The Athena Project: A Thriller Read online

  The area they were now in was rumored to have housed an al Qaeda training camp at one point, though no one could ever say exactly where. Add to that a report of “dead foreigners,” and that was all Naylor had needed to hear. He had no idea what had so spooked the villager who had stumbled upon the bodies, but his interest had been piqued, and once his mind was set on something, it was impossible to dissuade him from it.

  The other men of their party made camp, while Ryan and the old man trudged deeper into the jungle.

  Forty-five minutes later, the soft earth beneath their feet turned to what Naylor at first thought were rocks and then realized were actually pavers. Though choked with weeds, it appeared that they were on some sort of long-abandoned road.

  They followed the path as it wound down into a wide gulley. There were enormous stones, some twenty feet high and fifteen feet across in places. Some appeared to have been worked with tools. Despite their having been eroded by time and the elements, Naylor could make out letters or strange symbols of some sort on them.

  Ryan reached out to touch one of the monoliths, but the old man caught his wrist and pulled his hand back. “The stones are evil,” he said. “Don’t touch them.”

  “Where are we?” Ryan asked.

  “We are close,” replied the old man as he let go of Naylor and continued. “Close to the dead.”

  The gulley was unusually cool. Naylor hadn’t noticed it at first, but the temperature had to be at least fifteen to twenty degrees cooler. The trees on the ridges above them were full enough that the thick jungle canopy remained intact. Even if somebody in an airplane knew what he was looking for, this little valley would be impossible to spot.

  Wildly overgrown, it stretched on for a hundred yards before leveling out and being swallowed back up again by the jungle. Naylor kept his eyes peeled for any sign of recent human habitation, but there were no remains of campfires, no shelters, no refuse, nothing. It was also eerily quiet. He’d been so focused on the road and then the tall stones that he hadn’t noticed that the jungle around them was now completely silent. The screaming birds and monkeys had completely disappeared.

  “This way,” the old man said, pointing off to the right, into the jungle.

  Naylor didn’t bother responding, he simply nodded and followed behind.

  They walked until the pavers ended and kept going. Ryan wondered if this had once been the site of some ancient civilization. He had his digital camera with him and he made a mental note to snap some pictures of the monoliths on their way back. They would add color to his next report.

  As Naylor swung his pack over to one shoulder to fish out his camera, the old man stopped and held up his hand. This time, Ryan was paying attention and he came to an immediate stop. He knew better than to speak.

  The old man peered into the distance and then said, “Do you see it?”

  Naylor moved up alongside him and looked. He could see shapes, but he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking at. “Is that a jeep?”

  The old man nodded. “And something else. Something bigger.”

  All of the Muslims were known by a single term among the Guaranis. “Arabs?” asked Naylor.

  The old man shrugged and moved slowly forward. Though the gun had been rubbing his skin raw for hours, Ryan reached back anyway to make sure it was still there.

  The closer they got to the objects, the slower the old man moved. They appeared to have been camouflaged. The hairs on the back of Ryan’s neck were starting to stand up.

  The first shape turned out to be a truck. The old man raised his index finger to his lips and motioned for Naylor to remain quiet. Ryan didn’t need to be reminded.

  As they neared, Naylor could see that the vehicle hadn’t been intentionally camouflaged at all. It had been consumed by the jungle.

  It was old. At least fifty years. Maybe more. It looked military. As Naylor studied the truck, the old man moved off to the nearby jeep.

  Naylor climbed up onto the running board and looked inside. It had been picked clean. By who or what, he had no idea. He worked his way to the front in the hope of discovering where the truck was from, or to whom it had belonged.

  The glass of the gauges was spiderwebbed with cracks, the interior of the cab rusting away. There wasn’t enough sunlight to make out any specific detail.

  Naylor unslung his pack so he could grab a flashlight and pull out his camera.

  He looked up to check on the old man, who had already moved on from the jeep and toward something else.

  Ryan removed his flashlight and put it in his mouth as he searched for his camera. There was thunder in the distance. As he heard the rumble, he glanced at his watch. Every day in the jungle the rain came at almost the same time. He looked back up for the old man but didn’t see him. He couldn’t have gone far.

  Finding his camera, Ryan zipped his backpack. He positioned himself where he could get the best shot and powered up the camera.

  He took his first picture and the automatic flash kicked in, brilliantly illuminating the interior of the cab. Moving a bit to his left, he had readied his next shot when there was a flash of lightning. It was followed by a scream.

  Ryan ran toward the sound of the old man. His screams were like nothing he had ever heard. They weren’t screams of pain. They were screams of abject terror.

  He tore through the jungle with his pistol in his hand and his lungs burning. As he ran, the screams intensified. When Naylor found him, he couldn’t figure out what had so frightened him until he followed the old man’s eyes off and to the right. The minute he saw them, he understood why the man was so terrified.

  Then Ryan saw something else entirely, and that was when his own blood ran cold.

