Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (17 page)

“Costas is already in the water.”

“What? In the sub? He’s supposed to wait for me.”

“He wanted to get it submerged to check the gimbal, to make sure it’ll keep the sub trim and level. He realized that the only way he could do it was to have it in the water for a shallow-water trial. All’s going well. He should be finished and on the surface by the time you get on deck.”

Jack drained the rest of the coffee and handed back the mug. “Thanks. Two minutes to change into my overalls and I’m there.” The crewman ducked away down the corridor, and Jack stripped off his outer clothes and pulled on the orange IMU overalls that had been hanging behind his door. They were more comfortable in the confined space of the bathysphere, and cooler if the heat ramped up. He had to steel himself to spending the next few hours cooped up inside a metal and Perspex ball barely big enough to fit the two of them crouched down, something that preyed on a lingering claustrophobia he had battled since a near-death experience diving in a mine shaft when he was a boy. He splashed some water on his face, wiped it on his sleeve, and stooped out the door into the passageway. He kept his own personal demon at bay by focusing his mind on the objective. This was not just about the plaque, about his burning personal quest. It was also about ensuring that the sarcophagus was successfully winched to the surface, a huge achievement in itself but also a carrot to dangle in front of the egomaniacal tyrant in charge of the Egyptian antiquities service who might thus be persuaded to save a young woman from an appalling fate.

Jack slid on his hands down the rails of the stairway to the main deck level, swung open the hatch, and stood in the full glare of the sunlight on the foredeck below the bridge, cursing himself for having forgotten his sunglasses. In front of him the new red derrick was swung off to starboard, its cable taut where the submersible was held over the side of the ship. Jack grabbed a hard hat from the bin beside the hatch and went over to the rail. Looking down he could see the submersible awash in the azure blue of the Mediterranean. Out of the water it was ungainly, its manipulator arms making it look like some giant insect, with racks of compressed air cylinders and piping on either side. In the water it was another story entirely. A streamlined yellow carapace covered the pressurized bathysphere and double-lock chamber, a crucial feature that allowed divers to enter
and egress. The vectored-thrust propellers allowed an extraordinary precision of movement and position holding, perfect for archaeological work and the task ahead of them almost a thousand meters below on the seabed.

Macalister came alongside him, and they both watched as the submersible rose higher and Costas came into view through the Perspex viewing dome. Jack glanced at his watch. The journalists would be having their second briefing now, and soon afterward be expecting to set up their cameras. Before that the submersible would have to be raised out of the water and placed on its cradle on the deck in order for Jack to get inside. Then it would be winched out again. If this was going to be in full view of the world’s media, they needed everything to run as smoothly as possible and not allow filming until they were in the water again and certain that everything was good to go.

Macalister pressed the earphone he was wearing and bent down to listen more clearly and then straightened up, gave a thumbs-up, and made a whirling motion with his hand, looking back at the derrick operator. He turned to Jack. “That was Costas, and he’s ready to come up. He said it was crucial to trial it, and the issue’s resolved.”

“You mean he got itchy feet, and just couldn’t resist taking it for a joyride.”

Macalister grinned, and signalled again to the derrick operator.

The cable creaked, and the motor screeched. There was a sudden lurch, and the cable began paying out rapidly from the derrick, coiling in the sea around the submersible. Jack glanced back in alarm and saw the derrick operator frantically pulling the emergency hand brake. Jack looked at the submersible. At least it was buoyant, not dependent on the winch to keep it afloat. But as he watched, the top of the submersible dipped beneath the waves, and then was submerged. Jack’s heart began to pound.
Something was wrong
.

“It’s the cable,” Macalister shouted. “The coils have fallen on top of the submersible, weighing it down.”

