Treasure of Khan (6 page)

His eyes bulged at the sudden realization that he'd been duped and he struggled to catch his breath. The shock quickly turned to anger and regaining his voice, he began screaming at the pilots.

“Turn back! Turn the airplane around! We must return at once,” he cried.

But his plea fell on deaf ears. In the cockpit, the two pilots suddenly had something more troubling of their own to contend with.

 

T
HE
M
ITSUBISHI
G3M bomber, known in the west as a Nell, was not on a bombing mission at all. Flying casually alone at an altitude of nine thousand feet, the twin-engine aircraft was flying reconnaissance, probing the aerial resources of Russia that were rumored to have surfaced in Mongolia.

With its easy conquest of Manchuria and successful advance into northern China, the Japanese had sharpened their sights on the important seaports and coal mines of Siberia to the north. Leery of the Japanese intent, the Russians had already bolstered their defensive forces in Siberia, and recently signed a defense pact with Mongolia that allowed for the deployment of troops and aircraft in that mostly barren country. Already the Japanese were busy gathering intelligence, testing and probing the defensive lines in preparation for an outright northern offensive that would be launched from Manchuria in mid-1939.

The Nell had come up empty on its foray into eastern Mongolia, finding no sign of troop deployments or runway construction on behalf of Russian aircraft. If there was any Russian military activity in Mongolia, it would be much farther north, the Japanese pilot concluded. Below him was nothing but the occasional nomadic tribe, wandering the empty expanse of the Gobi Desert with their herd of camels.

“Nothing but sand out here,” the Nell's copilot, a youthful lieutenant named Miyabe, said with a yawn. “I don't know why the wing commander is excited over this real estate.”

“As a buffer to the more valuable territory to the north, I suspect,” Captain Nobuji Negishi replied. “I just hope we get repositioned to the front when the northern invasion occurs. We're missing all the fun in Shanghai and Peking.”

As Miyabe stared at the flat ground beneath the plane, a bright glint of sunlight briefly flashed out of the corner of his eye. Scanning across the horizon, he tracked the source of the light, squinting at what he saw.

“Sir, an aircraft ahead and slightly below us,” he said, pointing a gloved hand toward the object.

Negishi peered ahead and quickly spotted the plane. It was the silver Fokker trimotor, flying northwest toward Ulaanbaatar.

“She's crossing our path,” the Japanese pilot noted with a rise in his voice. “At last, a chance for battle.”

“But sir, that's not a combat plane. I don't think it is even a Chinese airplane,” Miyabe said, observing the markings on the Fokker. “Our orders are to engage only Chinese military aircraft.”

“The flight poses a risk,” Negishi explained away. “Besides, it will be good target practice, Lieutenant.” No one in the Japanese military was getting reprimanded for aggressive behavior in the Chinese theater, he well knew. As a bomber pilot, he would be afforded few opportunities to engage and destroy other aircraft in the skies. It was a rare chance for an easy kill and he wasn't about to pass it by.

“Gunners at your stations,” he barked over the intercom. “Prepare for air-to-air action.”

The five-man crew of the attack bomber were immediately energized as they manned their battle positions. Rather than play the quarry of smaller and quicker fighter aircraft, as was their lot in life, the bomber crew suddenly became the hunter. Captain Negishi mentally computed a dead-reckoning line of the trimotor's path, then eased back on the throttles and banked the bomber in a wide slow turn to the right. The Fokker slipped by beneath them until Negishi eased out of the turn, which brought the bomber around and behind the silver trimotor.

Negishi eased the throttles forward again as the Fokker loomed ahead. With a top speed of two hundred sixteen miles per hour, the Mitsubishi was nearly twice as fast as the Fokker and easily closed the gap.

“Ready with the forward guns,” Negishi ordered as the unarmed plane grew larger in the gunsights.

But the trimotor was not going to pose like a sitting duck. Randy Schodt had seen the bomber first and tracked it as it curled around onto his tail. His hopes that the Japanese plane was just making a harmless flyby vanished when the Mitsubishi took up position squarely behind him and hung on his tail, rather than fly alongside. Unable to outrun the faster military aircraft, he did the next best thing.

