The Orion Protocol (24 page)

PART

V

Men praise thee in the name of Ra. Thou dost pass over and pass through untold spaces. Thou steerest thy way across the watery abyss to the place thou lovest . . . and then thou dost sink down and make an end of hours.

—The Egyptian Book of the Dead

54

Three months earlier/The Giza Plateau/Egypt

Former Commander Jake Deaver had left Boulder and flown to Egypt on seventy-two hours’ notice. His passport had needed renewing and he had to get Nile-fever and malaria shots, but he wasn’t really thinking that much about missing Christmas with his daughter and probably New Year’s as well. He was too excited about getting to go inside the Great Pyramid at Giza, which was a measure of Jake’s love affair with ancient Egypt and everything about it.

Long before his midlife plunge into the serious study of Sanskrit, Sumerian, and the earliest-known cultures of the Fertile Crescent, he knew he would someday visit the Giza plateau. The circumstances of that visit were important, however: he desired a certain kind of access that mere celebrity would not afford him.

Deaver’s space hero cache had at least helped open the door to a cordial e-mail correspondence with Egyptologist Dr. Marcus Mancini which resulted in a dream opportunity: impressed by the scholarship of the astronaut-turned-historian, Mancini invited Jake to Egypt to visit his dig-in-progress at Giza. Deaver promptly accepted.

Blessed with the good timing of winter break, he could grade papers on the long flight to Cairo and back. And after he resolved his holiday plans, neither reports of tourist kidnappings nor the State Department’s vocal concerns about his safety could have kept him away.

Shielding his eyes and scanning the desert plateau for signs of his host, Jake directed the armed, embassy-vetted driver to park their Land Rover rental near the base of the Great Pyramid. Gawking up at this Wonder of the World with exuberant pleasure, Deaver abandoned the truck’s hardworking air-conditioning for the intense Egyptian sun.

“Commander Deaver!”

Reeling slightly from the initial body slam of Sahara heat, Jake heard the voice calling his name. He surveyed the awesome site overlooking the Valley of the Kings, finally seeing Dr. Mancini descend a four-thousand-year-old sandstone causeway and stride down a sandy incline to greet him.

“Dr. Mancini, I presume.” Jake smiled easily as they shook hands.

“Please. My friends call me Marcus, Commander.” Mancini beamed at the still lean and fit former space hero who somehow made his sixty years look like forty-nine and holding. “Or should I say
professore
?”

“Jake is good.”

“
Molto bene
. I’m so happy you could make the journey. Come.”

With Deaver’s driver/bodyguard cradling a machine pistol and keeping pace a few steps behind, the seventy-one-year-old Italian archaeologist led the way back up to the Pharaonic causeway from where they could best view the dig.

“Take a look.”

Sweating through his T-shirt, Jake caught up with Mancini, only to have his breath taken away by the sight below: within the shadow of the famous Sphinx, three ornate sailing ships were being exhumed from thousands of years of dry dock by a small army of Egyptian laborers.

“
Magico
, eh?” Mancini gestured toward the exotic vessels, which seemed to be emerging from Time itself as much as from the dunes at Giza.

“My God, Marcus. They’re beautiful.”

Despite the withering stare of Ra, the sun god, and a cloud of tiny black flies that refused to be waved away, Deaver was entranced.

“How big are they?”

Mancini turned to him from beneath the slice of shade afforded him by the brim of a battered Panama hat.

“Oh, somewhat bigger than the
Nina
, the
Pinta
, or the
Santa Maria
,”
he said, with a discernible note of mischief. Jake reacted to the implied ocean-crossing range being ascribed to the tall reed ships.

“You tested for saline?”

“
Si, si
. But say nothing, please.”

Mancini flicked a glance at Jake’s Egyptian bodyguard.

“For the Antiquities Committee,” he said, lowering his voice, “they must remain ‘ceremonial boats,’ at least for now. But I promised myself I would not complain.”

The idea that these colorful craft might have once sailed down the north-flowing freshwater Nile to ply the Mediterranean Sea was part of an ongoing conflict that divided Cairo’s classicist Egyptologists from many scholars in the West. Long-held basic assumptions about the history of Mankind in the so-called cradle of civilization had come under intense assault from European and American archaeologists for a generation. And the Cairenes were in no mood for further heretical assertions in the scientific literature.

Whether human civilization was dramatically
older than modern Egyptians claimed or not, Jake found the debate about it endlessly fascinating.

“I can only imagine, Marcus. Must be quite a tightrope.”

“In Egypt, my friend, Egyptology is not just a science. It is also a religion, an ideology, a national obsession, and a blood sport.”

As a new student of the ancient world, the Apollo alumnus was aware of the factions and the infighting. Jake had read and closely followed the work of West, Bauval, and other non-Egyptian scientists who’d been given permission to study the Sphinx in the early nineties.

