Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (7 page)

J
ack Howard walked along the old quayside of Alexandria harbor toward Qaitbey, the fifteenth-century fort built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse that now served as headquarters for Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology. The sun was beating on the rocks, the light shimmering off the waters of the harbor, and for a few moments Jack allowed himself to relish the summer air of the Mediterranean and forget that he was in a country on the brink of war. He cast his mind back ten years to the discovery of a scrap of papyrus in the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum that had led them to the truth behind the Atlantis legend. The Egyptian student who had made the discovery was now Hiebermeyer’s wife, and together they had created one of the premier centers in Egypt for the study of archaeology.

Jack had a strong sense of déjà vu as he made his way across the worn stones toward the fort. He was going to hear the latest from the mummy necropolis, still an ongoing excavation producing extraordinary finds, and he in turn was going to match Maurice with an account of their latest underwater discoveries, hoping for that sparking of ideas and rush of excitement as things fell into place that had marked their collaboration over the years.

But there was a dark side to this day. All Jack’s projects since Atlantis had been threaded together, interlinked by discoveries that had sent him around the world, from Egypt to Greece and Turkey, from India and Central Asia to ancient Herculaneum and across the Atlantic to the frigid waters of Greenland and the jungles of the Yucatan. The loose ends of one project had become the beginnings of another. Yet for the first time today, he had felt a looming sense of finality, that what had begun here a decade ago was about to offer up its last, that the extraordinary wellspring of ancient Egypt was about to close down forever. He felt edgy and nervous, and that heightened sense of awareness he experienced while diving was now with him all the time. If there were to be any more discoveries in Egypt, they were going to have to happen in the next days, even the next hours, in a window that was rapidly closing down on all of them.

He stared over the bobbing boats in the harbor at the extraordinary form of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria. Just like its predecessor, the famous
mouseion
founded by the Macedonian king Ptolemy in 283
BC
, the library seemed fated to suffer from religious extremism. Back then it had been Christianity, culminating in the antipagan purge by the Roman emperor Theodosius in
AD
391, that led to the library’s destruction, whereas now it was extremism and the threat of regional war. The reconstructed library had been a noble enterprise at a time when many believed that the Internet and electronic publishing had eclipsed the need for physical repositories of knowledge. And yet the threat of destruction and of Internet sabotage meant that electronic means of data storage were just as vulnerable as the libraries of old. Each epoch seemed destined to build up a critical mass of knowledge, only for it to be largely destroyed and a few precious fragments to survive, buried by chance like the library that Jack had excavated at the Roman site of Herculaneum, or the shreds of papyrus reused as mummy wrappings that
Hiebermeyer and his team had unearthed in the desert necropolis.

Jack shaded his eyes against the sun as he thought about the Atlantis papyrus. The story of Atlantis had come down from the sixth-century-BC Athenian traveler Solon, who had visited the Egyptian temple of Sais, heard it from the High Priest, and had then written it down, only for his original papyrus to have been lost and then reused as mummy wrapping. The knowledge memorized by the High Priest had been passed down through generations from earliest times, an oral tradition whose days were numbered with the arrival in Egypt of the Greeks and their new religion. But what if at the height of ancient Egypt, during the New Kingdom of the later second millennium BC, a visionary pharaoh had decided to collate and transcribe all that ancient knowledge? What if there had been an
earlier
library somewhere in the heartland of ancient Egypt? Jack stared at the extraordinary discoid shape of the modern Bibliotheca, deliberately designed to look like a sun disk rising out of the horizon to the east. Who would that visionary pharaoh have been? Would it have been Akhenaten, the one who rejected the old religions, the pharaoh who worshipped the sun god, the Aten?

Jack reached into his pocket and took out a military campaign medal from the Victorian period that he had bought from a market stall near the docks where the taxi had dropped him off. It was a Khedive’s Star, worn and battered, awarded to an Egyptian soldier who had fought under British command in the 1880s war against the Mahdi in Sudan. Jack thought again of those British officers in the desert, who were there not only for war, but whose exploration for ancient sites had so fascinated him. Had they been hunting not just for confirmation of Old Testament history but for something even greater than that, for a lost repository containing the greatest treasure that a civilization could offer, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the ancient Egyptians?

