Dirk swam over to a small inflatable boat tethered to the drop line and bellied himself over the side. Unfastening his tank and weight belt, he reached over the side and helped pull his sister aboard. Summer spat out her regulator, barely catching her breath.

"What do you make of that coral outcropping in the middle of the sandbar?" she asked.

"It showed some linearity."

"I thought so, too. I'd like to excavate some of the sand around its fringes and see if there's anything there not devoured by the coral."

She pulled the porcelain figurine from her dive bag and studied it under the sunlight.

"You think you've got a shipwreck in the coral, eh?" Dirk chided, releasing the bowline and starting a small outboard motor.

"This had to come from somewhere," she said, holding up the figurine. "How old do you think it might be?"

"I haven't a clue," Dirk replied. "For my money, the rectangle stone is much more intriguing."

"You have a theory?"

"I do," he said, "but I don't think I'll make any outlandish claims until I've had a chance to peruse the ship's research computers."

Dirk gunned the throttle and the small boat leaped over the waves toward a ship moored in the distance. The NUMA research vessel was painted a bright turquoise blue, and as they approached from the stern the black-lettered MARIANA EXPLORER could be read on the transom. Dirk idled the boat to the port side, drifting beneath a small crane that hung over the water dangling a strand of cables. As Dirk and Summer attached the cable ends to D hooks mounted to the rubber boat, a man's torso leaned over the rail. With a muscular build, thick mustache, and steely blue eyes, the man could have been the incarnate of Wyatt Earp, reborn with a Texas accent.

"Hang on to your pants," he shouted, pressing the controls on the hydraulic winch. In an instant, Jack Dahlgren raised the boat out of the water and deposited it on the ship's deck. As he helped rinse off and stow the dive equipment, he asked Summer, "Did you capture the final reef here? The captain wants to know if he can pick up and move to the next survey area, Leleiwi Point, on the east side of the island."

"The answer is yes and no," Summer replied. "We've completed the data collection, but I'd like to make another dive on the site."

Dirk held up the porcelain figure. "Summer thinks she has a treasure wreck on her hands," he grinned.

"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 b.u.t.ton.

"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 a.s.serted, 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 a.s.sortment of storage tanks built on the central heights of the island. Though just a tiny land ma.s.s, 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 ash.o.r.e 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 a.s.sembled 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 m.u.f.fled 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 gla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.eline 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.sive 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 gla.s.ses. "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 pa.s.sed 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."