The Japanese plane's turret gunner just squeezed the first round from his 7.7mm machine gun when the trimotor banked sharply left and seemed to stall in the air. The gunner's bullets sprayed harmlessly into the sky as the bomber quickly overshot the Fokker.

Negishi was caught completely off guard by the sudden maneuver and cursed as he tried to muscle the bomber back toward the smaller plane. The rattle of machine-gun fire echoed through the fuselage as a side gunner tracked the sudden juke by the Fokker and sprayed a long burst in its direction.

Inside the Fokker, Hunt swore louder at the pilots as crates of artifacts began tumbling around the interior of the plane. A loud crash told him that a crate of porcelain bowls was suddenly smashed by the plane's violent turns. It wasn't until the Fokker banked sharply right and Hunt caught a glimpse out the side window at the Japanese bomber that he realized what was happening.

In the cockpit, Schodt tried every trick in the book to shake the Mitsubishi, hoping that the bomber would abandon the pursuit. But the Japanese pilot was angered by the earlier rebuff and pursued the Fokker relentlessly. Time and again, Schodt would stunt and stall his aircraft to throw the bomber off his tail, causing the Japanese plane to circle around and reacquire the trimotor in its gunsights. The hunter would not give up the chase, and Schodt would soon find the Mitsubishi back on his tail again, until finally one of the gunners found his mark.

The Fokker's rear stabilizer was the first to go, shredded in a hail of lead. Negishi licked his chops, knowing the plane could no longer turn left or right without the control from the stabilizer. Grinning like a wolf, he brought the bomber in close for the kill. As the gunner fired again, he was shocked to see the Fokker once again juke to the right, then pull up in a stall.

Schodt wasn't through yet. With Dave jockeying the throttles on the two wing-mounted engines, Randy was still able to duck and weave away from the Mitsubishi. Once again, the gunfire burst harmlessly into the fuselage, Hunt grimacing as another crate of artifacts was decimated.

Wise to his opponent's tactics, Negishi finally swung the bomber around in a wide arc and approached the Fokker from the side. This time, there was no escaping the gunfire and the Fokker's right wing engine disintegrated under a fury of bullets. A plume of smoke burst from the engine as Schodt shut down the fuel line before the motor caught fire. Jockeying the remaining two engines, he continued to fight with all his skills to keep the Fokker airborne and out of harm's way, but his hourglass finally ran out. A well-placed shot by the Mitsubishi's topside gunner severed the Fokker's elevator controls and effectively ended the flight of the
Blessed Betty
.

Without the ability to control altitude, the wounded trimotor began a flat descent toward the ground. Schodt watched helplessly as the Fokker plunged toward the dusty ground with its wings ajar. Amazingly, the airplane held its balance, gliding downward, with its nose bent just a fraction forward. Shutting down the remaining engines just before impact, he felt the left wingtip clip the ground first, throwing the plane into a clumsy cartwheel.

The crew of the Japanese plane watched with minor disappointment as the Fokker rolled across the ground, failing to explode or burst into flames. Instead, the silver trimotor simply flipped twice, then slid inverted into a sandy ravine.

Despite the difficulty in downing the civilian plane, a cheer rang out aboard the Mitsubishi.

“Well done, men, but next time we must do better,” Negishi lauded, then banked the bomber back toward its base in Manchuria.

On board the Fokker, Schodt and his brother were killed instantly when the cockpit was crushed on the first roll of the aircraft. Hunt survived the crash, but his back was broken and his left leg nearly severed. He painfully clung to life for nearly two days before perishing in the jumbled wreckage of the fuselage. With his last gasp of energy, he pulled the lacquered box close to his chest and cursed his sudden turn of luck. As his last breath left him, he had no idea that still clutched within his arms, he held the clue to the most magnificent treasure the world would ever see.

