Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  ‘Already done,’ Hiebermeyer said, beaming. ‘I’ve got an electronic caliper measurement of .445 inch, just right for .43 calibre Remington. The bullet wasn’t loose in the pit but had penetrated the clay on the side of the sangar. Fortunately I was here supervising when it was revealed and I had the student stop excavating while the bullet was still in situ so that I could measure the angle of trajectory. You’re right, Jack. It had been fired from the opposite cliff and had penetrated the sangar below the maximum possible line of sight of the shooter, so was coming in on an arching trajectory. I used a laser rangefinder and got a range of four hundred and thirty-five yards to an opening on the upper ridge where a sniper could have been positioned. I then did a little research of my own with a friend in Germany who is a military re-enactor, and he told me that the drop of a bullet from a regulation Remington cartridge in dry desert conditions over that distance would be about twenty-nine inches. That allowed me to find the exact spot on the opposite cliff where the sniper sat when he took the shot that hit the British soldier.’

  ‘And the spot where the sniper may have died,’ Jack said.

  ‘How can you know that?’ Costas asked.

  Jack picked up the Martini-Henry cartridge again, and turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Did you find any more of these?’

  Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘That came from where you’re standing, and we swept the entire sangar with a metal detector. My friend told me that the British generally didn’t collect their cartridges after use. Any expended cartridges here would probably quickly have been trampled into the dust underfoot, and not been visible to locals who might have come scavenging this place afterwards.’

  Costas looked around. ‘Yet if this was a sentry post, there’d be at least a couple of guys here at any one time, and if they were being sniped at, you’d expect them to fire a barrage of rounds at that cliff.’

  Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘I think there was someone here who knew his business, and got them to hold their fire. I think he was a skilled sharpshooter himself. He would have known he had only one chance before his opponent moved. One shot, one kill.’

  ‘One down on each side,’ Costas said. ‘Even score, nobody wins.’

  Jack looked pensively back at the cliff. ‘A single sniper up in those cliffs could have held back the British column for hours, inflicting officer casualties and battering the morale of exhausted men who must already have been questioning the worth of what they were doing. So despite the casualty here, I think that if the dervish sniper was killed, then it was one up for the British.’

  Hiebermeyer replaced the finds tray and stood up. ‘Except that two men were killed that day in this sangar.’

  Jack stared at him. ‘How do you know?’

  Hiebermeyer made his way out of the section and into the pit, and then leapt up on the wall again. ‘This is where it gets really fascinating, because what we’ve found takes us back from 1884 almost three thousand years. But before then, we’re going to meet up with Aysha and hear her take on all this. After all, it is her site.’

  Jack climbed up to the rim of the sangar and stared to the south. He could hear the helicopter drumming along the course of the Nile, and he wondered how much deeper the echo would have sounded a hundred and thirty years earlier, before the Aswan dam had been constructed and the river level raised. He looked into the waters now, imagining the gorge as it had been then: the rocks with the torrent in between, the boats queuing up awaiting their turn to be hauled through the cataract, the shouts and singing of the men below, British and Canadian, west African and Egyptian and Sudanese. He turned back and looked at the sangar again, and thought about how thin the veil of dust was that lay over the detritus of the past in the desert, how quickly it reduced everything to the same level: the remains from that day in 1884 could be as old as the ancient Egyptian walls that surrounded them. Yet the absence of any overburden, of any stratigraphy, also meant that the past was immediate, and he could almost put himself back there on that fateful day, hear the screams of the soldier who had been hit and lay dying in the dust in front of him, and see the man with the rifle who had lain against the parapet and fired at the far cliff. In the blink of an eye their modern clothes could become the khaki of a hundred and thirty years earlier, and in another blink the skirts and sandals of the ancient Egyptian soldiers who had manned this outpost three thousand years before that, all of them sharing the same apprehension about what lay through the pall of dust beyond the horizon to the south.

