Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters

by Alex Archer

  She passed the time playing cards with Paul in the breakroom, but her mind wasn’t on what she was doing and he repeatedly trounced her. Eventually she gave up her seat to Garin, allowing Paul to have a bit of a challenge, and she sat staring at the wall, wondering if she was doing the right thing. By the time Reinhold stuck his head in the doorway and announced they might have something, she was about ready to crawl out of her skin. She jumped to her feet and followed the German scientist back to the control room, Garin and Paul at her heels.

  At a word from Reinhold, the image from the drone’s forward camera that was showing on the central screen was replaced by something much more complex.

  Reinhold pointed at it. “What you’re seeing here is a three-dimensional computer model we’ve built with the preliminary data sent back to us by the drone. We’ve isolated the various magnetic fields recorded by the drone’s imaging equipment and assigned each of them a color. We then laid those colors over a topographic model of the rift valley itself.”

  The image in front of them was mostly gray, with a few blotches of dark red running throughout.

  “The gray color represents the baseline material of the mountains, mostly granite, dolomite and shale,” Reinhold said. He pointed to one of the veins of dark red running through it. “This dark color appears to be veins of hematite crystal, something the region is particularly known for. So far, nothing is surprising or out of the ordinary.”

  He nodded at the technician manning the controls and the imaging began to slip down the screen, revealing more of the valley, just as if the drone were flying over it. Everything looked similar to what they’d already seen, until they reached the far end. At that point, a blotch of blue color appeared.

  “Initial measurements tell us that this anomaly is roughly fifty feet long by seventy feet wide and made mostly of a combination of iron, carbon and manganese. In other words, steel.”

  Reinhold looked at the trio with an expression of pride. “I would bet my professional reputation that this is your missing aircraft.”

  Chapter 10

  Excitement was high as the team put on its cold weather gear and got ready to go out to the crash site. The plan was to take the Sno-Cats—Annja and Paul in one, Garin and Reinhold in the other—and see what condition the wreckage was in. Once they knew that, they could make more detailed plans for how to get at whatever it was they were supposed to recover from it.

  The Junkers Ju 88 had a length of 47 feet and a wingspan of 65 feet, which was roughly the same size as the anomaly Reinhold had picked up with his scanning equipment. That suggested the plane was actually intact, a rather surprising discovery but one Annja was excited about. Her research had told her that there were only two surviving Junker 88s in the world. Being able to add a third to that list would be quite a coup.

  At least something good might come of all this, she thought.

  At first, it was slow going. The terrain was a mixture of rocky ridgelines, boulder-strewed hills and long fields of glacial ice complete with crevasses large enough to swallow either of their vehicles whole. The Sno-Cats, however, were perfect for this kind of trek. The vehicle’s four independent tracks moved up and down as well as side to side, allowing it to maneuver over, through, or around the various obstacles they encountered, while the high cab allowed excellent visibility. The fact that both vehicles were painted DayGlo orange would allow them to keep each other in sight, even if the weather should turn nasty before they got back to camp.

  They had been underway for nearly half an hour when Paul broke Annja out of her reverie by saying, “I’m impressed.”

  “At what?”

  “How quickly you managed to find this thing,” he said. “It’s been less than three days since you got that first phone call, you’ve flown halfway around the world and yet you’ve still managed to find the literal needle in the haystack.”

  “I did have a bit of help, you know.”

  “Yes, but still. You were the driving force behind this and that’s impressive.”

  If it hadn’t been for her skill in finding lost cities and artifacts, Doug wouldn’t be in the position he was in, so she didn’t much feel like celebrating her achievements at the moment and let it go at that.

  After almost an hour of travel—in which they only advanced a few miles from their base camp—Draynor radioed that they were getting close to their destination.

  Ten minutes later they came up over the last ridge to find that the terrain flattened out ahead of them, becoming a long, sloping valley with clear ground directly ahead, allowing them to see a good distance forward. Annja immediately began looking around, searching for some sign of the wreckage or, better yet, the aircraft itself sticking up out of the snow.

  “Anything?” she asked Paul, who was doing the same out his window on the right side of the vehicle.

  “No, nothing.”

  Where on earth is it? she wondered.

  The first Sno-Cat moved forward another half mile, then began to slow before gradually coming to a stop. Annja pulled up behind it and got out to see what was going on.

  “The GPS unit says we’re less than a hundred yards from the target,” Reinhold said as she walked over to where he was standing with Garin beside their Sno-Cat.

  “Less than one hundred yards?” Annja asked. “We should be seeing something then, shouldn’t we?”

  Reinhold shrugged. “I’m not sure. If the plane landed intact, then yes, we probably should. But if it broke apart on impact…”

  Then it could be scattered in bits and pieces underneath all this snow and we wouldn’t know it.

  It wasn’t a welcome thought, for Annja knew it would make their job of recovering whatever it was the kidnapper wanted from the wreckage that much harder. Welcome or not, though, they had at least come prepared to deal with the situation.

