Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (5 page)

Guerin nodded, his face now looking drained. “
Un moment
, monsieur, while I recover my composure.” He gestured at the equipment and then looked at Jones. He was suddenly beaming. “It is, as I believe you have correctly surmised, an automatic valve, the first-ever demand valve. When the diver breathes in, the cylinder releases a lungful of air, regulated through the device on the valve.”

“Tried and tested, I presume?” said Chaillé-Long, taking the butt of his cigar from his mouth and tossing it into the river.

“Monsieur Denayrouze has been developing a similar device, and Monsieur Rouquayrol has been making cylinders strong enough to hold more air,” he replied, his eyes narrowing. “But their
régulateur
is inferior to mine, requiring the diver to open the valve manually each time he needs air.”

Chaillé-Long looked at him shrewdly. “Are you in competition with these other gentlemen?”

“It is why I have had to be so secretive. And there is something else,
mon ami
. This device would revolutionize
underwater warfare. Divers could swim freely to attach mines beneath enemy ships’ hulls, wreaking havoc. One day wars will be fought underwater, you know. The world’s navies would clamor for it.”

“It is a good thing, then, that when I needed a diver for our enterprise, I was not obliged to employ these other gentlemen, and you were at hand.”

“A matter of good fortune that I had travelled to Alexandria intending to test my prototype, first in the ancient remains of the harbor and then on the wreck of the
Oceanus
in Aboukir Bay, where it blew up in 1798 during the Battle of the Nile. In these days of the British Empire, people have forgotten the role of Napoleon in opening up ancient Egypt to the world, and my discovery of the wreck would have been
pour la France
.”

“You mean it would have brought you the fortune in gold coin that is said to lie in her hold?”

Guerin shrugged theatrically. “An
inventeur
needs his income, monsieur. How else does he buy his
matériel
?”

“So, you do not selflessly give your endeavors to
la France
, then?”

Guerin eyed Chaillé-Long. “Do you work for the United States of America, monsieur, or for yourself?”

The ghost of a smile passed Chaillé-Long’s lips. “It sounds as if you are embarked upon a profitable enterprise.”

“Now you understand how it is that I have not been able to test my equipment like this before. I could not risk prying eyes seeing it.”

Chaillé-Long gave the man a wry look. “I am grateful to you for answering my question in so
direct
a fashion.” He put his hands on his hips, surveying the shore that was just coming into view, a dark bank several boat lengths away. “Now, are we ready?”

Jones eyed Guerin. “Do you have your lamp?”

“Mais oui,”
the Frenchman replied exuberantly, lifting an open-fronted metallic box the size of a kerosene lamp but containing an opaque glass ball. “Another one of my inventions. It contains a battery and an electrical
filament. The opaque glass keeps the light from shining too strongly, as the glare off the suspended particles in the water would obscure my view. I have tested it myself to a depth of ten meters off the Marseilles docks.”

“You are indeed an entrepreneur,” Chaille-Long murmured. “If
liberté, fraternité et égalité
are in truth not your master, then you and I could do business.”

Guerin looked at Jones, his eyes glinting. “And you, monsieur, for your part, you have
les explosifs
?”

Jones carefully lifted up an oiled tarpaulin beside the hatch and revealed a small wooden box attached by a coiled cable to a plunger. “Borrowed from the Royal Engineers depot in Cairo,” he said. “Security there is not what it used to be. The box contains eight one-pound sticks of dynamite, packed in petroleum jelly for waterproofing. The cable is two hundred feet long, and the charge should be waterproof down to a depth of thirty feet. If the captain can hold us at that distance from the riverbank, the boat should survive the detonation unscathed.”

Guerin stared hesitantly at the box. “That is, if I find what you are after, and have occasion to lay the charge.”

“I have spent weeks triangulating this exact position from the pyramids, transposing the ancient plan on the most up-to-date topographical maps prepared by the Ordnance Survey.”

The Frenchman tweaked his mustache. “More
équipage
liberated from the Royal Engineers, I surmise? And you found a theodolite too? You are a man of many skills.”

Jones coughed. “Let’s just say I’ve had some training.”

