Beneath Still Waters
Beneath Still Waters
Alex Archer
A wrecked German bomber…key to the secrets of the Third Reich?All it took was one phone call and TV show host and archaeologist Annja Creed is in mortal danger. Her producer Doug Morrell has been abducted by a greedy treasure hunter who's seeking the lost raubgold, or looted gold of Nazi Germany. The terms are simple: retrieve the bounty and Doug lives. Fail, and he dies…Now Annja and her friends must find a missing German fighter plane that was shot down over the Alps in 1945. According to legend, the aircraft not only holds a shipment of gold the Nazis had stolen, but also carried the last letters of the führer himself. Letters that point to a more startling treasure buried underwater halfway around the world. But Annja isn't interested in treasure, or even unearthing historic relics. Annja has one agenda: get Doug out alive…even if it means drawing her sword from its otherworldly sheath. Even if it means death.Because once greed drives a man to violence, nothing will stop him…
A wrecked German bomber…key to the secrets of the Third Reich?
All it took was one phone call and TV show host and archaeologist Annja Creed is in mortal danger. Her producer Doug Morrell has been abducted by a greedy treasure hunter who’s seeking the lost raubgold, or looted gold of Nazi Germany. The terms are simple: retrieve the bounty and Doug lives. Fail, and he dies…
Now Annja and her friends must find a missing German fighter plane that was shot down over the Alps in 1945. According to legend, the aircraft not only holds a shipment of gold the Nazis had stolen, but also carried the last letters of the führer himself. Letters that point to a more startling treasure buried underwater halfway around the world. But Annja isn’t interested in treasure, or even unearthing historic relics. Annja has one agenda: get Doug out alive…even if it means drawing her sword from its otherworldly sheath. Even if it means death.
Because once greed drives a man to violence, nothing will stop him…
It was Doug on the screen. He was tied to a metal chair in a nondescript room.
Annja’s anxiety propelled her closer to the hotel room’s television as she turned up the volume on the DVD player.
Not that Doug was speaking. His arms and legs were tied to the chair, leaving his hands free and his bare feet resting on what looked to be a wet concrete floor. The camera was close enough that Annja could tell his face was bloody and swollen. A thin line of dried blood ran down the side of his face. When he raised his head and looked at the camera, the one eye not swollen shut was filled with fear.
“Help me, Annja,” he said, and his voice was little better than a croak. “I don’t care what he asks you to do or who he asks you to do it to—I’ll die here if you don’t do what he wants.”
The camera zoomed in on his face and then slipped down to his body and stopped on his right hand. That close, Annja could see that his last two fingers were bent at odd angles.
She could hear Doug saying, “No, no, I didn’t do anything! Don’t!” She steeled herself but she didn’t turn away. Annja owed it to him to watch what he was having to endure.
A gloved hand reached into the camera frame. It was neither large nor small, so she couldn’t tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s, though she suspected the former. Not because a woman couldn’t be that cruel—she knew from experience that that certainly wasn’t the case—but because her mystery caller who’d sent the DVD had claimed to be the one who had kidnapped Doug.
The individual took hold of Doug’s middle finger and snapped it. Doug let out a shriek of pain and the screen went blank.
Watching the kidnapper inflict pain on Doug to coerce her into action filled Annja with a righteous fury.
He’d picked the wrong woman to tangle with.
Beneath Still Waters
Alex Archer
THELEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK
JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned,
gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against
the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.
The broadsword shattered, fragments falling
into the mud. The crowd surged forward,
peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards
from the trampled mud. The commander tossed
the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued
praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed
her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France,
but her legend and sword are reborn…
Contents
Cover (#u6e6abe3b-3758-5c33-a5ab-9aad0a26dfa2)
Back Cover Text (#u7a9cbd28-0580-5920-afb3-d601fedd2950)
Introduction (#u84b63459-77a4-5c1b-9091-0555c6b01d4d)
Title Page (#u1cf7092f-c138-5d13-a8b0-c799b3ec67af)
The Legend (#u892edb9d-ce26-5e19-a6a6-fbf8448477f3)
Chapter 1 (#uc0947394-2b9a-53c0-a00d-2b57f09eeb5a)
Chapter 2 (#ucd4cef2c-c252-5d54-8f24-9a86800e2a5f)
Chapter 3 (#u7567113a-62ba-53f3-b62b-fff17b743760)
Chapter 4 (#ud1a50ae7-5211-5a2d-9077-345d2ade5787)
Chapter 5 (#u1af8af0a-7a30-5d8f-9e71-2e16b9e0c4c8)
Chapter 6 (#ue1d93cef-c4f4-51c7-b97a-45c4d0c3cd96)
Chapter 7 (#ue3909643-e510-59b3-a96f-2abac5d5ac59)
Chapter 8 (#u7422500c-0e75-5de2-b0f9-6987e0c1dc65)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_c0aadbd9-759e-5ad1-8900-8539ebe93d79)
April 5, 1945Outside Potsdam, Germany
One last mission.
That’s how they’d sold it to him. One final mission that would not only provide for their future security, but would put his name in the history books alongside those of Goering, Goebbels and Himmler, men who had gone above and beyond the call of duty in their aid and support of the Fatherland.
One final mission for the glory of the Third Reich.
Major Konrad Brandt had wanted to laugh in their faces.
He didn’t give a damn about the history books, the Nazi Party, or even the survival of the Third Reich. All of it was meaningless in his eyes. All he cared about was getting out of Germany before everything fell completely into ruin. He knew that day wouldn’t be long in coming, knew that time was running out, but his personal sense of duty to the oaths he had sworn, to serve and protect the Fatherland, had so far kept him from simply turning his back on his comrades and abandoning his post, no matter how insane matters had become. When they told him that this mission would take him beyond the borders of their lost and forsaken country without need of return, he knew his salvation had arrived and he’d practically fallen over himself to accept the responsibility.
Now, standing between two SS officers in the shadows outside the chalet that had been commandeered earlier in the week as a temporary headquarters for this mission, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake.
Too late to back out now, even if you did, he thought.
He’d flown his Junkers Ju 88 into this makeshift camp in the woods outside Potsdam a week earlier, landing on a crude runway that had been plowed by tanks in the middle of a forest clearing. Once there, he found that the mission he’d been recruited for was “on hold” while they awaited the arrival of several important dignitaries.
No one, of course, could tell him who they were waiting for, just that they couldn’t begin until they arrived. He’d been treated well, at least, given a bed in a room shared by several Wehrmacht officers and three decent meals a day, which was more than he’d expected. The army officers didn’t pay him much attention—he was Luftwaffe, after all—but that was fine with him. He spent the days catching up on his sleep and thinking about what he was going to do once he was clear of this place.
* * *
EARLY THE NEXT morning the cavalcade that they’d been waiting for finally arrived. Brandt was on his way back from breakfast when he noticed the flurry of activity and hoped that meant that they could start getting things worked out within a few days, at least. Those in charge apparently weren’t going to wait that long, however, for within fifteen minutes of his return there was a knock at his door. Opening it, he found a pair of Waffen SS thugs in their black uniforms and red party armbands standing outside in the hallway. The SS were the protective detail for the senior officials in the Nazi Party; their presence indicated that the dignitaries who had arrived the previous night were more than just senior army officers.
“Major Brandt?” said the man on the right, the taller and more senior of the two. “I am Major Adler. Come with us, please.”
It was common knowledge that a person crossed one of Himmler’s Shutzstaffel at his or her own peril, so Brandt did as he was told. The SS officers flanked him like an honor escort—or a prisoner detail, Brandt thought—and marched him across the camp to the building housing the dignitaries. They led him to a room on the second floor and then knocked on the door.
“Come,” came a muffled call from the interior.
The senior SS officer inclined his head in the direction of the door. Taking his cue, Brandt opened the door and stepped into the room.
Whatever it had once been, the room clearly now served as a planning area. Maps hung on the walls, and another was laid out on a large table in the center of the room. There were no windows, and the only light came from a shaded lamp that stood at the edge of the table, highlighting the map but leaving much of the rest of the room in partial shadow.
Though he was half cloaked in shadow, there was no mistaking the identity of the man seated behind the table. When Brandt’s brain caught up with what his eyes already knew, he snapped to attention and whipped out a near-perfect salute.
“Heil Hitler!”
The leader of the Third Reich waved in return and regarded his visitor for a moment. At last, he spoke.
“They tell me you are a good pilot. Is that true?”
Brandt thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I’ve survived so far. I don’t know if that makes me a good pilot or just a lucky one.”
The remark was flirting dangerously close to disaster, for to speak ill of the war was tantamount to treason in the eyes of many Party officials, but Brandt found that he just didn’t care anymore. The Führer asked him a question; he gave a truthful answer. If that was a treasonous response, so be it.
Hitler watched him closely for several seconds and then laughed quietly. “Skilled or lucky, either one will do, I suppose.”
He stood and leaned over the map. “We are here,” he said, pointing.
Brandt stepped closer so that he could see.
“Your destination is here,” Hitler continued, moving his finger to the southeast. “You will refuel here, here and here. Crews are already in place, ready to service the aircraft in case you run into difficulty along the way.”
Difficulty. An interesting way to describe running headlong into a hornet’s nest of Allied aircraft. But then again, according to headquarters, we are actually winning this war, Brandt thought.
His feelings aside, he had to admit that the route had been well planned; the refueling stops were close to the range of his aircraft but not dangerously so and as a result he would have some extra fuel to maneuver with. Given that the Allies were pushing north out of Italy and Greece, he had no doubt that he was going to need it. It would have been safer to go northwest across territory controlled by the Soviets, given the state of their air force at present, but that would have meant refueling in enemy territory, which was clearly out of the question. No, southwest it would have to be, over the Alps and through Romania, then into Greece and Turkey. Once he was past the Turks, it would be smooth sailing from that point forward.
You can do this, he told himself. A little skill, a little luck, and you’ll be free of this place, this war, once and for all.
“Any cargo?”
“Fifteen hundred pounds of supplies and this,” Hitler said, passing him a leather satchel as he spoke. “You are to deliver both to General Giesler upon your arrival at your destination, is that understood?”
“Yes, my Führer.”
The fifteen hundred pounds would bring the weight of his loaded aircraft to just over thirty thousand pounds, but that was still a few thousand pounds below his maximum takeoff weight. It was no different from carrying a full complement of 500-pound bombs, really. It would cost him some speed and maneuverability in the air, but he was going to have to live with that.
“Will there be any fighter escorts to help me break the Allied lines?” Brandt asked.
“No,” Hitler told him. “I believe a single aircraft has a greater chance of breaking through undetected than a full squadron. Crews are loading your plane now, and you will leave as soon as possible.”
He came around the table to stand in front of Brandt, eye to eye.
“I cannot stress enough the importance of your mission, Major. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the Reich is in your hands. You must not fail or all we have worked for will be lost!”
For just a split second Brandt was tempted to speak the truth, that everyone but the madman in front of him already knew that they had lost, that it had all been in vain, but he squashed that notion before he could give voice to it and commit suicide by doing so. Instead, he simply clamped his heels together and threw out another salute.
“Heil Hitler!”
That seemed to satisfy the other man, who grunted an acknowledgment and turned away to study the map once more.
Brandt took that as a dismissal and headed for the door, where he was met once again by his SS escorts, who walked him back to his quarters.
* * *
BRANDT STOOD AT the edge of the makeshift runway and watched with satisfaction as the mechanics swarmed over his aircraft, preparing it for the flight to come. With parts being in such scarce supply over the past few months, he was normally concerned about letting men unfamiliar to him near the plane, but given that he was on a mission for Hitler himself, he was confident that his beloved Junkers was getting the best care possible.
He and that aircraft had been together for the past four years, and he had begun to think of it more as a companion than a vehicle. They had seen each other through some hairy moments and even hairier missions, and the Junkers had become a talisman to him; as long as he was behind the controls of that aircraft, he’d live to fight another day. If he was going to survive the flight to come, he was going to need her to be in top shape.
The sound of an approaching train drew his attention, and he turned to watch a locomotive pull into the station a hundred yards away. No sooner had it stopped than a work team slipped out of one of the cars and quickly began unloading large wooden crates onto a waiting truck. The crates were heavy; it took four men to carry one of them. Brandt could see more of the same stacked in the car they were unloading, and he wondered just what they contained.
Looks like you are going to find out, he thought, as the truck pulled away from the train and headed directly for the crew waiting by the bomb-bay doors underneath each wing.
Intrigued, Brandt wandered over.
As he drew closer, he could see black lettering stamped on the side of each box.
Magyar Nemzeti Bank.
He knew enough Hungarian to be able to translate.
Hungarian National Bank.
Hitler’s words came back to him. “The future of the Reich is in your hands.”
Now he understood. The fifteen hundred extra pounds of weight he would be carrying was most likely gold and silver bullion looted from the Hungarian national treasury and was no doubt designed to fund whatever operation General Giesler was putting together halfway around the world.
If it is, you could buy your way to freedom with it, a voice spoke up in the back of his mind. Just fly right over Allied lines and deliver yourself, the plane and its cargo into their hands in exchange for your freedom.
It wasn’t a bad idea, provided the crates actually did contain treasure looted from the bank.
There was only one way to find out.
As Brandt approached, he called out to the crew chief. “Bring me a pry bar. I want to know what’s in those crates before they’re put aboard my aircraft.”
The crew chief turned to comply, but a voice from inside the aircraft stopped him.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Major.”
Brandt looked up into the interior of his aircraft to find the same SS officer he’d dealt with earlier, Major Adler, looking down at him from inside the bay.
“The crates are to remain sealed. Orders.” The officer smiled as he said it, as if he knew it was going to cause issues for Brandt and he was waiting for the inevitable confrontation.
Brandt wasn’t going to give him one. He knew that he could always open one of the crates at the first refueling stop if need be, far from Major Adler’s prying eyes, and if he discovered it to be the treasure he suspected it was, he could decide what to do with it from there. A fortune in gold and silver could set him up very nicely for the rest of his life in quite a few countries. He gave a smile of his own, trying to look reassuring in the process. “Of course, Major. Orders. Now the crew and I have a lot to do to get ready for takeoff, so if you wouldn’t mind, please get out of my aircraft.”
Another smile.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Brandt paused, a sudden suspicion forming. “And why not, Major?”
“Because I’m going with you, of course,” Adler said.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_06b34a5f-6998-506a-87f3-a0d456d544cd)
Honestly, he should have seen it coming; he knew that. With a plane full of treasure and Hitler’s personal papers in hand, he shouldn’t have expected to make the trip alone. It would have been too easy to do exactly what he’d been thinking of doing, turning over the plane and its cargo to the Allies. An ordinary soldier wouldn’t have worked as a guard, for he might have been convinced to abandon his post given the failing war effort, Brandt knew.
But an officer of the Waffen SS, the most fanatical of all Nazi units? That was the perfect choice. Brandt had no doubt that Adler would carry out his orders to the letter no matter what was happening on the home front, and nothing Brandt could say to him was going to change that. Especially since their orders had been hand delivered by Hitler.
Best make the most of it, he’d thought to himself and set out to do just that.
