Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (30 page)

“It’s possible. The ship that’s still here was abandoned in the middle of refitting, as if it too had been intended for departure but there was no time to make both vessels ready. Akhenaten must have known his life was in danger. A man like the caliph Al-Hakim, who had done
beneficent things, had perhaps endowed some kind of library or seminary at this spot, but had made mortal enemies in the old priesthood for his desecration of their temples and banning of their rituals. Maybe departure was his only option once he had achieved his ambitions and seen the Israelites safely resettled in Canaan.”

“Have you voiced this idea to Maurice?”

“He says that for a man who founded a new religion, created a new capital city, and seems to have engineered the destruction of his entire chariot army to let the Israelites escape, anything is possible. Akhenaten was ancient Egypt’s wild card.”

“Just as long as he took Nefertiti with him too.”

Jack looked at the ship again, making sure his camera took in as much as it could of the astonishing sights around him. It was as if they had walked into an ancient Egyptian shipyard while the workers were out on a lunch break. He turned back to Costas. “Okay.
Definitely
worth it. Where do we go from here?”

Costas nodded back the way they had come. “The passageway from the wharf carried on beyond the point where I broke through into these chambers. There might once have been entrances from these sheds into a complex under the plateau, but if so they’ve been sealed up. We could spend hours sounding out the plaster on the walls and not find them. Every entrance seems to have been sealed up, as if this whole place had been mothballed. That might fit in with your theory.”

Jack followed Costas back through the ship chambers and clambered up the jumble of fallen masonry where they had entered. He heaved Costas up on his shoulders and then strained as he took Costas’ outstretched arm and hauled himself into the passageway. He suddenly felt exhausted and woozy, as if he had experienced a rapid loss of blood pressure, and he leaned against the wall of the passageway and took a drink from his hydration pack. He realized that he had not drunk anything since they had passed beyond Cairo, and he made a mental note to keep hydrated.

He pushed off and followed, his unsteadiness having passed. Ahead beyond the western limit of the boat chambers he could see Costas’ beam waver, and then stop. As he neared he could see that the passageway had ended, carrying on only as an aperture at head level about half a meter high and a meter wide that extended into the darkness as far as their beams could penetrate. He remembered three months before, staring down a similar slit from under the pyramid, looking in exactly the opposite direction to their position now. Somewhere between the two was the space that had been lit up so brilliantly by the light that had come down through the pyramid.

He refused to think that that was the end of the road, that what they had seen was no more than a reflection from further tunnels and ventilation shafts. What they had found already had been extraordinary, but there had to be more, a central hub to the radiating passageways indicated on the plaque, something set farther back under the plateau directly ahead of them now.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Costas said.

“I’m thinking that if there’s another chamber ahead, it must have been accessible from this tunnel if it was used to bring in building materials and workers. But maybe once the work was completed, this tunnel was shut off except for this aperture, with the entrance to the chamber then becoming the hypothetical processional way that we think might be represented by that other arm of the Aten heading toward Fustat.”

“You mean our hypothetical egress tunnel.” Costas crouched down at the corner of the tunnel and peered closely at the gaps where the slabs of granite abutted one another. “You’re right, Jack. Under the veneer I can see the edges of blocks of masonry. The Egyptians were past masters at this, weren’t they? Creating burial chambers and then devising ingenious ways of blocking them off to deter tomb robbers. Look at all those obstructions that Colonel Vyse had to blow his way through to reach
the sarcophagus in the Pyramid of Menkaure. Somebody was doing the same kind of thing here.”

“Only I don’t think what lies beyond here was a burial chamber.”

“Maybe not. But I have a horrible feeling that there’s one right here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Beside the floor, Jack. Look down to where I am. There’s a really bad smell coming from it.”

Jack followed Costas’ gaze and knelt in front of an irregular hole that looked as if it had been punched through a plastered space between two slabs of granite. He saw something, reached in, gingerly pulled it out, and held it under his beam. It was a human hand, a very old human hand, mummified and nearly skeletal. He held it out to Costas. “Ever wanted to shake hands with a mummy?”

“I knew it. We weren’t going to go underground in Egypt without finding mummies. No way.”

