Pharaoh jh-7

by David Gibbins

  ‘Okay. Without the tethering cable we can’t stream our magnetometer and sonar data to you, so you’ll be in the dark until we’ve finished. We should be done within an hour.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘Hold fast. Over and out.’

  A red light flashed beside the main computer screen. Costas clicked on the mouse, and grunted. ‘An email reached us before the tether was released, but has only just popped up. It’s from Maurice Hiebermeyer.’

  Jack looked up. ‘I told him he could be with us live while we searched the seabed. Can you get him on Skype?’

  ‘Apparently not. The message was sent via Aysha, from somewhere in the Nubian desert just south of the Egyptian border.’

  ‘They’ve been excavating there,’ Jack said. ‘I haven’t visited the site yet, but it sounds amazing. Pharaonic-period forts as well as material from the British campaigns of the Victorian period. Last year the Egyptians dropped the water level behind the Aswan Dam enough to reveal the upper levels of the forts, so it was a chance for the first excavation since they were inundated in the 1960s. There’s still a lot underwater, though.’

  ‘Sounds like an IMU project,’ Sofia said.

  ‘Watch this space,’ Jack replied.

  Costas had been reading the message. ‘Oh God. The reason Aysha sent it was that Maurice is back in the pyramid of Menkaure again. Apparently some string-pulling and returned favours has resulted in the Egyptian Antiquities Authority appointing him official inspector for the restoration work at the site, a rare honour for a foreigner.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Jack murmured. ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Care to share the excitement?’ Costas enquired, peering at him.

  ‘I’ll let Maurice do it when he’s ready. If he finds what I hope he’ll find.’

  ‘Anyway, why “Oh God”?’ asked Sofia.

  Costas sounded anguished. ‘Because he’s got Little Joey, my special robot, with him. To keep Maurice happy, I agreed to have Joey flown out to Alexandria, but I never expected him to get permission to take it into the pyramid. Now he wants the activation code.’

  ‘And you’re going to give it to him,’ Jack said firmly. ‘He needs the robot to explore the narrow shafts in the pyramid. You spent hours showing him how it works. You can’t be there every time someone wants to use one of your creations.’

  ‘My favourite robot,’ Costas said sadly, slowly tapping out a sequence of letters and numbers and then clicking the send icon, ensuring that it would be delivered when they were re-tethered to the ship. ‘I’ll never see it again.’

  Sofia looked at him. ‘Wasn’t Little Joey the robot who made the ultimate sacrifice at Atlantis last year, when the volcano erupted? There’s a full obituary by you on the IMU website.’

  ‘Ultimate sacrifice,’ Costas repeated, looking at her appreciatively. ‘I like that. At least you are on my wavelength.’

  Jack spoke with gravity in his voice. ‘This one’s Little Josephine. Little Joey’s sister.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Got you.’

  ‘That pyramid’s a long way from the Nubian desert, where he was yesterday,’ Costas said.

  Jack nodded. ‘I always worry about him when he goes south of Egypt. He’s like a Victorian explorer on the Nile, with absolutely no sense of his own vulnerability and more than a few strongly voiced opinions. If he doesn’t stumble into a holy war, he’s likely to start one. That whole region’s becoming a powder keg again.’

  Sofia shook her head. ‘For me, that’s someone else’s war. I’ve had enough of jihad for one lifetime.’

  ‘I can appreciate that,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve got the greatest respect for navy medics, whatever country they serve.’

  ‘Thanks. That means a lot.’ She looked at Jack. ‘I read your bio on the IMU website. Royal Navy commander?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘Just in the reserves, before starting my doctorate. I wanted all the diving experience they could offer, so I started in mine warfare and clearance before moving on to the Special Boat Service.’

  ‘You go anywhere interesting?’

  ‘A few hot spots, but Kazantzakis here is the real navy guy.’

  Costas snorted. ‘No way. Not like you two. You’ve both been in at the sharp end. I’m just a submersibles geek. I needed a job after MIT.’

  ‘You mean the US Navy head-hunted you. Engineer lieutenant commander. And what about that Navy Cross?’

