Treasure of Khan

path, humming quietly as it disappeared into the night.

'A shame. I was starting to get attached to that machine,' Giordino muttered as they quickly scrambled up the hill.

'Hopefully, a camel herder in the Gobi Desert will put it to good use.'

Cresting the ravine, they ducked behind a crumbling wall of the bakery and peered around the front lot.

Corsov's car was nowhere to be seen.

'Remind me to bad-mouth the KGB next time we're in public,' Giordino said.

A half mile down the road, they suddenly eyed the red flash of a pair of taillights, illuminated from a tap on the brakes.

'Let's hope that's our boy,' Pitt said.

The duo took off from the building and ran down the road at a sprint. Approaching the crunching sound of tires on gravel, they jumped to the side of the road and hesitated as a car with its headlights off crept out of the darkness. It was the gray Toyota.

'Good evening, gentlemen,' Corsov grinned as Pitt and Giordino climbed into the car. His breath filled the interior with the odor of vodka. 'A successful tour?'

'Yes,' Pitt replied, 'but our hosts wish to follow us home.'

Behind the bakery, they could see the flash of a bouncing headlight beam from down the hill. Without a word, Corsov whipped the car around and sped off down the road. In minutes, he was barreling down a mix of back-road city streets before suddenly appearing at the rear of their hotel.

'Good night, gentlemen,' Corsov slurred. 'We shall reconvene tomorrow, when you can give me a full report.'

'Thanks, Ivan,' Pitt said. 'Drive safe.'

'But of course.'

As Pitt slammed the door shut, the Toyota burst off down the street disappearing around a corner with its tires squealing. Walking to the hotel, Giordino suddenly stopped and pointed. Across the street, music and laughter wafted from the little cafe, still bustling at the late hour.

Giordino turned to Pitt and smiled. 'I believe, boss, that you owe me a diversion.'

-19-

Theresa sat in the study, looking through a seismic report with a thousand-mile stare. A melancholy depression, tinged with anger, had gradually replaced her shock at Roy's brutal killing. He had been like a brother to her and his murder the night before was painful to accept. It had been made worse by the appearance of Tatiana in the courtyard shortly after Roy expired. With glaring eyes that spit fire, she'd hissed at Theresa.

'Do not obey and the same fate will befall you!'

The guard who had killed Roy was summoned to crudely drag Theresa back to her room and keep her under armed guard.

Since that moment, she and Wofford had been under constant surveillance. She gazed across the study to the entryway, where two stone-faced guards stood staring back at her. Their brightly colored silk dels, or tunics, softened their appearance, but she knew from the night before that they were highly trained killers.

Alongside her, Wofford sat with his bum leg propped on a chair, deeply engrossed in a geological report. He had been shocked by Roy's death but seemed to have shaken it off quickly. More likely, he was using the task at hand to conceal his emotions, Theresa decided.

'We might as well give them the work they asked for,' he had told her. 'It might be the only thing that keeps us alive.'

Maybe he was right, she thought, trying to regain focus on the report in her hands. It was a geological assessment of a basin area in an unidentified plain. Sandstone and limestone rifts were identified as being overlaid with clay and shale stretched across the basin. It was just the type of stratigraphy that was conducive to subsurface petroleum reserves.

'The geology seems promising, wherever it is,' she said to Wofford.

'Take a look at this,' he replied, unrolling a computer printout across the table. Known as a seismic section, the printout showed a computer-enhanced image of several layered levels of sediment for a confined location. The chart was created by a seismic survey team that sent man-made shocks into the ground and recorded the sound reflections. Theresa stood up to get a better look, examining the chart with fresh interest. It was unlike any seismic image she had seen before. Most subsurface profiles were opaque and smudgy, resembling a Rorschach inkblot left out in a rainstorm. The profile before her was a crisp image, with clearly delineated subsurface layers.

'Amazing image,' she remarked. 'Must be made with some cutting-edge technology. I've never seen anything this precise.'

'It definitely beats anything we've ever used in the field. But that's not the amazing aspect,' he added.

Reaching over, he pointed to a bulbous shape near the bottom of the page that extended off the edge.

Theresa leaned over and studied it carefully.

'That looks like a classic, not to mention nicely sized, anticlinal trap,' she said, referring to the dome-shaped layer of sediments. The cusp of a sedimentary dome like the one before her was a flashing red light for geophysicists, as it is a prime spot for petroleum deposits to accumulate.

'Nicely sized, indeed,' Wofford replied. Pulling over a stack of similar profiles, he spread several on the table. 'That particular trap stretches nearly forty kilometers. There's six other smaller ones I've found in the same region.'

'It certainly looks like the right conditions for a deposit.'

'You never know until the drill gets wet, but from these images, it looks pretty promising.'

'And there's six more? That's a tremendous reserve potential.'

'At least six more. I haven't digested all the reports yet, but it is mind-boggling. Taking a stone's throw from the image, there might be two billion barrels potentially sitting in that one trap alone. Add in the others and you could have over ten billion barrels. And that's just for one field. No telling how much is in the entire region.'

'Incredible. Where is the field located?'

'That's the hitch. Someone has carefully removed all geographic references from the data. I can only tell that it is subterranean, and that the surface topography is flat with a predominant sandstone base.'

'You mean we might be looking at the next North Sea oil fields and you don't know where they are located?'

'I haven't a clue.'

***

Sarghov laughed between sips from a cup of tea, his big belly jiggling with each guffaw.

'Charging through the night on a forklift, toting an Avarga security guard through the air,' he chuckled.

'You Americans always have such a flair for dramatics.'

'It wasn't the understated exit I would have preferred,' Pitt replied from across the cafe table, 'but Al insisted we ride, not walk.'

'And we still nearly missed last call.' Giordino smirked before sipping his morning coffee.

'I'm sure management is scratching their heads, wondering why a pair of Westerners were waltzing around their facility. A shame you didn't find any evidence that our oil survey friends had been there.'

'No, the only item of interest was the tunnel-boring machine. And it was concealed under a canvas tarp similar to the object that was removed from the freighter at Baikal.'

'It is possible the machine was stolen and brought into the country surreptitiously. Mongolia does not have easy access to high technology. Perhaps the company does not want the government to be aware of its technological equipment.'

'Yes, that could be true,' Pitt replied. 'I would still like to know what it was that they hauled away from Baikal under wraps.'

'Alexander, have there been any developments in the abduction investigation?' Giordino asked before biting