Treasure Of Khan Part 22

"As you wish, General Secretary," s.h.i.+nzhe bowed.

"Tell me first, though. Who is it that is making this contemptuous demand?"

s.h.i.+nzhe looked helplessly at Yee. "It is a small ent.i.ty that is unknown to our ministry," she answered, addressing the president. "They are called the Avarga Oil Consortium."

-14-

THEY WERE HOPELESSLY LOST. Two weeks after departing Ulan-Ude with instructions to explore the upper Selenga River valley, the five-man seismic exploration team had lost its way. None of the men from the Russian oil company LUKOIL were from the region, which added to their misfortune. The trouble began when someone spilled a hot coffee on the GPS unit, drowning it in a quick death. It was not enough to halt their progression south, even when they stumbled across the Mongolian border and off the edge of the Siberian maps they carried for insurance. What kept them going was a series of subsurface folds detected from the pounding of the "thumper" truck that indicated possible structural traps. Structural traps in the sediment are natural collection basins where pockets of oil and gas can acc.u.mulate. The survey team had meandered southeast while tracking the deep traps that meant possible oil and completely lost track of the river.

"All we have to do is head north and follow our tracks where they're visible," said a short, balding man named Dimitri. The team leader stood peering west, watching the long shadows cast by the trees as sunset approached.

"I knew we should have left a trail of bread crumbs," grinned a young a.s.sistant engineer named Vlad.

"I don't think we have enough fuel to reach Kyakhta," replied the thumper's driver. Like the vehicle itself, he was a big, burly man with thick limbs. He climbed into the open driver's door and stretched out on the bench seat for a catnap with his meaty hands tucked behind his head. The big thirty-ton rig carried a steel slab under its belly, which pounded the ground, sending seismic shocks deep into the earth. Small transceivers were placed various distances from the truck, which received the signals as they bounced off the subsurface sediment layers. Computerized processing converted the signals into visual maps and images of the ground below.

A dirty red four-wheel-drive truck pulled alongside and stopped, its two occupants jumping out to join the debate.

"We had no authorization to cross the border, and now we don't even know where the border is," complained the support truck's driver.

"The seismic readings justify our continued tracking," Dimitri replied. "Besides, we were ordered to take to the field for two weeks. We'll let the company bureaucrats worry about obtaining permission to drill. As for the border, we know it is somewhere north of us. Our immediate concern will be to acquire fuel in order to reach the border."

The driver was about to complain when a m.u.f.fled boom in the distance diverted his attention.

"Up there, on the hill," Vlad said.

Above the rocky hill they stood on rose a small mountain range, which glimmered green from its pine-covered crags. A few miles distant, a puff of gray smoke drifted into the cloudless sky from a thick-wooded ridge. After the blast's echo receded from the hilltops, the sound of heavy machinery rumbled faintly down the slopes.

"What in the name of Mother Russia was that?" grumbled the truck's driver, awakened by the blast.

"An explosion up on the mountain," Dimitri replied. "Probably a mining operation."

"Nice to know we're not the only people in this wilderness," the driver muttered, then returned to his nap.

"Perhaps someone up there can tell us the way home," Vlad ventured.

An answer was short in the waiting. The hum of an engine drew closer until a late-model four-wheel drive appeared in the distance. The vehicle rounded a hill, then barreled across the open flats toward the surveyors. The car hardly slowed until it was nearly upon them, then stopped abruptly in a cloud of dust. The two occupants sat motionless for a moment, then exited the vehicle cautiously.

The Russians could tell immediately that the men were Mongolian, with their flat noses and high cheekbones. The shorter of the two stepped forward and barked harshly, "What are you doing here?"

"We're a bit off track," replied the unflappable Dimitri. "We somehow lost the road while surveying the valley. We need to get back across the border to Kyakhta, but we're not sure if we have enough fuel. Can you help us out?"

The Mongol's eyes grew larger at hearing the word "survey," and for the first time he carefully studied the thumper truck parked behind the men.

"You are conducting oil exploration?" he asked in a calmer tone.

The engineer nodded yes.

"There is no oil here," the Mongol barked. Waving his arm around, he said, "You will bivouac here for the night. Stay in this spot. I will bring fuel for your truck in the morning and direct you toward Kyakhta."

Without a farewell or pleasantry, he turned and climbed into the car with his driver and roared back up the mountain.

"Our problems are solved," Dimitri said with satisfaction. "We'll set up camp here and get an early start in the morning. I only hope you have left us some vodka," he said, patting the shoulder of his sleepy truck driver.

Darkness fell rapidly once the sun set over the hills, bringing with it a ripe chill to the night air. A fire was built in front of a large canvas tent, which the men crowded around while downing a tasteless dinner of canned stew and rice. It didn't take long for the nightly entertainment of cards and vodka to emerge, with cigarettes and pocket change ruling the pots.

"Three hands straight." Dimitri laughed as he raked in the winnings from a hand of preference, a Russian card game similar to gin rummy. His eyes glistened under heavy lids, and a trickle of vodka dripped from his chin as he gloated to his equally inebriated coworkers.

"Keep it up and you'll have enough for a dacha on the Black Sea," one countered.

