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?”