“You okay?”
“I was nearly gone, Jack. Seeing stars.” He jerked his head at the emergency oxygen bottle attached to the casing beside him. “Couldn’t risk using that because the air cutoff meant there was a pressure buildup inside the bathysphere, enough to make pure oxygen toxic. But it’s back to normal now.”
Jack rubbed the towel on his hair, feeling the ache in his head from the cold. “What’s our status?”
“We’re going to the bottom, Jack. When you opened the valve, it filled the bathysphere. We’ve got enough air for at least six hours. But there’s still a problem with the pipes to the ballast tanks. Right now I just have to concentrate on maintaining life support and keeping the sub stable and upright. Once we get within fifty meters of the seabed, I’ll activate the vertical water thrusters to soften the landing. If the vectored thrusters work as well, they might give us enough power to hop around like a big bug on the seabed, but not to rise more than a few meters without draining the battery.”
“How close will we be to the sarcophagus?”
“We should be dead on target.”
“Comms?”
“Dead as a dodo. The fiber-optic cable was severed. We have no way of communicating with the surface.”
“But they could still brake the cable before we hit the seabed.”
Costas shook his head. “Too much of it has been paid out. The weight of that amount of cable as well as the dead weight of the submersible would be too much by now for them to be able to halt the fall. The only way of repairing the winch will be to let the cable uncoil completely after having secured the upper end with the old derrick, and then attempt to repair the fault in the winch machinery. I was never happy with that new derrick, Jack. Too many corners were cut to get this show ready in time for the media, who now look as if they might not get a show at all. But we’ve got the best people topside, including the engineer from the shipyard who installed it, and with any luck we’ll be back on track soon. The biggest danger is the cable spooling off entirely and falling on us, two tons of metal dropping a thousand meters at about fifty meters a second, like a gigantic whip. If that happens, this submersible will become the second sarcophagus down there.”
“Meanwhile they’ll be sending down an ROV.”
“It’ll be on its way as we speak. My guys in the engineering lab will be onto it.”
“Okay.” Jack eased out of his wet clothes, realizing that he was shivering uncontrollably. He had hardly noticed it in the euphoria of survival, but now he felt the cold ache all over his skin, adding to the residual pain he felt in his chest. He towelled himself down as well as he could, pulled on Costas’ clothes, and followed him through the hatch into the bathysphere, sliding down into the copilot’s seat beside Costas. He leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. “I never thought I’d be happy to be in a confined space, but this is that time.”
“Seat belts on, Jack. Brace yourself.”
Jack strapped himself in and watched Costas activate the thrusters. The three portholes in front of them showed pitch black. The external lights were still off. The depth gauge showed 820 meters, then 840. The thrusters came to life, slowing down the submersible and forcing Jack up in the seat against his belt. Costas activated the multibeam sonar, and a high-definition image appeared on the screen in front of them as it swept the seabed some eighty meters below. It revealed undulating sediment and then the familiar outline of the shipwreck, the scatter of guns clearly visible and the sarcophagus standing stark in the center, where the pit had been dug around it preparatory to lifting.
Costas flicked on the external strobe array, revealing a shimmer of reflected particles through the portholes, and then he took the joystick in his right hand while keeping his left on the water jet throttles. “Easy does it,” he muttered to himself. “I need to pull us a fraction off the vertical of the cable to avoid landing right on top of the sarcophagus. The vectored thrusters aren’t responding, but I should be able to do it by reducing the flow through the port-side vertical thrusters while keeping the starboard ones on full throttle.”
Jack could feel the vibration of the water jets on one side of the submersible, and watched the altitude gauge, measuring their height above the seabed. At twenty-two meters he could see a hint of something through the forward viewing port, and suddenly he was seeing the shipwreck, the dull green of brass guns covered with verdigris poking out of the sediment. Above the breech of one of them, he could see the distinctive heart-shaped bale mark of the East India Company, a little detail he had not noticed before when he had studied photos of the wreck. It opened up a small unexplained byway in the history of the ship that sent a frisson of excitement through him. And then with a soft explosion of sediment they came to a halt, 934 meters beneath Seaquest and the surface of the Mediterranean.
“The eagle has landed,” Costas said, releasing the controls.
The veil of sediment dropped, and the white form of the sarcophagus came into view only a few meters in front of the strobe array. Jack could clearly make out the architectural style of the carving, a geometric pattern that made the sarcophagus one of the greatest exemplars of sculpture from the Egyptian Old Kingdom, at the time of the building of the pyramids. For almost two hundred years, the only image that the world had seen of the sarcophagus had been a woodcut in Colonel Vyse’s account of his excavations. It showed the sarcophagus inside the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Menkaure. Now it was in front of them, looking almost as if it had been designed to be in this place, unaffected by the forces of nature that were steadily eroding and crumbling the wreck around it.
Costas tried the controls again. “They’ve gone dead. I can’t move them. That coil must have caused more damage than I thought.”
“So we’re not going anywhere. No big bug hopping on the seabed.”
Costas shook his head and lay back, stretching. “All we can do now is wait.” He reached down into a paper bag on his side. “Brought lunch with me. Didn’t have time topside. Sandwich?”
Jack felt as drained as he had ever felt, bone tired and aching all over, and he knew that when they surfaced, the medicos on Seaquest would want to give him a thorough road check. But meanwhile he was famished, and the idea of a picnic with his best friend trapped inside a submersible almost a kilometer deep in the abyss did not seem such a bad plan at all. He took the sandwich, and they ate together, occasionally swigging from a water bottle that Costas had placed between them. As Jack sat there munching, staring at one of the greatest archaeological discoveries they had ever made, he knew there was nowhere at this moment that he would rather be.
It felt good to be alive.
Twenty minutes later Jack finished wrapping a bandage around his forearm and stared out the front viewing port at the sarcophagus. Inside it he knew lay the plaque they had discovered on their dive to the wreck three months previously, something that Colonel Vyse must have found inside the pyramid and included as an added extra for the British Museum when he consigned his cargo to the Beatrice that day in 1837 in Alexandria harbor. It was not the plaque they had seen that had spurred Jack to come back here, as they had been able to record all the surviving carving three months earlier, but rather the hope that they might find the fragment a meter or so across that had been missing from one corner, the sharp edges suggesting that the break had been recent rather than ancient and might have taken place during the wrecking. The plaque had shown the Aten sun symbol superimposed on a plan of the pyramids at the Giza plateau, with the orb of the Aten in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure and the radiating lines extending eastward toward the site of modern-day Cairo and the Nile. There was a chance, just a chance, that the missing fragment might show the intersection of the thickest radiating line with the river at a point just south of modern Cairo, the clue that Jack needed to the location of another entrance into the underground complex that he and Costas had seen from beneath the pyramid.