blocks filled the entrance, with cracks leading to deeper spaces beyond. Costas’ voice came on again. “I think the diver blew open the stone doors that once sealed off this entrance, and in the process caused the rockfall that’s blocked it up again for us. But there’s one spot where I think we might get through, directly in front of me now, where my terrain mapper shows a block that could be dislodged. With a little assistance.”

  “Explosives?”

  “C5. Always be prepared.”

  “I was wondering about that bulge in the front of your boiler suit.”

  “It’s our only option. We’ve got to try it.”

  “Remember what happened in 1892,” Jack said. “We don’t want to create an explosive vortex and see our felucca sucked in.”

  “I think that happened because the stone door was watertight and there was an air space in the tunnel beyond, so that when the doors blew the water poured in and created a whirlpool that must have pulled down their boat. My guess is that our diver was using some kind of waterproofed dynamite and probably didn’t really know what he was doing, using too much of it and creating a hole so large that the flow of water pushed those slabs open too quickly and created a lethal vortex. C5 is a far better explosive and much easier to position for maximum effectiveness with small quantities. I think I’ve got just about the right amount for the job.”

  “Risk factor?”

  “An underwater shock wave, but that should be mitigated by the pressure resistance of our E-suits.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Costas drew a package out the bulge in the front of his boiler suit, swam forward, and pushed it into the crack. He worked it farther in for a few minutes and then pushed himself back out. “Okay. I’ve separated it into three charges, with individual detonators. They’re manual, and I’ve set the delay for two minutes. You good with that?”

  “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 brea
thing 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.”

  Jack took a deep breath. “Time to go.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Forty minutes later Costas eased off on the throttle of the aquajet and they slowed down to swimming speed, allowing Jack to relax his grip on the handle and focus more on the tunnel around them. The most telling feature so far had been a line of foot-sized indents carved into the side walls at intervals of about a meter and running the entire length of the tunnel from the outset.