The Athena Project: A Thriller Read online

  “No, sir,” Walsh replied with a smile. He had been pushing a classified DoD-wide Facebook/Wikipedia hybrid as a means of better sharing, disseminating, and understanding everything from insurgent tactics to terror cell hierarchies. Cooney had been slow to buy in and often made the project the butt of jokes in meetings. Walsh had been hearing from everyone else, though, how valuable they had found it and knew it was only a matter of time before Cooney finally came around. “If you’ll permit me, I’d like Director Paxton to begin the presentation.”

  Paxton had been busy setting up her laptop, and once the spinning DARPA logo could be seen on the screen at the front of the room, she said, “Admiral Walsh has asked me to brief you on some rather unusual science.”

  “Isn’t that redundant coming from DARPA?” asked Slazas.

  Leslie had been determined that she was going to kill Slazas with kindness and flashed him her brightest smile. “Very true, we’re in the unusual science business. But I think you’ll find this case particularly interesting. Are you familiar with something called Operation Paperclip?”

  “That was our effort at the end of World War II to gather up as many German scientists as we could. The goal was to deny the Soviets, as well as the UK, access to their knowledge and expertise.”

  “Correct,” said Leslie as she advanced to her first slide. It was a black-and-white photo of 104 rocket scientists at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. “Paperclip was created by the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, and overseen by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency under the Joint Chiefs.

  “President Truman at the time had been adamant that any active Nazis or any active supporters of Nazism be rejected from the program. He didn’t care if other nations scooped them up; they were not welcome in America.

  “Needless to say, both the OSS and the Joint Chiefs disagreed with the president.”

  Paxton advanced to her next slide. It was a picture of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. “To circumvent President Truman, as well as the Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA created false histories for the scientists. Any Nazi affiliations were either minimized or scrubbed altogether. They also scoured German political and employment records and scrubbed those as well.

  “The new sanitized bios were then paperclipped, hence the code name, to the scientists’ U.S. government personnel files, and they were granted their security clearance to work in the United States.”

  “Imagine what we could get done if the OSS was still around,” mused Cooney.

  Slazas nodded in agreement and said to the DARPA director, “What does this have to do with why we’re sitting here?”

  Paxton advanced to her next slide, a group of German scientists in a lab somewhere, surrounded by beakers and Bunsen burners. Taking a sip of water from the glass on the table in front of her, she replied, “Operation Paperclip had originally begun as part of Operation Overcast, but was eventually spun off as its own op. While Paperclip was focused on scientists, Overcast was all about locating and securing actual Nazi scientific and military technologies, of which there were a tremendous number.

  “Toward the end of the war, when Hitler had been handed multiple defeats by the Soviets, he charged Werner Osenberg, the scientist in charge of the Nazis’ Military Research Association, the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft, with identifying and recalling from combat Germany’s brightest scientists, engineers, and technicians.

  “The names were compiled into what was known as the Osenberg List. It was a veritable who’s who of the greatest scientific minds the Nazis had, and it formed the basis for Operation Paperclip. From it, we were able to recruit top scientists for our space program, such as Wernher Von Braun, as well as scientists who secretly worked on the Manhattan Project.”

  “Director Paxton,” said Slazas, “can we fast-forward through the history lesson?”

  Walsh held up his hand. “We’re almost there, Jim. Trust me. This is important.”

  Slazas backed down and Leslie continued. “What many people don’t know is that Hitler had another list compiled at about the same time. It was based on the top-secret work of a Nazi SS Obergruppenführer who some say was the Third Reich’s most brilliant scientist, General Hans Kammler. This list ranked the Nazis’ most promising scientific and military projects, many of which were decades ahead of their time. With detailed overviews, status, and ratings, it was known as the Kammler Dossiers.

  “JIOA bifurcated their operations so that the Paperclip team could focus on the scientists and the Overcast operatives could focus on the actual projects. Of particular interest to the Joint Chiefs at that time was the Nazi Wunderwaffe program.”

  “Wonder weapons,” said Cooney.

  “Exactly,” replied Paxton as she advanced to her next slide, a Nazi flying-wing aircraft that looked exactly like the stealth fighter. “While the Nazi propaganda ministry blew a lot of smoke about the revolutionary superweapons Hitler was bringing online, there was more than a little fire there.

  “Megabattleships, ballistic missile submarines, air-independent propulsion U-boats, an electric U-boat—the first ever designed to operate submerged for an entire voyage—a submarine aircraft carrier, self-propelled antiaircraft guns, supertanks, long-range bombers capable of reaching the United States, rocket-powered vertical takeoff aircraft, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, rocket-powered fighters, experimental helicopters, advanced artillery and missiles, an orbital parabolic mirror capable of focusing the sun’s rays in a devastating beam anywhere on earth, night vision devices, a nuclear program, an antigravity program, and a host of other exotic projects we have yet to categorize.”

  “And that’s what Operation Overcast was charged with running down?”

