"Cultural treasure would be just as fine with me."
"What signs of a wreck did you find?" Dahlgren asked.
"Nothing obvious, but Summer did find an interesting stone object," Dirk offered. "We need to go look at the videotape."
Dirk and Summer showered and dressed, then met Dahlgren in one of the research ship's laboratories.
Dahlgren had hooked the video camera to a monitor and was replaying the images over the large screen.
When the rectangular stone appeared, Dirk reached over and pressed the PAUSE button.
"I've seen something like that before," he said, then sat down at an adjacent computer and began tapping the keyboard. "It was at an underwater archaeology conference, from a paper presented on a wreck discovered in Malaysia."
After a few moments of searching, he located a website that contained a copy of the scientific paper, along with photographs of the excavation. Dirk scrolled through the images until he stopped at an underwater photograph of a stone slab. It was a rectangular piece of granite, tapered on one end, with a pair of holes carved through the center.
"Clear away the growth and I'd say you have a close match to the object in Summer's video," Dahlgren asserted, comparing images.
"Yes, not only the same shape but the same relative size," Dirk noted.
"Okay, I'll bite," Summer said. "What is it?"
"An anchor," Dirk replied. "Or, rather, the stone weight that fitted into a wooden grappling anchor.
Before the days of lead and iron, it was a lot simpler to construct an anchor from wood and stone."
"You're talking the ancient days of sail," Dahlgren said.
Dirk nodded. "That's why it is intriguing. Summer's anchor looks to be an identical match for this one,"
he said, pointing to the screen.
"We all agree on that," Summer said. "But what's it from? What kind of wreck did they excavate in Malaysia?"
"Well," Dirk said, scrolling down the screen to a computerized drawing of a four-masted sailing ship.
"Would you believe a thirteenth-century Chinese junk?"
-34-
The air over Kharg Island was hazy brown. Oily smoke spewed up by the holocaust at Ras Tanura a week before still choked the skies over the Persian Gulf. Even at Kharg Island, a rocky limestone spit on the Iranian side of the gulf one hundred eighty miles from Ras Tanura, taking a breath of the thick polluted air left the greasy taste of petroleum in one's mouth.
The toxic air was an environmental match to the waters east of the small island, which were topped with a perpetual layer of oil. The water pollution was homegrown, however, in the form of leaks and spills from the adjacent crude oil transport facility. A huge T-shaped jetty on the east side of the island held berths for up to ten tankers. Off the west coast, a man-made island could fill the bellies of several Ultra Large Crude Carrier supertankers, fed by gravity from an assortment of storage tanks built on the central heights of the island. Though just a tiny land mass, Kharg Island is Iran's largest oil export terminal, as well as one of the biggest oil transport facilities in the world.
Dusk was approaching when a battered black drill ship chugged past the fleet of tankers aligned in a row along the eastern terminal. Angling north, the drill ship turned and approached the island, mooring close to the bluffs at the tip of the northern coast. An Iranian military boat patrolling the coastal waters cruised by but paid no thought to the old ship, which flew the flag of India.
None of the oil workers ashore paid much attention either, especially after night fell. But that's when the drill ship quietly sprang to life. The ship moved slowly back and forth, surveying the black waters before settling on a desired spot. Fore, aft, and side thrusters were activated, gluing the ship to a stationary point despite the effect of wind and current. Under low-wattage deck lighting, the ship's crew scurried about wearing black jumpsuits. A short drill string was assembled beneath the derrick and lowered through an open moon pool. The end of the drill string didn't hold the usual roller cone drill bit for oil drilling, but rather an odd trio of oblong cylinders bound in a tripod fashion.
The tripod was lowered to the bottom, then the deck crew slowly disappeared and the ship grew quiet.
But twenty minutes later, an explosive boom emanated from beneath the ship. A loud but muffled clap was all that could be heard on the surface, barely discernible to the neighboring ships and island workers.