Guerin’s eyes twinkled. “Do you mean in larceny,
mon ami
, or in the military sciences?”

Jones pointed at the riverbank looming out of the darkness. It was held off by the captain’s boy with a pole. A cascade of bricks and mortar lay embedded in the bank, and above it they could make out the ruined walls and gun embrasure of the fort. “There it is,” Jones exclaimed, his voice hushed. “This was the feature that
coincided precisely with my measurement, the place I told the captain to find. When I came here in daylight, I also measured the movement of water along the shore. It’s outside the main river current, but there are strong eddies, enough to keep river silt from accumulating or mud from building up too deeply. Monsieur Guerin, I believe you will be in with a very good chance.” He looked up at Chaillé-Long. “Are you up to getting your hands wet, Colonel?”

Chaillé-Long bristled. “I will have you know that I have survived pitiless rain, mud, misery, malaria, and the other dread fevers of the jungle in my years as an explorer of deepest Africa.” He pointed to a faint scar on his cheek. “This wound, as you will doubtless have wondered, I acquired fighting off the Bunyan warriors of Uganda, alone with my Reilly elephant gun, assisted only by two of my bearers with Snider rifles, together accounting for dozens of ’em.” He took off his silk gloves with a theatrical flourish. “I do believe, sir, that I am capable of dipping my hand in this river, however fetid and pestilential its waters may be.”

Jones glanced at Chaillé-Long as he squatted down beside him. He noted the silk top hat, the black cape with its crimson lining, the patent leather shoes. The war in Sudan had attracted all manner of mavericks, some of them genuinely capable, others charlatans, and had refracted their skills in the intensity of the struggle, sometimes brilliantly so. And then it had thrown them out at the other end, propelling some on to greater things and others back to the obscurity from which they had emerged. The American officers hired as mercenaries in the Khedive’s service had made the Egyptian army a force to be reckoned with, but it had included their share of tale spinners and egotists. Jones remembered one night by the Nile sitting with his officer, Major Mayne, and a group of other Royal Engineers officers and listening to them talk about Chaillé-Long and his exploits in equatorial Africa. He had been derided at the Royal Geographical Society for suggesting that Lake
Victoria was only twelve miles across, having misidentified some islands as the opposite shore, and for trying to bribe a cartographer to make Lake Kyogo, on the Upper Nile, appear larger than it was, a blatant act of self-aggrandizement. It was also common knowledge that the wound on his face had not been caused by enemy fire but by his Sudanese cook, who had saved his life by shooting an attacking warrior with a revolver but in the process grazing Chaillé-Long on the face with the bullet.

Yet all the posturing and exaggeration was unnecessary. Chaillé-Long had indisputably gone farther south than any other foreigner in the Khedive’s service, showing the grit and determination so admired by the British and earning a letter of approbation from Gordon himself, published in the
New York Herald
. And he had no need to embellish his experience of fighting: Jones had respect for anyone who had been through the bloodbath of the American Civil War, and he knew that Chaillé-Long had been in at the sharp end. Beneath the foppery and affectation, he had seen the look in his eyes that he knew well from men who had faced death on the battlefield, and he had also seen the pearl-handled Colt revolver beneath the cape. Of one thing he was certain: Chaillé-Long was not a man to be trifled with, and Jones knew that, having made the decision to approach him in the first place, he was now committed to seeing this through with that man in the cape and top hat looming over him, whatever the outcome.

The captain of the boat whistled gently and pointed to the shore. Chaillé-Long waved back and drew himself up. “Now, Monsieur Guerin, if you will be so kind as to instruct us, Jones and I will assist you in donning your contraption. We have less than four hours until dawn, when we shall suddenly be conspicuous. We have no time to lose.”

H
alf an hour later, Jones and Chaillé-Long watched as Guerin floated on the surface of the Nile, his underwater lamp lighting up a brown smudge of silt in the water around him. With some considerable effort they had heaved him off the side of the boat. Meanwhile the captain and his boy offset the balance on the other side by swinging the boom around and hanging out as far as they could from it without falling in. After they had slid Guerin into the water, trying to keep their splashing to a minimum, Jones had double-checked the regulator valve above the bulbous air tank on his back while Guerin had inspected his face mask for leaks.

