Page 78 of Clive Cussler Desolation Code

“Of course she did,” Joe said. “Why wouldn’t she?”

No one replied to this.

Joe looked around. The Australian company had done a lot of work before moving on. The equipment, material, and supplies they’d left behind appeared to be substantial. Far more than anyone would bring in for just a test well. He guessed they had been further along than anyone suspected when Vaughn bought them out. It dawned on him that the abandoned equipment and the tunnels themselves might be useful. They’d obviously helped hide and sustain the escaped clones.

“How far down does this go?” Joe asked, pointing to the test well.

“Very deep.”

That didn’t exactly help. “Are there other tunnels around here?” he asked. “Other shafts?”

The nearest man nodded.

The second one elaborated on that. “Many.”

These are not the most talkative people in the world, Joe thought. “Here’s a question: Does anyone have a map?”

“Map?” the first man asked.

“A paper or drawing,” Joe explained. “One that shows where all the tunnels go.”

The first man thought for a bit and then nodded. He and his partner exchanged a few hushed words and then came to an agreement.

“Drawing,” the first one said.

“Yes,” Joe replied.

“Come,” he said, starting off toward a distant section of the cave.

Joe was led from the main room down another tunnel. It took them to a smaller space with an actual doorframe, but no door. Inside he found a large desk with an office chair behind it. File cabinets and a couple of poster boards with schematic drawings on them took up the side wall. A remote panel covered with dust blinked in various hues as LEDs flashed the status of different pieces of equipment.

Joe concluded that this was the operations room for the geothermal venture. He went to the desk, slipped his hands free from the vines, and began searching through the documents that had been left behind. He found shipping invoices, catalogs of available equipment, and receipts confirming the delivery of supplies. He found a barrel filled with poster-sized tubes. In each was a blueprint marking out the tunnels and equipment locations on different levels. The excavation proved far more extensive than he’d expected.

“Those Aussies turned this place into an anthill,” he muttered.

At the far end of the room, he spotted a particularly sturdy doormade of gray steel that was beginning to show spots of rust. Built directly into the rock, it reminded him of the door to a bank vault. A warning sign covered in corrosion hung on it.

Joe went to the door, attempted to clean off the sign, and then leaned on the door, shoving it open. Lighting came on inside the room and a mischievous grin spread across Joe’s face.

He turned to his newfound friends. “We need to show this to Kurt.”

Chapter 46

The conversation with Kai left Kurt with a dilemma. He and Joe had come here with a rather limited set of goals centered on gathering enough evidence to prove to the world that Vaughn was cloning humans, imprisoning them, and subjecting them to barbaric experiments. But the revelations he’d seen in Kai’s artwork, accompanied by the knowledge that the sea locusts were rampaging across the ocean toward various shores, changed the equation. The fact that Priya had been joined with Vaughn’s machine complicated the matter further.

Truth was that their options were limited. Without the helicopter, or the speedy ribbed inflatable, escaping the island was unlikely, not with Vaughn alerted to their presence and a fleet of drones and patrol boats at his disposal. And that meant they needed to take action here and now. But the question was: How?

According to satellite data, Rudi and Yaeger estimated that Vaughn had barracks and housing for two hundred people on the far side of the island. Even if that number was divided up between clones being used in the experiments, science, and support staff, and then the cruel brothers and other paramilitary forces keeping everyone in line, they would easily be facing a hundred men at arms, plus drones andwhatever other robotic nightmare machines Vaughn had dreamed up to keep himself safe.

Adding to the danger was the idea that TAU was at the hub of all these things, both machine and human. If one drone or one of the linked humans spotted them, all of them would know instantly where the attack was coming from.

TAU and Vaughn had achieved the desire of every field marshal and five-star general since the beginning of time: the ability to see the battlefield from a god’s-eye view, knowing everything that was going on in every corner of the landscape, instantly and at all moments.

Hiding around a corner did no good if a camera or a drone spotted you. Killing a sentry before he sounded an alarm was of little use if his eyes caught sight of you as he dropped. Even the instant elimination of a lookout or guard would set off alarm bells as the man’s consciousness went offline.

Viewed like this, the task was worse than a long shot. One with a foregone and disastrous conclusion.

Their only real advantage lay with Priya: the Gray Witch. “If I go to the other side of the island, will the Gray Witch be able to conceal me from TAU?”

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