3: Chapter 3 Black Gold Beneath the Desert

Late at night.

Deep in the desert, thirty-one kilometers southeast of the Governors Mansion in Khuzestan Province.

There were no roads.

Reza sat in the passenger seat of the jeep, with Hassan driving, followed by three trucks loaded with men and equipment.

The jeeps sent by the Americans had only arrived two days ago, and Reza had put them to use that very night.

The headlights cut two stark white beams through the desert, revealing nothing but gravel and rocks ahead.

On the map, this area was called the "Ahvaz Wasteland," officially labeled as "saline-alkali Gobi with no economic value."

But Reza knew that beneath this "no economic value" desert lay something capable of changing his destiny.

In his past life, this place was known as the "Azadegan Oil Field."

Discovered by a Japanese oil company in 2003, it had proven reserves of 4.2 billion barrels, making it one of the largest undeveloped oil fields in the early 21st century.

But in 1975, no one knew of its existence.

"We're here."

The jeep stopped by a dried-up riverbed.

Reza jumped out of the car and looked around by the moonlight; the flat Gobi, with a few low sand dunes in the distance, offered an extremely wide field of view, allowing anyone approaching from any direction to be spotted three kilometers away.

The location was excellent. The concealment was sufficient.

The trucks behind stopped, and over fifty burly men wrapped in headscarves filed out.

They were all people Hassan had found in local tribes—half from the Bakhtiari tribe and half from the Arab tribes. They had blood feuds with each other, but they shared one thing in common: poverty.

The kind of poverty where their wives and children were starving to death.

The conditions Reza offered were simple: come work, and get five hundred Rials a day. Don't ask what you're doing, and don't talk about what you see. Violators would be dealt with according to tribal law.

At that time in Iran, five hundred Rials was enough to feed a family of five for a week.

When these men received the money, their hands were shaking.

"First, we dig an exploratory well."

Reza took out a marker stake and stuck it in the middle of the riverbed at a spot he had calculated using GPS coordinates. "Right here. Drill straight down to four hundred meters."

An old oil worker who had come along—a retired technician Hassan had paid a high price to poach from the Abadan Refinery—looked at the spot, his face full of skepticism.

"Your Highness, I came to this place thirty years ago."

The old technician, named Nasser, was as thin as a stick but had sharp, discerning eyes. "The British gave up when they explored it. The surface strata are alternating limestone and shale; it doesn't look like an oil-bearing structure."

"The British didn't explore deep enough," Reza said.

This was a fact. In the 1950s, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had conducted preliminary exploration in this area, but the drilling technology at the time could only reach about two hundred meters, while the oil-bearing layer of the Azadegan Oil Field was between three hundred eighty and four hundred fifty meters deep. Missing by less than two hundred meters, the British had missed a super oil field.

Nasser clearly didn't believe the geological judgment of a young prince, but the employer had paid, so he just did his job.

"A four-hundred-meter exploratory well, with our current equipment, will take at least three weeks."

"I'll give you two weeks."

"Your Highness, this isn't a negotiation,"

"Two weeks." Reza's tone was unquestionable. "I will give you double the pay, but you must have results within two weeks."

Nasser gritted his teeth, shouted at his men, and began unloading the equipment.

The drilling equipment was something Reza had Hassan buy on the black market—two old Soviet-made rotary drilling rigs, rusted but still usable.

It cost him almost all of his "Governor's budget." The administrative budget allocated by King Pahlavi to the Khuzestan Governors Mansion each year was two million Rials, which was equivalent to about twenty-eight thousand US dollars at the exchange rate at the time.

Twenty-eight thousand US dollars—that was all his startup capital.

Hassan walked over and lowered his voice: "Your Highness, I just received news from Ahvaz. The commander of the 92nd Infantry Division, Jafar, met with someone today—a person from the CIA."

"What rank?"

"I'm not sure, but he arrived in a military helicopter."

Reza narrowed his eyes.

Brennan had just left, and immediately after, someone from the CIA went to see the division commander.

What did that mean?

It meant that although Brennan had judged him "low threat" on the surface.

He had still added a note in his report: "recommend continued monitoring."

The CIA always operated on the principle of "better safe than sorry."

"What's the background on this Jafar?"

"The King's loyal dog."

Hassan's tone was dismissive.

"He rose to power by sucking up to the head of SAVAK. He's no good at fighting, but he's an expert at politics. The 92nd Division under his command looks like it has eight thousand men, but no more than two thousand can actually fight; the rest are all ghost soldiers. He has three villas in Ahvaz, two wives, and collects a ten-thousand-dollar consulting fee from the Americans every month."

