Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (5 page)

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I ran out of air and had to come up a little quickly. It was only a niggle in my elbow and a bit of dizziness, but I knew it was the bends and could get a lot worse. Luckily the fisherman had a decent radio, and there was a US Navy helicopter on search-and-rescue exercises only a few miles away.

‘Anyway, they got me into the chamber, and there was this slightly overweight sweaty guy surrounded by a jumble of electronics and tools he’d insisted on taking inside to play with. I spent the next eight hours holding bits of wire for him.’

‘Yeah,’ Costas said. ‘But we cooked up the idea of the International Maritime University, and here we are today.’

‘So what were
you
doing there? In the chamber?’

Jack coughed. ‘He’d spent too long monitoring the effect of pressure on some submersible component he was developing. Only instead of watching it from the outside, he’d gone into the chamber to cuddle it during its ordeal.’

‘I had to hold it together with my hands. It was too complex for clamps.’

‘What was it?’ Sofia said.

Costas looked at her shrewdly. ‘A coupling joint for an external manipulator arm. Later I developed it at IMU and it’s now standard on all our equipment.’

‘What’s the pressure rating?’

‘Two thousand metres ocean depth. It could be more except for the internal gyro, which is a little sensitive. But that’s what allows us to use the arm as a virtual excavator, with the finesse of a human hand.’

Sofia gestured at the porthole, where the submersible’s external arm array was visible. ‘I know how you could use it down to five thousand metres.’

Costas looked astonished. ‘No way.
No way
. What’s the gyro?’

‘A Universal Electrics SPC-100, with some modifications. You remember I said I had a flirtation with robotics engineering? It was my masters project.’

‘You’re kidding me. Can I see it?’

‘I can talk you through it now.’

Jack gave an exaggerated groan. ‘How long am I stuck here with you two?’

A red light flickered on the console. ‘I think you’re in luck, Jack. It’s Macalister.’

The familiar voice came crackling over the intercom. ‘Okay, Jack. We’ve done two half-kilometre sweeps across the head of the bay, and we’ve got a result. The magnetometer revealed a scatter of small linear anomalies over an area of flat sandy seabed the size of a tennis court, and the sonar showed a hump in the sediment that might be rectilinear. It’s at eight hundred and sixty-two metres depth, about a kilometre and a half from you at compass bearing 034 degrees. We’re holding position offshore above the anomaly so we can tether up to you and watch what you find on the video screen. Acknowledge.’

‘Roger that.’ Jack clicked the intercom to continuous so that the control room on
Seaquest II
could hear everything that went on, and turned to Costas, his throat dry with excitement. ‘I think we’re in business.’

Forty minutes later, they had reached a depth of seven hundred metres, having dropped down the slope at an angle of more than forty-five degrees. On the way they had passed huge outcrops of rock and dramatic slopes of sediment that had tumbled down the edges of the rocks like scree on a mountainside, until the dwindling light made it impossible to make out more than the twenty metres or so of seabed revealed in the cone of light from the submersible’s external strobe array ahead of them. Costas had been letting the computer steer the submersible towards a locator beacon at the bottom of the tethering line hanging below
Seaquest II
, and suddenly they saw it, a flashing red light in the inky blackness ahead. As they came to within a few metres, he activated the manipulator arm and extended the pincers at the end of it around the cable, and then let the automated program articulate the arm backwards and slot the cable into its aperture above the double-lock chamber. The blank monitor beside the navigational screen above the console suddenly came to life, an image crowded with the faces of the crew, who were staring down at them. The crew moved aside and the white-bearded Macalister appeared, the gold braid of a captain visible on the epaulettes of his naval sweater. Jack did a thumbs-up, and Macalister nodded curtly. ‘Let’s hope this is it,’ he said. ‘The weather’s worsening up here by the minute, and it’s going to be hard enough hauling the submersible into the ship’s docking bay as it is. We can’t afford more than a few minutes at the target, just enough for a positive identification.’

‘Roger that,’ Costas said.

‘Who’s operating the external video camera?’ Jack said.

