Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [3]
The northern entrance to the mine had been the main entrance.
Originally, it had been level with the waterline of the swamp, and through its doors a wide canal bored horizontally into the mountain. Bargeloads of gold and diorite would be brought out of the mine via this canal.
But then Imhotep V had come and reconfigured it.
Using a temporary dam not unlike the one the European force was using today, his men had held back the waters of the swamp while his engineers had lowered the level of the doorway, dropping it 40 feet. The original door was bricked in and covered over with soil.
Imhotep had then disassembled the dam and allowed the swampwaters to flood back over the new doorway, concealing it for over 2,000 years.
Until today.
But there was a second entrance to the mine, a lesser-known one, on the south side of the mountain.
It was a back door, the endpoint of a slipway that had been used to dispose of waste during the original digging of the mine. It too had been reconfigured.
It was this entrance that the Nine were seeking.
Guided by the tall white-bearded Wizard—who held in one hand a very ancient papyrus scroll, and in the other a very modern sonic-resonance imager—they stopped abruptly on a mud-mound about 80 metres from the base of the mountain. It was shaded by four bending lotus trees.
‘Here!’ the old fellow called, seeing something on the mound. ‘Oh dear. The village boys did find it.’
In the middle of the muddy dome, sunken into it, was a tiny square hole, barely wide enough for a man to fit into. Stinking brown mud lined its edges.
You’d never see it if you weren’t looking for it, but it just so happened that this hole was exactly what Professor Max T. Epper was searching for.
He read quickly from his papyrus scroll:
‘In the Nubian swamp to the south of Soter’s mine,
Among Sobek’s minions,
Find the four symbols of the Lower Kingdom.
Therein lies the portal to the harder route.’
Epper looked up at his companions. ‘Four lotus trees: the lotus was the symbol of the Lower Kingdom. Sobek’s minions are crocodiles, since Sobek was the Egyptian crocodile god. In a swamp to the south of Soter’s mine—Soter being the other name for Ptolemy I. This is it.’
A small wicker basket lay askew next to the muddy hole—the kind of basket used by rural Sudanese.
‘Those stupid, stupid boys.’ Wizard kicked the basket away.
On their way here, the Nine had passed through a small village. The villagers claimed that only a few days ago, lured by the Europeans’ interest in the mountain, four of their young men had gone exploring in the swamp. One of them had returned to the village saying the other three had disappeared down a hole in the ground and not come out again.
At this point, the leader of the Nine stepped forward, peered down into the hole.
The rest of the team waited for him to speak.
Not a lot was known about the leader of this group. Indeed, his past was veiled in mystery. What was known was this:
His name was West—Jack West Jr.
Call-sign: Huntsman.
At 37, he had the rare distinction of being both militarily and university trained—he had once been a member of the most elite special forces unit in the world, while at another time, he had studied ancient history at Trinity College in Dublin under Max Epper.
Indeed, in the 1990s, when the Pentagon had ranked the best soldiers in the world, only one soldier in the top ten had not been an American: Jack West. He’d come in at No. 4.
But then, around 1995, West disappeared off the international radar. Just like that. He was not seen at international exercises or on missions again—not even the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite his experience there during Desert Storm in’91. It was assumed he had quit the military, cashed in his points and retired. Nothing was seen or heard of him for over 10 years . . .
. . . until now.
Now, he had re-emerged.
Supremely fit, he had dark hair and laser-sharp blue eyes that seemed perpetually narrowed. Apparently, he had a winning smile, but that was something rarely