He spent the next half hour giving Adler a lecture on how to operate the rear-facing 13 mm machine guns in the rear cockpit. They didn’t have ammunition to spare, so Adler was going to have to forego any practice, but it really wasn’t all that difficult, just point and shoot. They had a much higher chance of survival with someone manning the guns if they were jumped by an Allied patrol, for the attack would most likely come from behind and any attempt Brandt made to outrun it would make his forward-facing 20 mm cannon next to useless.
While he was doing that, the crew loaded the crates into the aircraft and secured them so that they wouldn’t slide around in the event he was forced to make any sudden maneuvers. He double-, then triple-checked their work once they were done; given their weight, even a single loose crate could be potentially disastrous if it came free in the midst of combat.
By the time the cargo was loaded, it was close to noon. Brandt would have been perfectly happy to wait to take off under the cover of darkness, but the higher-ups had other plans. As soon as they were loaded, the order came for them to get underway.
Brandt sighed. Even with the future of the Reich at stake, high command still wasn’t thinking straight.
He climbed into the cockpit, stashing the satchel Hitler had given him under his seat, which was the only place big enough in the cockpit to hold it. He strapped himself in and began going through the preflight check, making sure that all of the instruments were working and the controls were responding properly before they left the mechanics behind for good. Behind him he could hear Adler testing the movement of the guns.
They took off moments later, with Brandt in the front of the cockpit in the pilot’s seat and Adler in the rear manning the 13 mm machine guns, leaving the nose gunner–bombardier position empty. Brandt hoped they weren’t going to regret that decision later.
The men’s seats were literally back-to-back, so they could pass instructions and information to each other simply by shouting over their shoulders, but there was an internal intercom system available, as well. As Brandt took the plane into a vertical climb to give them some altitude, he heard Adler shout, “For the glory of the Reich!” but chose not to reply. He wasn’t doing this for the Reich, after all. He just wanted to get out of Germany alive.
Once in the air, he turned the aircraft to the south and began to follow the route Hitler had shown him on the map, flying from Potsdam to Nuremberg before turning east to cross the Swiss Alps near Salzburg. Once over the Alps they would make their way through Austria and into Hungary, continuing from there down to Romania and then out over the Black Sea.
The extra weight from the cargo made the aircraft sluggish and slow to respond to Brandt’s commands, just as he’d suspected it would. He made a few preliminary maneuvers, getting a feel for the way the aircraft responded so that he would know what he could and couldn’t do in an emergency. The plane moved about the sky with all the finesse of a brick, which was going to make matters rather difficult if they encountered enemy aircraft, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it at this point.
It is what it is, he thought stoically.
They had been in the air for just over an hour and had started crossing the Austrian Alps when things went south.
Brandt glanced at the topographical map in his lap, making certain that he knew exactly where he was in relation to the peaks below him, and when he looked up again a pair of American P51 Mustang attack fighters were diving out of the sun to his right. He never would have seen them if the second aircraft hadn’t made the mistake of changing its angle of attack too early, allowing the sun to glint off the steel edge of the wings.
It wasn’t much, but Brandt was a veteran pilot who had survived more than a hundred missions over the past few years, and that was more than most. Without hesitation he shoved the yoke forward and threw the Junkers into a desperate dive.
The Mustangs were faster and more maneuverable than his aircraft on a good day, never mind when it was loaded with crates of gold. His only hope of survival was to get down amid the mountain peaks and hope that the American pilots didn’t have the nerve to follow.
Given what he’d heard about Mustang pilots, he didn’t think that was very likely, but he wasn’t about to sit back and let them blow him out of the sky either.
“Hang on!” he shouted to Adler as the plane turned over and headed toward the earth in a screaming dive.
Brandt had his hands full keeping control of the aircraft, so didn’t dare look over his shoulder in an effort to locate the enemy planes. As it turned out, he didn’t need to; the thunder of the guns from behind him as Adler opened up let him know that the Mustangs were following them down.
Bullets began stitching their way across the port wing in response, leaving half-dollar-sized holes in their wake, but thankfully they didn’t appear to have damaged anything important as the plane kept flying. Brandt threw the aircraft into evasive maneuvers, twisting about the sky as he sought to escape his attackers. A narrow mountain pass loomed ahead of him and he aimed directly for it, pulling up out of the dive at the last second and soaring between the two peaks at dangerous speed.
Behind him, the Mustangs followed.
The next few moments were some of the most hair-raising he’d ever experienced in his career as a fighter pilot. He tossed his aircraft all over the sky, despite its heavy load, doing everything he could to throw the Americans off his tail. He clung to the mountains where and when he could, trying to get his pursuers to make a mistake as they twisted through the air, hoping against hope that one if not both of them would slam into the nearby peaks and leave him and his charge in peace to continue their mission.
It was wishful thinking and, like most wishes, didn’t come true. The Mustangs stayed behind him the whole way, firing at his aircraft when the opportunity presented itself and content to stick with him when it didn’t. Bit by bit their machine-gun fire began to whittle away at the frame of his aircraft.
At some point one of them was going to get lucky, hit the fuel tanks or aileron controls or even the ammunition that was stored aboard for the forward and aft machine guns, and it would be all over. There would be nothing left of him and Major Adler but a smear on the landscape.
He had to do something, but what?
The solution, when it came to him, was surprisingly simple and, dare he say it, rather elegant.
He’d spent all this time and fuel trying to get away from the Mustangs. What if he got in close instead? The only shots that had been fired had come from the rear of his aircraft, and he would bet that the pilots of the American aircraft were convinced by now that the forward weapons were inoperable. Add to that the fact that all he’d done was run, and it was a good bet that the Americans thought him little more than a sitting duck. They wouldn’t expect him to suddenly turn and bring the battle to them. If he could catch even one of them napping, he could even up the odds a little.
It was worth a try.
He quickly explained to Adler what he was going to do.
“Are you insane?” the major cried on hearing the plan, to which Brandt replied that he might very well be. It didn’t matter, though, because they were going to try it whether Adler liked it or not.
He kept running, waiting for the right moment.
It came sooner than he expected.
Ahead of him loomed another cluster of rising peaks, with a narrow pass between two of them. It was just the kind of terrain he’d been using for the past several minutes to try to shake his pursuers. If the American pilots were as good as he thought they were, they would be expecting him to make for that pass like a rabbit for its warren.
Brandt intended to disappoint them.
Instead of diving for the space between the peaks, Brandt pulled back on the stick, sending the Junkers into a steep climb as if he intended to loop the plane in a big circle to try to get behind the mountains. The maneuver might have been worthwhile if he’d been flying one of the newer fighters such as a Focke-Wulf or a Messerschmitt, but in an overloaded night bomber like the Junkers he might as well have been standing still.
Behind him, the faster and more agile Mustangs moved to intercept.
This was the crucial moment. If the Americans caught him before he managed to roll out again, he would be moving perpendicular to their line of travel and would present nearly the entire surface of his aircraft to their guns. He didn’t want that to happen.
“Hold on!” he shouted as the plane reached the apex of its climb. He completed the classic Immelman Turn maneuver by rolling out at the top and rushing back in the direction he’d just come from.
One of the Mustangs was caught rushing toward him, trying to get into the very position he’d been worried about, and made the mistake of hesitating for a split second as he realized the two planes were now flying directly toward each other at impressive speeds.
Brandt didn’t make the same error. He began firing as soon as the Junkers rolled out of its turn, slamming the Mustang with a barrage of fire from the Junkers’s forward-facing 20 mm cannons. Tracers whipped between the two aircraft as the American sought to respond, but Brandt had been just a hair quicker off the mark and drilled the other aircraft with gunfire even as it began to take evasive action.
One second the Mustang was racing toward him, the next he was doing everything he could to get up and over the exploding cloud of debris that had once been an American aircraft.
Brandt let out a shout of triumph.
His exultation was premature, however. In focusing on the lead aircraft he’d lost sight of the second, and that came back to bite him as the American roared up from below. The pilot had anticipated Brandt’s roll-out, diving and then swooping back up to come at the Junkers and its unprotected belly. Bullets ripped through the port engine, the wing and the cockpit as the Mustang flashed past. One of the bullets took a chunk out of Brandt’s calf, and he gasped in pain; he could feel blood course down his leg and into his boot.
The enemy gunfire shredded the controls for the wing flaps and set the engine alight, causing the plane to yaw heavily to the left. Fortunately Adler’s guns roared to life in that moment, catching the Mustang as it raced past and sending it spiraling out of control to crash into the nearest mountainside.
“I’m hit, I’m hit,” Adler called, but Brandt couldn’t do anything to help him because not only was he hit himself, but he had his hands full just trying to keep the plane aloft. He fought the controls, hands straining on the yoke, feet pumping the foot pedals in an effort to force the damaged hydraulics to work long enough to get the ailerons and flaps trimmed the way he needed them. At the same time, he maneuvered through the maze of snow-covered peaks, desperately trying to avoid ending up like their recently departed foes. He could hear Adler thrashing around in pain but had no choice but to block it out as he concentrated on keeping them both alive.
By the time he managed to get the aircraft level again, Adler had gone quiet and still. Brandt knew what that meant; Adler was either dead or, at the very least, too wounded to be of any help. For the first time Brandt noticed the freezing air flowing in through the holes in the cockpit floor and canopy, chilling him to the bone but helping to keep him from slipping into shock from his own injury. Shock was probably the least of his worries, for the plane was losing altitude fast and the rushing winds were fanning the flames in the port engine into a veritable bonfire. Brandt didn’t know which would be worse, slamming into the side of a mountain or being blown to bits when the engine exploded. Right then, both seemed like a possibility.
He racked his brain for a solution to the problem facing him and came up with…nothing. All he could do was fight to keep the plane in the air and pray for a miracle.
Then he saw it.
A few miles ahead of him was the frozen surface of a long, narrow glacier.
If he could get to it, he could attempt a landing. He knew his chances weren’t good. With a fully operational aircraft it would be a difficult feat. With the mangled wreck that he was flying it was going to be nearly impossible, but what other options did he have?
None.
You can do this, he told himself.
He was coming in too hot and too steep, so he needed to bleed off some of his airspeed and he needed to do it immediately. He dropped the flaps, feathered the engines and tipped the nose up slightly to create more resistance as the plane continued what could best be described as a controlled fall out of the sky.
The Junkers wanted to drag to the left, but Brandt fought the stick, doing everything he could to keep it lined up on the glistening surface of the glacier, now dead ahead of him.
Come on, baby! Keep it in the air just a few more minutes! he urged.
As Brandt drew inexorably closer, he hit the switch that controlled the landing gear, only to hear the steady drone of the alarm warning him that the hydraulics had failed.
He cursed a blue streak even as he reached over and began turning the crank that would lower the wheels by hand. By the time he was finished he was almost to the glacier and little more than five hundred feet in the air.
It was going to be close.
Brandt continued to push the aircraft on, demanding that it stay airborne for a few more seconds, just long enough to get him past the trees lining the shore and over the ice itself.
Fate took pity on him, for the aircraft did just that, sailing over the tree line with barely inches to spare and flying toward the ice in front of him.
You’re only getting one shot at this. Make it count, he told himself.
Brandt kept the nose up as best he could as he came in, knowing to do anything less would be disastrous. He reached out and killed the engines as the wheels made first contact with the ice, the whole aircraft bouncing once, then twice, before settling down and racing toward the opposite end of the glacier.
Now Brandt had a new problem on his hands: how to stop the lumbering wreck before it crashed into the shore on the far side. He pumped the brakes while holding the yoke steady, but it was little more than throwing cupfuls of water on a raging forest fire. He was going to stop or he wasn’t, and there was little he could do about it either way.
He was lucky that the glacier was several miles in length and he had plenty of room to run. Gradually the plane began to slow and finally it came to a skidding halt in the middle of the glacier.
Brandt leaned back against the seat and breathed a sigh of relief.
The sound of the ice cracking beneath the weight of the aircraft was a thunderous boom, and instantly he realized his mistake.
He hadn’t set down on a glacier at all, but the frozen surface of a mountain lake!
With a lurch, the nose of the aircraft dropped several feet as the ice beneath the wheel struts gave way. Brandt shouted in fear and scrambled to open the cockpit canopy, knowing he had to get out of the aircraft before it slipped beneath the surface of the icy water or he was as good as dead.
He quickly unbuckled the safety belt holding him in his seat and grabbed the latch to eject the canopy, giving it a good yank.
Nothing happened.
He did it again, pulling harder this time, but it still wouldn’t budge.
The safety latch!
Removing the safety was normally the job of the observer, as it was above the rear panel in that section of the compartment, which was why Brandt had nearly forgotten about it. He twisted in his seat and looked into the rear section of the compartment.
Adler was dead, just as he’d suspected. He was still buckled into his seat, however, which would make getting past him to the safety latch a little bit easier. Brandt began to squeeze around his own seat, preparing to do just that when there was another splintering crack and the plane lurched downward.
Except this time it kept going.
Water began filling the cockpit through the bullet holes in the canopy as the rest of the ice beneath the Junkers gave way. The crippled aircraft dropped into the icy waters of the lake, heading for the bottom.
Even then Brandt wasn’t prepared to give up. He pulled himself back into his half of the compartment and climbed onto his seat, ignoring the pain from his injured leg as he began pounding at the glass above, desperately trying to break it. The cockpit glass was extra thick, both to withstand the pressure of the G-forces it would be subjected to in flight and to keep it from fragmenting when a bullet passed through it. Pounding on it was like railing against a tsunami and about as effective.
As the water reached his waist and his view of the surface above was eclipsed by floating blocks of ice, Brandt realized that he’d managed to escape the war after all.
Just not in the way that he’d intended.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_48bf9546-c5fb-5a5a-ac72-d081710672cf)
Present Day
With her heart pounding, Annja Creed stood balanced precariously on the edge of the cliff and stared at the gleaming water far below her.
She could hear the shouts of those following her up the tunnel through the rocks and knew that they would catch up to her soon. She didn’t want to be here when they did. She had just a few minutes at best to decide what she was going to do.
Not that I have all that many options, she thought. She couldn’t turn back; doing so would only bring her face-to-face with those coming up behind her, and there was no way she would be able to get through them in the narrow confines of the tunnel. Nor could she stay where she was, for the ledge was narrow and there would be no room for her once the others arrived. Their sheer numbers alone would force her over the edge.
She glanced over the side of the cliff again; it certainly seemed like a long way down.
Did she really want to do this?
The voices were closer now, so close that they had to be just around the last bend in the tunnel. She knew that she had run out of time.
Annja had to make a decision, and she had to make it now.
Do or die, she thought. Paul did it. So can you.
She glanced once more toward the water below her, crossed her fingers in the universal plea for good luck and, taking a deep breath, stepped off the edge just as the others emerged from the rocky tunnel.
Annja’s stomach jumped into her throat as she plunged toward the water, but at the same time she felt the thrill of doing something she’d never done before rush through her frame. It wasn’t every day that she leapt off a fifty-foot cliff into the ocean below, and she relished the feeling of being so alive in the midst of that moment, even as she dropped like a stone. As the surface of the water loomed nearer, she pulled her legs together, pointed her feet downward and pressed her hands flat against her bare thighs, tucking her arms against her torso. By the time she hit the water, she was perfectly aligned to strike the surface and she did so with barely a splash, cleaving the water and disappearing into its depths as if she was born to be there.