He grasped the medal until the points of the star hurt his hand, and then thrust it back into his pocket. These thoughts had run through his mind endlessly since he and Costas and Hiebermeyer had been forced to leave Sudan almost two months previously, bringing with them enough evidence from the ancient temple carvings beside the Nile to suggest that Akhenaten’s City of Light lay somewhere near modern Cairo and that the pyramids were the key to its entry. He and Costas had been there, on the cusp of an incredible discovery, suspended beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure and seeing where the reflected sunlight shone against something far ahead, beyond a tunnel almost completely blocked by rockfall. Ever since they had been forced to leave the site, he had tried not to think of it, knowing that there was no chance of them returning with the tools they would need to break their way through. He had gone to the Gulf of Suez intent on moving on, and yet as long as he was in Egypt, as long as there was a glimmer of hope, the image of Akhenaten kept returning to him. Perhaps there was another entrance to the underground complex, closer to the Nile. He needed to look again at the plan that he believed was preserved in the radiating arms of the Aten sun symbol on the plaque from the wreck of the
Beatrice
, and at the known layout of the early dynastic canal system that linked the pyramids with the Nile. As long as there were still IMU feet on the ground in Egypt, he would pursue it.
He would not give up
.

Ten minutes later he mounted the worn stone steps at the entrance to Qaitbey Fort. He passed the red granite blocks from the toppled ancient lighthouse that had been incorporated into the fort when it was built in 1480. Inside, Hiebermeyer’s institute occupied a modern single-story stone structure set against one wall of the courtyard, with a library, a conservation lab, and research facilities for the Egyptian graduate students who were the mainstay of Hiebermeyer’s team. The institute
was funded by a fellowship scheme managed by his wife, Aysha. On the opposite side of the courtyard were the foundations of the new museum, being funded by IMU’s main benefactor, Efram Jacobovich, to complement their existing museum in the ancient harbor at Carthage, in Tunisia. The Alexandrian museum would showcase shipwreck finds made by IMU teams off the north coast of Egypt and in the Nile. Like everything else here, like the fellowship scheme, the future of the museum project now hung by a thread, something that Jack knew he was going to have to discuss with Hiebermeyer once they had shared the excitement of their latest discoveries.

Costas came hurrying up the steps behind him holding out a VHF radio. “Jack, there’s a message from Captain Macalister on
Seaquest
. He wants to talk to you as soon as possible.”

Jack shook his head. “Not now. I’ve got to devote all my attention to Maurice. It’s going to be pretty intense in there. Every time I checked the news in the taxi from the airport, the situation in Cairo seemed to be deteriorating. This could be Maurice’s swan song at the institute. Tell Macalister I’ll contact him in an hour.”

“Okay. I’ll deal with anything urgent.” Costas stopped to make the call, and Jack turned in to the courtyard. On the wall to the left was an IMU poster showing
Seaquest
, the research vessel that was his pride and joy. The image was now as iconic from her many expeditions around the world as Captain Cousteau’s
Calypso
had been in his youth. For much of the summer the
Seaquest
had been in the West Mediterranean off Spain with an IMU team excavating the wreck of the
Beatrice
, the ship that had been taking the sarcophagus of the pharaoh Menkaure to the British Museum when she had foundered in 1824. It was the discovery of an extraordinary plaque within the sarcophagus, not of Menkaure but of Akhenaten, that had propelled Jack on his current quest. But right now he was more concerned with the whereabouts of
Seaquest
’s sister ship,
Sea Venture
, which had
been carrying out geological research off the volcanic island of Santorini, north of Crete. Like
Seaquest
, she carried a Lynx helicopter, and she had been diverted south toward Egypt ready for an evacuation. Jack had been relieved to see the line of crates on the helipad beside the fort, but it had also made him unexpectedly well up with emotion. If that image brought home the reality of the situation to him, he could hardly imagine how it made Maurice feel. Not for the first time he was thankful for the presence of Aysha, a rock who had kept Maurice anchored through storms in the past and was going to be needed more than ever now.

