Skeleton Crew (Sam Reilly Book 27) by Christopher Cartwright

Author:Christopher Cartwright [Cartwright, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashton Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Trident GS

Sam Reilly heard shouting from the cabin he shared with his best friend. He exchanged a glance with Tom. “Where’s that coming from?”

Tom stood up. “It sounds like it’s coming from the east bank.”

Sam’s heart missed a beat. He ran down the corridor and stepped out onto the deck. There was a commotion on the eastern sandbank. The local team who was operating the bulldozers and dredgers, clearing away the sand and gravel that formed the eastern bank to make way for the Trident, were yelling in Arabic.

The speech was gunfire fast. Sam was catching the few words in Arabic shared with the French language, but otherwise, missed everything.

But there wasn’t the sort of high pitch shrill of a serious disaster.

Still, the two men began to run along the gangway toward the Trident’s bow. If he had to guess, Sam figured one of the bulldozers had probably slipped into the embankment, falling on its side, or worse yet, into the canal.

They reached the railing at the bow.

Sam’s eyes swept the eastern bank.

It was a sight to see. The place appeared like an oversized kids’ play area at the beach, with different bulldozers, all working the sand. They were excavating a large, deep canal around the bow of the Trident which had already penetrated more than thirty feet into the eastern sand dunes.

He counted each of the bulldozers.

There were five.

All of them upright.

A large flag with their number rose from the back of their driver’s cabin, identifying them by their number. Four had stopped excavating. Their drivers had placed them in the park position with their bucket positioned firmly in the sand for stability. Their engines switched off.

The fifth one had also stopped moving, but its engine was still running. Fumes were rising from its exhaust.

Sam’s eyes concentrated on an object buried deep in the sand in front of the bulldozer.

It was little more than a dark outline.

Looked like planks of wood.

Even at this distance, he could tell they had uncovered what appeared to him to be some sort of traditional boat.

He imagined in the vast, sun-kissed expanse of the desert – through which the Suez Canal now ran – the relentless winds had been sculpting the dunes for centuries. They had been shaping and reshaping the arid landscape in an ever-changing dance. This archaic vessel might have remained buried under the golden sands forever, had it not been for the unlikely set of events that had recently led to an excavator's metal claws tearing into the earth.

Sam picked up his local hand-held UHF radio and depressed the mic. “Excavator One, this is Sam Reilly. What have you got?”

The excavator operator, his skin dark from the ever-present scorching sun in the region, glanced up at the bow of the Trident.

Sam waved at him.

The man replied through the radio. It was close and the clarity near perfect. “I don’t know sir. My initial scrape of the bucket hit an unexpected solidity beneath the sand. It is hard and looks wooden.”

Sam frowned.

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