The Athena Project

by Brad Thor

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 26

  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.

  “Everything was brought to the Montauk Air Force Station, or Fort Hero as it was called, at Montauk Point on the eastern tip of Long Island. Just like the Manhattan Project, security at Montauk was extraordinarily tight. And human nature being what it is, speculation ran wild among the people of Long Island about what was going on. To divert attention from the real focus of the project, the government seeded rumors and disinformation everywhere.

  “There was talk about exotic psychological warfare techniques and even time travel experiments being carried out in a secret underground facility beneath the base. Real science-fiction kind of stuff. The crazier the conspiracy theory, the more the military would promote it. Anything to throw people off. Some of the theories, though, were not that far from the truth. Have you heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?”

  “You mean that story from the 1940s about a ship disappearing from the naval yard in Philly, appearing in Norfolk, Virginia, and then back in . . .” her voice trailed off.

  Hutton finished her sentence for her. “Back in Philadelphia again with crew members’ twisted bodies fused to different parts of the ship.”

  “That actually happened?”

  “No, but something very similar did and word unfortunately leaked out. The story of the Philadelphia Experiment, like the other conspiracy theories, was created to take attention away from what the military actually was doing at Montauk Point.”

  Casey tried to take it all in. “So what actually were they doing?”

  She watched as Hutton looked over both his shoulders before he responded. “Something called quantum teleportation.”

  “Teleportation?” asked Casey. “As in beam m
e up, Scottie? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m not. The Germans’ achievements were remarkable.”

  “Is that why those bodies were fused to the walls in Zbiroh?”

  “Yes,” he said. “As their experiments picked up speed, they ordered boxcar after boxcar of human subjects from concentration camps across the Third Reich.”

  Casey shuddered. “They even used children.”

  “I know,” Hutton replied, his head bent. “It was terrible.”

  “And we just reproduced those horrible experiments?”

  “We tried, for a while.”

  “That’s disgusting,” stated Casey.

  “Our volunteers were willing. That’s the difference. They knew the risks.”

  “But still.”

  Hutton nodded. “The German scientists brought to Montauk swore that the Engeltor could work; that it had worked. In fact, there was a rumor circulating near the end of the war. It claimed that three thousand Germans had disappeared right before being captured by Patton’s Third Army. The group was made up of scientists, SS personnel, men, women, and children. They allegedly disappeared into an underground facility and sealed the entrance behind them with explosives.”

  “Mass suicide?”

  “That’s not the way the story was told. That facility was a gateway of some sort. No trace of those people has ever been found.”

  Casey said, “But the Montauk experiments sound like they were a bust.”

  “The researchers there believed they were somehow missing a step; that some critical piece of data had been lost and if it could be rediscovered, the device would work perfectly.

  “Considering that we didn’t get all of the Nazi documents and all of the scientists out of Europe, our military was willing to concede that the researchers might have been right.”

  If she had not seen the skeletons embedded in the walls of the facility at Zbiroh herself, she wouldn’t have believed any of it was possible. “So what ultimately ended up happening?”

  “The research was scaled back. At the time, it was deemed too dangerous.”

  “Scaled back, not abandoned?”

  Hutton shook his head. “Are you kidding? Why abandon it? Imagine the military applications of this technology. Imagine being able to move troops and materials anywhere, instantly. Better yet, imagine being able to fax, for lack of a better term, a bomb or even a laser beam anywhere with absolutely no warning.”

  Casey had seen and deployed with multiple pieces of technology that at one point in time must have seemed like the stuff of science fiction. In fact, half the “futuristic” devices from the TV show Star Trek could now be seen in the real world: magnetic resonance imaging, flip cell phones, the military’s laser project known as the Personnel Halting And Stimulation Response (PHASR) rifle, the military’s universal translator known as the Phraselator, global positioning via satellite, ultrasound surgery, the list went on and on. Even Lieutenant Uhura’s wireless earpiece wasn’t much different from the Bluetooth earpiece Casey used today. Why not teleportation? “Yes,” she agreed. “If you could pull that off, it would be incredible.”

  “The United States doesn’t have a choice,” replied Hutton. “Quantum teleportation has become the most aggressively pursued field of military research on the planet. It’s like the race for the atom bomb. This technology is the ultimate game-changer. Can you envision what the world would look like today if our enemies had developed the bomb before us?”

  It wasn’t a pretty picture. “Is that what we’re talking about? Is that why we were sent to Zbiroh?”

  Hutton nodded once more. “While there have been huge leaps forward in quantum physics, especially in the last year, Kammler’s research, his device, is really the platform upon which any serious program would have to be built.”

  “You knew the facility in Zbiroh had been breached.”

  “We had our suspicions. That’s why we sent you. Now we know.”

