‘That could only be Gordon,’ Jack said. ‘He might have been fearful of something this large being pilfered or damaged.’
‘It’s certainly kept it free from looting until now,’ Costas said.
‘Let me try to get closer,’ Jack said. ‘There’s a hieroglyphic cartouche in there, and I may be able to make it out.’ He wriggled past Costas and put his hand further into the gap over the slab, feeling more of it. He found the cartouche again, and felt it as if it were Braille, his eyes shut. His knowledge of hieroglyphics was not that of an Egyptologist, but he had learned to identify this one. ‘It’s our old friend Akhenaten,’ he murmured. ‘Now where does Gordon get a slab like this with Akhenaten’s name on it?’ He had a sudden hunch, and felt the lines that extended around the cartouche, imagining in his mind’s eye how they might cover the entire slab and a larger original depiction. He remembered the carving he had seen in that fleeting second in the wreck of the Beatrice, on the slab inside the sarcophagus. He was certain it was the same pattern. Then he remembered the depiction of Akhenaten in the crocodile temple, the missing slab in the centre that he was convinced was the key to understanding these images, to seeing them for what they really were. He pushed his hand in to a point where he felt the centre of the image might lie, but it was completely sealed beneath the packing material. ‘We’re going to have to come back,’ he said. ‘This is really important. As big as anything we’ve found yet.’ He withdrew his hand and pushed back from the wreckage, and then rose alongside Costas out of the hole. ‘I’m not saying anything about this to al’Ahmed. We’ll tell him about the wreck, which is supposed to be his main interest. If we talk about antiquities, then this site will be stripped bare before we’re back.’
‘If he sends down divers of his own, they’ll find this anyway,’ Costas said. ‘Keeping mum would just be staving off the inevitable.’
‘If we play our cards right, it’ll be us doing the excavation,’ Jack said. ‘Then we can reveal this find first to the Khartoum museum, and bring it up under controlled conditions so that nobody else walks away with it. Antiquities like this are worth millions and are used to lubricate drug deals. And we know al’Ahmed has a special interest in Akhenaten. He may even know about this slab and just be using us to find the wreck and establish its existence. We need to play a very careful game.’
The high-pitched whine of an outboard motor approached at high speed from some distance away. When it was over their location, it turned round and idled. ‘Sounds like a Zodiac-sized outboard, sixty or eighty hp,’ Costas said. ‘The only guys out here I can imagine having those will be the police. That’s encouraging if they’ve finally arrived, though I don’t want to ascend into a revving outboard if they’re other people who don’t know we’re here. I vote we swim up along the riverbed to shore.’
Jack nodded, and they set off underwater. After about a hundred metres the riverbed rose to less than ten metres depth, and then it became too shallow to justify remaining submerged. The sound of the outboard was still some distance away, over the site, and it seemed safe to ascend. Costas gave the thumbs-up sign, and they both rose together, face to face, only a stone’s throw from shore.
Jack knew something was wrong even before they broke surface. Pulsating orange lights seemed to revolve in the water, and they heard a loudspeaker in Sudanese. Three police cars with flashing lights were parked beside the Toyota, and the inflatable suddenly revved up and gunned towards them, sweeping round dangerously close and coming to a halt. Two policemen in combat gear were sitting at the back carrying assault rifles, and in between them a Sudanese man in a suit and tie with a police badge on his belt stood up with his hands on his hips, staring at them. Jack flipped back his visor. ‘Do you speak English? Is there a problem?’
The man shook his head and motioned them to shore. Costas was already struggling out of the sludge, and Jack joined him. Unclipping their helmets, they walked into a blaze of lights. Jack shaded his eyes, spotting Ibrahim sitting in a car with a policeman taking some form of statement. ‘Ibrahim! What’s going on?’
A policeman moved up to him and raised his rifle, and Jack immediately put his hands up, followed by Costas. He felt his harness being roughly unclipped and his backpack drop to the ground. Someone grabbed one wrist and then the other, handcuffing them behind his back. He could see that Costas was receiving the same treatment, and they were both pushed forward into the glare. ‘What the hell is going on?’ Jack said angrily to the nearest policeman. ‘Why are we being arrested?’
Ibrahim appeared in front of him, followed by two policemen. ‘Listen to me, Jack. They’re not going to arrest me. I’m going to drive back to Semna immediately. They’ve stripped the car and taken your mobile phones, everything. I’ve seen this before. All you’ll get back when they dump you across the Egyptian border will be your passports. But I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Why are we being arrested?’ Jack said. ‘What for?’
A policeman stood between Ibrahim and Jack, patting a truncheon, but Ibrahim spoke to him quickly in Sudanese and the man stepped aside grudgingly, a scowl on his face. Ibrahim turned to Jack. ‘I’m not supposed to be talking to you. You’re not supposed to have contact with anyone until you cross the border. Once you remove all of your gear they’ll blindfold you and take you in separate cars. Nobody will tell you anything. But you’ve been arrested for diving on an archaeological site without a permit, and for attempting to steal antiquities. That carries a statutory sentence of ten years. You’re getting off lightly.’
‘But we had a permit,’ Jack exclaimed.
‘We had permission, not a permit. There was nothing on paper. Everything was at the whim of al’Ahmed, and he’s clearly decided to revoke his support. It was always going to be a risk.’
‘We find it for him, and then he deports us,’ Jack said. ‘It was a setup.’
‘Be cool, Jack. And you too, Costas. Go with the flow and don’t provoke them. You can shout as much as you like after you’ve crossed the border. But one thing you can be sure of is that you won’t be allowed back in the Sudan while this man holds the strings of power in the antiquities department.’
20
Major Edward Mayne lay against the crumbling mud-brick wall of the fort, peering through his telescope over the Nile at the low buildings of the city some eight hundred yards away. He took a deep breath, then dropped his head down and swallowed hard to stop himself from retching. They had smelled the city from miles off, an occasional waft in the air, then a rancid backdrop that had tainted every breath, and finally the sickening, honey-sweet smell that assailed him now, a stench of decay combined with the fetid odour of the river, which was too sluggish to wash away the filth that oozed into it, leaving it mouldering and fly-ridden on the mudbanks that lined the shore. From a distance they had seen flocks of vultures wheeling over the city, and as they approached they watched the birds drop down and pull indescribable trophies from the river mud – lumps of gristle and strings of bones barely hanging together – and fly off with them to their desert feasting grounds to the west. Four weeks ago at the cataract he had mused on the fact that they were drinking water that had flowed past here, past Gordon, but now it made him sick to his stomach. He had known that Khartoum would be a city on its last legs, a place of starvation and disease and death, but nothing could have prepared him for this.
He lay still for a moment, listening out for Charrière’s return from the riverbank. The exposed riverbed was as wide as the Thames foreshore in London at low tide, but instead of hard gravel was a muddy effluvium that was already beginning to dry and crack; the river itself continued to flow through a narrow central channel, but on either side it was reduced to brown trickles and pools between mudflats. They had spotted one place where a boat crossing looked feasible, an irregular channel that ran past Tutti island some four hundred yards to the west and then towards the far shore, its waters visibly diminishing even in the short time they had been there. Charrière had gone half an hour ago to investigate a cluster of boats that had been drawn up nearby, their owners evidently awaiting the winter run-off from the mountains to the south that would once again cause the Nile to flood.