"China isn't going to renege on acceding Inner Mongolia?" Gunn asked.
"It's too politically dangerous for them to do so, both internationally and within the confines of Inner Mongolia, whose occupants largely favored secession from China. No, the Chinese will be happy enough, as we've agreed to sell them oil at a favorable price. That is, until our pipeline to the Russian port of Nakhodka is completed." The president smiled and waved at the Russian ambassador, who stood a few yards away chatting with Sarghov.
"Just ensure that the oil revenues go to the people who need it most," Pitt requested.
"Indeed, we've taken a lesson from your own state of Alaska. A portion of the revenues will be distributed to every man, woman, and child in the country. The remainder will support the state's expansion of health, education, and infrastructure. Borjin has taught us that not a dime of profits will end up in the hands of an individual, I can assure you."
"That is good to know. Mr. President, I have one favor to ask of you. We discovered a plane crash in the Gobi Desert."
"My director of antiquities has already informed me. We'll be sending a research team from the National University of Mongolia right away to excavate the aircraft. The bodies of those aboard will be returned to their homes for proper burial."
"They deserve that."
"It was a pleasure, Mr. Pitt," the president said, as an aide tugged at his sleeve. He turned and started to walk away, then stopped.
"I almost forgot," he said to Pitt. "A gift from the people of Mongolia to you. I understand you have an appreciation for such objects."
He pointed down the hill to a large flatbed truck that had discreetly followed the funeral procession up the mountainside. A large covered object sat upright on the truck's bed. As Pitt and the others watched with curiosity, two workmen climbed up and pulled back the canvas covering. Underneath sat the dust-covered Rolls-Royce from Borjin's compound.
"Should make for a nice restoration project on the weekends," Wofford said, eyeing the decrepit car.
"My wife Loren will love that," Pitt replied with a devious grin.
"I'd love to meet her sometime," Theresa said.
"Next time you are in Washington. Though I take it you'll be working in Mongolia for some time to come."
"The company gave us three weeks of paid leave for our ordeal. We are both hoping to go home to rest and recuperate before Jim and I come back."
From the look she gave Giordino and the tone in her voice, it was clear that the "we" was not referring to Wofford.
"I don't suppose you could take it upon yourself to nurse a rabid old sea dog like Al back to health during that time," Pitt offered.
"I was rather counting on it," she said coyly.
Giordino, leaning on a crutch with his lower leg heavily bandaged, smiled broadly.
"Thanks, boss. I've always wanted to see the Zuider Zee."
As the friends parted company, Pitt strolled down the hill toward the flatbed truck. Gunn joined him as he approached the old Rolls.
"The Mongolian energy minister just told me that the price of oil is down another ten dollars today," he said. "The markets are finally accepting the news that the Avarga Oil Company has been put out of business for good and the destructive earthquakes are finished. Combined with the news of the oil reserves in Inner Mongolia, the experts predict that the price will soon drop to levels below those seen before the Persian Gulf disruption."
"So the oil panic has subsided and a global depression averted. Maybe the economic powers that be will finally learn the lesson and focus on developing renewable energy sources in earnest."
"They won't until they absolutely have to," Gunn said. "Incidentally, I was told that the Pentagon was none too happy that all three of von Wachter's seismic devices were completely destroyed, after the last-known device was sunk in the Persian Gulf."
"NUMA can't take responsibility for that one."
"True. It was a lucky stroke that Summer and Dirk stumbled upon Borjin's brother and the second device in Hawaii. Or he stumbled upon them. Had the ship traveled on to Valdez and damaged the Alaska Pipeline as planned, there would have been real pandemonium."
"It was the Chinese wreck Summer found. It drew them there for some reason," Pitt said. A faraway look crossed his face as he mentally searched the clues. Then his green eyes suddenly sparkled in enlightenment.
Gunn was oblivious to the mystery, focused instead on the immediate demands of his government.