But fifty feet beneath the ship, a high-powered sound wave was blasted into the gulf floor. The downward-directed seismic wave bounced and refracted harmlessly through the earth's crust. Harmless, except for a single point of convergence from the three oblong cylinders, which focused their blast of sound at the exact depth and position of a marked fault line.
The brief acoustic burst was followed by a second discharge, then a third. The concentrated acoustic blasts bombarded the subterranean fault line with vibrating seismic waves until it reached a point of irreversible stress. Like Ella Fitzgerald shattering a glass with her voice, the pounding acoustic vibrations fractured the fault located a half mile beneath the surface.
The rupture reverberated to the surface with a savage shake. The U.S. Geological Survey would clock it at 7.2 on the Richter scale, a killer quake by all accounts. Loss of life was minimal, with major damage limited to just a few Iranian coastal villages near Kharg Island. Since the Persian Gulf waters were too shallow for a tsunami to form, the damage was restricted almost entirely to a section of Iranian shoreline near the gulf's tip. And to Kharg Island.
On the tiny oil-pumping island, the damage was catastrophic. The whole island shook as if a nuclear bomb had detonated beneath it. Dozens of oil storage tanks ruptured like balloons, spilling their black contents in rivers that slopped down the hillside and into the sea. The huge fixed oil terminal off the eastern shore broke into several free-floating pieces that battered and punctured the moored tankers.
The supertanker terminal on the western side of Kharg Island disappeared altogether.
The small black drill ship didn't wait around to survey the damage, instead steaming south in the early hours of the morning. The flurry of helicopters and rescue ships streaming to the rocky island took little notice of the old vessel headed away from the destruction. Yet in its wake, the drill ship had single-handedly devastated Iranian oil exports, jolting the global petroleum market once again while plunging China into a state of chaos.
-35-
To the teetering oil futures market, the report of the destruction at Kharg Island hit like an atomic blast, unleashing a fear-driven free-for-all. Frenzied traders jumped over the oil futures contracts, bidding the price of sweet crude up to a stratospheric one hundred fifty dollars per barrel. On Wall Street, the Dow headed in the opposite direction. A reeling stock market was forced to shut down early as trading curbs halted activity after a massive sell-off erased twenty percent of the market's value in half a day.
Across the U.S., anxious motorists reacted to the news by racing to the nearest gas station to fill their cars up on cheaper fuel. The stampede buying quickly exhausted the thin margin of surplus refined gasoline and fuel shortages soon sprouted across every state. Sporadic violence flared over the waning supply in some regions as a sense of panic gripped the country.
At the White House, the president called an emergency meeting of his top security and economic advisers in the Cabinet Room. A no-nonsense populist elected from Montana, the president listened quietly as his chief economic adviser recounted a litany of disastrous consequences resulting from the oil shock.
"A near doubling of oil prices in less than a month will produce unprecedented inflationary pressures,"
touted the adviser, a balding man with thick glasses. "Aside from the obvious distress to the entire transportation sector, there are countless industrial and manufacturing bases that rely on petroleum content. Plastics, chemicals, paint, textiles ... there's hardly an industry that is not directly impacted by the price surge. The dramatic rise in
oil costs will have to be passed on to the consumer, who is already suffering from shock at the gas pump. An immediate recession is a foregone conclusion. My fear is that we are standing at the precipice of a deep and prolonged economic depression of global proportions."
"Isn't this price hike a knee-jerk reaction?" the president asked. "After all, we don't import a drop of oil from Iran."
"There is a major element of panic, no doubt about it. But the damage to Kharg Island disrupts the global supply of oil, which impacts the price in the U.S. even if our own import supply remains steady. Of course, we are already seeing a shortfall in imports from the destruction at Ras Tanura. As a result, the markets are on edge. The anxiety is partly being fueled by rumors, one of which says that a terrorist element was responsible for the damage to both Persian Gulf facilities."
"Anything to those claims?" the president asked his national security advisor, a studious man with a lean face.