Jack stared at the cable. At least fifty meters had been paid out. If the weight of the cable forced the submersible down to a depth of ten meters, then the volume of air in its ballast tanks would be halved and it would sink of its own accord. It would come to a halt only when it reached the maximum extent of the cable. Jack tossed off his hard hat, grabbed another intercom headset from its stand, and put it on. “Costas, do you read me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Blow the ballast tanks. There’s a malfunction in the derrick, and about fifty meters of coiled cable has dropped onto you.”

“No can do, Jack. Something’s jamming the valve.”

Jack stared at the wavering form of the submersible just beneath the surface. He could just see where a coil of cable had caught around the manifold linking together the rack of compressed air cylinders on one side. The submersible suddenly sank deeper and the coil disengaged, swirling around with the rest of the cable in the water below the derrick. “Okay,” Jack said. “A coil of cable was caught around it. Try now.”

“Still no good. The drag from the cable must have somehow closed the external valve.”

Jack turned back to the derrick operator. “Can you hold it?” he shouted.

The man gave a thumbs-up, his other hand still on the brake. “I should be able to hold it once it reaches the maximum extent already paid out. That’s fifty-seven meters from the top of the derrick. But I can’t guarantee for how long. After that, it’s a thousand-meter payout.”

Jack turned back to the water. The submersible was nearly out of sight now, sinking more rapidly, the cable unwinding and straightening out above it. Two men with tool kits rushed up to the derrick, removed the panel over the electronic controls, and tried to isolate the problem.

Beside Jack the two safety divers were quickly finishing
kitting up. Jack cupped his hand over the mike so that Costas could hear against the noise. “You’re going to come to a halt at about fifty meters depth. The divers should be able to free the valve. Failing that, you can do an emergency egress through the double-lock chamber, and they’ll escort you to the surface. You copy that?”

“Copy, Jack. But there’s another problem. It’s also cut off my breathing air. The carbon dioxide levels in the bathysphere are already in the red. I’ve only got a few minutes before blackout.”

Jack stared at the two safety divers, his mind racing through the options. They had just zipped up their E-suits and were donning air cylinders. The cable suddenly became taut, and the derrick jolted. “Okay,” he said into the mike. “The divers are less than a minute away from entry. Do you copy?”

There was a pause, and Costas’ voice when it came through sounded distant. “Copy that. I’m on the way out, Jack. My legs and arms are tingling.”

Jack stared at the cable, watching the water shimmer off it. In the space of a few minutes, a routine equipment check had turned into a deadly crisis. He felt his breathing and heart rate slow, as if he were making time itself slow down to stretch out the seconds so that he could run through all the options. The divers had only the compressed air tanks they used for shallow-water safety checks and maintenance. It would take too long now to rig them up with mixed gas or rebreathers. With compressed air, they were limited to fifty meters, maybe twenty meters beyond that in an extreme emergency, but no more. If the cable ran free again and the submersible plummeted beyond that depth, there was only one option left for rescue, one that he would never allow another member of his team to take.

And then it happened. The derrick screeched and the cable began to feed out again. Jack ripped off the headphones and glanced back to the derrick operator, seeing where the others had leapt forward to help him try to hold the brake, their tools cast aside. The cable was falling
fast, dropping the submersible far beyond air-diving depth now. Jack turned, feeling as if he were in slow motion. His vision tunneled, his metabolism slowed as if he were already in dive response, his system anticipating what his brain was telling it and doing all it could to maximize his chances of survival. He blew on his nose to clear his ears, keeping his nose pinched, and with his other hand scooped up the weight belt of one of the divers, holding it tight and bounding to the edge of the deck beside the cable. He was barely conscious of those around him, of Macalister’s shocked face, of the two divers too stunned to move, of voices behind yelling at him not to do it.

He stared into the abyss. All he thought of was the darkness, and Costas.

He breathed fast, gulping in the air, took a final deep lungful, and jumped.

J
ack had just enough time to cross his ankles and arms to present minimal resistance before he hit the water, his right hand pinching his nose ready to equalize the pressure in his ears and sinuses and his other hand wrapped around the diver’s weight belt he had grabbed just before leaving the deck. He knew that the cable from the derrick to the submersible was only a few meters away, and with the dead weight of the belt he would plummet directly on target without having to angle sideways.