  He took a deep breath, smelling the tang of the desert and the acrid odour of camel dung, even imagining he had caught a sulphurous whiff of gunpowder. He felt as if another deep breath would suck in that veil and he would take the past within himself and step out into that day in December 1884. For a few moments he had not only seen the sharpshooter but become one with him, focused on the only things of importance at that moment: the balance of the rifle, the view through the sights, the measured pace of his breathing, the touch of his finger on the trigger. Jack wondered who the man had been, whether he would ever know his name.

  He took a water bottle from his leg pocket, unscrewed the top and offered it to the other two. Costas took a mouthful, and then Jack drained the rest and replaced it in his pocket, screwing back the top as he did so. The drumming of the helicopter became a roar as it settled into its landing site, the whirling of its rotor blades just visible through the storm of dust created by the downdraught. It powered down, and Jack turned to the others. ‘I’ll give Ibrahim about an hour to offload the equipment with the crewmen. It’s his operation and I don’t want to interfere. But as soon as he calls through, I’m on to it. I’m itching to dive.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Costas said.

  Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Does that give us enough time?’

  Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I hope so. There are rogue elements in the regime here who could shut us down at any moment. There’s a lot simmering just beneath the surface in the Sudan: warlords, fundamentalism. We’re just trying to pack as much as we can into every day while we’re still able to work here.’

  ‘Where’s Aysha?’

  ‘At the Senusret shrine. Once we’ve talked to her, I’ll finish showing you what we’ve found. It’s fabulous stuff, one of the most exciting discoveries ever made in Egyptology. Follow me.’

  PART 2

  5

  Near the third cataract of the Nile, Sudan, 23 December 1884

  Major Edward Mayne of the Royal Engineers pushed the white cotton of his scarf up over his nose, leaving only a narrow gap beneath his headdress to see through, and pressed his heels into the flanks of his camel. He lurched forward as it swerved into a shallow gully, picking its way among the exposed bedrock that provided a surer footing than the loose shale and dust of the surrounding desert. Over the last two weeks he had learned to move in rhythm with the beast, becoming one with it as his guide had taught him, leaving him swaying like a sailor on land when he dismounted to take measurements and sketch the rocky course of the river through the cataracts, noting the places where boats might be hauled up against the current. The day before, a messenger had reached him with orders to return to the main camp of the river expedition and report to headquarters, and he and his guide had ridden hard that morning to reach the camp before the midday sun made travel intolerable. He knew that Corporal Jones would be waiting for him in the sangar dugout, where he had left him with the sentries overlooking the camp beside the Nile. As he got closer, he had made sure to avoid the deep gullies so that he was always exposed to view. Over the past weeks Mahdist sharpshooters had begun to inflict casualties on the river column, and he knew there would be jittery trigger fingers at the sight of anyone wearing Arab dress approaching on a camel.

  He looked back to the east, where he had parted ways with his guide, Shaytan Ahmed al-Abaid, a chieftain of the Dongola people of upper Nubia, who had accompanied him on his foray int
o the desert. The previous evening they had huddled over the embers of their fire beside the wells of Umm Bayaid, concealed within a rocky gully from prying eyes, and had talked together until the last vestige of heat had left the rocks and they had lain to sleep on the hard ground, keeping close to their camels for warmth. Shaytan had been an interpreter for General Gordon in Khartoum, and had only left three weeks before, when Gordon had ordered him out of the city for his own safety. The Mahdi’s forces had blocked the main exit routes, and Shaytan had only made it through by disguising himself in the patched jibba robe of an Ansar warrior, the most fanatic followers of the Mahdi. He had travelled to General Wolseley’s headquarters at Wadi Halfa, some two hundred miles north on the Egyptian border, and offered his services to the expedition that was now inching its way south along the Nile in a forlorn attempt to relieve Gordon. In the careful ways of desert dialogue, in a wide-ranging discussion over cups of strong tea, Mayne had extracted from Shaytan all he could about Gordon’s state of mind. Shaytan’s account was dispassionate, the most up-to-date he had, and was not clouded by the prejudgements of British intelligence officers that had made it difficult for Mayne to get a good grasp of the man. That evening’s discussion had been the most valuable outcome of his foray into the desert; forward reconnaissance of the Nile had anyway seemed of dubious value in light of the probability that the river column would never reach Khartoum in time to save Gordon.

