177: Eye of the Sahara

In the hotel room, the air was so oppressive it felt like you could wring water from it.

The SAS team had cleared the entire floor and were guarding outside, not even a fly could get in.

Inside the room, the only sound was the frantic whirring of the laptop fan in front of the three-screen setup.

Lin Feng sat before the computer, his fingers flying across the keyboard so fast they almost left afterimages.

Wang Dalong stood behind him, his back drenched in cold sweat, so tense he forgot to breathe.

He had never seen Lin Feng like this before.

It was a kind of... a mix of extreme excitement and immense terror, a near-maddening focus!

"Image recognition initiated... Keywords 'Ouroboros' 'infinity symbol'... Setting fuzzy matching algorithm..."

"Search scope locked: all scanned documents of Count Cavendish..."

Lin Feng muttered rapidly, each command typed into the system with flawless precision.

On the screen before him, tens of thousands of scanned document thumbnails, like a black waterfall, cascaded downward in a frenzy!

The sheer volume of information would make an ordinary person's brain explode at a glance.

Wang Dalong watched, dizzy and heart pounding, wanting to ask something but not daring to utter a word given Lin Feng's state.

Time ticked by, second by second.

The air in the room grew heavier and heavier.

Suddenly!

"Stop!"

Lin Feng let out a low roar, slamming his right index finger onto the Enter key!

Click!

The crisp sound made Wang Dalong shudder.

The cascading waterfall on the screen froze instantly.

A yellowed map fragment was instantly enlarged by the system, occupying the entire center of the screen.

"My God!"

Wang Dalong's eyes widened instantly, and he couldn't help but curse.

It was a map labeled in German, seemingly a geological survey map of French West Africa, with burn marks on the edges, looking tattered and unremarkable.

But in the upper right corner, in an area almost covered by ink stains, at the uninhabited border of Libya, Algeria, and Niger, a symbol drawn in red pencil was clearly imprinted there!

The symbol was so small it was almost negligible, but Wang Dalong would never mistake it!

A snake swallowing its own tail!

An infinity symbol twisted into an '∞'!

"Exactly the same! It really exists!" Wang Dalong's voice cracked as he pointed at the blood-red symbol on the screen, utterly stunned. "This... this old Count Cavendish... he wasn't collaborating with these Nazis for just a day or two, was he?"

Lin Feng ignored him.

All his attention was fixed on the geographical location marked by that symbol.

It was a massive geological structure composed of concentric circles.

From the map's contour lines, it looked like a giant eye embedded in the earth!

Lin Feng reached out and tapped the screen firmly.

His fingertip turned white from the pressure.

He turned and looked at Wang Dalong.

"Fatty, do you know what this place is?"

"This... how would I know?" Wang Dalong felt uneasy under his gaze. "Some godforsaken desert, what else could it be?"

"This place is called the 'Richat Structure.'"

Lin Feng's voice was soft but trembled slightly from extreme excitement.

"Of course, it has a more famous name..."

"—Eye of the Sahara."

"Eye of the Sahara?" Wang Dalong was stunned; the name sounded familiar, but he couldn't recall it immediately.

Lin Feng didn't give him time to think, tapping a few more keys on the keyboard.

On an adjacent screen, a high-resolution satellite image was retrieved.

Two images—one a hand-drawn map from World War II, the other a modern space satellite photo—were placed side by side.

The composition, the outline, matched perfectly!

"The most crucial part isn't this."

Lin Feng zoomed in on the map fragment to the limit, until the pixels began to blur.

He pointed to a line of nearly illegible, handwritten German text next to the Ouroboros symbol.

The handwriting was scribbled and tiny, almost blending with the paper's grain.

Wang Dalong pressed his face close to the screen, squinting to identify each letter.

"Flug...zeug...1942?"

He stammered it out.

"Aircraft, 1942? Brother Feng, what's... what's the issue? Isn't it just saying a plane was there in 1942?"

Lin Feng slowly leaned back in his chair, as if all his strength had been drained in an instant.

He let out a long breath, white and heavy, as if expelling all the shock from his chest.

Yet the aura he emitted grew even more terrifying.

"The issue is huge."

Looking at the still-confused Wang Dalong, he spoke calmly, each word landing heavily on Wang Dalong's heart.

"Fatty, the 'Eye of the Sahara'—in official public records, it was first fully observed by humans in 1965."

"It was discovered by astronauts from the American 'Gemini' space program, hundreds of kilometers up in space."

Lin Feng paused, giving Wang Dalong time to digest.

"Because its diameter is a full 40 kilometers! Even if you flew over it in a plane, you wouldn't see its full form! If you were in it, you'd just think it was a series of oddly shaped circular hills!"

Wang Dalong's mouth slowly, uncontrollably, fell open.

His brain, like an old tractor, struggled to process every word Lin Feng said.

A few seconds later.

Boom!

A chill spread from his tailbone, up his spine, straight to the top of his head!

All the hairs on his body stood on end!

"Wait... wait... Brother Feng, you mean..."

His voice trembled uncontrollably, his teeth chattering.

"Exactly."

Lin Feng's eyes shone frighteningly bright, a mix of exhilaration and madness from uncovering a shocking secret!

"Twenty-three years before astronauts discovered it from space!"

"In 1942! An era when jet planes weren't even widespread!"

"The Nazi 'Ancestral Heritage Society,' these maniacs, not only knew of its existence but even established some facility there, a base important enough to mark with their core emblem!"

The entire room fell into a deathly silence.

You could hear a pin drop.

Wang Dalong felt his worldview shattered by Lin Feng's words!

This discovery was a hundred times, a thousand times more horrifying than finding a Nazi underground city under an Alpine glacier!

How did they discover it?

In that era, how could they have surveyed a perfect circular structure 40 kilometers in diameter from the ground?

What did they build there?!

Questions gripped Wang Dalong's heart!

Lin Feng said no more, immediately grabbing the encrypted satellite phone on the table and dialing a number.

The call was answered almost instantly.

"It's me."

"Madam, the situation has changed."

Without wasting words, Lin Feng quickly reported the discovery and all his deductions based on it in the most concise language.

On the other end of the line, there was a long silence.

So long that Wang Dalong wondered if the signal had been lost.

Finally, Madam Elizabeth's steady, authoritative voice spoke again.

Her voice carried a trace of exhaustion Wang Dalong had never heard before, and a desperate resolve.

"Mr. Lin, I've already had the private jet's flight path re-applied for."

"Destination,"

"Mauritania, Nouakchott International Airport."