In the seconds it took him to leave the deck, his mind had flashed through the physiology of free diving: the possibility of middle ear and sinus rupture if he failed to equalize, and the inevitability of lung barotrauma and blood shift into the capillaries as his chest cavity was squeezed. Yet there was also the reflexive response of the body to being underwater, the reduction of metabolic rate that could allow him to remain conscious for the crucial few extra seconds he might need to reach the submersible and open the air-tank manifold to give Costas a chance of survival.

Below him lay almost a thousand meters of water to the wreck of the
Beatrice
. At that depth without a pressure suit, his organs would be crushed, but he would have been dead a long time before that. With every ten
meters of depth from the surface, his lungs would halve in volume, so that at fifty meters the air that had filled his lungs would occupy only one-fifth of that volume, at a hundred meters one-tenth. By a hundred and fifty meters, lung barotrauma was a near certainty. The constricting volume of his chest cavity would cause the membranes to rupture, and he would begin to drown in his own blood. By then, perhaps two minutes or two and a half minutes into the dive, he would be reaching the limit of his breath-holding endurance. At that point he would either give way and breathe in water, or black out because the increased carbon dioxide level in his body would trigger unconsciousness. Either way meant death. All he knew for certain was that the maximum free-diving depth ever achieved had been a little over 250 meters, less than a quarter of the depth of the water below him now and representing almost superhuman physiological endurance. If the submersible had dropped any deeper than that before he reached it, there could be only one possible outcome, for him as well as for Costas.

He was instinctively prepared for a shock of cold, but as he sliced into the water he felt the warmth of the Mediterranean envelop him. He knew that the cold would come, a rapid, numbing cold as he passed through the thermocline, and that the oxygen saturation in his brain was inducing a mild sense of euphoria, something that would wear off quickly as the oxygen was depleted. As he felt himself plummet, he concentrated on equalizing his ears, his eyes shut tight. To open them in the pellucid water would be to reveal the enormity of the darkness beneath him, something that would make even the strongest diver balk. He would do so only once he had passed the point of no return, once he knew that bailout was impossible.

Less than ten seconds after entering the water, he passed the first big thermocline, at this time of year at a depth of about thirty-five meters. Even if he dropped the weights, he knew that without fins he would stand no
chance of returning to the surface now. The cold increased his sense of speed, his skin more sensitized to the water rushing past. Equalizing became easier as the pressure differential decreased, each halving of the air spaces in his body every ten meters now involving smaller and smaller volumes of gas. He was deeper than he had ever free-dived before—eighty, perhaps ninety meters—far beyond the safe depth for compressed-air diving, well into the death zone, where the chances of sudden unconsciousness increased dramatically with every meter of descent.

He felt a searing pain in his lungs, as if a clamp were compressing his chest from all sides, tightening with every second that passed. Even if there had been air to breathe, he felt that his chest could never bear the expansion. The cold was shocking now, as cold as the Arctic Ocean, further paralyzing him. He knew he had little time, maybe half a minute, no more. He opened his eyes. For a few seconds he was distracted from the agony in his body as he concentrated on trying to see. He looked down, blinking against the blur. Directly below him it was pitch dark, an absolute darkness like he had never seen before. He had the sense that he was sinking into it, that he had plummeted below the final gloom of natural light. He knew that meant he was at least 120 meters deep, probably closer to 150 meters. For an instant the pain seemed to leave him and he felt himself holding Rebecca tight, a memory of a moment when he had felt that his life had been most worthwhile, a moment of utter contentment. He forced himself out of it, back to reality. He needed to remain focused for his final seconds, even if it meant excruciating pain.
Costas
.

