“I worry about you sometimes. Aysha thinks you’d be a great dad to living, sentient human beings.”
Little Joey seemed to bristle, and cocked his eye at Jack. “Careful what you say,” Costas said. “He’s very sensitive.” He reached in, took the robot out, and placed it on the ledge at the beginning of the aperture. Then he pulled out a radio control unit and strap-on virtual goggles. “He’s programmed to be reactive to his environment. Because of what we tend to do, I’ve made him fully sensitized to tunnels and the kind of archaeological features we’ve encountered in the past. He’s like a robotic tomb raider. I’ll send him down that tunnel now and he’ll stop and report back anything unusual.”
“How does he do that?”
“He’ll tell us. You’ll see.” Costas reached under the tail of the robot and activated a switch. Like its larger counterpart, Little Joey was shaped like a scorpion, with four legs on either side, the single eye on its stalk and two flexible arms, only it was no bigger than a large rat. Costas lifted it and aimed it down the tunnel. But it leapt up, assumed its original sideways position, and looked back at Costas. Then it leapt around again and aimed itself down the tunnel. “He’s very independent,” Costas said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t like to be shown what to do. Always has to try it himself first.”
“Just like children,” Jack said thoughtfully. “That’s what you’d discover if you had them. Like a certain teenager we know.”
Little Joey suddenly scurried off down the aperture, his lights showing as pinpricks in the darkness, and came to a halt perhaps ten meters ahead.
“Dead end?” Jack asked.
Costas hunched over the radio. “It means he’s seen something, but we won’t know until I’ve booted the system up and he can react. Once that’s done I’ll be able to put on the goggles and see what he sees. It’ll take a few minutes.” Costas stood back, took a deep breath, and wiped the back of his hand over his face, blinking hard.
“You okay?” Jack said.
“Beginning to feel the effect. Nothing serious, yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some basic science, Jack. Those extremists at the pyramid were spraying it with some kind of fuel, right? We saw those tanker trucks on the CNN report. It must have been a pretty well-planned operation.”
“They’ve been threatening it for years. Nothing about this coup is spur of the moment. They’re taking up where the Mahdi left off in 1885.”
“Well, spraying fuel and igniting it is how you get a stone building to look as if it’s burning. The biblical burning bush is thought to have been based on something similar in appearance, where in some conditions the gas exuding from certain desert species could be ignited to give the appearance of a bush wreathed in flame but not actually burning. Some of that fuel is likely to have entered the pyramid through the shafts that were used to bring light to this underground complex. The fuel will be burnt out long before it reaches us, but that’s not the problem. The problem is what I experienced firsthand during that terrorist strike on my destroyer in the Gulf, when I was trapped by fire belowdecks in the engine room before I managed to escape and help with the rescue.”
“Fire consumes oxygen,” Jack murmured. “I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“You remember the low oxygen readout you noticed after we surfaced? Ever since then, when I’ve exerted myself I’ve felt a little lightheaded. I put it down to the residual effect of carbon dioxide buildup during my final minutes on the rebreather, but this is a better explanation.”
Jack nodded. “That’s reassuring. I felt it a few minutes ago. I nearly blacked out.”
“Reassuring, but not. They’ll be jetting fuel continuously at the pyramid to maintain the spectacle, and that means more fuel getting down those shafts. With the outer surface of the pyramid wreathed in fire, the only way the burning fuel inside can feed its flames is by sucking up the oxygen from inside the pyramid, from the shaft, from the burial chamber, from the well we went down three months ago, and ultimately from every connected part of this underground complex. Slowly but surely, we’re being starved of oxygen.”
“How long, do you think?”
“Two or three hours, probably. Maybe less.”
“Well, we weren’t planning on lingering. If we’re in here much longer than that, we’ll never make our rendezvous with the felucca before dawn.”
“At least it means if we do get stuck down here, we won’t be around long enough to have to eat mummies.” Jack gave Costas a wan look. “I for one do not intend to suffocate because of some deranged extremist.”
“Amen to that. Let’s just hope Little Joey can save the day.”
They were interrupted by a chirping sound from down the aperture. Jack angled his headlamp beam and peered down. The robot was shaking and waving its arms as the eye looked back at them and then at the wall in front. “Something seems to be wrong,” he said. “Looks like a malfunction.”
Costas stared incredulously at Jack. “Malfunction? Little Joey? No way. He’s just excited. It means he really has found something. It shows that the system is coming online.” He picked up the mask, tried it on, and then removed it. “About a minute more, and then I can actually be Little Joey, real time. Lanowski calls it a mind-meld.”
Jack continued staring at the chirping and chattering apparition that was caught in his beam. “Is he really agitated? I mean, you must have programmed this.”
“It’s like a smoke alarm. He’s programmed to respond if he finds what I’ve asked him to look for. But he really has been acting like a wilful teenager recently. You think you’ve got problems with Rebecca. I left Lanowski alone with him in the engineering lab for half an hour a few weeks ago, and he hasn’t been the same since.”
“It’s stopped,” Jack said.
Costas put on the mask. “Eureka,” he murmured, manipulating the controls. “I’m looking through his eye, Jack. The shaft goes off to the right, and there it is, a very suffused red glow.”
Jack’s heart began to pound with excitement. “Can you get up to it?”
“I’m getting there now. About a meter to go. Okay. Looking out over a big room, circular, maybe twenty meters across. Recesses around the edge filled with jars. Holy cow. Holy cow.”
Jack could barely contain himself. He wanted to be there, to be where Costas was. Jars like that were exactly what Jones had described to Howard Carter. “What is it? What can you see?”
Costas seemed to be transfixed, his hand motionless on the control lever and his mouth wide open. He slowly let go of the control and took off the mask, his eyes staring into space, and then turned to Jack. “You remember those first ever pictures of King Tut’s tomb? You’re not going to believe what I’ve just seen.”
CHAPTER 23
Jack pushed ahead with his feet through the shaft, using his elbows and hands to pull himself along. He inched toward the halogen beam from Little Joey some five meters away where the shaft angled sharply to the right. The image he had seen from the robot’s camera confirmed beyond a doubt what lay around the corner, yet Jack refused to register it until he saw it with his own eyes.
He could hear Costas grunting and cursing where he had climbed in behind from the tunnel, his frame barely fitting into the shaft. They knew that they must be following in the path of Corporal Jones, and almost certainly the caliph Al-Hakim before that, taking the only passage left open when the ship sheds and the entrance tunnel had been blocked up in antiquity. They were crawling along a shaft that was part of the extraordinary network cut through the rock to reflect sunlight into the underground complex.