The Athena Project: A Thriller Page 11

  “Wasn’t this place supposed to have been flooded?” asked Rhodes.

  Casey nodded. “Part of it,” she said as she looked around at the large room they were now in. It appeared to be an airlock of some sort. There was a large freight elevator at one end and across from it an oval, pressure-style door with a wheel that acted as a handle. Casey walked over to it and cranked the wheel until the lock released. When it did, she pulled the door open and a blast of damp, moldy air rushed out.

  Inside was a concrete landing and a flight of stairs going down. Casey motioned for the team to follow her.

  As they descended, the smell of mold grew stronger. At the bottom of the stairs they found another door like the one above. Rhodes and Ericsson made ready while Casey turned the handle. When the lock clanked into place, she nodded to her teammates, opened the door, and they swept into the hallway on the other side.

  With its tiled floor, concrete walls, and bulkhead light fixtures, it looked as if they could have been in some European hospital’s basement. As Casey turned off her night vision goggles and flipped them up, Rhodes and Ericsson followed suit. They removed the filters from their flashlights and let the powerful beams illuminate the hall.

  It had been underwater for a long time and most everything was discolored. Heavy metal doors lined both sides. One by one, the women searched the rooms.

  They were in offices of some sort. There were desks, lamps, filing cabinets, and typewriters. There were also microscopes, calipers, and surgical instruments. From the rusted wastepaper cans to stacks of German newspapers molded together by water, it all formed a bizarre sort of time capsule. There was no doubt that they were indeed inside Kammler’s secret research facility.

  The women checked the drawers of the desks and file cabinets, but they were all empty. Someone had cleaned the entire place out.

  At the end of the corridor were two more hallways, one to the right and one to the left. They stayed together and explored the one on the left first. There was a cafeteria, a more formal private dining area, and a kitchen in between that served both. There had been a hierarchy here, and it was obvious in the tin lunch trays in the cafeteria and the neatly stacked, SS monogrammed china in the private dining room.

  There was a library and a communal gathering area. After that came the bedrooms. There were some that had only one bed, but the majority had two to four. There were communal bathrooms with sinks, toilets, and showers. At the very end of the hall were what appeared to be a barracks with row upon row of bunk beds.

  As they explored, Casey made sure she kept capturing everything on video. The bunker felt like some sort of strange museum, as if someone had raised a Nazi version of the Titanic and had drained all the water.

  The other hallway was considerably longer and was lined with all sorts of laboratories. Each seemed to be dedicated to a different field: chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, medicine, and more. There were rooms with stainless-steel autopsy tables and rows of freezers. The women could only imagine what kind of horrors had taken place there.

  The few scattered pieces of equipment that had been left behind, while no doubt quite advanced at the time, appeared quite primitive more than sixty years later.

  At the very end of the hallway was a set of heavy double doors. Rhodes pulled them open and the trio walked into what looked like some sort of early 1900s zoo. They passed cage after cage made of thick iron bars. Casey badly wanted them to have been for monkeys, or apes, or any sort of wild animal Kammler’s people might have been experimenting on, but she knew they weren’t. These were for holding human beings.

  On many of the floors were words in a language she couldn’t understand. There were hash marks in one of the cages as well. What had someone been counting? The number of days in captivity? Maybe the number of days since a loved one had been taken away?

  Two cages later lay a little girl’s doll. There had been animals here all right, she thought, but the animals had been the ones outside the cages. She could think of nothing worse than torturing a child. The anguish people had been forced to suffer at the hands of the Nazis was beyond imagination.

  At the end of the rows of cages, they passed through an open doorway and into a communal shower. As they looked up at the large shower heads protruding from the ceiling, they all were thinking the same thing. Had this shower been used to gas prisoners? There was no telling. All Gretchen Casey knew was that the more she saw, the sicker to her stomach she was becoming.

  To their left was a large, metal door. It was hung on a track with pulleys and a cable that ran into a conduit and disappeared into the wall at the far end of the room. Rhodes tried to slide the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Unlike the other doors they had encountered, this one seemed to have rusted to such a degree that it couldn’t be moved, not even with all three women working on it at once.

  They gave up and walked to the end of the shower room. A small flight of tiled steps led up to a door, which they were able to open.

  On the other side, they found themselves in a wide, semicircular room reminiscent of an airport control tower. Desks, which appeared to have held all sorts of equipment at one point, were pressed up against large glass windows. It seemed to have been designed as an observation station. But designed to observe what?

  Casey walked over to one of the windows and tried to use her flashlight to illuminate what was on the other side. It was no good. The thick glass acted like a mirror and bounced most of the light right back in her eyes.

  Using her flashlight to guide her, she walked over to the door at the far end. She had no idea what kind of experiments the Nazis had been working on, but there was something about the scope and layout of this observation station that told her whatever they were observing from here was very important.

  Opening the door, she felt a cold rush of air from the other side. She raised her flashlight and cast its beam into the darkness. What she saw was amazing.