“I think we might just have found Corporal Jones’ larder.” Jack carefully replaced the hand, took a deep breath, and poked his head partway into the hole. He panned his beam around and revealed a carved-out annex the size of a small bedroom. It was a charnel house, filled with a mass of disarticulated mummies and mummy parts, bedded down in a great mass of feathery material that looked like pieces of mummy wrapping and shredded human skin. He looked for anything diagnostic, and then saw a fragment of wooden coffin casing, its edges gnawed away but part of the painting and hieroglyphs on the surface just visible. He pulled his head out and sat back against the wall of the tunnel, gasping for breath, his eyes smarting from the dust.

“Well?” Costas said. “Is there a passageway?”

Jack shook his head, and coughed. “What we’ve got in there,” he said, “is a giant rat’s nest.”

“Not caused by Corporal Jones after all?”

Jack nodded, coughing again. “Him too. I’m sure of it. I think he took his cue from the rats. They must
have gnawed out a small entrance from this passage, and Jones in his desperate hunt for food must have seen it and enlarged it. There’s more damage in there than rats could cause, and more bits missing. Originally that chamber was stuffed full of intact mummies, but they’re not from the time of Akhenaten. The one fragment of decorated coffin I saw was definitely Old Kingdom, almost certainly from the time of Menkaure. What I think we’ve got here is a secondary burial, mummies probably of viziers and minor officials involved in the construction of the pyramid, cleared out of their tombs by Akhenaten’s workmen to make way for something bigger. It makes sense that the original tombs should have been under the plateau in front of the pyramid. If they were removed and maybe extended to make a larger chamber, then that’s a promising sign.”

“If we could get through.” Costas eased himself up, looking back distastefully at the hole where the withered fingernails of the hand were poking out. Jack followed suit, and they both peered down the aperture at the end of the tunnel.

“It could be done,” Jack said after a moment. “Al-Hakim and Jones must have crawled down there, as we haven’t seen any way ahead other than this.”

“I know what would have drawn them on,” Costas said. “I think this was a light shaft, like the one under the pyramid. Even at night if there was a moon, they would have seen some light ahead, enough to tempt them to try their luck at getting through. After all, by this stage if they were trapped down here, they wouldn’t have had anything to lose.” He glanced back again at the hand. “Other than Jones, leaving his mummy larder behind.”

“Do we risk it, or double-check for entrances elsewhere?”

“We could do a recce.”

“What do you mean?”

A chirping sound came from the bulge in the front of Costas’ boiler suit, and then it moved. Jack jumped
back, startled, but then he relaxed slightly, shaking his head. “You brought along a little friend, didn’t you?” Costas unzipped the top of his boiler suit and a little mechanical eye on a stalk peered out, followed by two miniature robotic hands that slowly reached up and grasped the edges of the suit. “I couldn’t leave Little Joey behind, could I?” Costas said, gently stroking the neck behind the eye. “Not after Big Joey had all the fun at the wreck site.”

“I worry about you sometimes. Aysha thinks you’d be a great dad to living, sentient human beings.”

Little Joey seemed to bristle, and cocked his eye at Jack. “Careful what you say,” Costas said. “He’s very sensitive.” He reached in, took the robot out, and placed it on the ledge at the beginning of the aperture. Then he pulled out a radio control unit and strap-on virtual goggles. “He’s programmed to be reactive to his environment. Because of what we tend to do, I’ve made him fully sensitized to tunnels and the kind of archaeological features we’ve encountered in the past. He’s like a robotic tomb raider. I’ll send him down that tunnel now and he’ll stop and report back anything unusual.”

“How does he do that?”

“He’ll tell us. You’ll see.” Costas reached under the tail of the robot and activated a switch. Like its larger counterpart, Little Joey was shaped like a scorpion, with four legs on either side, the single eye on its stalk and two flexible arms, only it was no bigger than a large rat. Costas lifted it and aimed it down the tunnel. But it leapt up, assumed its original sideways position, and looked back at Costas. Then it leapt around again and aimed itself down the tunnel. “He’s very independent,” Costas said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t like to be shown what to do. Always has to try it himself first.”

