"That was a close call," the Russian scientist declared, regaining color and strength once the vodka surged through his bloodstream. "I am indebted to my friends from NUMA," he said, hoisting a second shot of vodka toward the Americans before downing it in a casual gulp.

"To your health," Pitt replied before kicking back his shot.

"Vashe zdorovie!" Sarghov replied before downing his drink.

"Do you know what became of Theresa and the others?" Giordino asked, concern evident on his heavy brow.

"No, we were separated once we boarded the ship. Since it was apparent they were going to kill me, they must have wanted them alive for some reason. I would presume they are still aboard the ship."

"Alexander, you are safe!" bellowed Captain Kharitonov as he barged into the cramped sick bay.

"He has a sprained wrist and a number of contusions," the doctor reported, applying a bandage to a cut on Sarghov's face.

"It is nothing," Sarghov said, waving away the doctor. "Listen, Ian. The Avarga Oil Consortium freighter ... there is no doubt that they were responsible for attempting to sink your ship. Your crewman Anatoly was working for them, and possibly the woman Tatiana as well."

"Anatoly? I had just hired him on at the beginning of the project when my regular first officer fell ill with severe food poisoning. What treachery!" the captain cursed. "I will call the authorities at once. These hoodlums will not get away with this."

The authorities, in the form of the chief of police and his young a.s.sistant, arrived nearly an hour later, accompanied by the two Irkutsk detectives. It had taken that long for the impertinent chief to rise, dress, and enjoy an early breakfast of sausages and coffee before casually making his way to the Vereshchagin, retrieving the two detectives from a local inn along the way.

Sarghov retold his tale of abduction, while Pitt and Giordino added their search for the missing derrick and their escape from the freighter. The two Irkutsk men gradually took over the interrogation, asking more probing and intelligent questions. Pitt noted that the two detectives seemed to show an odd deference to the Russian scientist, as well as a hint of familiarity.

"It will be prudent to investigate the freighter with our full security force," the police chief announced with bl.u.s.ter. "Sergei, please round up the Listvyanka auxiliary security forces and have them report immediately to police headquarters."

Nearly another hour pa.s.sed before the small contingent of local security forces marched toward the freighter's berth, the pompous chief leading the way. The first light of dawn was just breaking, casting a gray pall over a damp mist that floated just above the ground. Pitt and Giordino, with Gunn and Sarghov at their sides, followed the police force through the dock gate, which was now open and unguarded. The dock was completely deserted, and Pitt began to get a sick feeling in his stomach when he realized that all three trucks parked by the ship had now vanished.

The bossy police chief charged up the freighter's gangplank, calling out for the captain, but was met by only the sound of a humming generator. Pitt followed him to the empty bridge, where the ship's log and all other charts and maps were noticeably absent. Slowly and methodically, the police team searched the entire ship, finding an equally purloined and empty vessel. Not a shred of evidence was uncovered as to the ship's intent, nor a person around to tell its tale.

"Talk about abandoning ship," Giordino muttered, shaking his head. "Even the cabins are empty of personal effects. That was one quick getaway."

"Too quick to have been carried out unexpectedly in the short time we were gone. No, they had finished their work and were already sneaking out the door when we stopped by. I'll bet there weren't any personal effects or links to the crew brought aboard in the first place. They planned on walking away from an empty ship."

"With a kidnapped oil survey team," Giordino replied, his mind centered on Theresa. After a long silence, he returned to the bridge, hopeful to find some sort of clue as to where the departed trucks had gone.

Pitt stood on the bridge wing, staring down at the stern deck and its array of empty containers. His mind whirred with puzzlement over the motive for the abductions and the fate of the survey team. The pink glow of the rising sun bathed the ship in a dusky light and illuminated the gouge marks imbedded in the deck where the sunken derrick had stood the night before. Whatever secrets the ship possessed had departed with the crew and cargo that vanished quietly in the night. But the sunken derrick was something they had not been able to hide. The significance was lost on Pitt, but, deep inside, he suspected it was an important clue to a bigger mystery.

Part Two:

The Road

to

Xanadu

-10-

CAPTAIN STEVE HOWARD squinted through a scratched pair of binoculars and scanned the bright aqua blue waters of the Persian Gulf that glistened before him. The waterway was often a bustling hive of freighters, tankers, and warships jockeying for position, particularly around the narrow channel of the Strait of Hormuz. In the late afternoon off Qatar, however, he was glad to see that the shipping traffic had almost vanished. Ahead off his port bow, a large tanker approached, riding low in the water with a fresh load of crude oil in its belly. Off his stern, he noted a small black drill ship trailing a mile or two behind. Tanker traffic was all he was hoping to see and with a slight relief, he lowered the gla.s.ses down to the bow of his own ship.

He needed the binoculars to obtain a clear view of his own ship's prow, for the stodgy forepeak stood nearly eight hundred feet away. Looking forward, he noted rippling waves of heat shimmering off the white topside deck of the Marjan. The ma.s.sive supertanker, known as a "Very Large Crude Carrier," was built to transport over two million barrels of oil. Larger than the Chrysler Building, and about as easy to maneuver, the big ship was en route to fill its cavernous holds with Saudi light crude oil pumped from the teeming oil fields of Ghawar.

Pa.s.sing the Strait of Hormuz had flicked on an unconscious alarm in Howard. Though the American Navy had a visible presence in the gulf, they couldn't blanket every commercial ship that entered the busy waterway. With Iran sitting across the gulf and potential terrorists lurking in a half dozen countries along the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, there was reason to be concerned. Pacing the bridge and scanning the horizon, Howard knew he wouldn't relax until they had taken on their load of crude and reached the deep waters of the Arabian Sea.

