CZECH REPUBLIC
SATURDAY
With a top speed of over forty knots, they traversed the Gulf of Venice in under two hours. Harvath and Riley dropped the team in the Slovenian coastal town of Koper. The idea had been to get them out of Italy as quickly as possible.
It was dark when they arrived and found the car with German plates that had been left for them. After throwing their bags in the trunk and climbing in, Ericsson slid behind the wheel and drove them inland toward the A1. Rhodes acted as copilot as Casey and Cooper slept in back.
It was a boring, pitch-black, nine-hour drive that cut across Austria to Salzburg, skirted Munich, and went up through Germany before crossing into the Czech Republic.
Despite the coffee and energy drinks they’d purchased while gassing up the car and stretching their legs, everyone was exhausted. Even if they hadn’t had to drive nine hours, they still would have been wiped out. The Bianchi assignment had required absolute, laserlike focus from all of them. Each had performed at her physical and mental peak. What the women needed now were hot showers, a week of doing nothing, and probably more than a couple glasses of wine. What they had been given, though, was another assignment.
They had stopped in Munich for breakfast, and by the time they pulled into the Czech town of Zbiroh, it was late morning.
Sixty kilometers from Prague, Zbiroh was in the southeast of the country and the landscape looked very much the same as it had in Germany before they crossed the border; rolling green foothills, forests, and farmland. After they left the somewhat industrial city of Pilsen, there was nothing but small villages, cows, and Eastern Orthodox-inspired churches.
“Okay, who’s up for shopping?” joked Rhodes as they took a drive through the rather austere couple of blocks that passed for Zbiroh’s center.
“First guy we see with a full set of teeth is all mine,” said Ericsson.
“If you can pry him off his sister,” added Cooper.
Casey shook her head. “What a bunch of big-city snobs.”
“Wait a second,” countered Rhodes. “I grew up in the Chicago suburbs.”
“Same thing.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Don’t bother arguing with her,” said Ericsson. “As far as Gretch is concerned, she’s got all of us beat in the small-town-girl thing.”
Casey laughed. “If the Choo fits.”
“You’re unbelievable,” replied Rhodes, unwilling to let it go. “My dad was a cop. Julie’s dad was a fisherman, and her mom taught school. Alex’s mom was an immigrant and her parents saved all they had to open a restaurant. You can’t get any more red, white, and blue than that.”
Ericsson threw up her hands. “You’ve done it now, sweetheart.”
“What? Why do you guys just roll over for her?”
“Because they know,” said Casey.
Rhodes let her mouth hang open as if she was heavily medicated and slurred, “That East Texas is the best place in the whole world.”
Casey ticked the points off on her fingers as she spoke, “One gas station and only one gas station. It’s where you get your gas, get your car repaired, and fill up the air in your bicycle tires or the inner tube you’re taking swimming.
“There’s only one store for groceries and if they don’t have it, you don’t need it. If you don’t dress and prepare your own game, the store’s butcher will do it for you. He’ll meet you in back, unload whatever you’ve got in your truck, and call you when he’s got your steaks, burgers, sausages, and jerky ready to be picked up.
“The town has one doctor. He delivered my mother and he delivered me. He’s eighty-eight years old and he still makes house calls.
“When our sheriff sees a ten-year-old boy walking down the road with a rifle he doesn’t call a SWAT team, he asks the boy how the hunting is.
“We have one church and that church still puts on socials year round and picnics in the summertime.
“We have front-porch swings because we like to see our neighbors pass by and we like to ask them how they’re doing. We know everyone’s names and they know ours. And yes, just about every single house flies the American flag.
“So with all due respect to Honolulu, Atlanta, and Chicago, I think I’ve got all of you beat.”
“We had a Williams-Sonoma,” snarked Rhodes.
Casey smiled. “You didn’t have Mayberry. I had Mayberry.”
“But if you wanted your ears or anything else pierced in Mayberry, you had to see the vet, right?”
Casey shook her head. “Someday, when you finally come down to visit, you’ll see for yourself.”
“Let me know when the Victoria’s Secret opens,” said Rhodes, “and I’ll be on the first covered wagon down there.”
“I hate to interrupt,” said Cooper, who was now taking her turn driving, “but do we all have a feel for the layout of this place?”
“I haven’t seen the public pillory yet,” offered Ericsson.
“Or where they burn the witches,” chimed in Rhodes.
