Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) Read online

  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.’

  Jack slid back to the console, flipped off the audio feed to the ship to keep their conversation to themselves and looked at Costas. ‘Can you override the system so that I can control the arm?’

  ‘You heard Macalister,’ Costas said. ‘Remember your end of the bargain.’

  ‘It’d only be for a few minutes. If you shut off the video stream to the ship, they wouldn’t know we were still using it. As far as Macalister is concerned, we’d be ascending.’

  Costas paused, and then shook his head. ‘Okay, Jack. You have the con.’

  Jack jumped back to the space between the seats and grasped the handle that controlled the manipulator arm. He arched the arm over the lid of the sarcophagus, to the gap where the lid had slid sideways and the interior of the coffin was revealed, and dropped the camera down towards the triangular hole. He had guessed that it might be just large enough, and he had been right. The camera disappeared inside. He activated the powerful miniature light array surrounding the camera, but all he could see on the video screen was sand, a close-up view of the sediment that evidently filled the sarcophagus. He moved the camera from side to side, but still there was nothing. ‘Come on, Jack,’ Costas said. ‘One more minute, max.’

  He took hold of the handle that controlled the water jet, and aimed the nozzle through the hole, switching the jet to its most powerful setting. There was nothing to lose, and nothing inside the sarcophagus after all this time that would be delicate enough to be damaged. For a second or two the camera would be in the eye of the dust storm created by the water jet, and he might just see something before the silt clouded the image.

  He pressed the trigger. The image exploded into a maelstrom of sand, obscuring everything.

  And then he saw it.

  For a second it was there, the image of a pharaoh, wearing a crown and a skirt but with an oddly shaped physiognomy: a protruding belly and a jutting chin. Beside him was his consort, a queen with shapely breasts and hips, her hair over her shoulders. The pharaoh was leaning over something as if he were creating it, lines forming a matrix like a labyrinth or a maze, a pyramid in the centre, and over it all the rays of the sun, shining from a disc above. And then the image was gone, lost in the swirl of sediment. ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Jack.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Costas said.

  ‘Do you remember Captain Wichelo’s interleaved sheet in his copy of Vyse’s book? You wondered whether there was something else I wasn’t telling you. Well, that was it. Wichelo mentioned a stone plaque that Vyse had packed in the sarcophagus, something he’d found inside the pyramid. That pharaoh’s not Menkaure; it’s Akhenaten, and his wife Nefertiti. Wichelo said that Vyse called the carving “the City of Light”.’

  ‘Did you get photos?’

  ‘At least one. I need to email it to Maurice. This will astonish him.’

  ‘Then the sooner we leave here, the better.’ Costas pulled a lever to blow air into the ballast tanks, and they began to ascend. Jack kept peering down, watching the sarcophagus as it disappeared into the inky blackness, and then settled back to study the images he had taken.

  ‘That’s a hell of a manipulator arm,’ Sofia said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Costas replied ‘You should come to the IMU engineering lab. Really. I can show you a lot more like that.’

  ‘Come and have dinner with me in Cartagena tonight. After I call the Minister of Culture and tell her about this.’

  ‘Tonight. Sure. Cool.’ Costas looked slightly flummoxed, and then smiled at her. ‘Yeah. I’d really like to. That’d be great.’

  Jack tore his eyes away from the screen and turned around. ‘I hate to throw a spanner in the works, but we might just have to go somewhere else this evening.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said. ‘I should have seen this coming. Sorry, Sofia. I think it’ll have to wait.’

  ‘No problem. I’m going to have my hands full anyway documenting this and filing my report for the Ministry. They’re going to want a press release, pronto. I think they’re really going to make a major deal out of this, and it’ll be my big break. It’ll be great for news of an underwater discovery off Spain to be about archaeology rather than some rip-off treasure-hunters who think they can hoodwink us into believing that they’re archaeologists. This could lead to a lot more IMU involvement in Spain, and I’d love to push for that. But I’ll be waiting for you. And I won’t take no for an answer.’

  ‘Roger that, Sofia. I’ll be back. Meanwhile we’ll liaise with the Spanish Civil Guard and have round-the-clock protection over the site.’

  ‘You’ve got it. They’re on standby already.’

  Jack tapped on the intercom. ‘Is Captain Macalister there?’

  ‘I hear you, Jack.’

  ‘Is the Lynx helicopter ready?’

  ‘As you requested. And the IMU Embraer jet is at Cartagena airport. The crews aren’t yet on standby, as you weren’t sure whether you’d need them.’

  ‘Well I need them now. We’re leaving this evening.’

  ‘Where to, Jack?’ Costas asked. ‘Sun, sand and martinis?’

