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

misplaced. He said it would just rekindleyour desire to get to the bottom of our original quest.”
    “Damn right it has,” Jack said.
    “And make you take risks. Really big risks that could jeopardize your future and even your life.”
    “Been there before.”
    “Not like this,” Costas replied. “Maurice’s own words. He knows these people. This time we’re not just dealing with some maverick warlord. The antiquities director may be our bad guy of the moment, but when that coup happens he’ll be ousted by someone who’ll make the Taliban thought police look tame. Cut off his head, and another one will appear. This time we’re up against an ideology, an extremist movement that the world has been fighting since the days of the Mahdi in Sudan, and so far it’s been a losing battle.”
    “All the more reason not to give up. You win the fight against ideology with ideas, not with hardware. That’s the lesson of history. If I can find a revelation from the past that adds ammunition to that battle, then it will be worth it.”
    “That’s a tall order, Jack. This could just be the highest mountain you’ll climb.”
    “You can walk away. I won’t hold it against you. I can go it alone.”
    “As if.”
    “Well?”
    “What’s in it for me?”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” Jack said. “Submersibles. We’ll definitely need submersibles.”
    “You making that up?”
    “How else do we get into passages under pyramids too small to dive through?”
    Costas narrowed his eyes. “Remote operated vehicles, autonomous android excavators?”
    “You name it. Any gismo on the books. You just name it.”
    “Little Joey Three, my latest submersible micro-robot? I haven’t told you about him yet. Lanowski and I wereperfecting him in the IMU engineering lab just before I came out here. Amazing bionics.”
    “Anything. It’s all yours.”
    Costas shook his head. “So much for the beach holiday.”
    Jack concentrated on his ascent. Costas had been right:
a wing and a prayer
. They had come here following a report of a find that had suddenly opened up another extraordinary possibility, another part of the trail they had been on for months now, from the ancient crocodile temple they had discovered on the Nile to the pyramids. It was a trail that shadowed one made over a hundred years before at the time of another conflict, the war against the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, a war that itself foreshadowed what was on the verge of happening in the Middle East today. Yet somehow Jack knew that the story of what had gone on in the nineteenth century had not yet been fully told, that somewhere in it there was another key to the quest ahead that needed to be found before they could take a new plunge into the unknown.
    Jack looked down and saw that a thin black shape had emerged from the encased chariot wheel in the coral head they had examined. It was wavering like a stalk of sea grass in a current. Other dark shapes appeared from the surrounding heads, and one detached itself and began to move sinuously toward shore. They were sea snakes, ones that had clearly been dormant within the heads but had been disturbed by the divers’ exhaust bubbles and movement. Jack remembered the captain’s story of a swarm of snakes thrashing on the surface, and he began to see more of them now, rising from the coral heads farther down the slope and following the first one toward the place where the other two had apparently sensed the inflow of freshwater from the shore. He felt uneasy, as if by coming to this place they had disturbed something that should have been left alone, a secret that should have died with a pharaoh and his Israelite slave more than three thousand years ago. He saw Costasconcentrating on the boat above them as he ascended, and decided not to tell him. There had been enough snakes for one dive, and they needed to look ahead.
    Together they reached the metal bar of the decompression stop. Costas turned to him,