The crystal blue water was warm and inviting, and she felt invigorated by its touch. She let the fall carry her down until she began to slow, then with powerful kicks and strokes of her arms she headed back toward the sunlight above. When she broke the surface of the water she found her companion and new love interest, journalist and photographer Paul Krugmann, treading water nearby and waiting for her.
“Well?” he asked.
“We have to do that again!” she said, and his smile matched her own.
They were in Jamaica, cliff diving at the world-famous limestone cliffs on Negril’s west side. They had had lunch at Rick’s, a cliff-side café that gave them a good view of the divers nearby, and a short time later had decided to try the jump themselves. Neither was a stranger to taking risks. If the locals could handle it, so could they.
It turned out to be just as exciting and entertaining as they’d thought it would be. They made three more jumps together, each one as exhilarating as the last, before their dive “instructor” waved them aboard the waiting boat for the short ride back to their beachside resort on the other side of the island. Paul was in Jamaica on business, sent there to do a photo montage piece on the resort where they were staying. He’d asked her to join him, saying they’d make a holiday of it, and she’d agreed. It had sounded as if it would be fun, and that was something she was sorely in need of.
Annja had just gotten back from a trip to Europe on behalf of Chasing History’s Monsters, the cable television show she co-hosted each week. The show focused on the point where history intersected with myth and legend, and had taken her all over the world as its status as a cult favorite among the intended audience grew. Annja wasn’t as popular as the show’s other host, Kristie Chatham—for she tended to be more serious, focusing on the historical and scientific issues behind each episode’s central theme, never mind that Annja had fewer “surprise” wardrobe malfunctions while filming—but that was just fine with her. She’d worked too hard to build her reputation to throw it away for ratings and other such nonsense, much to the continued disappointment of her producer, Doug Morrell.
Chasing History’s Monsters had Annja on the road quite a bit during any given year, but she could live with that. She made use of the time on location to pursue her other major passion, archaeology. Just as her reputation as a television host had grown over the past few years, so, too, had her success as an archaeologist.
She’d made some startling discoveries over the past few years, some so amazing that she had been forced to keep news of them to herself. Those that she could talk about had cemented her reputation as both an adventurer and a scholar. She’d developed a network of museum contacts the world over as a result and was often called in to assess the provenance and authenticity of items the museums had recently acquired or was intending to purchase. More than once she’d saved a museum director from falling victim to a clever forgery, and the good will she’d generated had come back to her twofold.
But all work and no play made Annja very cranky, especially given her other, more esoteric duties as bearer of Joan of Arc’s sword, and she’d impulsively agreed to accompany Paul to the Caribbean.
She and Paul had been dating for the past six months or so, which might not be much for him but was the longest stretch of time for any relationship she could remember in, well, forever it seemed. So far, things had been light and easy, which was probably the very reason it had been going so well. Annja’s job could take her away at a moment’s notice for weeks at a time, something few of her former boyfriends understood or wanted to deal with, but Paul was different. He lived the same sort of life, traveling at the whim of the clients who paid for his journalistic services, so he wasn’t the type who would begrudge her the time away when work came calling.
Annja glanced over at him as the boat chugged toward the resort, admiring his sun-bleached hair and rugged good looks. He had a strong but wiry build and was deeply tanned from spending so much of his time outdoors. He wasn’t hard on the eyes, which didn’t hurt any, and so far had been both thoughtful and considerate in their time together.
Who knew? Maybe she’d found one worth keeping this time around.
She laughed aloud at the thought and, hearing her, Paul looked over and grinned in return.
Yep. So far, so good.
The boat took them around the island and up to the long wooden dock that stretched into the bay in front of the resort. They disembarked with the rest of the passengers, followed the group down the length of the dock to the shore, and then headed up the beach toward the entrance to the hotel. Annja’s long hair and slim, athletic, bikini-clad body caught the attention of more than a few of the men on the beach, but she barely noticed. She was used to people appreciating her for her beauty or simply recognizing her from the show, so being the focus of attention wasn’t all that novel anymore. In fact, sometimes it could be a real pain in the butt.
They entered the lobby, the cool stone floor beneath their bare feet a welcome respite from the hot sun outside, and headed for the elevator. Once inside, Paul punched the buttons for the fourth and fifth floors, where their respective rooms were. Annja liked the fact that when planning the trip Paul hadn’t automatically assumed they would share a room, even though they were romantically attached. It was one of the things she appreciated about him—his willingness to give her room and let her take things at her own pace.
As the numbers on the floor panel ticked upward, Paul turned to her and said, “An hour to rest and change and then dinner?”
“Sounds good to me.”
The elevator stopped at his floor. As the doors opened he gave her a quick kiss and then stepped out into the hall as Annja continued upward.
Paul had gotten her an oversized corner suite with an incredible ocean view. After arriving, she stood in front of the window for a short while, simply admiring the scenery, and then turned and headed for the bathroom.
Annja slipped out of her bathing suit and stepped into the shower, washing the salt from her skin and hair before getting out and toweling herself dry. She had just started brushing out her long hair when her cell phone rang.
Thinking it was Paul, she snatched it up without looking at the number.
Answering it, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re canceling dinner…”
“Annja, get me out of here! He’s a freakin’ maniac and I can’t…”
The connection was abruptly cut while the speaker was in midsentence, but she’d recognized the voice immediately. It would have been hard for her not to, for she’d heard it practically every day of her professional career for several years.
It had been the voice of her producer in New York and the man behind the runaway success of Chasing History’s Monsters, Doug Morrell.
She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it, as if it might suddenly impart the necessary information for her to understand just what the heck was going on. She could feel her heart rate rising, the blood rushing through her veins in anticipation of what might come, and her hand itched to call her sword to her side.
She found it funny that her body reacted to the situation as if there was real danger when intellectually she recognized it for what it was—one of Doug’s crazy little stunts to get her to call him while she was on vacation.
He’d called and left messages several times over the past few days, begging her to call him in New York, but so far she’d managed to ignore them. She was on vacation, after all, and there wasn’t anything urgent enough on her current schedule to justify his pulling her away from that.
He, of course, thought differently. In his early twenties, Doug ate, slept and breathed the program and its success. Nothing was more important to him than its continued success, and he’d been known to chase her down in the far corners of the globe to get answers to tiny little questions that weren’t important and could wait to be answered, if answering was necessary at all, when she returned from her time off.
This was no doubt one of his more esoteric attempts to get her attention.
Calling was one thing. Trying to scare her out of her wits with some crazy scheme was another.
She knew of one way to put an end to that, at least.
She checked her cell phone’s call log and found the number that the call had come in from. She didn’t recognize it as his cell number or his office phone, but that didn’t mean anything; Doug could have used someone else’s phone.
Ignoring the faint feather of unease that was starting to unfurl in her gut, Annja hit redial.
It rang once, twice and then was answered on the third ring.
Annja didn’t give Doug a chance to say anything.
“Listen up, Doug, because I’m only going to say this once. I. Am. On. Vacation. I can deal with the decisions about the show when I return, which will only be in a few days, so chill out with the sick jokes! Understood?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, and then a voice said, “This isn’t a joke.”
It didn’t sound like Doug.
The voice was too deep, too guttural. Doug also talked a mile a minute, and this guy was calm, rational, his speech seemed carefully measured even in so short a response.
That’s what he wants you to think, she told herself, but don’t fall for it. It’s Doug. It has to be.
She knew that he could have disguised his voice quite easily with the help of a voice modulator purchased from any halfway-decent electronics store. In fact, she thought she heard the slight echo behind his words that indicated that such a device was being used.
The speaker wasn’t finished.
“Do not attempt to trace this call. The signal has been scrambled through more countries than I can count. Just listen.”
Trace the call?
“I have your friend Doug. If you do as I ask, he will be returned to his home in good health. On the other hand, if you don’t do precisely what I ask, then you will never see him again. Rest assured, though, that if that happens, I will make certain that he suffers considerably before I kill him. Do we understand each other?”
Annja felt the hairs on the back of her neck and arms stand at attention as the threat was delivered calmly and succinctly.
It certainly sounded convincing.
“Cut the crap. I know it’s you, Doug. You can’t fool me.”
The voice chuckled. “Apparently, I can, because this is not Doug.”
The chuckle caused Annja’s irritation, already smoldering, to grow into an open fire.
“You’re not Doug, huh? Well, we’ll see about that.”
Annja pulled the phone away from her ear and hit the disconnect button. She waited a beat and then immediately dialed Doug’s cell phone from memory.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
No answer.
That flicker of unease she’d felt earlier came back and began threading its way up her spine like a snake moving through tall grass.
Frowning, Annja tried again, this time calling Doug at his apartment in Brooklyn.
No answer there, either.
Of course not, dummy, she berated herself. He’s at the office, just as you thought. Try there.
She did as her subconscious bid her, calling Doug’s office line and cursing herself for not doing that in the first place.
The phone began ringing.
Come on, come on, pick it up, she urged.
His voice mail kicked in after the fifth ring.
Now Annja was starting to worry. Doug was almost never out of contact; he even took his cell phone into the bathroom with him. The fact that she couldn’t reach him anywhere was starting to feel suspicious.
He’s just on the other line, she told herself. Give him a minute and call him back.
She did so, and this time the phone was answered on the third ring.
“Doug! Thank heavens!”
But it wasn’t him.
“Annja?” a female voice asked tentatively.
“Who’s this?”
“Karen, Doug’s assistant.”
Of course. Now that he had an assistant he was apparently too important to answer his own phone.
“I need to speak to Doug, Karen. Is he in?”
“No. I haven’t seen him since you left for vacation,” she said.
What? Three days? Maybe longer?
“Do you know where he is?” Annja asked.
With a sudden feeling of dread, she knew what the answer was going to be before it even came out of Karen’s mouth.
“No. That’s why I’m so glad you called. I was hoping you could help me find him.”
It was a bad sign that Karen didn’t know where Doug was.
A really bad sign.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go,” she told Karen, hanging up the phone before the other woman could say anything more and fighting the sense of panic that was quickly filling her as she frantically dialed the original number.
Just as before, it rang three times and then was answered.
“I’m listening,” Annja told the person on the other end.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_e0a158ba-f18d-50ec-8b33-a96bec6ff8ac)
“Perhaps now you will take me seriously, yes?”
Annja did her best to hang on to her temper. When she got scared, she had a tendency to get irritated and if this guy really had Doug she didn’t want to tick him off by blowing her cool.
“Where’s Doug? What have you done to him?”
“Done? I haven’t done anything,” the person said. “Yet.”
It was just one word, but it had the power to freeze her blood in her veins.
The kidnapper went on. “I have simply persuaded Mr. Morrell that it was in his best interests to get in touch with you to convey my desire to discuss a business arrangement. He had initially declined my request, but very quickly saw the error of his ways. I hear that you are on vacation. Are you enjoying Jamaica?”
Annja sensed that time was of the essence, and she had no interest in bantering with this guy. She ignored his question about Jamaica, choosing instead to demand, “Who are you and what do you want?”
“Morrell was right about your temper, I see,” the man said, infuriating Annja even further. She didn’t like the position she was in, with all of the control in the kidnapper’s hands, but there was nothing she could do until she knew what he wanted. For now, she was going to have to grin and bear it, something she wasn’t very good at doing.
Her right hand reached into thin air and plucked a broadsword seemingly out of nowhere. The blade had once belonged to Joan of Arc, had, in fact, been broken asunder on the day and hour of her execution. More than five hundred years later it had been miraculously re-formed in Annja’s presence and she had become the blade’s current bearer.
The sword could appear or disappear at her will, and when she wasn’t using it, it rested in a mystical place just outside the bounds of reality that she called the otherwhere. It could not be taken from her against her will and over the years had seemed to impart some extra bit of strength, dexterity and speed to her physical movements when the situation demanded it. She had become an expert in its use and, quite literally, didn’t go anywhere without it.
Having the blade in hand helped calm her and kept her from raging at the maniac who had snatched one of her friends. He didn’t know it yet, whoever he was, but having her as an enemy was not a good thing.
“Let me worry about my temper,” she told the man, “and you can tell me what it is that you want. Clearly there’s something you need me to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone through the hassle of kidnapping my television producer.”
“You are as perceptive as your reputation suggests, Miss Creed. That bodes well for your ability to carry out my requests.”
Annja didn’t like the “s” on the end of that word, for it suggested the caller had multiple things for her to do in order to free Doug, but she kept her mouth shut and waited for him to continue.
“There is a package waiting for you at the front desk. Retrieve it but do not open it until you are back in your room. When you have examined what is inside, call me back at the number I’m giving you.”
The caller recited a new phone number, and Annja quickly memorized it.
But she wasn’t ready to be a pawn in someone else’s game quite yet. At least, not a pawn that didn’t attempt to retain a bit of its own free will.
“Why don’t you just tell me now, and I’ll grab the package later?”
It was the wrong thing to do.
There was silence on the end of the phone for a moment, followed by a shriek of pain that seemed to go on forever.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there? What are you doing to him?” she cried.
The voice returned. “When I give an order, I expect it to be carried out without negotiation or discussion. Each time that doesn’t happen, Mr. Morrell will pay the price for your obstinacy. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” Annja replied through gritted teeth.
“Then what are you waiting for? Go get that package.”
And with that, the line went dead.
Annja sent the sword back into the otherwhere and hurried out of her room, clutching the phone tightly in one hand. She didn’t dare put it down just in case the stranger called again; she didn’t know what he’d do to Doug if he called and she wasn’t right there to answer it.
A group of tourists stood in front of the elevator so Annja hurried past it and took the stairs, rushing down them two at a time in her haste to get to the ground floor. She considered calling Paul and asking him to join her, but decided against doing so. There was no need to get him involved unless she had to, and she wasn’t sure yet if that was the case. It might be safer for Paul if she kept him out of it completely.
There was an elderly couple at the registration desk when Annja got to the lobby, and she had to stifle the urge to push them aside and ask about the package. She stood behind them, impatiently shifting from foot to foot as she waited for them to finish getting the directions they needed. The registration clerk gave her a sympathetic smile over their heads as they examined the map and Annja tried to smile back, but she was afraid it looked more like a death’s head rictus.
At last they were done and Annja stepped up to the counter.
“May I help you?” the clerk asked.
“My name is Annja Creed and I’m in room 402. I believe you have a package for me.”
“Ah, yes, Miss Creed. One minute, please.”
The clerk stepped into the back room, leaving Annja alone. A sense that she was being watched washed over her and she spun to look, but there was no one there.
Keep it together, Creed, she told herself.
The clerk returned carrying a thick manila envelope and handed it to her across the counter. Her name was written on the front with black magic marker.
“Were you on duty when this was delivered?” she asked the clerk.
He hesitated and then said, somewhat reluctantly, “Yes, miss.”
“Did you see who delivered it?”
“No, miss.” He looked down and then looked back up at her. “To be honest, I had stepped away for a quick smoke, and when I came in the envelope was lying on the counter. I looked around to see who might have left it, but there was no one about. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine. No problem,” she told him, while inwardly she was cursing at having lost her best chance of getting a lead on who might be behind this.
Not knowing what it might contain, she didn’t feel comfortable opening the envelope in the lobby, so she’d wait until she got back to her room.
