The line of trumpeters to his left had been gaping at Mina and her bare-breasted warriors, and now looked at him expectantly. To the east the glow of dawn had become stronger, and a crack of sunlight appeared between land and sky. Akhenaten extended his left hand, and the trumpeters instantly raised their instruments and blew, a ragged noise at first that levelled out and became a deafening blare across the desert. It was the signal to mount up. The men turned from leering at the women and leapt on their chariots, the drivers unleashing the reins and standing with their whips at the ready, the archers pulling arrows out of their quivers and stringing them loosely in their bows. Out of the dust to his right, Mehmnet-Ptah appeared in his royal chariot, glinting now in the sunlight, his great curved sword upraised, and pulled to a halt just ahead of the start line. Stamped into the gold and electrum shield at the front of the chariot were the wings of Horus, the falcon god, and above it Akhenaten could see the rays of the Aten and the cartouche containing his own name. Behind him Mina drew up with a section of her chariots, and he saw others of her division stream off to the left and right to take up positions on either flank of the Egyptian charioteers, ready to funnel them toward the encampment below the rising sun.
Akhenaten’s own chariot drew up alongside. He got up, waved the charioteer aside, and took his place at the reins. He would drive the chariot himself, spurring his army on like the warrior pharaohs of old, but he would fall back behind the main body before they converged on the cliff encampment. He stared to the east, narrowing his eyes. The light was stronger now, searing his vision on either side of his blind spot. If he did not give the signal soon, the horses might shy away from it and refuse to gallop, but he wanted to wait long enough that the sun would blind the drivers as they hurtled closer to the edge. The blare of the trumpets had also been the last warning to any of the Israelites who might remain in the camp. Moses should by now have spirited them away along the perilous path just beneath the lip of the cliff, and they should be far away to the north. If all went according to plan, after this morning there would no longer be an Egyptian chariot army to pursue the Israelites; they should be able to make their way across the northern isthmus of the gulf beyond the border of Egypt and to safety.
Mehmnet-Ptah looked back to him. Akhenaten raised his arm again, and then dropped it. With a huge battle cry, the general whipped his horses forward, his sword flashing. On either side the ground rumbled, and, like a great wave breaking on a beach, the line of chariots surged forward in a cacophony of yelling and neighing and screeching of wheels. Then Mina and her chariots followed, hurtling ahead like a spear thrust through the center of the line. For an instant Akhenaten saw her as he whipped his horses forward, saw the snakes held high above her head like batons, writhing and turning, heard her warriors shrieking and ululating as they shot past. Soon they had overtaken Mehmnet-Ptah and disappeared in the cloud of dust that had risen above the plain. Far out on either side he could see the two flanking lines sweeping ahead and closing in to constrict the main force, driving it toward the cliff-top encampment. As the dust enveloped the last of the charioteers, all he could hear was an extraordinary din, like the sound of a rushing sandstorm heading out from the desert and dropping into the canyon of the sea.
He veered right, reached the cliff edge, and turned to look back at the Israelite encampment. The dust cloud had rolled ahead of the chariots and erupted like a huge exhalation from the desert, billowing and swirling out over the sea. An astonishing sight met his eyes, almost impossible to register. In the final seconds as the first rank of charioteers had realized their mistake in driving too fast at the cliff edge, they had tried to rein in their horses, slowing them enough that the following ranks had crashed into them, each successive rank doing the same. The combined momentum of horses and chariots and men had pushed the entire army in one impacted mass over the cliff, the leading edge appearing out of the dust cloud hundreds of feet above the sea. For a moment the mass seemed suspended in space, like a great frieze of battle carved into the wall of a temple, and then with a cacophony of shrieking and whinnying and bellowing it plummeted to the sea, a thrashing, seething mass of limbs and wheels and spars that fell like some monstrous apparition from the heavens, hitting the water with a mighty crash. Giant waves erupted around the edges, throwing dismembered parts of horses and men far into the air to rain down on either side. Within the tumult it was as if the seas themselves had parted, exposing a sloping sandy seabed littered with chariots that still seemed to be driving forward into the depths, their horses and charioteers gone.
Churning waters enveloped the scene, with shattered and burst bodies and slicks of blood lying thick on the surface. Akhenaten peered along the cliff face to the north, imagining the Israelites who he knew would have been left behind to watch before catching up with the main exodus. He knew that what they had seen today, the destruction of an army, the parting of the seas, would become a legend of their people as they fled along the great canyon of the gulf to the north. It truly had been the work of the Aten, the chariot army having been blinded by the rays of the sun, but only he and Moses would know that it was a deliverance planned not by divine wisdom but by two men intent on saving those whom they had chosen to be the people to carry forth the worship of the one god.
Then on the cliff edge out of the dust on either side he saw a distant line of chariots streaming off to the north and south, looping around to their rendezvous point somewhere behind him; it was Mina’s division, their job done. But from the center of the dust storm there was nothing, no longer any sound, no chariots returning. He had achieved what no enemy of Egypt had achieved in a thousand years. He had driven a pharaoh’s army, his own army, to utter destruction, over a cliff into the sea, leaving no survivors and no trace of their passing.
He reined around and turned his back on the scene, looking to the left and then right, and seeing the emptiness where the army had once been, the dust still settling on the scuffed hoof prints and the shallow depressions where the soldiers had been resting mere minutes before. He felt the warmth of the sun on his neck, and looking to the west he saw only the burning white disk in his vision that blotted out all but the shimmering sands of the desert. It was with him all the time now, the light of the Aten shining through all his thoughts and his deeds.
Now was the time for his own destiny.
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
Jack Howard sank slowly into the depths of the Red Sea, injecting a blast of air into his stabilizer jacket and reaching neutral buoyancy only inches above the seabed. Ahead of him the sand shimmered with the sunlight that streamed down from the surface some thirty meters overhead, blocked only by the shadow of the dive boat at the edge of his field of vision. For a few moments he hung there, barely breathing, perfectly at one with the sea.
When Jack dived he was always seeking the past, in shipwrecks, in sunken ruins, in humble scraps of evidence or fabulous treasures, some of them dating back to the dawn of recorded history. And yet for him the experience of diving was all about the present, about the heightened awareness and rush of adrenaline that came when every breath was precious and your life depended on it. In more than thirty years of diving, he had never lost that feeling, from his first dives as a boy through his academic training as an archaeologist and his time as a navy diver to his years with the International Maritime University on expeditions that spanned the globe. It was the same allure that had drawn men to the sea for millennia, men whose past receded with the shoreline, their future hemmed in by the vagaries of storm and wreck, whose survival could be measured only as far as they could see ahead. For Jack it was intoxicating, his lifeblood. He knew that even if he found nothing this time, the dive would revitalize him, would push him forward to try again, never to give up as long as the past beckoned him to explore its deepest secrets.