Chapter 9

            Keller and his Industrial Security team arrived by helicopter at the Hima exploration camp. The Aramco helicopter settled down on a salt flat, or sabkha, between two towering sand-dune ranges. The sabkha looked like a vast concrete pool and its only distinguishing feature, apart from a few scraggly salt bushes, was the geologists' camp – three tents, a campfire site and a supply area. When the chopper blades stopped, the only sound was the rhythmic flapping of the tents in the steady wind.

            A search of the camp turned up nothing.

            “Where's the Hummer?” I wondered.

            “Damned if I know,” said Al-Shaikh. “They had a Land Cruiser too. The workers drove it.”

            “Tracks don't last long, with the winds around here. But it's still possible to see where the vehicles took off from.” The Land Cruiser's tracks led over the lower dune range to the south. The wider tracks of the Hummer headed northwest, around the left side of the northern dune.

            Al-Shaikh took one of his men and set out on foot, following the Land Cruiser's tracks. Keller jumped back in the chopper, and instructed the pilot to follow the distinctive tracks of the Hummer.

            Eventually the tracks halted, disappeared. Beyond was a huge circle of swirled sand, about 200 meters across.  It formed a shallow depression. Keller's first thought was there might be a limestone sinkhole beneath the sand, that perhaps Vallentine and Dossary and their vehicle had been sucked in. But that explanation seemed preposterous; he had never heard of such a thing happening. He recalled the quicksand fields of Umm al-Sammim, on the other side of the Rub' al-Khali near Oman – shepherds had lost whole flocks of sheep and camels in those – but the quicksand was created by rainwater runoff from the Omani mountains, and there was no moisture here.

            Keller thought about the anomaly he had seen on the seismic chart in Salazar's office. The inverted pyramid beneath a thousand feet of sand. As the chopper hovered over the circle of sand, Keller took a GPS reading to pinpoint the location. The coordinates were the same. He realized with a chill that the mysterious anomaly was directly below him. He had no doubt whatsoever that the anomaly had something to do with the disappearance of the geologists.

            The whole thing gave Keller the creeps. He was reluctant to have the pilot set down anywhere within or near the circle of sand. Instead they returned directly to the sabkha.

            Al-Shaikh and his men had found the workers' Land Cruiser and had driven it back to the camp. There was still no sign of the Pakistanis. Where could they have gone?

            Back in Dhahran, Keller phoned a friend at the U.S. Consulate General. Annette Braverman was ostensibly a commercial attache, but Keller was fairly certain she was plugged in with the intelligence community in some way. She was a no-nonsense diplomat who seemed to know something about everything.

            “You found what?”

            “It's some kind of anomaly under the sands,” he said, “an object shaped like an inverted pyramid. In our new oil field, Hima. At least some of our geologists think the anomaly may be hollow. I think it's connected with the disappearance of two of our geologists, who vanished into thin air out in the desert yesterday. The object may also be linked to the recent deaths of two of our people in Dhahran. I was just wondering if you had heard anything about this, or if you could help in any way. It's got us pretty stumped here.”

            There was a moment of silence. Then:

            “Let me check it out, Dan, and I'll get back to you.”

            Keller sat back in the old gray wingback chair in his living room and tried to make sense of it all. In the old days, when Jennie was part of his life, he would have discussed the case with her. She'd always had insights he could use. But Jennie had died of melanoma two years earlier. Their daughter and son were grown, married and living their own lives back in the States. Keller glanced around the room. It was a small apartment, done in townhouse fashion, with living room and kitchen down and single bedroom and bath upstairs. When the family had been together in Arabia, they'd had a roomy detached house, three bedrooms and a garage, with a sizable backyard surrounded by a fence. They had even thought about putting in a pool. But that was ancient history, he thought, as he relaxed in his chair and sipped an iced tea. Now he had nothing but work, and the work was gnawing at him, like an old dog worrying a bone. Setting down his drink, he rubbed his eyes. Outside, he could hear a baseball game underway at the field across the street, with parents, coaches, fans and twelve-year-old players screaming their lungs out.

            Keller tried to make sense of the anomaly in the Hima field and discern a connection with the two deaths in Dhahran and the disappearances in the desert. Could there be a national security angle? Could the inverted pyramid shape beneath the dunes have something to do with governments, national interests, perhaps even terrorism? So far the Saudis weren't saying anything. Neither were the Americans. Could he be imagining all this?
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