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.
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
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…
A sense of urgency washed over Henri.
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.”
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.