Casey ignored them. “I think we’re good, Alex. Let’s head for the hotel.”
Cooper nodded and made a left turn. She followed a narrow, winding road up to the top of the forested hill overlooking the town. There they were greeted by the statues of two enormous lions flanking the entrance of the majestic Zbiroh castle.
“Wow,” said Ericsson. “I’m not surprised the Nazis commandeered this place during the war.”
“As monstrous as they were, the SS seemed to appreciate the finer things in life, but that’s not why they picked this castle,” said Casey, who had been filled in, to a certain degree, by Hutton. “It is sitting on top of one of the largest quartz deposits in Europe. This hill functioned as a huge radio wave amplifier, and the SS used it as an electronic listening post.”
“But what’s that got to do with the abandoned bunker we’re supposed to check out?” asked Cooper as she steered the car toward the south wing of the castle where the Château Hotel Zbiroh was housed.
“Apparently, radio wave intercepts weren’t the only things the quartz helped amplify.”
When Casey didn’t elaborate, Rhodes asked, “So are we supposed to guess what else the Nazis were working on here, Gretch?”
In the parking area, several fit, serious-looking men with short, military-style haircuts, wearing plain clothes with tan tactical boots, had just taken up positions around a black Range Rover and distracted her. “I’m sorry,” said Casey. “A Czech-speaking SS Obergruppenführer named Hans Kammler had been sent into Czechoslovakia after the Nazis invaded to take over one of its largest industrial-engineering companies, called Škoda.
“Kammler wasn’t a soldier, he was an engineer and a scientist. Some say he was Hitler’s most brilliant. He set up his offices in the city of Pilsen, which we passed about twenty miles back, but he lived here at the castle.
“He was in charge of the Third Reich’s most avant-garde, cutting-edge scientific programs. He claimed that in addition to the quartz found throughout this region, he had discovered other ‘miraculous minerals,’ as he put it, that unlocked doors to things never before seen in science.
“With the assistance of the Škoda staff, he began building bunkers and cave complexes throughout the region where he could protect his research, not only from aerial bombardment by the Allies, but also from the prying eyes of Allied spies, who very much wanted to get their hands on anything and everything that Kammler was working on.
“One of the bunkers he had created was on the grounds here at the castle.”
“But what specifically was he working on?” asked Cooper.
“Hutton said that information was on a need-to-know basis.”
“And we don’t need to know.”
“Exactly,” replied Casey. “What I did manage to get out of him was that it had something to do with bending or absorbing radar waves. That was it.”
Rhodes looked at Casey. “The Soviets took Czechoslovakia from the Nazis over sixty years ago. Why is there this sudden interest in Kammler and Zbiroh now?”
“The castle has the deepest well in Europe; over 550 feet. The well has all sorts of tunnels and passages splitting off from it. Most were sealed with concrete and steel by the Nazis before they fled. Almost all of them were boobytrapped. Whatever the Nazis were doing here, they believed they would eventually return to pick up where they left off.
“According to Hutton, the United States slipped a team in here just as the Nazis were leaving. Based on documents captured from one of Kammler’s lieutenants, we uncovered the location of one of the Nazis’ most secret research complexes.
“With the Soviet Red Army advancing, Kammler’s team abandoned the facility and blew up the entrance. There was a much smaller, very well-hidden secondary entrance, which took the team two days to find.
“When they got inside, they discovered that the complex had been flooded. Scuba equipment was air-dropped to the team, and they salvaged the documents they could and then photographed as much as possible. Because of sheer size, they were not able to extricate any of the equipment.
“They’d only brought a certain amount of explosives with them, so they had to choose between trying to blow the submerged equipment and collapsing the hidden entrance to the complex.
“They decided to destroy the equipment, but were only partly successful. The Red Army was almost on top of their position. After they had called in two airstrikes, the third finally hit the target dead center and completely sealed off the secret secondary entrance.”
“So we’re here to make sure the doors are still closed? Why?” asked Cooper. “It doesn’t make sense. Like Megs said, this research facility is more than sixty years old.”
Casey shrugged. “Ours is not to reason why. We’ve been tasked with reconning the complex and reporting back. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“And after that,” said Ericsson as the women watched a handsome man exit the hotel and climb into the black Range Rover idling in front with his bodyguard detail, “I think I may have found my full set of teeth.”
As Casey watched the Range Rover roll away from the front of the hotel, a bad feeling started to well up from deep within the pit of her stomach.