The Alexandria Connection (37 page)

Zn + 2HCl = H
2
+ ZnCl
2

Zinc + Hydrochloric acid = Hydrogen + Zinc Chloride

‘The ancient Egyptians had access to both zinc and hydrochloric acid,’ he continued.

‘I’m not sure if it helps,’ Badawi added, ‘but I have seen an analysis of the salt on these walls. It was done back in 1978, when Doctor Patrick Flanagan sent a sample to the Arizona Bureau of Geology. It was a mixture of limestone, salt and gypsum.’

‘Which in chemical terms is calcium carbonate, sodium chloride and calcium sulfate,’ said O’Connor, ‘which makes perfect sense. That’s precisely the residue you would expect if hot hydrogen gas was reacting with the limestone in this chamber.’

‘Good thing we have a chemist on this team,’ said Aleta.

O’Connor grinned. ‘Makes a change,’ he said. ‘Taking the lead next to you two.’ He examined the openings of the two shafts that ran from either side of the chamber. Apart from a very small cleft, both were blocked at the bottom. ‘These shafts would have been used to deliver the hydrated zinc chloride on one side and the dilute hydrochloric acid on the other, but they would have needed to be kept full to allow the weight of the fluids to force seepage through this small cleft.’

A sudden comprehension of a decades-old question appeared on Badawi’s face. ‘We’ve always been puzzled by these two small shafts . . . some have advocated they were a means of providing air, but they end sixteen metres before the outside of the pyramid, not far from the King’s Chamber. You might be right! They could have delivered liquids to create a reaction here.’

‘And if the hydrogen needed cooling, then that might explain the niche in the wall here,’ O’Connor said, pointing to an elongated cavity that resembled a fireplace. ‘That could have housed a cooling chamber.’

‘And there’s something else. You remember the Gantenbrink door?’ Aleta turned to Badawi looking pensive.

‘What’s the Gantenbrink door?’ O’Connor asked.

‘In 1992,’ Badawi said, ‘a German engineer, Rudolph Gantenbrink, explored one of these small Queen’s Chamber shafts using a robot . . . this one here,’ he said, pointing to the southern shaft. ‘The robot came up against a limestone block at the top, and embedded in the block were what looked like protruding copper electrodes.’

‘And over a hundred years earlier, in 1872,’ Aleta added, ‘Charles Smyth and his team found a small bronze grapnel hook, a portion of cedar, which may have been its handle, and a small granite ball.’

‘I wonder . . .’ O’Connor said, considering the possibilities. ‘Did the grapnel hook look like this?’ he asked, pulling out his notebook and quickly sketching a picture that looked like the hooks of two coathangers bound together.

Aleta nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Then I think Euclid’s on the money here. If the hooks – and there will be another one for the other shaft – had cedar handles, they would have floated on top of the fluids and been in touch with each electrode. As long as the shafts were nearly full, the circuit created would remain uninterrupted. But as soon as the level of fluid dropped, the circuit would be broken, signalling the need for more fluids to be pumped into the shafts.’

‘That’s supposing the Egyptian engineers had a knowledge of electrical circuits.’ The old professor was still struggling to come to terms with a hypothesis that, if true, would disprove everything he’d ever learned about the Great Pyramid and its purpose.

‘Given what’s in the Euclid Papyrus, I don’t think we have to suppose that . . . I think this is evidence they did. Remember the Baghdad battery?’ Aleta said.

‘Yes, it’s quite extraordinary. Are you familiar with it, Doctor O’Connor?’ Badawi asked.

‘Not in any detail . . . only that it was displayed in the Baghdad National Museum, and when we invaded Iraq and we reached Baghdad, we went to great lengths to protect the Oil Ministry, while we did nothing to protect the National Museum, which was being looted just down the road.’ O’Connor shook his head at the Coalition’s ham-fisted approach.

Badawi nodded. ‘It was found just outside Baghdad in 1936, and has been dated back to the time of the Library of Alexandria. Essentially, it consisted of a clay jar with a stopper made out of asphalt. The stopper had an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder and if filled with vinegar, or any other liquid that could carry an electric charge, it produced just over a volt.’

‘And that battery was around centuries before Volta invented the modern version in 1800,’ said Aleta, ‘so it’s more than possible Khufu’s engineers had their own version of the Baghdad battery. We just haven’t found it yet.’

‘But even if we accept that the engineers produced hydrogen in this chamber, that’s still short of Euclid’s notations on the real purpose of the Great Pyramid,’ said Badawi. ‘Let’s take the grand gallery up to the King’s Chamber.’

Aleta and O’Connor followed the professor back along the connecting stone passage and together the trio ascended the grand gallery’s wooden walkway.

