Читать книгу Beneath Still Waters - Alex Archer - Страница 12

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…

Annja snatched up the report and flipped to the last page, reading the notes in the margins a second time. The wreckage of the second P51 Mustang involved in the incident, the one belonging to Lieutenant Hartwell, had been located back in 1946.

Annja knew that the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, the military unit that was in charge of recovering the remains of US servicemen and servicewomen worldwide, kept very precise records of the location of any bodies discovered on one of their missions. Unfortunately, JPMAC hadn’t been formed until 2003. It was unlikely that they would have any information on the remains of a soldier recovered during World War II. But that line of thought made her consider another alternative.

The military never did anything without documenting it in triplicate. If a recovery team had been sent to Salzburg to bring home Lieutenant Hartwell’s remains, then there was almost certainly a record of it somewhere. They just had to find out where.

The best place to look for that, Annja knew, would be Hartwell’s service records.

The only problem with that was the fact that unless a person was next of kin, the military service records of former soldiers were sealed.

So how to get access to those?

“Earth to Annja, come in, Annja.”

With a start she realized that Paul had been trying to get her attention for several minutes.

“Sorry, I was thinking.”

“Yeah, I could see the smoke coming out of your ears,” he said with a laugh. “Want to tell me what is so engrossing?”

“I know how we can get the fix we need on a general search area,” she said, and told him about her idea. “So if we can somehow get access to Hartwell’s service records,” she went on, “we could probably track down more information about the mission to recover his remains, which in turn would get us a starting point for our own search.”

“So what you are saying is that you need a source inside the national military records center to help you get Hartwell’s records, which tends to be frowned upon since it’s a wee bit illegal, never mind a federal crime,” Paul said.

“Yep, that about sums it up,” Annja said with a sigh. “Know anyone who would commit a felony for you?”

Paul smiled. “As a matter of fact, I do. Hand me your cell phone.”

Half an hour later they were in the hotel’s business center watching as the pages of Lieutenant Nathan Hartwell’s military service records came over the fax machine. Annja could scarcely believe it.

“You forget that I’m a senior correspondent for one of the biggest magazines in the world,” Paul said with a laugh when he saw her expression. “Our network, the people we know, are our biggest assets. We couldn’t do our jobs without them.”

“And who might you know at the National Archives?” Annja asked, only half teasing.

Paul winked at her. “Sorry. A journalist never reveals a source.”

Annja’s curiosity was still poking at her, but she let it go. The fact that they had the records was more important than who they had gotten them from, wasn’t it?

Of course it was. Besides, she didn’t care if it was from a woman. Or that he’d probably had to call her at home to get the information given it was well after hours.

She kept telling herself that all the way back to her hotel room.

Once there, they began going through the file, looking for information on Hartwell’s death and the recovery of his remains. Fortunately, they found what they needed. While the file only listed Salzburg as the location where Hartwell had been killed in action, it did note the name of the recovery mission and its commanding officer. That was all they needed; from there, it was just a question of making a series of phone calls to the record keepers at the National Archives in the morning and having one of them dig up the information they were looking for.

The dinner hour had long come and gone, but the resort had twenty-four-hour room service. With nothing more to do until morning, they put the files away and relaxed for the first time all evening.

Even though they’d made good headway, Annja couldn’t help but feel the minutes wasting away, each one bringing them that much closer to the deadline.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.