Beneath Still Waters

“Look at me!”

This time the sharpness in his tone caught her attention. She stopped what she was doing and looked over at him, actually seeing him for the first time.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said gently, “but whatever it is, you aren’t going to be helped by letting it get the better of you. Take a deep breath, calm down a minute and tell me what’s got you so riled up.”

Annja realized that he was right; she wasn’t going to help Doug if she went at this haphazardly and in a panic. Yes, the clock was ticking but this is what she did. She found things that had been lost or hidden away, often for centuries. She was good at it, too. She could do this; she just needed to stay calm and to stay focused.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” she began, then told him about the phone call, the package, everything.

He didn’t believe her at first. He looked at the papers, checked her call logs, even watched the video, though he turned it off in a hurry when he saw Doug’s bruised and battered face. That was all he apparently needed to understand it was real.

His first reaction was a reasonable one.

“We have to go to the police,” he said, reaching for the phone.

Annja stretched out her hand and put it over his, stopping him.

“No,” she said softly.

“No? What do you mean no? Your friend has been kidnapped, his life threatened. You need to let the police handle this thing so they can get him back safely!”

“But that’s just it, Paul. They won’t.”

He stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown a third eye in the middle of her forehead. “What? How can you say that?” he asked, bewildered.

“Because it’s true!”

Easy there, Annja, she told herself. He’s just trying to help.

“Less than one in two victims in kidnapping for ransom cases are returned unharmed when the ransom is paid. I know. I looked it up. And as crazy as it sounds, that’s what this is essentially. A kidnapping for ransom. Our kidnapper just happens to have a really unusual demand.”

Paul looked at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “That’s what I don’t get. What does he really want? And why kidnap a television producer in order to get it? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Actually it does, in a strange kind of way. He wants my expertise in finding lost artifacts but can’t approach me outright because he knows that I would require him to follow the law and turn the wreckage and any human remains over to the German government as befits a casualty of war.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Anything found within the wreckage would have to be turned over, as well. That means he wouldn’t get to keep whatever the plane was carrying, and that’s what he wants. Not the plane but the cargo.”

Paul frowned. “So knowing that you wouldn’t help him steal the cargo if you did, indeed, find it, he decides to kidnap the producer of your show?”

“Not just my producer. Doug is my friend, one of the few I have. And I have a reputation for going to the ends of the earth for my friends.”

Saying it aloud brought a lump to her throat and she realized that she was scared, afraid for Doug’s safety. Whoever the kidnapper was, it was clear that he wasn’t afraid to use physical violence to get what he wanted and of her friends, few though they may be, Doug was probably the one least likely to be able to deal with what was coming his way.

Which is precisely why he was the one who was targeted, she thought.

“But why hurt him like that? Why not just kidnap him and let you know that he was being held?”

“Motivation,” Annja answered. “Specifically, mine. He’s got a deadline for some reason, and he wants the plane found before that deadline expires. If I thought Doug wasn’t in any immediate danger other than being held captive, I’d stall every second I could on the search for the plane to give the authorities time to find him. By backing up his threat with a show of force, the kidnapper is taking that option away from me. I have no doubt he will hurt Doug, perhaps even kill him, if I don’t do what he wants.

“Which brings us to the second reason we can’t go to the authorities,” Annja continued. “Time. Reporting the abduction will take away precious hours, possibly even days, from my hunt for the aircraft, and I can’t afford that.”

“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…

Chapter 6 (#ulink_8f19b50a-3f9d-5e55-bb98-ffae5106de0b)

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.