Celtic Empire (Dirk Pitt 25)

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll look forward to seeing you later.”

Dirk loaded their dive bags into the boat and cranked on the outboard motor. Summer released the dock lines and hopped aboard, taking a seat on the bow as Dirk guided the boat out of the small cove.

He briefly turned the boat north, hugging the eastern shore to take in the view of one of Egypt’s most iconic sites. Facing the water was the Temple of Abu Simbel, featuring four colossal statues of the seated Pharaoh Ramses II.

“It’s quite impressive in person,” Summer said, admiring the scale of the statues compared to the tourists milling about their base like ants.

“Equally impressive,” Dirk said, “is that they were relocated here in the 1960s from their original site, along with twenty-three other important temples and monuments that would otherwise have been flooded by the Aswan High Dam.”

“Too bad our Faras temple was one of the victims.”

Dirk looped the boat around to the south and opened the throttle. Leaving Abu Simbel, they motored into a barren stretch of the lake that stretched for fifty miles to Sudan.

Dirk reached into his dive bag and powered on a GPS unit he had purchased in Assiut. He’d already entered the coordinates of the Faras temple provided by Max and steered toward the point a dozen miles away. As the boat bounced through the waves, Summer assembled their dive kits and confirmed the borrowed air tanks were topped off.

Reaching the designated location a half hour later, Dirk positioned the boat over the coordinates, and Summer released an anchor off the bow. She let the rope slip through her hands, measuring the line as it went. When the line went slack, she tied it off to a cleat and turned to Dirk. “Looks to be about seventy-five feet. We got lucky.”

“Our real luck will be if we can find any remains of the temple.”

Despite a surface water temperature of eighty-five degrees, they slipped on lightweight wetsuits since it would be considerably cooler at the bottom. Before they donned their tanks, Dirk pulled a sheet of paper from his dive bag and showed it to Summer.

“Hiram found a hand-drawn image of Faras from the 1890s. It identifies the layout of the temple. Much of the building materials had been dismantled for reuse, but the

re were still remnants of the temple and a notable shrine wall. The fortress around it was quite a large structure. The remains look significant, so we should be able to see those. The temple was at the northernmost end of the fortress and contained a small sanctuary.”

Summer studied the drawing and nodded. “That gives us something more than a needle in a haystack. If we can locate the temple and sanctuary, then we have a shot at finding the Tutankhamun shrine and its description of the Faras apium.”

“The early British archeologists placed it in the sanctuary. Let’s see if Max put us close.”

Dirk grabbed a large flashlight while Summer clipped an underwater camera to her buoyancy compensator, then they both plunged over the side. After sweating in their wetsuits on the boat, the warm water brought welcome relief. They met at the anchor line and began their descent to the lakebed.

The freshwater lake had good visibility. As expected, the water turned colder as they passed a thermocline on their way down. Dirk found the anchor buried in soft silt. He hovered above it and scanned the surroundings as Summer joined him.

The lake bottom was nearly as barren as the surrounding desert. There was just enough vegetation to attract a trio of meandering perch that nibbled on some moss-covered rocks.

The brown lakebed’s surface was broken in places by rock outcroppings that reached skyward in jagged shapes. To Dirk’s disappointment, nothing within their immediate range looked man-made.

Summer tapped him on the arm and pointed to one of the outcroppings. At first glance, it seemed a random collection of boulders like all the others. As he swam closer, Dirk saw Summer wasn’t pointing at the rocks. She was pointing at a protrusion from the lakebed just beyond.

It rose only a foot or two, but extended linearly for nearly twenty feet. Dirk brushed a hand across the top, sweeping away a thick layer of silt. As the water cleared, he could see a layer of baked mud bricks beneath. It matched the description of the fortress walls. Dirk gave Summer a thumbs-up.

He turned back to the wall and drove his hand down the face of the bricks, working his way up to his elbow. Even at this distance from the Aswan Dam, silt had been building up, covering the ancient city’s remains. It would make their search much more difficult.

They tracked the remnants of the wall west for a few yards to a corner mound and a faint ridge running north. They followed the ridge as it turned east. Both divers ascended a few feet to get a wider view of the fortress walls. Once again, Summer spotted their objective.

A short distance to the north, a round object poked from the sediment, the remnant of a column. Summer swam closer, brushed away a few inches of sediment, and exposed its fluted exterior. While the fortress would have been constructed functionally, ornate columns would more likely have been part of the temple.

The excavation records showed the temple’s dimensions as fifty-six by twenty-six meters. Unlike the fortress, no clearly defined border walls had survived. As they swam north, several more stumps of columns became visible, part of the temple’s central courtyard. Following the stumps, they came to a low section of stone wall. Beyond it lay a tightly packed congregation of additional column bases.

There was no longer any doubt. The packed section of columns, broken and embedded in silt, matched the drawing of the temple’s main hall. They slowly swam over the column pieces, which rose from the silt like the teeth of a dinosaur. Just beyond was the ancient temple’s sanctuary.

They swam past the hall, hoping to discover the temple monument beyond. Instead, a chunky stone wall a few yards away marked the back of the sanctuary. Inside, where the monument should have been, was only sand and rock.

The historical account had said much of the temple’s stonework had been carried off to build later monuments. Still, the drawings indicated a small niche and wall face had survived to the 1890s. At that time, the heart of the sanctuary had still been there.

With their time at the bottom limited, Summer skimmed over the enclosure, scouring every rock and protrusion. Dirk focused his attention on the sanctuary’s southeast corner. No obvious structures rose from the sediment, but he hesitated at a flat protrusion next to the hypostyle hall.

He slipped a hand into the muck and felt a smooth slab of stone down several inches. He scooped his arm across the stone, pulling away the sediment and kicking up a dirty cloud. He held still, listening to his breathing through the regulator, while the water cleared. He leaned closer, stared at the exposed stone, and smiled.