There were thirty atmospheres in the tank, pumped into it by a steam compressor in some backstreet mechanical shop that Guerin had found in Alexandria, and Jones could only hope that there was more air than fumes in the mix. If all went well, he should have some thirty minutes at the depth that Jones had estimated for their target, about twenty-five feet below. Guerin had shown him the small safety shutoff he had devised for when the pressure reached ten atmospheres, indicating that it was time to surface but allowing him to open the flow again to breathe the final lungfuls of air from the cylinder before it emptied.

The regulator was hissing now, a froth of bubbles coming out with each exhalation. They watched as he vented the air bladder under his arms that had kept him afloat. As his head began to sink, Jones reached out and tapped it. “
Bonne chance
, my friend. Remember to drop your lead weights when you intend to ascend, or else you will never make it back up.” Guerin nodded, raised a hand in farewell, and dropped below the surface, the smudge of light quickly disappearing. After a few moments, only the bubbles from his exhaust betrayed his presence, along with the detonator cord that Jones fed out as Guerin descended. The cord was attached to the dynamite in a box on the front of his suit. “Damn it to hell,” Jones murmured. “I forgot to remind him to breathe out as he ascends.”

Chaillé-Long dabbed his wet forearms with his handkerchief and rolled his sleeves back down. “Breathe out? Why should he need reminding of that, might I enquire?”

“Because the instinct underwater is to hold your breath,” said Jones. “We were taught that in diving class at the Royal Engineers School at Chatham. If you hold your breath while ascending, you get something called an embolism.”

Chaillé-Long snapped shut his cuff links. “And what might that be?”

“Your lungs rupture like an overfilled balloon.”

“Surely Monsieur Guerin would know of such things.”

“Monsieur Guerin is more an engineer than a diver, more a theoretician than a practitioner.”

“Elegantly put, Jones. You
are
an educated man, I find, more so than I might expect from the ruffians I have seen in the rank and file of your army.”

“Educated, but not a gentleman. A benefactor who visited my orphanage paid for me to go to the Bluecoat School in Bristol. But I was too rebellious and knew I’d never be polished enough to be admitted to the Royal Military Academy, so at sixteen I ran away from the school and joined my father’s old regiment, the sappers
and miners. They gave me some skills, but the rest is self-taught. I’ve always enjoyed reading. Done a lot of that over the past eight years, since the war.”

Chaillé-Long tucked his cloak under him and sat down on the bench on the foredeck. He adjusted his top hat, produced two cheroots from his waistcoat pocket, offered one to Jones, who declined it, and then lit the other one with a silver lighter, drawing deeply on it and crossing his legs. “I’ve wanted to ask you about that, Jones, now that we have some time on our hands. About the last eight years. About the officer who pointed you in my direction, Major Mayne.”

Jones was looking at Guerin’s bubbles, straining to follow them in the darkness as they advanced toward the shoreline and then seemed to veer a dozen or so yards to the north. The bubbles would be pulled farther along by the current as they rose, giving a misleading impression of the position of the diver, but even so Guerin would soon be reaching the limit of the detonator cable. Jones watched anxiously, checking that the plunger box was still secure where he had nailed it to the deck, but then saw with relief that the bubbles were returning along the shore in the direction of the boat. They were no more than fifty feet away now. He perched on the gunwale, still keeping an eye on them, and glanced at Chaillé-Long.

“Major Mayne. Finest officer I ever knew. Without him, I wouldn’t be here. He was the one who mentioned your name as one of Gordon’s confidants, and when I came to need a partner for this enterprise, you were the only one I could find of those officers still in Egypt. I took a risk in revealing what I did to you, but I knew you had money, and without gold to pay for a boat and a diver I was going nowhere.”

“What were you doing with Mayne in the desert?”

Jones paused, looking at him shrewdly. “He was a reconnaissance officer, and we carried out forays behind enemy lines. I was his servant, his batman.”

“You mean he was an intelligence officer. A spy.”

Jones paused again. “Not exactly. I cleaned his rifle once. It was a Sharps 1873, 45-70 caliber, with a telescope sight and heavy octagonal barrel. One of your American sharpshooter rifles.”

