Over the course of three and a half days, Sam and Tom followed the same route that Harper Smith had taken three and a half centuries earlier. When they stopped after spending the exact same amount of time on camel as their predecessors, it turned out to be a little under two hundred miles from the Emerald Star — making the pyramid just inside the Kalahari Desert.
Both men stared down at the rows of sand dunes that continued all the way to the horizon.
“Well, we made it — as much as I hate travelling by camel!” Sam stared into the distance. “The pyramid must be somewhere in this vicinity. Of course, it might take us months to locate it from the air.”
Tom looked over the crest of the dune, squinted and then shook his head. “I don’t think we need to worry about that.”
“Why?”
Tom swallowed. “Because it appears someone beat us to it.”
Chapter Forty-Eight — The Buried Pyramid of the Kalahari
The opening looked more like the entrance to a mine shaft than a pyramid buried in sand. Three old railway sleepers formed the framework for the adit. It ran at a gradual decline right into the base of the next sand dune. Inside the makeshift timber set, used to support the roof inside, mingled with a series of posts, jacks and roof bolts used to prop up the sandy ceiling. They had been placed haphazardly, giving Sam the impression of an old gold mine built during the American gold rush era.
Sam glanced around at a series of recent vehicle tracks leading toward the entrance. There were two distinctly different tracks. One looked wide as though it belonged to a large vehicle, like a truck or four wheel drive, while the other was narrow but deep, and ran all the way inside the mine shaft. The smaller of the two looked like it possibly had been caused by a small digging machine, possibly a backhoe or frontend loader.
Tom dismounted his camel and removed his Heckler and Koch assault rifle from its pouch. He set it to full auto and approached the entrance to the shaft. He glanced back and said, “You might want to call Genevieve and tell her to bring in some reinforcements.”
Sam grinned and followed suit, removing his own weapon and setting it to full auto. It felt like a final shoot out scene from an old western movie, where the final standoff occurs inside an old ghost mine. Only in this case, the mine wasn’t a mine at all, it was a tunnel to an ancient pyramid and the good guys were carrying assault rifles.
He made the call to Genevieve, who said that she and Veyron would come with the Sea King armed to the teeth to secure the area.
Sam stopped at the entrance and listened. There were no sounds coming out from the mine and nothing outside it, either. He scanned the horizons in each direction. There was nothing but sand. No sand clouds or wisps of upturned sand spewing toward the sky, indicating a truck might be approaching.
“Genevieve says she can be here within an hour.” He turned to Tom as he filled a small bucket with water for the two beasts to drink. “What do you reckon?”
Tom attached a light to his weapon’s scope. “I think it’s time we find some answers.”
Sam nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
The tunnel extended a quarter of a mile before it reached the horizontal entrance to a pyramid. Sam found himself unintentionally holding his breath, listening for any signs of other persons inside. He heard none. He and Tom switched their flashlights off and waited another few minutes. The faint glow of the outside world was barely visible looking backward, and no light surfaced from inside.
Sam exhaled. “All right, let’s go.”
Tom stepped inside first. Thirty feet inside the angle of the tunnel changed from horizontal to a steep decline. Another four hundred feet inside and the tunnel separated into directions. The original tunnel continued to descend at the same angle, while the second tunnel ran at the exact same angle, only at an incline instead.
Sam said, “It’s the same anatomy as the Pyramid of Giza.”
“So which way do you want to go?” Tom asked.
“Up. Down probably leads to a storage chamber. We need to reach the king’s Chamber if we’re to find the location we saw from the looking glass.”
They continued climbing for another four hundred feet. Again the tunnel split into two. With the main tunnel following the same incline, while the second one ran horizontally deeper toward the pyramid’s core.
Sam shined his flashlight into the horizontal tunnel. “The queen’s chamber. Let’s keep heading upward.”
They continued to climb the stairs. The ceiling above opened to about thirty feet. If the anatomy of the architecture matched the Pyramid of Giza as the sunken pyramid on Infinity Island had, it indicated they were now traveling through the grand gallery. At the top of the incline, the tunnel leveled out horizontally and they stepped into the king’s chamber.
The room was rectangular with a ceiling just short of twenty feet. At the center of the room where Sam would have expected the sarcophagus to go, a single limestone pedestal stood. Sam recognized the recess built into the top of it as being the perfect match for the base of the Death Mask.
He shined his flashlight around the rest of the room. Two pictograms lined the east and west walls. The first was a series of numbers, most likely indicating an intersecting point on a map. The problem was, the distance was referred to as the carrib — that same ancient word they’d found on the stone tablet on board the shipwreck of the Mary Rose on the seabed of the Black Sea. There was an image next to it, which left no doubt in his mind of the location the map was referring to. The drawing depicted the two volcanic peaks of Mount Ararat.
The second consisted of three sets of Roman Numerals, which appeared highly at odds with their Egyptian environment. The size of each numeral changed dramatically from number to number so that the three sets formed the shape of a small pyramid. Sam took a photo and read the numbers out loud. They appeared vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t recall where he’d seen them before.
They certainly didn’t sound like any location he’d been to, and they were too long to refer to any sort of period of time. It irked him that he couldn’t recall where he’d seen the numbers.
Tom swore and then looked at him. “It’s the wrong place, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Any of this mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing, but my guess is it will.”
Sam finished taking photos of the chamber. When he was done, he said, “All right. We’re not going to learn anything more from here, let’s hitch a ride back to the Maria Helena and see what Elise can find out about either of these images.”
“And if she can’t?” Tom asked. “Then what?”
“Then we’ll have to take the Death Mask to its resting place on top of Mount Ararat.”
Sam gripped his Heckler and Koch assault rifle and started to walk down the descending passage. He made it two hundred feet and stopped. Because up ahead, he spotted the flicker of someone else’s flashlight.
Chapter Fifty
Dmitri switched off his flashlight.
In the narrow ascending passage sound traveled quickly. He heard the distinct click of a weapon being switched into a firing position and the labored breaths of two men approaching in the dark, having just extinguished their flashlights in an instant. He turned and started to slowly feel his way down the passageway.
After thirty or forty feet, his hand dipped into the horizontal passage that led to the queen’s chamber. He heard the sound of heavy footsteps, as though someone large was now running toward him. Only an insane person would try to run in the dark to greet a hidden enemy. The thought almost made him laugh out loud.