Kade: Santanas Cuervo MC by Kathryn Thomas Read Free Book Online

club. But, then, none of these men were actually drug runners and the Santanás Cuervo is no longer an outlaw club according to Kade.
     
    They jounced along the road for a while, Winter consulting a special GPS stuck to the windshield, before she turned off the road and started across country. The dry, hard-baked soil posed no problem for the Jeep, but she had to weave her way among the scrub and stunted trees.
     
    “Jesus,” Big Dick grunted as they banged and bounced. “How much farther?”
     
    “About a mile.”
     
    “Christ. Talk about Nowheresville, Texas.”
     
    “Is that them?” Big Dick asked a moment later as they crested a low hill and the five hulking vehicles appeared.
     
    “That’s them,” she confirmed, adjusting her path.
     
    “Ugly sum-bitches,” Duck muttered from the back seat.
     
    “Are you kidding?” Winter exclaimed. “They’re beautiful and elegant pieces of engineering. When they stop and vibrate, all five trucks are vibrating in sync, making those five trucks operate like one big unit.”
     
    Big Dick chuckled. “They may be elegant pieces of engineering, but they’re still ugly as shit.”
     
    She snickered as they pulled to a stop beside the first in the line of the large pieces of machinery. “Don’t tell Phil that. You’ll hurt his feelings,” she teased.
     
    The hydraulic vibrator truck, or thumper truck as Winter referred to it, was a truck in name only. Twelve feet tall, eight feet wide and twenty feet long, it rolled on four heavily lugged tires that looked like tractor tires, except they were six feet tall and nearly as wide. The trucks looked like they could go anywhere, and when Duck glanced behind the line of trucks, the near-straight path as the trucks muscled aside or flattened the brush gave him no reason to believe they couldn’t. The trucks had a cab in the front for a driver, a giant of an engine mounted on the back, and a complicated series of hoses and hydraulic rams running to a huge plate hung under the center of the truck. They walked to the third truck in the line. There was hydraulic fluid all over the underside of the truck and the top of the plate.
     
    “How does this beast work, anyway?” Big Dick asked.
     
    “You want to show him?” Winter asked one of the men. “This is Greg Bowden, by the way. He’s the site foreman and drives one of my trucks.”
     
    “Everly Dickerson,” Big Dick said as he shook the man’s hand.
     
    Duck took the man’s hand next. “Pete Waddle.”
     
    “Sure,” Greg said before he turned and walked away. They followed him to the first truck and waited as he climbed into the cab.
     
    The big machine turned over then roared to life. “That plate weighs about sixty thousand pounds,” Winter shouted to be heard over the bellowing machine, then gave a signal to Greg. The weight lowered and they heard a deep rumble and felt a vibration beneath their feet before the plate lifted back to its stored position. A moment late the engine fell silent again.
     
    “That’s it?” Duck asked. He’d felt bridges move more when a truck drove over them.
     
    “That’s it. We inject a vibration into the ground. The waves bounce off the strata and the geophones pick them up, and from that we can build a three dimensional map of what is underground. It’s kind of like sonar, but for the earth.”
     
    “And that shows you where the oil and gas are located?” Duck asked.
     
    “It shows us where oil and gas might be located.”
     
    “Winter here is working on something that’s going to change the way the oil and gas industry explores, though. Isn’t that right Doctor Kelly?” Greg teased.
     
    “How’s that?” Big Dick asked as Winter looked down sheepishly.
     
    “Just a little something I’m working on. It takes the soundings, the same soundings the oil industry has been using for years, and extrapolates out the densities to a much finer level. That gives us a better picture of what’s down there.