"What about gambling debts and hookers?"

Hassan was stunned: "...How did you know he gambles?"

"I guessed. People like that, once they've taken American money for a long time, get bolder and their desires grow. Gambling, women, opium—they have to be into something."

Actually, it wasn't a guess.

In the records of his past life, it was clearly documented that Jafar Amin fled to Iraq on the eve of the 1978 revolution after being hunted by loan sharks for gambling debts.

This man was a pure opportunist.

But he couldn't be touched now.

The 92nd Division might be a paper tiger.

But a paper tiger is still a tiger; until he grew his own claws, he couldn't afford to provoke it.

"Watch him, but don't alert him," Reza said. "Focus on his communication methods with the CIA—meeting locations, frequency, and what communication tools are used."

"Understood."

The roar of the drilling rig starting up came from the construction site, shaking the sandy ground beneath their feet.

Reza stood by and watched for a while.

Then he took out a notebook he carried with him from his pocket. The first thing he did after arriving in this era was to find paper and a pen to record all the most critical information in his mind.

It wasn't that his memory was poor, but that the amount of information was too vast.

Twenty years of Middle Eastern war history, hundreds of battles, thousands of key figures, tens of thousands of time nodes—missing any single detail could cost him his life in the future.

He turned to the page marked "1975-1977," which was densely filled with shorthand codes that only he could understand.

1976.3: Iraq purchases the Osirak nuclear reactor from France, launching its nuclear program.

1976.9: The King secretly approves SAVAK's massacre of three thousand people in the Kurdish region; the news is suppressed by the US.

1977.1: Carter becomes US President and begins promoting human rights diplomacy, putting pressure on Pahlavi.

1977.6: The first large-scale student protest erupts in Tehran.

1977.10: Ayatollah Khomeini's son, Mostafa, dies suddenly in Iraq; Ayatollah Khomeini publicly accuses SAVAK of assassination.

Two years.

He had two years before the revolution broke out in 1979 to accomplish three things:

First, have money. Without money, everything is just empty talk. So, the well beneath his feet must produce oil.

Second, have men. Not the four hundred guards, but an armed force truly loyal to him that can fight hard battles. At least three thousand men.

Third, have technology. Missiles, armored vehicles, air defense systems—he didn't need to compare with the Americans, but at least he had to let his opponents know that "attacking Iran will come at a price."

These three things were all indispensable.

Twelve days later.

Late at night.

Nasser, covered in mud, crawled out from under the derrick and stumbled over to Reza.

His old face was full of unbelievable ecstasy, his lips trembling, unable to say a complete sentence.

"It's, it's out!!"

He was clutching a core sample stained with black liquid; the pungent smell of crude oil spread in the night wind.

Reza took the core sample and sniffed it under his nose.

Light crude oil.

Low sulfur content.

Extremely high quality.

"What's the depth?"

"Three hundred ninety-two meters!" Nasser shouted. "Your Highness, this is a light oil layer! I estimate the thickness to be at least over fifty meters! This reserve... this reserve... My God, I've worked in oil for thirty years, and I've never seen such a thick oil layer!!"

The surrounding workers were silent at first, then erupted into a suppressed cheer.

They didn't know what strategic value this meant, but they knew oil meant money.

Hassan stood behind Reza, his Adam's apple bobbing.

He was now one hundred percent sure that this young prince was definitely not that playboy prince who would get drunk and curse in the streets.

But who on earth was he?

"Nasser."

Reza returned the core sample to him, his voice not loud, but every word nailed into the ears of everyone present.

"From now on, you are the chief engineer of this well. Monthly salary: five thousand Rials. But you must remember one thing—"

He looked around, his gaze sweeping over the face of every worker.

"This well does not exist. If anyone mentions a single word to the outside world, I will make him disappear in this desert, and not even his bones will be found."

A cold wind swept across the Gobi.

No one spoke.

Reza turned and walked toward the jeep.

The first step, he had completed.

Next, he had to turn this black gold into real money, and then turn that real money into guns, artillery, and missiles.

Time was running out.

The undercurrents in Tehran had already begun to surge.

The cassette tapes of Ayatollah Khomeini from Najaf, Iraq, were flowing into Iran continuously.

The anger of the grassroots masses was like the oil beneath this Gobi—it was just waiting for a drill bit to gush out.

And he had to be that drill bit before anyone else.