  ‘I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  Jack looked at Sofia. ‘USS Madison. You remember the suicide bomb attack?’

  Sofia regarded Costas with amazement. ‘You were there?’

  ‘All I did was pull a few guys out. I could free-dive deeper than anyone else on the ship that day, so I could reach them. I hate the fact that I couldn’t get them all; that’s why it’s not in my bio.’

  ‘He may look like a beach bum whose only fitness activity is to raise a cocktail glass, but Costas comes from generations of Greek sponge divers. He drops like a stone and can hold his breath for two minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Ah,’ Costas said, lying back and closing his eyes. ‘The beach. Gin and tonics.’

  ‘When this is all over.’

  ‘That’s what you always say.’

  Sofia turned to Jack. ‘The German, Hiebermeyer. I’ve seen a couple of your TV specials. He’s the substantial guy with the baggy shorts and the little round glasses? Always with that younger woman, the Egyptian. Was she the one who sent the email?’

  ‘That’s Aysha, his wife,’ Jack said. ‘Used to be a student of his. She does hieroglyphics and inscriptions; he does the digging. They’re a great team.’

  ‘Never did understand what she saw in him,’ Costas said, a glint in his eye.

  ‘You’re talking about my oldest friend.’

  Costas gave him an exaggerated crestfallen look. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Maurice and I bonded at boarding school. You and I were thrown together ten years later inside a very small recompression chamber. For eight long hours.’

  Sofia grinned. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘I’d just come out of the navy and was about to return to Cambridge to finish my doctorate. Costas was working as a submersibles engineer at the US naval base at Izmir in between graduate studies at MIT. I’d heard about a possible Bronze Age wreck to the north-west of Izmir, so I got my gear, hired a fisherman and his boat and went to check it out.’

  ‘Alone,’ Costas said. ‘To seventy-five metres. On compressed air.’

  ‘I found the wreck: rows of oxhide-shaped copper ingots in the blue haze below. The doctor at the base said it was wishful thinking, a hallucination brought on by nitrogen narcosis. But I know what I saw. Of course nowadays I’d use mixed gas or an oxygen rebreather. I’d never take that kind of risk again.’

  Costas’ jaw dropped. ‘Did I just hear that? How many times have I stopped you going too deep since then?’

  Jack looked serious. ‘Not since I became a father.’

  ‘I saw the photos on the bridge,’ Sofia said. ‘She looks like a chip off the old block. She must be what, eighteen?’

  ‘Next month,’ Jack said. ‘But I’ve only known her for five years. Her mother and I split before she was born and she kept Rebecca secret from me – for Rebecca’s safety, and probably mine too. She was from a Mafia family and there was a vendetta. It’s a long story, but Rebecca has come out of it strong and I can’t imagine life without her now. When she’s not at school, she’s a full member of our team.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting her,’ said Sofia. ‘So what about Costas? The recompression chamber?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I ran out of air and had to come up a little quickly. It was only a niggle in my elbow and a bit of dizziness, but I knew it was the bends and could get a lot worse. Luckily the fisherman had a decent radio, and there was a US Navy helicopter on search-and-rescue exercises only a few miles away.

  ‘Anyway, they got me into the cha
mber, and there was this slightly overweight sweaty guy surrounded by a jumble of electronics and tools he’d insisted on taking inside to play with. I spent the next eight hours holding bits of wire for him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Costas said. ‘But we cooked up the idea of the International Maritime University, and here we are today.’

  ‘So what were you doing there? In the chamber?’

  Jack coughed. ‘He’d spent too long monitoring the effect of pressure on some submersible component he was developing. Only instead of watching it from the outside, he’d gone into the chamber to cuddle it during its ordeal.’

  ‘I had to hold it together with my hands. It was too complex for clamps.’

  ‘What was it?’ Sofia said.

  Costas looked at her shrewdly. ‘A coupling joint for an external manipulator arm. Later I developed it at IMU and it’s now standard on all our equipment.’

  ‘What’s the pressure rating?’