"None that we've ascertained," the man replied in a staid voice. "I'll task Langley with a further look, but all evidence points to naturally occurring earthquakes. The fact that two damaging rattles took place in close relative proximity appears to be a fluke of nature."
"Fair enough, but let's not take chances with any homegrown fanatics who want to capitalize on the situation here for a headline. Dennis, I'd like Homeland Security to elevate the terrorist threat advisory for all seaports. Let's make sure surveillance is boosted at our oil terminals, particularly along the Gulf Coast."
"Consider it done, Mr. President," replied the director of homeland security, seated opposite of the chief executive.
"Garner, I think a quick means to quell the public hysteria would be to immediately release some stocks from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve." The suggestion came from Vice President James Sandecker, a retired admiral and former head of NUMA. He was a small but intense man with blazing eyes and a fiery red Vandyke beard. An old friend of the president, he seldom addressed his boss by title. "The oil markets should cool down over time. Releasing a portion of the reserves should dampen the immediate public fear of an outright oil shortage, and perhaps boost confidence in the markets."
The president nodded. "Write up a Presidential Order to that effect," he barked at an aide.
"A sales pitch from the bully pulpit might not hurt, either," Sandecker added, glancing toward a large portrait of Teddy Roosevelt hanging on a side wall.
"I'll do my part," the president agreed. "Contact the networks and schedule a televised address for tonight," he directed. "I'll advocate voluntary gas rationing for the next thirty days. Might help the refineries catch up on supplies. We'll get the public calmed down first, then try to figure a way out of this mess."
"There must be some options to consider," mused the chief of staff. "Temporary price freezes and mandatory fuel rationing could be instituted quickly."
"Might be wise to promote some conservation measures publicly while privately twisting some arms,"
Sandecker said. "We can probably entice some of our other foreign suppliers to boost oil production.
Maybe our domestic producers can help as well, though I understand the Alaska Pipeline is now operating at capacity again."
"Yes, the arctic drilling has increased production," the economic adviser confirmed. "We would otherwise be in a lot worse shape right now. But that just means the upside from our present condition is limited. The measures mentioned are all fine and good, but they will only have a minor effect on domestic demand. The ugly reality is that they will have almost no impact on the global markets. A major supply fix is what's needed and that will take months for Saudi Arabia and Iran to sort out. I'm afraid to say, there is very little we can do right now to impact the global price of oil in a meaningful manner."
The dire assessment silenced the room. Finally, the president spoke.
"All right, gentlemen, put everything on the table. I want to look at all options and every worst-case scenario. And I suspect we'll have to move fast. With the oil price holding at the current level, exactly how much time do we have before completely losing the economy?" he asked, his dark eyes boring into the economist.
"Difficult to say," the adviser replied nervously. "Perhaps a thirty-day window before we see the first major work stoppages and associated layoffs. Once the markets have digested this initial shock, the price pressure may abate. But we'll need to see a price retreat of at least thirty to forty dollars to avoid a severe recession. The flip side is that the markets are in a very tenuous state. Another shock of any sort and we could have a global calamity on our hands."
"Another shock," the president said softly. "God help us from that."
-36-
The empty patch of sand that yielded Summer's porcelain figurine now looked like an underwater construction site. Aluminum grids and yellow ropes stretched in all directions across the seabed, punctuated by tiny orange flags staked into the ground. What had started as a sample test pit dug near the rocky outcropping had grown into a full-blown excavation project after Dirk and Summer uncovered a large framing timber buried two feet under the sand. Additional test pits confirmed that the porcelain figure and stone anchor were no random objects tossed over the side but part of an entire wreck buried between the two coral reefs.
