2012 (2 page)

He returned to his work. He was bare millimeters away from getting his sample-and the drill was moving-and there! Now to withdraw and go in with the collecting tool, a tiny claw made of the same hardened steel.

He took the silver tool out of his case and plugged it into the zinc-air generator he was using for power, then inserted it into the narrow hole made by the drill. Or rather, tried. The pulsations made it harder than threading a needle.

“Do we know if that machine shop ever shuts down?”

“Come out, Martin.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starting to feel it up here, and that should not be.”

Bits of stone were now dropping from the ceiling, and he knew that this was no ordinary event. The reason he knew was that the floor was clean and the room intact. Therefore, this was something new and Ahmad was right, he needed to get out of here right now.

He was millimeters from finishing, though. He watched the now vibrating screen, manipulated the instrument.

“Martin, are you coming up?”

“Hold on.”

“Are you pulling out? What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer. The pulsations got bigger, whoomp…whoomp…whoomp and he struggled, trying to catch just the tiny bit of stone he needed.

There was a crash and a piece of ceiling that must have weighed a quarter ton plunged past him into the Caviglia pit.

“The police are here, they are saying come out.”

“On my way.”

But still the instrument wasn’t set. Watching the screen, he maneuvered it frantically now. The weight of what was above pressed down on him like a great, suffocating hand.

He thought of Lindy and Trevor and Winnie, and drew the instrument out. Another block fell, and he knew that it was over. He started to gather his equipment.

Whoomp! Whoomp! Whoomp!

This wasn’t an earthquake, no earthquake felt like this. There was a machine down there, there had to be.

A series of sounds like shots being fired came echoing down the passage. In the dust, his light revealed cracks appearing along the walls.

He dashed for the passage, hunched, half running, half crawling, tearing his knees and hands to ribbons, racing along as the whole tunnel twisted and swayed like a rubber tube in the hands of a mad giant.

Screaming now, he burst upward. The floor crumbled beneath his feet, showers of stone fell around him, his progress slowed. The pulsations were huge now, great, shuddering seizures of the ground itself.

And then there were arms, people dragging at him, and he was coming out, he was free-and they were outside the pyramid. Coughing, his eyes closed by a thick layer of dust, he staggered and tried to collect himself.

What in the name of all that was holy was going on here?

“Run, Martin!”

He felt somebody tug at him, managed to wipe his eyes enough to see, turned and observed the strangest thing he had ever seen in his life.

Looking up the north face of the gigantic structure, he found himself watching huge ripples. It was as if the stone blocks themselves were liquefying and threatening to pour down on them like some kind of bizarre flood.

He mouthed the words, too astounded to speak them: The pyramid’s collapsing.

Sirens started wailing, one and then more, until the sound filled the air. In the distance, a line of tour buses on their way to a Pyramids at Dawn experience began making clumsy attempts to turn around in the roadway.

Martin followed Ahmad and the three policemen, running toward the wall that controlled access to the archaeological zone. Behind them there was a noise. It was a howl from the very throat of the world, screaming like a jet going down, like a million madmen burning alive.

Martin turned and saw that the pyramid was now bulging, as if it was becoming a huge block, its pyramidal shape disappearing as the stones that had been there for thousands of years burst from their rest and flew out into the sweet of dawn.

All across Cairo and up and down the Nile, people looked toward the sound, toward Giza. What they saw was unrecognizable to them and completely incomprehensible, a great, black column gushing into the sky, its walls flickering with tan dots.

Each of these dots was a stone weighing between one and three tons. Each was the size of a large automobile. And all were about to fall on the helpless millions of people who jammed the city of Cairo.

Martin understood this quite clearly. His belief, at this point, was that terrorists had detonated an atomic weapon under the pyramid. It had been his extraordinary misfortune to be inside it during the moment when the ages-old structure, the most important construction on earth, met its end.

