Page 144 of Risky Obsession

Then, she stopped.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Some of the ladder is missing.”

“Is there another way down?”

She shifted around to the back side of the ladder.

How did she do that if it’s connected to the rocks?

Lacey vanished.

“Lacey, are you okay?”

She returned to the ladder and looked up at me. “You are not going to believe this. Get your ass down here.”

My heart boomed in my chest as I climbed onto the ladder. Rust flaked in my hands as the metal creaked and groaned against my weight.

A massive chunk had been taken out of the cliff, like an entire section had carved off and dropped into the ocean, making the ladder seem to hang in mid-air. If the cliff had been blasted away, that was probably what had taken the ladder with it. I reached the bottom rung which wasstill about twenty feet above the waterline but couldn’t see Lacey anywhere.

“Come on,” Lacey said, appearing to my left. “You won’t believe this. Climb onto that ledge.”

She pointed at a narrow section of rock. I shifted around to the other side of the ladder, and using the metal for leverage, I pushed back onto the rock.

“This is amazing, Kane.” She held her hand toward me.

“What is it?” I gripped her tiny palm in mine, and she led me through a narrow gap between two giant boulders.

A massive man-made chasm came into view below us.

“Ta-da!” She spread her arms wide.

“Holy shit.”

Carved deep into the cliff was a cavernous opening that stretched like a giant tomb and disappeared into the darkness in the distance.

“What is this place?” Lacey’s eyes were enormous.

“It’s a submarine pen,” I said. The immense structure housed four long pens, running parallel to each other that were obviously deep enough for a submarine to exit straight into the ocean without detection from above.

A massive swastika flag against the far wall confirmed who had built it. Light speared through the roof and walls at intervals that suggested the skylights weren’t natural and had been designed on purpose to provide light.

“The Nazis went to great lengths to hide this place,” I said. “And by collapsing a section of the cliff, they concealed the entrance.”

“It’s been hidden all this time. Nobody would have found this place unless they came through the way we did.” Her face lit up. “This has to be where the gold is. Don’t you think?”

“It’s very promising, that’s for sure.”

The air was thick with an eerie silence, broken only by the sound of water dripping somewhere nearby.

I moved closer to the edge. The submarine area was shrouded in shadow, yet some structures were visible: bunkers, docks, and what looked like the crumbling remains of a U-boat in one of the watery pens.

“This is incredible.” She stepped to my side. “It must’ve been one hell of an effort to make these down here.”

“Andthen some.”

“We need to get down there.” She pointed to a concrete platform that ran the length of the first pen. A matching one ran the length of the fourth pen. And three narrow concrete platforms serviced the interior walls of the pens.