Clive Cussler Desolation Code

Prologue

The Island

A man dressed in tattered rags sprinted headlong through a tropical rainforest. Drenched in sweat, bare feet pounding the uneven ground, he pushed through the broad green leaves and charted a path higher. Upward, toward a peak he couldn't see, but believed he would reach.

Finding a more open trail, he paused near a tangled bush covered in colorful flowers. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat from his brow and smacked the side of his neck as a biting insect landed. Pulling his hand away revealed a smear of his own blood, which only partially covered the tattoo on his neck, displaying numbers and letters in an odd code-like arrangement. The last two digits were an offset one and zero. Because of this he was called Deci.

Wiping the blood off, Deci glanced back into the foliage, looking for the others, who were falling behind. "Come on," he shouted. "Keep moving."

A group of younger men appeared. They resembled him in skin tone and facial features, appearing so similar to one another it was hard to tell them apart. Their clothes were as ragged and dirty as his, and fear streaked their faces.

They pushed through, looking to him. "Are you sure this is the right way?"

In truth he wasn't, but he'd been told he would find a trail, and here it was. He pointed along the path. "To the top. Go quickly."

"And then what?" one of the younger men asked.

"Escape," he said. "Freedom."

These words landed flat with the younger men. They almost seemed confused. But the sound of dogs barking shook them out of their stupor. The hunters were coming; they'd picked up the trail and there was no chance of them losing it now. Not with so many of them pushing through the trees, sweating like beasts of burden.

"Go, go, go," Deci shouted.

The young ones took off again, followed at the last by another man, who was as old as their leader. He stopped and crouched near the bush. At a distance the two men appeared almost identical, but Deci's sunken eyes, gaunt cheeks, and scared face showed how their lives had diverged.

"Brother," the second man said. "They have us. We should turn back before it's too late."

"It's already too late," Deci replied. "Our only hope lies ahead."

"On the cliffs? What are we supposed to do? Jump?"

"A way will be revealed," the leader insisted. "She promised us."

A look of irritation crossed the second man's face. "She has never been seen. She's just a whisper in our minds."

"She gave us this," Deci insisted, grasping a necklace that lay heavy against his chest. It was bulky and heavy and made of electronic parts and batteries. He wore it as if it were a talisman of great power.

"The necklace cannot deflect bullets," the second man said, "or stop a dog from biting. And blind faith is for fools."

"Then turn back," Deci said. "But I will not let them do to the younger ones what they've done to us."

The two men stared at each other for a long moment. They'd had this argument before. The deadlock ended as a gunshot rang out from below. Both men flinched and ducked and then turned for the trail together, sprinting up the path in bare and bloody feet.

"You'd better be right," the second man said. "Or this is the only freedom we'll ever know."

The two men scrambled up the trail, ignorant of the tracks they were making in the dirt and the bloody footprints left on the steep rock faces. When they pushed through the last wall of tangled brush and arrived out into the open, they found themselves atop a rocky bluff, high above the sea. By now the sun was low on the horizon, the ocean waves shimmered in bronze and gray. A cool breeze drew the sweat off their bodies while the sound of crashing waves echoed up from below.

The young men were staring.

"I see forever," one of them said.

"How do we go?" another asked.

The leader looked around. He saw no sign of rescue. No sign of help. Maybe they were supposed to jump.

He stepped to the edge and looked down. Piles of rocks made up a jagged shoreline two hundred feet below. They stuck out too far from the base of the cliff to imagine one could reach the water. Even if they could jump far enough to make the water's edge, they would die broken and battered after plunging through the shallows and hitting the rocks.

Stepping back from the edge, Deci shuddered. He'd led them to their doom. He suddenly wished he wasn't the leader. Wished even more intensely that he'd never received the message or been given the necklace. And then he saw something that gave him hope. A knotted line had been anchored to the side of the cliff. It dropped down thirty feet, where a weighted end hung loosely. It looked as though the rope hung in front of an opening in the side of the cliff. A way out. He had been promised a way out.

