The Cairo Code (55 page)

“A little. Didn't you sleep?”

“I managed to grab a couple of hours.”

The bedroom was a small affair, with a bare wooden floor. There was just an iron bed, a chair by the balcony window, and an enamel jug and washbasin on a wicker table in a corner. Dusk had begun to fall, the shutters were open, the sound of crickets and the scent of flowers carrying into the room on the warm tropical air. The view of the Nile was exquisite, the dying orange light reflected on the waters, and Rachel stepped out on to the narrow wrought-iron balcony. “Did you ever miss it here after you returned to Germany?”

Halder joined her. “The happiest time I ever had was at Sakkara. I used to think I'd like to spend my life here, excavating ruins, and retire to live in a big old villa overlooking the Nile.” He smiled, took a deep breath. “It's good to smell the warm air of Cairo again.”

“Do you think Harry will be all right?”

“His comrades will have found him by now, I'm certain.”

“You should have let me talk to him one last time before we boarded the boat.”

“What good would it have done, Rachel? And there really wasn't time.”

Rachel sighed, and Halder said, “What's the matter?”

“Just a feeling I have, that it could get much worse from now on. You told me when you asked Harry not to get involved he refused. It's a frightening thought, both of you being up against each other. And no doubt his superiors will want him to be resolute to catch us. I'm sure he's in a quandary, just like you.”

“I'd try not to dwell on it,” Halder said, dispirited. “It's hard enough as it is, just the thought of him hunting us down. I'd hate to face the prospect of either of us having to decide which came first, duty or friendship, if it ever came down to it.”

As if to change the subject, Rachel pointed at an American captain's uniform laid out on the bed. “What's that for? A fancy-dress party at Shepheard's?”

“Now there's a thought.” Halder went back into the room, stuffed the uniform into a kit bag. “I've got a little work to do, along with our host and Kleist. I'll probably be gone until late, so don't wait up.”

Rachel followed him inside. “What about the others?”

“Doring and our friend Hassan will be taking turns on watch.”

Rachel bit her lip, a look of fear on her face. “I don't like the idea of being alone with either of them. They make me feel uneasy.”

“You'll be perfectly safe. Keep your door locked, but if anyone so much as bothers you—” He slipped Falconi's automatic from his pocket, handed it to her. “Feel free to use this, and let me worry about the consequences.”

She handed back the weapon and shivered. “I don't like guns. I never have.”

“No matter. I'll leave it just in case.” He tossed it on the bed. “There's something I need to discuss. It's about your father.”

Her face darkened. “What—what do you mean?”

“Schellenberg told me about the discovery at Giza. I admit I wondered at the time what the professor was getting up to, coming back exhausted some mornings to Sakkara, looking like he'd been up half the night. I would have thought it was a risky business, not to mention highly illegal, him not informing the Egyptian authorities.”

Rachel blushed. “There were good reasons why my father kept his work secret.”

“Tell me.”

“There was a war looming. The Egyptians were pro-German. If the country had fallen, the last thing he wanted was for anything valuable he might discover to end up in Nazi hands.”

“And what exactly did he find?”

“A tunnel about two hundred meters long, most of it part of a natural underground cavern in the rock, which led to an important noble's tomb from the Second Dynasty that hadn't been discovered. My father believed that the area the tunnel originated in had once been the location of living quarters for some of the craftsmen and stonemasons working on the pyramids. The passageway had obviously been extended either by them or grave robbers who intended to reach Cheops pyramid and steal any valuables they found inside, but they must have miscalculated and ended up in the noble's tomb instead.”

Halder frowned. “The area would have been closely guarded during the pharaoh's time. Which I presume would explain why they burrowed from such a distance away.”

Rachel nodded. “We found a valuable hoard of jewelry and scarabs buried in the passageway—the treasure was probably discarded by the robbers before they were caught and executed by the royal guards. Their bodies were left in the tunnel before it was sealed up again—the normal punishment in those days—obviously as a warning to others. The skeletons were still there, or what was left of them.”

