Journey of the Pharaohs Read online

  TITLES BY CLIVE CUSSLER

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  CONTENTS

  Titles by Clive Cussler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Ch
apter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE HISTORIC PAST

  EGYPT, 1074 B.C.

  KHEMET—Former member of the Medjay, a group whose role was to guard the Valley of the Kings.

  QSN—Orphaned child who gives information to Khemet, his name means Sparrow and the Bringer of Sorrow.

  HERIHOR—Military commander who rose to become Pharaoh of Upper Egypt and then vanished.

  NEW YORK CITY, 1927

  JAKE MELBOURNE—Pilot, barnstormer and World War I ace, competing for the Orteig Prize.

  CARLO GRANZINI—Head of the Granzini crime family.

  STEFANO CORDOVA—Melbourne’s friend and mechanic, Granzini’s nephew.

  THE PRESENT DAY

  NATIONAL UNDERWATER AND MARINE AGENCY (NUMA)

  KURT AUSTIN—Director of Special Projects, salvage expert and world-class diver.

  JOE ZAVALA—Kurt’s closest friend, the mechanical genius responsible for constructing much of NUMA’s exotic equipment.

  RUDI GUNN—Assistant Director of NUMA, a graduate of the Naval Academy.

  HIRAM YAEGER—NUMA’s Director of Technology, designed and built Max, NUMA’s supercomputer.

  PAUL TROUT—Geologist with a Ph.D. in Ocean Sciences, married to Gamay.

  GAMAY TROUT—Marine biologist, married to Paul, most outspoken member of the group.

  SCOTLAND

  VINCENNES—Mysterious passenger on the fishing trawler.

  SLOCUM—Smugglers’ contact, part of the Bloodstone Group.

  UNITED KINGDOM SECURITY SERVICE, SECTION 5 (MI5)

  OLIVER PEMBROKE-SMYTHE—Former member of the SAS, currently Director of Counter-Terrorism Operations for MI5.

  MORGAN MANNING—MI5 special operative, investigating the Bloodstone Group.

  HENRY CROSS—Professor of Antiquities at Cambridge University, assists MI5 in identifying smuggled artifacts.

  THE BLOODSTONE GROUP

  SOLOMON BARLOW—Former mercenary, now an arms dealer and head of the Bloodstone Group.

  KAPPA—Weapons specialist and Barlow’s second-in-command.

  ROBSON—Former street thug from a tough section of London, now one of Barlow’s lieutenants.

  DALY—Associate of Robson’s, blames Robson for his incarceration.

  GUS—Associate of Robson’s, Daly’s half brother.

  FINGERS—Member of Robson’s old street gang.

  SNIPE—Another member of Robson’s street gang.

  ADDITIONS TO THE BLOODSTONE GROUP

  XANDRA AND FYDOR—Brother-and-sister pair of assassins, they operate jointly under the pseudonym the Toymaker.

  OMAR KAI—Flamboyant mercenary who is hired by the Bloodstone Group after they reach the United States.

  FRANCE

  FRANCISCO DEMARS—Grandson of the man who discovered the Writings of Qsn, lives in a château in France.

  SPAIN

  FATHER TORRES—Catholic priest, serving at San Sebastián de las Montañas in Villa Ducal de Lerma.

  SOFIA—Young child who introduces Gamay and Paul to Father Torres.

  THE UNITED STATES

  JAMES SANDECKER—Former Director of NUMA, now Vice President of the United States.

  MIRANDA ABIGAIL CURTIS—Senior archivist with the FBI.

  MORRIS—Lead agent in Sandecker’s security detail.

  THE NAVAJO NATION

  EDDIE TOH-YAH—Old friend of Kurt Austin’s, part of the Navajo tribal administration.

  EDDIE’S GRANDFATHER—Leader of the local Navajo Council, Keeper of the Flame.

  PROLOGUE

  Valley of the Kings, Egypt

  1074 B.C., during the time of the 18th Dynasty

  Heat shimmered in waves across the Valley of the Kings as the merciless sun baked the desert sands into clay.

  High above the valley, at the edge of a cliff, a bearded man named Khemet lay flat on his stomach, sweating beneath the noonday sun, looking for any sign of movement. Sweat trickled down the side of his face, a fly buzzed around his ear, but nothing moved down below.

  The valley was still—as the resting place of the buried Pharaohs should be. The only movement was a dust devil that rose from the southern end and danced across the sand.

  Khemet slid back from the rim. Several men in linen robes crouched there. A boy stood next to them. Khemet addressed the child. “What is it you’ve brought us here to see?”

  Villagers in Thebes called the boy Qsn, which meant Sparrow. They used the term not because he was small for his age and tended to chirp as he spoke, but as an insult. To the people of Egypt, the sparrow was a nuisance, stealing food and spoiling fruit. The townspeople saw the orphaned boy in the same light.