"Or a black dachshund on the Caspian Sea," said another and laughed.

"This game is too rich for my blood, I'm afraid," griped Vlad, noting he was down a hundred rubles for the night. "I'm off to my sleeping bag to forget about Dimitri's cheating ways."

The young engineer ignored a slew of derisive remarks from the others as he staggered to his feet. Eyeing the canvas tent, he instead walked toward the rear of the thumper truck to relieve himself before turning in. In his inebriated state, he tripped and tumbled into a small gully beside the truck, sliding several feet downhill before colliding with a large rock. He lay there for a minute, clutching a wrenched knee and cursing his clumsiness, when he heard the clip-clop sound of horse hooves approaching the camp. Rolling to his hands and knees, he sluggishly crawled to the top of the ravine, where he could peer beneath the thumper truck and see the camp-fire on the opposite side.

The voices of his comrades fell silent as a small group of horses approached the camp. Vlad rubbed his eyes in disbelief when they came close enough to be illuminated by the fire's light. Six fierce-looking hors.e.m.e.n sat tall in the saddle, looking as if they had just ridden off a medieval tapestry. Each wore a long orange silk tunic, which ran to the knees and covered baggy white pants that were tucked into heavy leather boots. A bright blue sash around their waists held a sword in a scabbard, while over their shoulders they carried a compound bow and a quiver of feathered arrows. Their heads were covered by bowl-shaped metal helmets, which sprouted a tuft of horsehair from a center spike. Adding to their menacing appearance, the men all wore long thin mustaches that draped beneath their chins.

Dimitri raised himself from the fireside with a nearly full bottle of vodka and welcomed the hors.e.m.e.n to join them.

"A drink to your fine mounts, comrades," he slurred, hoisting the bottle into the air.

The offer was met by silence, all six riders staring coldly at the engineer. Then one of the hors.e.m.e.n reached to his side. In a lightning-quick move that Vlad would later replay in his mind a thousand times over, the horseman slammed a bow to his chest, yanked back the bowstring, and let fly a wooden arrow. Vlad never saw the arrow in flight, only watched as the bottle of vodka suddenly lurched from Dimitri's hand and shattered to the ground in a hundred pieces. A few paces away, Dimitri stood clutching his throat with his other hand, the feathered shaft of an arrow protruding through his fingers. The engineer sank to his knees with a gurgling cry for help, then fell to the ground as a torrent of blood surged down his chest.

The three men around the campfire jumped to their feet in shock, but that was to be the last move they would make. In an instant, a hail of arrows rained down on them like a tempest. The hors.e.m.e.n were killing machines, wielding their bows and firing a half dozen arrows apiece in mere seconds. The drunken surveyors had no chance, the archers finding their targets with ease at such close range. A brief sprinkling of cries echoed through the night and then it was over, each man lying dead with a tombstone of arrows protruding from his lifeless body.

Vlad watched the ma.s.sacre in wide-eyed terror, nearly crying out in shock when the first arrows took flight. His heart felt like it would beat out of his chest, and then the adrenaline hit, urging his body to get up and flee like the wind. Scrambling down the gully, he started to run, faster than he had ever run in his life before. The pain in his knee, the alcohol in his blood, it all vanished, replaced by the singular sensation of fear. He ran down the sloping foothills, oblivious to any unseen nighttime obstructions, pushed on by sheer panic. Several times he fell, cutting nasty gashes on his legs and arms, but immediately he staggered to his feet and resumed the pace. Over the pounding of his heart and the gasping from his lungs, he listened for the sound of pursuing hoofbeats. But they never came.

For two hours, he ran, staggered, and stumbled until he came to the rus.h.i.+ng waters of the Selenga River. Moving along the riverbank, he came upon two large boulders that offered both shelter and concealment. Crawling into the crevice beneath the rocks, he quickly fell asleep, not wanting to awake from the living nightmare he had just witnessed.

-15-

THE RIDE, THERESA DECIDED, replicated the jarring discomfort of a b.u.t.terfield stagecoach pa.s.sage across the American Southwest in 1860. Every b.u.mp and rut seemed to vibrate directly from the wheels to the bed of the two-ton panel truck, where the energy was transferred up her backside in a force that made her bones rattle. Bound, gagged, and seated on a hardwood bench across from two armed guards did not improve the comfort factor. Only the presence of Roy and Wofford shackled beside her offered a small degree of mental consolation.

Sore, tired, and hungry, she struggled to make sense of the events at Lake Baikal. Tatiana had said very little after waking her in their shared cabin with a cold pistol pressed against her chin. Marched at gunpoint off the Vereshchagin and onto a dinghy, she and the others had been transferred to the black freighter briefly, then pushed ash.o.r.e and bound into the back of the panel truck. They waited on the dock nearly two hours, hearing gunshots and a commotion on the s.h.i.+p before the truck was started and they were driven away.

She wondered grimly what had become of the Russian scientist Sarghov. He had been roughly pulled away from the group when they first boarded the freighter and herded off to another part of the s.h.i.+p. It hadn't looked good, and she feared for the safety of the jolly scientist. And what of the Vereshchagin? It appeared to be sitting low in the water when they were forced off. Were Al, Dirk, and the rest of the crew in danger as well?