  The observation station was built overlooking a giant cavern. Looking up, she saw that the ceiling was almost entirely covered with some sort of crystal formations. As she played her flashlight across it, the light was refracted into a prism of colors. The ceiling was like a giant disco ball.

  “You girls should see this,” Casey said over her shoulder.

  There was a viewing platform underneath the observation room’s window and she stepped out onto it. She was joined by Rhodes and Ericsson, who also cast their flashlight beams upward.

  “What is this place?” asked Julie.

  “I don’t know.”

  They swept their flashlights in a wide arc and the walls of the cavern, just like the ceiling, burst to life, refracting the light in all directions.

  “What’s down there?” Ericsson asked, shining her light down below.

  It was hard to see, but about thirty feet down was a large platform or stage of some sort.

  Rhodes had already walked to the other end of the viewing platform. “I’ve found some stairs over here,” she called out.

  When Gretchen and Julie joined her, they saw that the rusted door they couldn’t budge from the inside fed to a ramp of some sort that led down in the same direction as the stairs. It must have been used for moving equipment.

  Megan, who always preferred to be on point, stepped onto the stairs and began to lead the way down.

  The stairs had been carved out of the sheer rock wall. There was a railing, but as it had been submerged for God only knew how long, she didn’t put too much faith in it. Instead, she chose her steps carefully, as did Ericsson and Casey. They were less concerned with where they were than where they were going.

  With their flashlights lighting up the stone steps, they took them one at a time. It wasn’t until they reached the very bottom that they paused to look around.

  Casey was the first to see them. Rhodes was the first to choke back a scream.

  CHAPTER 22

  Despite all the mayhem they had seen as operators, nothing could have pre
pared them for what they found. It was beyond horrific; beyond grotesque.

  Human skeletons protruded from the rock walls surrounding the platform. It was as if they had been fused with the cavern itself. The mouths were wide open in silent screams.

  “What did those bastards do?” asked Rhodes.

  Casey was having trouble speaking. Her heart rate had spiked and it was all she could do to keep things under control. She was plenty tough, but this went beyond rational explanation. Her mind was screaming for her to get out of there. She was scared, but she was also in charge. She had to control her fear and not let it control her.

  “Jules, are you okay?” she asked, reaching out and putting her hand reassuringly on Ericsson’s arm.

  Julie nodded, slowly.

  “What the hell did those bastards do?” Rhodes repeated.

  “I have no idea,” replied Casey.

  “People just don’t grow out of walls.”

  “I know.”

  “So what happened? What the hell happened?”

  “Megan, you’ve got to calm down,” said Casey.

  “What do you mean, calm down? Look at these skeletons. Look at their mouths all open. It’s like they were alive when this happened. This is beyond horrifying.”

  She was right. The word shocking didn’t even come close to describing what they were looking at. There were skeletons of adults as well as children. What the hell had Hutton sent them into?

  “I’m going to video all of this and then we’re going to get the hell out of here,” said Casey, asserting her command. “You two can go back upstairs if you want. You don’t have to stay down here.”

  “No,” replied Ericsson, pulling herself together. “We don’t split up.”

  “She’s right,” said Rhodes. “We stay together.”

  “Good,” answered Casey.

  After filming all of the bones protruding from the walls, she focused on the platform itself. There were two discolored patterns in the cement where some large object or objects had once sat. Looking more closely, she could see that those objects had been bolted down.

  Casey shot several close-ups of the marks and then said, “Okay, that’s it. We’re getting out of here.”

  They were pretty far below ground, but she tried to raise Alex Cooper over the radio anyway. As the quartz was so well known for amplifying radio signals, she thought it was worth a try. Cooper didn’t answer. Casey decided to leave it until they got back up into the tunnel and beyond the airlock.

  Everyone was shaken by what they had seen. It was a shock to all of them. Despite Rhodes’s love of being on point, Gretchen ordered her to fall back. Casey would lead her team out.

  They were cautious, but they mounted the steps a lot faster than they had coming down. Though they had witnessed something beyond their worst collective nightmare, all of them had a very bad feeling that the true evil of the facility had not entirely been revealed to them.

  “By the way,” said Rhodes as they got to the observation platform, “there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping in that hotel tonight.”

  “I agree,” added Ericsson. “I say we get in the car, drive, and don’t stop driving until the sun comes up.”

  Casey was with them. “I’m all for that,” she said, as she pressed on.

  They moved through the observation station, out the door, and down the short flight of stairs into the shower room. From the shower room, they moved past the cages, and though Casey didn’t want to, she allowed her eyes to be drawn to the little girl’s doll again.

  They left the cages behind and stepped through the double doors into the long research corridor. As they passed the various labs, Casey forced herself to slow down. Was there anything she was missing? Were there any clues to who had been here? Any clues to who had opened this place up and cleaned it out? That was their job. That was why they had been sent here.

  She shone her flashlight into each of the rooms they passed. She didn’t expect to suddenly spot something they hadn’t seen the first time around, but she felt that she should at least try to bring back something useful regardless of how disturbing the scene in the cavern had been.

