Page 20 of Cooper

“Bianca,” whispered Coop.

“No. No, this is what we will do. If I do it out in the open, speak publicly about it, my uncle has no claim whatsoever and if he gets the land, if somehow the land is manipulated as a tool between nations, it will not be on my head but on his.”

They all stared at her and Kat smiled, putting an arm around the other woman’s shoulders. Tru folded her arms across her chest and glared at the men, daring them to say a word. Kat finally spoke.

“If you need us, we’ll be in the conference room writing up a proposal for the land management folks.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

By the time Thomas stepped out of the dust-streaked transport truck, the Argentine plateau looked less like a place on a map and more like the surface of some old, patient planet that had been waiting for them. The wind came low across the scrub and shale chips, smelling faintly of mineral dust and dry grass, and May stood beside him with both hands on her hips, staring at the broken ridges as if they had personally invited her to solve a riddle.

Emma unfolded the preliminary satellite printouts across the hood of the truck, pinning one corner down with a rock and the other with her elbow.

“If the report is exaggerated,” she said, squinting against the glare, “then somebody went to a heroic amount of trouble to exaggerate in the correct geological direction.”

Lindsay laughed as she lifted a case of core sleeves from the back of the second truck.

“That is the most Emma way possible to say we might be standing on a fortune.” Rachel, already checking the calibration on the handheld spectrometer, glanced up.

“Please do not say fortune until I have at least one clean reading. I am emotionally vulnerable to good data.”

Dana kept quiet for a moment, kneeling to break a thin plate of dark shale between her gloved fingers. The rock split with a papery snap, revealing a dense black interior that caught the light with a dull, oily sheen.

“Organic-rich,” she murmured, then sniffed the fresh fracture and raised her brows. “And aromatic enough to make the safety briefing suddenly feel relevant.”

The security team fanned out with practiced ease. Tristan took the northern ridge with binoculars, Duncan paced the old access track, Chief remained near the vehicles with the radio, Morgan and Manx checked the low ravines for movement, and JB, who seemed incapable of standing anywhere without looking relaxed, leaned against a fender and asked whether shale counted as a collectible if it ruined your boots.

“Only if you label it properly,” May called back, swinging a soil auger from her shoulder. “Unlabeled rocks are just clutter with academic confidence.”

Thomas smiled despite himself and set the first survey grid, marking points with orange flags that snapped and fluttered in the wind.

The reported depository lay at the edge of a basin where uplift had peeled back layers of sedimentary history like pages in a damaged book. Bands of limestone, siltstone, marl, and black organic shale appeared along the slope, the target interval running in a continuous dark seam with the lateral persistence of a true source-rock system. Emma tapped the map beside the structural contours.

“If this seam holds across the grid, it is not a pocket. It is a basin-scale interval.”

They began with shallow pits, each dug carefully through the hard desert pavement and into the finer material below. Lindsay and Rachel worked together, one loosening soil and weathered shale with a mattock while the other bagged samples by horizon, depth, color, grain size, moisture, carbonate reaction, and field odor. Every bag received coordinates, elevation, sample depth, and a chain-of-custody mark, because Rachel claimed that unlabeled samples were how perfectly intelligent people invented chaos.

At the first pit, the upper soil was ordinary enough: pale brown, sandy, sparse with rootlets and windblown dust. At nearly a foot, the auger bit into compact clay with caliche nodules. At two feet, it scraped against laminated shale fragments that came up black, fissile, and faintly glossy, with pyrite pinpricks along bedding planes. Dana held one shard to the light.

“This is not just source rock. This has been waiting for someone with paperwork.”

Thomas ran the portable gas detector near the fresh cut and watched methane and heavier-hydrocarbon indicators climb faster than he expected. It was not a roaring hazard, but the response was strong enough to make him step back, check wind direction, and order the team to keep ignition sources cold.

“We are getting gas showing up at the surface expression,” he said. “That means any deeper core could be very interesting, or very rude.”

Chief lifted his head from the radio.

“Define rude.” May answered without looking up.

“Anything that makes scientists stop joking.”

JB immediately stepped away from the pit by three full steps, earning a grin from Morgan and a chuckle from Manx.

“Good to know your survival instinct is calibrated.”

The second grid point produced a thicker shale interval, and the third produced something stranger: soil with a greenish cast beneath the weathered layer, streaked by tiny metallic flecks that flashed gold and copper under the sun. Rachel ran the spectrometer twice, frowned, ran it a third time, and then simply handed the unit to Emma without speaking.

Emma read the display, blinked.