The Third Gate by Lincoln Child

expense and risk—do you really think it likely that Narmer’s tomb contains little of value?”
    “But an impenetrable swamp …” Logan shook his head. “Think of the logistics involved in tomb building—especially for a primitive culture, operating in a hostile region.”
    “That’s the fiendish beauty of the thing. Remember how I said the Sudd spreads a little every year? Narmer knew that. He could build his tomb on what was then the edge of the Sudd, keeping its location secret. There’s a vast system of volcanic caves just below the surface of the Sudd valley. After his death, the swamp, expanding ever outward, would hide all traces of his tomb. Nature would do the job for him.” Rush’s face took on a troubled look. “Almost too well.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You heard Stone. The site is up and running, smooth as clockwork. All the experts are in place, the technicians and archaeologists and mechanics and the rest. Only …” He hesitated. “Only the precise location proved a little more difficult to find than Stone’s experts assumed.” Rush sighed. “Of course there is the usual need for a low profile—not as much as on a typical site, of course, but it’s there nonetheless. And it’s the worst time of the year to work, too: the rainy season. It makes the Sudd that much more difficult and unpleasant and unhealthy a place to work.”
    Logan remembered Stone’s words: We are under some significant time pressures . “So why the frantic pace? Why not just wait for the dry season? The tomb has sat there for five thousand years—why not another six months?”
    As if in answer, Rush stood and beckoned Logan to follow him out of the saloon. They regained the deck and walked carefully forward to the bow. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, the pitiless white ball now an angry orange. The Nile spread out from the prow in thick undulating lines. The cry of waterbirds was giving way to strange trumpetings from either bank.
    Rush spread his hands. Glancing ahead, Logan saw a range of hills rising on both sides of the river, widening to form a vast amphitheater ahead of them, marching on into the distance where sight failed. “You see that?” Rush asked. “Beyond those is the Af’ayalah Dam. Already it’s nearing completion on this, the Sudanese side ofthe frontier. In five months, all this—everything, the whole useless godforsaken place—will be underwater.”
    Logan peered into the gathering gloom. Now he understood the hurry.
    As he peered thoughtfully into the water ahead, he began to notice bracken floating in the lazy current. First, just bundles of papyrus reeds. But then the reeds began forming small islands, attaching themselves to promontories of mud that rose out of the river like miniature volcanoes.
    “The dam provides us with a great cover story,” Rush went on. “We’re posing as a team researching the ecosystem, documenting it before it’s gone forever. But that layer of phoniness costs extra money, and, again, the longer it continues, the more difficult the deception becomes.”
    The boat began to slow as the debris grew thicker. Now Logan could see huge logs, twisted together as if in titanic struggle, moss and rotting weeds hanging from their flanks like so much webbing. A stench of decay and overripe verdure began rising around them. A door in the superstructure opened and two mates appeared, each carrying a strange, harpoonlike weapon attached to pneumatic hoses. They took up positions in the platforms on each side of the bow, leaning out over the water, devices at the ready.
    Suddenly, a floodlight snapped on in the forecastle, sending a shaft of surreal blue light ahead of the bow. The turbine throttled back still further. A light rain had begun to fall. The vegetation was growing ever thicker, a nearly impenetrable carpet of weeds and papyrus and branches and vile muck that now surrounded them. The men in the bow began using their pneumatic devices to