And then he saw it. A few meters below him, a suffused glow appeared, the emergency lighting of the submersible. He hit the cable and slid down it, the metal cutting into his exposed forearm. He crashed into the carapace of the submersible like an astronaut out of control on a spacewalk. He let go of the weight belt, which spun a crazy dance into the depths, disappearing
out of sight below. He saw the recumbent form of Costas watching him through the viewing port of the bathysphere, his face distorted by the thick Perspex. He pulled himself over to the manifold linking the air cylinders together and found the wheel that opened the valve, seeing where it had been bent over by the cable falling on it. He pulled it anticlockwise.
Nothing
. He tried again, using every fiber of his being, every ounce of energy he had left. Still nothing. He suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to breathe, and began gagging, each reflex sending a jolt of pain through his lungs. He caught sight again of the face in the porthole.
He could not give up now
. He heaved one last time, and suddenly it gave way, cracking open. He spun the wheel around several times and pulled himself frantically down to the wheel that opened the double-lock chamber, spinning that too, feeling the hatch open inward and pulling himself inside, pushing it shut and slamming his hand down on the handle that opened the valve to fill it with air.

A deafening hiss filled his ears, and the water in the chamber became a raging maelstrom, lit up by the orange glow of the emergency lighting. Seconds later his head was above water, and he was gasping, taking in huge lungfuls of air, shuddering as the oxygen coursed through him. He coughed hard and saw a fine mist of red, evidence of some respiratory tissue damage but not enough to indicate major barotrauma. He saw blood drip from his nose, and he tipped his head up. He glanced at his watch; it had been a little over four minutes since he had last looked at it on the deck of the ship just before jumping. The depth gauge on the casing of the chamber showed 275 meters, and was increasing rapidly. In the course of tangling with the submersible, he had dropped through the threshold of possibility for free diving. Another ten meters and he would probably have been gone. He had been lucky.

The chamber emptied of water, the hissing stopped, and the hatch from the bathysphere clanged open.
Costas’ head appeared through it. “Jack. Good of you to drop in.”

Jack coughed again, his voice hoarse, distant sounding. “Don’t mention it.”

“You okay?”

Jack tipped forward, a finger pressed against his nose. “Could use a tissue.”

Costas fumbled in the pocket of his overalls, leaned in, and passed over a scrunched ball of white. Jack took it, holding it cautiously. “Pre-used?”

“Tried and tested.”

Jack wet it, tore off a chunk, shoved it up his nostril, and held it there. He cautiously tipped forward again and saw that the bleeding had been stemmed. His breathing had nearly returned to normal, and he edged forward, noticing for the first time the gash like a deep rope burn on his left forearm where he had slid down the cable. Costas handed him a towel, a fleece, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. “My spare clothes. A little short and a little wide, but who’s looking. Once we get into the bathysphere, we’ll dig out the first-aid kit for that arm.”

“You okay?”

“I was nearly gone, Jack. Seeing stars.” He jerked his head at the emergency oxygen bottle attached to the casing beside him. “Couldn’t risk using that because the air cutoff meant there was a pressure buildup inside the bathysphere, enough to make pure oxygen toxic. But it’s back to normal now.”

Jack rubbed the towel on his hair, feeling the ache in his head from the cold. “What’s our status?”

“We’re going to the bottom, Jack. When you opened the valve, it filled the bathysphere. We’ve got enough air for at least six hours. But there’s still a problem with the pipes to the ballast tanks. Right now I just have to concentrate on maintaining life support and keeping the sub stable and upright. Once we get within fifty meters of the seabed, I’ll activate the vertical water thrusters to soften the landing. If the vectored thrusters work as well, they might give us enough power to hop around
like a big bug on the seabed, but not to rise more than a few meters without draining the battery.”

“How close will we be to the sarcophagus?”

“We should be dead on target.”

“Comms?”

“Dead as a dodo. The fiber-optic cable was severed. We have no way of communicating with the surface.”

“But they could still brake the cable before we hit the seabed.”