She was grateful the envelope didn’t contain one of Doug’s fingers or anything gruesome like that, just a folder with several pieces of paper inside and a DVD in a paper sleeve. She turned on the desk lamp and sat down, flipping through the pages briefly. They appeared to be military action reports of some kind.
That was enough for her; she didn’t have time to read them all. She could do that later.
She picked up the DVD and slid it out of its case, then walked it over to the entertainment unit in the suite’s living room. It took her a few minutes to work out which remote control worked which device, but once she figured it all out she fired up the television and then slipped the DVD into the player.
The screen remained blank long enough that Annja thought the player might not be properly connected to the television, but as she got up to check it, the screen suddenly brightened and an image appeared.
It was Doug.
He was tied to a metal chair in a nondescript room somewhere. His forearms were tied to the arms of the chair, his legs to the legs of the chair, leaving his hands free and his bare feet resting on what looked to be a wet concrete floor. The camera was close enough for Annja to see that his face was bloody and swollen, as if he’d been subjected to a thorough beating at some point in the past few hours. A thin line of dried blood ran from his cracked and swollen lips. When he raised his head and looked at the camera, the one eye that he could see out of was full of fear.
“Help me, Annja” he said, his voice little more than a croak coming from an obviously parched throat. It sounded as though he hadn’t had any water for hours. “You have to help me. I don’t care what he asks you to do or who he asks you to do it to. I’ll die here if you don’t do what he wants. Please, don’t let that happen, Annja, please.”
The camera zoomed in to show his face and then moved down to his body and stopped on his right hand. That close Annja could see that his last two fingers were broken and bent at odd angles.
She could hear Doug saying, “No, no, I didn’t do anything, don’t,” in a breathy gasp. She steeled herself for what was coming but she didn’t turn away, feeling as if she owed it to him to watch what was being done so that she could avenge him for all the wrongs he endured to coerce her into action.
A gloved hand reached into the camera frame. It was neither large nor small, so she couldn’t really tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s, though she suspected the former. Not because a woman couldn’t be that cruel—she knew from experience that that certainly wasn’t the case—but because her mystery man had claimed to be the one who had kidnapped Doug, and she had yet to see anything that made her think this was anything more than a single nutjob at work. As she’d expected, the individual took hold of Doug’s middle finger and without further ado snapped the bone. Doug let out a shriek of pain and the screen went blank.
Watching the kidnapper inflict pain on Doug for no other reason than to make her do his bidding filled her with a righteous fury. She vowed then and there to make him pay for what he had done.
He’d picked the wrong woman to tangle with.
Annja picked up the phone and entered the number the kidnapper had given to her.
It was answered almost immediately.
“You have the package?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen the DVD?”
Annja gritted her teeth and then replied in the same clear tone, “Yes.”
“You understand that I’m not kidding around?”
“Yes, I understand. Now get on with it. What do you want me to do?”
“In April 1945 a particular German aircraft went down somewhere in the Swiss Alps. I want you to find that aircraft and recover what is inside it. You have one week to do so.”
Find a plane lost in the Swiss Alps over fifty years ago? This guy was a total loon! Annja counted to ten to be sure she had a hold of her anger.
“So help me, if you hurt him any more than you already have, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
The man on the other end of the phone chuckled. “You can certainly try, Miss Creed. In the meantime, I would start looking for that wreckage. One week. I will call you at exactly noon seven days from now. Keep your phone handy.”
The kidnapper hung up.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b8c04643-5d58-5cd8-a521-0994bdcb0b95)
When Paul knocked on her door fifteen minutes later, Annja was sitting cross-legged on the couch, engrossed in reading the after-action reports the kidnapper had supplied. At the sound of his knock, she shouted, “Go away!” in the direction of the door and just kept reading. When she looked up moments later to double-check something she’d read in a previous report, she found him standing there in the middle of the room, watching her.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded.
He held up a small square of plastic. “You gave me a key, remember?”
Annja grunted and went back to reading.
Paul walked over and picked up one of the sheets of paper. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t touch that!” she said, snatching it out of his hands.
Paul actually took a step back at the venom in her tone. The tension in the room felt like a physical presence.
“You’re scaring me, Annja. What’s going on?”
Annja ignored him, jotting down notes on the cover of the folder the pages had come in and moving on to the next page.
“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.
“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.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_6a4524e2-7dee-51e2-9c27-44c475a3c4b4)
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 she’d be worried about the price tag that would come with that help, and she would carefully consider the pros and cons of picking up the phone and getting him involved, but she didn’t have the luxury to worry about such things at this point. Time was too precious a resource to waste. Whatever the price, she was willing to pay it in order to rescue Doug.
Paul looked over at her. “I’ve got be honest, Annja. I don’t know how we could search an area of that size even with an army at our disposal. An army that, I should point out, we don’t have.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m working on it.”
With only a trace of reluctance, Annja picked up the phone and called Garin Braden.
“Hello, Annja,” he said, when he answered the call. “To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?”
“I hate to say it, Garin, but I really need your help.”
Garin laughed. “The mighty Miss Creed needs my help? You must be joking.”
Annja gritted her teeth. “I’m serious, Garin. I really need your help.”
“Well, in that case let me drop everything I am doing and rush to your aid.”
His sarcastic tone made her wince, but she pushed on anyway. “Please, Garin. A friend’s life is at stake and time is of the essence.”
Garin Braden was over five hundred years old. When she thought about it, that sounded crazy even to her, but she couldn’t deny the fact that it was true. Garin had been squire to a French knight named Roux, who in turn had been assigned to watch over Joan of Arc. Roux and his squire had failed in their mission, and when Joan’s sword was broken in the moments before her execution, the lives of the two men had been mysteriously lengthened. Over the next few centuries Roux searched for the fragments of the blade, intending to bring them back together, while Garin fought to keep that from happening, convinced the fragmentation of the blade was the very thing that assured his extended life span.
Annja was aware Garin had since come to realize that his efforts had likely been wasted, as her custodianship of the blade so far had had no ill effect on him. In fact, he seemed to be growing quite fond of her. Annja had diligently resisted his efforts to flirt, despite her attraction to him. The fact that he was the perfect example of tall, dark and handsome, never mind ridiculously rich, constantly battled with her understanding that Garin cared first and foremost about himself. He was determined, ruthless and used to getting what he wanted, no matter what the effort or cost. It made him dangerous in more ways than one.
She knew it was in her best interest to stay as far away from him as she could and yet here she was, reaching out to him for help in her moment of need.
Apparently my heart and my head aren’t seeing eye to eye again, she thought.
Knowing his nature, Annja expected Garin to ask what was in it for him and, frankly, she didn’t have an answer. The last time she had asked for his help he’d insisted on taking her to dinner and she’d had no choice but to agree. She was afraid of what he would require this time around.
To her great surprise, he didn’t do anything of the sort.
“What do you need?” he asked.
Given the nature of some of the expeditions she’d been on in the past, Annja had learned not to talk about them too much over an open telephone line, for you never knew who might be listening in. Instead she told him that she needed to find a certain object within a certain specified time frame and left it at that, knowing he would read between the lines and understand that she was after an artifact of one kind or another.
That was close enough for what she needed until she could see him.
Garin was silent at first and then asked, “Where are you now?”
“The Hotel Planita in Negril, Jamaica.”
“Okay, stay there. I’ll send a chopper for you.”
Garin hung up before she could thank him. He always did like having the last word.
* * *
JUST UNDER THREE hours later, a massive AW101 VVIP AgustaWestland helicopter settled onto the hotel lawn, inviting stares from more than a few observers. Annja didn’t blame them; this was the same helicopter used to transport the President of the United States under the designation Marine One, and just seeing it up close was pretty awe-inspiring. Given that it was one of Garin’s helicopters, Annja had no doubt that the interior would be even more lavish than she could imagine.
She and Paul watched as the door opened and a set of steps unfolded from inside the aircraft. Seconds later a black man with a shaved head and a soul patch on his chin appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a sharply cut suit and dark sunglasses. He scanned the small crowd assembled on the other side of the lawn before his gaze settled on Annja and her companion. He gestured them forward without hesitation.
Annja crossed the lawn and climbed the stairs. “Hello, Griggs,” she said, as she stepped aboard the aircraft.
Matthew Griggs, head of DragonTech Security and Garin Bradin’s right-hand man, nodded to her. “Miss Creed,” he said, with that lilting British Caribbean accent of his. “Please make yourself comfortable.”
The interior of the helicopter resembled that of a private jet more than any helicopter Annja had ever been in, with mahogany fittings, lush leather seats and even thick carpet underfoot to help absorb the sound of the rotor blades.
Griggs turned just as Paul came up the steps. The DragonTech Security man interposed himself between Paul and the interior of the aircraft. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but this is a private flight.”
“It’s all right, Griggs. He’s with me.”
Griggs spoke over his shoulder to Annja without taking his eyes off Paul. “Is Mr. Braden aware of this?”
He wasn’t, but Annja wasn’t about to admit that to Griggs.
“Of course.”
“Very well.”
Once both guests were settled, Griggs said, “Help yourselves to the refreshments. We’ll be in Miami in about three hours.”
With that, he pulled in the stairs, secured the door and returned to the cockpit. Five minutes later they were airborne.
Glancing around the cabin, Paul gave a low whistle. “You said you were going to get us some help, but this is a bit more than I expected. Dare I ask who it belongs to?”
Annja didn’t see any reason not to tell him, especially considering the fact that Paul was likely to be meeting him in a few hours.
“Garin Braden.”
Paul started in surprise. “Garin Braden?”
“Yes.”
“Garin Braden the industrialist?”
Annja would have been more prone to call him Garin Braden the scoundrel, but that was splitting hairs, in her view.
“Yes.”
An uneasy expression crossed Paul’s face.
Seeing it, Annja asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Braden and I had a bit of a run-in at a press conference when I asked him some uncomfortable questions,” Paul replied.
“When was this?”
“A year, maybe eighteen months ago.” He shrugged, then waved it off. “I’m sure he’s forgotten about it by now.”
Annja wasn’t so sure of that—Garin tended to carry a grudge longer than anyone she knew—but she agreed and left it alone for the time being. If it was an issue, they’d deal with it later. “Might as well relax,” she told him. “We’ve got a few hours of flight time ahead of us, it seems.”
While Paul wandered around, checking out the cabin, Annja pulled her laptop out of her backpack and fired it up. She connected to the flight’s onboard Wi-Fi and began researching the Junkers aircraft and its capabilities. Getting a better sense of its strengths and weaknesses would allow her to better pinpoint how far it might have gone after being damaged in the dogfight with Captain Mitchell and his wingman, which in turn might allow them to narrow their search area.
Or, if we’re particularly unlucky, make it even bigger.
She was thankful that there was a fair bit of information available.
The Junkers Ju 88 was a twin-engine multirole combat aircraft built by the German firm Junkers Flugzeugund Motorenwerke for use by the Luftwaffe in World War II. It had been intended to be a fast bomber that could outrun any Allied fighters that tried to chase it. According to most of the sources Annja checked, it had been moderately successful.
Despite being plagued by several problems in the later part of its development, the aircraft and its many variants were in constant production from 1939 to the end of the war in 1945. More than 160,000 were built, more than any other German twin-engine aircraft of the time period. It served successfully as a bomber, dive bomber, night fighter, heavy fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. They had seen heavy action during the Battle of Norway, the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain, as well as in various campaigns on the Eastern Front.
The Junkers had a top speed of 292 miles per hour, a ceiling of 29,000 feet, and a maximum range of 1,700 miles. It had been built to be flown by a crew of either three or four, though one man could manage it on his own if the rear-facing cockpit guns and the weapons bay under the nose were left unmanned. Annja’s research told her that one of the key features of the Junkers aircraft was its ability to keep fighting even after taking heavy damage. That explained how the target aircraft had managed to stay aloft despite being savaged by the pair of P51s under Mitchell’s command. That concerned her somewhat, as the Junkers’s hardiness might mean it had managed to go even farther than they suspected after the destruction of the Mustangs.
All in all, it seemed like a pretty hardy aircraft. It made her wonder what the pilot’s destination had been. Where had he been trying to go with all that gold, if that, indeed, had been what he’d been carrying?
She called up a map of Europe and the Middle East on her screen. She looked at it for several minutes, trying to work out reasonable routes in her head. With a possible range of 1,700 miles, the pilot certainly had his choice of destinations available to him. If he’d flown due south, he could have reached the deep deserts beyond Tripoli in Libya. Flying due west would have taken him nearly to Atyrau, Kazakhstan. An agent of the Reich might have found assistance in either location and could have flown on from there after refueling. While dangerous, both would have been safer than the route he had chosen; southeast through Austria and into the teeth of the Allied army marching north toward Berlin. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
Nothing made a lot of sense in those days, she reminded herself. The war was all but lost and the Reich was falling apart. The guy probably loaded up what he could and made a run for it. Stop trying to read more into it or you’ll drive yourself nuts, Annja thought.
With that warning ringing in her ears, she put the laptop away and sat back to enjoy the rest of the flight. She knew all too well that there would far too little time for rest in the days ahead.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_3129b513-c038-5087-b4f1-bafe4e4224fc)
Griggs’s estimate had been right on the money; they landed at Miami International Airport just under three hours later. A black SUV with dark tinted windows was waiting for them next to the helipad. Griggs escorted them to the vehicle and then climbed in beside the driver. Annja assumed they would be taken to wherever Garin was staying, so she was surprised when the driver raced around several parked Airbuses and delivered them to a sleek business jet waiting for them on the other side of the terminal.
Annja was about to ask what was going on when she noticed the corporate logo of a gold dragon poised in midflight on the tail of the aircraft. It was the same one that had been on the tail rotor of the helicopter they’d just left behind.
DragonTech Security.
When the car stopped, Griggs escorted them up the steps and into the aircraft.
Garin Braden was waiting for them.
“Ah, Annja,” he said, as a broad smile swept across his face. “So good to see you.”
Garin was a big man, both physically and charismatically. He seemed to fill the room wherever he was. His dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and his beard was immaculately groomed, as usual. This day he was dressed in a dark shirt and jeans, which was unusual for him. Annja was more used to seeing him in impeccably cut suits.
Everybody needs a dress down day, she thought with a smile.
Annja introduced Paul to him, noting that Garin held the other man’s hand just a moment longer than normal.
Had he recognized Paul? she wondered.
Garin didn’t say anything or acknowledge that the two had previously met, so Annja let it go. He ushered them into chairs opposite his own and got right down to business. “You said it was urgent. Tell me what is going on.”
Annja laid it all out for him: Doug’s kidnapping, the phone call, the package, the fact that the kidnapper knew she was in Jamaica, the demand that she find and recover the plane and its contents. The only thing she left out was the fact that she was romantically involved with Paul. She didn’t need Garin critiquing her choice of companions, but she knew he would do so anyway. No sense in giving him more ammunition for the task.