  They pulled harnesses, ropes, a handheld GPS and a metal detector out of the back of the Sno-Cat. Annja and Reinhold each tugged on a harness and clipped into the ropes that Garin and Paul had prepared. If they encountered anything unexpected, like a snow-covered crevasse, the ropes would keep them from being dragged to their deaths before anyone had time to react.

  Annja was well used to such precautions, but it was obvious Reinhold wasn’t as comfortable. He fussed with the harness and double-checked the knot that secured the rope to it half a dozen times until Annja calmed him by reminding him that he wasn’t going out there alone; she would be right next to him the entire time.

  The GPS had already been programmed with the location of the anomaly from the scanned data. When they were ready, Reinhold activated the device and the two of them stepped forward, following the signal for nearly the length of a football field before Reinhold stopped and said quietly, “Right here.”

  Annja stepped up next to him and looked around. There was nothing to see but a flat stretch of snow in every direction.

  “You’re sure this is the right spot?” she asked.

  Reinhold nodded. “Absolutely. According to the scan, the anomaly should be right here.”

  So where was it?

  Annja turned in a slow circle, looking for something, anything, that might indicate a plane had crashed there fifty years before.

  Nothing caught her eye.

  She activated the metal detector and made a slow circuit around the spot where Reinhold was standing. When that didn’t give her any hits, she moved outward about a yard and repeated the process. She kept doing that until she had made half a dozen revolutions around the point where Reinhold was standing.

  The metal detector remained frustratingly silent.

  “Anything?” Reinhold called.

  “Nothing.”

  Could the data have been wrong? she asked herself. Could the drone have picked up on something else entirely, something not related to their search?

  She stopped and turned in a slow circle, looking for she didn’t know what. She had the nagging feeling that she was missing something, something obvious
, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what. She took in the flat stretch of land she was standing on, let her gaze roam to the sloping hills that rose from that flat surface on all sides. The valley reminded her a bit of a soup bowl. A soup bowl?

  A sudden suspicion rushed over her.

  She went down on one knee and began brushing aside the snow at her feet, digging with her gloved hand.

  Annja could hear Reinhold calling to her, asking if she had found something, but it seemed to be coming from a long way off, because her attention was focused almost entirely on what she was doing.

  She’d gone down about a foot when her hand struck something hard.

  She began clearing away more of the snow as Reinhold hurried over to help her. In just a few moments the two of them managed to clear away a circular area about three feet in diameter, exposing a thick sheet of ice that ran in every direction.

  Annja stared down at it, her heart beating madly in her chest as she realized why they hadn’t found anything. The “ground” wasn’t ground at all; they were standing on the surface of a frozen lake!

  In her mind’s eye she could picture the Junkers as it came though the pass behind them, fighting to stay aloft with at least one, maybe two, engines on fire and the wind whistling through the gaping holes in the fuselage from the Mustang’s guns. It had been April, which meant the lake could just as easily have been frozen as not, but either way, the pilot had probably seen it as the best place to try to make a controlled landing. Given the size and shape of the anomaly seen on the data collected by the drone, Annja thought the pilot had pulled it off and brought the plane down relatively intact. Once he had, the plane had either broken through the ice or simply sunk to the bottom under its own weight once it filled with water.

  Either way, she would bet it was right there on the bottom of the lake beneath the ice on which they stood.

  Now they just had to figure out how to get down there to prove her theory.

  Chapter 11

  Once back in the heated comfort of the command center, the group decided that the simplest course of action was to bring in some cold-water diving gear and send someone down to verify that the aircraft was where they expected it to be. It was going to take time to assemble the gear and have it flown to the site, which troubled Annja, but the truth of the matter was that there wasn’t any way around it. They needed the gear if they were going to survive going into that freezing water for even a few minutes. Without it, they would freeze to death in moments.

  Garin took care of the necessary arrangements, including footing the bill for all the gear, while Annja and Paul returned to the lake and used the plows on the fronts of the Sno-Cats to clear a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot area over the spot where the plane was supposed to be. Using a heating coil taken from the command center’s emergency supplies and the power from one of the Sno-Cat batteries, they managed to melt a hole two-and-a-half feet in diameter most of the way through the ice. At that point they reverted to using hand axes to chop the rest of it away until they broke through.

  Annja stared at the dark water at the bottom of the hole, knowing that in a few short hours she would be going into its depths, and felt none of the excitement she usually felt when on the verge of a discovery of this magnitude. The sense of accomplishment, of a job well done, was completely absent; Doug’s kidnapping had tainted the whole operation for her.

  Stay focused. It will be over soon enough, she told herself.

  * * *

  THE THUNDER OF rotors echoed off the mountain peaks two hours later, alerting Annja and her companions that the equipment they were waiting for had arrived.

  Annja watched a large helicopter marked with the DragonTech logo touch down long enough for the men inside to unload several large crates of equipment from the rear cargo hold. It then lifted off again to make room for another aircraft, and another. Within an hour the quiet little camp had been transformed by a flurry of activity. Not only had Garin’s men brought the necessary dive equipment, but they’d also brought generators, floodlights and a pair of prefab cold-weather shelters, one to serve as a base of operations for the dive itself and the other for the team to sleep in.

