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

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 businesscenter 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 NationalArchives 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.

Chapter 7
    The next morning Annja, with the help of an archivist, was able to track down the file number of the recovery mission that had retrieved Lieutenant Hartwell’s remains. Since information on that type of operation had been declassified decades ago, she was able to submit a request for information about the mission and sweet-talked the archivist into filling it right away. A few hours later an email arrived in her in-box containing the scanned file.
    The longitude and latitude of the location where Hartwell’s plane had come to rest, and where his remains had been recovered, was right there in black-and-white on page three.
    While Annja was on the phone, Paul bought a series of digital topographical maps from a vendor online. He called them up on-screen, selected the one that covered the region the best and used the coordinates Annja supplied to pinpoint the location of the wreckage on the map. Given the damage to the Junkers that Mitchell had reported, both Annja and Paul agreed that it probably couldn’t have flown more thananother ten or twenty miles from its last known position, so he electronically drew a circle on the map with a radius of twenty miles.
    “There it is,” he said when he was finished. “There’s our search area.”
    Annja stared at it with a mixture of excitement and dismay. The thrill of the hunt had caught up with her overnight, and she was feeling exactly as she usually did at the start of a new dig. Archaeology was her one true love, the thing that she came back to again and again. She relished that feeling it gave her of reaching back into the past and the sense of satisfaction she got when she