‘This is the antechamber,’ Badawi explained. ‘You can see the big grooves in the limestone that were used to secure the massive granite portcullis blocks, designed by the engineers to seal off the main chamber,’ he said, leading the way into the King’s Chamber itself. ‘The first people to break into this chamber were the Muslims in 820 AD . . . Caliph al-Mamun’s workers. Not only were the walls unmarked, but unlike the tombs of Tutankhamun, and other pharaohs, the chamber was almost empty, apart from this.’ Badawi pointed to the huge, lidless, empty coffer damaged on one corner. The walls of the chamber, constructed from massive granite blocks, were also totally bare and devoid of the usual markings.

‘Pretty much as it was built all those thousands of years ago,’ said Badawi. ‘The coffer has likely never held a mummy, and as it’s wider than the ascending passage, it would have been placed here before the roof of the chamber above us was sealed with five rows of granite beams. They’re called relieving beams,’ he said, pointing to the stone beams above them. ‘The traditional theory is they were put there to relieve pressure on the flat roof of the chamber, but in light of the Euclid Papyrus, I’m not so sure about the pressure relief theory. Added to that, there are many, many people who have reported strange energetic effects when they’ve visited this chamber.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ O’Connor agreed, a thoughtful look on his face. He stared at the roof above him, imagining the hundreds of thousands of tonnes pressing down on it. ‘Why would Khufu’s engineers go to all the trouble of quarrying, dressing, and transporting an extra 3000 tonnes of granite from Aswan, 500 miles up the Nile, not to mention the difficulty of positioning them so high up in the structure, when a simple inverted V would perform the same function? It doesn’t make any sense. And the two shafts that connect this chamber with the outside of the pyramid clearly had nothing to do with ventilation. You don’t ventilate a mummy and expose it to the atmosphere.’

O’Connor turned to Aleta and Badawi. The looks on the faces of the two renowned archaeologists confirmed Egyptology had just been turned on its head.

‘I think Euclid was right . . . the Great Pyramid is not at all what it seems.’

I
t had taken many months of training, planning and positioning, but at last, the teams of terrorists in Great Britain, Australia and the United States were ready to attack the West.

General Khan felt a surge of adrenalin as he read the single word text from Crowley:

Execute.

At last, they could strike again at the Infidel he hated with such passion. Khan pulled up the stampgeekcol.com website and made a comment under his codename. ‘I have just acquired a 1971 Republik Österreich two-schilling stamp commemorating twenty-five years of nationalised industry, featuring the Austrian nitrogen plant at Linz.’ Khan added the image of the plant that depicted a plume of smoke issuing from a maze of towers and pipes.

Eleven thousand kilometres away, ensconced in her impenetrable office at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Barbara Murray struggled to make sense of General Khan’s latest posting on the website. She put through an encrypted call to Tom McNamara.

‘The attacks on the
Leila
and the
Atlantic Giant
were preceded by benign acquisition postings on stampgeek,’ Murray said, ‘but I’m not sure what this latest post from Khan means, other than we can expect another attack. I doubt it has anything to do with Austria.’

‘I agree. But that doesn’t give us much to go on, and it’s a bit hard to put forces on alert on the basis of a probable attack in an unknown location. I’ll brief the president and the National Security Council of course, but I suspect we’ll need something more concrete . . . Any luck on breaking Crowley’s encryptions?’

‘Not yet, but I’m working on it.’

Murray was almost 100 per cent sure another attack was imminent, but she was sympathetic to McNamara’s position. The system was too big and unwieldy to act on every possible alert, and if the post turned out to be a message about some other activity, albeit undoubtedly illegal, he would be pilloried for crying wolf. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she fed a fresh set of criteria into the massive NSA computers in yet another attempt to break open EVRAN and Crowley’s encryption codes.

Across the Atlantic, Sadiq Boulos and Gamal Nadar knelt on their prayer mats in their dilapidated two-bedroom flat in a housing estate in Peckham, less than five kilometres to the south of St Paul’s Cathedral. Nadar, who had been charged with detonating the bomb, took the lead. Both men believed this would be their last prayer before they were welcomed into heaven. Together, they assumed the
sujood
position, kneeling on their prayer mats. They had long since determined
Qibla
as being to the south-east. It differed, depending on what part of the world you were in, but when praying,
Qibla
was the direction a Muslim must face toward Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, and the holiest site in all of Islam.

‘
Allahu Akbar
 . . . Allah is great . . .

‘
Subhana rubbiyal a’ala
 . . . How perfect is my Lord . . .

‘
Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah
 . . . peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.’

At the end of the prayers, Nadar and Boulos embraced. It was time to go.

‘Soon we will join Muhammad, peace be upon him,’ said Nadar, extracting the small blue Cobalt 60 container from where it had been hidden in the back of a wardrobe. He opened the prepared briefcase, which, save for an indentation for the cobalt, was filled with 20 kilograms of plastic explosive, and then turned toward Boulos, smiling as he opened the container and the lead shielding. The Cobalt 60 glowed a deep, eerie blue, and both men were immediately subjected to intense, cancer-causing gamma rays. In a few hours, they would become very ill, but the bomb was planned for detonation well before then.