  The crew got to work assembling the gear, setting up the lights and erecting the shelter next to the hole Annja and Paul had dug through the ice. Before long the surface of the lake was brightly lit and they were ready to proceed.

  It was time to get back to the search.

  Paul, Garin, Annja and Reinhold gathered inside the shelter.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Paul asked Annja as she inspected the equipment that Garin’s team had brought in. “We’ve been going all day. Shouldn’t we do this after a decent night’s rest?”

  Annja shook her head. “We’ve wasted enough time as it is. We need to find that plane.”

  Paul moved in closer and took hold of her arm. “Annja, listen to me. You need to be at your absolute best to dive in water this cold. Wait and do it in the morning.”

  Annja pulled away, seriously annoyed with him for the first time. “I’m perfectly fine, Paul. I can handle this. If you don’t want to be here, go wait in the tent, but I’m going down to that wreck and I’m doing it now.”

  Paul threw up his hands. “All right. We’ll do it your way. Heaven forbid I try to talk some sense into you.”

  Annja knew that Paul’s feelings were hurt, but she didn’t have time for that right now. She put it aside and concentrated on what was in front of her. Paul was right about one thing; this was a dangerous dive.

  The cold was her biggest enemy, but the wreck itself would be hazardous, too. Add to that the fact that she would be diving alone, since neither Paul nor Garin had cold-water diving experience, and the risk rose exponentially. She would need to keep her wits about her and be sure she didn’t linger too long down at the wreck.

  Garin and Reinhold went out to check on the setup of the guide wire she would be using for the dive, so Annja took advantage of the opportunity to strip down to her undergarments and begin pulling on her gear. She started with a polypropolene sheath that fit her like a glove and that was designed to wick away her body moisture while retaining her body heat. Over that she pulled on a layer of insulation made of Thinsulate, a microfiber known to have a high resistance to water and one that would retain its insulating properties even when wet. Her third and final layer of undergarment protection was a shell consisting of a one-piece jumpsuit.

  Then and only then was she ready for her dry suit. Paul helped her put it on, making sure the neck seals and hood were properly adjusted to keep the water away from her skin, before helping her pull on the booties and three-fingered mitts. Fins came next, followed by a weight belt to help her counter the natural buoyancy of everything she was wearing.

  Properly suited up at last, she slipped her arms through her tank straps and hefted the oxygen tank onto her back, securing it in place. Satisfied with the fit, she tested her regulator, ensuring that it was working properly, then grabbed her mask and headed outside.

  The halogen floods pushed back the darkness and lit the place with their stark, white light. Under their glow the water inside the dive hole looked even darker than before, and at the sight of it Annja felt a brush of trepidation. She shook it off and walked over to the hole where Garin and Reinhold were waiting. A safety line had been anchored in the nearby ice, and Garin helped her clip the line to her belt. She would carry it with her down to the wreck so that she had a guide wire to follow back up when it came time for her to surface.

  “Here, take this,” Garin said, passing her a handheld dive light. “It’s going to be pitch-black down there.”

  She clipped its tether to her suit, ensuring that she wouldn’t lose it if she had to let go for some reason.

  Annja went through a final check of her equipment for safety’s sake and then, satisfied, sat at the edge of the hole with her feet in the water. She pulled her mask on and prepared to go into the water.

  Garin crou
ched beside her. “You’ve got thirty minutes, no more,” he said. “After that, we’re pulling you out.”

  “Understood.”

  She gave him the thumbs up, put her regulator into her mouth and then pushed off the ice to drop into the dark water below.

  Garin had been right; it was pitch-black. The thick cover of snow on the ice above, never mind the late hour, kept even the brilliant illumination cast by the halogen floodlights from reaching her. Hovering there with only the light in her hand to guide her, she felt as if she was all alone in the universe.

  Time’s a-wasting, her inner voice chided and she listened to it, turning her face downward and kicking hard with her legs.

  Down she went, deeper into the gloom.

  Her dive light cut through the murk around her for a few feet before being swallowed up again, so she kept her pace slow and steady, moving downward a few feet at a time. At that rate it took her several minutes to descend the one hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of the lake.

  She paused, orienting herself, and then pushed off again, cutting through the water like a seal with powerful kicks of her legs in the direction Reinhold’s scan had suggested.

  If the data were correct, the plane shouldn’t be more than fifty feet ahead of her.

  She was upon it suddenly, the dark shape seeming to materialize out of the gloom as if in response to her presence. Her dive light picked out the port engine first, jutting from the wing’s leading edge, the propeller still intact and covered with hanging strands of algae that moved slightly in the water’s current.

  Annja moved a few feet to her left, bringing the rest of the aircraft into view. For a moment, all she could do was hang there in the water, staring in amazement at her discovery.

  The plane was surprisingly intact, given that it had crashed into a lake and spent seventy years at the bottom. The cold water had limited the corrosion that the aircraft had suffered, and the damage that she could see appeared more the result of the dogfight with Captain Mitchell and his wingman rather than a crash landing, controlled or otherwise, into the waters of the lake.