“Just like children,” Jack said thoughtfully. “That’s what you’d discover if you had them. Like a certain teenager we know.”

Little Joey suddenly scurried off down the aperture,
his lights showing as pinpricks in the darkness, and came to a halt perhaps ten meters ahead.

“Dead end?” Jack asked.

Costas hunched over the radio. “It means he’s seen something, but we won’t know until I’ve booted the system up and he can react. Once that’s done I’ll be able to put on the goggles and see what he sees. It’ll take a few minutes.” Costas stood back, took a deep breath, and wiped the back of his hand over his face, blinking hard.

“You okay?” Jack said.

“Beginning to feel the effect. Nothing serious, yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some basic science, Jack. Those extremists at the pyramid were spraying it with some kind of fuel, right? We saw those tanker trucks on the CNN report. It must have been a pretty well-planned operation.”

“They’ve been threatening it for years. Nothing about this coup is spur of the moment. They’re taking up where the Mahdi left off in 1885.”

“Well, spraying fuel and igniting it is how you get a stone building to look as if it’s burning. The biblical burning bush is thought to have been based on something similar in appearance, where in some conditions the gas exuding from certain desert species could be ignited to give the appearance of a bush wreathed in flame but not actually burning. Some of that fuel is likely to have entered the pyramid through the shafts that were used to bring light to this underground complex. The fuel will be burnt out long before it reaches us, but that’s not the problem. The problem is what I experienced firsthand during that terrorist strike on my destroyer in the Gulf, when I was trapped by fire belowdecks in the engine room before I managed to escape and help with the rescue.”

“Fire consumes oxygen,” Jack murmured. “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“You remember the low oxygen readout you noticed after we surfaced? Ever since then, when I’ve exerted myself I’ve felt a little lightheaded. I put it down to the
residual effect of carbon dioxide buildup during my final minutes on the rebreather, but this is a better explanation.”

Jack nodded. “That’s reassuring. I felt it a few minutes ago. I nearly blacked out.”

“Reassuring, but not. They’ll be jetting fuel continuously at the pyramid to maintain the spectacle, and that means more fuel getting down those shafts. With the outer surface of the pyramid wreathed in fire, the only way the burning fuel inside can feed its flames is by sucking up the oxygen from inside the pyramid, from the shaft, from the burial chamber, from the well we went down three months ago, and ultimately from every connected part of this underground complex. Slowly but surely, we’re being starved of oxygen.”

“How long, do you think?”

“Two or three hours, probably. Maybe less.”

“Well, we weren’t planning on lingering. If we’re in here much longer than that, we’ll never make our rendezvous with the felucca before dawn.”

“At least it means if we do get stuck down here, we won’t be around long enough to have to eat mummies.” Jack gave Costas a wan look. “I for one do not intend to suffocate because of some deranged extremist.”

“Amen to that. Let’s just hope Little Joey can save the day.”

They were interrupted by a chirping sound from down the aperture. Jack angled his headlamp beam and peered down. The robot was shaking and waving its arms as the eye looked back at them and then at the wall in front. “Something seems to be wrong,” he said. “Looks like a malfunction.”

Costas stared incredulously at Jack. “Malfunction? Little Joey? No way. He’s just excited. It means he really has found something. It shows that the system is coming online.” He picked up the mask, tried it on, and then removed it. “About a minute more, and then I can actually
be
Little Joey, real time. Lanowski calls it a mind-meld.”

Jack continued staring at the chirping and chattering apparition that was caught in his beam. “Is he really agitated? I mean, you must have programmed this.”

“It’s like a smoke alarm. He’s programmed to respond if he finds what I’ve asked him to look for. But he really
has
been acting like a wilful teenager recently. You think you’ve got problems with Rebecca. I left Lanowski alone with him in the engineering lab for half an hour a few weeks ago, and he hasn’t been the same since.”

“It’s stopped,” Jack said.

Costas put on the mask. “Eureka,” he murmured, manipulating the controls. “I’m looking through his eye, Jack. The shaft goes off to the right, and there it is, a very suffused red glow.”