Beautifully crafted blue-and-white porcelain plates and bowls, along with votives and carvings of jade, all hinted at a wreck of Chinese origin. Portions of the ship's frame also correlated with the design of a massively sized Chinese junk. To Summer's amazement and chagrin, the potential discovery of an early Chinese ship in Hawaiian waters had caused a sensation. Media representatives from around the world descended on her like vultures to capture the story. After a slate of repetitive news interviews, she was only too happy to slip on a tank and fins and escape the bedlam underwater. The news-hounds would lose interest in the story quick enough, she knew, and then the excavation could be resumed uninterrupted.
Summer floated over the grids and past a pair of divers blowing sand away from a large timber believed to be the sternpost. A few yards away, manual probes driven into the sand had detected another large section of wood that might be the rudder. Gliding to the edge of the work site, she kicked toward the surface alongside a drop line, holding a balled fist over her head until she broke the surface.
A brown metal barge was now moored over the site, and Summer swam the few yards over to its side ladder. Tossing her fins onto the deck, she climbed up and onto the small barge. It was little more than an open deck, with a dingy tin hut constructed at one end. A wall rack full of dive gear hung against the side of the hut, while the deck rail was lined with a generator, water pump, and several compressors. A pair of surfboards lying on the tin shack's roof offered the only hint of frivolity to the work site. The boards belonged to Dirk and Summer and were deemed standard equipment whenever they worked in Hawaii.
"How's the water?" drawled the voice of Jack Dahlgren. He was hunched over one of the compressors, screwdriver in hand, as Summer stowed her tank and dive gear.
"It's Hawaii," she smiled. "Always a delight." She toweled her hair off, then walked over to Dahlgren.
"Be up and running soon?" she asked.
"Just waiting for a final fuel and supply drop from the Mariana. We've got one compressor to run an airlift and another to provide surface-supplied air. They'll make diving in these purty waters a breeze."
"I'm more excited about applying the airlift to the last few buried areas."
The airlift was little more than a hollow tube with compressed air fed into the lower end. The pressurized air ascended up the tube, producing a vacuum effect ideal for sucking away sand and loose debris from a wreck site.
"Mariana Explorer to Brown Bess," crackled a handheld radio strung to the side rail. Dirk's voice was instantly recognized on the other end.
"Bess here. Come on back," Dahlgren replied.
"Jack, we've got the fuel and hot dogs and are ten miles away. The captain says we'll tie up on your leeward
side to offload the fuel."
"We'll be waiting." Dahlgren peered across the horizon, spotting a turquoise dot cruising toward the barge. Then the radio crackled once more.
"And tell Summer that she has yet another visitor who would like to talk to her about the wreck.
Explorer out."
"Not another reporter," Summer cursed, rolling her eyes in disgust.
"Summer says she'll be happy as a clam to host another interview. Bess out," Dahlgren replied into the microphone, laughing at Summer's taciturn look.
The NUMA vessel arrived within the hour and tied up alongside the barge. While Dahlgren oversaw the loading of a fifty-five-gallon drum of gasoline, Summer climbed aboard the Mariana Explorer and made her way to the wardroom. There she found Dirk having coffee with a dark-skinned Asian man wearing slacks and a navy polo shirt.
"Summer, come meet Dr. Alfred Tong," Dirk said, waving her over.
Tong stood up and bowed, then shook Summer's outstretched hand.
"A pleasure to meet you, Miss Pitt," he said, looking up into the gray eyes of the taller woman. He had a powerful grip, she noted, and skin like her own that had seen much of the sun. She tried hard not to stare at a prominent scar that ran down his left cheek, instead gazing at his intense walnut-colored eyes and jet-black hair.
"Thank goodness," Summer blushed. "I was expecting another TV reporter."
"Dr. Tong is a conservator with the National Museum of Malaysia," Dirk explained.
"Yes," Tong said and nodded, then continued in choppy English. "I was attending a seminar at the University of Hawaii when I heard of your discovery. An associate at the university put me in touch with a local NUMA representative. Your captain and brother were kind enough to invite me out for the day."
"The logistics were well timed," Dirk explained. "The Mariana Explorer happened to be in Hilo picking up fuel and supplies for the barge and will be returning that direction this evening."
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