Amidst it all, though, a particular sequence of images had stuck in my mind since my visit to the mine. Try as I might to stop it, I couldn't. I saw it with my eyes open and I saw it with them shut. In the chill air between the ridgelines, I saw it now.
It started with the arrival of a convoy of Opel trucks a week before the end of the war.
The scientists would have had mixed feelings about leaving: a sense of regret at having to abandon the project; relief to be escaping the oppressive feeling of the place; joy at the knowledge they were getting out ahead of the Russians.
A late spring day, the guns a long way off, the scientists talking and smoking in threadbare suits, their bundled possessions to hand, as the convoy was readied for departure. Sixty-two scientists meant three trucks' worth; perhaps another five to transport the crates. Eight trucks in all, moving west, gears grinding on the steep roads through the mountains. A disciplined unit operating to a fixed schedule, the details drawn up by Sporrenberg's bureaucrats in Breslau.
Two kinds of troops attached to the unit: drivers and logistics personnel to oversee the evacuation procedure and an armed sonderkommando group acting as escort.
To these special-action troops, the scientists were simply "subjects." The trick was to maintain their docility and compliance until the last possible moment.
After multiple "operations" in the ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Minsk and the other occupied towns and cities of Central and Eastern Europe, the SS had found that by sticking to a preprepared book, the subjects could be kept as passive as cattle.
For some of the scientists, there may have been a tremor of foreboding as the three trucks peeled off from the main body of the convoy and headed into the forest.
But for most it would only have hit them when the tailgates dropped away exposing a line of troops with SS runes on their collars, their guns raised.
The Waffen-SS would have outnumbered the subjects two to one, their crushing shock and bewilderment combining with the SS's weight of numbers to make them respond without question to the barked orders as they moved toward the edge of the ditch. At no point, special-action orders decreed, should subjects feel that the executioners offered the remotest kind of hope.
And so, it had come to this. Two shifts, 31 bullets per shift, each shot three, maybe four seconds apart. The first victims facedown in the dirt for each member of the second shift to witness in a terrible moment of finality as he stepped up to the ditch, their grave, the proportions worked out in advance in some warm administrative office a long way from the front.
Sixty-two men meant a ditch ten meters long, two meters wide and one meter deep, the bodies stacked two high.
If the executioner tasked with placing his pistol at the base of each head observed the guidelines laid down for his benefit, the act of pulling the trigger was calculated to be no more arduous than switching off an electric light.
When the trucks left, the only thing to denote the scene of the crime would have been a mound of freshly dug earth half a meter high.
By the following spring, the mound would have collapsed to the exact same level as the ground around it. This, too, would have been carefully calculated according to the known decay rates of human tissue and the ambient conditions of the ditch.
To preserve the secret of the mine, the SS had consulted not even a page, but a paragraph or two from the execution manual it had drawn up for the Holocaust. It had tapped on the crime of the century to do this to a handful of its own people.
Though none of this was proven fact, remember this, I told myself, should you ever be tempted to view this as a technology hunt in a remote place that has little or nothing to do with you.
Chapter 21
The next day, I was back into Germany, on my way to Austria, making good progress on the autobahns in the rental car I'd picked up across the border, when the phone rang. It was Marckus. Hearing his voice, I felt a wave of relief, the cellular link between us suddenly feeling like a lifeline.
I spent the next 20 minutes briefing him on the mine. To begin with, he put up some resistance, trotting out his old belief that it was pointless pursuing the Germans for anything remotely as advanced as antigravity technology. But I had a feeling that Marckus was simply going through the motions.
The longer I talked, the more he listened. By the end, he was firing the questions at me.
I told him I had a hunch; that the Wenceslas Mine complex had been some kind of nuclear installation, the strange, henge-like construction being redolent of a reactor housing, with a tile-lined coolant pool in its midst. I didn't buy Witkowski's test-rig thesis, but then again I wasn't dismissing it either.
As for the Bell, I had absolutely no idea what it could have been, but without my notes at hand, I couldn't give Marckus the kind of details he required to conduct an in-depth analysis.
I promised to send him an email with the facts that night, as soon as I got to my hotel in Bad Ischl, across the Austrian border. "What happens in Bad Ischl?" Marckus asked. I told him about the Junkers "truck" business and how it had altered my plans. With long-range transport aircraft at his disposal, Kammler had had the means to ship the core secrets of the Skoda Works anywhere he wanted. And for all I knew, he had gone with them. It was pointless trying to pick up the clues of his disappearance in Ebensee or anywhere else for the time being. It was enough to know that the Nazis had, via Kammler's special projects group, a repository of technical secrets that had gone way beyond the V-weapons they had developed and used by the end of the war. It had taught me other things, too. For years, I had read of the SS' involvement in exotic weapons technology, but dismissed it as inadmis sible claptrap peddled by people with an unhealthy interest in its warped ritualistic ideology; this, despite Speer's solid documentation of Himmler's penchant for unconventional scientific solutions to Germany's dire military position in the closing years of the war. In Infiltration, Speer's account of how the SS eventually succeeded in establishing its own industrial empire within the visible economic framework of the Reich, he had listed some of Himmler's more absurd ideas: producing fuel from fir-tree roots, tapping the exhaust fumes of bakery chimneys for the manufacture of alcohol and producing oil in abundance from geraniums.
Speer also attests to Himmler's willingness to entertain any radical ideas for new weapons — especially those that leaped the current state of the art. One such was a proposal for turning the upper atmosphere into a giant high-voltage conductor, presumably for the purpose of frying the Allies' B-17, B-24 and Lancaster bombers as they flew into Reich airspace. These ideas, many of which were based on unsound science, came to naught, but it would have taken only one far-reaching proposal underpinned by some solid scientific reasoning for this vast array of funded research activity to deliver the payoff so desperately sought by the Nazi leadership. Like lasers, for example. Or an atomic bomb. It had also taught me just how effective — and this word, of course, glosses over the grotesque cruelty of its methods — the S S security machine had been.
The Kammlerstab had been protected by a triple ring of counterintelligence agents to prevent word of its activities from leaking. If it hadn't been for Voss and Agoston, the existence of the special projects group at Skoda might never have surfaced at all.