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Alex Archer
A wrecked German bomber…key to the secrets of the Third Reich?All it took was one phone call and TV show host and archaeologist Annja Creed is in mortal danger. Her producer Doug Morrell has been abducted by a greedy treasure hunter who's seeking the lost raubgold, or looted gold of Nazi Germany. The terms are simple: retrieve the bounty and Doug lives. Fail, and he dies…Now Annja and her friends must find a missing German fighter plane that was shot down over the Alps in 1945. According to legend, the aircraft not only holds a shipment of gold the Nazis had stolen, but also carried the last letters of the führer himself. Letters that point to a more startling treasure buried underwater halfway around the world. But Annja isn't interested in treasure, or even unearthing historic relics. Annja has one agenda: get Doug out alive…even if it means drawing her sword from its otherworldly sheath. Even if it means death.Because once greed drives a man to violence, nothing will stop him…
A wrecked German bomber…key to the secrets of the Third Reich?
All it took was one phone call and TV show host and archaeologist Annja Creed is in mortal danger. Her producer Doug Morrell has been abducted by a greedy treasure hunter who’s seeking the lost raubgold, or looted gold of Nazi Germany. The terms are simple: retrieve the bounty and Doug lives. Fail, and he dies…
Now Annja and her friends must find a missing German fighter plane that was shot down over the Alps in 1945. According to legend, the aircraft not only holds a shipment of gold the Nazis had stolen, but also carried the last letters of the führer himself. Letters that point to a more startling treasure buried underwater halfway around the world. But Annja isn’t interested in treasure, or even unearthing historic relics. Annja has one agenda: get Doug out alive…even if it means drawing her sword from its otherworldly sheath. Even if it means death.
Because once greed drives a man to violence, nothing will stop him…
It was Doug on the screen. He was tied to a metal chair in a nondescript room.
Annja’s anxiety propelled her closer to the hotel room’s television as she turned up the volume on the DVD player.
Not that Doug was speaking. His arms and legs were tied to the chair, leaving his hands free and his bare feet resting on what looked to be a wet concrete floor. The camera was close enough that Annja could tell his face was bloody and swollen. A thin line of dried blood ran down the side of his face. When he raised his head and looked at the camera, the one eye not swollen shut was filled with fear.
“Help me, Annja,” he said, and his voice was little better than a croak. “I don’t care what he asks you to do or who he asks you to do it to—I’ll die here if you don’t do what he wants.”
The camera zoomed in on his face and then slipped down to his body and stopped on his right hand. That close, Annja could see that his last two fingers were bent at odd angles.
She could hear Doug saying, “No, no, I didn’t do anything! Don’t!” She steeled herself but she didn’t turn away. Annja owed it to him to watch what he was having to endure.
A gloved hand reached into the camera frame. It was neither large nor small, so she couldn’t tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s, though she suspected the former. Not because a woman couldn’t be that cruel—she knew from experience that that certainly wasn’t the case—but because her mystery caller who’d sent the DVD had claimed to be the one who had kidnapped Doug.
The individual took hold of Doug’s middle finger and snapped it. Doug let out a shriek of pain and the screen went blank.
Watching the kidnapper inflict pain on Doug to coerce her into action filled Annja with a righteous fury.
He’d picked the wrong woman to tangle with.
Beneath Still Waters
Alex Archer
THELEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK
JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned,
gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against
the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.
The broadsword shattered, fragments falling
into the mud. The crowd surged forward,
peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards
from the trampled mud. The commander tossed
the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued
praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed
her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France,
but her legend and sword are reborn…
Contents
Cover (#u6e6abe3b-3758-5c33-a5ab-9aad0a26dfa2)
Back Cover Text (#u7a9cbd28-0580-5920-afb3-d601fedd2950)
Introduction (#u84b63459-77a4-5c1b-9091-0555c6b01d4d)
Title Page (#u1cf7092f-c138-5d13-a8b0-c799b3ec67af)
The Legend (#u892edb9d-ce26-5e19-a6a6-fbf8448477f3)
Chapter 1 (#uc0947394-2b9a-53c0-a00d-2b57f09eeb5a)
Chapter 2 (#ucd4cef2c-c252-5d54-8f24-9a86800e2a5f)
Chapter 3 (#u7567113a-62ba-53f3-b62b-fff17b743760)
Chapter 4 (#ud1a50ae7-5211-5a2d-9077-345d2ade5787)
Chapter 5 (#u1af8af0a-7a30-5d8f-9e71-2e16b9e0c4c8)
Chapter 6 (#ue1d93cef-c4f4-51c7-b97a-45c4d0c3cd96)
Chapter 7 (#ue3909643-e510-59b3-a96f-2abac5d5ac59)
Chapter 8 (#u7422500c-0e75-5de2-b0f9-6987e0c1dc65)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_c0aadbd9-759e-5ad1-8900-8539ebe93d79)
April 5, 1945Outside Potsdam, Germany
One last mission.
That’s how they’d sold it to him. One final mission that would not only provide for their future security, but would put his name in the history books alongside those of Goering, Goebbels and Himmler, men who had gone above and beyond the call of duty in their aid and support of the Fatherland.
One final mission for the glory of the Third Reich.
Major Konrad Brandt had wanted to laugh in their faces.
He didn’t give a damn about the history books, the Nazi Party, or even the survival of the Third Reich. All of it was meaningless in his eyes. All he cared about was getting out of Germany before everything fell completely into ruin. He knew that day wouldn’t be long in coming, knew that time was running out, but his personal sense of duty to the oaths he had sworn, to serve and protect the Fatherland, had so far kept him from simply turning his back on his comrades and abandoning his post, no matter how insane matters had become. When they told him that this mission would take him beyond the borders of their lost and forsaken country without need of return, he knew his salvation had arrived and he’d practically fallen over himself to accept the responsibility.
Now, standing between two SS officers in the shadows outside the chalet that had been commandeered earlier in the week as a temporary headquarters for this mission, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake.
Too late to back out now, even if you did, he thought.
He’d flown his Junkers Ju 88 into this makeshift camp in the woods outside Potsdam a week earlier, landing on a crude runway that had been plowed by tanks in the middle of a forest clearing. Once there, he found that the mission he’d been recruited for was “on hold” while they awaited the arrival of several important dignitaries.
No one, of course, could tell him who they were waiting for, just that they couldn’t begin until they arrived. He’d been treated well, at least, given a bed in a room shared by several Wehrmacht officers and three decent meals a day, which was more than he’d expected. The army officers didn’t pay him much attention—he was Luftwaffe, after all—but that was fine with him. He spent the days catching up on his sleep and thinking about what he was going to do once he was clear of this place.
* * *
EARLY THE NEXT morning the cavalcade that they’d been waiting for finally arrived. Brandt was on his way back from breakfast when he noticed the flurry of activity and hoped that meant that they could start getting things worked out within a few days, at least. Those in charge apparently weren’t going to wait that long, however, for within fifteen minutes of his return there was a knock at his door. Opening it, he found a pair of Waffen SS thugs in their black uniforms and red party armbands standing outside in the hallway. The SS were the protective detail for the senior officials in the Nazi Party; their presence indicated that the dignitaries who had arrived the previous night were more than just senior army officers.
“Major Brandt?” said the man on the right, the taller and more senior of the two. “I am Major Adler. Come with us, please.”
It was common knowledge that a person crossed one of Himmler’s Shutzstaffel at his or her own peril, so Brandt did as he was told. The SS officers flanked him like an honor escort—or a prisoner detail, Brandt thought—and marched him across the camp to the building housing the dignitaries. They led him to a room on the second floor and then knocked on the door.
“Come,” came a muffled call from the interior.
The senior SS officer inclined his head in the direction of the door. Taking his cue, Brandt opened the door and stepped into the room.
Whatever it had once been, the room clearly now served as a planning area. Maps hung on the walls, and another was laid out on a large table in the center of the room. There were no windows, and the only light came from a shaded lamp that stood at the edge of the table, highlighting the map but leaving much of the rest of the room in partial shadow.
Though he was half cloaked in shadow, there was no mistaking the identity of the man seated behind the table. When Brandt’s brain caught up with what his eyes already knew, he snapped to attention and whipped out a near-perfect salute.
“Heil Hitler!”
The leader of the Third Reich waved in return and regarded his visitor for a moment. At last, he spoke.
“They tell me you are a good pilot. Is that true?”
Brandt thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I’ve survived so far. I don’t know if that makes me a good pilot or just a lucky one.”
The remark was flirting dangerously close to disaster, for to speak ill of the war was tantamount to treason in the eyes of many Party officials, but Brandt found that he just didn’t care anymore. The Führer asked him a question; he gave a truthful answer. If that was a treasonous response, so be it.
Hitler watched him closely for several seconds and then laughed quietly. “Skilled or lucky, either one will do, I suppose.”
He stood and leaned over the map. “We are here,” he said, pointing.
Brandt stepped closer so that he could see.
“Your destination is here,” Hitler continued, moving his finger to the southeast. “You will refuel here, here and here. Crews are already in place, ready to service the aircraft in case you run into difficulty along the way.”
Difficulty. An interesting way to describe running headlong into a hornet’s nest of Allied aircraft. But then again, according to headquarters, we are actually winning this war, Brandt thought.
His feelings aside, he had to admit that the route had been well planned; the refueling stops were close to the range of his aircraft but not dangerously so and as a result he would have some extra fuel to maneuver with. Given that the Allies were pushing north out of Italy and Greece, he had no doubt that he was going to need it. It would have been safer to go northwest across territory controlled by the Soviets, given the state of their air force at present, but that would have meant refueling in enemy territory, which was clearly out of the question. No, southwest it would have to be, over the Alps and through Romania, then into Greece and Turkey. Once he was past the Turks, it would be smooth sailing from that point forward.
You can do this, he told himself. A little skill, a little luck, and you’ll be free of this place, this war, once and for all.
“Any cargo?”
“Fifteen hundred pounds of supplies and this,” Hitler said, passing him a leather satchel as he spoke. “You are to deliver both to General Giesler upon your arrival at your destination, is that understood?”
“Yes, my Führer.”
The fifteen hundred pounds would bring the weight of his loaded aircraft to just over thirty thousand pounds, but that was still a few thousand pounds below his maximum takeoff weight. It was no different from carrying a full complement of 500-pound bombs, really. It would cost him some speed and maneuverability in the air, but he was going to have to live with that.
“Will there be any fighter escorts to help me break the Allied lines?” Brandt asked.
“No,” Hitler told him. “I believe a single aircraft has a greater chance of breaking through undetected than a full squadron. Crews are loading your plane now, and you will leave as soon as possible.”
He came around the table to stand in front of Brandt, eye to eye.
“I cannot stress enough the importance of your mission, Major. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the Reich is in your hands. You must not fail or all we have worked for will be lost!”
For just a split second Brandt was tempted to speak the truth, that everyone but the madman in front of him already knew that they had lost, that it had all been in vain, but he squashed that notion before he could give voice to it and commit suicide by doing so. Instead, he simply clamped his heels together and threw out another salute.
“Heil Hitler!”
That seemed to satisfy the other man, who grunted an acknowledgment and turned away to study the map once more.
Brandt took that as a dismissal and headed for the door, where he was met once again by his SS escorts, who walked him back to his quarters.
* * *
BRANDT STOOD AT the edge of the makeshift runway and watched with satisfaction as the mechanics swarmed over his aircraft, preparing it for the flight to come. With parts being in such scarce supply over the past few months, he was normally concerned about letting men unfamiliar to him near the plane, but given that he was on a mission for Hitler himself, he was confident that his beloved Junkers was getting the best care possible.
He and that aircraft had been together for the past four years, and he had begun to think of it more as a companion than a vehicle. They had seen each other through some hairy moments and even hairier missions, and the Junkers had become a talisman to him; as long as he was behind the controls of that aircraft, he’d live to fight another day. If he was going to survive the flight to come, he was going to need her to be in top shape.
The sound of an approaching train drew his attention, and he turned to watch a locomotive pull into the station a hundred yards away. No sooner had it stopped than a work team slipped out of one of the cars and quickly began unloading large wooden crates onto a waiting truck. The crates were heavy; it took four men to carry one of them. Brandt could see more of the same stacked in the car they were unloading, and he wondered just what they contained.
Looks like you are going to find out, he thought, as the truck pulled away from the train and headed directly for the crew waiting by the bomb-bay doors underneath each wing.
Intrigued, Brandt wandered over.
As he drew closer, he could see black lettering stamped on the side of each box.
Magyar Nemzeti Bank.
He knew enough Hungarian to be able to translate.
Hungarian National Bank.
Hitler’s words came back to him. “The future of the Reich is in your hands.”
Now he understood. The fifteen hundred extra pounds of weight he would be carrying was most likely gold and silver bullion looted from the Hungarian national treasury and was no doubt designed to fund whatever operation General Giesler was putting together halfway around the world.
If it is, you could buy your way to freedom with it, a voice spoke up in the back of his mind. Just fly right over Allied lines and deliver yourself, the plane and its cargo into their hands in exchange for your freedom.
It wasn’t a bad idea, provided the crates actually did contain treasure looted from the bank.
There was only one way to find out.
As Brandt approached, he called out to the crew chief. “Bring me a pry bar. I want to know what’s in those crates before they’re put aboard my aircraft.”
The crew chief turned to comply, but a voice from inside the aircraft stopped him.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Major.”
Brandt looked up into the interior of his aircraft to find the same SS officer he’d dealt with earlier, Major Adler, looking down at him from inside the bay.
“The crates are to remain sealed. Orders.” The officer smiled as he said it, as if he knew it was going to cause issues for Brandt and he was waiting for the inevitable confrontation.
Brandt wasn’t going to give him one. He knew that he could always open one of the crates at the first refueling stop if need be, far from Major Adler’s prying eyes, and if he discovered it to be the treasure he suspected it was, he could decide what to do with it from there. A fortune in gold and silver could set him up very nicely for the rest of his life in quite a few countries. He gave a smile of his own, trying to look reassuring in the process. “Of course, Major. Orders. Now the crew and I have a lot to do to get ready for takeoff, so if you wouldn’t mind, please get out of my aircraft.”
Another smile.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Brandt paused, a sudden suspicion forming. “And why not, Major?”
“Because I’m going with you, of course,” Adler said.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_06b34a5f-6998-506a-87f3-a0d456d544cd)
Honestly, he should have seen it coming; he knew that. With a plane full of treasure and Hitler’s personal papers in hand, he shouldn’t have expected to make the trip alone. It would have been too easy to do exactly what he’d been thinking of doing, turning over the plane and its cargo to the Allies. An ordinary soldier wouldn’t have worked as a guard, for he might have been convinced to abandon his post given the failing war effort, Brandt knew.
But an officer of the Waffen SS, the most fanatical of all Nazi units? That was the perfect choice. Brandt had no doubt that Adler would carry out his orders to the letter no matter what was happening on the home front, and nothing Brandt could say to him was going to change that. Especially since their orders had been hand delivered by Hitler.
Best make the most of it, he’d thought to himself and set out to do just that.
He spent the next half hour giving Adler a lecture on how to operate the rear-facing 13 mm machine guns in the rear cockpit. They didn’t have ammunition to spare, so Adler was going to have to forego any practice, but it really wasn’t all that difficult, just point and shoot. They had a much higher chance of survival with someone manning the guns if they were jumped by an Allied patrol, for the attack would most likely come from behind and any attempt Brandt made to outrun it would make his forward-facing 20 mm cannon next to useless.
While he was doing that, the crew loaded the crates into the aircraft and secured them so that they wouldn’t slide around in the event he was forced to make any sudden maneuvers. He double-, then triple-checked their work once they were done; given their weight, even a single loose crate could be potentially disastrous if it came free in the midst of combat.
