Brad Thor - The Athena Project

“It completely fries things that are electronic, right?” asked Naylor.

“That’s right,” replied Leslie. “We got our first real taste of what an EMP could do after we ignited several hydrogen bombs over the Pacific in 1958.

“The resultant hurricane of electrons traveled hundreds of miles and blew out street lamps in Hawaii, while disrupting radio transmissions in Australia for over eighteen hours. We decided then and there that if we could harness this destructive force, it would make one heck of a weapon.”

“And I’m assuming we did,” said Tracy.

Jack Walsh nodded. “Much of it’s classified, but suffice it to say that we have a lot of EMP weapons in development and in our arsenal.”

“As do our enemies,” added Paxton. “Electromagnetic warfare has been one of the military’s greatest concerns. Successfully employed, an EMP weapon could send us back to the Dark Ages. We wouldn’t be able to heat or cool homes, pump water, remove sewage, dispatch police or firefighters, process or deliver food and medicine. It would be absolute chaos. Millions upon millions of people would die.”

Naylor looked at the device they were standing over. “From one small bomb like this?” he asked.

Walsh shook his head. “This kind of device is not going to take down the entire United States power grid. For a one-shot, one-kill like that, you’d need to actually detonate a nuke high above the center of the country.

“What’s dangerous about an e-bomb like this is that they are very inexpensive to fabricate. Any nation or terrorist group with 1940s level scientific technology could build one.

“For less than the cost of a new car, you could build twenty of these devices and plunge the island of Manhattan into darkness for months. With our dependence upon electricity for just about everything in our lives, New York City would become a dead zone, virtually uninhabitable. On top of that, anything stored on computer would be evaporated-banking records, stock transactions, medical records. Also, anything with electronic circuitry would be, as you said, fried. The economic impact would be incalculable. Add to that the loss of human life that would occur and you would have a terrorist attack that would easily dwarf 9/11.

“Give a terrorist organization one hundred thousand dollars and they could do this in ten cities; with a million dollars they could do it in one hundred, and so on. There’d be nothing we could do to stop it.”

“So how did this bomb get here?” asked Tracy.

Paxton held up the aluminum tube and pointed inside it. “This tube is normally filled with a high explosive like PBX. That’s the boom part of the bomb. The fact that this device was rendered inert suggests that it is probably being used in a training exercise of some sort.”

Naylor nodded. “We’ve got plenty of terrorist organizations to choose from down here. We can start with just about any of them.”

“Hold it,” said Tracy. “What does an EMP device have to do with what happened to these bodies? Is there another aspect of EMP detonations that we don’t know about?”

“Apparently, there’s a lot going on that we don’t know about,” replied Leslie. “Are we concerned that some sort of weapon did this to these people? Yes. That’s part of the reason we’re here. What I think we should do now is scour the site and see what other evidence we can gather.”

With the SF men maintaining a perimeter, Paxton suggested they split into teams. She sent Ryan and Tracy in one direction and then led Jack in the other.

Once they were well out of earshot, she said, “I think that bomb is from Pakistan.”

“Pakistan? What makes you think that?”

“Because the Indian military intercepted several similar devices a year ago en route to Bangalore, their version of Silicon Valley. They believe it was a plot funded by Pakistani intelligence.”

“I remember something about that,” said Walsh. “But wouldn’t that give more credence to the notion that this bomb didn’t materialize out of thin air, but is here because terrorists were training with it?”

Paxton shook her head. “I don’t think a terrorist group is going to go to all that trouble to smuggle a bomb into Paraguay, just to leave it in the middle of the jungle.”

“So you think it came through the device?”

“Don’t you? Should we go back and look at the bodies again? You know what caused that carnage and why they were melded to those rocks.”

She was right. “Okay,” he agreed. “Let’s say all of it did come through the device. Why here? Why Paraguay?”

Leslie swept out her arms. “The World War II-era trucks. The old road. This was a receiving point.”

“Receiving point for what?”

“Gold. People. Equipment. Stolen artwork. You name it. This would have been humming like a Nazi Greyhound bus station.”

“But when I think of Nazis fleeing Europe for South America,” said Walsh, “I normally think of Argentina or Brazil. Those were the real hotspots. Why not set the receiving point there?”

“I had the same question until I saw the runes carved in those old stones,” replied Paxton. “Nueva Germania.”

“ Nueva what?”

“Nueva Germania. New Germany,” she replied as she walked over to him. “In the late 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister and her husband traveled to Paraguay to establish a colony in the jungle that would demonstrate German superiority and the superiority of the Aryan race to the entire world. It’s where Josef Mengele fled after the war.”

Walsh stared out at the thick, overgrown jungle. “This was Neuva Germania?”

Paxton shook her head. “I think this was the site of the original colony. It thrived for a while, but they were under constant assault from the indigenous Guaranis, who eventually chased them off. The colonists moved on and built a more conventional style town, closer to civilization, but the original colony always maintained a mystical, almost cultlike aura for them.”

Walsh thought about that as Leslie continued. “Maybe we weren’t the only ones to know about what Kammler was up to, but we were the only ones to successfully get our hands on the research and the majority of the scientists at the end of the war.”

“But we haven’t made significant progress with it, have we?”

“Remember what Einstein said: If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research ,” Leslie replied without really answering his question.

“Einstein also said that what we were doing with quantum teleportation was spooky .”

“And I would agree with him. In a sense, it is spooky, but let’s get back to my hypothesis about what happened here.”

Walsh was uncomfortable with hypotheses. He preferred facts. That was the difference between science and the intelligence field. Scientists came up with an answer and used it to find facts while intelligence operatives came up with facts and used them to find an answer. Nevertheless, they were dealing with someone that straddled her world and his. To get to the answer, they were going to have to work together. “Okay, so tell me what happened,” he said.

“So we had a monopoly on the Kammler personnel and the Kammler technology, but at some point that changed. And we know someone picked the bunker clean in Zbiroh.

“Let’s assume that at the very least they have been able to rebuild the device.”

“I’d say that’s a fair assumption,” replied Walsh.

“Are you going to leap right into big experiments? Or are you going to start small?”

“Small, of course.”

“Is pushing people through or pushing a bomb through big or small?”

Walsh looked at her. “It’s big. Very big.”