  “How do you know, though, that the program back in America hasn’t somehow been compromised?” asked Casey. “I mean, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on R&D and the Russians, Chinese, and even the Israelis only spend in the millions on espionage and they have been robbing us blind.”

  “True, but we don’t think the program has been penetrated.”

  Casey laughed. “Rob, our enemies have all of our nuclear secrets, why wouldn’t they be able to get this research as well?”

  “Because the U.S. military took unprecedented steps to hide it,” said Hutton.

  “Like what?”

  “Now we’re drifting outside my pay grade.”

  “You know something, though,” said Casey. “I can tell.”

  “I only heard RUMINT,” he replied, using the acronym for rumor intelligence.

  “What rumor?”

  Hutton lowered his voice. “That back in the 1990s the U.S. military realized that, just like you said, we were getting robbed blind. A decision was made to identify the most promising research in the country and move it somewhere where nobody would be able to get to it.”

  “Sounds similar to what Kammler was charged with,” said Casey.

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” replied Hutton, “but I guess you’re right.”

  “So where was all of our greatest research moved to? Area 51?”

  Hutton smiled. “Good one.”

  “Come on,” pressed Casey. “You’ve got no idea? You have to. You and Walsh are pretty tight.”

  “All I have are rumors,” he said. “Some say it’s hidden beneath the Greenbrier in West Virginia in the old congressional fallout shelter. Some say the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is a smokescreen for it. Hell, I’ve even heard some joker claim that Richard Daley helped get it hidden beneath the White Sox’s Comiskey Park in Chicago.”

  “Well, if anybody could have pulled that off,” said Casey with a smile, “it would have been Mayor Daley.”

  “Whatever they’re up to,” Hutton continued, “you can imagine there’s a ton of disinformation being put out around it.”

  Gretchen thought about it for a moment. “If you were going to hide something like that, where would you put it?”

  He didn’t need to ponder the question. He was military through and through. “Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. A place where I could see people coming from miles off. A place where I controlled all the property and had great interlocking fields of fire.” As he looked at her, he could see the wheels spinning. “You don’t agree, do you?”

  “No,” said Casey as she shook her head. “I think it’d be better to hide it right in plain sight. I might even draw a little attention to it just to throw people off balance.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “It’s probably just me. I can’t think of anything more mind-numbing than to be kept on some dusty military base day in and day out the way they were with Manhattan Project. Of course, you’ve gotta have security, but if you can allow people to come and go, live somewhat normal lives, that has to be good for productivity, not to mention people with families.”

  “So you’re a yes on the Mayor Daley and Comiskey Park theory then.”

  Casey ignored his joke. She knew what would happen if the conversation got too personal. To stop that from happening, she brought them back to the business at hand. “What happened that made Walsh dispatch us to the facility at Zbiroh?”

  Hutton knew he couldn’t keep it from her any longer. “Somebody else is pursuing the technology.”

  “I kind of figured that.”

  His face was deadly serious. “This isn’t just anybody. This is someone who has gotten their hands on Kammler’s technology.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “Because they’ve started sending through human subjects. And the results have been exactly the same; disastrous. Worse still, the bodies are fresh, so we know it happened recently.”

  Casey was at a loss for words.

  “And
that’s not all,” added Hutton.

  “There’s more?”

  “I saved the best for last. Whoever is doing this, they’ve also been trying to get a bomb through.”

  Casey’s eyes went wide.

  This time, it was Hutton who leaned in toward his camera. “We’ve got to find out who this is, and we need to stop them.”

  “Agreed,” replied Casey. “One hundred percent. Where do you want us to start?”

  He looked at her, but he was all business. “Have Rhodes start with the man you brought back in the trunk of your car. Find out everything he knows about who stripped that facility at Zbiroh bare.”

  “And then?” she asked, even though she had a good feeling she knew what the answer was going to be.

  “And then we’re going to make sure nobody ever gets the ability to fax a bomb or a laser to us.”

  CHAPTER 27

  ISTANBUL

  The swim did little to clear Armen Abressian’s mind. When he climbed out of the water, there was a message waiting for him on his phone. Thomas had called again.

  “I’m here, Thomas,” he said, calling the younger man back.

  “I thought you’d want to know that Viktor came by a half-hour ago. He was drunk and so were his men.”

  This wasn’t good. “Tell me what happened,” said Abressian.

  “I did just what you told me. I told Viktor that Professor Cahill was with me and that while I was sorry to hear about his girls disappearing, Cahill couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  Sanders laughed. “No. In fact, he told me to my face that I was a liar.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then he said he wanted to talk to you. I told him you were out of the country, but that I expected you back soon. I told him you were sorry to hear about his girls having gone missing, but that you’re also certain the professor had nothing to do with it.”

  “And what did he say to that?” asked Abressian.

  “He seemed a lot less prepared to call you a liar than he was me.”