"Not only were all of the seismic devices destroyed, but von Wachter's research materials as well. Apparently, Borjin had all of the professor's data in the laboratory building, which is now a pile of charcoal. There's nothing left for anyone to be able to resurrect the technology."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"I suppose not. Though I'd feel better if I knew the knowledge was in our hands and not the likes of Borjin."
"Just between you, me, and the car," Pitt said, "I happen to know that the operator's manual you lifted from the lab survived the flood and fire."
"The manual survived? It would give a big leg up to anyone trying to duplicate von Wachter's work. I hope it's secure."
"It's found a safe and permanent home."
"You sure about that?" Gunn asked.
Pitt walked to the rear of the Rolls and opened a large leather trunk mounted to the car's luggage rack. Lying at the bottom of the musty interior was the seismic array operator's manual, with the shaft from the crossbow arrow still protruding from its cover.
Gunn let out a low whistle, then put his hands over his eyes and turned away.
"I never saw it," he said.
Pitt latched up the trunk, then casually inspected the rest of the car. Overhead, a bank of dark gray clouds began moving in rapidly from the west. The remaining mourners milling about the tomb quickly headed toward their vehicles parked below to avoid the pending deluge.
"I guess we better be on our way," Gunn said, steering Pitt toward their rented jeep down the hill. "So, it's back to Washington?"
Pitt stopped and stared at the mausoleum of Genghis Khan one last time. Then he shook his head.
"No, Rudi, you go on ahead. I'll catch up in a few days."
"You staying here a bit longer?"
"No," Pitt replied with a faraway twinkle in his eye. "I'm going to hunt a wolf."
-66-
THE TROPICAL SUN beat warmly on the deck of the Mariana Explorer as she rounded the rocky lava finger of Kahakahakea Point. The NUMA ship's captain, Bill Stenseth, slowed the vessel as it entered the mouth of the now-familiar cove in Keliuli Bay. Ahead and to his left he noted a red marker buoy bobbing on the surface. Seventy feet beneath it lay the mangled remains of the Avarga Oil Company drill ship, partially buried under a pile of loose lava rock. With the depths shallowing, Stenseth took the research ship no farther, stopping engines and then dropping anchor. "Keliuli Bay," he announced, turning toward the rear of the bridge.
Seated at a mahogany chart table, Pitt was examining a coastal chart of Hawaii with a magnifying glass. Unfurled beside the map was the cheetah skin he had retrieved from Leigh Hunt's crashed Fokker in the Gobi Desert. Pitt's children, Dirk and Summer, stood nearby, looking over their father's shoulder with curiosity.
"So, this is the scene of the crime," the elder Pitt said, rising from the table and peering out the window. He stretched his arms and yawned, tired from his recent flight from Ulaanbaatar to Honolulu, via Irkutsk and Tokyo. The warm humid air felt refreshing on his skin, after leaving Mongolia during a late-summer cold snap that had snow flurries in the air when he boarded his flight.
Pitt's return to Hawaii brought with it a certain melancholy, which deepened during his layover in Honolulu. With a three-hour wait for his commuter flight to Hilo, he rented a car and drove across the Koolau Mountains to the east shore of Oahu. Off a side road near Kailua Beach, he wandered into a tiny cemetery that overlooked the ocean. It was a small but well-maintained patch of green surrounded by lush foliage. Pi
tt sauntered methodically through the grounds, examining the assorted tombstones. Beneath the shadowy branches of a blossoming plumeria tree, he found the grave site of Summer Moran.
His first and deepest love, and the mother of his children, Summer Moran had died only recently. Pitt had not known she was alive and living in seclusion after a disfiguring accident, believing that she had died decades earlier. He had lived the years trying to purge her memory from his mind and heart, until the sudden arrival of his two grown children on his doorstep. A flood of emotions returned, and he painfully wondered how his life would have been different, had he known she was alive and raising their twin children. He had forged a close bond with the kids now, and he had the love of his wife Loren. But the feeling of loss remained, tinged with anger at losing the time he could have spent with her.
