Ericsson pulled on the handle and the door swept back soundlessly on perfectly greased hinges.
Rhodes stepped through the doorway, followed by Casey and Ericsson, who closed the door behind them. They then moved forward slowly, purposefully.
“Wasn’t this place supposed to have been flooded?” asked Rhodes.
Casey nodded. “Part of it,” she said as she looked around at the large room they were now in. It appeared to be an airlock of some sort. There was a large freight elevator at one end and across from it an oval, pressure-style door with a wheel that acted as a handle. Casey walked over to it and cranked the wheel until the lock released. When it did, she pulled the door open and a blast of damp, moldy air rushed out.
Inside was a concrete landing and a flight of stairs going down. Casey motioned for the team to follow her.
As they descended, the smell of mold grew stronger. At the bottom of the stairs they found another door like the one above. Rhodes and Ericsson made ready while Casey turned the handle. When the lock clanked into place, she nodded to her teammates, opened the door, and they swept into the hallway on the other side.
With its tiled floor, concrete walls, and bulkhead light fixtures, it looked as if they could have been in some European hospital’s basement. As Casey turned off her night vision goggles and flipped them up, Rhodes and Ericsson followed suit. They removed the filters from their flashlights and let the powerful beams illuminate the hall.
It had been underwater for a long time and most everything was discolored. Heavy metal doors lined both sides. One by one, the women searched the rooms.
They were in offices of some sort. There were desks, lamps, filing cabinets, and typewriters. There were also microscopes, calipers, and surgical instruments. From the rusted wastepaper cans to stacks of German newspapers molded together by water, it all formed a bizarre sort of time capsule. There was no doubt that they were indeed inside Kammler’s secret research facility.
The women checked the drawers of the desks and file cabinets, but they were all empty. Someone had cleaned the entire place out.
At the end of the corridor were two more hallways, one to the right and one to the left. They stayed together and explored the one on the left first. There was a cafeteria, a more formal private dining area, and a kitchen in between that served both. There had been a hierarchy here, and it was obvious in the tin lunch trays in the cafeteria and the neatly stacked, SS monogrammed china in the private dining room.
There was a library and a communal gathering area. After that came the bedrooms. There were some that had only one bed, but the majority had two to four. There were communal bathrooms with sinks, toilets, and showers. At the very end of the hall were what appeared to be a barracks with row upon row of bunk beds.
As they explored, Casey made sure she kept capturing everything on video. The bunker felt like some sort of strange museum, as if someone had raised a Nazi version of the Titanic and had drained all the water.
The other hallway was considerably longer and was lined with all sorts of laboratories. Each seemed to be dedicated to a different field: chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, medicine, and more. There were rooms with stainless-steel autopsy tables and rows of freezers. The women could only imagine what kind of horrors had taken place there.
The few scattered pieces of equipment that had been left behind, while no doubt quite advanced at the time, appeared quite primitive more than sixty years later.
At the very end of the hallway was a set of heavy double doors. Rhodes pulled them open and the trio walked into what looked like some sort of early 1900s zoo. They passed cage after cage made of thick iron bars. Casey badly wanted them to have been for monkeys, or apes, or any sort of wild animal Kammler’s people might have been experimenting on, but she knew they weren’t. These were for holding human beings.
On many of the floors were words in a language she couldn’t understand. There were hash marks in one of the cages as well. What had someone been counting? The number of days in captivity? Maybe the number of days since a loved one had been taken away?
Two cages later lay a little girl’s doll. There had been animals here all right, she thought, but the animals had been the ones outside the cages. She could think of nothing worse than torturing a child. The anguish people had been forced to suffer at the hands of the Nazis was beyond imagination.
At the end of the rows of cages, they passed through an open doorway and into a communal shower. As they looked up at the large shower heads protruding from the ceiling, they all were thinking the same thing. Had this shower been used to gas prisoners? There was no telling. All Gretchen Casey knew was that the more she saw, the sicker to her stomach she was becoming.
To their left was a large, metal door. It was hung on a track with pulleys and a cable that ran into a conduit and disappeared into the wall at the far end of the room. Rhodes tried to slide the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Unlike the other doors they had encountered, this one seemed to have rusted to such a degree that it couldn’t be moved, not even with all three women working on it at once.
They gave up and walked to the end of the shower room. A small flight of tiled steps led up to a door, which they were able to open.
On the other side, they found themselves in a wide, semicircular room reminiscent of an airport control tower. Desks, which appeared to have held all sorts of equipment at one point, were pressed up against large glass windows. It seemed to have been designed as an observation station. But designed to observe what?
Casey walked over to one of the windows and tried to use her flashlight to illuminate what was on the other side. It was no good. The thick glass acted like a mirror and bounced most of the light right back in her eyes.
Using her flashlight to guide her, she walked over to the door at the far end. She had no idea what kind of experiments the Nazis had been working on, but there was something about the scope and layout of this observation station that told her whatever they were observing from here was very important.
Opening the door, she felt a cold rush of air from the other side. She raised her flashlight and cast its beam into the darkness. What she saw was amazing.
The observation station was built overlooking a giant cavern. Looking up, she saw that the ceiling was almost entirely covered with some sort of crystal formations. As she played her flashlight across it, the light was refracted into a prism of colors. The ceiling was like a giant disco ball.
“You girls should see this,” Casey said over her shoulder.
There was a viewing platform underneath the observation room’s window and she stepped out onto it. She was joined by Rhodes and Ericsson, who also cast their flashlight beams upward.
“What is this place?” asked Julie.
“I don’t know.”
They swept their flashlights in a wide arc and the walls of the cavern, just like the ceiling, burst to life, refracting the light in all directions.
“What’s down there?” Ericsson asked, shining her light down below.
It was hard to see, but about thirty feet down was a large platform or stage of some sort.
Rhodes had already walked to the other end of the viewing platform. “I’ve found some stairs over here,” she called out.
When Gretchen and Julie joined her, they saw that the rusted door they couldn’t budge from the inside fed to a ramp of some sort that led down in the same direction as the stairs. It must have been used for moving equipment.
Megan, who always preferred to be on point, stepped onto the stairs and began to lead the way down.
The stairs had been carved out of the sheer rock wall. There was a railing, but as it had been submerged for God only knew how long, she didn’t put too much faith in it. Instead, she chose her steps carefully, as did Ericsson and Casey. They were less concerned with where they were than where they were going.
With their flashlights lighting up the stone steps, they took them one at a time. It wasn’t until they reached the very bottom that they paused to look around.
Casey was the first to see them. Rhodes was the first to choke back a scream.