  Khemet knew differently. The child was a beggar, not a thief. In fact, he worked hard for the smallest of coins, watching everything with sharp eyes, gathering information. His size and age meant he was often invisible even in plain sight.

  The boy crawled to the edge of the cliff, looked down into the valley and then tugged Khemet’s arm. He extended a tiny finger, pointing. “Pharaoh’s tomb has been opened. The stone has been thrown aside.”

  Squinting to see in the bright sun, Khemet looked past the magnificent three-story temple of Hatshepsut, with its long central stairway and rows of towering columns, and ignored the piles of rubble sealing the entrance of some lesser-known ancestors, finally focusing on a gap in the rock where smooth limestone blocks denoted the entrance to the tomb of Horemheb, one of the more recently buried Pharaohs.

  His eyes weren’t as sharp as the child’s, but after shielding them from the sun he began to see into the shadows. The whitewashed slab that had been used to seal the tomb lay on the ground, broken in two where it had fallen. The path in front of the tomb was heavily rutted from the wheels of carts and trampled with the hooves of oxen.

  “The boy is right,” Khemet said. “The tomb has been violated.”

  “And just what does he want us to do about that?” one of the other men said.

  The boy looked back, unafraid to address the adults. “You are the Medjay,” he said in his high-pitched voice. “You are the servants of Rameses XI of Memphis. You guard the resting place of the Sons of Amun.”

  Khemet smiled. He had been a captain in the Medjay—a force of warriors appointed by the Pharaohs to guard the tombs of their ancestors—but his position had been swept away in the political upheaval that was dividing Egypt.

  “Perhaps the Sparrow doesn’t hear everything,” one of the men said. “We’re no longer needed by the Sons of Amun.”

  “But Rameses—”

  “Rameses rules in Memphis and Alexandria,” Khemet explained more patiently, “but this is Upper Egypt and Herihor has taken the title of Great House for himself.”

  The boy’s face showed contempt. “Herihor is not only the High Priest, he is—”

  “Here, he is a King,” Khemet snapped. “There are those who would cut your tongue out for saying otherwise.”

  The boy shrank back.

  Khemet allowed the lesson to sink in before adding, “Fortunately, we’re not among them.”

  The men behind them laughed. The child looked relieved.

  “Egypt is not what it was,” one of his men said. “The weaker it gets, the more Pharaohs it needs. Soon there will be one in every region.”

  This brought more laughter from Khemet, though the boy looked stricken. He was still young enough to believe in concepts like duty and honor and, above all, the glory of kings descended from the gods. Those beliefs were not unlearned without great pain.

  Khemet turned his attention back to the open tomb. “We should investigat
e and see what they’ve taken.”

  Leaving the cliffside, he led the group around and down a secret trail that took them to the valley below. These were hidden paths only the Medjay knew.

  When they arrived, the light was brighter and more dazzling, as if they were walking the path to Heaven itself. Unlike the tawny cliffs around them, the valley floor was covered with pulverized limestone and white dust, chips and shavings from the great blocks that had been cut and worked and manhandled into place almost continuously for the past thousand years.

  The reflected light caused Khemet to pull a scarf across his eyes and he entered the tomb of Horemheb looking like a bandit.

  Once inside, he removed the scarf and stood in the entry corridor. The cool air caressed his body while his eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness. As his pupils dilated, the splendor of the artisans’ work appeared before him. Ceiling and walls, whitewashed and covered in hieroglyphics. Statues, carvings and other works of art. All lit up by the light coming in from the entrance of the tomb and from the torches mounted on the walls, which gave off an even purer light as they burned a smokeless blend of castor oil and natron.

  Khemet took one of the torches and moved forward. His men followed close behind, the boy at his side.

  Passing a second doorway, they entered the burial chamber reserved for lesser wives and servants.

  Khemet stopped and pushed the boy back into a cleft in the wall. “Quiet, now,” he said. “We’re not alone.” Reaching under his garment and pulling out a short sword, he waved the men to move up beside him. “Be ready.”

  Without a sound, Khemet stepped through the next doorway. He passed two statues of Anubis, the flickering torch in Khemet’s hand casting shadows across the unmoving beasts on the far wall.

  “Worthless guards,” one of the men whispered of the Anubis pair, “sitting idly by as robbers plunder the belongings meant to equip Pharaoh in the Afterlife.”

  The sound of a tool hitting stone could be heard up ahead. Moving into Pharaoh’s burial chamber, Khemet found the source of the noise, a priest and a stonecutter carving a message into the far wall. Between them lay the stone sarcophagus of Horemheb. Its heavy lid had been thrown down and discarded. The golden coffin, death mask and mummified Pharaoh were gone.