By the time the cargo was loaded, it was close to noon. Brandt would have been perfectly happy to wait to take off under the cover of darkness, but the higher-ups had other plans. As soon as they were loaded, the order came for them to get underway.
Brandt sighed. Even with the future of the Reich at stake, high command still wasn’t thinking straight.
He climbed into the cockpit, stashing the satchel Hitler had given him under his seat, which was the only place big enough in the cockpit to hold it. He strapped himself in and began going through the preflight check, making sure that all of the instruments were working and the controls were responding properly before they left the mechanics behind for good. Behind him he could hear Adler testing the movement of the guns.
They took off moments later, with Brandt in the front of the cockpit in the pilot’s seat and Adler in the rear manning the 13 mm machine guns, leaving the nose gunner–bombardier position empty. Brandt hoped they weren’t going to regret that decision later.
The men’s seats were literally back-to-back, so they could pass instructions and information to each other simply by shouting over their shoulders, but there was an internal intercom system available, as well. As Brandt took the plane into a vertical climb to give them some altitude, he heard Adler shout, “For the glory of the Reich!” but chose not to reply. He wasn’t doing this for the Reich, after all. He just wanted to get out of Germany alive.
Once in the air, he turned the aircraft to the south and began to follow the route Hitler had shown him on the map, flying from Potsdam to Nuremberg before turning east to cross the Swiss Alps near Salzburg. Once over the Alps they would make their way through Austria and into Hungary, continuing from there down to Romania and then out over the Black Sea.
The extra weight from the cargo made the aircraft sluggish and slow to respond to Brandt’s commands, just as he’d suspected it would. He made a few preliminary maneuvers, getting a feel for the way the aircraft responded so that he would know what he could and couldn’t do in an emergency. The plane moved about the sky with all the finesse of a brick, which was going to make matters rather difficult if they encountered enemy aircraft, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it at this point.
It is what it is, he thought stoically.
They had been in the air for just over an hour and had started crossing the Austrian Alps when things went south.
Brandt glanced at the topographical map in his lap, making certain that he knew exactly where he was in relation to the peaks below him, and when he looked up again a pair of American P51 Mustang attack fighters were diving out of the sun to his right. He never would have seen them if the second aircraft hadn’t made the mistake of changing its angle of attack too early, allowing the sun to glint off the steel edge of the wings.
It wasn’t much, but Brandt was a veteran pilot who had survived more than a hundred missions over the past few years, and that was more than most. Without hesitation he shoved the yoke forward and threw the Junkers into a desperate dive.
The Mustangs were faster and more maneuverable than his aircraft on a good day, never mind when it was loaded with crates of gold. His only hope of survival was to get down amid the mountain peaks and hope that the American pilots didn’t have the nerve to follow.
Given what he’d heard about Mustang pilots, he didn’t think that was very likely, but he wasn’t about to sit back and let them blow him out of the sky either.
“Hang on!” he shouted to Adler as the plane turned over and headed toward the earth in a screaming dive.
Brandt had his hands full keeping control of the aircraft, so didn’t dare look over his shoulder in an effort to locate the enemy planes. As it turned out, he didn’t need to; the thunder of the guns from behind him as Adler opened up let him know that the Mustangs were following them down.
Bullets began stitching their way across the port wing in response, leaving half-dollar-sized holes in their wake, but thankfully they didn’t appear to have damaged anything important as the plane kept flying. Brandt threw the aircraft into evasive maneuvers, twisting about the sky as he sought to escape his attackers. A narrow mountain pass loomed ahead of him and he aimed directly for it, pulling up out of the dive at the last second and soaring between the two peaks at dangerous speed.
Behind him, the Mustangs followed.
The next few moments were some of the most hair-raising he’d ever experienced in his career as a fighter pilot. He tossed his aircraft all over the sky, despite its heavy load, doing everything he could to throw the Americans off his tail. He clung to the mountains where and when he could, trying to get his pursuers to make a mistake as they twisted through the air, hoping against hope that one if not both of them would slam into the nearby peaks and leave him and his charge in peace to continue their mission.
It was wishful thinking and, like most wishes, didn’t come true. The Mustangs stayed behind him the whole way, firing at his aircraft when the opportunity presented itself and content to stick with him when it didn’t. Bit by bit their machine-gun fire began to whittle away at the frame of his aircraft.
At some point one of them was going to get lucky, hit the fuel tanks or aileron controls or even the ammunition that was stored aboard for the forward and aft machine guns, and it would be all over. There would be nothing left of him and Major Adler but a smear on the landscape.
He had to do something, but what?
The solution, when it came to him, was surprisingly simple and, dare he say it, rather elegant.
He’d spent all this time and fuel trying to get away from the Mustangs. What if he got in close instead? The only shots that had been fired had come from the rear of his aircraft, and he would bet that the pilots of the American aircraft were convinced by now that the forward weapons were inoperable. Add to that the fact that all he’d done was run, and it was a good bet that the Americans thought him little more than a sitting duck. They wouldn’t expect him to suddenly turn and bring the battle to them. If he could catch even one of them napping, he could even up the odds a little.
It was worth a try.
He quickly explained to Adler what he was going to do.
“Are you insane?” the major cried on hearing the plan, to which Brandt replied that he might very well be. It didn’t matter, though, because they were going to try it whether Adler liked it or not.
He kept running, waiting for the right moment.
It came sooner than he expected.
Ahead of him loomed another cluster of rising peaks, with a narrow pass between two of them. It was just the kind of terrain he’d been using for the past several minutes to try to shake his pursuers. If the American pilots were as good as he thought they were, they would be expecting him to make for that pass like a rabbit for its warren.
Brandt intended to disappoint them.
Instead of diving for the space between the peaks, Brandt pulled back on the stick, sending the Junkers into a steep climb as if he intended to loop the plane in a big circle to try to get behind the mountains. The maneuver might have been worthwhile if he’d been flying one of the newer fighters such as a Focke-Wulf or a Messerschmitt, but in an overloaded night bomber like the Junkers he might as well have been standing still.
Behind him, the faster and more agile Mustangs moved to intercept.
This was the crucial moment. If the Americans caught him before he managed to roll out again, he would be moving perpendicular to their line of travel and would present nearly the entire surface of his aircraft to their guns. He didn’t want that to happen.
“Hold on!” he shouted as the plane reached the apex of its climb. He completed the classic Immelman Turn maneuver by rolling out at the top and rushing back in the direction he’d just come from.
One of the Mustangs was caught rushing toward him, trying to get into the very position he’d been worried about, and made the mistake of hesitating for a split second as he realized the two planes were now flying directly toward each other at impressive speeds.
Brandt didn’t make the same error. He began firing as soon as the Junkers rolled out of its turn, slamming the Mustang with a barrage of fire from the Junkers’s forward-facing 20 mm cannons. Tracers whipped between the two aircraft as the American sought to respond, but Brandt had been just a hair quicker off the mark and drilled the other aircraft with gunfire even as it began to take evasive action.
One second the Mustang was racing toward him, the next he was doing everything he could to get up and over the exploding cloud of debris that had once been an American aircraft.
Brandt let out a shout of triumph.
His exultation was premature, however. In focusing on the lead aircraft he’d lost sight of the second, and that came back to bite him as the American roared up from below. The pilot had anticipated Brandt’s roll-out, diving and then swooping back up to come at the Junkers and its unprotected belly. Bullets ripped through the port engine, the wing and the cockpit as the Mustang flashed past. One of the bullets took a chunk out of Brandt’s calf, and he gasped in pain; he could feel blood course down his leg and into his boot.
The enemy gunfire shredded the controls for the wing flaps and set the engine alight, causing the plane to yaw heavily to the left. Fortunately Adler’s guns roared to life in that moment, catching the Mustang as it raced past and sending it spiraling out of control to crash into the nearest mountainside.
“I’m hit, I’m hit,” Adler called, but Brandt couldn’t do anything to help him because not only was he hit himself, but he had his hands full just trying to keep the plane aloft. He fought the controls, hands straining on the yoke, feet pumping the foot pedals in an effort to force the damaged hydraulics to work long enough to get the ailerons and flaps trimmed the way he needed them. At the same time, he maneuvered through the maze of snow-covered peaks, desperately trying to avoid ending up like their recently departed foes. He could hear Adler thrashing around in pain but had no choice but to block it out as he concentrated on keeping them both alive.
By the time he managed to get the aircraft level again, Adler had gone quiet and still. Brandt knew what that meant; Adler was either dead or, at the very least, too wounded to be of any help. For the first time Brandt noticed the freezing air flowing in through the holes in the cockpit floor and canopy, chilling him to the bone but helping to keep him from slipping into shock from his own injury. Shock was probably the least of his worries, for the plane was losing altitude fast and the rushing winds were fanning the flames in the port engine into a veritable bonfire. Brandt didn’t know which would be worse, slamming into the side of a mountain or being blown to bits when the engine exploded. Right then, both seemed like a possibility.
He racked his brain for a solution to the problem facing him and came up with…nothing. All he could do was fight to keep the plane in the air and pray for a miracle.
Then he saw it.
A few miles ahead of him was the frozen surface of a long, narrow glacier.
If he could get to it, he could attempt a landing. He knew his chances weren’t good. With a fully operational aircraft it would be a difficult feat. With the mangled wreck that he was flying it was going to be nearly impossible, but what other options did he have?
None.
You can do this, he told himself.
He was coming in too hot and too steep, so he needed to bleed off some of his airspeed and he needed to do it immediately. He dropped the flaps, feathered the engines and tipped the nose up slightly to create more resistance as the plane continued what could best be described as a controlled fall out of the sky.
The Junkers wanted to drag to the left, but Brandt fought the stick, doing everything he could to keep it lined up on the glistening surface of the glacier, now dead ahead of him.
Come on, baby! Keep it in the air just a few more minutes! he urged.
As Brandt drew inexorably closer, he hit the switch that controlled the landing gear, only to hear the steady drone of the alarm warning him that the hydraulics had failed.
He cursed a blue streak even as he reached over and began turning the crank that would lower the wheels by hand. By the time he was finished he was almost to the glacier and little more than five hundred feet in the air.
It was going to be close.
Brandt continued to push the aircraft on, demanding that it stay airborne for a few more seconds, just long enough to get him past the trees lining the shore and over the ice itself.
Fate took pity on him, for the aircraft did just that, sailing over the tree line with barely inches to spare and flying toward the ice in front of him.
You’re only getting one shot at this. Make it count, he told himself.
Brandt kept the nose up as best he could as he came in, knowing to do anything less would be disastrous. He reached out and killed the engines as the wheels made first contact with the ice, the whole aircraft bouncing once, then twice, before settling down and racing toward the opposite end of the glacier.
Now Brandt had a new problem on his hands: how to stop the lumbering wreck before it crashed into the shore on the far side. He pumped the brakes while holding the yoke steady, but it was little more than throwing cupfuls of water on a raging forest fire. He was going to stop or he wasn’t, and there was little he could do about it either way.
He was lucky that the glacier was several miles in length and he had plenty of room to run. Gradually the plane began to slow and finally it came to a skidding halt in the middle of the glacier.
Brandt leaned back against the seat and breathed a sigh of relief.
The sound of the ice cracking beneath the weight of the aircraft was a thunderous boom, and instantly he realized his mistake.
He hadn’t set down on a glacier at all, but the frozen surface of a mountain lake!
With a lurch, the nose of the aircraft dropped several feet as the ice beneath the wheel struts gave way. Brandt shouted in fear and scrambled to open the cockpit canopy, knowing he had to get out of the aircraft before it slipped beneath the surface of the icy water or he was as good as dead.
He quickly unbuckled the safety belt holding him in his seat and grabbed the latch to eject the canopy, giving it a good yank.
Nothing happened.
He did it again, pulling harder this time, but it still wouldn’t budge.
The safety latch!
Removing the safety was normally the job of the observer, as it was above the rear panel in that section of the compartment, which was why Brandt had nearly forgotten about it. He twisted in his seat and looked into the rear section of the compartment.
Adler was dead, just as he’d suspected. He was still buckled into his seat, however, which would make getting past him to the safety latch a little bit easier. Brandt began to squeeze around his own seat, preparing to do just that when there was another splintering crack and the plane lurched downward.
Except this time it kept going.
Water began filling the cockpit through the bullet holes in the canopy as the rest of the ice beneath the Junkers gave way. The crippled aircraft dropped into the icy waters of the lake, heading for the bottom.
Even then Brandt wasn’t prepared to give up. He pulled himself back into his half of the compartment and climbed onto his seat, ignoring the pain from his injured leg as he began pounding at the glass above, desperately trying to break it. The cockpit glass was extra thick, both to withstand the pressure of the G-forces it would be subjected to in flight and to keep it from fragmenting when a bullet passed through it. Pounding on it was like railing against a tsunami and about as effective.
As the water reached his waist and his view of the surface above was eclipsed by floating blocks of ice, Brandt realized that he’d managed to escape the war after all.
Just not in the way that he’d intended.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_48bf9546-c5fb-5a5a-ac72-d081710672cf)
Present Day
With her heart pounding, Annja Creed stood balanced precariously on the edge of the cliff and stared at the gleaming water far below her.
She could hear the shouts of those following her up the tunnel through the rocks and knew that they would catch up to her soon. She didn’t want to be here when they did. She had just a few minutes at best to decide what she was going to do.
Not that I have all that many options, she thought. She couldn’t turn back; doing so would only bring her face-to-face with those coming up behind her, and there was no way she would be able to get through them in the narrow confines of the tunnel. Nor could she stay where she was, for the ledge was narrow and there would be no room for her once the others arrived. Their sheer numbers alone would force her over the edge.
She glanced over the side of the cliff again; it certainly seemed like a long way down.
Did she really want to do this?
The voices were closer now, so close that they had to be just around the last bend in the tunnel. She knew that she had run out of time.
Annja had to make a decision, and she had to make it now.
Do or die, she thought. Paul did it. So can you.
She glanced once more toward the water below her, crossed her fingers in the universal plea for good luck and, taking a deep breath, stepped off the edge just as the others emerged from the rocky tunnel.
Annja’s stomach jumped into her throat as she plunged toward the water, but at the same time she felt the thrill of doing something she’d never done before rush through her frame. It wasn’t every day that she leapt off a fifty-foot cliff into the ocean below, and she relished the feeling of being so alive in the midst of that moment, even as she dropped like a stone. As the surface of the water loomed nearer, she pulled her legs together, pointed her feet downward and pressed her hands flat against her bare thighs, tucking her arms against her torso. By the time she hit the water, she was perfectly aligned to strike the surface and she did so with barely a splash, cleaving the water and disappearing into its depths as if she was born to be there.
The crystal blue water was warm and inviting, and she felt invigorated by its touch. She let the fall carry her down until she began to slow, then with powerful kicks and strokes of her arms she headed back toward the sunlight above. When she broke the surface of the water she found her companion and new love interest, journalist and photographer Paul Krugmann, treading water nearby and waiting for her.
“Well?” he asked.
“We have to do that again!” she said, and his smile matched her own.
