Sub-Sahara Read online

  About the Author

  Ethan Arkwright grew up in South Africa and New Zealand. He studied English and Marketing. He lives in England with his wife and children.

  www.ethanarkwright.com

  By the same author

  Transition

  Sub-Sahara

  Ethan Arkwright

  Published by North Shield Publishing

  www.northshieldpublishing.com

  Copyright © Ethan Arkwright 2016

  The right of Ethan Arkwright to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

  This book has been written and edited in British English.

  Cover and illustrations by Collingridge and Smith Architects UK Ltd (www.casa-uk.com) with special mention going to Nina May-Gill and Tiffany and Phil Smith.

  ISBN: 0956888054

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9568880-5-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published, without prior consent of the publisher.

  Location of Pyramid

  Diagram 1

  Diagram 2

  Pyramid Exterior

  Diagram 3

  Pyramid Interior 1

  Diagram 4

  Pyramid Interior 2

  It embodies scale and mystery, the thin line between survival and destruction, the power to take life or to transform it. A self-contained, homogenous, identifiable world, uncompromising and irreducible.

  In other words, a challenge. And by no means an easy one.

  As big as the United States, with a population the size of Norfolk…and though the great ergs, the sand seas, are amongst the most exquisitely beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, there is a dark side. The Sahara is also a killer…It has its share of war and conflict.

  –Michael Palin, Sahara

  Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

  –Chinese Proverb

  Chapter 1

  Light entered the chamber for the first time in six millennia.

  ‘We’re through!’ Mike Baker yelled. ‘Rebecca, we’re through!’

  Rebecca Grainger moved quickly to view the hole Mike had made with his hammer and chisel.

  ‘You punched through into nothing?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Yeah. Chisel just went straight through,’ Mike said.

  ‘Can you widen it enough to get a look in there?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Sure. Give me five minutes,’ Mike said.

  ‘Make it a quick five minutes.’ She was grinning now. ‘There’s nothing more impatient than a team of archaeologists on the verge of a major discovery. I’ll round up the rest of the glory hunters.’

  Rebecca backed away from Mike in the enclosed space at the bottom of the well shaft and unclipped the palm-sized radio attached to her belt.

  ‘Phil, find Tina,’ she said into the radio. ‘Both of you get down here now. We think there’s a chamber under the well shaft. Mike has just broken through.’

  ‘Really?’ Phil Cranmer’s voice crackled over the radio. ‘That’s awesome. We’ll be right down.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Rebecca, there’s something else I was about to call you about. We have a problem up here. All the local helpers just jumped into one of the trucks and took off,’ Phil said.

  Rebecca’s face darkened in the artificial light at the bottom of the well.

  ‘What the hell do you mean “took off”? Where to? Without them, the operation is dead,’ she said.

  ‘I couldn’t get any sense out of them. They were suddenly scrambling around like mad men collecting their things and jumping into their truck. They wouldn’t stop to explain. The only thing the lead guide said was that “the winds aren’t right.” He said if they stayed, they’d die, and we all had to leave now,’ Phil explained.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Rebecca said. ‘I checked the weather this morning. There aren’t any conditions forecast that could cause a sandstorm. That storm in the south isn’t coming near us.’

  ‘That’s why it’s weird,’ Phil said. ‘There are now only the ten of us left on the dig site.’

  Rebecca thought for a few seconds. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘you guys get down here now. We’ll figure out quickly if we have something here or not. Then, when we get back up, I’ll contact our guide office in Agadez to find out what the hell is going on.’

  ‘Gotcha. On our way.’ Phil’s voice crackled.

  Rebecca returned the handheld radio to her belt.

  She was concerned what this new development meant for the expedition. She was more concerned that it would reflect badly on her management of the operation.

  They were there to excavate a dry well recently uncovered near an oasis. The well had been covered by a large sand dune until the wind had shifted the dune to reveal a corner of it.

  Local Tuareg legend referenced a magical well into which people threw treasures and gifts as offerings to the ancient gods before impending battles. The team of ten archaeologists and Malian helpers had been excavating the well for three weeks, and they were now at the bottom of it.

  Rebecca was not going to abandon the site without having something to show for it.

  ‘We’re coming down!’ Phil yelled from above.

  Rebecca looked up to the circle of light fifty metres above her and saw two dark forms start to move down the walls on the rung-and-harness system they had installed. She watched them come down and stood ready at the bottom in case they needed her assistance.

  Phil Cranmer hit the ground level first and unclipped himself from the harness. ‘Wow, what a breakthrough. Just as we were about to run out of funding. This place just keeps surprising us,’ he said as they both helped Tina Hagley to land safely.

  Phil was a portly American academic who didn’t get out in the field much and was wildly enthusiastic about everything.

  ‘I know,’ Rebecca said. ‘We had the great capstone we had to shift on rollers—’

  ‘The shaft from carved stone, not seen in this part of the world before,’ Phil said.