  Leslie Paxton nodded and clicked to her next slide of three plainclothes men armed with M3 submachine “grease guns” riding in an old U.S. Army jeep somewhere in Europe. It looked to the men around the table as if it might have been taken in Paris.

  “About the time Nazi-controlled Europe began to fall, the JIOA managed to steal a copy of the Kammler Dossiers. A female operative working for the OSS parachuted out of a Nazi aircraft with two bullet wounds, an SS officer strapped to her as her prisoner, and the documents chained to his wrist in a briefcase.

  “Based on the information contained in the dossiers, Operation Overcast began inserting secret teams, similar to the three-man Jed-burgh teams used in France, throughout Nazi-controlled Europe.

  “Their assignment was to secure as much high-value Nazi scientific and military technology as possible. Raw data, blueprints, hardware; whatever they could find. Whatever they couldn’t take away with them, they were to document as thoroughly as possible and then destroy, in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Soviets, or even the Brits. Either we got it, or no one did.”

  The chairman nodded and Paxton continued. “With the Soviets advancing from the east, much of Overcast’s attention was focused there. As the Nazis fled the advancing Red Army, they often flooded and boobytrapped their research facilities, many of which were contained in mountain cave systems or underground bunkers. They fully believed they would eventually return and pick up on their experiments right where they had left off.”

  She could see Slazas getting antsy and, sensing he was ready to interrupt her again, said, “I’m getting there, I promise.”

  The lieutenant general leaned back in his chair and waited. When the DARPA director advanced to her next slide, his chair came forward with a thud. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “This picture was taken by one of the Overcast teams at a Nazi research facility in Czechoslovakia in 1944.”

  Surrounding a twenty-foot-high, fifteen-foot-wide metal structure that looked like the Greek symbol for Omega, Ω, there were countless human skeletons protruding from solid rock. They were twisted in agonizing poses and their jaws appeared locked open, as if frozen in midscream.

  “This was one of Kammler’s most promising pieces of technology,” she continued. “It w
as called the Engeltor, or Angel’s Gate. It had been based largely on the work of German physicist Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory. In essence, the Engeltor, which the Americans simply referred to as the Kammler Device, was designed to be a giant fax machine that could fax people and objects.”

  “Right into solid rock?” asked Cooney.

  Paxton created a split screen and put up another, similar photograph. “The technology is extremely temperamental. Based on the scientists and data that American operatives were able to recover from the Third Reich, the United States built its own Engeltor. The photograph I just put up was taken in 1945, at Camp Hero on Montauk Point, Long Island.”

  Slazas stared in disbelief.

  “As you can see,” offered Paxton, “we were able to re-create similar results.”

  The lieutenant general shook his head. “You call those results? That’s horrific.”

  The head of DARPA shrugged. “It’s science. We were trying to reproduce the Kammler experiments, but without having all the pieces to the puzzle.”

  “The bodies in the second photo; were those American soldiers?”

  “Yes. They volunteered for the assignment and knew the risks they were taking.”

  “But look what happened to them. They knew that was a possibility?”

  “Yes, they did, and they also knew that it was one of the most promising pieces of technology the United States had ever worked on.”

  “Pioneered by the Nazis,” said Slazas, shaking his head.

  “As were cruise missiles, stealth aircraft, and rocket science. I would suggest our military has benefited tremendously from all of those.”

  Slazas knew that data collected from Nazi experiments had helped advance science, particularly medicine, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  Cooney studied Paxton. “You used the present tense when you spoke about the technology. You said it is temperamental. Are we to assume that the United States is still experimenting with it?”

  “Yes,” replied Paxton. “We are, but with limited success.”

  “How limited?” asked the chairman.

  “Occasionally, we’re able to move very small, inanimate objects. We’ve also been able to move very basic living organisms, such as bacteria. Most of the advancements we have been able to make have come because of breakthroughs in the field of quantum teleportation.”

  “Like what the Chinese just pulled off?”

  Paxton knew what the man was talking about. In the open scientific community, the record for quantum teleportation had been held by a joint U.S.-European research team that had beamed particles from one side of the Danube to the other, a distance of six hundred meters. That feat had recently been shattered by the Chinese, who had beamed particles sixteen kilometers; twenty-five times the distance achieved by the U.S.-European team.

  “Exactly,” said Leslie. “The potential military applications of this technology are limitless.”

  “Which is why we requested this meeting,” said Walsh as he signaled Paxton to advance to her next slide. As she did, he said, “This picture was taken by one of our intelligence operatives in Paraguay two days ago.”

  Cooney and Slazas stared at the screen.

  “My God,” said the chairman. “Are you telling me that we’ve begun using human subjects again?”

  Leslie shook her head. “No, sir. We don’t use human subjects. We haven’t since the forties. This wasn’t us.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “We believe someone has gotten access to the technology,” said Walsh.

  “How? Has the program been compromised?”

  “Anything is possible, but I doubt it,” said Paxton, who paused before adding, “The research is part of Stardust.”