They were in Jamaica, cliff diving at the world-famous limestone cliffs on Negril’s west side. They had had lunch at Rick’s, a cliff-side café that gave them a good view of the divers nearby, and a short time later had decided to try the jump themselves. Neither was a stranger to taking risks. If the locals could handle it, so could they.
It turned out to be just as exciting and entertaining as they’d thought it would be. They made three more jumps together, each one as exhilarating as the last, before their dive “instructor” waved them aboard the waiting boat for the short ride back to their beachside resort on the other side of the island. Paul was in Jamaica on business, sent there to do a photo montage piece on the resort where they were staying. He’d asked her to join him, saying they’d make a holiday of it, and she’d agreed. It had sounded as if it would be fun, and that was something she was sorely in need of.
Annja had just gotten back from a trip to Europe on behalf of Chasing History’s Monsters, the cable television show she co-hosted each week. The show focused on the point where history intersected with myth and legend, and had taken her all over the world as its status as a cult favorite among the intended audience grew. Annja wasn’t as popular as the show’s other host, Kristie Chatham—for she tended to be more serious, focusing on the historical and scientific issues behind each episode’s central theme, never mind that Annja had fewer “surprise” wardrobe malfunctions while filming—but that was just fine with her. She’d worked too hard to build her reputation to throw it away for ratings and other such nonsense, much to the continued disappointment of her producer, Doug Morrell.
Chasing History’s Monsters had Annja on the road quite a bit during any given year, but she could live with that. She made use of the time on location to pursue her other major passion, archaeology. Just as her reputation as a television host had grown over the past few years, so, too, had her success as an archaeologist.
She’d made some startling discoveries over the past few years, some so amazing that she had been forced to keep news of them to herself. Those that she could talk about had cemented her reputation as both an adventurer and a scholar. She’d developed a network of museum contacts the world over as a result and was often called in to assess the provenance and authenticity of items the museums had recently acquired or was intending to purchase. More than once she’d saved a museum director from falling victim to a clever forgery, and the good will she’d generated had come back to her twofold.
But all work and no play made Annja very cranky, especially given her other, more esoteric duties as bearer of Joan of Arc’s sword, and she’d impulsively agreed to accompany Paul to the Caribbean.
She and Paul had been dating for the past six months or so, which might not be much for him but was the longest stretch of time for any relationship she could remember in, well, forever it seemed. So far, things had been light and easy, which was probably the very reason it had been going so well. Annja’s job could take her away at a moment’s notice for weeks at a time, something few of her former boyfriends understood or wanted to deal with, but Paul was different. He lived the same sort of life, traveling at the whim of the clients who paid for his journalistic services, so he wasn’t the type who would begrudge her the time away when work came calling.
Annja glanced over at him as the boat chugged toward the resort, admiring his sun-bleached hair and rugged good looks. He had a strong but wiry build and was deeply tanned from spending so much of his time outdoors. He wasn’t hard on the eyes, which didn’t hurt any, and so far had been both thoughtful and considerate in their time together.
Who knew? Maybe she’d found one worth keeping this time around.
She laughed aloud at the thought and, hearing her, Paul looked over and grinned in return.
Yep. So far, so good.
The boat took them around the island and up to the long wooden dock that stretched into the bay in front of the resort. They disembarked with the rest of the passengers, followed the group down the length of the dock to the shore, and then headed up the beach toward the entrance to the hotel. Annja’s long hair and slim, athletic, bikini-clad body caught the attention of more than a few of the men on the beach, but she barely noticed. She was used to people appreciating her for her beauty or simply recognizing her from the show, so being the focus of attention wasn’t all that novel anymore. In fact, sometimes it could be a real pain in the butt.
They entered the lobby, the cool stone floor beneath their bare feet a welcome respite from the hot sun outside, and headed for the elevator. Once inside, Paul punched the buttons for the fourth and fifth floors, where their respective rooms were. Annja liked the fact that when planning the trip Paul hadn’t automatically assumed they would share a room, even though they were romantically attached. It was one of the things she appreciated about him—his willingness to give her room and let her take things at her own pace.
As the numbers on the floor panel ticked upward, Paul turned to her and said, “An hour to rest and change and then dinner?”
“Sounds good to me.”
The elevator stopped at his floor. As the doors opened he gave her a quick kiss and then stepped out into the hall as Annja continued upward.
Paul had gotten her an oversized corner suite with an incredible ocean view. After arriving, she stood in front of the window for a short while, simply admiring the scenery, and then turned and headed for the bathroom.
Annja slipped out of her bathing suit and stepped into the shower, washing the salt from her skin and hair before getting out and toweling herself dry. She had just started brushing out her long hair when her cell phone rang.
Thinking it was Paul, she snatched it up without looking at the number.
Answering it, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re canceling dinner…”
“Annja, get me out of here! He’s a freakin’ maniac and I can’t…”
The connection was abruptly cut while the speaker was in midsentence, but she’d recognized the voice immediately. It would have been hard for her not to, for she’d heard it practically every day of her professional career for several years.
It had been the voice of her producer in New York and the man behind the runaway success of Chasing History’s Monsters, Doug Morrell.
She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it, as if it might suddenly impart the necessary information for her to understand just what the heck was going on. She could feel her heart rate rising, the blood rushing through her veins in anticipation of what might come, and her hand itched to call her sword to her side.
She found it funny that her body reacted to the situation as if there was real danger when intellectually she recognized it for what it was—one of Doug’s crazy little stunts to get her to call him while she was on vacation.
He’d called and left messages several times over the past few days, begging her to call him in New York, but so far she’d managed to ignore them. She was on vacation, after all, and there wasn’t anything urgent enough on her current schedule to justify his pulling her away from that.
He, of course, thought differently. In his early twenties, Doug ate, slept and breathed the program and its success. Nothing was more important to him than its continued success, and he’d been known to chase her down in the far corners of the globe to get answers to tiny little questions that weren’t important and could wait to be answered, if answering was necessary at all, when she returned from her time off.
This was no doubt one of his more esoteric attempts to get her attention.
Calling was one thing. Trying to scare her out of her wits with some crazy scheme was another.
She knew of one way to put an end to that, at least.
She checked her cell phone’s call log and found the number that the call had come in from. She didn’t recognize it as his cell number or his office phone, but that didn’t mean anything; Doug could have used someone else’s phone.
Ignoring the faint feather of unease that was starting to unfurl in her gut, Annja hit redial.
It rang once, twice and then was answered on the third ring.
Annja didn’t give Doug a chance to say anything.
“Listen up, Doug, because I’m only going to say this once. I. Am. On. Vacation. I can deal with the decisions about the show when I return, which will only be in a few days, so chill out with the sick jokes! Understood?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, and then a voice said, “This isn’t a joke.”
It didn’t sound like Doug.
The voice was too deep, too guttural. Doug also talked a mile a minute, and this guy was calm, rational, his speech seemed carefully measured even in so short a response.
That’s what he wants you to think, she told herself, but don’t fall for it. It’s Doug. It has to be.
She knew that he could have disguised his voice quite easily with the help of a voice modulator purchased from any halfway-decent electronics store. In fact, she thought she heard the slight echo behind his words that indicated that such a device was being used.
The speaker wasn’t finished.
“Do not attempt to trace this call. The signal has been scrambled through more countries than I can count. Just listen.”
Trace the call?
“I have your friend Doug. If you do as I ask, he will be returned to his home in good health. On the other hand, if you don’t do precisely what I ask, then you will never see him again. Rest assured, though, that if that happens, I will make certain that he suffers considerably before I kill him. Do we understand each other?”
Annja felt the hairs on the back of her neck and arms stand at attention as the threat was delivered calmly and succinctly.
It certainly sounded convincing.
“Cut the crap. I know it’s you, Doug. You can’t fool me.”
The voice chuckled. “Apparently, I can, because this is not Doug.”
The chuckle caused Annja’s irritation, already smoldering, to grow into an open fire.
“You’re not Doug, huh? Well, we’ll see about that.”
Annja pulled the phone away from her ear and hit the disconnect button. She waited a beat and then immediately dialed Doug’s cell phone from memory.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
No answer.
That flicker of unease she’d felt earlier came back and began threading its way up her spine like a snake moving through tall grass.
Frowning, Annja tried again, this time calling Doug at his apartment in Brooklyn.
No answer there, either.
Of course not, dummy, she berated herself. He’s at the office, just as you thought. Try there.
She did as her subconscious bid her, calling Doug’s office line and cursing herself for not doing that in the first place.
The phone began ringing.
Come on, come on, pick it up, she urged.
His voice mail kicked in after the fifth ring.
Now Annja was starting to worry. Doug was almost never out of contact; he even took his cell phone into the bathroom with him. The fact that she couldn’t reach him anywhere was starting to feel suspicious.
He’s just on the other line, she told herself. Give him a minute and call him back.
She did so, and this time the phone was answered on the third ring.
“Doug! Thank heavens!”
But it wasn’t him.
“Annja?” a female voice asked tentatively.
“Who’s this?”
“Karen, Doug’s assistant.”
Of course. Now that he had an assistant he was apparently too important to answer his own phone.
“I need to speak to Doug, Karen. Is he in?”
“No. I haven’t seen him since you left for vacation,” she said.
What? Three days? Maybe longer?
“Do you know where he is?” Annja asked.
With a sudden feeling of dread, she knew what the answer was going to be before it even came out of Karen’s mouth.
“No. That’s why I’m so glad you called. I was hoping you could help me find him.”
It was a bad sign that Karen didn’t know where Doug was.
A really bad sign.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go,” she told Karen, hanging up the phone before the other woman could say anything more and fighting the sense of panic that was quickly filling her as she frantically dialed the original number.
Just as before, it rang three times and then was answered.
“I’m listening,” Annja told the person on the other end.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_e0a158ba-f18d-50ec-8b33-a96bec6ff8ac)
“Perhaps now you will take me seriously, yes?”
Annja did her best to hang on to her temper. When she got scared, she had a tendency to get irritated and if this guy really had Doug she didn’t want to tick him off by blowing her cool.
“Where’s Doug? What have you done to him?”
“Done? I haven’t done anything,” the person said. “Yet.”
It was just one word, but it had the power to freeze her blood in her veins.
The kidnapper went on. “I have simply persuaded Mr. Morrell that it was in his best interests to get in touch with you to convey my desire to discuss a business arrangement. He had initially declined my request, but very quickly saw the error of his ways. I hear that you are on vacation. Are you enjoying Jamaica?”
Annja sensed that time was of the essence, and she had no interest in bantering with this guy. She ignored his question about Jamaica, choosing instead to demand, “Who are you and what do you want?”
“Morrell was right about your temper, I see,” the man said, infuriating Annja even further. She didn’t like the position she was in, with all of the control in the kidnapper’s hands, but there was nothing she could do until she knew what he wanted. For now, she was going to have to grin and bear it, something she wasn’t very good at doing.
Her right hand reached into thin air and plucked a broadsword seemingly out of nowhere. The blade had once belonged to Joan of Arc, had, in fact, been broken asunder on the day and hour of her execution. More than five hundred years later it had been miraculously re-formed in Annja’s presence and she had become the blade’s current bearer.
The sword could appear or disappear at her will, and when she wasn’t using it, it rested in a mystical place just outside the bounds of reality that she called the otherwhere. It could not be taken from her against her will and over the years had seemed to impart some extra bit of strength, dexterity and speed to her physical movements when the situation demanded it. She had become an expert in its use and, quite literally, didn’t go anywhere without it.
Having the blade in hand helped calm her and kept her from raging at the maniac who had snatched one of her friends. He didn’t know it yet, whoever he was, but having her as an enemy was not a good thing.
“Let me worry about my temper,” she told the man, “and you can tell me what it is that you want. Clearly there’s something you need me to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone through the hassle of kidnapping my television producer.”
“You are as perceptive as your reputation suggests, Miss Creed. That bodes well for your ability to carry out my requests.”
Annja didn’t like the “s” on the end of that word, for it suggested the caller had multiple things for her to do in order to free Doug, but she kept her mouth shut and waited for him to continue.
“There is a package waiting for you at the front desk. Retrieve it but do not open it until you are back in your room. When you have examined what is inside, call me back at the number I’m giving you.”
The caller recited a new phone number, and Annja quickly memorized it.
But she wasn’t ready to be a pawn in someone else’s game quite yet. At least, not a pawn that didn’t attempt to retain a bit of its own free will.
“Why don’t you just tell me now, and I’ll grab the package later?”
It was the wrong thing to do.
There was silence on the end of the phone for a moment, followed by a shriek of pain that seemed to go on forever.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there? What are you doing to him?” she cried.
The voice returned. “When I give an order, I expect it to be carried out without negotiation or discussion. Each time that doesn’t happen, Mr. Morrell will pay the price for your obstinacy. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” Annja replied through gritted teeth.
“Then what are you waiting for? Go get that package.”
And with that, the line went dead.
Annja sent the sword back into the otherwhere and hurried out of her room, clutching the phone tightly in one hand. She didn’t dare put it down just in case the stranger called again; she didn’t know what he’d do to Doug if he called and she wasn’t right there to answer it.
A group of tourists stood in front of the elevator so Annja hurried past it and took the stairs, rushing down them two at a time in her haste to get to the ground floor. She considered calling Paul and asking him to join her, but decided against doing so. There was no need to get him involved unless she had to, and she wasn’t sure yet if that was the case. It might be safer for Paul if she kept him out of it completely.
There was an elderly couple at the registration desk when Annja got to the lobby, and she had to stifle the urge to push them aside and ask about the package. She stood behind them, impatiently shifting from foot to foot as she waited for them to finish getting the directions they needed. The registration clerk gave her a sympathetic smile over their heads as they examined the map and Annja tried to smile back, but she was afraid it looked more like a death’s head rictus.
At last they were done and Annja stepped up to the counter.
“May I help you?” the clerk asked.
“My name is Annja Creed and I’m in room 402. I believe you have a package for me.”
“Ah, yes, Miss Creed. One minute, please.”
The clerk stepped into the back room, leaving Annja alone. A sense that she was being watched washed over her and she spun to look, but there was no one there.
Keep it together, Creed, she told herself.
The clerk returned carrying a thick manila envelope and handed it to her across the counter. Her name was written on the front with black magic marker.
“Were you on duty when this was delivered?” she asked the clerk.
He hesitated and then said, somewhat reluctantly, “Yes, miss.”
“Did you see who delivered it?”
“No, miss.” He looked down and then looked back up at her. “To be honest, I had stepped away for a quick smoke, and when I came in the envelope was lying on the counter. I looked around to see who might have left it, but there was no one about. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine. No problem,” she told him, while inwardly she was cursing at having lost her best chance of getting a lead on who might be behind this.
Not knowing what it might contain, she didn’t feel comfortable opening the envelope in the lobby, so she’d wait until she got back to her room.
She was grateful the envelope didn’t contain one of Doug’s fingers or anything gruesome like that, just a folder with several pieces of paper inside and a DVD in a paper sleeve. She turned on the desk lamp and sat down, flipping through the pages briefly. They appeared to be military action reports of some kind.
That was enough for her; she didn’t have time to read them all. She could do that later.
She picked up the DVD and slid it out of its case, then walked it over to the entertainment unit in the suite’s living room. It took her a few minutes to work out which remote control worked which device, but once she figured it all out she fired up the television and then slipped the DVD into the player.
