Page 10 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

The Herati Gambit

America out of this hemisphere. The bigger problem is how to get
that oil out of Turkmenistan. That brings us back to the Great
Game.”
“Right,” said Nishtikstein, pointing to a dotted line on the map.
“The British have fought fiercely for decades to keep the Indian
Ocean their private pond, ensuring access to their Asian empire and
protecting their southern flank further west: Aden, Suez, Rhodesia.
Now that the Russians are on their side and the Allies have the
Middle East secured and the Shah of Iran in their camp, they are
paying less attention to this area. If Caspian Sea oil can be stealthily
extracted—perhaps by slant drilling—and transported to the coast
without attracting attention, then the Axis has a chance of winning
the game. Otherwise, according to what we’ve read, their war effort
may well come to naught.”
“That is not an assessment Berlin, Tokyo or Rome would want
made public.” Retsu Goh again looked at his watch. “Here’s how
they’re going to pull this off. If they started a big operation, laying a
pipeline across several hundred miles of desert, spies on the ground
or Allied reconnaissance planes would spot it and bring in heavy
bombers. Tunneling under all that terrain would take years. But the
labor has already been done for them: centuries of ghanat
construction.”
“Yes, yes.” Korbin stared at the American. “That is what I do not
understand.”
“I do,” said Retsu calmly. “In California water has been brought
hundreds of miles from the north to the south through a system of
pipelines, aqueducts, pumping stations and hydroelectric dams, an
engineering feat turning the state into a major agricultural producer
for the United States. The exposed portion of that man-made
waterway is subject to loss through evaporation. The ancient peoples
living in this hot and arid region, driven by necessity, developed an
ingenious irrigation system to solve that problem: underground
tunnels connecting periodic vertical shafts from the surface serving as
wells. Gravity supplied the motive force. Although many of the
hundreds of ghanat in Iran and Afghanistan have fallen into disuse
and disrepair, enough remain to provide a hidden passageway for an
oil pipeline all the way from Turkmenistan to Gwendar on the

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