Halicarnassus and now circled high overhead, keeping watch over the landscape and waiting for the extraction call.
“Range finders,” Jack commanded, and two laser range finders were brought out, one for each set of statues.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Zoe asked, nodding at the second of the four statues of Rameses II. Sometime in the distant past, its head had fallen off.
“No,” West said. “In ancient Egypt, they counted from right to left. The ‘third eye’ will be on that one.” He pointed at the statue second from the right.
Helped by Pooh Bear, Astro abseiled down from the rocky overhang above the statue in question, clutching one of the range finders in his free hand.
Over at the Nefertari temple, Scimitar did the same, aided by Vulture: there the “third eye” was also on the second statue from the right, a statue of Nefertari.
As they roped into position, West turned and gazed out over Lake Nasser.
The great lake stretched away to the horizon, dark and silent, possessed of that unnatural calm found only in man-made lakes. A low fog hovered over it.
The opposite shore swung around in a long curve, and, rising up out of the lake in front of this shoreline, Jack could just make out a series of pyramid-shaped islands.
At the base of many of those islands and all along the old shoreline, Jack knew, were all manner of hieroglyphic carvings that UNESCO had not been able to save from the rising waters. Just like the Three Gorges Dam in China.
Astro and Scimitar were in position.
The great stone head in front of Astro was simply huge, even larger than he was.
“Mount the range finders in the eye sockets,” West instructed. “Make sure they’re precisely aligned with the statues’ sight lines.”
Astro did so—likewise, Scimitar at his statue—using clamps to secure his range finder to the eye socket of his statue.
Once they were done, West got them to adjust the devices slightly, two degrees to southward—to account for the slight repositioning of Abu Simbel by UNESCO.
“OK, turn them on.”
The range finders were switched on—
—and suddenly two dead-straight red laser lines lanced out from the third eye sockets, shooting out over the lake, slicing through the fog, disappearing into the near distance—
—only to converge at a point about one and a quarter miles away, at one of the small pyramidal rock islands jutting up out of the waters of Lake Nasser not far from the opposite shore.
“Oh my goodness,” Wizard breathed. “We found it.”
Two Zodiac speedboats were immediately inflated and launched into the water.
Vulture and Scimitar were left on the shore as a rear guard while Jack and the others shoomed off in the two speedboats.
Within ten minutes, the two Zodiacs arrived at the pyramidal island, shrouded by fog.
The semisubmerged snouts of dozens of Nile crocodiles could be seen nearby, forming a wide circle around the two boats, their eyes glinting in the team’s flashlights, staring at the intruders.
As it drew near, Zoe peered up at the rocky island. At the waterline, its flanks were sheer, almost vertical, while farther up they tapered to a more gentle slope.
“The surface looks almost hand-carved,” she said. “Like someone chiseled the rock island into the shape of a pyramid.”
Wizard said, “Archaeologists have long pondered the shape of these islands, back when they were just hills, before the lake rose. But, no, tests have proved that they were not carved in any way. This is just their natural shape.”
“Weird,” Lily said.
“Hey! I’ve got a sonar reading…” Astro called from his Zodiac, on which was all manner of depth-sounding and ground-penetrating radar devices.
“No, wait,” he sighed. “It’s nothing. Living signature. Something down on the bottom. Probably just a croc— hold on, this is better, GPR has found a void in the base of the island directly beneath us. Sonic resonance confirms it. Looks like a horizontal tunnel of some kind, delving into the island.”
“Bring the boats together,” Jack ordered, “and anchor us to the base of the island. Then bring out the air- chute and the docking door. Astro, Pooh Bear—get your tanks on. You’ve got the job of sealing the entrance.”
Twenty minutes later, a strange contraption sat in between the two anchored Zodiacs: a hollow inflatable rubber tube that dived down into the water like an open-topped vertical pipe.
Astro and Pooh Bear—in full scuba gear and bearing harpoon guns for the crocs—splashed backward into the inky water, flashlights on.
Ninety feet underneath the boats, they arrived at the lake bed, at the point where it met the base of the rock pyramid.
They panned their flashlights over the surface of the island pyramid, to reveal hundreds of images cut into the rocky surface. They were mainly standard Egyptian carvings: hieroglyphics and images of pharaohs shaking hands with gods.
