Brad Thor - The Athena Project

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 was 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.”