  ‘Lots of sun, lots of sand, not so sure about the martinis. We’re going to a place impossibly far removed from here, but linked to it by that.’ He pointed at the image of the figure from the plaque, frozen in blurry outline on the video screen. ‘By Akhenaten.’

  ‘About my guess earlier that there was more there than meets the eye. Game on?’

  Jack pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know. There’s a lot more to fathom out. A lot of threa
ds to follow. But I think if we stick with it, this could be the greatest adventure yet. The biggest prize.’

  ‘Well?’

  Jack grinned at him. ‘Okay. Yes. Game on.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You ever ridden a camel before?’

  ‘Oh no. Not camels.’

  ‘We’re going to the Nubian desert. To the Sudan.’

  3

  Near Semna, northern Sudan, present day

  Jack held on to the door handle on the passenger side of the Toyota four-wheel drive as it hurtled at breakneck speed down the highway through the desert of northern Sudan, passing a convoy of army trucks that honked at them in unison, the moaning sound trailing off quickly as they sped by. Costas was in the back seat, leaning over and holding the keffiyeh scarf that he had been attempting to wrap around his head in Arab fashion, but which was being blown off by the hot wind coming through the open windows. The car was being driven by Ibrahim al-Khalil, a former Sudanese naval officer who was now IMU’s representative in Sudan. Ibrahim normally led an ongoing project searching for ancient wrecks along the Red Sea coast of Sudan, but had been called in at short notice to liaise with Jack for the Nile dive they had planned for today. He was one of IMU’s best divers, and Jack would trust him with his life underwater; that, and the stress for Ibrahim of working in the pirate-infested waters off eastern Sudan, allowed Jack to forgive him the adrenalin burst that clearly took over when he got behind the wheel of a car, even though they had no deadline and less than twenty kilometres to go. Not for the first time in over thirty years as a marine archaeologist, Jack felt less safe travelling to the dive site than he ever did underwater.

  He forced himself to forget the road and review the journey so far. He and Costas had left Seaquest II in the harbour at Alexandria and flown in the ship’s Lynx helicopter to Cairo, where IMU’s Embraer 190 jet had been waiting to fly them to the Sudanese border town of Wadi Halfa in the Nubian desert. Some eight hundred kilometres south of Cairo they had flown over the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser, the vast reservoir more than five hundred kilometres long that had begun to fill up after the first stage of the dam was completed in 1964. As a small boy, Jack had been riveted by a National Geographic article that showed the huge engineering project to relocate the ancient Abu Simbel temples above the rising waters of the lake, and he had asked the captain to fly over the artificial hill where the four colossal statues of Ramses the Great sitting side by side were just visible from twenty thousand feet. He had dreamed of diving deep below the waters of the lake to the original temple site, and imagined swimming through the cavernous chambers that lay behind the facade; in the aircraft he found himself running swiftly through the logistics of an IMU project to take a film crew to the site. He had sensed something else, gazing down at the temple for the first time from the air, so high that he could see the curvature of the earth through the dust haze on the horizon. The temple was among the most impressive monuments of ancient Egypt, built by Ramses the Great in the thirteenth century BC to intimidate the people of Nubia, yet from Jack’s vantage point the statues seemed merely to emphasise the impossibility of controlling this place and the puny efforts of any army to conquer the desert.

  At Wadi Halfa they had been met by Ibrahim, who had cleared them through the formalities necessary to bring diving equipment across the Egyptian border. Jack had never before worked in Sudan, and his only personal contact other than Ibrahim was an old Sudanese friend from the Royal Naval College who was now deputy commander of the Sudanese air force and who had generously agreed to loan them the use of an air force Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter to take their gear from Wadi Halfa to Maurice Hiebermeyer’s excavation site near Semna on the Nile, some thirty kilometres to the south. All that Hiebermeyer had told him was that they would be looking for structures of pharaonic date submerged since the 1960s, and he had imagined a straightforward dive requiring little more than standard IMU scuba equipment; if they needed more sophisticated gear, they could always request it from Seaquest II. While they were waiting at the airport for the paperwork to be finished, Costas had fired up the compact diesel air compressor and filled their four twelve-litre air tanks so that they would be good to go on arrival at the site.

