Treasure of Khan

rough dirt road. But that's exactly where he found himself. His back, rear, and legs all ached from the constant jarring. With every rut and pothole sending his teeth chattering, he was convinced that the truck manufacturer had neglected to install shocks and springs on the vehicle.

'The suspension on this thing must have been designed by the Marquis de Sade,' he grimaced as they rolled over a harsh bump.

'Relax,' Giordino grinned from behind the wheel. 'This is the smooth section of the highway.'

Gunn turned a lighter shade of pale, observing that the highway consisted of a weathered pair of dirt tracks through the high steppe grass. They had bounced across the open lands since midday, en route to Borjin's compound of Xanadu. They had to rely on Pitt and Giordino's collective memory to find their way there and several times were forced to guess which of the myriad of tracks to follow over the rolling hills. Familiar landmarks confirmed they were on the right route as they approached the small mountain range to the southeast that they knew housed the estate.

'Another two hours, Rudi,' Pitt said, gauging the distance out the windshield, 'and your troubles will be over.'

Gunn silently shook his head, having the distinct feeling that his troubles were just beginning. A follow-up phone call from Hiram Yaeger before they departed Ulaanbaatar had added a new sense of urgency and gravity to their mission. The revelation that an odd series of earthquakes had been occurring in Mongolia was impossible to ignore.

'We're just scratching the surface on establishing a correlation, but this much we know,' Yaeger said in a weary voice. 'A series of earthquakes have rocked several areas in north-central Mongolia, as well as a dispersed area in and around the southern border of China. The earthquakes are unique from the norm in that their epicenters are relatively close to the surface. They mostly have been moderately sized quakes, as measured on the Richter scale, yet have produced high-intensity surface waves, which can be particularly destructive. Dr. McCammon has discovered that the foreshocks that preceded each quake are nearly uniform in intensity, which is inconsistent with a naturally occurring earthquake.'

'So you think there is some sort of man-made activity that is inducing the earthquakes?' Pitt asked.

'As unlikely as it sounds, the seismological records seem to indicate as much.'

'I know that oil drilling sometimes generates earthquakes, and underground nuclear testing has suspected links. I recall that when the old Rocky Flats Arsenal near Denver began injecting contaminated water deep into the ground, earthquakes shook the surrounding area. Have you determined if there is some sort of major drilling operation going on? Or perhaps some nuclear testing by Mongolia's neighbor to the south?'

'The epicenters in the northern part of the country have been located in a mountainous region east of Ulaanbaatar, a remote and rugged area, from what we've been able to determine. And a drilling-induced quake would not show the uniform preshock seismicity, according to Max. As far as the southern-area quakes, we would see it in the seismic profiles if a nuclear test blast had occurred.'

'Then let me take a guess and say that brings us to the late Dr. von Wachter.'

'Give that man a cookie,' Yaeger said. 'When Max told us that von Wachter had been killed in a landslide in the Khentii Mountains east of Ulaanbaatar, the light went on. The coincidence was too great.

We concluded that his acoustic seismic array, or an offshoot of the technology, must have something to do with the earthquakes.'

'That doesn't seem possible,' Gunn said. 'You would need a tremendous shock wave to set things off.'

'That's the general perception,' Yaeger replied. 'But Dr. McCammon, working with Max and some other seismologists, has a theory on that. We spoke to a colleague of von Wachter's, who had been told by the doctor of his success at reflection imagery. The secret of his detailed imaging, if you will, was the ability to condense and packet the acoustic waves emitted into the ground. Normally transmitted sound waves behave like a pebble thrown into a pond, rippling out in all directions. Von Wachter developed a means of packeting the waves so that they remained concentrated in a narrow band as they penetrate the earth. The resulting waves, as they reflect back to the surface, apparently produce a crisp, detailed image far beyond any existing technology. Or so the colleague stated.'

'So how do you get from a seismic image to an earthquake?' Gunn persisted.

'By two leaps of faith. First, that von Wachter's system produces a detailed image that visibly identifies active subterranean faults and fault lines. That is hardly a stretch of the imagination for shallow faults, which existing technologies can already detect.'

'Okay, so von Wachter's seismic array can accurately pinpoint active faults beneath the surface,' Gunn said. 'You would still need to disturb those pressure points in some manner, say by drilling or with explosives, in order to produce a rupture and subsequent earthquake.'

'That's our second leap. You are correct, the fault would need to be disturbed in order to trigger an earthquake. But a seismic wave is a seismic wave. The fault doesn't care if it comes from an explosion ...'

'... or an acoustic blast,' Pitt said, finishing Yaeger's sentence. 'It makes sense. The ten-foot hanging tripod is a transducer array system that generates the acoustic blast. From the size of the transducers and the power supply that goes with it, it looked to me like they could generate a sonic boom.'

'If the acoustic blast is pinpointed at a fault line, the resulting vibrations from the seismic waves could induce a fracture, then, bammo, instant earthquake. It's just a theory, but McCammon and Max both agree it could work. Perhaps von Wachter's imaging technology was never intended as such but was discovered as an inadvertent side effect.'

'Either way, it is in the hands of Borjin now. We've got to assume he possesses the technology and the ability to use it,' Pitt said.

'You've already seen the effects up close,' Yaeger said. 'One of the quakes that matched the profile was at Lake Baikal. Perhaps by accident, it set off the underwater landslide, which created the seiche wave that nearly killed you. We now suspect their real target was an oil pipeline at the northern end of the lake, which they succeeded in rupturing.'

'That explains why they tried to sink the Vereshchagin and destroy our computers. We told Borjin's sister, Tatiana, of our seismic studies in the lake. She must have realized that our equipment would have detected the man-made signals that preceded the earthquake,' Giordino said.

'Signals that we could have traced to a vessel on the lake ... the Primorski,' Pitt added.

'So they've already put the technology to destructive use,' Gunn said.

'It's worse than you think. We don't know the purpose or motivation behind the earthquakes in Mongolia and China. But the characteristics of those quakes exactly match the two recent Persian Gulf earthquakes that have devastated oil exports from the region.'

The men in the hotel room were shocked. That the technology existed to induce an earthquake was startling enough. More unbelievable was that it was being used to instigate a near-global economic collapse, and that the trail led to the enigmatic mogul who lived in the hinterlands of Mongolia. Borjin's games of deception and destruction were becoming clearer to Pitt now. With his apparent discovery of oil reserves in Inner Mongolia, he was positioning himself to become the de facto oil king of East Asia.

Pitt doubted his ambitions would end there.

'Has this been elevated?' Pitt asked.

'I've been in touch with Vice President Sandecker and have a briefing scheduled with him. The old bull wants to see something concrete. He promised he would have the president convene a National Security Council special session if the facts warrant immediate attention. I told him of your involvement, and he asked that you provide proof that the earthquakes can be specifically linked to Borjin.' Admiral James Sandecker, now Vice President Sandecker, was Pitt's former boss at NUMA and still maintained a close relationship with Pitt and his staff at the marine agency.

'The proof,' Pitt said, 'is in the laboratory on Borjin's compound. He's got a seismic array sitting there, though I don't think it is the same one used at Baikal.'

'Perhaps the Baikal device was flown to the Persian Gulf. We have to assume that there are at least two of the devices at large,' Yaeger said.

'Three might be a safer bet. I guess you've proven by the Baikal and gulf quakes that they can trigger the device aboard a ship.'