15
Hamgyong-Namdo Province
North Korea
THE MIST IS VERY BEAUTIFUL TODAY,” the young man said. His Korean accent was clearly audible but not so thick that his words weren’t intelligible over the flapping of the jeep’s canvas top. No doubt he recognized the importance of his mastery of English in keeping him from living at the edge of starvation like so many of his countrymen.
Gerhard Eichmann nodded absently, and stared out the side window. It really was beautiful. Tall, jagged hills sprang up everywhere around them, emerald green where there was sufficient soil to support life and grayish brown where the rock had been laid bare. Hazy clouds, only a few hundred meters above, threaded through them, being pulled toward the vortex created by a massive waterfall to the west.
It was easy to be lulled into a sense of contentment and peace. But it was there in North Korea that the contrasts nature had created were the starkest. It was a place that demonstrated with heartbreaking clarity the power of a small group of twisted men to create needless destruction and suffering for millions.
The dirt road turned rutted as it detoured around a recent landslide. Eichmann looked past his driver, catching a glimpse of a large facility nestled into a deep canyon. It was normally invisible from the road but the diversion allowed for a brief flash of the fencing and heavily camouflaged roof. His driver, Kyong, suddenly stared straight ahead as though not looking at it could make it cease to exist.
Odd, since two years before he had delivered Eichmann there for a series of meetings relating to the work being done behind its thick walls. Or at least, most of the work being done there. He twisted in his seat as the facility disappeared from sight, trying to pick out the west wing through the trees. Beyond the fact that it was called Division D, he didn’t know anything about it. Every query had been politely rebuffed and every request for access flatly denied. At first, he’d thought it was a mistake—one of the many edicts garbled in translation or subverted by the country’s dysfunctional bureaucracy. Further investigation, though, proved that assumption to be wrong.
They turned onto a narrow dirt road and wound along it before finally parking at its end. The foot trail that started there, used only very occasionally to transport supplies and personnel, was virtually invisible. Eichmann had been up it once before, though, and vividly remembered the four hours he’d spent struggling along the steep, eroded path.
He stepped from the vehicle and hesitated, looking down at his unsteady legs and the old hiking boots on his feet. There was no point in questioning this excursion now. He had spent three months begging for the opportunity and now here he was—about to personally witness the last, symbolic moment of his life’s work.
The beginning of the end to a life that he never could have imagined.
* * *
THE YEARS HAD SETTLED in even harder than Eichmann realized and this time the trip took a full six hours. His exhaustion and the pain from his bleeding feet were so profound that he nearly cried when he saw the first hint of human inhabitation. Not in the form of buildings or roads, but in a bizarre image of farmers tending an expansive rice paddy. From a distance, it looked completely ordinary, deceptively idyllic. As they approached, though, the picture became more complex.
While the tools were typically rudimentary and clothing traditional, the people were anything but. There were Africans, Hispanics, Caucasians, Arabs. Of the few Asians visible, none was Korean, instead having genetic origins in China, Laos, and Japan. Both men and women were represented in equal numbers and all were in their mid-twenties.
Kyong chatted nervously as they passed, ignoring the farmers who had stopped to stare at the strangers approaching their carefully isolated village.
The buildings were typical in design, with simple whitewashed walls and peaked roofs. What made them unique was their large size. There were no families here, only a group of guardians and teachers that had raised the children from infancy according to a rigid protocol Eichmann had designed. Housing was communal with people randomly assigned and reorganized at regular intervals to prevent the formation of overly strong relationships. Interactions with authority figures were limited to avoid favoritism. And outside influences were non-existent. A psychological experiment done with a level of control that the rest of the world’s scientists could only dream of.
They entered a building that looked like all the others but was actually a school, and Eichmann followed the hallway toward voices at its end. His boots clacked loudly against the bare floorboards and the moldy scent of Asian wood filled his nostrils. He wanted to remember it all. Every detail.
The girl twisted in her chair when he entered, her wide, pale face registering surprise and terror at the intrusion of an unfamiliar player into her meticulously designed universe.
While it was unlikely that she would remember, she had seen him during his last visit to the village. It was hard to believe that had been seventeen years ago.
The man sitting in front of her said something in a stern voice and she refocused on him as he began reading from a paper on the desk between them.
Despite the fact that she was a blond-haired Caucasian taken as an infant from her home in Romania, the oral examination was being conducted in Korean—the only language she spoke. In fact, the only one she knew existed.
The physical tests, blood workups, MRIs, and CAT scans had already been completed and the data transmitted to Eichmann. This intelligence test and the personality tests to come were the final piece of a puzzle so complex, he wasn’t sure he would ever fully understand all its facets.
He settled onto an empty bench, watching the desperate concentration on her face as the test conductor clicked a stopwatch and she began scribbling in the open notebook in front of her.
No reward had been offered to her for excelling on the test, only the promise of severe punishment for failing. The stick without a carrot wasn’t an ideal motivator but the incredibly tight controls on the experiment restricted him in this area. Rewards were difficult to provide to people who had no knowledge at all of the outside world. She had no comprehension of, and thus no aspiration to, money or possessions or social status. Food was already adequate, as was housing. Medical care was provided in sufficient quantities to ensure that his carefully designed data set did not shrink unduly over the years.
He had been forced to walk in because neither she nor any of the others was aware of the existence of cars. The only advanced technology she’d seen were the undoubtedly terrifying machines used to test her and the occasional airplane explained away as a kind of bird by the people running the experiment.
Her twin sister, living with adoptive parents in France, experienced a very different world. She had, however, just completed identical testing—though through a much more complex process, and with a cover story created to satisfy her family and the French authorities.
He watched the girl—Eun was her name—and she did the same to him out of the corner of her eye. Undoubtedly, his presence would skew her results slightly, but it didn’t matter. The conclusions of the study had been known for a long time. Perhaps even before they’d started down this path.
Maybe he and Christian had just been unable to face it? Perhaps somewhere deep inside them they’d wanted to catch a glimpse of God, to discover that man really was set apart. That humanity would eventually find its way and fulfill its promise.
He smiled sadly. It was hard to believe that they had ever been so young.