‘And the half-life . . . 5.27 years,’ said Boulos. ‘The Infidel’s city will have to be evacuated.’ He had read up on the deadly substance and had been delighted with his findings.

Nadar fitted the radioactive metal into the slot he’d prepared. ‘It fits perfectly, Sadiq,
Alhamdulillah
 . . . praise be to Allah!’ He closed the briefcase and locked it.

‘Paradise is not far away, Sadiq.’ The pair had often discussed this paradise the Qu’ran so temptingly offered, and at last, they had their opportunity to go there.

‘Yes, and not only that, Gamal, but the virgins . . . the houris will be so beautiful!’ Boulos said, turning to his favourite
hadith,
or saying, the
Al-Itqan fi Ulum al-Qur’an
by Jalaluddin Suyuti. The celebrated fifteenth-century Egyptian religious scholar had held a chair in the mosque of Baybars in Cairo, and his interpretation of the Holy Qu’ran was one in which both Nadar and Boulos put great store. Boulos turned to page 351, and began to read.

Each time we sleep with a Houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one will marry seventy houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetising vaginas.

Nadar and Boulos had both bought smart casual clothes for the occasion, warned that sloppy dress and backpacks might arouse suspicion, particularly for men of Middle Eastern appearance. No one took the slightest notice of either them or the briefcase and they climbed the 528 narrow steps, past the Whispering Gallery and the Stone Gallery, and on up to the Golden Gallery, almost at the top of the dome.

Nidal Basara and Jibral Maloof had rented a small two-bedroom flat on the Esplanade at Burnham-on-Sea, a small town in Somerset at the mouth of the River Parrett and Bridgewater Bay. More importantly, Burnham-on-Sea was very close to the massive Hinkley Point nuclear power station.

Basara piloted their small fishing tinny out of the mouth of the river, and headed west along the coast. The tinny attracted no more attention than the passing gulls, and they motored quietly into the Bristol Channel, keeping a distance from the shore.

‘There it is, Jibral! That will be the Infidel’s downfall,’ Basara said, scanning the huge reactor through his binoculars. ‘Once we’ve achieved a core meltdown, the winds will take the radioactive cloud right across his biggest city.’

‘
Insha’Allah!
’ Maloof replied enthusiastically.

Abdul Qureshi and Shadib Said were seasoned terrorists. They had both spent twelve months fighting on the side of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in the long and protracted Syrian civil war against President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority. The Alawites, a sect of Shia Islam, were allied with Iran and Hassan Nasrallah’s Iranian-backed Shi’ite Hezbollah, based out of Lebanon. The Syrian conflict had only entrenched the view of both young men: that Shi’ite Muslims were heretics, and the only true Muslims were Sunnis.

It was a split that went back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The Prophet was illiterate, and when he died in 632, he left no written directions as to who should be his successor. A bitter fight broke out between those who thought Muhammad’s successor should be a blood relative, and those who thought the most theologically qualified should succeed him. The proponents of the blood relative argument were the
Shia-t-Ali,
the followers of Ali, who was both the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, having married the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. On the other side, the proponents of the best qualified candidate were the Sunni, which in Arabic meant ‘one who follows the traditions of the Prophet’. They backed Muhammad’s close friend and advisor, Abu Bakr, who eventually won, becoming the first in a long line of Caliphs, not extinguished until Mustapha Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, abolished the office in 1924. Much like the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Sunni’s and Shi’ites had been at each other’s throats for centuries. But they did have a common enemy to which these two fanatical young Sunnis had now turned their attention: the West.

Just on three-thirty p.m., Qureshi and Said emerged from Melbourne’s iconic Flinders Street Station.

‘The wind is from the south, Shadib, so we’ll use the Skydeck.’ Even though the Skydeck’s outside viewing platform faced South Melbourne, Qureshi had designed the bomb so the explosion would blow the cobalt outwards, and he was confident the wind would take the deadly cloud around the sides of the building and to the north, into the city centre. They took the walkway across the Yarra River, and made their way to the Eureka Skydeck, the southern hemisphere’s highest viewing platform. They took the fast lift to the top, and immediately stepped through the air lock on to the terrace, an outside platform that was almost 300 metres above the city.

‘Perfect,’ Qureshi whispered as he took a last look at the view across South Melbourne and the magnificent Port Phillip Bay. ‘The tennis is on at Rod Laver Arena, and those women exposing themselves are about to play their last matches,’ he hissed, his voice laden with contempt. The sight of the scantily clad players, their knickers in plain view when they served, had more than once brought him to a point of apoplexy.