Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters by Alex Archer Read Free Book Online Page A

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 hadbeen 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