In an office elsewhere on the island base, the American colonel known as Wolf watched the eleven members of West’s Abu Simbel team arrive at The Halicarnassus on a closed-circuit TV monitor.
Flanking him as always were his two junior men, Rapier and Switchblade.
The door behind them opened, and Paul Robertson entered.
“What do you think, Colonel?” he asked.
At first, Wolf didn’t reply. He just kept watching Jack on the monitor.
“Judah was right,” he said at last. “West is good. He puts together puzzles very well—Abu Simbel was smart. He’s also slippery. He got the better of Judah at Giza and escaped Black Dragon’s attack in Australia.”
“Iolanthe?” Robertson asked.
“She is to be watched like a hawk,” Wolf said. “They might appear helpful now, but the Great Houses of Europe only ever act in their own interests. They have their own agenda here. Make no mistake, the Royals will abandon us the instant it suits them.”
“Do you want me to give Astro or Vulture any special instructions?” Robertson asked.
“As far as Astro is concerned, definitely not. At this stage, his actions must be completely unconnected to us. Astro must be completely ignorant of his role in this; otherwise West will almost certainly find him out. As for the Saudi, he knows we’re watching.”
“What about this mission to Abu Simbel to place the First Pillar?” Robertson said. “Should we step in?”
Wolf thought about that for a moment.
“No. Not yet. It’s not the first reward that interests us. It’s the second. Thus we have an interest in Captain West succeeding in placing this First Pillar. We can also learn from his experience.”
Wolf turned to Robertson, his blue eyes glinting. “Let young West lay this one, and when it is done, grab the little fuck and all his people and bring them to me.”
Lashed by the driving rain, The Halicarnassus lifted off from Mortimer Island in the Bristol Channel.
As it banked round on a heading that would take it to Egypt, another encrypted signal went out from the island base, but not one related to Jack or Wolf or even Iolanthe. To those who could decrypt it, the message read:
FIRST PILLAR SUCCESSFULLY CLEANSED.
WEST GOING TO ABU SIMBEL IN
SOUTHERN EGYPT TO SET IT IN PLACE.
DO WHAT MUST BE DONE.
TEMPLE OF RAMESES II AT ABU SIMBEL
TEMPLE OF NEFERTARI AT ABU SIMBEL
AIRSPACE OVER THE SAHARA DESERT
DECEMBER 10, 2007, 0135 HOURS
The Halicarnassussoared toward southern Egypt, zooming through the night sky, racing the coming dawn.
Despite the late hour, there was activity going on all over the plane: Jack and Iolanthe checking the layout of Abu Simbel and its surrounds; Wizard, Zoe, and Alby doing mathematical and astronomical calculations; while Lily, Stretch, and Pooh Bear studied Lake Nasser.
“So,” Jack said, coming over to Wizard’s desk, “when exactly do we need to have the Pillar in place?”
Wizard tapped some astronomical charts with his pen. “Again, everything depends on Jupiter. According to these charts, the Titanic Rising will occur at 6:12 A.M. local time, just around dawn.
“It’ll be difficult to see Jupiter due to the light of the rising Sun—so we’ll have to use an infrared telescope. The duration of the Rising will also be shorter than the one Zoe saw at Stonehenge because we’re on a different latitude—at the high latitude of Stonehenge, the Firestone received a flat, almost tangential blow from the Dark Sun. But at Abu Simbel we’ll be a lot closer to the Equator and thus more perpendicular to the Dark Sun, so we’ll receive a more direct hit from it. Which means it’ll be shorter, lasting about a minute.”
Jack nodded. “Six twelve it is then.”
Wizard asked, “How are you going with the location of the temple-shrine?”
“I think we have a candidate.”
Jack turned a book around for Wizard and the others to see. It showed the two massive temples dedicated to Rameses II and his wife Nefertari at Abu Simbel.
The larger temple featured four sixty-foot-high figures of Rameses, all seated on thrones, while the facade of the second temple—one hundred yards from the first—featured six thirty-foot-high figures: four of Rameses and two of his favorite wife, Nefertari. Both sets of statues gazed out over Lake Nasser at a curious collection of pyramid- shaped islands that jutted above the flat surface of the lake.
“What we have to remember about Abu Simbel,” Jack said, “is that it does not stand where it originally stood. When the Soviets built the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, they knew that the lake it created would cover the statues. So UNESCO had the statues of Abu Simbel moved to higher ground, block by block, piece by piece. They erected the statues on higher ground, in almost exactly the same alignment as they originally stood.”
“Almostexactly the same alignment?” Astro said, alarmed. “You mean the statues aren’t correctly aligned anymore? If they’re not—”
“They’re a couple of degrees out,” Jack said calmly. “But the discrepancy is known, so we can account for it.