“I don't understand what your father was doing at Giza in the first place. His work was at Sakkara.”

“A German professor named Braun had suspected the existence of the tunnel, and secretly made some preliminary explorations a couple of months before my family was due to leave Egypt. Braun was a former colleague of my father's and confided in him, but before he could take his work further he was summoned back to Germany and conscripted. My father managed to get the necessary permission from the authorities to carry on with Braun's work, but said nothing about the passageway, for the reasons I told you.”

“Schellenberg claimed it led from the direction of the Mena House. Is that where your father believed the workmen's site might originally have been?”

She nodded. “In that general area, yes. Why?”

“I can't tell you why exactly, but I'll need to have a look at the tunnel. Can you remember its exact location?”

“Yes—yes, of course.”

“How difficult would it be to gain entry?”

“Not very difficult. My father sealed up the entrance again, but it's well enough hidden, so no one would suspect its existence.”

“Good. We'll go over everything in detail before I leave.”

“Is it dangerous what you have to do?”

“Not particularly, but you never know. Just a little reconnaissance work, and to see if we can find and enter the passageway.”

“Take me with you, Jack,” she said suddenly.

Halder shook his head. “For one, the army and police will be on the lookout. And I wouldn't like to take the chance of you getting caught.”

“I'm well able to look after myself.”

“So I've noticed.”

“I'm also beginning to think I'm your good-luck charm.” She half smiled and leaned over, kissed him briefly on the lips.

Something sparked in him, and he responded, drawing her close, feeling the rise of her breasts against his chest through her cotton blouse as she moved into his arms.

He smiled. “And what the devil was
that
for?”

“Does there have to be a reason?”

“No, but I think there might be.”

“Take me with you. Please? I'd feel safer, rather than staying here. And I can help you find the passageway a lot quicker.”

“I guess I never could say no to a beautiful woman.”

That same afternoon, Achmed Farnad was in the barn, working feverishly, sweat running down his face. He had the trapdoor open and he grabbed the Luger pistol, then hauled out the radio and battery.

Two truckloads of British troops had swept into the village, were searching every house and hovel. There was no point tempting providence. The best thing to do was bury the radio somewhere in the desert and get rid of the gun.

Mafouz had the donkey and cart waiting, and Achmed hefted the radio onto the cart, then the battery, and hurriedly covered them with old sackcloth and some scrap metal. “You know what to do, Mafouz. Be careful, my son. Quickly, now!”

As the boy led the donkey out, Achmed saw his wife hurrying towards them, chickens scattering in her path. “Achmed! The soldiers are coming—!”

Achmed' s blood turned to ice. Pursuing her across the yard was a British officer and half a dozen of his men. Behind them was Wafa, the crabby old midwife, being helped by two more soldiers. The officer had his revolver out, and he led them into the barn. Wafa pointed an accusing finger. “That's him. He's the one!”

“Traitorous witch!” Achmed spat. In his panic, he realized to his horror that he still had the Luger in his hand. Before he had a chance to toss it away, one of the soldiers screamed, “The sod's got a gun!”

A rifle shot cracked, a terrible pain blossomed in Achmed' s side, and he clutched at his wound and keeled over. His wife and son screamed, and were held back as the troops covered him with their weapons.

“Get a medic!” the officer roared. “We want him alive.”

Achmed was still conscious as the soldiers rushed forward to give him first aid. Then he saw the officer pull the sackcloth from the cart and toss aside the metal junk, revealing the radio underneath. “Achmed Farnad, I'm arresting you on suspicion of aiding and abetting enemy agents.”

Captain Willi Neumann was unhappy.