  The camel snorted and tossed its head; Mayne knew he was close to the sangar now, just off to the west. Beyond that he saw the flash of the heliograph on a rocky outcrop above the far bank of the river, the signallers tilting the mirror in the sunlight to send out the long and short dashes of Morse code. The telegraph line from Khartoum had been cut as soon as the Mahdi’s forces had surrounded the city; some said that Gordon himself had done it in a fit of pique over the delay in sending a relief expedition to get his Egyptian and Sudanese staff and their families out of Khartoum before the Mahdi made escape impossible. The heliograph could only be used for the most basic information, for requests for supplies or reports of daily progress up the Nile; the Mahdi’s spies were perfectly able to read Morse code, and anything more sensitive would soon reach the ears of the sheikhs who commanded the force the British troops knew was waiting in the desert somewhere to the south. The only way to communicate securely was by courier, using local Sudanese tribesmen, who could ride swiftly and knew how to avoid the thieves and murderers of the desert oases. For weeks now it was the only way that messages from Gordon had reached them, messages that had infuriated Wolseley in their fickle vacillation between optimism and fatalism, and in the obscurity of Gordon’s intentions. Even the authenticity of the messages could be suspect, brought by messengers whose loyalty could never be certain. In the desert, the truth shifted like the sands, changing subtly in complexion with each gust of wind, then being swept away by storms that left a whole new landscape of reality to understand and navigate.

  Mayne steered the camel towards the flashing light, knowing that the sangar now lay directly ahead above the near bank of the river. The message being sent out would be relayed down the heliograph posts to Korti, the advance camp on the Nile where the camel corps was assembling, and then on to Wadi Halfa. He smiled wryly to himself, remembering what Corporal Jones and the other soldiers had called Wadi Halfa: Bloody Halfway. It had become a standing joke for the men of the river column to ask each other how far they had gone at the end of each day, after another few hundred yards of backbreaking toil, hauling and rowing the boats to the next obstacle; the answer was always the same: bloody halfway. The joke had become strained as the level of the Nile had steadily fallen through December, and the channels he had spotted during his reconnaissance trips upstream had become trickles by the time the boats reached them. Sometimes it seemed as if they were caught in a Greek myth of the underworld, where no matter how hard they tried, their goal remained forever elusive. Yet Mayne knew that if this were the underworld, then they were only in the first circle of hell; somewhere ahead was an invisible barrier beyond which lay a deeper reach, a place where a force of darkness was marshalling that could obliterate them with the speed and ferocity of a sandstorm. And in the eye of that looming maelstrom was General Charles Gordon, their sole purpose for being here, a man whose future seemed increasingly doubtful as the chances of the relief expedition ever reaching him faded hour by hour.

  He turned and watched Shaytan receding noiselessly in the distance, his camel wavering in the heat haze as it sauntered away. The sun glinted off the brass-covered flintlock pistol with a handle like a rat’s tail that Shaytan had taken from the dismembered corpse of an Ottoman Turkish official they had found in the desert a few days previously, whether the work of the Mahdi’s men or brigands was unclear. With his golden gun and his belted dagger, Shaytan seemed from another era, yet Mayne had learned that the desert had a timeless quality in which the past seemed to live with the present. It had seemingly rebuffed every attempt by the British to introduce new technology: the railway his fellow engineers had pushed as far as they could beyond Korti, until the supply of track and their own energy had been sapped; the river steamers that Gordon had used in the upper reaches of the Nile near Khartoum, constantly breaking down and immobilised for want of wood for fuel; the Gatling and Gardner machine guns that should have assured their supremacy on the battlefield, but that jammed in the dust and the heat. They had learned through bitter experience that the only way to broach the desert was to adapt to it and learn the ways of desert survival as Mayne had done from Shaytan, yet even that put interlopers at a disadvantage against those who had been born to it. It was impossible to know where Shaytan would go next, or which side he would now join. What was certain was that his time with Mayne had come to an end, and they both knew that if they were to meet again, they might be trying to cut each other’s throats. It was the way of the desert, and signified nothing more than that they were both part of the eternal course of history in these lands.