  ‘Two thousand metres ocean depth. It could be more except for the internal gyro, which is a little sensitive. But that’s what allows us to use the arm as a virtual excavator, with the finesse of a human hand.’

  Sofia gestured at the porthole, where the submersible’s external arm array was visible. ‘I know how you could use it down to five thousand metres.’

  Costas looked astonished. ‘No way. No way. What’s the gyro?’

  ‘A Universal Electrics SPC-100, with some modifications. You remember I said I had a flirtation with robotics engineering? It was my masters project.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. Can I see it?’

  ‘I can talk you through it now.’

  Jack gave an exaggerated groan. ‘How long am I stuck here with you two?’

  A red light flickered on the console. ‘I think you’re in luck, Jack. It’s Macalister.’

  The familiar voice came crackling over the intercom. ‘Okay, Jack. We’ve done two half-kilometre sweeps across the head of the bay, and we’ve got a result. The magnetometer revealed a scatter of small linear anomalies over an area of flat sandy seabed the size of a tennis court, and the sonar showed a hump in the sediment that might be rectilinear. It’s at eight hundred and sixty-two metres depth, about a kilometre and a half from you at compass bearing 034 degrees. We’re holding position offshore above the anomaly so we can tether up to you and watch what you find on the video screen. Acknowledge.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Jack clicked the intercom to continuous so that the control room on Seaquest II could hear everything that went on, and turned to Costas, his throat dry with excitement. ‘I think we’re in business.’

  Forty minutes later, they had reached a depth of seven hundred metres, having dropped down the slope at an angle of more than forty-five degrees. On the way they had passed huge outcrops of rock and dramatic slopes of sediment that had tumbled down the edges of the rocks like scree on a mountainside, until the dwindling light made it impossible to make out more than the twenty metres or so of seabed revealed in the cone of light from the submersible’s external strobe array ahead of them. Costas had been letting the computer steer the submersible towards a locator beacon at the bottom of the tethering line hanging below Seaquest II, and suddenly they saw it, a flashing red light in the inky blackness ahead. As they came to within a few metres, he activated the manipulator arm and extended the pincers at the end of it around the cable, and then let the automated program articulate the arm backwards and slot the cable into its aperture above the double-lock chamber. The blank monitor beside the navigational screen above the console suddenly came to life, an image crowded with the faces of the crew, who were staring down at them. The crew moved aside and the white-bearded Macalister appeared, the gold braid of a captain visible on the epaulettes of his naval sweater. Jack did a thumbs-up, and Macalister nodded curtly. ‘Let’s hope this is it,’ he said. ‘The weather’s worsening up here by the minute, and it’s going to be hard enough hauling the submersible into the ship’s docking bay as it is. We can’t afford more than a few minutes at the target, just enough for a positive identification.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Costas said.

  ‘Who’s operating the external video camera?’ Jack said.

  A girl’s face appeared, her long dark hair tied back, wearing the new pair of glasses that made her look uncharacteristically studious, Jack thought. She waved, and blew him a kiss. ‘Hi, Dad. Maria sends her love. She met me at Madrid airport on the way here. As you know, we’re all supposed to be going climbing in the Pyrenees next week. She’d really like to hear from you.’

  ‘Good,’ Jack said, slightly discomfited. ‘Great. Later. What I need you to do now is concentrate completely on that console. The camera’s mounted on the end of the manipulator arm, and your job is to control it so that Costas and Sofia and I can focus on what we actually see outside. You got that?’

  ‘Roger that, Dad. Good to go.’

  Sofia grinned. ‘Like a chip off the old block, as I said.’

  Costas flipped a switch. ‘Rebecca, you have control of that arm.’

  They watched out of the porthole as the end of the arm rose up from the equipment array below the strobes. It turned the camera towards them, the lens staring into the porthole like the outsized eye of some abyssal fish, and then it waved from side to side and turned forward.

  Jack looked at the monitor and saw that Rebecca had gone from the image and been replaced by another figure, a man with long lank hair, wearing a lab coat. He lifted a small portable blackboard into view and tapped it, his face flushed with enthusiasm. ‘Hey, Costas. Glad to see we got the submersible going. You and I. When you’re back topside, I’ve made some time to give you the lowdown on submersible circuitry. I’ve tailored it specially for you. A kind of idiot’s guide.’