A small man, broad and muscular, the son of a Hamburg docker, his ruddy twenty-six-year-old face looked aged before its time. Unlike his father and three generations before him who had succumbed to the lure of the sea, he'd been bitten by the flying bug and joined the Luftwaffe at seventeen. With three tours of duty in Russia flying Junkers transports behind him, in all kinds of weather imaginable and with Soviet fighter pilots and flak crews constantly doing their utmost to blast him out of the skies, Neumann had possessed the Devil's own luck, suffering nothing more than a minor shrapnel wound in his left thigh that had barely needed a half-dozen stitches.

That afternoon at Practica di Mare airfield, he wondered if his luck was going to change for the worse. It was bad enough having to fly over enemy territory
and
land on enemy soil, but his latest problem only added to his troubles. As the senior flying officer, he was in charge of the two crews—four Luftwaffe flight officers including himself—manning the two Dakotas detailed to fly Skorzeny and his men on their mission to Egypt. He'd worked with Skorzeny once before, dropping him and two dozen of his men on a mission behind Soviet lines in the dead of winter, and was quite certain the colonel was raving mad, even if after Mussolini's daring rescue he was considered the golden-haired boy in Berlin. Neumann didn't know exactly what the the colonel was getting up to in Cairo dressing his men and himself in American uniforms; his own briefings had been confined to the flying end of things and the rest wasn't his business. But the weather was—and the safety of his crews.

He held the forecast sheets in his hand as he stood outside the hangar with Skorzeny, a cool wind blowing in from the sea, less than a kilometer away, the sun still warm and bright but starting to drop, twilight beginning to creep in. Back inside the hangar, his own crews and Skorzeny's paratroops were waiting restlessly, men of action who found inactivity the worst fate of all. “It looks like we may have a problem, Colonel.”

Skorzeny stood before him, his massive size dwarfing Neumann. “Explain.”

“The reports indicate there's a risk of very heavy fog all along this part of the Italian coast, over the entire twenty-four hours to come, and it could be on its way very soon. If the predictions are accurate, it may be really bad—treacherous, in fact. Which for us means poor visibility. And poor visibility, as you know, can hamper takeoff and landing.”

“I'm not concerned with landing,” Skorzeny answered brusquely. “Only takeoff, Neumann. Surely it can still be done even if the fog's really bad?”

Neumann shrugged. “Any of my crews could take off pretty much blind, that's not the problem. And we're all reasonably familiar with the Dakota, having been trained on it at the Luftwaffe special operations unit in Berlin. In fact, two of the crew flew them while working for commercial airlines before the war. But it's really a question of safety and risk. If we have very bad fog here at the airfield we could find ourselves in dire trouble, on or after takeoff, if either aircraft suffered engine failure or a serious technical problem.”

“But surely control tower could help guide us down by radio if we had to return to the airfield?”

“That's still no guarantee of a safe landing, if conditions are bad. There's such a thing as an aircraft's operating limits, and they apply as much to weather and visibility. We might not be able to
see
the runway lights, let alone the runway, and that kind of thing spells nothing but danger. I wouldn't like to take the risk of trying to land again in dense fog with near-zero visibility, not with two aircraft fully laden with fuel, men, and munitions. It would be insane. And there's nowhere else we could try to land in these parts. South of Rome, the Allies control the airfields—and even there they'll have the same weather, if the forecasts are to be believed.”

Skorzeny ran a massive hand over his face and sighed, then stared out at the coast with narrowed eyes, as if trying to discern the weather threat for himself. “
Nothing
can be allowed to stop us, Neumann. Not even the likelihood of heavy fog. The signal I received from Berlin expressly says we're on alert. Which could mean taking off at a moment's notice if we get the word. That's unlikely until darkness falls, I know, but that's how it stands.”

“But it's the weather we're talking about, Colonel. We can defy nature only at our peril. If anything should go wrong, the lives of your men could be at serious risk, and those of my crews too.”

“I'll defy
anything
that gets in the way of this mission, Captain, nature included. We do what we must, and we go when we have to. Fog or no fog, I want those aircraft off the ground if and when the time comes.”

“But the safety of the crew and passengers—”