"What is she doing?" Levont asked, although his tone didn't hold out much hope for an answer.
Rebecca put her hand out. "Do you have another knife?"
"Yeah, but-"
Brandt studied Vakasa's work. She was determined. "Give it to her," he instructed the point man.
Levont turned over the knife, and Rebecca sank to her knees alongside the girl, chipping away at the wall.
"Want to share?" he asked his fiancee.
"Want to lend a hand?" Rebecca replied.
Since they were trapped and all, just waiting for the authorities to figure out they only needed a couple of flashbangs or a tear gas grenade, Brandt pulled his knife and dug into the limestone.
"How about now?" he asked.
Rebecca frowned. Sometimes she liked to let a theory run its course before discussing it. This was not the time he could indulge her.
"I either need to know," Brandt stated, "or start prepping for an assault."
"There have been rumors for years that there are tunnels that run beneath the pyramids," Rebecca said. "That run all over this plateau."
Levont knelt next to them, adding another blade to the mini-excavation. "Why haven't I ever heard of that?"
She nodded next to Brandt. "Because the Egyptian government has not just vehemently denied it, but gone to great lengths to cover it up."
"Which, in our experience, usually means that they do exist." Brandt sighed. Why couldn't ancient history stay fucking ancient?
Rebecca nudged him with her shoulder. "That's what I was thinking. I mean, several well-respected scientists have done ground-penetrating radar studies and found results very consistent with an intricate and elaborate system of passages."
Wiping dust away from his nose, Brandt dug harder. Even if it was only a rumor, that was better than a deadly shoot-out any day. And if anyone could find a secret entrance to a millennia-old hidden tunnel, it was the woman he was engaged to.
"Why hasn't the History Channel picked it up, then?" Levont asked, then coughed. The tight passageway was not ideal for all the dust they were churning up. Brandt could begin to taste why the rock was called limestone.
"Because each of the scientists had their equipment and findings confiscated, then were systematically discredited," Rebecca answered, using the side of her arm to brush back her unruly hair.
Great info. Just not exactly helping right now with the thick limestone wall that blocked their escape.
Then his knife hit something even harder. As a matter of fact, it broke off the tip of the hardened-steel blade. "I think I've got something.
More carefully, he dug around the hold he'd made to expose a slab of black rock. Across the glassy surface were hieroglyphics. Brandt didn't even bother to wait until Rebecca asked. He just got up and out of her way.
This slab of ancient Egyptian writing was possibly the most exquisite find of ancient hieroglyphics in more than a decade. Not that Rebecca voiced her fascination. They weren't on an expedition. They were trying to formulate an escape.
Her fingers ran over the otherwise-smooth surface, reading the carved-out symbols like reverse braille. Well, "reading" might have been a bit generous. Hieroglyphics weren't her thing. Where was Bunny when you needed her? She was much more adept at ancient languages. Why hadn't the woman gotten on that chopper with her?
Oh, yeah, because then she'd be stuck far underground with the entire Egyptian police force after her. That's why.
Vakasa put her tiny finger on the stone as well, smiling, tracing the ancient letters.
"Any clue?" Brandt said. "Any at all?"
Rebecca didn't respond to him. She studied the little girl's face. Was that comprehension? "Can you read this?" Rebecca asked.
The girl's smile widened as she put her cheek against the cool slab.
"Was that a yes?" Brandt asked. "Is this some kind of door? Can we blow it open?"
"I'm not sure," Rebecca answered.
"Rebecca, a little late for modesty."
She shook her head as Vakasa went back to outlining the letters. "Trust me, I'm not. These aren't just hieroglyphs. These are from the Early Dynastic Period."
"What's that?" Levont asked as he helped chip off more limestone to reveal exactly how wide the wall was. All the more letters to not understand.
"Exactly my point," Rebecca said. "This is seriously ancient writing."
Brandt rocked back onto his heels and up. "That's it. We're blowing the wall."
"But-"
The look on Brandt's face stopped Rebecca cold. She knew that look. The look that said, Our lives are on the line, so I am in absolutely no mood to have an academic debate about this. Unfortunately, Rebecca had seen it too many times before.
"On it, Sarge," Levont said.
Rebecca tried to move Vakasa out of the way, but she refused. As Levont got out the C4, Rebecca took picture after picture of the letters with her phone, trying desperately to record at least some of this ancient find. Snapping the shots, she translated as best she could.
Okay, so hieroglyphs were read left to right. They didn't really use vowels, so there was that. Unfortunately, the ancient Egyptian language was partly phonetic. Like English, you put the sounds together to make the words. Which would be great. However, they only did that about a third of the time.
Sometimes the duck symbol meant "duck." Other times it was the "st" sound. Still other times it meant "son."
Then another really awesome habit of the ancient scribes was to just throw in symbols for aesthetic purposes. Meaning, if they didn't like the look of a sentence, they'd just drop in a seated god or add a scarab beetle to make the passage prettier.
Oh, yeah, and their modifiers could be before the word, in the middle of the word, or after the word. No biggie when trying to speed-read ancient Egyptian.
Damn that Bunny. Rebecca hoped she was happy wherever she was, tucked safely away.
Bunny frowned as she pushed the earphone tighter to her ear. The audio feed was scratchy and mainly filled with police officers shouting in Egyptian. Stark was putting it through a filter and translation program, but even he didn't look too hopeful.
