Beneath Still Waters. Alex Archer
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.
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 than another 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 located something previously thought to have been lost forever in the mists of time. She’d felt that way on her first dig at Hadrian’s Wall years ago, and she still felt that way today. Finding an aircraft that had been missing since World War II was the type of challenge she normally would jump at.
Although, the life of one of her friends didn’t normally hang in the balance, completely dependent upon her success, and that’s where the dismay came in.
The deadline was the problem. Given enough time and materials, Annja knew that she could probably find the airplane. She didn’t have any doubt about it. If it was there, she would find it. But with only seven days to do it—actually six, now—it was going to be nothing less than a Herculean task. They needed help; it was as simple as that.
Good thing she knew where she could get some.
Normally