L
AKE
B
AIKAL
, S
IBERIA
J
UNE
2, 2007

T
HE STILL WATERS OF THE
world's deepest lake radiate the deep translucent blue of a polished sapphire. Fed by cold ancient streams that are free of silt and sediments, Lake Baikal possesses remarkably crystalline clear waters. A tiny crustacean,
Baikal epishura,
aids the cause by devouring algae and plankton growths that degrade most freshwater lakes. The combination produces such a stunning clarity to the water that on a calm day, a silver coin can be seen from the surface at a one-hundred-foot depth.

Surrounded by craggy snowcapped peaks to the north and dense taiga forests of birch, larch, and pine to the south, the “Blue Pearl of Siberia” stretches as a beacon of beauty across an otherwise hostile landscape. Situated in the dead center of lower Siberia, the four-hundred-mile-long crescent-shaped lake curves south to north just above the border with Mongolia. A massive body of water, Lake Baikal is nearly a mile deep in some spots and holds one-fifth of all the fresh water on the planet, more than all of North America's Great Lakes combined. Just a few small fishing villages dot the lake's shore, leaving the enormous lake a nearly vacant sea of tranquillity. Only at its southern end does the lake sprawl toward any significant population centers. Irkutsk, a modestly hip city to a half million Siberian residents, sits forty-five miles west, while the ancient city of Ulan-Ude lies a short distance from its eastern shoreline.

Theresa Hollema glanced up from a laptop computer and briefly admired the purple mountains at the edge of the lake, crowned by cotton-ball clouds that grazed their peaks. The Dutch geophysicist delighted in the clear blue skies that so seldom graced her home outside of Amsterdam. Drawing a deep breath of the crisp air, she subconsciously tried to absorb the scenery through all her senses.

“It is an agreeable day on the lake, no?” asked Tatiana Borjin. She spoke with a deep voice in the emotionless manner endemic to Russians speaking English. Yet the gruff tone and a businesslike personality didn't match her appearance. Although she resembled the local ethnic Buryats, she was, in fact, Mongolian. With long black hair, bronze skin, and almond-shaped eyes, she possessed a natural and robust beauty. But there was a deep intensity behind her dark eyes that seemed to take everything in life with harsh seriousness.

“I had no idea that Siberia was so beautiful,” Theresa replied. “The lake is breathtaking. So calm and peaceful.”

“She is a calm jewel at the moment but can turn wicked in an instant. The Sarma, sudden winds from the northwest, can burst onto the lake with the force of a hurricane. The local graveyards are filled with fishermen who failed to respect the forces of Baikal.”

A slight chill ran up Theresa's spine. The locals seemed to constantly speak of the spirit of the lake. Baikal's pristine waters were a proud cultural resource to the Siberians, and protecting the lake from industrial pollutants had fostered an environmental movement that had grown globally. Even the Russian government was surprised at the widespread outcry when it had first decided to build a wood-cellulose-processing plant on its southern shores fifty years earlier. Theresa just hoped that a Greenpeace rubber boat armada would not appear to assail their presence on the lake.

At least her involvement was relatively harmless, she convinced herself. Her employer, Royal Dutch Shell, had been contracted to survey a section of the lake for reported oil seeps. Nobody said anything about drilling or exploratory wells, and she was confident that would never happen on the lake anyway. The company was just trying to cozy up to the owners of some exploratory Siberian oil fields in hope of landing more significant business.

Theresa had never heard of the Avarga Oil Consortium before traveling to Siberia but knew there were a variety of oil companies clamoring in the Russian marketplace. A few of the government-sponsored companies, like Yukos and Gazprom, grabbed all the headlines, but, like anywhere in the world, there were always some little wildcatters owning a smaller piece of the pie. From the looks of what she'd seen so far, the Avarga Oil Consortium didn't even have a piece of the crust.

“They're obviously not pumping their revenues into R & D,” she joked to the two Shell technicians that accompanied her as they climbed aboard the leased survey boat.