  Shaytan had called Mayne ‘Nassr’ayin’, meaning ‘Eagle Eye’. It was the same name he had been given in Iroquioan by the Mohawk Indians when he had spent a year living among them as a boy on the Ottawa river in Upper Canada, when his uncle had been in charge of a Royal Engineers detachment maintaining the canal from Lake Ontario to the new capital. The Iroquioan name, ‘Kahniekahake’, had stuck when he had returned to Canada as a newly commissioned subaltern and joined the Mohawk scouts in Wolseley’s expedition up the Red River in 1870 to quash the rebellion of Louis Riel. It was an extraordinary fact that some of those same men, including his boyhood friend Charrière, were here today, employed by Wolseley for their expertise with river craft to help haul the hundreds of whaleboats to be used to transport soldiers up the Nile towards Khartoum.

  To the followers of Islam, the eagle was a perfect creation of Allah; to the Mohawks it was the spirit of a young warrior on a vision quest. Yet Mayne knew that Shaytan wore Islam as lightly as his ancestors had worn the beliefs of others who had passed through the desert in the distant past, and that for the Mohawk the spirit world required no special belief; it was simply the world they inhabited. Spending time with Shaytan had allowed Mayne to understand the desert people in a way that the staff officers in Korti and Wadi Halfa never would. The call to jihad that lay at the core of the rebellion was not the main motivation for the majority of the Mahdi’s army, a vast and motley gathering of tribesmen drawn from all quarters of the Sudan, some of them from the deepest reaches of the desert, where the influence of Islam was peripheral at best. For many, their instinct was to fight each other rather than join in a common cause. And yet this truth, that they were not all converts to militant Islam, was not a weakness; in the hands of the Mahdi, it was a strength. The Mahdi himself was one of them, born on the Nile, and he knew what drove his people. He knew how to use his holy vision to attract and rally his core of fanatical followers, the Ansar, and how to use their suicidal courage to draw others to foll
ow his banner. And the tribesmen were not simply fighting to expel foreigners – Turkish and British and Egyptian and even Arabs – in order to defend their families and their traditions. The Mahdi knew how to stir them so that they were fighting because they relished it, because their pulses quickened at the sight of blood, because they could not resist following when the Ansar surged forward screaming and brandishing their spears at the enemy. Mayne had realised that the war had become self-fuelling, and that the only hope the British would ever have of containing it would be to return with an army large enough to mount a campaign of attrition and annihilation.

  He looked back one last time at the wavering form in the distance. A gust of wind took one end of Shaytan’s headscarf and unfurled it like a banner, until it seemed to join the distant streaks of black cloud that appeared above the horizon; his camel appeared to stretch outwards and upwards like a mirage, and then was gone. It was like this in the desert, a place of mirages, of illusions, where desperate thirst could feel like dust in the throat, where there was no moral compass, where cruelty could be as casual and transient as the camaraderie he had felt over the last few weeks. Of all the places where he had been on campaign, he had never experienced the insidious draining that he had felt in the desert. The worst of it was when your body dried up until you were like a camel; they said that if you survived that without going insane, you learned to feed it with just what was necessary to keep from collapsing. Mayne knew he had been there often over the past few days, that Shaytan had made him experience it to show him how to survive; but it had left him with a desiccated feeling that would take days to resolve, and he knew that his body would try to convince him he was sated when he needed to drink more than he ever had done before in his life.