‘Roger that, Sofia. I’ll be back. Meanwhile we’ll liaise with the Spanish Civil Guard and have round-the-clock protection over the site.’
‘You’ve got it. They’re on standby already.’
Jack tapped on the intercom. ‘Is Captain Macalister there?’
‘I hear you, Jack.’
‘Is the Lynx helicopter ready?’
‘As you requested. And the IMU Embraer jet is at Cartagena airport. The crews aren’t yet on standby, as you weren’t sure whether you’d need them.’
‘Well I need them now. We’re leaving this evening.’
‘Where to, Jack?’ Costas asked. ‘Sun, sand and martinis?’
‘Lots of sun, lots of sand, not so sure about the martinis. We’re going to a place impossibly far removed from here, but linked to it by that.’ He pointed at the image of the figure from the plaque, frozen in blurry outline on the video screen. ‘By Akhenaten.’
‘About my guess earlier that there was more there than meets the eye. Game on?’
Jack pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know. There’s a lot more to fathom out. A lot of threads to follow. But I think if we stick with it, this could be the greatest adventure yet. The biggest prize.’
‘Well?’
Jack grinned at him. ‘Okay. Yes. Game on.’
‘Where?’
‘You ever ridden a camel before?’
‘Oh no. Not camels.’
‘We’re going to the Nubian desert. To the Sudan.’
3
Jack held on to the door handle on the passenger side of the Toyota four-wheel drive as it hurtled at breakneck speed down the highway through the desert of northern Sudan, passing a convoy of army trucks that honked at them in unison, the moaning sound trailing off quickly as they sped by. Costas was in the back seat, leaning over and holding the keffiyeh scarf that he had been attempting to wrap around his head in Arab fashion, but which was being blown off by the hot wind coming through the open windows. The car was being driven by Ibrahim al-Khalil, a former Sudanese naval officer who was now IMU’s representative in Sudan. Ibrahim normally led an ongoing project searching for ancient wrecks along the Red Sea coast of Sudan, but had been called in at short notice to liaise with Jack for the Nile dive they had planned for today. He was one of IMU’s best divers, and Jack would trust him with his life underwater; that, and the stress for Ibrahim of working in the pirate-infested waters off eastern Sudan, allowed Jack to forgive him the adrenalin burst that clearly took over when he got behind the wheel of a car, even though they had no deadline and less than twenty kilometres to go. Not for the first time in over thirty years as a marine archaeologist, Jack felt less safe travelling to the dive site than he ever did underwater.
He forced himself to forget the road and review the journey so far. He and Costas had left Seaquest II in the harbour at Alexandria and flown in the ship’s Lynx helicopter to Cairo, where IMU’s Embraer 190 jet had been waiting to fly them to the Sudanese border town of Wadi Halfa in the Nubian desert. Some eight hundred kilometres south of Cairo they had flown over the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser, the vast reservoir more than five hundred kilometres long that had begun to fill up after the first stage of the dam was completed in 1964. As a small boy, Jack had been riveted by a National Geographic article that showed the huge engineering project to relocate the ancient Abu Simbel temples above the rising waters of the lake, and he had asked the captain to fly over the artificial hill where the four colossal statues of Ramses the Great sitting side by side were just visible from twenty thousand feet. He had dreamed of diving deep below the waters of the lake to the original temple site, and imagined swimming through the cavernous chambers that lay behind the facade; in the aircraft he found himself running swiftly through the logistics of an IMU project to take a film crew to the site. He had sensed something else, gazing down at the temple for the first time from the air, so high that he could see the curvature of the earth through the dust haze on the horizon. The temple was among the most impressive monuments of ancient Egypt, built by Ramses the Great in the thirteenth century BC to intimidate the people of Nubia, yet from Jack’s vantage point the statues seemed merely to emphasise the impossibility of controlling this place and the puny efforts of any army to conquer the desert.
At Wadi Halfa they had been met by Ibrahim, who had cleared them through the formalities necessary to bring diving equipment across the Egyptian border. Jack had never before worked in Sudan, and his only personal contact other than Ibrahim was an old Sudanese friend from the Royal Naval College who was now deputy commander of the Sudanese air force and who had generously agreed to loan them the use of an air force Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter to take their gear from Wadi Halfa to Maurice Hiebermeyer’s excavation site near Semna on the Nile, some thirty kilometres to the south. All that Hiebermeyer had told him was that they would be looking for structures of pharaonic date submerged since the 1960s, and he had imagined a straightforward dive requiring little more than standard IMU scuba equipment; if they needed more sophisticated gear, they could always request it from Seaquest II. While they were waiting at the airport for the paperwork to be finished, Costas had fired up the compact diesel air compressor and filled their four twelve-litre air tanks so that they would be good to go on arrival at the site.
They had loaded everything on board the helicopter and then set off in the Toyota towards the modern highway that ran the length of the Nile towards Khartoum. The helicopter would not be able to depart from Wadi Halfa for another few hours, and Jack had wanted to see the desert from the perspective of the soldiers and adventurers who had come this way when the only transport was on the ground, by foot or camel. He had been fascinated to drive through Wadi Halfa itself, a staging post for generations of British soldiers who had campaigned in the desert: the relief expedition sent to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum in 1884; the army led by Lord Kitchener to exact revenge against the Mahdist forces fourteen years later; the soldiers who had garrisoned Egypt and the Sudan against the Ottoman Turkish enemy during the First World War; and then another generation who had been here during the Second World War. Jack knew that this modern history lay over another history of successive campaigns, beginning almost four thousand years earlier, when the pharaohs of ancient Egypt had attempted to bring the Nubian desert and the fabled kingdoms that lay to the south under their control, and had started to search for the gold ore deposits that were the source of their wealth. As the Toyota sped south, he had begun to sense the reasons why those campaigns seemed always to have been rebuffed, and why the Egyptians had never brought this land under their heel. The Nile to the north was surrounded by fertile flood plains of verdant green, but here it was a ribbon of silver through a wasteland of red, the gorge too deep and the cliffs too high for the adjacent desert ever to be irrigated during the annual flood that was the lifeblood of Egypt to the north. People had always lived here – fishermen, boatmen, farmers on the few patches of lowland where the river water could be hauled out with shaduf water-lifting devices, and nomads of the desert wadis and oases – but the Nubian desert could never sustain the concentrated population of the Nile valley in Egypt, and the people here would be as difficult to control as the sand and dust of the desert itself.