He had no experience in such things, but he quickly saw the drawback to using it: if he could see it, so could the hunters.

He removed the necklace and placed it over the head of his brother. "Climb down."

His brother looked down at the rope and the rocks far beneath it. He shook his head.

"Go," Deci insisted. "Lead them."

"No," he said. "You take them. I have no faith."

Deci grasped his brother by the arm and drug him to the edge of the cliff. Reaching over, he managed to grasp the rope. He pulled on it to test the security, then placed it in his brother's hands. "She promised a way out. This is it. Now go!"


Pushing through the jungle, a half mile behind the group of escapees, a tall Caucasian man with a bald head and narrow, hawkish eyes found himself enjoying the hunt. Dressed in khakis and a safari vest, he carried two pistols on separate belts and walked with a shotgun in his hands.

On the island he was known as the Overseer, but at previous stops in his life he'd been a big-game hunter, a trail boss in some of the toughest parts of the world, and a mercenary for hire to anyone with the right denominations of currency.

Here on the island, he found himself grinning as the dogs locked in on the scent and pulled hard against their leads. He laughed as the handlers struggled to keep up, holding the animals back and hacking their way through the brush with machetes.

"Run them down," the Overseer growled with a demented sense of glee. "If even one man escapes, each of you will suffer the punishment meant for them."

If his men needed any more motivation, this was enough. They pushed on, climbing higher and moving faster as the foliage thinned. Before long they were tracking bloody, scuffling footprints imprinted by raw, uncovered feet. It made the trail easy to follow, but left the Overseer wondering about the course they'd chosen.

Previous escapees had always run for the other side of the island, fleeing the civilized but prisonlike compound in hopes of surviving in the rocky, volcanic wasteland. These men were taking a different path. One that kept them away from the dividing wall and its razor wire and cameras.

It was curious, he thought, but it didn't matter much. Soon they'd be trapped between the dogs and the cliffside.

The dogs began yelping more intensely. They smelled the quarry up ahead.

"Let them go," the Overseer shouted.

The handlers dropped their leashes and the dogs shot forward. They rushed upward and vanished from sight, a lethal pack only a fraction removed from the wolves they were descended from. The Overseer picked up his pace, eager to watch the animals do their job.

He arrived at a small clearing to find the animals running in circles, sniffing the ground and then raising their snouts to howl at the sky. The trail had come to an end, but there was no one to be found.

A branch creaked behind him, and the Overseer turned in time to see a figure leaping down toward him. The barefoot man hit him, knocking him to the ground and rolling free. Both men jumped up, and the dogs spun around as if to set upon the attacker.

"Stay!" the Overseer shouted at them in a deep, commanding voice. The dogs heeled and stood stiffly.

The Overseer aimed the shotgun at the dirty, bleeding man. "Where are the others?" he demanded. "Tell me now and I'll show you mercy."

The escapee was thin. The shredded clothes hanging on him like rags. Living in the bush for weeks would do that to a person. He stepped back nervously, looking from side to side. From the waistband of his threadbare pants he pulled a homemade knife. It was nothing more than a length of thick fabric wrapped around a sharpened flint.

"You've made yourself a weapon," the Overseer noted. "How interesting. We didn't teach you that. Maybe you vermin learn faster than we've been told to expect."

The Overseer tossed the shotgun aside and took a machete from one of his men. "Let's see how well you use it."

He stepped forward, but Deci threw a handful of dirt in his face. The Overseer squinted against the attack, suffering the sting of the grit with eyes open as he slashed with the machete.

It grazed Deci's chest deep enough to draw a line of blood, but the mark was no more than a flesh wound. He had suffered worse than that in the rooms.

Deci glanced at the blood on his chest and shrugged it off. He circled to the right and then back, holding the knife toward the Overseer and then pointing it at the nearest of his men.

"Don't worry about them, boy," the Overseer said. "Bring that sharpened little stick to me."