  The code name was immediately familiar to both Cooney and Slazas. Having realized by the 1990s that most of the United States’ top-secret research programs and facilities had been penetrated by foreign spies, the U.S. government embarked on one of its most ambitious, most highly classified projects ever. Codenamed Stardust, it was the Supermax of research facilities. The idea had been to put its best scientific eggs in one basket and then build a henhouse that none of the foxes would ever be able to get into.

  Chairman Cooney stared at the screen. Without turning to look at Leslie or Jack he asked, “Let’s assume for a moment that the Stardust program hasn’t been penetrated. Where would someone have gotten this technology?”

  “I would start at the beginning,” said Walsh. “At the Kammler facility in the Czech Republic.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we could only get a three-man team in there at the end of the war. It had been flooded by the Nazis and they had a very limited oxygen supply to explore with. With the Soviets advancing on their position, they had to move fast. They removed what documents they could and then used their explosives to try destroy the Engeltor Kammler had built. Exiting the the complex, they called in an airstrike to seal the facility permanently.

  “I think we should send a team in to make sure it has remained sealed.”

  “Why not use satellite imagery?”

  “We tried that. The tree cover is too dense. Even if it weren’t, it’s an underground facility. Satellites wouldn’t be able to help us see through all that rock. That’s why I want to send a team in. Once they’re there, they can—”

  “Hold on,” interrupted Slazas. “You’re serious. You want to send U.S. military personnel. Why don’t we ask the CIA to do this?”

  Walsh looked to the chairman, “That’s not my call to make.”

  Cooney knew his intelligence director well enough to ask, “I’m going to assume you have an opinion on it, right?”

  “I do,” said Walsh, “and while we all agree that there are some very good people at the Agency, they’re not the organization they used to be. If they could do what we needed done, we wouldn’t be hiring so many private intel groups.”

  Cooney nodded. “True.”

  “The CIA also has no idea of the extent of our operations down in South America, particularly around the triborder region. If we bring them in on this, they’re going to end up learning a lot more about our intelligence-gathering than we want them to know.”

  Again, the chairman said, “I agree.”

  “What about informing the president?” asked Slazas.

  Walsh shook his head. “I’m against it.”

  “Why?”

  “The director of Central Intelligence is an appointee. He’s an old friend and a political ally of the president’s. I think if we want this done right, we have to do it ourselves and keep it as quiet as possible.”

  “We have a good relationship with the Czechs. Why don’t we bring them in to help on this?”

  Walsh shook his head again. “There’s a lot we kept hidden from them at the end of the war. It’d be a big can of worms to open this late in the game. Besides, we’re only talking about a reconnaissance operation.”

  Slazas’s feelings about the subject were clear from the look on his face.

  Walsh understood that they had strayed into dangerous territory, especially with a civilian in the room. Smiling, he looked at Leslie and said, “Director Paxton, could you give us the room for a moment, please?”

  “Of course,” replied Paxton as she unplugged her laptop and stepped outside.

  When the soundproof door clicked shut behind her, Slazas looked at Cooney and said, “For the record, I want you to know I think this is a bad idea.”

  “I have to tell you, I’m on the fence here,” added Cooney.

  Walsh had expected this reaction. He pulled up a picture on his iPhone and slid it across the table. “I think this might change your mind.”

  Cooney looked at the photo and then zoomed in on it. “Am I looking at what I think I’m looking at?”

  “Yes, sir” said Walsh. “We believe it’s a bomb of some sort.”

  There was silence in the room. Cooney looked at Slazas, who reluctantly nodded.
<
br />   Finally, General Cooney said, “If we do this, it will need to be done quietly and done completely under the radar. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Whoever you send,” continued Cooney, “they’ve got to be smart and they’ve got to move fast. And if things go wrong, I don’t want any of it tracing back to us. That means no knuckle draggers. This cannot look military or have any U.S. military fingerprints on it at all.”

  “Yes, sir,” Walsh stated. “You don’t need to worry. I already have the perfect team in mind.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Nino Bianchi spread out his hands as he took in the two gorgeous women standing in front of him. “Now this is why people love coming to my parties,” he stated. “I always have the most beautiful guests.”

  “You also have a beautiful home,” offered Cooper.

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Casey. “Let him keep telling us how beautiful we are.”

  Bianchi laughed. “You have a lovely accent. Virginia?”

  Casey laughed politely and replied, “Lower.”

  “The Carolinas?”

  She smiled and rolled her eyes at him. “We’re going to be here all night at this rate. Texas.”

  “Of course,” said Bianchi. “Texas. And yours?” he asked, turning to Cooper.

  “Atlanta.”

  “Two southern belles. How fortunate am I?”

  “You speak English very well, Signore Bianchi,” said Casey, trying to keep her mind on her assignment. Looking at him, all she could think about was the busload of Americans he had helped to blow up. If the choice had been hers to make, she would have pulled out her pistol and shot him right there in the middle of the party. “How did you become so fluent?”

  The man gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Unlike you Americans, we Europeans speak many languages. Which reminds me. What do you call someone who speaks three languages?”

  Casey looked at Cooper and then back to Bianchi. “Trilingual?”

  “Exactly,” he replied. “How about two languages?”