With heaviness in his chest, he gathered up a handful of the fragrant plumeria blossoms and sprinkled them gently over her grave. For a long while, he stood wistfully by her side, staring out at the ocean. The gentle rolling waves from his other love, the sea, helped wash away the pain he felt. He finally stepped from the cemetery tired and drained, but with a renewed sense of hopefulness.
Standing on the bridge now with his children, he felt a warm glow, knowing a part of Summer still lived. The adventuresome spirit rekindled, he refocused on the mystery Chinese shipwreck.
"The marker buoy is where Summer laid waste to the drill ship." Dirk smiled, pointing out the window. "The Chinese wreck site is almost in the dead center of the cove," he said, swinging his arm around to the right.
"The artifacts have all dated to at least the thirteenth century?" Pitt asked.
"Everything has indicated as much," Summer replied. "The ceramic pieces recovered date from the late Song to the early Yuan dynasties. The wood samples came up elm and date to approximately 1280. The famed Chinese shipyard of Longjiang used elm and other woods in their ship construction, which is another piece of confirming evidence."
"The local geological records don't hurt either," Dirk said. "Since the wreck was devoured by a lava flow, we checked the known history of volcanic eruptions on the Big Island. Although Kilauea is the best-known and most-active volcano, Hualalai and Mauna Loa also have a recent history of activity. The closest to our spot here, Mauna Loa, has erupted thirty-six times in the last one hundred fifty years. She's had an untold number of lava releases in the centuries prior. Local geologists have been able to radiocarbon-date charcoal samplings recovered from beneath the lava flows. One lava sample study, from neighboring Pohue Bay, dates around eight hundred years old. We don't know for sure if the lava flows that washed into the cove and buried our ship were from that same eruption, but my money says it was. If so, then our ship would have arrived no later than 1300 a.d."
"Does anything correlate with your cryptic cheetah skin?" Summer asked.
"It is impossible to date, but the voyage depicted shows some interesting similarities," Pitt replied. "The lead vessel is a mammoth four-masted junk, which seems to match the size of your wreck, based on the rudder uncovered by Dirk and Jack. Unfortunately, there was no narrative accompanying the images. Only a few decipherable words appear on the skin, which translates as 'A lasting voyage to paradise.' "
Pitt sat down and studied the two-dimensional artistry on the animal skin again. The series of drawings clearly showed a four-masted junk at sail with two smaller support ships. Several panels depicted a long ocean voyage until the ships arrived at a cluster of islands. Though crudely marked, the islands lay in the same relative position as the largest of Hawaii's eight islands. The large junk was shown landing on the biggest island, anchoring near a cave at the base of a high cliff. The final panel was what most intrigued Pitt. It showed the moored ship near some crates at the base of the cliff. Fire and smoke enveloped the ship and the surrounding landside. Pitt studied a flag burning on the ship's mast with particular interest.
"The volcanic eruption fits like a glove," he said. "The flames in the drawing look like a brush fire, but that's the secret. It wasn't a fire at all but a volcanic eruption."
"Those crates," Summer said. "They must contain some sort of treasure or valuables. Tong, or Borjin, as you've said his real name is, knew something about the ship's cargo. That's why they were trying to open up the lava field with a directed earthquake."
"I guess the laugh is on them," Dirk said. "The treasure, or whatever it is, wasn't even on the ship. If the drawing is correct, then the cargo was taken ashore and destroyed by the lava flows."
"Was it destroyed?" Pitt asked with a wily grin.
"How could it have survived the lava flows?" Summer asked. She picked up the magnifying glass and studied the last panel. Her eyebrows arched just a trace as she studied the crates surrounded by black stone. The image showed no flames on or about the crates.
"They are not on fire in the picture. Do you really think they could have survived?"
"I'd say it is worth a look. Let's go get wet and find out for sure."
"But would it have to be buried in lava?" Dirk protested.
"Have a little faith in the old man," Pitt smiled, then headed off the bridge.
With a high degree of skepticism, Dirk and Summer followed their father to the rear of the ship and assembled three sets of dive gear. Loaded into a Zodiac, they were lowered over the side of the ship by Jack Dahlgren.