As if responding to the command, Deci lunged forward, slashing for the Overseer's neck. It was a daring attack, but the Overseer had a lifetime of fighting in his past. He stepped sideways, leaning back to avoid the knife and countering with the machete.

The heavy blade dug into Deci's arm. This time he howled in pain and stumbled back, staring at the gash in his flesh. Blood was running red, pouring from the exposed sinew and fat.

"That's just a taste of what's to come," the Overseer warned. "Now throw down your weapon and I'll tell them you have promise. That you belong with us."

No statement he made could have enraged Deci more. With his face twisted into a mask of hate, he lunged again, raising his wounded arm as a shield and thrusting the primitive knife toward the Overseer's stomach. He managed to rip into the safari vest and draw some blood, but the Overseer shoved him aside and brought the machete down hard.

Deci's hand was taken off at the wrist, and he tumbled to his knees. He scuffled away, retreating like a beaten animal.

Tired of the game, the Overseer looked at the dogs. "Mord!" he shouted, issuing the command to attack.

Two of the dogs shot forward, charging at Deci without hesitation. They hit him nearly simultaneously and he rolled with the impact. Another roll seemed deliberate, and then all three went over the edge.

They heard barking and howls as the animals fell. It was followed by sudden silence. An eerie quiet spread across the clearing. The men seemed unsure what to do.

The Overseer moved to the edge of the cliff and glanced downward. Deci and the two dogs lay battered and broken a few feet from each other, splatters of blood marking their impact points.

Looking down, it dawned on the Overseer that Deci had sacrificed himself. More than that, he'd come up with a complex plan, made a weapon, led a mini-rebellion, and chosen to die for a concept he couldn't possibly understand: freedom.

They were learning things they hadn't been taught. And doing so faster than anyone had a right to expect. This, he would have to report.

"Fan out," the Overseer snapped. "Find the others. Look in the trees and the bushes. Look under every rock. They have to be here somewhere."

With new urgency, the men, and the surviving dogs, rushed into the tropical brush, desperate to pick up a new trail.

The Overseer lingered at the cliffside, silently impressed with Deci's choice to go out fighting. He gazed at the ocean. The sunlight was streaming through a line of clouds on the horizon, its beams visible in the contrast between light and dark. There was nothing else to see. No ships, no land, nothing but the endless, golden sea.

It made him wonder where they thought they were escaping to. This island, the rooms, the Overseer, and the Providers-this was all they knew. All they had ever seen.

He briefly wondered what their primitive brains would think if they did reach the web of complexity, chaos, and madness that men called civilization. Probably, he guessed, they would wish they never had.

Howls and barking from deep in the brush interrupted his reverie, and the Overseer reverted to the task at hand. He turned away from the sea and went back down the path, pleased to know that the hunt was still on.

Chapter 1

Reunion Island, Southern Indian Ocean

The island of Reunion-or La Réunion, as the locals called it-sat in the tropics five hundred miles east of Madagascar and nearly two thousand miles due south of Saudi Arabia. A domain of France, it was a natural paradise as dramatic and beautiful as the famed island of Tahiti. It boasted stunning volcanic peaks, rainforests of brilliant green, and smooth, black sand beaches made from eroded lava that had been ground to dust by the waves.

Despite the appearance of a deserted tropical isle, Reunion was home to nearly a million French-speaking citizens. It drew tens of thousands of tourists every month and, according to some, nearly as many sharks.

Because of its location, Reunion acted like a rest stop on an oceanic path linking the waters of Australia and those of South Africa. Marine biologists called the route Shark Highway, as it was traveled heavily by great whites, bull sharks, makos, and hammerheads. As a result, the little French island in the Indian Ocean had become the shark attack capital of the world, dealing with dozens of attacks every year and scores of fatalities.

Unhappy with the nickname their island had earned, Reunion's government took action, stringing nets around certain beaches to cordon them off from the sea while imposing strict no swimming/no surfing rules outside the protected zones. The program reduced the number of attacks dramatically, eventually culminating in a full year without any fatalities.