  ‘Thanks, Jacob,’ Costas said between gritted teeth. ‘Really appreciate it.’

  ‘Any time,’ Lanowski replied cheerily, and disappeared.

  Costas shook his head. ‘What a guy.’

  ‘But you love him really,’ Sofia said.

  ‘We all love him,’ Costas said, gripping the controls. ‘Okay. All eyes on the prize. I’m going in.’

  Jack slid back to his original position lying on his front with his face to the porthole. Costas gunned the submersible forward, and Jack watched the digital depth gauge beside the porthole drop below eight hundred metres. Ahead of him the seabed began to level out, but still there was nothing to see except empty sand and the occasional flash of a reflected eye as some creature strayed into the cone of visibility in front of the submersible, into light of an intensity that nothing down there would ever have experienced before. Costas slowed the submersible right down, and Jack watched the manipulator arm arch some five metres ahead with the camera roving from side to side like some giant insect searching the sea floor. ‘We should be there now,’ Costas said.

  Jack peered ahead. Still there was nothing. And then a huge hollering and whooping erupted from the crew crowded around the video screen on Seaquest II. Jack quickly glanced back at the screen, and saw that Rebecca had positioned the camera directly above the shape of a cannon lying half buried in the sediment. She had spotted it at the furthest swing to port of the manipulator arm, and Costas quickly brought the submersible about to aim in that direction. Then they saw another gun, and another. Had Rebecca not seen the first one, they would probably have missed the site entirely and gone off into the abyss, realising their mistake too late for another search. Jack felt a surge of pride: she might well have saved the day. ‘Good work, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Now let’s gently hose down that first gun and have a look at it.’

  They watched as the water jet located about two thirds of the way up the manipulator arm uncurled itself and looped down like a snake to blow a gentle jet over the gun, dispersing the sediment over the breech and revealing corroded metal. Macalister was the resident naval ordnance expert, and he immediately piped up. ‘No doubt about it, it’s a nine-pounder, a so-called long nine,’ he said, his voice edged with
excitement. ‘Typical of the guns you’d have found arming merchant ships in the Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century.’

  There was another noise from the crew, more of a gasp, and Sofia joined in. ‘Look, Jack. There it is. It’s fantastic.’

  She and the crew were watching video from the camera, but Jack was looking at the real scene through the porthole, a few metres behind them. He stared into the gloom, seeing more guns but nothing else. And then he spotted it. Directly ahead, the sediment had formed a hump in the seabed. In the centre, almost completely buried, was a rectilinear stone sarcophagus, its lid shifted and much of the sculpted sides buried, but still unmistakable. It was just like the image in Jack’s dreams. They had found the sarcophagus of Menkaure.

  ‘Congratulations, Jack,’ said Macalister, the sound of whistling and clapping coming from the crew behind him. ‘A marvellous end to the season.’

  ‘Congratulations to everyone,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘A team effort, as always.’

  Costas drove the submersible a few metres forward and then rose above the sarcophagus so that it was clearly visible. The ten or twelve guns that poked out of the sand around it formed the ghostly outline of a ship. There was nothing else to be seen, just the stone and the guns, and for a moment Jack thought how the sediments of the seabed were like the sands of the desert; how they seemed to reduce the evidence of human endeavour to its bare essentials, to its boldest statements and nothing else. The sea floor was a place that made the efforts to tame it seem minuscule and arrogant; a place whose elemental clarity attracted certain men on a quest for revelation, from the time when the world was beginning to rediscover ancient Egypt, and from deepest antiquity almost five thousand years before, the time of the first pharaohs and the pyramids.

  Macalister’s voice crackled again. ‘Okay, Costas. We’ve got a two-metre swell on the surface. I’ve asked Rebecca to relinquish control of the manipulator arm and shut it down. We’ve got all the imagery we need. You need to ascend.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Costas said. ‘Blowing tanks now.’