Mohammed gestured frantically at Jack and Costas to get down. They dropped into the scuppers and crawled forward to where Lanowski was already lying under the deck in the bow of the boat, absorbed in checking the battery in one of the beacons. Jack looked back and saw Mohammed unfurl and raise a black flag in the stern, and then slowly swing the tiller to take them farther out into the basin toward the entrance. With any luck there would be more interesting and easier targets for the gunmen than a felucca setting out to sea, especially one that appeared to be sporting the flag of the extremists.
Jack drew himself up farther into the crawl space in the bow of the felucca, wedged his feet beside one of their kit bags, and pushed a sleeping bag forward as a makeshift pillow. He felt the bulge of the Beretta in the holster on his chest, and shifted slightly to make sure the grip was accessible in case it was needed. He could make out Lanowski and Costas lying in the gloom beside him, their faces etched with the reality of what they were undertaking. They all knew there was no going back now. Even if they had decided to abort, Jack would never have risked calling back the Lynx to a place that was crawling with trigger-happy gunmen who almost certainly had SAMs in their trucks. The only way ahead was the one they had mapped out, from one burning cauldron to another, but with a plausible exit strategy. They would stick to their plan.
Jack shifted again, trying to find a more comfortable position, and shut his eyes. He tried to forget what he had just seen, and to think instead of those who had gone before him down the Nile in search of fabulous discoveries, of the sand travellers of the past, those who breathed in the dust of the desert and felt the brush of the wind that blew from the pyramids. He thought of what could lie beneath, of sealed chambers full of treasures, of rows of pottery jars brimming with papyri that might contain all the lost wisdom of the ancient world.
The chug of the engine increased to a throb, and he felt the bow rise. He opened his eyes and peered through a crack in the planking, seeing the end of the quay and hearing the slap of the waves as they passed into open water. The engine began to vibrate badly, seeming to jar every bone in his body, and each slap of the waves felt like a body blow. The movement of the boat had released a rancid smell of fish from the scuppers, and wafts of diesel smoke erupted every few seconds from a hole in the engine. The great triangular sail would remain furled until they had traversed the coast and veered south into the Nile, where a good following wind might allow them to ease off on the engine.
He rolled over again and looked at Costas. He was splayed out on top of the kit bags, his mouth open and emitting snores, oblivious to everything around him, rocking to and fro with every shudder of the boat.
Jack swallowed hard. He was beginning to regret devouring the food that Mohammed had offered him on the quayside. He stared at the planks above him, wishing he could be outside and focusing on the horizon, and glanced at his watch. They had ten hours to go until they passed Cairo.
It was going to be a long day.
CHAPTER 20
It was dark by the time the felucca passed through the northern suburbs of Cairo, the lingering heat of the day tempered by a torrential downpour that had left a mist over the banks of the river. Earlier they had used the boat’s huge triangular lateen sail to make their way with the wind against the current, but with the city looming ahead Mohammed and his son had furled the sail and lowered the mast to make the boat less conspicuous and had fired up the old diesel engine again.
As they chugged past vessels heading north, Mohammed had exchanged a few words with their captains and learned that everyone who could was leaving Cairo by whatever means possible, by river or road or on foot, with groups of people even striking out across the desert with all they could carry to find a place to hide and wait out the worst of what was happening in the city.
There had been a tense half hour as they passed the center of the city and the walled enclosure of Fustat, Old Cairo, near the Ben Ezra synagogue, where Jack and Maria had explored the Geniza chamber only four days previously. Jack had tried to make out the medieval walls in the gloom and the mist, remembering that this was the place where he and Costas were due to rendezvous with Aysha before dawn and to find the felucca for their return journey up the Nile to the sea. Between now and then, they should finally have answered the question that had been eating at Jack for months now, ever since they had returned from their explorations in Sudan, since he and Costas had seen the shaft of light beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure. He glanced at Costas’ recumbent form beneath the foredeck of the boat, next to the spot where Jack had just spent several of the most uncomfortable hours of his life hidden from sight during the long daylight passage down the Nile. At least one of them would have had a good rest.
They had begun to pass amorphous shapes floating in the river that Jack knew must be bodies, but until now the city had been ominously quiet, with only the odd gunshot and distant scream. Then just before they reached Fustat, there had been the call to prayer, the muezzins and recordings from the minarets joining in the familiar cadences that seemed to undulate over the city, reaching a crescendo and then stopping suddenly. It had been more than a call to prayer; it had been a signal for the extremists. Seconds later the city erupted in gunfire and a cacophony of shrieking and yelling rising from all directions and echoing across the river. A long burst of automatic fire came at them from the east bank, the muzzle flashing like a distant jet of flame in the night, the bullets zipping overhead and several of them slapping into the side of the boat. Mohammed kept his nerve, staying in the central channel of the river, and the gunman soon turned his attention elsewhere, firing shorts bursts into groups of people who were running and tripping along the embankment.
Jack knew that people were dying now, by the scores if not the hundreds, and that before the night was out the river would run with blood. As the glow of fires began to redden the night, he cast his mind back to the descriptions of Khartoum in Sudan a hundred and thirty years before. It had been the first city on the Nile to fall to the extremists. Those who were watching from the river then must have seen similar sights. Despite all the advances in technology, in weaponry and in communications, when it came to the razing of a city and the destruction of its inhabitants, little had changed through history. It was reduced to the same individual acts of savagery and horror that were little different from the time when the forces of jihad had first swept west across Africa almost fifteen hundred years before, or when the Crusaders had done the same in the name of their own faith.
Jack huddled down again out of sight beneath the thwarts, watching the river through a slit in the planks. Soon the glow of Cairo was enveloped in darkness, and the sounds of gunfire receded into the night. He knew they must be nearing their destination, the ruined Napoleonic fort on the west bank of the river that Lanowski had identified as the point where the tunnel from the pyramid entered the Nile. He could see the screen of Lanowki’s computer now in the space in the bows opposite his own makeshift bed. A few moments later Lanowski emerged with his GPS receiver, his long lank hair coming out from under a woolen Jacques Cousteau hat and his face daubed black. Jack smiled to himself despite the grim scenes of the past hour. Lanowski had come into his own as IMU’s newest field operative, and he was clearly relishing it. He made his way up to Mohammed, exchanged a few words in Arabic, and then came back to Jack, crouching down and showing him the GPS readout and its convergence with the programmed position for the fort. “We’re less than a kilometer away,” he said quietly. “Time to wake Costas?”