Alex Archer - Beneath Still Waters

“So what are you going to do?” Paul asked.

She looked up at him, surprised. “Find the bloody plane, of course. What else is there to do?”

“But you don’t even know what plane you are looking for. And last time I checked, the Swiss Alps are pretty damn big.”

“That’s where these come in,” she said, picking up the stacks of reports that she’d been going through.

“Mission reports from both the German Luftwaffe and the American Air Force for the month of April 1945. I don’t know how he got them, but he did and that’s all that matters. Somewhere in here is the clue I’m looking for that will tell me what I need to know—the identity of the plane I’m supposed to find.”

Paul shrugged. “Well, if you’re confident you’ll find it, so am I. Pass some of those over here,” he said as he sat down on the other end of the couch.

“What are you doing?” Annja asked.

“What does it look like I’m doing? Helping you, of course.”

She stared at him, at a loss for words. She hadn’t imagined…

Paul’s expression softened. “You didn’t think you were going to have to do all of this alone, did you?”

Annja gulped down a lump in her throat for the second time that evening, but this time it was for an entirely different reason. She’d been on her own so long that she’d just assumed…

Finding her voice, she said, “Actually, yeah, I did. This isn’t your fight and you’ve got things to do.”

Paul laughed. “Things to do? Are you nuts? A man’s life is at stake here. I think that’s a little more important than some stupid magazine article, don’t you?”

She nodded, unable to speak. She thought she just might be falling in love with this man.

She passed him half the stack of reports and settled down to read.

The clock was ticking…

Annja found the information she sought nearly four hours later. Surprisingly, it was in a report from an American airman, Captain Dennis Mitchell, who survived the crash of his P51 Mustang in April 1945 and hid among the partisans at the Swiss border for three weeks before he was able to rejoin an Allied unit and relay the details of what had happened that day.

The report detailed an encounter between the pilot’s combat air patrol in a pair of P51s and a lone German Junkers Ju 88. Mitchell described how his patrol had come upon the Junkers flying low and slow as it neared the Austrian border. Figuring they had an easy target, the two Mustang pilots had gone on the attack. To their surprise the pilot of the Junkers turned out to be better than average and managed to elude their guns for several long minutes as they chased him over the Alps.

Just when they thought they had him dead to rights, the Junkers pilot had turned the tables on them, suddenly growing claws and becoming the cat instead of the mouse. A head-to-head attack directed at Mitchell’s aircraft had critically damaged it and he’d bailed out just seconds before it blew to pieces. While floating to the ground under his parachute, he’d witnessed the destruction of his wingman’s aircraft, but also the fatal wounding of the Junkers. When last he saw it, the aircraft was flying southwest on a course that would take it deeper into the Alps, with smoke pouring from one engine and a full-fledged fire engulfing the other. He hadn’t thought it would get very far in that state.

Mitchell had landed in a valley between two peaks and had stumbled upon a partisan group as it crossed the mountain. They’d sheltered him from the enemy as the country fell apart around them and when the opportunity arose had escorted him back to Allied lines. He discovered that Hitler had committed suicide the previous day and the war in Europe was effectively now all but over.

There was a page added to the original report that stated post-war recovery crews had managed to find the wreckage of the aircraft belonging to Mitchell’s wingman, Lieutenant Nathan Hartwell, as well as his remains, which had been collected and shipped to the States for burial back home. The wreck had been in the mountains along the border near the Austrian city of Salzburg.

“I think I’ve got something here,” she said to Paul and then showed him what she had found.

“What would a German aircraft be doing flying alone and heading south at that point in the war?” Paul asked. “Didn’t we basically control all of Germany at that point?”

Annja nodded. Her particular field of specialty was European history, concentrating on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, but she hadn’t neglected her study of the modern era. “The last major battle between Germany and American and British Allied forces took place near Lippstadt in the first week of April. About the same time, Soviet forces broke the German lines in the east and marched all the way to Berlin, reaching it on the sixteenth of April. By that point, the war was all but over except for the surrendering.”

Paul thought about that for a moment. “The Battle of Berlin started on the sixteenth when Soviet forces attacked the capital. Hitler committed suicide on April thirtieth. But back on the fourteenth of April we have a lone German aircraft making a run for the border, flying ‘low and slow’ as Captain Mitchell put it. Sounds to me like somebody loaded his personal stash of loot and tried to get out of Dodge before everything came crashing down. What do you think?”

Annja nodded. “I bet you’re right. And what’s the one currency accepted anywhere in the world?”

The two looked at each other.

“Gold,” they said simultaneously. “Gold.”

Paul clapped his hands together. “That’s why the plane was flying so slowly when Mitchell’s patrol happened upon it. It was loaded with what was probably a fortune in gold,” he said excitedly.

“That would also explain why Doug’s kidnapper is so interested in finding it.”

Now that they knew what they were likely looking for, they could turn their attention to locating it, which wasn’t going to be easy, Annja knew. They had a general location where the dogfight had taken place, but no idea how far the pilot had managed to fly the crippled aircraft or in which direction he had ultimately headed.

“We need a map,” Annja said.

Five minutes later they had her laptop out and open on the table, a map of Germany displayed on the screen. The Alps stretched across the southernmost part of Germany, along the border it shared with Austria and Liechtenstein. They were about seventy-five miles wide and rose to heights of nearly 10,000 feet in the region around Salzburg, which was the general area that they were concerned with. The wreckage of the Junkers, if it had even survived this long, was somewhere in the midst of all that.

Paul summed it up nicely with a single word.

“Damn.”

Annja had to agree. It was a lot of ground to cover, too much, in fact. They would barely scratch the surface in the week that they’d been allotted. A thorough investigation would take years, decades even.

There had to be a better way.

She sat back, considering the information they had found. Mitchell’s report indicated that the Junkers had been moving in a southeasterly direction when he had last seen it. If they could pinpoint where Mitchell had been at the time, then they could at least come up with a theoretical flight path for the aircraft and could limit their search to that area. It would give them a much smaller area to cover.

So how to accomplish that? Annja wondered.

There was nothing in the report to suggest that Mitchell had known where he’d bailed out of his aircraft except in the most general of terms, and the wreckage of his P51 had never been found.

But they did have the next best thing…