“Sharps 45-70?” Chaillé-Long exhaled a lungful of smoke. “Saw a man take out a buffalo with one at a thousand yards.”

“Well, I saw Mayne shoot a dervish across the Nile at over five hundred yards, and that was with a service Martini-Henry rifle,” Jones replied. “It was the finest shot I’ve ever seen, so who knows what he was capable of with the Sharps.”

Chaillé-Long knit his brows. “So, Mayne goes with this rifle on a mission to Khartoum, and a few weeks later Gordon is dead and, apparently, Mayne too, having disappeared and never been seen since?”

“That’s what I told you when we first met.”

Chaillé-Long cocked an eye at him. “All the most reliable accounts of Gordon’s last moments have him on the balcony of the Governor’s Palace, surrounded by dervishes, in full view, as it happens, from the other bank of the Nile—let’s say five hundred, six hundred yards distant, beyond the dervish encampment and where a sharpshooter might creep up and lie undetected, awaiting the right moment.”

“I know for a fact that Mayne met Gordon in Khartoum the morning of his death.”

“You know this for a fact? How so?”

Jones checked himself; he had revealed enough. “I’ve spent a lot of time amongst Arabs since then, and heard firsthand from men who were in Khartoum that day.”

“Was Mayne alone in his enterprise?”

Jones paused. “I did not see him depart for Khartoum from Wadi Halfa, where he went to be told of his mission by Lord Wolseley. I last saw him the day before on the Nile, where he left me with his belongings. That’s when he gave me the inscribed stone that he and his fellow officers had found in the crocodile temple beside the pool, with the radiating sun symbol of the pharaoh
Akhenaten that he had recognized as the plan of something underground, with the three temples at Giza clearly shown.”

“The artifact that brought us here,” Chaillé-Long exclaimed, taking another draw. “The ancient map to something hidden beneath the very feet of all those many who have tramped the plateau of Giza seeking treasures, little knowing what might lie below.”

He clamped his cheroot hard, and then removed it and picked out a piece of tobacco from between his teeth. He looked to the deck, and then at Jones again. “Did the thought ever occur to you,” he said quietly, “that Gordon alive in the hands of the Mahdi would have been a grave embarrassment to the British, a death knell for the Gladstone government, a fatal dent in the prestige of the empire? Gordon alive, a Christian martyr abandoned to the forces of jihad, or Gordon alive, a willing partner of the Mahdi, a man so disgusted by the failure of his compatriots to rescue the people of the Sudan that he would cast his lot with the enemy? Would not such a man have been a prime target for assassination?”

Jones kept his eyes glued on the waters below the riverbank. “Thoughts are for officers, Colonel. I’m just a lowly sapper.”

Chaillé-Long thought for a moment, shook his head, then flicked his butt into the river. He leaned back and smiled. “But not any longer, it seems. You say you’ve been associating with Arabs. Tell me, Jones, are you a deserter?”

Jones coughed. “Before Major Mayne left on his mission to Khartoum, he arranged for me to return to the railway construction unit that I’d been working with when I first arrived in Egypt after service in India. He thought railway construction would be safer and would see me through the campaign. He was probably right, but as far as I could see, neither the railway nor the river expedition were ever going to reach General Gordon in time, so I tossed a coin and stayed on the river. Everything
was going swimmingly until the Mahdi’s boys finally caught up with us at a place called Kirkeban and there was a terrible twenty-minute battle. One moment I was bayoneting and bludgeoning dervishes, and the next thing I knew I was floating down the river all alone, with only the corpses of my mates for company. I fetched up at the same pool where the major had found the crocodile temple and the clue in the inscription that he gave me for safekeeping. I stayed there for days, weeks, living off abandoned supplies. I’d been knocked on the head and was half-crazed. We’d heard rumors of a giant crocodile in the pool, and I became obsessed with the idea of catching it, conceiving all manner of devices to do so. The Leviathan, we’d called it, after the biblical monster. Then Kitchener and his camel troops arrived, and seeing them put some sense into me. You know Kitchener?”

Chaillé-Long nodded. “Rising star of the Egyptian army. The man who has sworn to avenge Gordon.”

