But Hunt shook his head, his simple sentence drowning out all of Jayden’s other thoughts the moment it reached his ears. “It’s C4.”
Jayden’s hands froze on the controls as he stared at the boxy, gray object. “What?”
“I think it’s a block of C4 that didn’t trigger for some reason when the rest of it took out this pipe. Look at the blast pattern. This didn’t happen from some kind of natural wave action or even a subsea earthquake. Certainly not an animal, even a very large one. This pipe was blasted apart, and for whatever reason, those bricks there were never triggered.”
The radio boomed again with the voice of a topside crewman. “Jayden, we need some better images of that breakage. Can you get closer? The footage you got of the other end is good, we know what needs to be done there, but now we need to see how we’re going to fix this side of things.”
Hunt shook his head slowly back and forth, not liking the proximity to the explosives.
Jayden eyeballed the distance from the C4 to the pipe and then spoke into his transmitter. “A little bit, but not much. Little bit of a tricky cross-current down here, but I’ll see what I can do, over.”
Hunt looked over at Jayden. “Be careful. We don’t need to bump into that C4 and maybe nudge the trigger the rest of the way.”
Jayden got an odd look on his face and then picked up the radio transmitter again. “Topside, who would put C4 down here, anyway? Was that left over from of the installation process?”
There was a few second delay before a reply came back from a senior crewman. “It was not part of the installation. We don’t know where it came from. Proceed with extreme caution, over.”
Jayden put his hand back on the joystick and inched the stick forward. The sub inched toward the broken pipe. When he eased back on the thruster, the sub would drift immediately with the current toward the stack of C4.
“Watch it, watch it!” Hunt warned.
Perspiration rolled down Jayden’s forehead despite the cool temperature in the sub’s cabin. His hands worked the controls as the sub neared the shattered pipe that spewed severed cables out of its end.
“Just a little closer should do it,” came the crewman over the radio, indicating that the video feed was not quite clear and close enough.
But Hunt shook his head as the sub started to wobble, buffeted by currents. “I don’t like it, Jayden. We don’t want to bump that thing.”
“Right. We’re outta here.” Jayden accelerated the sub while turning left, hoping to bring them closer to the broken pipe as they passed by it in a wide U-turn that would take them away from the C4. But as he swung into the turn, the voice on the radio telling them the video was great quality, a sudden downwelling of water slammed them into the bottom. As soon as they hit, billowing clouds of mud were stirred up into the water by the sub, even though Jayden turned off the thrusters so as not to make it worse.
They flipped over and around before coming to rest in a total brownout.
“Not sure which way to go!” Jayden watched the compass spin wildly from the craft’s gyrations.
“Take us straight up,” Hunt advised.
Nodding, Jayden hit the button that activated the sub’s airbags, one in each side pontoon, for sudden lift. But as he did, the sub was hit by a cross-current that turned it sideways, rocketing into the block of C4.
Hunt’s warning was drowned out by the dull boom of the detonation.
The sub’s floodlights suddenly went dark. Two seconds after that, the control panel indicator lights also blinked out. Hunt and Jayden both braced themselves by gripping the frames of their seats.
“We’ve lost power! I’ve got no control,” Jayden yelled.
“Let’s hope those airbags stay inflated and we’re rising.” Hunt squinted out the dome into the swirling blackness. He couldn’t tell which way was up. All they could do was to sit and wait.
“Spam in a can,” Hunt said.
“What?”
“We’re like spam in a can right now. It’s what test pilot Chuck Yeager said about the first astronaut to orbit the Earth. That he wasn’t a real pilot, just meat in a can.”
“Thanks, Carter.”
“Hey, you know what else pilots say?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. Because if this can plops back to the bottom…” He left the sobering thought unfinished. To be powerless 2,000 feet down without even a communications link to the ship would mean a slow death by suffocation as their oxygen ran out.
But Hunt’s next words buoyed their spirits. “It’s getting lighter.”
Indeed, looking at what they now knew to be up, through the dome, they could see the barest lightening of the water, meaning they were looking towards the distant sun. It meant that the buoyancy airbags were doing their job, lifting the sub through the water toward the surface. The ride seemed to take forever, but gradually it grew brighter and brighter until it was obviously daylight, meaning they were definitely rocketing towards the surface.
A few minutes later the powerless submersible was close enough to the surface for Hunt to make out the underside of their support vessel. It occurred to him that should they come up directly beneath it, striking it, there would be nothing they could do. Without power, they had no steering, nor could they communicate with the ship to tell them to move it out of the way. But they came up almost a football field away from it, bobbing like a cork in the sunny Mediterranean. It had become stiflingly hot in the cabin and Jayden and Hunt wasted no time in popping the hatch to rejoice in the cool sea breeze. Upon spotting the bright yellow vessel, the ship’s crew deployed a tender vessel to retrieve the submersible and its crew. Knowing they had been out of contact, they wasted no time reaching them.
As the sub was tied to the tender, Jayden and Hunt were helped into the support boat. One of the boat crewman remarked how they’d seen the video feed of the broken pipe before it was disrupted. “Big section of pipe missing. We’ve got our work cut out for us to replace it, but thanks to your surveillance, we know what to expect.”
Hunt agreed before adding, “I’ll say one thing. Taking out those cables was no accident. Somebody sure wanted to knock out communications between Egypt and the rest of the world.”
Chapter 2
“According to the LiDAR scans, it should be right here.” Dr. Madison Chambers directed the beam of her flashlight to the far corner of a room that once housed a mummy and accompanying treasures meant to see it into the afterlife. LiDAR, or Light Detection And Ranging, was laser-based technology that had recently allowed archaeological discoveries to be made from air-based platforms such as planes. Once an anomaly was detected, field teams would zero in on what was found via imaging for some boots-on-the-ground investigation.
That investigation was here and now, and Dr. Chambers was its leader. A respected archaeologist and tenured professor at a major American research university, Madison found herself in charge of a thirty-person team of scientists, technicians and research assistants, most of whom were now above ground in the camp tents or at ground-level excavation sites. The LiDAR imaging had led her to this place at the very bottom of the pyramid, and she suspected a subterranean chamber of some sort lay not too far away.
Short of stature at just over five foot tall, but long on bravery, Dr. Chambers, long chestnut hair in a ponytail beneath a ball cap, walked across the stone floor to a caved-in section of wall. Crumbling sections weren’t uncommon in the pyramid, but as one of the newly discovered rooms at the base of the pyramid, the exciting thing about it was that it could perhaps act as a doorway to somewhere new.