KallMeKris

look at what they had seen and understand in three dimensions what the map had shown them in two.

So he stood at the side of the van and he walked to the spot where the single beer bottle had been found by the 1996 search team, about a mile and a half from the van, and he looked south.

and the terrain fell away toward a wide alluvial fan, beyond which the ridge line of the China Lake boundary rose in the distance, which was eight or nine miles away on the map.

But in the desert in July, that distance would be everything.

So two days later, sitting at home with his maps, the theory started to crystallize.

And he wrote about it afterwards saying, it was like viewing one of those optical illusions where an image suddenly pops out.

Everything just fell into place and became visible.

I suddenly saw a way the Germans could have ended up where the van was found through a series of reasonable, honest mistakes and why they might have set out for the south.

I was always acutely aware that I might have done exactly the same thing were I in their situation."

And he began explaining an expedition.

But most of the people he contacted actually declined.

And one person said yes, and it was his RMRU teammate, Les Walker.

And they carried a personal locator beacon and a spot satellite tracker that reported their position in near real time to a public webpage.

which was a direct line of communication with the outside world that the Rimkus Meyer family never had.

So on November 11th, 2009, the two of them started into the back country in the late morning, and they visited the van site, and they located the old bottle find, and they pushed south toward a search area Mahoud had mapped as a wide alluvial fan roughly a mile and a half across, bounded by ridges, and his pack, loaded with water and overnight supplies, weighed close to 65 pounds.

And his first impression of the search area was, uh-oh, his words, not mine.

And he would say that this will take at least several trips to cover.

So they camped that night at the northwest corner of the fan in the desert dark.

And day two began at 7 a.m.

and they moved south along the western edge of the fan, traveling several hundred yards apart, communicating by radio.