Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page A

being on the diving. For Jack, no amount of equipment preparation, of preparation of body and mind, of bringing a lifetime of experience to bear could guaranteehis ability to see beyond the perimeter of his vision to what might lie ahead. Living for the moment was more than just an intoxication for him; it had become a tool of his trade, sharpening his senses and his acuity of observation, clearing his mind and allowing him to see more in a few moments on the seabed than he could do in hours on land. He stared down the slope and saw the seconds slipping away on his dive computer. He knew he was going to have to bring all that acuity to bear if they were to stand any chance of finding what all his instincts told him lay out there: a revelation that just might shake the foundations of history.

C HAPTER 2
    J ack stared up at the hull of the dive boat some thirty meters overhead, watching as the captain gunned the engine to keep clear of the shore. Something nudged him.
    “Jack.” He heard the suck of another regulator, and turned to see Costas hovering behind him. It was still a double-take to see him in rented scuba gear rather than the usual E-suit, an all-environment dry suit with Kevlar exoskeleton and an integrated re-breather that Costas had developed more than ten years before at the International Maritime University engineering lab in Cornwall. He had been constantly refining it since then. Out here anything with an IMU logo was going to attract unwanted attention. Even the full-face masks with intercom were a lucky find in the backroom of the dive operator they had decided to hire. All they had brought of their own was Costas’ photo rig and the GoPro camera he had strapped to his forehead. Yet Jack relished going back to basics, to the kind of equipment he had pored over in dive magazines as a boy. Sucking on a battered rental regulator gave him the same thrill he had felt when he did it on his first open-water dive all those years ago.
    He steadied himself, injecting a small blast of air into his stabilizer jacket. “What is it?”
    “Found something.”
    Jack shook his head, staring back down the slope. The coral heads were shimmering with schools of fish, and in the distance he saw the flash of a whitetip reef shark. “Not yet. But I want to look at those outcrops down there. It means going a bit deeper, and I know we can’t risk extending our no-stop time with the boat having no recompression chamber. But even if we only have five minutes, that might be enough.”
    “No. I mean
I
found something.”
    Jack turned to him and caught his breath. Costas was kneeling on the sand holding an object in front of his camera. It was a rusty old rifle, the stock riddled with shipworms and the metal receiver caked with marine growth. Jack lifted it from him, staring at the distinctive magazine and bolt. “Lee-Enfield Mark III,” he said, turning it over, seeing the magazine cutoff and long-range volley sights. “First World War issue, early on, before 1916.”
    Costas held up a rusted charger clip containing five staggered cartridges with rimmed bases. “There’s more where this comes from, Jack. Strewn down the slope behind me. It looks like the remains of several crates.”
    “You sure?”
    “All the same. Lee-Enfield rifles and .303 ammunition.”
    Jack’s heart began to pound. Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Egyptian wife, Aysha, had been researching old archaeological reports in the Cairo Museum and had come across a diary written by an archaeologist friend of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had served alongside him as an intelligence officer during the First World War and had assisted with the Arab Revolt. Aysha had nearly put the diary aside when her eye was caught by a remarkable sketch, and she had read the accompanying entry. While loading arms from shore at a clandestine transit point in the Gulf of Suez, the dhow carrying the arms had capsized, and in the scrabble torecover what they could, the