"I'll have a tequila waiting for the first person who finds a Ming vase," he joked as he cast off the rubber boat.
"Don't forget the salt and lime," Summer shouted back.
Pitt steered the Zodiac toward the shore, angling to one side of the cove before killing the motor a few yards from the surf line. Dirk tossed an anchor over the side to secure their position, then the threesome slid into their dive gear.
"We'll run parallel to shore as close to the surf line as we can get," Pitt instructed. "Just watch out for the breakers."
"And what exactly are we looking for?" Dirk asked.
"A stairway to heaven." His father smiled cryptically, then pulled his mask down over his face. Sitting on the edge of the boat, he leaned over backward and dropped into the water, disappearing under a small wave. Dirk and Summer quickly adjusted their masks and regulators, then followed him over the side.
They converged on the bottom, less than twenty feet below, in water that was dark and turbid. The crashing surf roiled the water with foam and silt, reducing the visibility to just a few feet. Summer saw her father nod at her then turn and head into the murk. She quickly followed behind, knowing her brother would take up the rear.
The bottom surface was a bed of craggy black lava that rose up sharply to her left. Even underwater, she was pushed strongly from the side by the incoming waves and she frequently turned seaward and kicked hard with her fins to avoid being body-slammed into a rising mount of lava.
She followed her father's fins and trail of bubbles for twenty minutes before he finally disappeared for good into the dark waters ahead of her. She figured they were roughly halfway across the cove's landfall shore. She would swim another ten minutes, she decided, then surface and find out exactly where she was.
Following the surf line, she felt herself being carried close to a lava rise by a large wave. Turning to kick away, she was surprised by a second, more powerful wave, which pushed her forcefully toward shore. The wave quickly overpowered her, and she slammed backward into the lava wall, her steel air tank grinding against the rock.
Unhurt by the collision, she remained pinned against the lava until the wave rolled past. She started to move away when she noticed a dark spot on the rocks above her head. Pulling herself closer, she peered into a black tube that angled slightly upward and toward the shore line. She couldn't tell in the murky water whether it was just a hole in the rocks, so she pulled out a flashlight and reached inside. The beam of light faded in the water, not detecting an opposing wall to reflect. The opening clearly traveled for some distance.
Her heart skipped a beat as she real
ized that this was what her father was searching for. She braced herself by the opening as another large wave passed by, then reached around and banged the flashlight against her dive tank. A metallic clanging echoed through the water.
Almost immediately Dirk appeared, looking at Summer quizzically, then eyeing the opening with surprise as she pointed the way. A minute later her father swam up, playfully patting Summer on the head after spotting the tunnel. Flicking on his own flashlight, he swam into the tube, his kids following behind.
Pitt immediately recognized the opening as a lava tube. Its cylindrical-shaped walls were almost perfectly formed, rounded and smoothed as if made by a machine. But the passage was actually the result of a steady flow of hot lava cooling on the surface and creating an outer crust. The liquid center ultimately flowed out, leaving a hollow tube. Lava tubes have been found that stretch fifty feet wide, while a few run several miles long. Summer's tube was relatively small, stretching about six feet in diameter.
Pitt followed the tube for thirty feet, noticing a gradual ascent on his depth gauge. The tube suddenly flared wide, and he noticed a reflection from his flashlight just before his head broke the surface of a calm pool of water. Bobbing on the surface, he turned the light around him. Steep black walls of lava fell vertically to the water on three sides. The fourth side, however, opened to a wide, rocky clearing. Pitt kicked lazily toward the landing as the underwater lights of Summer and Dirk surfaced near him. They all swam to the rocks and climbed out of the water before anyone spat out their regulators and spoke.
"It's amazing," Summer said. "An underground cavern fed from a flooded lava tube. Though it could use a little air-conditioning." The air in the cave was dank and musty, and Summer contemplated keeping her tank and regulator on.
"It was likely a much deeper cave at one time, but became sealed off by the lava flows gushing down the mountainside," Pitt said. "It's a fluke that a lava tube happened to form at its entrance."