Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) by David Gibbins Read Free Book Online Page A

within his grasp.
    Something bumped the boat, knocking him momentarily off balance. He peered over the bow, seeing a small swell on the surface of the river, doubtless marking some fetid unpleasantness beneath. With the annual Nile flood only now abating, they had encountered all manner of flotsam on their trip upstream, from the washed-away wooden structures of riverside
shaduf
irrigation pumps to the bloated carcasses of cows. Most remarkable had been a rotting fishing net tangled up with empty wooden cartridge boxes marked “Gordon Relief Expedition,” the detritus of a botched conflict eight years before that had taken all this time to wash its way down from the former war zone in the Sudan. The boxes had seemed archaeological, artifacts from another era, and yet Egypt, the world even, was still gripped in the aftershock of General Gordon’s death at the hands of the Mahdi army in Khartoum, and the ignominious British failure to retain Sudan. In Egypt the British were bent on revenge, and in Sudan, the Mahdi army on jihad, which threatened to sweep across North Africa and the Middle East as it had done more than a thousand years before, drawing the West into a conflict that would make the wars of the Crusades seem like child’s play.
    Seeing those cartridge cases had made him ponder hisown role in the affair. He had been one of a group of American officers restless after the Civil War who had crossed the Atlantic seeking excitement in Africa, and had been employed by the Khedive of Egypt. From being a captain in the 11th Maryland Regiment of the Union army, a veteran of Gettysburg, and a personal acquaintance of General Grant, now
President
Grant, he had become a lieutenant colonel in the Khedive’s service, and then chief of staff to Gordon after the British general had been appointed governor of equatorial Sudan. With his exotic surname, Chaillé-Long, a legacy of his Huguenot French ancestry, and the manners of a southern gentleman, he had seemed a cut above the other American officers and had quickly found favor as a kind of honorary European. He had at first struck up a cordial relationship with Gordon; despite being born on a Maryland plantation, he had joined the Union army opposed to slavery, and had been more than willing to assist Gordon in his effort to eradicate the slave trade in the Sudan. Their relations became strained only when Chaillé-Long realized the futility of that enterprise and the impossibility of working under such a man as Gordon. They were broken entirely after the Khedive appointed Chaillé-Long to travel deep into Africa to conduct a treaty with the king of the Ugandans, on the way becoming a celebrated explorer whose name now stood alongside those of Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley.
    In 1877 he had returned to America in high esteem, newly decorated by the Khedive with the Order of the Medjidieh, acclaimed as the first American to stand on the shores of Lake Victoria. With Gordon still in charge, the Sudan had been closed to him, but he had seen the future in international law, and after a degree at Columbia had set up a practice in Alexandria in Egypt. In 1882 he had earned the approbation of the State Department by taking over the U.S. Consulate during the British naval bombardment of the city that preceded their military conquest of Egypt, the circumstance that led to directBritish involvement in the Sudan and the debacle of the relief expedition in 1885.
    After that, Egypt too had seemed closed to him. And yet here he was again, drawn back not by the promise of military glory or exploration but by something else, by unfinished business from his time under Gordon in the 1870s. A few of them had become party to another enterprise, one that had begun with a small circle of British officers around Gordon obsessed with uncovering the truth of the Old Testament. Their quest to find out more had led them on a trail of discovery that had brought him to this place now on the eve of