Read The Project 02 - The Lance for Free Online Page A

glove across his face. "No one would have doors that opened out. They'd get blocked by snow."
    " I wonder if they're locked?"
    " Against what? Penguins? Let's push and see."
    They pushed against one of the doors. Grunting, they pushed harder. With a rusted squeal, the steel door opened. They pushed at the other door and swung it inward. The interior lay in darkness.
    Hans went back to the idling cat, backed it around and pointed it straight at the open entrance. He switched on the six halogen headlamps and hit high beam. The interior lit up with brilliant white light. He took two hand held torches from the cab and joined Otto.
    A high roofed tunnel ran straight as an arrow into the mountain. Bare electric light bulbs, long dark, were spaced down the center of the ceiling.
    " Whoever built this bored right into the mountain."
    " What could it have been for?" Otto said. "This is huge. It would take a lot of equipment. I never heard of anything like this down here."
    A little way in, Hans paused at a room on the right.
    " This could have been a guardroom." He pointed at a frost covered stove in the corner. "That looks like something from sixty or seventy years ago."
    " A military base? For what? Who built it?"
    On the other side of the corridor was a kitchen and eating area, big enough for a hundred men. They passed two barracks rooms with gray wooden lockers still in place at the ends of the bunks. Hans opened one. Empty.
    They walked down the corridor, past what might have been officer's quarters with two bunks to a room. They came upon a radio room. A microphone and telegraph key still sat on top of a metal desk, next to a large transmitter console tied with snaking cables to a tall rack of receivers and test equipment. Next to the transmitter was a wooden box. Otto opened the box. Inside was something like a typewriter, with a complex keyboard arrangement of letters and buttons.
    Everything was covered by a thick layer of white frost. Otto wiped off the face plate of the silent transmitter. The switches were marked in German. Both men saw the swastika at the same time.
    " Holy shit! This must be Doenitz's secret base!"
    Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, head of Nazi Germany's naval forces, had once referred to "an invincible fortress in the Antarctic", but no one had ever found evidence of its existence. Now Otto and Hans were standing in it.
    Hans picked up a logbook lying on the desk. He thumbed through it without absorbing the words, set it down again.
    " This short wave stuff was state of the art in the forties," Otto said. "Look at the size of that transmitter. Must be two kilowatts at least. There've been rumors of this place since the war, but no one ever knew where it was, or if it was real."
    "Berlin isn't going to be happy about this."
    " No one wants to think about that Nazi crap anymore. What they do with this is their business. But we have to report it."
    They left the radio room and continued down the passage. The next room contained two large diesel generators, silent and cold. Exhaust tubes disappeared into the ceiling.
    Down the tunnel a series of four rooms opened to the sides. T hree were empty. The fourth held six large wooden crates, each stenciled in black with an eagle and swastika. Hans rubbed frost away from a label.
    He looked at Otto. " It says 'kitchen supplies'."
    " That's a lot of supplies."
    In the corner Otto spied a long crowbar, set against the icy wall. He picked it up and pried away the lid of a crate. He shone his light inside.
    " Not kitchen supplies. Look at this!"
    The crate was filled with paintings. They peered in.
    "That's a Vermeer!" Hans said. "I recognize the style. Or it's a damn good copy."
    " No one would stash a copy here." Otto pushed the lid back in place. "That painting is worth a fortune. It must have been stolen during the war. I'll bet all these crates are full of things stolen by the Nazis."
    They walked down the tunnel and passed two large closed doors on their left. The