It’s Mengele’s journal that Krause wants!
The information inside of it would be priceless to Krause. Henri now understood why he wanted it so badly. The Angel of Death’s presence in the Underworld, the reason he’d been here, hit Henri like a freight train.
Project Fleshgod… It was Mengele’s doing!
He started for the door as another mental bombshell dropped. Krause employed the best scientists in all of Europe, maybe in the entire world. Henri knew of the man’s medication, that it was not some ordinary painkiller or antibiotic. It was of a unique design.
He understood now where it had come from. Someone had designed it exclusively for Krause.
And if Krause could combine his knowledge and power with the information in the Mengele journal…
He could breathe life into Project Fleshgod.
A sense of urgency washed over Henri. I need that journal!
Chapter 50
Emil
Emil and his team entered the South Wing with their weapons up. They had tried to access the level beneath Sub-Level 5 with the eastern elevator but couldn’t without the use of a key. It made him wonder where the Kane woman had gotten one.
Once it was evident that they were alone, Emil headed for the hole in the floor at the rear of the room. He edged closer to it and looked down. There was a large, cavernous space filled with artificial light underneath where he stood. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get a good enough look at it from this angle to see what was inside.
“Static lines.”
His four Chief Petty Officers went about tying off rappelling cords to the nearest support posts. The steel beams still looked plenty strong enough to support the weight of several men. In all, five two-hundred-foot-long lines were tied off and then tossed into the abyss beneath the Underworld.
Ever the active leader, Emil clipped on first, turned, and leaned backward over the hole. He gave his men a nod.
“Sir?” one of them asked. “What do you think is down there?”
Emil had no idea. So, he answered him the same way Henri had replied to Emil’s near-identical question.
“Like the commander said, ‘with any luck, the future.’”
He leaped away and dropped. Physics swung him back to the wall, and he performed the action three more times before clearing the stone elevator shaft. When he did, all he could do was hang in midair in awe of what lay beneath him.
“My God.”
Chapter 51
Zahra
The door in the rear of the hangar was, in fact, a hatch similar to what they had found on the U-boat. This one even contained the same door wheel as its sibling. The biggest difference was the size of the hatch. It was twice as tall and twice as wide as the one on the sub.
“That’s not ominous or anything,” Zahra commented. “Well, open says me.”
She gripped the wheel and spun it, happy to feel it move with minimal effort. After a full rotation, it stopped, and she pushed. Here, she needed help. Hammet stepped forward and shouldered into the hatch. The two of them got it open enough to slip through.
But Yana didn’t follow them.
“What are you doing?” Zahra asked, sticking her head back through the opening.
She found Yana facing the other way, peering through her binoculars. She was looking across the hangar and back up at their entry point.
“What are—” Zahra repeated but was cut off.
“We have company,” Yana explained. “I count five of them. They just entered via static lines.”
Zahra re-entered the hangar and accepted Yana’s offered binoculars. She saw them, too. “Oh, shit. Come on.”
Both women slipped inside and shut the hatch. They spun the wheel and locked it. Hammet’s confusion was apparent. Zahra quickly filled him in.
“Five men are rappelling down from the ceiling entrance. We need to keep moving.”
He nodded and stepped aside. A second elevator greeted her.
“Why have the hatch?” Yana asked.
“No idea,” Zahra replied, “but I bet it has to do with whatever is at the bottom.”
The trio stepped on. Hammet didn’t wait any longer than he had to. He pressed a single red button and got them moving.
This was by far the longest elevator ride so far. They descended for what must have been hundreds of feet. The first fifty feet of the trek was through cut stone, same as above. The rest of the descent was made inside crisscrossing steel.
The temperature suddenly dropped to below freezing. Zahra, Yana, and Hammet dropped their bags and hurriedly pulled out their coats and put them back on. Zahra looked south through the gaps between the supports, but she couldn’t see anything yet.
Moments later, she could.
“Whoa,” Zahra said. “Look.”
They had entered another opening beneath the mountains, except instead of its walls formed by the natural cavern of rock, this one was primarily made of ice.
She looked over her shoulder and saw that the wall behind her was still rock. This elevator system had been built into a vertical rockface. Zahra looked up and saw that the floor of the hangar was, indeed, stone. She could even see the tangle of cables that had been fed beneath the control center platform. They then snaked over to the exposed rock wall and descended beside the elevator shaft, attached to it with heavy-duty clamps and bolts.
The elevator came to a stop on an abyssal precipice. Zahra carefully stepped out, glad that there was still twenty feet between it and her boots.
“What the hell is that?” Yana asked.
Zahra didn’t know either. One hundred feet across from them was a dark shape beneath the ice. At the center of it was another door, but this one didn’t have a hatch wheel or a distinguishable handle of any kind. It was also quite large. Zahra estimated that it was over eight feet tall and four feet wide.
The chasm stretched five hundred feet to the left and right, where each side ended with more ice. The door had been constructed in the exact middle of the ice wall. While the massive wall seemed huge to her, Zahra knew there could be hundreds more just like it elsewhere on the continent.
Bigger ones, too.
A stout bridge made entirely of steel beams and stretched out over the yawning expanse. It connected directly to the ice-locked anomaly. Zahra took in the construction and deduced that it should be able to hold their combined weight. Dietrich Krause’s designs had been flawless so far, so why not now?
On each side, reinforced handrails and vertical supports ran along the entire length of the bridge. Zahra looked back to the rock wall and followed cables as they touched down next to the elevator platform. Then, they turned and followed the bridge across the abyss. Zahra leaned right and noticed that they’d been attached to the bridge itself, much like they had been attached to the wall behind her.
“The floor,” Hammet said, kneeling and inspecting the bridge, “it’s not metal.”
Zahra carefully touched it with the bottom of her right foot and found it to be constructed of a type of nonslip rubber. She applied more pressure. It held without issue.
She glanced at her partners, closed her eyes, and stepped onto the bridge.
It accepted her weight just fine.
Zahra let out a long breath. She took her attention off the bridge and applied it back on the newest door.
“This is it,” Zahra said quietly. “This is the source of the Underworld’s power.”
“Is it a giant generator?” Hammet asked.
“Or perhaps it’s a nuclear option?” Yana suggested.