Brad Thor - The Athena Project

Her shots were immediately followed by multiple rounds from Cooper’s.40 caliber pistol.

Minutes felt like hours as they sat with neither sight nor sound of any of Heger’s men. There was no telling how close they were, or how many remained.

Suddenly, they heard Cooper’s pistol fire again, but this time it came from much farther off in the woods.

Several minutes later, Cooper came back. “TNT,” she said as she approached, using their code for there’s no threat to indicate she was coming in alone.

“I took out another one, but two others got away. I think one of them might have been Heger. I’m not sure.”

With the toe of her boot, Rhodes kicked the night vision goggles off their prisoner. “We’re going to clear that mystery up real fast.”

“But first,” clarified Casey, “we need to get out of here and get someplace safe.”

PRAGUE

Someplace safe” was the home of John Vlcek. And while Rhodes prepared their prisoner, whom they had driven to Vlcek’s bound and gagged in the trunk of their car, Gretchen Casey used Vlcek’s computer to Skype with Robert Hutton back at Fort Bragg.

“You knew that stuff was there,” said Casey angrily. “All of it.”

They were each wearing a headset and using a secure webcam feed. The digital encryption was quite good and Vlcek had several additional features enabled that helped to make sure their communication was as watertight as possible.

“All I know is what I was told,” replied Hutton.

Casey studied his face on her screen. She was looking for any indication that he wasn’t telling the truth. “Who ordered this operation?”

Hutton hesitated and then, referring to the Special Operations Command, said, “SOCOM.”

“Who told them to order it?”

“I don’t know.”

There was something in his face, just a flash of it. “You’re lying to me.”

“No, I’m not.”

Casey leaned forward toward the camera mounted on Vlcek’s computer. “Who was it, Rob?”

After a moment, Hutton relented. “It came from the Joint Chiefs.”

“Who specifically?”

“Jack Walsh.”

“The director for intelligence?”

Hutton nodded. “Yes.”

“The same Jack Walsh who helped stand up the Athena Project?”

“Yes.”

Casey leaned back in her chair and shook her head.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Hutton.

“It means I’m tired of being lied to. SOCOM didn’t task us. Jack Walsh called you directly and you tasked us.”

Hutton didn’t respond right away. He didn’t need to. She could read it on his face. “What aren’t you telling us, Rob?”

Casey had already uploaded all of the video from the Kammler bunker and had briefed Hutton on both the firefight and the prisoner they had taken. All her cards were on the table.

“I told you what you needed to know to get the job done.”

“Really?” asked Casey. “We walked into a firefight with.40 caliber pistols against eight heavily armed Czech Special Forces soldiers. Does that sound to you like my team had everything they needed?”

Hutton tried to reply, but Casey held her finger up to stop him. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t give me the line about following orders and compartmentalization. We were outmanned and outgunned because we were not fully briefed. This operation made no sense from the get-go and I should have pressed you for more details.”

“You did,” Hutton said with a laugh.

“Then I should have pressed harder,” replied Casey. “That’s what I get for trusting you.”

The reaction in Hutton’s eyes said it all. It was visible for only a moment and he masked it quickly, but the barb had found its mark.

“You’re an operator. You follow orders. You don’t question them,” he finally said.

Technically, Hutton was correct. An operator’s primary obligation was to follow orders. But the men and women of Delta were selected for their intelligence and ability to think for themselves. They were so highly prized because they didn’t need their hands held. They could be dropped behind enemy lines or into some of the harshest environments in the world and be trusted to complete the mission; any mission.

In fact, most male operators had at least two disciplinary actions in their Army file before arriving at Delta. The women of the Athena Project were different. They hadn’t come up through the regular Army; they’d been recruited from outside. They hadn’t yet been given a chance to be insubordinate or disobey a direct order just because their instincts told them they knew better.

It was a double-edged sword for Hutton. He’d been an operator as well. He knew what it was like being mushroomed; being kept in the dark and fed crap. But now that he was on the other side, sending teams out on assignments rather than being sent himself, he had to find the right balance.

He also knew that it was important for his operators to trust him. He’d never led women before. It was a steep learning curve. He’d made more than a few mistakes, but one thing that had become clear to him was that he couldn’t lie, not if he intended to maintain both their trust and respect.

He also knew that telling Gretchen that her job was to follow orders and not question them was weak. Her response drove that home.

“Up yours, Rob,” she replied.

“Damn it, Gretchen,” he said. “This is how it works. I can’t always give you all the information.”

“Well you could have given us more.”

The statement hung in the air between them for several moments.

Finally, Hutton relented, “I don’t have all of the pieces, but I’ll give you whatever I can. What do you want to know?”

Casey adjusted her headset and leaned back in toward the computer. “Why now? Why after sixty years did this suddenly become so important?”

Hutton looked at her and smiled. “You’re a smart girl, Gretch. What do you think?”

“I think the fact that the place was empty means that someone cleaned it out.”

“And?”

Gretchen couldn’t believe where this was going. “ And , something somewhere must have happened that made Walsh want us to go look to see if anyone had breached that facility.”

Hutton closed his eyes and nodded.

“Something bad?” she asked.

Opening his eyes, he looked right at her and said, “You have no idea.”

Casey listened as Hutton quickly rehashed the history of Operations Overcast and Paperclip, as well as how the Kammler Dossiers had been acquired. He then explained what specifically had been discovered at the facility at Zbiroh.

“Kammler named the project Engeltor, or the Angel’s Gate,” he said. “It had been conceived of as a hybrid between two experiments; one dealt with antigravity and another that was looking to camouflage aircraft and ships from enemy radar by bending light around an object to make it invisible. Both involved quantum physics and unified field theory. Combing them resulted in the Angel’s Gate.”

“Did any of it work?”

“Apparently, some of it worked well enough to attract the attention of the U.S. government. And while an Overcast team went after any and all documents and equipment they could find, the Paperclip folks went after the scientists who had been working on the project.