“I heard him say it. That he’d kill a dervish for every hair on Gordon’s head. But I knew that could only be a long time in the future. It was Kitchener himself who told me that Gordon had been killed and that the British force was retreating back to Egypt and abandoning the Sudan to the Mahdi. It was then that I knew that Major Mayne wouldn’t be coming back, that it was a forlorn hope for me to wait for him. Then just before we reached the British camp at Abu Halfa, on the Egyptian border, I gave Kitchener the slip. I remembered what had happened after the battle of Kirkeban, and how it would look with me having disappeared. An army recovering after defeat is always looking for scapegoats and is never generous to soldiers they think have done a runner. I’d been cashiered before, out in India, even made sergeant once before being reduced. I was too cocky for my own good, mostly, with too many opinions for certain officers to stomach. But this time it was more serious. I didn’t fancy having survived the dervishes at Kirkeban
only to face a firing squad of my own mates at Abu Haifa.”

“That was more than eight years ago,” Chaillé-Long said. “What have you done since then?”

Jones peered at him and stroked his stubble. “Master of disguise, I am. That’s what Major Mayne used to call me. Within days of our reconnaissance missions behind dervish lines, I’d look the part, with a beard and a turban. My mother was Anglo-Indian, the daughter of a British soldier and a Madrassi woman, so I’m naturally dark skinned. I knew enough Madrassi to pass myself off as an Indian, and enough Arabic from Major Mayne and our time in the desert to get by. I learned to live like an Arab, to blend into the folds of the desert and the crowded souks of Cairo, to live without being noticed.”

“And you read books. You learned about the ancient Egyptians.”

“I joined with the fellahin, who are used as laborers on digs, and found work at Giza, clearing out the pyramids. I went to Amarna and became foreman of a French excavation there. No questions were ever asked; I looked the part of an Arab, and with my engineering skills I could do the job well. I spent days in the Cairo Museum, working from cabinet to cabinet, memorizing everything I saw. I learned to read hieroglyphics.” Jones lowered his voice. “I learned everything I could about
him
.”

“Him?”

Jones leaned forward, almost whispering. “Long-face. That’s what the Canadian Indians called him. We had them with us on the Nile expedition, you know, voyageurs, brought over from Canada by Lord Wolseley to navigate the boats. On the way up they’d stopped at Amarna and seen the crumbled statues of the pharaoh who had built the city, that strange face with the big lips. In the Mohawk language they called him Menakouhare, long-face. The name stuck with me.”

“You mean Akhenaten.”

“The Sun Pharaoh,” Jones said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Father of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. The
one who went south to the desert as Amenhotep the fourth, high priest of the old religion, and came back as Akhenaten—
He through whom the Light shone from the Aten, the Sun God
. He went south with his wife, Nefertiti, and his companion Moses, the former slave who had the same revelation and took away his vision of the one god to his people. They were in the crocodile temple, the one Mayne found beside the pool on the Nile. I saw it myself, steeled myself to go inside in the weeks I spent there alone after the battle, when my mind was unbalanced. I saw the wall carving, with Menakouhare at the head of the procession, the Aten symbol before him. I saw the gap where Mayne had taken the plaque that I showed you. Akhenaten had his vision in the desert, but his City of Light was not to be there. It was to be here, out of sight and hidden in the heartland of ancient Egypt. And we will be the first in three thousand years to see it.”

Chaillé-Long put his hand on his hip and eyed Jones keenly. “When we have made our great discovery, you and I will be much in demand. We will be on the front page of the
New York Herald
and the
Illustrated London News
, and around the world. People still reeling from the death of General Gordon, from his
neglect
, I say
neglect
, will see our triumph as his apotheosis, as proof that he was in Khartoum for a higher purpose, not only to succor the people of Sudan but also to safeguard the clues to a discovery that will be for the enlightenment of mankind. I have little doubt that on my return I will be called to the House of Representatives, even the Senate. You should come with me, Jones. America is a place for a man like you. There are railways to be built, rivers to be dammed. With my connections and good word, I can propel you on a path to riches and fame, unfettered by the barriers of class and etiquette of your own country that keep men like you in the gutter.”