  They kept moving, and with each room they passed, Casey allowed herself to become more convinced that there wasn’t anything of value left here.

  Soon, they arrived at the office corridor. At the end of it was the hatch, and on the other side of that were the stairs up to the airlock. Then it was the tunnel and finally they’d be away from this place.

  They stepped through the hatch and climbed the stairs up toward the airlock. When they reached the landing, all of them were breathing more heavily than normal. They were all in incredible shape, but considering the stress they were under, the distance, and the number of stairs they had climbed, as well as the speed they had been moving, it wasn’t surprising that they were all a little short of breath.

  The women moved through the doorway and into the airlock. After passing through the blast door, they quickened their pace up the tunnel. None of them looked up at the ghastly murals. They had seen enough to last them a lifetime.

  Passing the guardhouse, Casey said, “Everybody okay? We’re al-most out.”

  “Ask me how I’m feeling once we get out of here,” said Rhodes.

  Gretchen looked back at Ericsson, “You all right?”

  Julie nodded. “I’m okay,”

  “Good,” replied Casey as she reached for her radio and hailed Cooper. The reception was terrible. There was a lot of static and she couldn’t understand what Alex was saying. So much for the quartz improving radio reception, she thought.

  Soon enough, they began to smell the forest and knew that they were almost out. Had it been daytime, they would have been able to use the sunlight spilling in to gauge how much farther they had to go.

  As it was, all they had to go on was their memory of how long the tunnel was and the radio signal, which was starting to become clearer.

  They knew they were just about there when they picked up an audible snippet of Cooper’s voice.

  “Say again,” replied Casey over her radio.

  When no response came, Gretchen said, “We’re going to be on top of you any second now. Be ready to move.”

  There were a couple of radio clicks, but that was it.

  “On our way out,” said Casey. “Do you copy? Over.”

  They were twenty yards from the tunnel entrance when they heard Cooper’s voice again, but this time it didn’t come over the radio. This time it came in the form of a scream.

  “Run!”

  CHAPTER 23

  ISTANBUL

  TURKEY

  Armen Abressian blinked his eyes and looked at his watch. It was late. Business never sleeps, he thought to himself as the phone on the nightstand kept vibrating.

  He picked it up and placed his feet over the side of the bed. He was a handsome, powerfully built man in his early sixties with gray hair, a thick beard, and deeply tanned skin. When he spoke, he did so with a soothing, basso profundo voice coupled with a slight accent that was difficult to place.

  Looking out over the twinkling lights of the Bosporus, he activated the call and said, “I’m here, Thomas.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Armen. I assume you have a guest,” said Thomas Sanders, Abressian’s second in command.

  Abressian looked over at the gorgeous creature in his bed. She was less than half his age and worth every penny. He’d have to see if he could hire her for another night. Things were not moving as quickly as he had planned.

  “What is it I can do for you, Thomas?”

  “We have a problem.”

  Another one? It had been just over twenty-four hours since Nino Bianchi had been abducted from his home in Venice. While no one knew for sure who had done it, it smacked of the Israelis, especially as they had used women to pull off the job. That would be just like them. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. Abressian still had one more shipment he was expecting from Bianchi.


  Turning his attention back to Sanders, he replied, “What is the problem?”

  “It’s Professor Cahill.”

  Of course it was. “What has happened now?” Abressian asked calmly.

  “The Bratva want him.”

  Bratva was slang for the Russian mafia who ran the town of Premantura at the southern end of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula. There wasn’t a single official or law enforcement officer in the area who wasn’t on the Bratva’s payroll. It was a place where people learned to keep quiet. The locals kept to themselves, minded their own business, and didn’t ask any questions. That was one of the reasons Abressian had selected it. Via his relationship with the Russians, he was able to purchase a significant amount of goodwill. Professor Cahill, though, had been burning through it very quickly.

  When it came to quantum physics, George Cahill was a genius. When it came to everything else, he was an idiot.

  Abressian had discovered him toiling away in a physics lab at the Australian National University. Technically, he was on unpaid administrative leave. Cahill had been reprimanded twice for his substance abuse, but when it came to light that he had been involved in several inappropriate relationships with students, he was removed from his duties until he could complete a rehabilitation program with a full review of the charges against him. But Cahill’s situation had rapidly deteriorated.

  It seemed that the harder his demons rode him, the faster he descended into a hell of his own making. Incredible brilliance often dwells on the razor’s edge of madness, and this was certainly the case with George Cahill.

  When Armen Abressian had found the twenty-nine-year-old Cahill, he was being beaten outside a seedy bar on the outskirts of Canberra. The wheels had completely come off Cahill’s axles. Abressian suspected the man might have been bipolar or sociopathic, prone to incredible mood swings and incredibly self-destructive behavior. Alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, and gambling had sucked the young genius into a suicidal black hole from which not even the faintest hope of escape appeared possible. That is, until Abressian had made Cahill the offer of a lifetime.