We clambered back into the car and made our way down the track that led past the abandoned power station. It was now dark enough for Witkowski to use his lights, the beams catching in the weeds that tumbled through the cracks in the prefab concrete roadway laid by the Germans during the war.
Whatever the SS had been moving around here, it had been pretty heavy-duty, Witkowski remarked.
The track cut through a wood, emerging in a clearing on the far side of the power station. Caught in the headlights, rising out of the ground straight ahead, was a circular concrete construction 30 meters wide and 10 high. With its 12-meter-thick columns and horizontal beams, it was part-reminiscent of some ritual pagan edifice.
Witkowski parked the car, but left the headlights on, the beams bathing the columns of the object in bright white light. "What is that thing?" I asked. But Witkowski was already out of the door, crouching over something a few feet from the car. He was studying what looked like a partly exposed underground drain. Its concrete cover had cracked to reveal a duct about a foot across.
"This carried the electricity cable from the power station," he said. "It disappears into the ground just beyond the car, but diverts via this thing." "What is it?" I asked again. "I am not sure. But whatever it is — whatever it was—I believe the Germans managed to complete it. In this light it is difficult to see, but some of the original green paint remains. You do not camouflage something that is half-finished. It makes no sense." He paused. "There is something else. The ground within the structure has been excavated to a depth of a meter and lined with the same ceramic tiles that Sporrenberg describes in the chamber that contained the Bell. There are also highstrength steel hooks set into the tops of the columns. I think they were put there to support something; to attach to something. Something that must have exerted a lot of power." I looked at him. "What are you saying?" He took a moment before replying. "I'm saying I think it's a test rig. A test rig for a vehicle or an engine of some kind. A very powerful one."
That night I tried to call Marckus on my cell phone, but the isolated farmhouse where we were staying was buried in a deep valley, every bit as remote as the one that housed the nearby Wenceslas Mine complex, and I couldn't get a signal.
The Polish couple who owned the small farm let out a room to Witkowski whenever he came south from Warsaw to visit. They shared his curiosity about the mine and the neighboring rat run of uncompleted tunnels that were part of the SS-run "Giant" underground weapons complex. For all they or anyone else knew, the tunnels extended under the ground I was standing on. But being only second-generation inhabitants of this region, their parents having been shipped in to replace the Germans who'd lived here for three hundred years previously, they knew as little about the history of the place as Witkowski and I did. This, undoubtedly, helped to give the place a detached, soulless air.
There was no anecdotal evidence to fall back on; the only evidence was history's imprint on the topography itself.
I needed Marckus. I needed to run every last detail of the mine past him to see if it rang any bells in that weird analytical mind of his. I needed his guiding expertise again. Without some input from a physicist, the data on the Bell was nothing more than a bunch of science mumbo jumbo.
As I collected my thoughts under the swath of clear, starlit sky between the ridgelines, I elected to concentrate on a matter I did know something about; something that had been nagging at me ever since Witkowski had mentioned it: the matter of the KG 200 unit at Opeln, the base that had operated the Ju 290 and 390 transport aircraft on detachment to the Kommando. It was a highly significant development.
The Ju 290 was quite a rare bird; the 390 even more so. The 290 had been a big four-engined aircraft designed for the maritime reconnaissance, transport and bombing roles. The first transports had been used in the Stalingrad air bridge in 1942, but toward the end of the war, the final variants were modified for extreme-long-range operations. Three such aircraft are known to have made flights to Japanese bases in Manchuria. The Ju 390 was a six-engined modification of the Ju 290 with even more impressive operating characteristics. Though only two prototypes were built, they clearly demonstrated the Ju 390's ability to mount ultra-long-range operations of up to 32 hours endurance. On one occasion, a Ju 390 flew to within 12 miles of New York and back again. It could also carry a very heavy payload.
Above all, though, the Luftwaffe had referred to these aircraft as "trucks."
A book in Witkowski's possession, The Nuclear Axis by Philip Henshall, had provided this one essential detail. Henshall had picked up on Tom Agoston's story of Himmler's request for a "truck." But Henshall had arrived at a markedly different interpretation of the data. When Kammler had telexed Himmler on April 17 from his Munich office — the last signal anyone ever received from him — refusing the Reichsführer-SS the use of a "heavy truck" from the Junkers "motor pool," he hadn't been referring to a truck in the conventional sense. He had been referring to an aircraft. A long-range one with a heavy pay load.
Kammler had been telling Himmler, his superior, that he couldn't have a Junkers 290 or 390 for his own use, because it was committed elsewhere. It could only have been for use by the Special Evacuation Kommando. Why else stamp such an ostensibly bland, innocent message geheim—secret? Why else would Himmler have been bothering himself with trucks?
With Bormann, Hitler's deputy, in charge of the evacuation plan, Kammler would have been in a unique position to call the shots. Although Hitler viewed Himmler as a valued and trusted ally — certainly up until the moment his secret surrender negotiations were discovered— it was Bormann, Hitler's gray eminence, who had his ear.
Kammler could safely refuse Himmler permission to use a Ju 290 or 390 without fear of recrimination. With such aircraft at its disposal, the Kommando could have flown its cargo of documents, personnel and technology pretty much anywhere it wanted. Spain, South America— Argentina, even — would have represented no problem to such a longrange platform.
The realization pulled me up short. What was the point of chasing Kammler, if he 'd already shipped everything out?
After dinner, a good but simple meal of boiled eggs and local ham, I wandered back outside to take the air, leaving Witkowski inside to talk to our hosts.
I gazed at the ridgelines again. A few miles away, lay the Wenceslas Mine.
Part of me was transported back to the desert around Groom Lake, to the time when I'd stood vigil over the hills that shielded Area 51 from the outside world.
The part-completed Giant underground manufacturing complex and the Wenceslas Mine were a lot closer than I'd ever been able to get to the 27,000-feet-long paved runway on the desert lakebed. But the feeling they evoked in me was curiously similar.
The S S had installed a security system around the mine every bit as impenetrable as the cordon around Groom Lake. That, undoubtedly, was a part of it.
As was the fact that the technologies at the heart of both places were essentially a mystery to everyone but the people who'd worked on them.
It was not knowing what lay beyond those ridgelines that made me do this. It was the not knowing that drove me on.
All these sensations contributed to the almost tangible atmosphere that imbued both places. I was consumed with the need to go on until the picture steadied. I knew then that I was tired — more tired than I'd ever been. I had got to the point where my every living minute was filled with a need to know the truth of something this insoluble, and that it had got ahold of me so badly that my subconscious mind was trying to solve it in my sleep, failing in the process and turning in on itself, twisting raw thoughts and images into the worst kind of dreams. Here, in the depths of Kammler's kingdom, a thousand miles from the warm archives of the Imperial War Museum and the Public Records Office, the scale of the Holocaust had begun to cling to me like a second skin.