“Clever how they designed her to resemble a decrepit fishing boat,” cracked Jim Wofford, a tall, friendly geophysicist from Arkansas who wore a thick mustache and a ready smile.

The high-prowed black fishing boat looked like it should have been scuttled years earlier. The exterior paint was peeling everywhere and the whole vessel reeked of wood rot and dead fish. It had been decades since the brightwork had been polished, and only the occasional rainstorm accounted for any washing of the decks. Theresa noted with unease that the bilge pump ran continuously.

“We do not possess our own sea vessels,” Tatiana said without apology. As the representative from Avarga Oil, she had been the sole interface with the Shell survey team.

“That's all right, for what it lacks in space it makes up for in discomfort.” Wofford smiled.

“True, but I bet there's some caviar hiding aboard someplace,” replied Wofford's partner, Dave Roy, a fellow seismic engineer who spoke in a soft Boston accent. As Roy knew, Lake Baikal was the home to enormous sturgeon that could carry up to twenty pounds of caviar.

Theresa helped lend a hand as Roy and Wofford lugged aboard their seismic monitors, cable, and towfish, organizing the equipment on the cramped stern deck of the twenty-eight-foot fishing boat.

“Caviar? With your beer tastes?” Theresa chided.

“As a matter of fact, the two make an excellent combination,” Roy replied with mock seriousness. “The sodium content of caviar produces a hydration craving that is perfectly fulfilled by a malt-based beverage.”

“In other words, it's a good excuse to drink more beer.”

“Who needs an excuse to drink beer?” Wofford asked indignantly.

“I give up.” Theresa laughed. “Far be it for me to argue with an alcoholic. Or two.”

Tatiana looked on without amusement, then nodded toward the boat's captain when all the equipment had been stowed aboard. A dour-faced man who wore a jacquard tweed hat, the captain's most notable feature was a wide bulbous nose tinted red from a steady consumption of vodka. Ducking into the small wheelhouse, he fired up the boat's smoky diesel engine, then released the dock lines. In calm waters, they chugged away from their berth at the small fishing and tourist village of Listvyanka, located on the lake's southwest shoreline.

Tatiana unrolled a map of the lake and pointed to an area forty miles north of the town.

“We shall survey here, at Peschanaya Bay,” she told the geologists. “There have been numerous surface oil slicks reported by the fishermen in this area, which would seem to indicate a hydrocarbon seepage.”

“You're not going to take us sniffing around in deep water, are you, Tatiana?” Wofford asked.

“I understand the limitations of the equipment available to us. Though we have a number of potential seeps in the center of the lake, I realize the depths are too great for us to survey in those regions. Our research objective is focused on four locations in the south of Lake Baikal that are all near the shoreline, presumably in shallow water.”

“We'll find out easy enough,” Roy replied as he plugged a waterproof data cable into a three-foot-long yellow towfish. In addition to providing an acoustically derived image of the lake bed, the side-scan sonar sensor would also indicate the relative bottom depth when towed.

“Are the sites all located on the western shoreline?” Theresa asked.

“Only the target area in Peschanaya Bay. We must cross the lake to the other three sites, which are on the eastern shore.”

The old fishing boat motored past the docks of Listvyanka, passing a hydrofoil ferry slicing into port on its return from a transport run to Port Baikal on the opposite shore of the Angara River. The sleek enclosed passenger ferry looked out of place beside the small fleet of aged wooden fishing boats that filled Listvyanka's waters. Escaping the small harbor, the fishing boat turned north, hugging the craggy western shore of the cold lake. Deep, rich forests of taiga marched down to the shoreline in a carpet of green, interspersed with rolling meadows of thick grass. The rich colors of the landscape against the crystal blue lake made it difficult for Theresa to picture the stark bitterness of the region in the dead of winter, when a layer of ice four feet thick covered the lake. A shiver at the thought made her glad she was visiting when the days were longest.