  ‘Some of the team up top think this is not so much another Samana well type of construction but might be some kind of ancient tomb structure, like the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa,’ Tina said.

  Tina was a young British researcher who worked for Rebecca at Cambridge University.

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Rebecca said, though the thought had been forefront in her own mind from the moment Mike’s chisel punched through into air.

  ‘C’mon,’ Phil said. ‘Look at the space we’re in. It’s twice the size of a normal well; you can seat seven quite comfortably here.’

  ‘Did you bring the big torch?’ Mike called out impatiently from the far wall. He sat back on his heels and wiped his brow.

  Mike was an ambitious archaeologist in his mid-thirties from Durham University.

  ‘Of course,’ Phil said. He pulled it out of his backpack and walked over to where Mike was working.

  ‘I’ve managed to chisel it out to a foot wide,’ Mike said, showing off his work. ‘Now, for the moment of truth.’

  He took the torch from Phil, pointed it into the hole, and fired up the beam.

  Rebecca bit her lip. ‘What can you see?’ she asked. Her hands were shaking with nerves.

  ‘A big, empty room,’ Mike said. ‘It’s square, about twelve feet each way, at least five foot high, and…’

  ‘What? For God’
s sake,’ Rebecca said, her voice rising.

  ‘There are carvings on the wall. This room wasn’t meant for water.’

  The three archaeologists gasped, and the sound was amplified in the enclosed space.

  ‘Wait.’ Mike was craning his head into the hole as much as he could. ‘There’s a tunnel in the corner…’

  ‘It’s an antechamber!’ Phil exclaimed. ‘We got ourselves an antechamber, people.’

  Rebecca put her hands over her mouth. She was speechless.

  Mike pulled himself away from the hole. ‘That’s exactly what it looks like.’

  The radio on Rebecca’s belt squawked, and then a slightly distorted voice came over it. ‘Rebecca, you have to get up here right now. Base is contacting us on the shortwave radio. They say they must speak to you immediately. They say it’s an emergency.’

  The euphoria of the moment was broken. Rebecca snatched the radio from her belt. ‘What’s up?’ she asked.

  ‘They won’t say. Insist on speaking to you only,’ the voice said.

  ‘Okay…coming up,’ she said, trying to maintain composure while she was a tumult of emotion.

  ‘I’ll need to go and see what they want,’ she said to the team. ‘In the meantime, can you all get stuck in with Mike and open that hole out to about a metre wide, so we can get down there later today? Get the drills down here so we can get in there faster.’

  Phil and Mike nodded in agreement; they generally didn’t like taking orders from Rebecca, believing they were her equal on the dig, but in this case, it didn’t matter. They, more than anyone, were itching to see what was on the other side of the tunnel in the room below them.

  ‘I’ll go see what the latest emergency is all about,’ Rebecca said. She walked over to the ladder-and-harness system to start the journey upwards. ‘You know what they’re like, always making a fuss about nothing.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Rebecca, are you still there? Can you hear me?’ The voice was breaking up with an unusual amount of static in the signal. ‘This is real. You don’t have much time. You can’t get out. We can’t get you out…What are you going to do?’

  Rebecca looked out over her archaeological expedition with all nine team members busy on site. Everything looked normal. The tents were laid out in rows, steam was coming from the cooking tent because lunchtime was approaching, and most of the team members were busy digging out marked channels around the top of the catacomb structure. All were oblivious to the looming catastrophe.

  She was responsible for all of them.

  Rebecca dropped to her knees and put her free hand to her face. ‘Oh God, I don’t know.’ She looked around in a daze at the giant sand dunes surrounding them, many half a kilometre high.

  There was nowhere to go.

  ‘When did it turn?’ she asked into the radio.

  ‘Thirty minutes ago. It’s been reclassified as a superstorm. It’s now a thousand miles wide…they reckon it’s expending the energy of two hundred thousand atomic bombs. That means even once it makes landfall, it’s just going to keep going. It’s only going to peter out once it hits southern Algeria, same as Hurricane Sandy finished in Canada after taking out most of the northeastern United States…Rebecca?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. It’s just that…you’re telling me to get out of the way of Mother Nature; I’m in the middle of the desert. I can’t see how I can do that here. There’s nowhere to go.’

  ‘Then…I’m sorry…I’m…’

  There was silence.

  There was nothing else to say.

  The archaeologists stared at Rebecca in stunned silence.

  After taking a few minutes to compose herself upon hearing the news, Rebecca had called everyone together to discuss the situation.

  Having to relay the impending doom to others had snapped her out of her dazed state. This was her site, and she had to get back in control—or as much in control as she could be.

  She was standing on a supplies box so that everyone could see her clearly, though she hardly needed the extra height. She was already tall, standing five feet eleven inches. It had started out as just another day on the job, so she had her long, wavy, red hair tied back in a ponytail and was dressed in her usual dig attire of cream cargo trousers and a light, checked shirt to guard her fair skin against the desert sun.