  CHAPTER 2

  VENICE, ITALY

  FRIDAY, TWO DAYS LATER

  Megan Rhodes studied the Palazzo Bianchi through the scope mounted on her LaRue sniper rifle. “You’ve still got two at the front door and two on the roof,” she said via the wireless bone microphone/earpiece in her left ear. “Plus three dock boys helping guests on and off their boats as they arrive out front.”

  “Roger that,” came the voice of Gretchen Casey over the radio. “Jules, are you all set?”

  “I’m in position,” said Julie Ericsson, “but I still want to know why every time we do an op involving a social function, I’m responsible for transport.”

  “Because you can’t tell a shrimp fork from a salad fork,” replied Alex Cooper, who was closing in on the palazzo from beneath the water next to Casey.

  “That’s cute,” replied Ericsson. “You know what, Coop? Fork you.”

  “Easy, everybody,” Casey cautioned her team. “Let’s make sure we’re focused and that we keep everything simple, just like we rehearsed.”

  “How close are you to the entry point?” asked Rhodes.

  “Thirty meters,” said Casey. Like the other two women, she and Cooper had been trained at the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Combat Diver Qualification Course in Key West Florida.

  They were wearing dry suits and using closed-circuit Draegar Lar V “rebreathing” devices, which recycled their spent CO2 and prevented any bubbles from rising to the surface and giving them away.

  Their DSI M48 Supermasks had integrated Aquacom communications that allowed them to talk with their other team members. Underwater propulsion devices developed for the U.S. military, called Seabob US7s, pulled them silently toward their objective with zero emissions. The high-tech water scooters, built near the Mercedes and Porsche factories in Stuttgart, Germany, came complete with sonar location technology, onboard navigation, speeds in excess of thirty miles an hour, and four hours of run time. They were among the hottest, and most expensive pieces of military equipment the United States had recently fielded. Nothing was being spared for this operation.

  Fifty-two-year-old Nino Bianchi was a black-market arms merchant. No matter what the conflict or the customer’s ideology, he could procure almost any weapons system and have it delive
red anywhere in the world. When he provided the plastic explosives used in a bus bombing in Rome that killed more than twenty Americans, the United States decided to do something about him. And they had just the right group to do it.

  America’s primary counterterrorism unit, the First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, also known as Delta Force, Combat Applications Group (CAG), or simply “The Unit” to its members, was created in 1977 by Army colonel Charles Beckwith. It was based on the British Special Air Service model and was designed to serve as a highly specialized force capable of carrying out direct-action and counterterrorism assignments anywhere in the world.

  Divided into three operating squadrons (A, B, and C), the squadrons were then subdivided into troops and could be broken down into progressively smaller teams as their missions required. The smallest team normally consisted of four operators and was referred to as a patrol, or a “brick.”

  The Unit’s operators excelled in a wide array of clandestine operations, including hostage rescue, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency, as well as strikes inside hostile, off-limits, or politically sensitive areas.

  Delta was headquartered in a remote section of North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. There, “behind the fence” as it was called, no expense was spared in training the world’s most elite warriors. The facility housed massive climbing walls, extensive shoot houses for close-quarters battle, sniper ranges, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a dive tank, and multiple other training ranges and facilities that strove to anticipate the kinds of environments where operators could be called upon to deploy at a moment’s notice.

  Besides the three operational squadrons, there were an additional nine detachments charged with providing operators with every form of imaginable support—from intelligence, training, aviation, and medical care to the most sophisticated weaponry and technology in the U.S. military’s arsenal.

  Never content to rest on its laurels, Delta was always exploring new ways to make itself better, deadlier, and more efficient. Taking a cue from the success of its Operational Support Detachment, which often used women to gather intelligence in advance of Delta missions, it asked one of its most aggressive and forward-thinking questions. Why not train and field female operators?

  It was an exceedingly good idea. In fact, it was such a good idea that many within Delta’s ranks were surprised that it hadn’t been pursued earlier.

  Women normally attracted less attention in the field than men, and when they did, it was often of a completely different kind. Give a woman a dog’s leash, one person said, and she could wander around anywhere. Put a woman in a car with a baby seat and she could sit all day surveilling a target without attracting much notice. Women were welcomed in places men were not and could get away with things men could never dream of. A female operative capable of kicking in your door, shooting you in the head, or cuffing you and stuffing you in a trunk was the last thing most of the bad guys would ever expect.

  With the approval of the Army’s Special Operations Command under which Delta was chartered, a group of operatives agreed to become recruiters. At first they looked within the armed forces for highly skilled, highly motivated women. There were some, but not nearly enough to fully meet the objectives that had been set for the all-female squadron they were creating, codenamed the Athena Project. Thus, the recruiters were forced to look outside the military.

  They were searching for intelligent, self-confident, polished women who could blend in and disappear into foreign cultures. They needed to be athletic and highly competitive. They needed to hate to lose, because Delta Operators never lost; they won at all costs. The women needed to be driven in such a way that success had become part of their DNA. They also needed to be attractive.