As the great fountain of stones reached its apogee at an altitude of over two miles, Martin lay down beside the wall. He was not a religious man, and was surprised by the deep feeling of peace that had come over him. Death had come to him. This was quite certain.

But then a paroxysm of fear made him grab his head, made him scream into the continuing, expanding roar of the vast unfolding explosion.

Then he stopped. He brought before him an image of Lindy, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, one of the wisest human beings he had ever known. He decided that he would die like this, with her filling his mind.

And then he heard Trevor’s voice as clearly as if he had been standing there say, “When’s Dad coming home?” And Winnie replied with prim care, “Trevor, you’re so impatient. He’ll be home when he’s finished.”

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be able to hear them, and then the big clock in the hall was ringing the hour, eight deep bongs.

A whistling sound turned to a scream turned to a hoarse roar, and a stone crashed down into the desert thirty feet from where he lay. The ground leaped and knocked the breath out of him. He saw Ahmad, his eyes glazed with shock, his lips pulled back from his teeth, staring straight at him.

Another block hit, then another, then it was raining stones and there were screams and above them the clanging crunch of stones as they struck buses and cars, and the distant roar of the ones hitting the Nile, and explosions as they bombed Cairo. A row of houses a quarter of a mile away disappeared in dust, the road was smashed, cars ran into the desert weaving crazily, a bus, careening away from the scene, was struck in the rear and lifted up as if begging for deliverance, and then exploded in flames and desolate, shattering screams.

It went on and on and on, for what seemed like hours, then days, then it was as if it entered a sort of eternity, an endless explosion. Always, there would be another stone from the sky. Always, another chorus of screams, always another bone-shattering jolt.

Until that was no longer true. What he heard now was a silence even deeper than the one that had oppressed him in the pit. In part, it was because of his stunned left eardrum and the ringing in his right ear that would not go away for days. In part it was the shock of seeing what looked like a cliff where Ahmad had been, just feet from his face. Beside it, one of the policemen lay sprawled on his back, sightless eyes staring at the sky, dead from shock. A German tourist wandered about calling out, “Morgen hat gebrochen, Morgen hat gebrochen.”

Morning has broken. And, like thunder out of the east, the sun rose behind the storied plateau of Giza, wreathed now in smoke, choked by rubble.

Martin got to his feet. He was staying at the Mena House just across from the pyramids, and he began walking toward it now. He realized that he was staggering, but it didn’t matter, the other ghosts on the ruined plateau were just the same.

In contrast to the plateau, the gardens of the Mena were still verdant. Half a dozen huge blocks were embedded in the golf course, looking as if they had been there forever.

The hotel itself was undamaged, the staff and guests outside, looking up at the great, black column that hung in the sky, blowing slowly south with the prevailing winds of the season. The British and Egyptian Royal flags flew in stately splendor, as unaffected as the hotel itself.

November in Egypt could be so lovely, with even Cairo enjoying a few crystal days.

Martin went through the upper lobby and into the Khan el Khalili. There was a waiter there, standing at a window. “I would like a cup of coffee,” Martin said. The waiter did not move. Then he did, he turned. His eyes streamed with tears. Martin realized that he was crying, too. They embraced, and the two men wept together like children. “I lost my friend,” Martin said.

“I lost my Egypt, our heart is broken now, sir.”

Later that day, Martin went onto the roof of the hotel, to see for himself what everyone was talking about, everyone who was not fighting fires or cleaning up the bombed city, or looking helplessly at the great stones that had shattered her.

Before him stood the plateau, and where the pyramid had been there was a new object, a gigantic black lens. It was afternoon now, with light made delicate by the dust.

He stared out across the space that separated the hotel from the pyramid complex. Here and there, figures could be seen moving around it, for the most part Royal Egyptian Police in their green uniforms, and British soldiers in khaki. A resplendent Rolls Royce stood in the road in front of the Mena, and the Governor General could be seen striding amid the huge blocks, followed by a crowd of officers.