The screen remained blank long enough that Annja thought the player might not be properly connected to the television, but as she got up to check it, the screen suddenly brightened and an image appeared.
It was Doug.
He was tied to a metal chair in a nondescript room somewhere. His forearms were tied to the arms of the chair, his legs to the legs of the chair, leaving his hands free and his bare feet resting on what looked to be a wet concrete floor. The camera was close enough for Annja to see that his face was bloody and swollen, as if he’d been subjected to a thorough beating at some point in the past few hours. A thin line of dried blood ran from his cracked and swollen lips. When he raised his head and looked at the camera, the one eye that he could see out of was full of fear.
“Help me, Annja” he said, his voice little more than a croak coming from an obviously parched throat. It sounded as though he hadn’t had any water for hours. “You have to help me. I don’t care what he asks you to do or who he asks you to do it to. I’ll die here if you don’t do what he wants. Please, don’t let that happen, Annja, please.”
The camera zoomed in to show his face and then moved down to his body and stopped on his right hand. That close Annja could see that his last two fingers were broken and bent at odd angles.
She could hear Doug saying, “No, no, I didn’t do anything, don’t,” in a breathy gasp. She steeled herself for what was coming but she didn’t turn away, feeling as if she owed it to him to watch what was being done so that she could avenge him for all the wrongs he endured to coerce her into action.
A gloved hand reached into the camera frame. It was neither large nor small, so she couldn’t really tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s, though she suspected the former. Not because a woman couldn’t be that cruel—she knew from experience that that certainly wasn’t the case—but because her mystery man had claimed to be the one who had kidnapped Doug, and she had yet to see anything that made her think this was anything more than a single nutjob at work. As she’d expected, the individual took hold of Doug’s middle finger and without further ado snapped the bone. Doug let out a shriek of pain and the screen went blank.
Watching the kidnapper inflict pain on Doug for no other reason than to make her do his bidding filled her with a righteous fury. She vowed then and there to make him pay for what he had done.
He’d picked the wrong woman to tangle with.
Annja picked up the phone and entered the number the kidnapper had given to her.
It was answered almost immediately.
“You have the package?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen the DVD?”
Annja gritted her teeth and then replied in the same clear tone, “Yes.”
“You understand that I’m not kidding around?”
“Yes, I understand. Now get on with it. What do you want me to do?”
“In April 1945 a particular German aircraft went down somewhere in the Swiss Alps. I want you to find that aircraft and recover what is inside it. You have one week to do so.”
Find a plane lost in the Swiss Alps over fifty years ago? This guy was a total loon! Annja counted to ten to be sure she had a hold of her anger.
“So help me, if you hurt him any more than you already have, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
The man on the other end of the phone chuckled. “You can certainly try, Miss Creed. In the meantime, I would start looking for that wreckage. One week. I will call you at exactly noon seven days from now. Keep your phone handy.”
The kidnapper hung up.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b8c04643-5d58-5cd8-a521-0994bdcb0b95)
When Paul knocked on her door fifteen minutes later, Annja was sitting cross-legged on the couch, engrossed in reading the after-action reports the kidnapper had supplied. At the sound of his knock, she shouted, “Go away!” in the direction of the door and just kept reading. When she looked up moments later to double-check something she’d read in a previous report, she found him standing there in the middle of the room, watching her.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded.
He held up a small square of plastic. “You gave me a key, remember?”
Annja grunted and went back to reading.
Paul walked over and picked up one of the sheets of paper. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t touch that!” she said, snatching it out of his hands.
Paul actually took a step back at the venom in her tone. The tension in the room felt like a physical presence.
“You’re scaring me, Annja. What’s going on?”
Annja ignored him, jotting down notes on the cover of the folder the pages had come in and moving on to the next page.
“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.
“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.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_6a4524e2-7dee-51e2-9c27-44c475a3c4b4)
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 she’d be worried about the price tag that would come with that help, and she would carefully consider the pros and cons of picking up the phone and getting him involved, but she didn’t have the luxury to worry about such things at this point. Time was too precious a resource to waste. Whatever the price, she was willing to pay it in order to rescue Doug.
Paul looked over at her. “I’ve got be honest, Annja. I don’t know how we could search an area of that size even with an army at our disposal. An army that, I should point out, we don’t have.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m working on it.”
With only a trace of reluctance, Annja picked up the phone and called Garin Braden.
“Hello, Annja,” he said, when he answered the call. “To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?”
“I hate to say it, Garin, but I really need your help.”
Garin laughed. “The mighty Miss Creed needs my help? You must be joking.”
Annja gritted her teeth. “I’m serious, Garin. I really need your help.”
“Well, in that case let me drop everything I am doing and rush to your aid.”
His sarcastic tone made her wince, but she pushed on anyway. “Please, Garin. A friend’s life is at stake and time is of the essence.”
Garin Braden was over five hundred years old. When she thought about it, that sounded crazy even to her, but she couldn’t deny the fact that it was true. Garin had been squire to a French knight named Roux, who in turn had been assigned to watch over Joan of Arc. Roux and his squire had failed in their mission, and when Joan’s sword was broken in the moments before her execution, the lives of the two men had been mysteriously lengthened. Over the next few centuries Roux searched for the fragments of the blade, intending to bring them back together, while Garin fought to keep that from happening, convinced the fragmentation of the blade was the very thing that assured his extended life span.
Annja was aware Garin had since come to realize that his efforts had likely been wasted, as her custodianship of the blade so far had had no ill effect on him. In fact, he seemed to be growing quite fond of her. Annja had diligently resisted his efforts to flirt, despite her attraction to him. The fact that he was the perfect example of tall, dark and handsome, never mind ridiculously rich, constantly battled with her understanding that Garin cared first and foremost about himself. He was determined, ruthless and used to getting what he wanted, no matter what the effort or cost. It made him dangerous in more ways than one.
She knew it was in her best interest to stay as far away from him as she could and yet here she was, reaching out to him for help in her moment of need.
Apparently my heart and my head aren’t seeing eye to eye again, she thought.
Knowing his nature, Annja expected Garin to ask what was in it for him and, frankly, she didn’t have an answer. The last time she had asked for his help he’d insisted on taking her to dinner and she’d had no choice but to agree. She was afraid of what he would require this time around.
To her great surprise, he didn’t do anything of the sort.
“What do you need?” he asked.
Given the nature of some of the expeditions she’d been on in the past, Annja had learned not to talk about them too much over an open telephone line, for you never knew who might be listening in. Instead she told him that she needed to find a certain object within a certain specified time frame and left it at that, knowing he would read between the lines and understand that she was after an artifact of one kind or another.
That was close enough for what she needed until she could see him.
Garin was silent at first and then asked, “Where are you now?”
“The Hotel Planita in Negril, Jamaica.”
“Okay, stay there. I’ll send a chopper for you.”
Garin hung up before she could thank him. He always did like having the last word.
* * *
JUST UNDER THREE hours later, a massive AW101 VVIP AgustaWestland helicopter settled onto the hotel lawn, inviting stares from more than a few observers. Annja didn’t blame them; this was the same helicopter used to transport the President of the United States under the designation Marine One, and just seeing it up close was pretty awe-inspiring. Given that it was one of Garin’s helicopters, Annja had no doubt that the interior would be even more lavish than she could imagine.
She and Paul watched as the door opened and a set of steps unfolded from inside the aircraft. Seconds later a black man with a shaved head and a soul patch on his chin appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a sharply cut suit and dark sunglasses. He scanned the small crowd assembled on the other side of the lawn before his gaze settled on Annja and her companion. He gestured them forward without hesitation.
Annja crossed the lawn and climbed the stairs. “Hello, Griggs,” she said, as she stepped aboard the aircraft.
Matthew Griggs, head of DragonTech Security and Garin Bradin’s right-hand man, nodded to her. “Miss Creed,” he said, with that lilting British Caribbean accent of his. “Please make yourself comfortable.”
The interior of the helicopter resembled that of a private jet more than any helicopter Annja had ever been in, with mahogany fittings, lush leather seats and even thick carpet underfoot to help absorb the sound of the rotor blades.
Griggs turned just as Paul came up the steps. The DragonTech Security man interposed himself between Paul and the interior of the aircraft. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but this is a private flight.”
“It’s all right, Griggs. He’s with me.”
Griggs spoke over his shoulder to Annja without taking his eyes off Paul. “Is Mr. Braden aware of this?”
He wasn’t, but Annja wasn’t about to admit that to Griggs.
“Of course.”
“Very well.”
Once both guests were settled, Griggs said, “Help yourselves to the refreshments. We’ll be in Miami in about three hours.”
With that, he pulled in the stairs, secured the door and returned to the cockpit. Five minutes later they were airborne.
Glancing around the cabin, Paul gave a low whistle. “You said you were going to get us some help, but this is a bit more than I expected. Dare I ask who it belongs to?”
Annja didn’t see any reason not to tell him, especially considering the fact that Paul was likely to be meeting him in a few hours.
“Garin Braden.”
Paul started in surprise. “Garin Braden?”
“Yes.”
“Garin Braden the industrialist?”
Annja would have been more prone to call him Garin Braden the scoundrel, but that was splitting hairs, in her view.
“Yes.”
An uneasy expression crossed Paul’s face.
Seeing it, Annja asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Braden and I had a bit of a run-in at a press conference when I asked him some uncomfortable questions,” Paul replied.
“When was this?”
“A year, maybe eighteen months ago.” He shrugged, then waved it off. “I’m sure he’s forgotten about it by now.”
Annja wasn’t so sure of that—Garin tended to carry a grudge longer than anyone she knew—but she agreed and left it alone for the time being. If it was an issue, they’d deal with it later. “Might as well relax,” she told him. “We’ve got a few hours of flight time ahead of us, it seems.”
While Paul wandered around, checking out the cabin, Annja pulled her laptop out of her backpack and fired it up. She connected to the flight’s onboard Wi-Fi and began researching the Junkers aircraft and its capabilities. Getting a better sense of its strengths and weaknesses would allow her to better pinpoint how far it might have gone after being damaged in the dogfight with Captain Mitchell and his wingman, which in turn might allow them to narrow their search area.
Or, if we’re particularly unlucky, make it even bigger.
She was thankful that there was a fair bit of information available.
The Junkers Ju 88 was a twin-engine multirole combat aircraft built by the German firm Junkers Flugzeugund Motorenwerke for use by the Luftwaffe in World War II. It had been intended to be a fast bomber that could outrun any Allied fighters that tried to chase it. According to most of the sources Annja checked, it had been moderately successful.
Despite being plagued by several problems in the later part of its development, the aircraft and its many variants were in constant production from 1939 to the end of the war in 1945. More than 160,000 were built, more than any other German twin-engine aircraft of the time period. It served successfully as a bomber, dive bomber, night fighter, heavy fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. They had seen heavy action during the Battle of Norway, the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain, as well as in various campaigns on the Eastern Front.
The Junkers had a top speed of 292 miles per hour, a ceiling of 29,000 feet, and a maximum range of 1,700 miles. It had been built to be flown by a crew of either three or four, though one man could manage it on his own if the rear-facing cockpit guns and the weapons bay under the nose were left unmanned. Annja’s research told her that one of the key features of the Junkers aircraft was its ability to keep fighting even after taking heavy damage. That explained how the target aircraft had managed to stay aloft despite being savaged by the pair of P51s under Mitchell’s command. That concerned her somewhat, as the Junkers’s hardiness might mean it had managed to go even farther than they suspected after the destruction of the Mustangs.
All in all, it seemed like a pretty hardy aircraft. It made her wonder what the pilot’s destination had been. Where had he been trying to go with all that gold, if that, indeed, had been what he’d been carrying?
She called up a map of Europe and the Middle East on her screen. She looked at it for several minutes, trying to work out reasonable routes in her head. With a possible range of 1,700 miles, the pilot certainly had his choice of destinations available to him. If he’d flown due south, he could have reached the deep deserts beyond Tripoli in Libya. Flying due west would have taken him nearly to Atyrau, Kazakhstan. An agent of the Reich might have found assistance in either location and could have flown on from there after refueling. While dangerous, both would have been safer than the route he had chosen; southeast through Austria and into the teeth of the Allied army marching north toward Berlin. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
Nothing made a lot of sense in those days, she reminded herself. The war was all but lost and the Reich was falling apart. The guy probably loaded up what he could and made a run for it. Stop trying to read more into it or you’ll drive yourself nuts, Annja thought.
With that warning ringing in her ears, she put the laptop away and sat back to enjoy the rest of the flight. She knew all too well that there would far too little time for rest in the days ahead.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_3129b513-c038-5087-b4f1-bafe4e4224fc)
Griggs’s estimate had been right on the money; they landed at Miami International Airport just under three hours later. A black SUV with dark tinted windows was waiting for them next to the helipad. Griggs escorted them to the vehicle and then climbed in beside the driver. Annja assumed they would be taken to wherever Garin was staying, so she was surprised when the driver raced around several parked Airbuses and delivered them to a sleek business jet waiting for them on the other side of the terminal.
Annja was about to ask what was going on when she noticed the corporate logo of a gold dragon poised in midflight on the tail of the aircraft. It was the same one that had been on the tail rotor of the helicopter they’d just left behind.
DragonTech Security.
When the car stopped, Griggs escorted them up the steps and into the aircraft.
Garin Braden was waiting for them.
“Ah, Annja,” he said, as a broad smile swept across his face. “So good to see you.”
Garin was a big man, both physically and charismatically. He seemed to fill the room wherever he was. His dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and his beard was immaculately groomed, as usual. This day he was dressed in a dark shirt and jeans, which was unusual for him. Annja was more used to seeing him in impeccably cut suits.
Everybody needs a dress down day, she thought with a smile.
Annja introduced Paul to him, noting that Garin held the other man’s hand just a moment longer than normal.
Had he recognized Paul? she wondered.
Garin didn’t say anything or acknowledge that the two had previously met, so Annja let it go. He ushered them into chairs opposite his own and got right down to business. “You said it was urgent. Tell me what is going on.”
Annja laid it all out for him: Doug’s kidnapping, the phone call, the package, the fact that the kidnapper knew she was in Jamaica, the demand that she find and recover the plane and its contents. The only thing she left out was the fact that she was romantically involved with Paul. She didn’t need Garin critiquing her choice of companions, but she knew he would do so anyway. No sense in giving him more ammunition for the task.
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Alex Archer
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фольклор
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A wrecked German bomber…key to the secrets of the Third Reich?All it took was one phone call and TV show host and archaeologist Annja Creed is in mortal danger. Her producer Doug Morrell has been abducted by a greedy treasure hunter who′s seeking the lost raubgold, or looted gold of Nazi Germany. The terms are simple: retrieve the bounty and Doug lives. Fail, and he dies…Now Annja and her friends must find a missing German fighter plane that was shot down over the Alps in 1945. According to legend, the aircraft not only holds a shipment of gold the Nazis had stolen, but also carried the last letters of the führer himself. Letters that point to a more startling treasure buried underwater halfway around the world. But Annja isn′t interested in treasure, or even unearthing historic relics. Annja has one agenda: get Doug out alive…even if it means drawing her sword from its otherworldly sheath. Even if it means death.Because once greed drives a man to violence, nothing will stop him…