Fifty feet beneath the stamping of zebra hooves and the trumpeting brays of elephants at the Louisville Zoo, a man-made cavern carved out of Kentucky’s underbed sprawls through 17 subterranean miles of limestone. Across 3 million square feet of underground real estate — about 100 football fields — the private owner of this cavern leases space to an obscured roster of secretive businesses. I’ve descended into the depths on a Thursday afternoon because, nearly 20 years ago, Sen. Mitch McConnell earmarked $4.5 million in Congressional funds for an IBM supercomputer and cybersecurity research lab down here which has seemingly disappeared from all record and memory.
As unanswered source calls mounted into the dozens, this is where my last-ditch effort to solve a missing supercomputer cold-case has taken me. Not stealth spelunking into a high-security lair with James-Bond aplomb, but packed into the back of a rickety Jeep-drawn tourist tram with about a dozen other visitors to the owner’s more well-known business — an underground amusement park known as the Mega Cavern.
