“Before we hijacked Paul and Gamay from their vacation, they were working with a Libyan hydrologist. I read the report on our flight down. Geology, mostly. But according to some tests Paul rigged up, there’s a deep aquifer underneath Libya that was feeding the water table up above. Suddenly, that water was on the move, creating a negative pressure instead of a positive one and rendering the pumps all but useless. And here we are, underneath the sands of Egypt, next to a pipeline you could drive a truck through, which seems to be drawing tons of water per second and just dumping it into the Nile.”
“Are you suggesting Osiris is causing the drought to foment the upheaval?” Renata asked.
“If there’s a human cause, I don’t see anyone else with a motive. Or the means.”
“And Piola?”
“He wants influence in Libya. That costs money. He’s either here to pay or here to collect. Either way, he’s part of this. And the drought is helping him.”
Joe studied the pipe. “I don’t know how much water you’d have to draw out of an aquifer to cause what Paul was suggesting,” Joe said.
“It’s a big pipe,” Kurt pointed out.
“Sure,” Joe said. “But not big enough.”
“How about nineteen of these?” Kurt asked. “According to their website, Osiris has nineteen hydroelectric plants online up and down the Nile. What if all of them are drawing water from the aquifer?”
Joe nodded. “Powered by the river itself. Ingenious.”
“So it’s all connected. The Black Mist, the drought — it all leads back to Osiris.”
Ten minutes later, the scenery finally began to change. “A light at the end of the tunnel,” Renata whispered.
Kurt had a feeling it wasn’t exactly the end of the tunnel, but at least it was another stop on the line.
For more than twenty minutes they’d been traveling in utter darkness, the only light coming from the soft glow of the instrument panel and the headlights of the tram up ahead of them.
“They seem to be slowing,” Joe said.
“Let’s not get too close,” he said. “If they stop, I don’t want them to hear us hitting the brakes.”
Joe slowed the car to a crawl. The vehicle ahead of them continued to reduce speed and then moved onto a siding, leaving the tunnel.
Joe stopped about a hundred yards from the opening and the three of them followed on foot.
When he reached the edge of the tunnel, Kurt peered around the corner.
What he saw surprised him. He looked back at his friends.
“Well?” Joe whispered. “Are we alone?”
“If you don’t count a pair of eight-foot-tall guys with jackal heads and spears in their hands,” Kurt said. “Anubis.”
“You mean the Egyptian god?”
“Yes.”
Kurt moved aside so the others could see the details of the room, an overarching cavern with walls made of sand-colored stone illuminated by a series of lights connected to a snaking black cable. Egyptian art and hieroglyphics could be seen along one section, while another seemed to have crumbled. The two large statues stood beside the entrance to a hand-carved tunnel on the far wall.
“Where are we?” Renata asked.
“More like when are we?” Joe said. “We started in a modern hydroelectric plant and wound up in ancient Egypt. I feel like we just time-traveled back about four thousand years.”
Both the pipeline and the tunnel seemed to run arrow straight along a westerly line. Recalling the satellite photos of the Osiris power plant, he remembered there was nothing to the west but congested streets filled with block after block of storefronts, warehouses and offices. Farther out, it became apartment buildings and small houses right out to the desert, where…
“You might not be too far off,” Kurt said.
“That’s a first,” Joe said.
“Based on the speed of the tram and the time we were in the tunnel, I’d guess that we’re five, maybe six miles west of the river.” He turned to Renata. “I think you’re going to get your wish.”
“What wish was that?”
“To see the Pyramids up close,” he said. “By my calculations, we’re right underneath them.”
48
“Underneath the Pyramids?” Renata asked.
“Or at least the Giza Plateau,” Kurt said.
“How far down?”
“Impossible to tell, but we seemed to have been descending for part of our journey and Giza is at least two hundred feet above the river level. We could be five hundred feet down or more.”
“Not really going to see the Pyramids, then, are we?”
Kurt looked around the room. Aside from the tunnel with the rails and the pipeline, the only way in or out of the room was the path guarded by the two statues of Anubis. “Not unless we catch up with the rest of the tour.”
“I’m surprised there aren’t any guards,” Renata said.
Kurt replied, “Guards stand on the tower and watch outward. We’re already in the heart of their stronghold.”
The tunnel was poorly lit, illuminated by bare low-wattage bulbs every seventy feet. In some places the passageway seemed like a natural fissure, in others it had clearly been hewn out of the rock by primitive tools and in certain sections farther on it had been shored up by modern methods.
After a downward section, the tunnel leveled off and ran straight. Along the walls were carved-out recesses reminiscent of the catacombs in Rome. Instead of holding human bodies, they contained mummified animals. Crocodiles, cats, birds and toads. Hundreds and hundreds of toads.
“The Egyptians mummified all kinds of things,” Joe said. “Crocodiles are a big one. Found in many tombs because of their connection with Sobek, one of their gods. Cats, because they could ward off evil spirits. Birds too. There’s a huge crypt in a dark cave beside the Pyramids — perhaps right above us — called the Bird Tomb. Hundreds of mummified birds. No humans.”
“What about frogs,” Kurt said, examining a half-unwrapped bullfrog or toad. “Was there a frog god or something?”
Joe shrugged. “Not that I’m aware of.”
They kept on moving and soon arrived at the entrance to a brightly lit room. Kurt eased toward the opening. He had the sense of being on the balcony at the opera, about halfway up and to the side of the stage. Spread out in the open cavern below was enough floor space to mount a small convention. Modern lighting illuminated the room, but everything else was of ancient origin.
The walls were smooth and covered with hieroglyphics and paintings. One wall depicted a pharaoh being tended to by Anubis, another showed a green-skinned Egyptian god raising up a dead pharaoh. A third panel displayed men with crocodile heads, swimming in the river, retrieving frogs or turtles.
“You’re the resident Egyptologist,” Kurt said to Joe. “What’s this all about?”
“The green-skinned guy is the same one we saw on the tablets in the museum. He’s Osiris, god of the underworld. He decides who stays dead and who goes back to life. He also has something to do with bringing the crops to life and then making them go dormant at the end of the season.”
“Osiris bringing the dead back to life,” Kurt said. “How appropriate.”
“Those crocodile men are representatives of Sobek,” Joe said. “Sobek also has something to do with death and resurrection, having saved Osiris once when he was betrayed and cut into little pieces.”
Kurt nodded and took in the rest of the scene. In the center there was a long row of sarcophaguses. At the far end was a small version of the Sphinx covered in gold leaf and iridescent blue lapis lazuli. At the other end, almost directly beneath them, lay a pit filled with a couple feet of water and four large crocodiles.
One of them roared and swished violently as an interloper got too close.