The Athena Project

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 me 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.”