A girl’s face appeared, her long dark hair tied back, wearing the new pair of glasses that made her look uncharacteristically studious, Jack thought. She waved, and blew him a kiss. ‘Hi, Dad. Maria sends her love. She met me at Madrid airport on the way here. As you know, we’re all supposed to be going climbing in the Pyrenees next week. She’d really like to hear from you.’

‘Good,’ Jack said, slightly discomfited. ‘Great. Later. What I need you to do now is concentrate completely on that console. The camera’s mounted on the end of the manipulator arm, and your job is to control it so that Costas and Sofia and I can focus on what we actually see outside. You got that?’

‘Roger that, Dad. Good to go.’

Sofia grinned. ‘Like a chip off the old block, as I said.’

Costas flipped a switch. ‘Rebecca, you have control of that arm.’

They watched out of the porthole as the end of the arm rose up from the equipment array below the strobes. It turned the camera towards them, the lens staring into the porthole like the outsized eye of some abyssal fish, and then it waved from side to side and turned forward.

Jack looked at the monitor and saw that Rebecca had gone from the image and been replaced by another figure, a man with long lank hair, wearing a lab coat. He lifted a small portable blackboard into view and tapped it, his face flushed with enthusiasm. ‘Hey, Costas. Glad to see we got the submersible going. You and I. When you’re back topside, I’ve made some time to give you the lowdown on submersible circuitry. I’ve tailored it specially for you. A kind of idiot’s guide.’

‘Thanks, Jacob,’ Costas said between gritted teeth. ‘Really appreciate it.’

‘Any time,’ Lanowski replied cheerily, and disappeared.

Costas shook his head. ‘What a guy.’

‘But you love him really,’ Sofia said.

‘We all love him,’ Costas said, gripping the controls. ‘Okay. All eyes on the prize. I’m going in.’

Jack slid back to his original position lying on his front with his face to the porthole. Costas gunned the submersible forward, and Jack watched the digital depth gauge beside the porthole drop below eight hundred metres. Ahead of him the seabed began to level out, but still there was nothing to see except empty sand and the occasional flash of a reflected eye as some creature strayed into the cone of visibility in front of the submersible, into light of an intensity that nothing down there would ever have experienced before. Costas slowed the submersible right down, and Jack watched the manipulator arm arch some five metres ahead with the camera roving from side to side like some giant insect searching the sea floor. ‘We should be there now,’ Costas said.

Jack peered ahead. Still there was nothing. And then a huge hollering and whooping erupted from the crew crowded around the video screen on
Seaquest II
. Jack quickly glanced back at the screen, and saw that Rebecca had positioned the camera directly above the shape of a cannon lying half buried in the sediment. She had spotted it at the furthest swing to port of the manipulator arm, and Costas quickly brought the submersible about to aim in that direction. Then they saw another gun, and another. Had Rebecca not seen the first one, they would probably have missed the site entirely and gone off into the abyss, realising their mistake too late for another search. Jack felt a surge of pride: she might well have saved the day. ‘Good work, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Now let’s gently hose down that first gun and have a look at it.’

They watched as the water jet located about two thirds of the way up the manipulator arm uncurled itself and looped down like a snake to blow a gentle jet over the gun, dispersing the sediment over the breech and revealing corroded metal. Macalister was the resident naval ordnance expert, and he immediately piped up. ‘No doubt about it, it’s a nine-pounder, a so-called long nine,’ he said, his voice edged with excitement. ‘Typical of the guns you’d have found arming merchant ships in the Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century.’

There was another noise from the crew, more of a gasp, and Sofia joined in. ‘Look, Jack. There it is. It’s
fantastic
.’

She and the crew were watching video from the camera, but Jack was looking at the real scene through the porthole, a few metres behind them. He stared into the gloom, seeing more guns but nothing else. And then he spotted it. Directly ahead, the sediment had formed a hump in the seabed. In the centre, almost completely buried, was a rectilinear stone sarcophagus, its lid shifted and much of the sculpted sides buried, but still unmistakable. It was just like the image in Jack’s dreams. They had found the sarcophagus of Menkaure
.

‘Congratulations, Jack,’ said Macalister, the sound of whistling and clapping coming from the crew behind him. ‘A marvellous end to the season.’

‘Congratulations to everyone,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘A team effort, as always.’