  After a short silence, the questions started.

  ‘We’re in the southern Ténéré desert—the Sahara—and you’re saying that a hurricane is going to hit us?’

  ‘Look,’ Rebecca replied. ‘I can only tell you what they told me. Then we need to decide collectively what we’re going to do about it because I don’t have any answers. They’ve been monitoring the weather for a while, but I thought nothing of it because we are in the desert, so I will explain it to you as they explained it to me.’ Rebecca took a deep breath before starting again. ‘A massive freak storm is coming in—a super hurricane. In the last six months, many of the trade winds have reversed and are heading east across the Atlantic instead of west towards the Americas. With the winds coalescing and feeding off the warm waters in the Gulf of Guinea, the result is that for the first time ever, a hurricane is going to pass over West Africa.’

  ‘This is unbelievable,’ another of the team said. ‘To get to us, it has to cross Nigeria. These things die out over land.’

  ‘True,’ Rebecca replied, ‘but it’s the unprecedented scale of this thing that’s going to get us. A category five hurricane is the biggest, with winds above one hundred and fifty miles an hour. With this storm, they’re predicting winds of two hundred and fifty miles an hour. They’re talking about adding another level to the classification system. So even if it loses two hundred miles an hour by the time it reaches the edge of the Sahara, it is still going to pick up all the sand, make a biblical sandstorm out of it, and bury us. Everybody else in the region is already battening down to save themselves. Our resupply vehicles are staying in Agadez. There’s no helicopter within five hundred miles. There’s no help coming.’

  Stunned silence again as the different faces registered a mix of confusion, anger, and fear.

  Rebecca looked over the faces of her colleagues to take in the entire dig site. It had all been going so well until this point.

  Now it would all be destroyed.

  ‘Right!’ Rebecca clapped her hands loudly to bring the attention of the group back to her. She looked at her watch. ‘We have about eight hours until the outer winds of the weather system get here. We can’t stay in the tents. We can’t drive out in time. We need to find some cover. Anyone have any ideas?’

  ‘We cram into the Land Cruisers?’ Tina offered. ‘They’re pretty heavy cars anyway, so shouldn’t blow over. We should all be able to fit into the three of them.’

  ‘Until they get completely covered with sand,’ Mike said. ‘If the winds shift the sand dunes, we could be under a couple of tons of sand. You won’t dig out of that, and it won’t take long for three to four people in a car to suffocate.’

  Silence descended on the group.

  ‘Any…other suggestions?’ Rebecca asked in a timid voice.

  ‘Make a big bowl of Kool-Aid,’ someone said.

  A few people smiled. Rebecca was glad; it was enough to break the tension.

  ‘We’re not quite at that stage yet,’ she said, ‘so let’s not throw in the towel.’

  Dave Harper spoke up. ‘The catacombs. We climb in there. It’s the only solid structure here. Between the shaft, the antechamber, and wherever that tunnel goes, I’m guessing onwards into larger burial chambers, there’s enough space and should be enough air for all of us until they can come and dig us out in a couple of days.’

  ‘Until the sand keeps pouring in with the wind from above and we are buried alive?’ another person said. ‘It would be like being inside an hourglass that’s filling up.’

  ‘It’s the only choice left,’ Dave countered. ‘We have the quick-set concrete. We have spare to reinforce the walls. That stuff is al
most like putty when you put it on. We could roll the capstone back over us and seal the edges. It would be dry enough by the time the killer winds get here.’

  ‘Dave,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’re talking about sealing us inside a tomb.’

  ‘What if Dave’s wrong about the air?’ Tina asked. ‘If there’s not enough, what next? Do we draw straws to see who gets killed? Who decides who lives and who dies here?’

  ‘We’ll be sealed in there forever,’ someone else said. ‘By the time they get enough equipment to dig us out, we’ll all be dead anyway. It’s better taking our chances up here.’

  ‘Well,’ Rebecca said, ‘I think our best chance of survival is to seal ourselves down there. We’re fast running out of time, so that’s what I’m doing. I know Dave is with me, as it’s his idea.’ She looked at Dave Harper, who nodded in agreement. ‘So we have a core team already. Those who want to join us, come with me. Otherwise, if you want to form a separate team to stay up here, good luck to you.’ She turned and started walking away.

  It was a desperate ploy on her part.

  She would do anything to survive and was frustrated in trying to get ten academics to agree. She started walking towards the stores tent. After fifteen paces, she looked behind her and saw seven of the team heading towards her.

  After a few more minutes of discussion, the last two people shrugged and headed over as well.

  Things happened quickly once the consensus had been reached. Everybody was galvanised by a common goal and the incoming threat.

  They gathered as many essentials as they could into backpacks: food, water, torches, batteries, even toilet paper. They formed a human chain to ferry the bags and anything else that could be relevant to the edge of the catacomb opening.