  It was a fact of life that people reacted differently to others based upon how they looked. If the female operatives were attractive, their beauty disqualified them as a threat and there was no end to what they could achieve. Men would do things they shouldn’t just to be near an attractive woman, extending opportunities and even information that would never be offered to their male counterparts. Men would try to impress them by bragging and inviting them to see things normally off-limits. In essence, men could often be counted on to act stupidly around an attractive woman. And those who didn’t could very likely be counted on to underestimate a woman, especially an attractive one.

  As the Delta recruiters cast their nets outside the military, they began haunting high-end female athletic events. They trolled for potential candidates at triathlons, winter and summer X Games, universities, and U.S. Olympic training facilities. The sport didn’t matter as much as whether a candidate possessed the essential characteristics.

  The selection and assessment process was extremely difficult. Many women didn’t make the cut. Standards, though, were never dropped just to fill out the ranks.

  The women who did pass the selection and assessment phases were exceptional, none more so than the brick of four women about to snatch Nino Bianchi from his extremely fortified home. They were all fiercely determined, fiercely loyal, and fiercely competitive, but other than that, they couldn’t have been more different.

  Alex Cooper was the twenty-eight-year-old, biracial daughter of an Ethiopian mother and an American father who owned a small restaurant in Atlanta. After high school, she went on to attend the University of Arizona as a communications major. There she became attracted to ultramarathon running—a sport that saw competitors in events racing over twenty-four hours, several days, or even thousand-mile distances. The sport suited her unwavering, granitelike determination.

  She was a quiet person by nature, and her boisterous teammates were always trying to get her to come “out of her shell.” They needled her constantly about being too reserved, too serious. She could be too hard on herself, and they saw it as their job to keep things in perspective for her. And as much as they teased her, they all knew how deep her still waters ran. Cooper was an outstanding operator.

  So was thirty-year-old Julie Ericsson, a triathlete who had grown up on the big island of Hawaii and had studied multiple subjects at the University of Hawaii. Her father ran fishing charters, while her mother was a schoolteacher. Julie, like Alex, was about five-foot-nine. Though she was of Spanish and Welsh descent, her parents’ genetics combined in such a way that she had an exotic, Brazilian look about her.

  She was the epitome of grace under fire and was easily the most organized member of the team. She had a real eye for detail, with equipment and logistics being her specialty. If the team needed anything done, Julie was the person they always turned to.

  Megan Rhodes was the quintessential “American” girl; blond-haired and blue-eyed. The thirty-one-year-old grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Her father was a cop and her mother passed away when she was very young. Rhodes attended college at the University of Illinois, where she continued a successful high-school athletic career as a competitive swimmer. Back in her teenage years, her five-foot-eleven height, as well as her striking Nordic features, had earned her the nickname “Viking Princess,” which had stuck with her all the way to Delta. It made those who knew her laugh. Megan was every bit the Viking, but there wasn’t an ounce of princess in her. She endured the worst situations any assignment could throw at them without ever complaining. A stone-cold killer when she had to be, Megan Rhodes’s glass was always half full. She was always the first one to volunteer to go into a dangerous situation and was also an extremely talented interrogator.

  The final woman on the team was Gretchen Casey. “Gretch,” as she was known by her teammates, was Texas tough. She had grown up in East Texas and had attended Texas A&M, where she was a prelaw student. Her dad was a former Army Ranger who owned a gunsmithing business and her mother was a semisuccessful artist. Gretchen’s father had her shooting from the day she could first hold a rifle. Her love of cross-country and shooting had led her to become a world-class summer biathlete who had been picked up by the U.S. Olympic Team. She competed for a while, but
gave it up when she fell in love with a hedge fund manager in New York.

  The relationship was good, for a while. Gretchen secured her law degree at NYU, but when she discovered that the hedge fund manager was running around on her, the Texas girl lost her taste not only for him, but for the Big Apple and the law as well.

  Not really knowing what she wanted to do, she began training again and picked up her career as a summer biathlete. She was eight months into it when a Delta Force recruiter spotted her and made her an offer that sounded like it might be fun.

  At five-foot-six, she was the smallest of the bunch, but height had nothing to do with her leadership abilities, which were exceptional and which had seen her put in charge of the group.

  As Casey and Cooper anchored their scooters on the canal bottom, Casey said over the radio, “We’re at the entry point.”

  Ericsson, who was cradling a small device in her lap that looked like an iPad or eReader of some sort, pressed a button and said, “Grafting a clean loop to the cameras in the boat garage now.”

  “Let us know when we’re good to go.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  When the live security footage had been replaced by the team’s repeating loop, Ericsson said, “It’s all yours.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The entry point was Nino Bianchi’s boat garage. But getting in wouldn’t simply be a matter of swimming under the doors and popping up on the other side. Bianchi took his security much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen.

  The brightly painted wooden doors, which looked like any others along the Grand Canal, hid two sheets of titanium, three inches thick, descending several feet below the water level. The titanium doors came to rest upon a wall of metal bars that went all the way down and were bolted to the bedrock beneath the canal bottom.