What their university-sponsored testing revealed was that erosion patterns on the oldest portion of the leonine body of the Sphinx had not been caused by eons of scouring desert wind and sand. The evidence in the stone was of water damage: heavy, protracted rainfall and deep pooling water acting on this monumental Egyptian national treasure over hundreds of years.

Problem was, the most recent geological era wet enough to have caused water erosion like that had occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,500
B.C.E.

This would make the fabled man-faced lion sculpture not simply older than the pharaohs credited with building it; the Sphinx would have to be at least five thousand years older than any known human civilization
capable
of building it. The dilemma this presented amounted to a crisis for the classicists.

“I guess the Egyptians prefer that their Egyptian national monuments stay Egyptian.”

“
Preciso
. But what you may be most interested in is up here.”

As they hiked together up toward the Pyramid steps, two Jeeps full of heavily armed, black-uniformed paramilitary police zoomed past, kicking up a dust cloud of fine sand. Jake’s driver/bodyguard waved them a casual salute.

“Trouble?” Deaver indicated the patrol.

“Radical fundamentalism.” Mancini gestured with both hands, as if to keep at bay an invisible army of the night. “They don’t know preservation from plundering. Or a Belgian tour bus from invading ‘infidel’ hordes. But forgive an old man’s disappointment over things that cannot be changed in our lifetimes. We go up here.”

Without a pause, Mancini proceeded to climb the steep face of the Pyramid like a mountain goat. Already hot and sweaty, Jake and his twentysomething driver exchanged looks, marveling at the older Italian scholar’s energy.

Here we go
, Deaver thought. Then mindful of the stress on his knees, he made his way up the great sandstone Wonder.

Waiting beneath a frescoed archway, Dr. Mancini seemed unfazed by the climb. He offered Jake a hand up the last step.

“Thanks.”

Deaver moved into the shade under the arch, gasping for breath. Looking out from this high vantage point across the plateau, he could see the two principal sister Pyramids, the oldest ones at Giza arrayed in a slightly offset line in relation to where he now stood.

Pulling a large water bottle out of his backpack, Jake offered it around. Mancini accepted, but the young Egyptian waved it off, leaning his shoulder against a shaded wall of two-ton stone blocks and lighting an acrid cigarette.

Jake unashamedly drank down a half liter before tucking the bottle away.

“So, what do you think?” Mancini gestured to the artwork above them.

“Oh, boy.”

Wiping sweat from his hands and face with his shirttail, Jake now focused on the fresco and immediately saw what he had come here most wanting to see.

It was a hieroglyph very much like one he had drawn by hand and sent to Mancini for translation: the most Egyptian-looking of the six hieroglyphs he’d brought home from the lunar rubble of Sinus Medii, the provenance of which he’d not shared with the Italian archaeologist.

“It’s gorgeous, Marcus.”

“A match, or a near match, don’t you think?” Mancini said, enjoying Deaver’s enthralled reaction.

“Can I take a rubbing?”

“Of course.”

Deaver extracted a pad of tracing paper from his backpack, tore out a sheet, and placed it carefully over the glyph. A delicate graphite image emerged as he worked with the edge of a soft pencil.

“God. It’s beautiful.”

Jake had characterized his original freehand drawing as “an untranslated glyph” he had run across. And the luck of Mancini actually finding a similar one at Giza had made the journey to Egypt feel something like fate.

Securing the rubbing between pristine leaves of vellum and two pieces of cardboard, he slipped it away inside his pack, then took out a small digital camera and began documenting the glyph in situ.

“Does it relate to the Moon?” Jake asked casually, covering the fresco from various angles and distances.

“Well, the context would suggest cosmology. Maybe early Sumer from the clay tablets, but I haven’t run a search. I can give you the software we use to sort out glyphs and pictos, Commander, if you like.”

“Thanks. That’d be great.”

Mancini asked the Egyptian bodyguard a question in his own language. The serious-faced young man unslung his automatic weapon, put out his cigarette, and indicated he would stay where he was.

“All right,” Mancini said, leading the way to the Pyramid entrance. “Shall we move on?”

Jake stashed the camera, hitched up his pack, and followed the archaeologist down the dimly lit tunnel that led to the fabled King’s Chamber. Mancini stopped a moment as their eyes adjusted to the dark.

“By the way, the word
Cairo
is not Egyptian. It’s ancient Sumer.”

Jake struggled to place that fact in the context of what he knew or thought he knew about the time line of human civilization.

“So, the name for the Egyptian capitol predates the pharaohs?”

“It’s in the clay tablets.” Mancini nodded and then continued on in the demi-dark toward the King’s Chamber.

“So, what’s it mean, Marcus?”

“That’s what I’m trying to puzzle out, my friend.” Mancini laughed.

“No, I mean what does
Cairo
mean in Sumerian?”

“Oh! Forgive me, Commander.” The archeologist laughed again, lighting the way now with a small halogen lamp. “It refers to the planet Mars.
Cairo
means ‘Mars.’ “