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

200 The Hunt for Zero Point
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.
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.