So it was up to her to try and figure out what the hell was going on at Khufu's Great Pyramid. It was chaos over on the other side of the world. And no wonder. It wasn't too frequently a bunch of Americans landed during the complex's light show, then escaped into possibly the world's most treasured landmark.
The police had sent in search teams. However, they were having just as much trouble contacting their own people inside the pyramid as Bunny was trying to raise Rebecca or Brandt.
Then she heard it. "Elasepha."
Down. Brandt and Rebecca had followed the lower passages.
"They headed down," Bunny informed the group. "Bring it on screen," she encouraged Stark, who brought up a map of the passages.
"It's a dead end," Prenner stated.
No duh. Everything in that pyramid was a dead end. Unless...
Was it by accident they went down, or did Rebecca remember the controversy of the 1996 documentary Sleeping Prophet, which suggested that there were a series of tunnels under the Pyramids and Sphinx, linking them all?
"Get me"-Bunny snapped her fingers, trying to remember the name of the quasi-scientist-"Dr. Schor. I think that's his name. There should be a diagram in his most recent paper."
Emily stepped forward. "Dr. Schor. Should I know who that is?"
Bunny didn't answer. She wasn't sure yet. The idea had been so crackpot at the time. As a matter of fact, Schor and a few other researchers who had joined their voices to the "There are tunnels under the pyramids" theory had flip-flopped so many times it was hard to keep track of them with a scorecard.
"Here we go..." Stark said as the elaborate tunnel system came up, overlaid on the map of the pyramids.
Underground passages that were supposedly "documented" were in green. Others were yellow, orange, and red. The warmer the color, the more it was based on speculation.
"What are we looking at?" Prenner asked.
Bunny pointed to the green tunnels, which were the fewest in number. "These were 'discovered' with ground-penetrating radar...These others were guessed at to complete the circuit."
If these scientists were correct-and Bunny was nowhere close to saying that they were-it did give Brandt and the rest a chance. A slim one, but a chance.
"But how are they going to find it?" Emily asked. "After the hundreds of excavations of that pyramid, how are they going to find it?"
Bunny stared at the very-red tunnel that abutted the westernmost wall of the lower passage. Was the tunnel just a figment of the scientists' imagination or a real structure the Egyptians had used to unite the pyramids? Either way, it was obscure. Super-obscure.
"Hell if I know."
You had to give it to Rebecca. She was snapping pictures and trying to read the chicken scratch even as Levont was rigging the C4.
"Update," Brandt asked Talli.
The man craned his head over his shoulder. "Best I can tell they haven't attacked because they think they have us cornered and the tourist bureau doesn't want any permanent damage to the tunnels."
Yeah, they really wouldn't appreciate what Brandt was about to do. But they couldn't count on the cops to stay their hand just because their government told them to. All it took was one yahoo with a hero complex and boom.
It didn't matter what country or what situation. There was always one of them in the bunch that had to make it go boom.
"Hold on," his fiancee said. "Think...I think this wall may be booby-trapped."
"Rebecca..."
"No, really," she protested. "This here...Any trying to pass will meet, or visit, or run into, the wrath of Anubis."
They really didn't have time for this, but this was Rebecca. He couldn't just order her to shut up. If only he could in situations like this.
"Any other bright ideas, then?" he asked. If you couldn't beat her straight on, let her beat herself.
"I just need a few more minutes to translate..."
She stopped as Vakasa laughed merrily, then kissed the black stone. The little girl jabbered in at least five different languages. Brandt caught, at the least, German, Russian, Arabic, possibly Norwegian, and Swahili.
"Say it again," Rebecca said. "But slowly. Lentement."
"Katika," the little girl said.
Levont nodded. "That's Swahili for 'in the.'"
Vakasa smiled. "Oldhos de."
"'Eyes of,'" Lopez filled in. "It was Porteguese."
Brandt encouraged the girl to continue. Rapidly, she spat out another sentence, which took the entire room to translate the translation.
Rebecca finally summarized. "In the eyes of Khepri, find the rise and fall."
Frowning, Brandt gave the nod to Levont. "Put the detonator in."
"Wait," Rebecca begged.
"That makes about as much sense in English as it did in the fourteen other languages she used."
Rebecca ignored him. Of course. Instead, she muttered to herself, "Eye of Khepri. Eye of Khepri."
Brandt was right. The passage made no sense, but the way Vakasa beamed up at her, it had to mean something. And the ancient Egyptians were known for booby traps. Possibly even biological weapons. Just ask anyone on the Tutankhamen expedition. Oh, wait, most of them you couldn't because they had died shortly after the opening of the tomb. Currently, the hypothesis was that the tomb was coated in a deadly strain of E. coli.
But what in the hell did Khepri have to do with anything? Rebecca scoured her ancient religions memories. Khepri was the god of something. But wasn't everybody a god in legend?
"Atum," Vakasa said.
That was so not helpful. "Anybody?" Rebecca asked the group, but they all shook their heads. Between Brandt, Lopez, Levont, Talli, and her, they had every major language group covered.
"I don't understand, Vakasa. Atum?" Rebecca asked.
The little girl's smile only spread. "Ra."
Now Ra, Ra Rebecca got. The Sun God. The head hauncho of the Egyptian Heliopolis. Rebecca nearly smacked herself on the forehead. Atum was a sun god as well. Only, Ra had a lot more charisma or something, because Atum was phased out for Ra as the cult spread in ancient Egypt.
Khepri! Now Rebecca got it. He was the god of the sunrise.