Costas came up behind him, and together they walked through an open doorway into Hiebermeyer’s main operations room. It was a familiar clutter of computer workstations, filing cabinets, books and papers, though the wall by the door was lined with plastic boxes where material had been packed for departure. Hiebermeyer himself was seated with his back to them behind an outsized monitor in the center of the room. Jack smiled as he saw the tattered khaki shorts and an Afrika Korps relic from the Second World War that he had given him years before at the outset of their careers. He was still wearing his leather work boots and was caked from head to foot in dust, having driven in from the desert that morning.

The day before, Jack had used the secure IMU channel on the VHF radio to fill him in on their discovery while they had been waiting by the Red Sea for their nitrogen levels to reduce enough to allow them to fly, and there was more to tell him now. But he was determined that Hiebermeyer should have first say; there must have been something exciting for him to have taken a break from the mummy excavation and come all the way here to meet them.

Hiebermeyer turned as they entered. “Jack. Costas. Good to see you.”

“You too, Maurice.” Hiebermeyer looked exhausted, even more weather-beaten than usual, and Jack noticed
that he had lost weight since they had last met. “What have you got?”

Hiebermeyer gestured at a paused image from Al-Jazeera news on the TV screen above him. It showed a reporter in front of the dark shapes of the pyramids on the Giza plateau. “What we’ve mainly got is that cleric raving again about blowing up the pyramids. He was the one who hit the headlines a few years ago when he first threatened to do it. Then, it seemed like a sick joke. Now it looks like reality.”

“Let’s forget that for a moment. I want to see what
you’ve
got.”

Hiebermeyer stared at him, his eyes suddenly gleaming. “All right, Jack. Prepare to be amazed.”

“Go on.”

Maurice pointed to his computer screen. “Take a look at this.” He clicked the mouse, and an image of an ancient underground chamber appeared. It had plastered walls, an array of artifacts in the corners, and a mummy casing in the center, its painted eyes just visible.

Jack peered closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “Undisturbed?”

“Completely intact,” Hiebermeyer enthused. “It’s an incredible rarity; there’s no evidence of tomb robbing at all. Last night I was the first person in that chamber for more than three thousand years. It’s eighteenth dynasty, Jack. I’m sure of it.”

“Eighteenth dynasty,” Costas said. “Late second millennium
BC
? I know that most of the necropolis is later than that, from the first millennium
BC
, like the mummy that produced the Atlantis papyrus.”

Hiebermeyer peered at him. “
Mein Gott
. Costas, we’ll make an archaeologist of you yet.”

“No chance of that, my friend. Not as long as you guys have robotic equipment you don’t know how to fix. So is this a royal burial?”

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not in the Faiyum oasis. They’re mostly officials, though some of them are pretty high ranking. This one’s an army officer, a previously
unknown chariot general by the name of Mehmnet-Ptah. Actually, it wasn’t the mummy casing that got me so excited, but the wall painting. That’s really what I wanted you to see.” He clicked the mouse again, changing the image to a close-up of one of the walls showing flaking colored plaster. “What do you make of that?”

Costas leaned over his shoulder and peered closely, and then straightened up. “Men in skirts. The usual Egyptian thing.”

Hiebermeyer snorted impatiently. “You mean Egyptian infantry, marching to the right and carrying spears. Now, if I scroll the image along, you can see chariots, just like the ones you’ve found in the Gulf of Suez, with the charioteers holding bows. And now here’s another group of charioteers, larger than the first and more elaborately attired.” He paused, looking up. “Any thoughts?”

Jack stared. The charioteers were also skirted but wearing sandals, some form of cuirass, and distinctive segmented helmets, and they were carrying short thrusting swords with bows slung over their shoulders. Above them were a faded hieroglyphic cartouche and the symbol of a bull’s horns. Jack felt a rush of excitement. “Mercenaries,” he exclaimed. “But not any old mercenaries. These are
Aegean
mercenaries. Those are bone and tusk helmets like the ones found at Mycenae, and the swords are the same type we found on the Minoan shipwreck we were excavating when you and Aysha discovered the Atlantis papyrus.”