It was of little matter to Theresa, though. The petroleum engineer's true love was traveling and she would have gladly visited the lake in January just for the experience. Bright and analytical, she had chosen her career less for the intellectual challenge than for the opportunity to travel to remote places around the globe. Extended stints in Indonesia, Venezuela, and the Baltic were broken up by the occasional two-week assignment like this one, where she was sent to survey an offbeat prospective oil field. Working in a man's field proved to be no setback, as her vivacious personality and humorous outlook on life easily broke down barriers with men who weren't already attracted to her athletic build, dark hair, and walnut eyes.

Forty miles north of Listvyanka, a shallow bay called Peschanaya cut into the western shoreline, protecting a narrow sandy beach. As the captain nosed the boat's prow into the bay, Tatiana turned to Theresa and proclaimed, “We will start here.”

With the engine thrown into neutral and the boat drifting, Roy and Wofford lowered the side-scan sonar towfish over the stern as Theresa mounted a GPS antenna onto the side rail and plugged it into the sonar's computer. Tatiana glanced at a fathometer mounted in the wheelhouse and shouted, “Depth, thirty meters.”

“Not too deep, that's good,” Theresa said as the boat moved forward again, towing the sensor a hundred feet behind. A digitally enhanced image of the lake bed scrolled by on a color monitor that captured the processed sound waves emitted from the towfish.

“We can acquire meaningful results as long as the depth stays under fifty meters,” Wofford said. “Anything deeper and we'll need more cable and a bigger boat.”

“And more caviar,” Roy added with a hungry look.

Slowly the fishing boat swept back and forth across the bay, its hardened captain spinning the ship's wheel lightly in his hands as the four visitors on the stern hunched over the sonar monitor. Unusual geological formations were noted and their positions marked, as the experienced oil surveyors looked for lake bed features that might indicate a hydrocarbon seep. Further studies, using core sampling or geochemical analysis of water samples, would still need to be undertaken to verify a seep, but the side-scan sonar would allow the surveyors to zero in on future geological points to examine.

As they reached the northern edge of the bay, Theresa stood and stretched as the captain swung the boat around and aligned it for the last survey lane. Toward the center of the lake, she noticed a large dirty-gray ship sailing north. It appeared to be some sort of research vessel, with an old-style helicopter wedged on the stern deck. The rotors on the helicopter were sweeping in an arc, as if preparing to take off. Scanning above the bridge, she noted oddly that the ship's mast appeared to be flying both a Russian and an American flag. Likely a joint scientific study, she mused. Reading up on Lake Baikal, she was surprised to learn of the West's scientific interest in the picturesque lake and its unique flora and fauna. Geophysicists, microbiologists, and environmental scientists migrated from around the world to study the lake and its pure waters.

“Back on line,” Roy's voice shouted across the deck. Twenty minutes later, they reached the southern edge of the bay, completing their multilane sweep. Theresa determined that there were three lake bed structures seen with the sonar that would warrant further examination.

“That wraps it up for the opening act of today's program,” Wofford said. “Where to next?”

“We will cross the lake to a position here,” Tatiana said, tapping the map with a slender finger. “Thirty-five kilometers southeast of our current position.”

“Might as well leave the sonar in the water. I don't think this boat can go much faster than our survey speed anyway, and we'll get a look at the water depths as we cross over,” Theresa said.

“No problem,” Wofford said, taking a seat on the deck and stretching his legs up onto the side railing. As he casually watched the sonar monitor, a quizzical expression suddenly appeared on his face. “That's odd,” he muttered.

Roy leaned over and studied the monitor. The shadowy image of the lake bottom had abruptly gone haywire, replaced by a barrage of spiked lines running back and forth across the monitor.

“Towfish bouncing off the bottom?” he asked.

“No,” Wofford replied, checking the depth. “She's riding forty meters above the lake floor.”

The interference continued for several more seconds, then, as abruptly as it started, it suddenly ceased. The contours of the lake bottom again rolled down the screen in clear imagery.

“Maybe one of those giant sturgeon tried to take a bite out of our towfish,” Wofford joked, relieved that the equipment was working properly again. But his words were followed by a low, deep rumble that echoed across the water.