Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

Copyright © 2013 David Gibbins

The right of David Gibbins to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication – apart from the obvious historical figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The factual backdrop is discussed in the author’s note at the end.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 7433 5

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About the Author

David Gibbins has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.

By David Gibbins and available from Headline:

Atlantis

Crusader Gold

The Last Gos
pel

The Tiger Warrior

The Mask of Troy

The Gods of Atlantis

Pharaoh

About the Book

Fans of Dan Brown and Clive Cussler will love the thrilling new Jack Howard action adventure from
Sunday Times
bestseller David Gibbins.

1351
BC
: Akhenaten the Sun-Pharaoh rules supreme in Egypt . . . until the day he casts off his crown and mysteriously disappears into the desert, his legacy seemingly swallowed up by the remote sands beneath the Great Pyramids of Giza.

AD
1884: A British soldier serving in the Sudan stumbles upon an incredible discovery – a submerged temple containing evidence of a terrifying religion whose god was fed by human sacrifice. The soldier is on a mission to reach General Gordon before Khartoum falls. But he hides a secret of his own.

Present day: Jack Howard and his team are excavating one of the most amazing underwater sites they have ever encountered, but dark forces are watching to see what they will find. Diving into the Nile, they enter a world three thousand years back in history, inhabited by a people who have sworn to guard the greatest secret of all time . . .

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Sherise Hobbs in London and Tracy Devine in New York; to my previous editors, Martin Fletcher and Caitlin Alexander; to Jane Selley for her excellent copyediting of this and my earlier novels; to Lucy Foley for her work in getting this book into production; to the rest of the team at Headline, including Katie Day, Darragh Deering, Marion Donaldson, Frances Doyle, Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, Barbara Roman and Ben Willis, and to the Hachette representatives internationally; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates, and to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; and to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates.

I am grateful to my mother Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my work, to my brother Alan for diving with me and for his photography and video work for my website www.davidgibbins.com, and to Angie Hobbs for her support. Much of the inspiration for this novel came during periods of travel and exploration funded in part by grants from the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. For unpublished material and help during research, I am grateful to the staff of the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Oriental Collections of the British Library, the National Army Museum and the Royal Engineers Museum and Library at Chatham in Kent; I am also grateful to John Denner, Fred Van Sickle and Paul Clare for assisting in my ‘experimental archaeology’ with Martini-Henry and Remington rifles of 1884–5 vintage; and to Peter Nield of Warwick School for his help with books onthe Sudan of the 19th century.

This novel is dedicated to my daughter Molly, with much love.

Historical characters, 1884–5

Buller, Major-General Sir Redvers
Brigade commander in the Gordon Relief Expedition, a veteran of many campaigns who won the Victoria Cross in the 1879 Zulu War in South Africa

Burnaby, Colonel Frederick
Cavalry officer and adventurer killed at the Battle of Abu Klea in January 1885

Chaillé-Long, Charles
American Civil War veteran and adventurer who was commissioned into the Egyptian Army in the 1870s and served under Gordon in the Sudan

Earle, Major-General William
Commander of the River Column in the Gordon Relief Expedition, killed at the Battle of Kirkeban in February 1885

Gladstone, William Ewert
British Prime Minister at the time of the Gordon Relief Expedition

Gordon, Major-General Charles, Royal Engineers
Governor-General of the Sudan, popularly known as ‘Chinese’ Gordon for his exploits in putting down the Taiping Rebellion in 1860–4

Kitchener, Major Herbert, Royal Engineers
Intelligence officer with the Gordon Relief expedition who became Sirdar of the Egyptian army, Commander-in-Chief in India and in 1914 British Secretary of State for War

Mahdi, the
Muhammad Ahmad, a former boatbuilder and Sufi who became leader of the Islamist forces in the Sudan in the early 1880s, dying of illness or poison in June 1885

Riel, Louis
Rebel Métis (mixed French/Indian) leader in western Canada who was the object of Wolseley’s Red River expedition in 1870, and was eventually caught and hanged in November 1885

Schliemann, Heinrich
German-born archaeologist who rediscovered Troy and Mycenae, and also explored in Egypt and the Sudan

Stewart, Major-General Sir Herbert
Commander of the Desert Column in the Gordon Relief Expedition, mortally wounded at the Battle of Abu Kru in January 1885

Stewart, Lieutenant-Colonel John
Gordon’s deputy in Khartoum who was murdered while accompanying the steamer
Abbas
downriver in September 1884

Von Slatin, Rudolf Carl
Austrian-born provincial governor in Sudan under Gordon who converted to Islam, spent eleven years as a captive of the Mahdists and was later Inspector-General of the Sudan, knighted and made an honorary Major-General by the British

Wilson, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Charles, Royal Engineers
Founder of the Intelligence Department in the War Office who was intelligence chief in the Gordon Relief Expedition and commanded the Desert Column after Major-General Stewart’s death

Wolseley, General Sir Garnet
Commander of the Gordon Relief Expedition, a veteran of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Red River expedition in Canada, the Ashanti War and the Zulu War, and head of the so-called ‘Ashanti Ring’ of officers he kept with him through successive campaigns

Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee.

He moveth his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together.

He is chief of the ways of God.

Who can open the doors of his face?

Round about his teeth is terror.

His strong scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.

His neesings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning;

Out of his mouth go burning torches, and sparks of fire leap forth.

In his neck abideth strength, and terror danceth before him.

When he raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid;

He maketh the deep to boil like a pot.

On the Leviathan, Job 41

Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days,
the town may fall
; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good bye.

Final journal entry of Major General Charles Gordon at Khartoum, 14 December 1884

For this shall everyone that is godly pray unto thee in a time that thou shalt be found;

In the flood of many waters they shall not come nigh unto him.

Psalms 32:6