‘Anywhere you want, my friend!’ laughed Khaleel. ‘And if anyone complains, it has rocket launchers and Gatling guns.’ He nodded at the turrets on the foredeck below. ‘It’s amazing how quickly people shut up when you point a six-barrelled cannon at them.’
‘The threat of death is always persuasive, isn’t it?’ Both men shared sly, knowing smiles. ‘How much further?’
‘Just under two kilometres,’ said the pilot.
‘Good.’ Shaban entered the weapons room behind the bridge. ‘We are approaching the co-ordinates,’ he announced. As well as a member of the Zubr’s crew, the room contained Osir, Diamondback, Dr Hamdi . . . and the group’s newest addition.
‘Dr Berkeley,’ Osir asked the IHA archaeologist, ‘are you absolutely sure they’re correct?’
‘As sure as I can be,’ said Logan Berkeley, annoyed at being doubted. ‘The inverted pyramid on the zodiac, the marking representing the Nile, the symbol in the Osireion, the position of Mercury relative to the end of the canyon - it all fits together.’ He indicated his laptop, which in one window displayed a satellite image of the desert overlaid with lines marking distances and directions, a photo of the Eye of Osiris inside the Osireion pulled from the IHA’s massive Egyptian database in another. ‘Either the Pyramid of Osiris is here, or it’s somewhere that’ll never be found.’
‘I hope it’s the former,’ said Shaban, with a menacing undercurrent.
Berkeley’s annoyance increased. ‘I’ll do what I’m being paid for,’ he snapped, ‘so there’s no need to threaten me.’ He looked at Osir. ‘It’s funny. If you’d tried to buy me off a week ago, I would never have accepted. Now? I just want to get something out of the whole fiasco at the Sphinx.’ His face clenched with anger. ‘I should have been on the front page of every newspaper in the world, but that bitch Nina Wilde turned me into a joke. At least the money will make up for some of that.’
The weapons officer called Khaleel into the room to point out something on a monitor. Osir raised an eyebrow. ‘Funny that you should mention Dr Wilde.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think she’s beaten you again.’ The screen displayed an image from one of the hovercraft’s targeting systems; the Land Rover would have been unmissable against the blank plain even without the cursor the weaponry computer had locked on to it.
‘What? God damn it!’ Berkeley glared at the monitor. Diamondback sniggered.
‘Who is this Dr Wilde?’ Khaleel asked.
‘A competitor,’ Osir told him. He looked more closely at the ruins. ‘But she may have done us a favour. There’s nobody there, so she must have found a way in. We won’t need to use all those bulldozers and diggers we brought after all!’
He went into the bridge, Khaleel, Shaban and Diamondback joining him. Ahead, the faded yellow void of the desert was broken by the spot of colour that was the Defender. The pilot eased back the throttle to slow the 500-ton hovercraft, the three huge propellers above its stern losing speed. ‘Your men,’ Osir quietly asked Khaleel. ‘Are they totally reliable? If one word of this gets back to the government . . .’
‘I will vouch for Tarik,’ said Shaban firmly. ‘I owe him my life.’
‘And I will vouch for my men,’ added Khaleel. ‘We only have a skeleton crew, but I hand-picked them. They will keep your secret . . . for the price you’re paying, certainly.’
‘Good.’ Osir looked back at the ruins as the Zubr wallowed to a stop, settling on its huge rubber air cushion in a cloud of billowing sand. ‘Let’s find Osiris . . . and Nina Wilde.’
24
‘Wow,’ said Nina, aiming her flashlight upwards and finding no end to the black void above. ‘That’s tall.’
‘You know where we are?’ Eddie said, indicating the two pipes running down the far wall. ‘Right under that bridge. If the trap’d been working and we’d been chucked off, this is where we would have ended up. It’s at least a two-hundred-foot drop. Splat.’
Nina tried to picture the whole pyramid in her mind’s eye. ‘Jeez. This place must be as big as the Great Pyramid. Maybe even be bigger.’
‘That’d explain why nobody tried to out-do Khufu’s pyramid,’ said Macy thoughtfully. ‘If the Great Pyramid was almost, but not quite, as big as Osiris’s, no other pharaoh could make their monument bigger than Khufu’s without insulting Osiris. And nobody would dare do that.’
‘So the pyramids were really just giant dick-waving exercises?’ asked Eddie. ‘People haven’t changed much over five thousand years, have they?’ He turned his attention to the pipes. They were connected, one narrowing considerably at its base before widening out conically below a broad horizontal slot. A woman’s face had been painted around it, the opening forming her mouth.
‘It’s like a church organ,’ Nina realised. ‘They must blow air through it somehow - and that’s where the loud voice comes from.’
‘If they dropped something down the other tube, it’d work like a piston.’ There was another passage near the pipes, this one blocked by a barred metal gate. ‘Let me guess. Try to open the gate, the trap goes off, and the whole room gets as loud as a Led Zep concert.’
‘The who?’ Macy asked.
‘No, Led Zep.’ Ignoring her blank look, he moved towards the opening.
‘Careful, Eddie,’ Nina warned.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not gonna move it. I just want to find the trigger.’
‘No, I meant the gate might not be the—’
A slab shifted beneath his foot.
‘—trigger,’ Nina concluded.
‘Get into the other tunnel!’ Eddie shouted, turning back the way they had come—
A second gate slammed down inside the entrance, making Macy jump. No sooner had its echo faded than another sound began to rise, a deep, mournful note, quickly becoming louder.
And louder.
Air gusted from the slot, the sound resonating up the pipe’s length and bouncing back, amplified. The whole room vibrated, dust dancing from the floor, paint and plaster cracking off the walls.
And the chamber’s occupants were also affected. ‘Jesus!’ Nina gasped, a nauseating sensation rising in her chest cavity. Her own organs were vibrating in sympathy with the booming bass note. She tried to lift the fallen gate, but it refused to budge.
Eddie had no more luck with the other gate. He turned to the pipes. ‘Block it! Shove something in it!’
Nina could barely hear him over the thunderous din, but got the gist. She shrugged off her pack and tipped out its contents, balling up the nylon. Macy followed suit. Eddie was already at the pipe, face screwed up in discomfort as he jammed his jacket and his own empty pack into the slot. The note’s pitch changed slightly, the escaping air screeching shrilly as its exit was obstructed.
The women staggered across the trembling floor to him. He grabbed their balled-up packs and stuffed them into the gap. Nina dropped her flashlight and clapped both hands over her ears, but it made no difference; the sound was inside her, trying to shake her apart from within.
It was doing the same thing to the pyramid. Pieces of masonry fell down the shaft and shattered on the stone floor - small lumps at first, but the cracks spreading across the walls warned that there would be larger ones coming.
Unable to shield his ears, Eddie was finding the noise agonising - but it eased slightly as he twisted the makeshift bungs to block the gaps. Pipe organs were closed at the top, air only able to escape through the slot. If he could completely seal it . . .