something to the rock climber. By his tone, Pitt guessed he was telling the man to get moving.
The scuffle of hard leather on soft rock began to move away, until the man reached the ground a few minutes later and remounted his horse. The clopping hooves echoed again, then gradually faded into the distance.
'That was close,' Giordino said.
'Lucky thing our climber had a change of heart. That knuckleball of yours would have left a sting,' Pitt replied, nodding toward the rock in Giordino's hand.
'Fastball. My best stuff is a fastball,' he corrected.
Gazing off toward the trail of dust kicked up by the horsemen, he asked, 'We stay put?'
'Yes. My money says they'll be back for another visit.'
Pitt thought back to what he had read about the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. A feigned retreat was the favorite battlefield tactic of Genghis Khan when facing a powerful opponent. His army often orchestrated elaborate staged retreats, some lasting several days. The unsuspecting enemy would be drawn to a defenseless position, where a punishing counterattack would destroy them. Pitt knew that taking to the desert on foot would place them at a similarly deadly risk against the mobile horsemen. He wasn't going to take that chance until he was sure they were gone for good.
Crouched in their stone lair, the two men rested from their night adventure while patiently waiting for danger to dissipate on the horizon. An hour later, a sudden rumble shook them awake. The noise sounded like faint thunder, but the sky was clear. Scanning to the north, they saw a high cloud of dust trailing the six horsemen. The horses were galloping at top speed, pounding down the path of the original trail like it was the home stretch at Santa Anita. In seconds, the pack raced past Pitt and Giordino's position until they reached the end of the motorcycle trail. Slowing their pace and splitting up, the horsemen fanned out and searched the area in all directions. The horsemen all rode with their heads hung down, scanning the ground for prints or other clues to Pitt and Giordino's disappearance. They searched for nearly an hour, again coming up empty. Then almost as suddenly as they appeared, the horsemen regrouped and headed back north along the trail, moving at a canter.
'A nice encore,' Giordino said as the horses finally disappeared over the horizon.
'I think the party is finally over,' Pitt replied. 'Time for us to hit the highway and find a burger stand.'
The men hadn't eaten since the day before and their stomachs rumbled together in empty harmony.
Climbing down the rock ridge, they moved toward the trail, stopping at a clump of tamarisk shrubs growing in thick concentration. Pitt grinned as he eyed the center branch, which was sprouting from the buried shell of the sidecar. A haphazard ring of rocks circled the partially exposed portions of the vehicle, obscuring its sides from the casual observer.
'Not bad for a nighttime camouflage job,' Pitt said.
'I think we were a little lucky, too,' Giordino added. He patted his coat pocket, which held the horseshoe he had removed from the sidecar's cowling.
Pitt's scheme to make the motorcycle disappear had worked better than he'd expected. After running out of gas, he knew it was just a matter of concealment. Backtracking along their trail on foot, he'd found a hardened gravel gully a few hundred feet behind, then returned to the motorcycle, brushing away the original tire tracks along the way with a thick strand of scrub brush. Then he and Giordino had pushed the motorcycle and sidecar backward along the same path to the gully, stopping periodically to brush away their footprints under the beam of the headlight. To the pursuers following the tracks, there was no way of telling that the motorcycle had actually moved backward from its last marks.
Pitt and Giordino had pushed the motorcycle and sidecar down the gully as far as they could, then set about burying it. Giordino had found a small tool kit beneath the seat of the sidecar. Working under the light of the headlamp, they disassembled the sidecar from the motorcycle. Laying it flat in a nearby hollow, they were able to bury the motorcycle under a few inches of sand. The task was made easier once Pitt fashioned a shovel blade from the seat back. The lightly blowing sand, cursed till now, aided their cause by covering their interment project in a light layer of dust.
The sidecar proved more troublesome to hide once they discovered a hard layer of bedrock lying six inches beneath the surface. Realizing they would never get the sidecar buried without a shovel and pickax, they dragged it to a cluster of tamarisk bushes and buried what they could in the center of the thicket. Giordino stacked rocks around the perimeter while Pitt dug up a thick shrub and planted it on the seat, its droopy branches covering the sides. Though far from invisible, the ad hoc camouflage had done the trick, as evidenced by a set of hoofprints that scratched the sand just a few feet away.
As the midday sun beat down on them, sending a battery of heat waves shimmering off the desert floor, the two men looked nostalgically at the half-buried sidecar.
'Didn't think I'd miss riding in that contraption,' Giordino said.
'Not so bad, given the alternative,' Pitt replied, scanning the horizon for signs of life. A barren emptiness stretched in all directions, punctuated by an eerie silence.
Pitt brought his left arm up in front of his face, positioning his wrist so that his Doxa watch was flat at eye level. Then he pivoted his body around toward the sun, turning his body until the bright yellow orb was aligned with the hour hand on his watch, which read two o'clock. An old survival trick, he knew that south must be halfway between the hour hand and twelve o'clock if he was standing in the Northern Hemisphere. Peering over his watch at the terrain, he visually lined up one as south, seven as north, and west was between the two at four o'clock.
'We go west,' Pitt said, pointing toward some red-hued hills that ambled across the horizon.
'Somewhere in that direction is the Trans-Mongolian railway, which runs from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. If we head west, we'll have to run into it eventually.'
'Eventually,' Giordino repeated slowly. 'Why does that sound like we don't have a clue how far that could be?'
'Because we don't.' Pitt shrugged, then turned toward the hills and started walking.
-27-
The Gobi desert hosts some of the most hostile temperature extremes in the world. Blistering summertime temperatures of over 110 degrees plummet to minus 40 degrees in the winter months. Even in a single day, temperature swings of 60 degrees are not uncommon. Taken from the Mongolian word meaning 'waterless place,' the Gobi rates as the world's fifth-largest desert. The arid lands were once an inland sea, and, in later eons, a swampy stomping ground for dinosaurs. The Southwest Gobi still rates as a favorite destination for globe-trotting paleontologists in search of pristine fossils.
To Pitt and Giordino, the vacant undulating plains resembled an ocean, though one made of sand, gravel, and stone. Pink sandstone bluffs and craggy red-rock outcroppings bounded a gravel plain blanketed with brown, gray, and ebony pebbles. Framed against a crisp blue sky, the barren land teemed with its own brand of wasteland beauty. For the two men trekking across the desolate mantle, the scenic environs were a calming diversion to the fact they were in a potential death zone.
The afternoon temperature bounded over the 100-degree mark as the sun seared the rocky ground. The winds had dwindled to a slight breeze, offering all the cooling power of a blowtorch. The two men didn't dare shorten their sleeves or long pants, knowing the ultraviolet ray protection was more important than a slight improvement in comfort. They reluctantly kept their coats as well, tying them around their waists for the chilly night ahead. Tearing a section of the jacket lining out, they fashioned silk bandannas on their heads, which made them look like a pair of wayward pirates.
But there was nothing humorous about the task at hand. On their second day without food or water, crossing a baking desert by day while facing near-freezing temperatures at night, they faced the double dangers of dehydration and hypothermia. Strangely, their hunger pangs had gone away, replaced by an unrelenting and unquenchable thirst. The pounds of dust swallowed during the motorcycle ride had hardly improved matters, adding to their dry, constricting throats.
To survive the desert heat, Pitt knew that conserving their strength was critical. They could survive three days without water, but over-expending themselves in the heat of the day could cut that time in half. Since they