Costas drove the submersible a few metres forward and then rose above the sarcophagus so that it was clearly visible. The ten or twelve guns that poked out of the sand around it formed the ghostly outline of a ship. There was nothing else to be seen, just the stone and the guns, and for a moment Jack thought how the sediments of the seabed were like the sands of the desert; how they seemed to reduce the evidence of human endeavour to its bare essentials, to its boldest statements and nothing else. The sea floor was a place that made the efforts to tame it seem minuscule and arrogant; a place whose elemental clarity attracted certain men on a quest for revelation, from the time when the world was beginning to rediscover ancient Egypt, and from deepest antiquity almost five thousand years before, the time of the first pharaohs and the pyramids.

Macalister’s voice crackled again. ‘Okay, Costas. We’ve got a two-metre swell on the surface. I’ve asked Rebecca to relinquish control of the manipulator arm and shut it down. We’ve got all the imagery we need. You need to ascend.’

‘Roger that,’ Costas said. ‘Blowing tanks now.’

Jack slid back to the console, flipped off the audio feed to the ship to keep their conversation to themselves and looked at Costas. ‘Can you override the system so that I can control the arm?’

‘You heard Macalister,’ Costas said. ‘Remember your end of the bargain.’

‘It’d only be for a few minutes. If you shut off the video stream to the ship, they wouldn’t know we were still using it. As far as Macalister is concerned, we’d be ascending.’

Costas paused, and then shook his head. ‘Okay, Jack. You have the con.’

Jack jumped back to the space between the seats and grasped the handle that controlled the manipulator arm. He arched the arm over the lid of the sarcophagus, to the gap where the lid had slid sideways and the interior of the coffin was revealed, and dropped the camera down towards the triangular hole. He had guessed that it might be just large enough, and he had been right. The camera disappeared inside. He activated the powerful miniature light array surrounding the camera, but all he could see on the video screen was sand, a close-up view of the sediment that evidently filled the sarcophagus. He moved the camera from side to side, but still there was nothing. ‘Come on, Jack,’ Costas said. ‘One more minute, max.’

He took hold of the handle that controlled the water jet, and aimed the nozzle through the hole, switching the jet to its most powerful setting. There was nothing to lose, and nothing inside the sarcophagus after all this time that would be delicate enough to be damaged. For a second or two the camera would be in the eye of the dust storm created by the water jet, and he might just see something before the silt clouded the image.

He pressed the trigger. The image exploded into a maelstrom of sand, obscuring everything.

And then he saw it
.

For a second it was there, the image of a pharaoh, wearing a crown and a skirt but with an oddly shaped physiognomy: a protruding belly and a jutting chin. Beside him was his consort, a queen with shapely breasts and hips, her hair over her shoulders. The pharaoh was leaning over something as if he were creating it, lines forming a matrix like a labyrinth or a maze, a pyramid in the centre, and over it all the rays of the sun, shining from a disc above. And then the image was gone, lost in the swirl of sediment. ‘
Yes!
’ exclaimed Jack.

‘What the hell was that?’ Costas said.

‘Do you remember Captain Wichelo’s interleaved sheet in his copy of Vyse’s book? You wondered whether there was something else I wasn’t telling you. Well, that was it. Wichelo mentioned a stone plaque that Vyse had packed in the sarcophagus, something he’d found inside the pyramid. That pharaoh’s not Menkaure; it’s Akhenaten, and his wife Nefertiti. Wichelo said that Vyse called the carving “the City of Light”.’

‘Did you get photos?’

‘At least one. I need to email it to Maurice. This will astonish him.’

‘Then the sooner we leave here, the better.’ Costas pulled a lever to blow air into the ballast tanks, and they began to ascend. Jack kept peering down, watching the sarcophagus as it disappeared into the inky blackness, and then settled back to study the images he had taken.

‘That’s a hell of a manipulator arm,’ Sofia said.

‘Thanks,’ Costas replied ‘You should come to the IMU engineering lab. Really. I can show you a lot more like that.’

‘Come and have dinner with me in Cartagena tonight. After I call the Minister of Culture and tell her about this.’

‘Tonight. Sure. Cool.’ Costas looked slightly flummoxed, and then smiled at her. ‘Yeah. I’d really like to. That’d be great.’