  They had loaded everything on board the helicopter and then set off in the Toyota towards the modern highway that ran the length of the Nile towards Khartoum. The helicopter would not be able to depart from Wadi Halfa for another few hours, and Jack had wanted to see the desert from the perspective of the soldiers and adventurers who had come this way when the only transport was on the ground, by foot or camel. He had been fascinated to drive through Wadi Halfa itself, a staging post for generations of British soldiers who had campaigned in the desert: the relief expedition sent to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum in 1884; the army led by Lord Kitchener to exact revenge against the Mahdist forces fourteen years later; the soldiers who had garrisoned Egypt and the Sudan against the Ottoman Turkish enemy during the First World War; and then another generation who had been here during the Second World War. Jack knew that this modern history lay over another history of successive campaigns, beginning almost four thousand years earlier, when the pharaohs of ancient Egypt had attempted to bring the Nubian desert and the fabled kingdoms that lay to the south under their control, and had started to search for the gold ore deposits that were the source of their wealth. As the Toyota sped south, he had begun to sense the reasons why those campaigns seemed always to have been rebuffed, and why the Egyptians had never brought this land under their heel. The Nile to the north was surrounded by fertile flood plains of verdant green, but here it was a ribbon of silver through a wasteland of red, the gorge too deep and the cliffs too high for the adjacent desert ever to be irrigated during the annual flood that was the lifeblood of Egypt to the north. People had always lived here – fishermen, boatmen, farmers on the few patches of lowland where the river water could be hauled out with shaduf water-lifting devices, and nomads of the desert wadis and oases – but the Nubian desert could never sustain the concentrated population of the Nile valley in Egypt, and the people here would be as difficult to control as the sand and dust of the desert itself.

  The Toyota slowed down, mercifully, and Ibrahim swung the wheel and engaged the four-wheel drive as they began to wend their way along a bumpy track towards the Nile a kilometre or so to the west. Costas leaned forward from the back seat and tapped his shoulder. ‘I’ve been thinking of our dive. How much deeper do you think Lake Nasser made the Nile at this point?’

  ‘We call our end of it Lake Nubia,’ Ibrahim replied. ‘A small but mostly amicable dispute with Egypt.’

  ‘Okay. Lake Nubia. How deep?’

  Ibrahim pulled the Toyota around a pothole and then took one hand off the wheel, fumbling in the glove compartment in front of Jack and pulling out a small folder, which he passed back to Costas. ‘Take a look at the first paper. It’s an offprint from the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of 1903. The author was a British geologist who studied the narrowest point of the Semna cataract at low water when the rocks on either side were exposed, at the place we’re going to now. He dropped a plumb line into the torrent and got twenty-three metres. He then looked at marks on the cliff made by the ancient Egyptians to show maximum high water when the Nile was in flood, and they were some twelve metres above the level of the river at maximum spate in the late nineteenth century, showing the amount of riverbed erosion that had occurred over three thousand years. All I know for sure is that those marks are now submerged, and the present level of the river caused by the Aswan dam is well above that, perhaps ten or fifteen metres.’

  Costas whistled. ‘That makes at least fifty metres depth to the base of that channel, maybe sixty. It’s a good thing we brought our mixed-gas gear.’ He flipped the pages and unfolded a plan showing the cataract. ‘What about this pool below the channel?’

  ‘As far as I know, nobody’s ever sounded it. In pharaonic times and during the British expeditio
n in 1884 it was a kind of a harbour, where the boats coming up from Egypt offloaded their goods for the trek across the desert. When I came here to do a recce for your visit, Maurice and I talked to some fishermen from the local village of Kumna. They confirmed the British army engineer reports that the pool is incredibly calm in the centre and on the west side, so the torrent must drop in an underwater current that sweeps around the east side, below where we’re heading now. They say that whereas the riverbed elsewhere through the cataract is scoured clear of sediment by the current, in the centre of the pool it’s covered by metres and metres of mud. Apparently the current does strange things, whirling around, and that animals that fall into the pool are sucked down into the mud, never to be seen again. They all know the story of the leviathan of the Old Testament, the terrifying river monster, and they think that this was its birthplace, the place that the ancient Egyptians believed was the dark pool that wells up from the underworld, from which evil sprang. The locals never swim or fish there. One old man told us that a giant immortal crocodile lurks deep in the mud, ravenous and unrequited ever since the ancient Egyptians stopped feeding it slaves.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Costas moaned, shutting the folder. ‘I’d forgotten. They have crocodiles in the Nile, don’t they? Jack, why didn’t you remind me?’

  ‘Crocodylus niloticus,’ Jack said. ‘It’s in the name. Pretty obvious.’

  ‘I don’t always think in Latin.’

  ‘Okay. We’re here.’ Ibrahim pulled the Toyota to a halt, leaving the engine running. ‘I’m going back to the road to wait for the helicopter. We chose a landing spot about a kilometre to the south so the dust from the downdraught doesn’t mess up the archaeological site. Once Maurice has shown you around, you could walk out to meet me.’