ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

190 The Hunt for Zero Point
untimely ends after their release from the special NKVD investigation
cell—Szymanski in an air crash and Prawin in a drowning accident.
"What was it that killed them?" I asked. "Their knowledge of the
Special Evacuation Kommando or the fact they knew about the mine?"
Witkowski kept his eyes on the road. "The Germans maintained a
special detachment of aircraft, probably Ju 290s, and a single Ju 390, both
rare heavy transport types, based at Opeln—Opole today—a hundred
kilometers from here. Witnesses say the planes were well camouflaged
and that some were painted with yellow and blue identification markings,
which suggests they were masquerading as Swedish planes. If so, it was
almost certainly a unit of KG 200, the Luftwaffe special operations wing,
which frequently flew aircraft under the flag of enemy or neutral
countries. The point is, the Evacuation Kommando had the ability to
move thousands of tons of documentation, equipment and personnel,
and they could move it north or south. Sporrenberg's brief was to go
north. The whole operation was highly secret. But nothing, it seems, was
more secret than the Bell."
We crawled out of Wroclaw in a heavy convoy of trucks bound for the
Czech border. I focused on a faint ribbon of sky between the clouds
gathering to the south and the outline of the Sudeten Mountains, the
inner core of Kammler's high-tech kingdom, indistinct yet somehow
threatening, on the distant horizon.