Jack looked at Lanowski. “Make sure you keep that beacon safe.”
“I’ve got two of them. One for me, the other for you.”
Costas peered closely. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Jacob? I tell you about everything I’m working on.”
Lanowski looked hesitant. “Well, it was going to be a birthday surprise for you. For today. Rebecca told me.”
Jack looked at Costas. “For today? Today is your birthday?”
The building vibrated from an explosion somewhere near the harbor, the detonation followed by the ripping sound of machine-gun fire. Costas jerked his head toward the door, his face grim. “I don’t think today is one for any kind of celebration.”
Jack pointed to the fragment of ancient masonry beside the computer, the find that Hiebermeyer had made years before in the sewage pipe excavation beside the pyramids. “Don’t forget that, Maurice,” he said. “If Costas and I get nowhere tonight, those hieroglyphs could be the only real proof we have for what lies under the plateau.”
“Maurice and I have everything,” Aysha said. “The First World War diary I found in the museum archives, the Geniza letter of Halevi, all the images and data from the mummy necropolis, everything.”
Jack reached out and shook Hiebermeyer’s hand. “Do you remember our old school motto? ‘Quit ye like men, be strong.’ We used to joke about it, but now is one of those times.”
Hiebermeyer tapped his head. “It’s all up here, Jack. I’m taking Egypt with me. I won’t let it go.”
The phone hummed, and Aysha picked it up and read a text. “That was my sister near Tantur, about eighty kilometers south of Alexandria. She says she’s just seen a convoy of trucks with gunmen racing up the highway. If Cairo falls, Alexandria won’t be far behind.”
Jack looked at his watch. “Okay. Time for us to go.”
Aysha nodded. “Mohammed has food and drink and sleeping bags on the felucca. All you need to do now is visit the washroom and say your prayers.”
Jack looked around the room. “Anything more we can do?”
“Everything’s on Sea Venture except what you can see here and the crates on the helipad.”
“Institute staff?”
“Anyone who wanted to leave has been airlifted out, along with their families. They’ll get refugee status in the UK.”
Jack turned to Costas and made a twirling motion with one hand. “We need to get the Lynx fired up.”
Costas unclipped the VHF radio from his belt and started walking to the door. “I’m on it.”
Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. “We’ll help you get this remaining stuff to the helipad. It’s 0730 hours already, and Mohammed’s probably loaded up and waiting. We can get going early and give him a little leeway.” He turned to Lanowski, who had shouldered a small rucksack and had picked up a crate of books from the floor. “Jacob? You still on for this?”
Lanowski stared at him, his face pale but determined. “Roger that, Jack. I’m good to go.”
Forty minutes later Jack was crouched between the thwarts of the felucca, staring in horror at the scene that was unfolding around them. The explosion they had heard while they were in the operations room had been the first of a succession every few minutes along the harbor front, all of them car bombs. After the third one, Hiebermeyer had decided to bring forward his plans and evacuate the institute immediately. Aysha had left quickly with their driver for Cairo. She was shorn of anything associating her with a foreign institute and was dressed in a burkha with a face veil. A few minutes later Mohammed and his son had finished loading the felucca and poled it away from the quayside. Jack and Lanowski were sitting in the bow, and Costas was helping the boy to fire up the diesel engine. As it coughed to life, the noise was drowned out by the Lynx, which raised a dust storm around the fort as the pilot held the aircraft poised for departure. Jack had watched as Hiebermeyer ran out of the fort with his briefcase and rucksack, ducked down on the helipad while the crewman loaded the last of the crates, and then took the outstretched arms and jumped on board himself. He had turned for a last glimpse of Egypt as the helicopter rose, angled sharply, and then clattered off over the Mediterranean, soon leaving Alexandria and Egyptian airspace far behind and disappearing from view over the northern horizon.
For Jack it should have been a scene of almost unbearable poignancy, watching his friend in his trusty old shorts and boots, still streaked with dirt from his last excavation, leave his beloved Egypt perhaps for the last time. But any reflection was instantly cut short by a cacophony of gunfire and engine revving coming along the highway from the west, the first of the trucks screeching onto the quay mere minutes after the Lynx had taken off. One of them disgorged half a dozen gunmen, who raced up to the fort, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, one of them waving the black flag of the extremists. Within minutes they had entered the fort and raised the flag on a pole above the ramparts. Qaitbay Fort suddenly looked as it had been intended, a stronghold of medieval Islam, all indication of its use over the past few years as an archaeological institute obliterated.
Two trucks raced up to the fort and this time let off a cluster of handcuffed prisoners, all of them Egyptian woman in Western dress, the gunmen rifle-butting them into the courtyard. Seconds later there was an earsplitting clatter of gunfire and the gunmen reappeared, leaving one man at the entrance, and piling back into the trucks. Jack turned away, feeling numb, glad only that Maurice and Aysha had not witnessed what had just happened. As the felucca chugged out into the basin toward the sea, he steeled himself for more to come, keeping his eyes glued on the gunmen at the fort. Suddenly the air was rent by another explosion, deeper and more resonant than the others, and then a rushing noise and the sound of shattering glass. “My God,” Costas exclaimed. “They’ve torched the library.”
Jack spun around, staring at the far side of the harbor. A gas truck had been driven into the foyer of the Bibliotheca and exploded, its wrecked form lying upside down on the road in front. The huge disk shape of the Bibliotheca was wreathed in flame, like a burning sun rising from the eastern horizon. Jack could barely breathe; his mind was reeling. It was as if he had been transported back fifteen hundred years to an event that seemed fossilized in history, too awful to comprehend. But this was real, and happening before his eyes. For the second time in two millennia, the great library of Alexandria had been destroyed by religious extremists, by those who believed that knowledge was offensive to their god. Jack could hear the screams of people streaming out of the building, and bursts of gunfire from the trucks that had ranged up beside the wreck of the tanker, their machine guns trained on the steps and raking them every time another person appeared. It was not just the books that were anathema to the extremists; it was those who had read them as well. In that instant the frailty of civilization seemed laid bare, the foundations of wisdom as fragile as those of morality, with those who espoused it as vulnerable as the women who a few minutes before had paid for their freedom of expression with their lives.
Another burst of automatic fire rang out from near the fort, and Jack spun around. A truck with a gunman on the roof was hurtling along the edge of the harbor to the point closest to the felucca, no more than a hundred yards distant. It screeched to a halt. The gunman vaulted out of the rear and began to taunt a fisherman who was gathering up his net on the quay. The gunman was prodding him with the barrel of his Kalashnikov. The fisherman backed away, his hands in the air, gesticulating toward his family in a small car beside them. The gunman raised his rifle and shot him in the head, watched his body jerk back and fall into the harbor, and then ran along the quay looking for others.