Costas shook his head. “Too much of it has been paid out. The weight of that amount of cable as well as the dead weight of the submersible would be too much by now for them to be able to halt the fall. The only way of repairing the winch will be to let the cable uncoil completely after having secured the upper end with the old derrick, and then attempt to repair the fault in the winch machinery. I was never happy with that new derrick, Jack. Too many corners were cut to get this show ready in time for the media, who now look as if they might not get a show at all. But we’ve got the best people topside, including the engineer from the shipyard who installed it, and with any luck we’ll be back on track soon. The biggest danger is the cable spooling off entirely and falling on us, two tons of metal dropping a thousand meters at about fifty meters a second, like a gigantic whip. If that happens, this submersible will become the second sarcophagus down there.”

“Meanwhile they’ll be sending down an ROV.”

“It’ll be on its way as we speak. My guys in the engineering lab will be onto it.”

“Okay.” Jack eased out of his wet clothes, realizing that he was shivering uncontrollably. He had hardly noticed it in the euphoria of survival, but now he felt the cold ache all over his skin, adding to the residual pain he felt in his chest. He towelled himself down as well as he could, pulled on Costas’ clothes, and followed him through the hatch into the bathysphere, sliding down into the copilot’s seat beside Costas. He leaned back,
closing his eyes for a moment. “I never thought I’d be happy to be in a confined space, but this is that time.”

“Seat belts on, Jack. Brace yourself.”

Jack strapped himself in and watched Costas activate the thrusters. The three portholes in front of them showed pitch black. The external lights were still off. The depth gauge showed 820 meters, then 840. The thrusters came to life, slowing down the submersible and forcing Jack up in the seat against his belt. Costas activated the multibeam sonar, and a high-definition image appeared on the screen in front of them as it swept the seabed some eighty meters below. It revealed undulating sediment and then the familiar outline of the shipwreck, the scatter of guns clearly visible and the sarcophagus standing stark in the center, where the pit had been dug around it preparatory to lifting.

Costas flicked on the external strobe array, revealing a shimmer of reflected particles through the portholes, and then he took the joystick in his right hand while keeping his left on the water jet throttles. “Easy does it,” he muttered to himself. “I need to pull us a fraction off the vertical of the cable to avoid landing right on top of the sarcophagus. The vectored thrusters aren’t responding, but I should be able to do it by reducing the flow through the port-side vertical thrusters while keeping the starboard ones on full throttle.”

Jack could feel the vibration of the water jets on one side of the submersible, and watched the altitude gauge, measuring their height above the seabed. At twenty-two meters he could see a hint of something through the forward viewing port, and suddenly he was seeing the shipwreck, the dull green of brass guns covered with verdigris poking out of the sediment. Above the breech of one of them, he could see the distinctive heart-shaped bale mark of the East India Company, a little detail he had not noticed before when he had studied photos of the wreck. It opened up a small unexplained byway in the history of the ship that sent a frisson of excitement through him. And then with a soft explosion of sediment they came to
a halt, 934 meters beneath
Seaquest
and the surface of the Mediterranean.

“The eagle has landed,” Costas said, releasing the controls.

The veil of sediment dropped, and the white form of the sarcophagus came into view only a few meters in front of the strobe array. Jack could clearly make out the architectural style of the carving, a geometric pattern that made the sarcophagus one of the greatest exemplars of sculpture from the Egyptian Old Kingdom, at the time of the building of the pyramids. For almost two hundred years, the only image that the world had seen of the sarcophagus had been a woodcut in Colonel Vyse’s account of his excavations. It showed the sarcophagus inside the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Menkaure. Now it was in front of them, looking almost as if it had been designed to be in this place, unaffected by the forces of nature that were steadily eroding and crumbling the wreck around it.

Costas tried the controls again. “They’ve gone dead. I can’t move them. That coil must have caused more damage than I thought.”

“So we’re not going anywhere. No big bug hopping on the seabed.”