Клайв Касслер - Typhoon Fury

But he had an idea that would work in any conditions.

He handed the tracker to Raven. “Get ready to put this under the truck by the rear wheels. Wait for the distraction.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What distraction?”

One of Locsin’s men was closing the rear door of the truck while the other wheeled the handcart back to the door and gave it to one of the employees. They were preparing to leave. It was now or never.

“You’ll know when,” Eddie said to Raven and put his arm around Hali’s shoulder, pulling him toward the rear of the truck.

“What are we doing now?” Hali asked in confusion.

“Get ready to hit me as hard as you can,” Eddie said in a low voice.

Hali looked at him like he was crazy. “What?”

Eddie staggered like a drunken idiot when they got close to the truck and loudly slurred his words into Hali’s face. “I said, your sister invited me over to her place. What was I supposed to do? I think we’ll have a storm party today.”

He glared at Hali, who finally got what he was going for. Hali reared back and sent a solid punch into Eddie’s gut. His tightened abs absorbed most of the blow, but he was impressed with Hali’s punch. The lessons Eddie had been giving him were paying off.

Eddie went down on his back, then sprung up and grabbed Hali by the neck and wrestled him to the pavement. A cheering crowd surrounded them, eager to have a good fight to distract them from the coming storm. While they exchanged softened blows, Eddie stole a glance at the people around them and saw that Locsin’s men were among the spectators, exactly as he had hoped.

Raven wouldn’t need long to snap the tracker’s magnet into place. Eddie put on a show with Hali for a few more seconds, just long enough to make it look respectable. Then he rolled away and acted like he was catching his breath. Hali didn’t pursue, much to the groaning dismay of the crowd.

They looked at each other as if they were grudgingly conceding the fight and got to their feet.

“Okay. I won’t go to her place if you don’t want me to,” Eddie said reluctantly. He extended a hand to Hali, who shook it. With that, the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had gathered.

Eddie watched the two men get in the truck and drive off.

Raven walked over to them and said, “You fight like girls, and I mean that in the best way.”

Hali rubbed his chin and smiled at Eddie. “You got me pretty good on one of those punches.”

“Sorry about that, but we had to make it look real,” Eddie said. He turned to Raven. “Is the tracker in place?”

“Exactly where you wanted it. Nobody saw a thing.”

“Then let’s return that farmer’s car and get back to the Oregon . If there weren’t such long lines at the gas stations I’d fill it up on the way back.”

He didn’t need to text Juan that the tracker was operational. It went active the moment the magnet connected to the truck. Seconds later, Eddie got confirmation on his phone. The Oregon was already receiving its signal.

61

Because the tracker was planted underneath the rear bumper of the truck, the big screen in the Oregon ’s op center could only show lateral and rear views as Kevin Nixon’s camera panned around. Still, Juan thought it was much better than simply following the blinking dot on the map next to it.

After leaving the city, the truck took the northern highway. For most of the trip, fields of sugarcane on both sides waved in the steadily worsening weather. The highway ran right along the coast for two miles before the truck turned off and headed inland on a narrow paved road.

After another few miles, the truck turned again, this time onto a muddy road toward one of the island’s central mountains. Almost immediately, the farms were replaced by a thick jungle as it started going uphill. The truck bounced so much on the bumpy road that the broadcast from the camera looked like it was coming from the back of a hyperactive kangaroo.

“I play a lot of video games,” Murph said, “but even my stomach isn’t going to be able to take much more of watching this.”

“I’ll help Kevin build an image stabilizer into the next camera,” Eric said.

“That doesn’t look like a public road to me,” Linda said. “If it is, their tax dollars are going to waste.”

The truck stopped abruptly. They could hear a few voices over the burbling exhaust, as if the driver was speaking to someone at a gate. Seconds later, the truck started moving again and was engulfed by darkness as it entered a tunnel. Just before it went inside, Juan noted that the road continued on along the hillside.

Receding into the distance at the tunnel entrance were two guards closing two chain-link gates that were covered with vegetation to disguise the opening. As soon as the gates were closed, they returned to their posts at seats inside. The positioning would give them a clear field of fire at any vehicles that approached.

“Does this remind anyone of the Bat Cave?” Murph asked.

“Locsin is pretty much the opposite of Bruce Wayne,” Juan said.

After a hundred yards, the tunnel opened into a much larger cave. Locsin was apparently so sure that the cave entrance was undetectable that he hadn’t bothered to post any guards where the tunnel entered the cave.

“This must be the cavern Beth mentioned in her email to Raven,” Linda said.

The camera’s limited view didn’t show how high the cave’s ceiling went. But the cave floor around them, leveled and compacted with crushed rock, was well lit by arc lamps powered by a huge diesel power plant. A tanker semi-trailer was parked alongside feeding it fuel, indicating Locsin’s headquarters complex was much more than simply a few men huddled in a dank cave.

The delivery truck moved through a cluster of low-slung buildings. Right now, Juan was just trying to get a feel for the overall layout of the place, but the recording from the camera feed would give them detailed intel they could review when planning the mission to infiltrate the cave and rescue Beth.

The truck continued on through a central plaza with a stalagmite in the center. For a split second, Juan saw a strange sight beyond it, unexpected for the interior of a cavern.

Eric saw it, too, because he said, “Was that a helicopter?”

“Looked like it to me,” Juan said. “Linda, I want the highest-resolution satellite photos you can get of this area. There must be another opening that we haven’t seen yet.”

“On it,” she replied.

The truck kept driving and did a three-point turn almost like they were giving a three-hundred-sixty-degree tour of the place. Juan counted at least a dozen buildings and twice as many trucks and Humvees. Beth was right in saying the place was huge.

The men they saw were all muscle-bound. Definitely long-term Typhoon users. There were enough of them to populate a small town, which meant a full-on assault was out of the question. Juan was already formulating a plan for getting in and out without being seen.

At one point in the truck’s turn, he saw a large cart being wheeled from a large three-story-tall building to one just as big but only two stories high. The tarp covering the object on top slid aside briefly before it was put back into place. It was the exact same type of black drone that had damaged the Oregon .

“I guess we know where they’re manufacturing their Kuyogs,” Murph said. “Judging by the size of those buildings, they could have hundreds of them in there.”

Given that each of the Kuyogs was packed with high explosives, Juan noted that could come in handy if the need arose.

The truck backed up to a long one-story building where the largest number of the men were entering or leaving, which meant it was likely the barracks, mess hall, and kitchen.