The sound of sixty sheet piles hitting dark rock bedrock at sixty blows per minute was not music, but to Master Borin Bronze-Lung, it was close enough.
Out in the narrows of the Gulf of Thalassos, where four miles of open ocean separated the southern headlands from the outer reef, the pile-driving barge The Hercules stood anchored by four massive steel spuds.
Above the barge, the fifty-ton steam drop hammer rose. Then it fell with a relentless, earth-shaking rhythm that sent blast waves shaking through three deep-water lengths of clear green salt water.
CLANG-THUMP. CLANG-THUMP. CLANG-THUMP.
With every blow, an eighty-foot sheet of Larssen steel, eighteen inches wide and weighing nearly two tons, sank three inches deeper into the fractured marine bedrock.
Giles Croft stood on the upper narrow high walkway of the eighty-foot circular template guide, checking the plumb of pile number thirty-four with his brass transit.
His oilskin jacket was soaked with salt spray, his notebook shielded beneath a sheet of stiff celluloid.
“Posture true within one-tenth of a degree,” Giles called down to Toby Karr, who stood on the lower template staging with a pair of steel measuring tongs.