Howard's eyes were drawn to a sudden movement on the deck and he adjusted the binoculars until they focused on a wiry man with s.h.a.ggy blond hair who tore across the deck on a yellow moped. Ducking and weaving around the surface deck's a.s.sorted pipes and valves, the daredevil whizzed along at the moped's top speed. Howard tracked him as he rounded a bend and sprinted past a shirtless man stretched out on a lounge chair holding a stopwatch in one hand.

"I see the first mate is still trying to top the track record," Howard said with a grin.

The tanker's executive officer, hunched over a colored navigation chart of the gulf, nodded without looking up.

"I'm sure your record will remain safe for another day, sir," he replied.

Howard laughed to himself. The thirty-man crew of the supertanker was constantly creating ways to stave off boredom during the long transatlantic voyages or the slack periods when oil was being pumped on or off the ship. A rickety moped, used to traverse the enormous deck during inspections, was suddenly seized upon as a compet.i.tive instrument of battle. A makeshift oval course was laid out on the deck, complete with jumps and a hairpin turn. One by one, the crew took turns at the course like qualifying drivers for the Indy 500. To the crew's chagrin, the ship's amiable captain had ended up clocking the best time. None had any idea that Howard had raced motocross while growing up in South Carolina.

"Coming up on Dhahran, sir," said the exec, a soft-spoken African American from Houston named Jensen. "Ras Tanura is twenty-five miles ahead. Shall I disengage the auto pilot?"

"Yes, let's go to manual controls and reduce speed at the ten-mile mark. Notify the berthing master that we'll be ready to take tugs in approximately two hours."

Everything about sailing the supertanker had to be done with foresight, especially when it came to stopping the mammoth vessel. With its oil tanks empty and riding high on the water, the tanker was somewhat more nimble, but, to the men on the bridge, it was still like moving a mountain.

Along the western sh.o.r.eline, the dusty brown desert gave way to the city of Dhahran, a company town, home to the oil conglomerate Saudi Aramco. Steering past the city and its neighboring port of Dammam, the tanker edged toward a thin peninsula that stretched into the gulf from the north. Sprawled across the peninsula was the huge oil facility of Ras Tanura.

Ras Tanura is the Grand Central Station of the Saudi oil industry. More than half of Saudi Arabia's total crude oil exports flow through the government-owned complex, which is linked by a maze of pipelines to the rich oil fields of the interior desert. At the tip of the peninsula, dozens of huge storage tanks stockpile the valuable black liquid next to liquid natural gas tanks and other refined petroleum products awaiting shipment to Asia and the West. Farther up the coast, the largest refinery in the world processes the raw crude oil into a slew of petroleum offshoots. But perhaps the most impressive feature of Ras Tanura is barely visible at all.

On the bridge of the Marjan, Howard ignored the tanks and pipelines ash.o.r.e and focused on a half dozen supertankers lined up in pairs off the peninsula. The ships were moored to a fixed terminal called Sea Island, which stretched beamlike across the water for more than a mile. Like an oasis nourishing a heard of thirsty camels, the Sea Island terminal quenched the empty supertankers with a high-powered flow of crude oil pumped from the storage tanks ash.o.r.e. Unseen beneath the waves, a network of thirty-inch supply pipes fed the black liquid two miles across the floor of the gulf to the deepwater filling station.

As the Marjan crept closer, Howard watched a trio of tugboats align a Greek tanker against the Sea Island before turning toward his own vessel. The Marjan's pilot took control of the supertanker and eased the vessel broadside to an empty berth at the end of the loading terminal, just opposite of the Greek tanker. As they waited for the tugs to push them in, Howard admired the sight of the other seven supertankers parked nearby. All over a thousand feet long, easily exceeding the length of the t.i.tanic, they were truly marvels of ship construction. Though he had seen hundreds of tankers in his day and served on several supertankers before the Marjan, the sight of a VLCC still filled him with awe.

The dirty white sail of an Arab dhow caught his eye in the distance and he turned toward the peninsula to admire the local sailing vessel. The small boat skirted the coastline, sailing north past the black drill ship that had tailed the Marjan earlier and was now positioned near the sh.o.r.eline.

"Tugs are in position portside, sir," interrupted the voice of the pilot.

Howard simply nodded, and soon the ma.s.sive ship was pushed into its slot on the Sea Island terminal. A series of large transfer lines began pumping black crude into the ship's empty storage tanks, little by little settling the tanker lower in the water. Secured at the terminal, Howard allowed himself to relax slightly, knowing that his responsibilities were through for at least the next several hours.

It was nearly midnight when Howard awoke from a short nap and stretched his legs with a stroll about the forward deck of the tanker. The crude oil loading was nearly complete, and the Marjan would easily meet its three a.m. departure schedule, allowing the next empty supertanker in line to take its turn at the filling depot. The distant blast from a tug's horn told him that a tanker further down the quay had completed its fill-up and was preparing to be pulled away from Sea Island.

Gazing at the lights twinkling along the Saudi Arabian sh.o.r.eline, Howard was jolted by a sudden banging of the "dolphins" against the tanker's hull. Large cushioned supports mounted along the Sea Island berths, the breasting dolphins supported the lateral force of the ships while being loaded at the terminal. The clanging blows from the dolphins weren't just coming from below, he realized, but echoed all along the terminal. Stepping to the side rail, he leaned his head over and looked down along the loading quay.

Sea Island at night, like the supertankers themselves, was lit up like a Christmas tree. Under the battery of overhead lights, Howard could see that it was the terminal itself that was pulsing back and forth against the sides of the tankers. It didn't make sense, he thought. The terminal was grounded into the seabed. Any movement ought to come from the ships drifting against the berths. Yet peering down the distant length of the terminal, he could see it waver like a serpent, striking one side of tankers and then the other.