Brad Thor - The Athena Project

“How deep into this place do you want to go?” Julie asked.

“As far as we can,” replied Casey.

The answer was good enough for Ericsson, who kept checking behind them, to make sure they weren’t being followed.

They stepped into the old stone guardhouse. There was a desk with a field telephone that was vintage World War II. There was also a cot, a table with two chairs, and a bookcase lined with moldy, German-language books. On one of the walls was a small control panel with a series of buttons and dials that looked as if it might have been responsible for the opening and closing of the heavy blast doors they had been passing through.

“Check this out,” said Rhodes as she dusted off the desk. “More runes.”

Casey looked down and saw the strange string of symbols that had been carved with the point of a knife. “More Nazi occultism. Terrific. Let’s keep going.”

They exited the guardhouse and continued walking deeper into the tunnel.

“When do you think somebody opened this place back up?” asked Ericsson.

Casey shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”

“Weeks? Months? Years?”

“Jules, I don’t know.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“I’m not angry,” replied Casey. “I’m just trying to process what I’m seeing too, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got about as much of this figured out at this point as you do.”

“I got it,” said Ericsson. “Enough said.”

Casey chastised herself for not being more professional, but Ericsson had a bad habit of asking dumb questions when she was on edge. Gretchen didn’t need that now.

The trio moved on in silence. Above them, the Nazi murals grew more macabre. Casey continued filming, just as she had in the guardhouse. She had no idea if any of this would be of value back home, but she had her orders.

Up ahead, they came to their first obstacle-a set of blast doors that were closed. Rhodes tried to push them open, but they wouldn’t budge.

“Maybe they left the key under the mat,” said Ericsson.

“What mat?”

“Found it,” said Casey, as she ran her fingers down along the outline of a smaller entrance that had been cut into one of the blast doors.

Ericsson came over, flipped up her NVGs, and lit up the lock with her filtered flashlight.

“What do you think?” Casey asked after a couple of moments.

Ericsson studied the rest of the door for any sign that it was wired, either with boobytraps or with alarm sensors, and then finally said, “I can do it.”

Taking off her backpack, she removed a small zippered case. Holding the flashlight in her mouth, she unzipped the case and pulled out a small steel lockpick gun.

Kneeling, she adjusted the flashlight and then slid the tension wrench into the lock and applied a slight amount of downward pressure. Next came the pick gun. Once it was inserted, she began pulling the trigger. The noise it made resembled a stapler being depressed over and over.

She adjusted the tension wrench a couple times and then felt the lock give way.

Removing the equipment from the lock, she said, “We’re in.”

Casey and Rhodes drew their weapons and pointed them at the door as Ericsson stowed her gear and then slung her pack over her shoulders.

Flipping her NVGs back down, she reached for the door handle and waited. All three took a deep breath and then Casey whis-pered, “Go.”

Ericsson pulled on the handle and the door swept back soundlessly on perfectly greased hinges.

Rhodes stepped through the doorway, followed by Casey and Ericsson, who closed the door behind them. They then moved forward slowly, purposefully.

“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?