Martin gazed long at that lens. It appeared to be perfectly round and convex, perhaps twenty feet high at its center. He cast across his memories of the past, trying to find in the encyclopedia of his mind some point of reference.

There was nothing. The past had not portrayed this. But he did not think it an accident that it had emerged immediately beneath the Great Pyramid. Of course it wasn’t an accident.

Had the pyramid, then, been built to block it, or perhaps to conceal it?

These were mysteries, but the even greater mystery was, what was it for? Clearly, it was the product of an advanced technology-and not only that, a very old one. The Giza Plateau had not been disturbed in thousands of years. Certainly, nothing this large had been buried here after the pyramids were built.

It was old, it had to be, but its construction must have presented more than just a structural challenge. The energy needed to blast all of those stones into the sky would have to be enormous. And yet, in all the years that the ground beneath the pyramid complex had been probed with tunnels and shafts, and examined with sonar and radar, no sign of the lens or of any sort of explosive device had been observed.

In fact, very little had been found. In the 1950s, the two so-called “solar boats” had been found buried in the boat-pits along the southern side of the Great Pyramid. But nothing else had ever been located-a few shadowy areas that suggested caves, but that was all.

God, but look at it! Gleaming in the light. Ominous as it could be.

The air was filled with the mourning of sirens. He thought of the British Empire as being ramshackle and overextended, but the Cairo Emergency Service was certainly well supplied with vehicles. He wondered about the hospitals, though. Had they as yet extended the National Health System to the protectorates, as well as the outright colonies? He didn’t know, but if not, then the hospitals here were liable to be primitive and he was damned lucky not to have been hurt.

Even his ears had stopped ringing.

He turned away, unwilling-or unableto stare any longer at the gaping dark eye that had replaced that great wonder. Eternal pyramid, built for the ages.

How long had it taken to destroy it? No more than five minutes.

He’d started back downstairs when he hesitated. This was a nightmare of some kind. He wasn’t awake.

But he was.

He turned back, and there it was again. Nothing to call it but a lens. Huge, glaring darkly upward at sky into which it had spit the pyramid.

As old as it must be, it seemed perfect, fresh and new, come up out of the earth like some demon’s eye that had opened after a sleep that had crossed the ages.

Which was exactly what had happened.

ONE

NOVEMBER 22 

DANCING IN THE DARK

GENERAL ALFRED WILLIAM NORTH ENTERED his superior officer’s luxurious suite in the Pentagon. General Samson had been appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, and had taken Al with him into the stratospheric world of high-level military politics.

General Samson’s orderly had not been present to announce him. Given the present state of chaos within the military, that wasn’t too surprising. He was probably on some detail or other within the vast building, and there hadn’t been anybody available to spell him.

They were due at the White House in ten minutes, so Al didn’t stand on ceremony. Knocking once, he entered the office. Al had met Tom Samson when he’d been promoted to Air Force Chief of Staff. He’d been a very efficient officer, and personable.

That, however, turned out to apply only to superior officers. Now that he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Al was still vice chairman, things had changed. Tom was a cold, charmless yeller, he was intolerant of failure, he was extremely demanding. Al still believed him to be a good officer, but his approach to the job was often too rigid. Truth to tell, Al had expected this promotion to be his. Counted on it, actually. What had happened had been a serious humiliation and a sad end to a great career. He had known the president for years, and he could not understand why he’d chosen Tom over him, frankly. He’d carried out his responsibilities with excellence.

The difference between the two of them was that Tom had served in fighters and Al had trained in them but served his entire career as a staff officer. Tom had a Purple Heart and an Air Medal. Did Al, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, envy Tom his participation in the Cuban Troubles?

Short answer: damn right. If it had been him, his career would not have stopped just short of the pinnacle.

“Tom, I’m here,” he said. Tentatively.

Silence.

The bathroom door was ajar, so Al walked toward it. “Tom?” he repeated.

There came a shuffle of sound from inside the bathroom.