Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters (12 page)

“Is there a destination listed?”

Garin shook his head. “No.”

A glance at Paul told her he could barely contain his excitement, so she nodded in his direction.

“I’m sorry,” he began, “but what’s a
Führerhauptquartiere
?”

Reinhold answered first. “The direct translation is Führer Headquarters. It is the name commonly given to the various headquarters used by Adolf Hitler during World War II.”

“Like the Führer Bunker?”

Reinhold nodded. “Yes. The
Wolfsshanze
, or Wolf’s Lair, and
Berghold
, the Eagle’s Nest, are two others. There were at least half a dozen, if not more.”

“And now, apparently, we’ve discovered another,” Annja said. She turned to Garin and Reinhold, both German citizens despite the centuries that separated
them. “Have either of you ever heard of this Wolf Island?”

They both shook their heads.

Reinhold leaned over the table, staring at the letter. “It’s addressed to Martin. Could that be Martin Bormann?”

“That would be my guess,” Annja replied. She glanced at Garin, who agreed that Bormann was the most likely recipient in his view, as well.

Martin Bormann had been a prominent official in the Nazi Party, having served as both the Party Chancellery, and as Hitler’s private secretary for many years. He had remained loyal to Hitler up to the very end and for years had been thought to have escaped to parts unknown after Hitler’s suicide.

More recent historical works stated that he had, in fact, committed suicide on a bridge near Lehrter Station, the main railway connecting Berlin to Hamburg, in order to avoid capture by the Russians during the fall of Berlin, just days after his Führer had taken his own life.

Now here was this letter, seemingly written in Hitler’s own hand, suggesting that Bormann had actually been somewhere else during the time in question.

Could it be true?
Annja wondered.
Could the rumors of Bormann’s survival and the plan to create a Fourth Reich out of the ashes of the Third actually have some substance to them?

It was the kind of information that could rewrite history, and she felt the call of the mystery as an almost physical force. It was exactly the kind of intriguing
puzzle that she would normally jump to investigate.

But she couldn’t.

At least, not yet.

Right now our priority is salvaging the gold from the plane and trading it for Doug’s life
, she reminded herself.
Nothing else matters until that task is complete
.

“As interesting as all of this is,” Annja said to the others, “none of it helps us free Doug from the kidnapper’s control. As much as I hate to do it, we need to table any further discussion of this topic until after we’ve rescued Doug.”

To her satisfaction, no one disagreed.

“What, exactly, are you expected to do?” Reinhold asked, reminding Annja that he hadn’t been there from the beginning and had only heard a few of the pertinent details.

She quickly filled him in.

Reinhold listened to her explanation and then said, “The kidnapper demanded that you find the aircraft. You’ve done so. Isn’t that enough?”

Oh, if only it were that easy
, Annja thought.

Yes, the kidnapper had ordered her to find the aircraft, no doubt so he could recover the gold before anyone else. Annja had no doubt that he hadn’t expected the airplane to be at the bottom of an Alpine lake; she certainly hadn’t, so why should he?

That was where things got complicated. She could leave the plane—and the gold it contained—right where it was and hope for the best, or she could do what she could to recover the gold in the time they still had available to them in the hopes that the kidnapper would see that as going above and beyond the call of duty and treat Doug commensurately.

While she wished she could say that the kidnapper had been reasonable in his demands so far, that certainly wasn’t the case. Expecting her to find the location of an aircraft that had gone missing seventy years earlier at the end of the biggest war the world had ever seen, and to do it in seven days, was about as far from possible as she could imagine. She had little doubt that the only way she was getting Doug back safe and sound was if she had that gold stacked up and ready for delivery by the time she made the phone call two days from now.

In answer to Reinhold’s question, she said, “No, I don’t think it is, actually. The kidnapper is going to want to take control of that gold as quickly as possible. Bringing it up from the bottom of the lake is going to take some effort and increase his risk of exposure. That’s not something he’s going to be happy about.”

She turned so she could speak to all of them at once. “We need to retrieve the gold from the lake in the time we have left if we hope to see Doug released unharmed.”

Garin shook his head. “I don’t know how you’re going to manage that, Annja. There’s no way you’re going to be able to carry up more than a few bars from the wreck at a time. Not with what they weigh. If there are as many bars as your description suggests, it is going to take us weeks to bring them all up with only a single diver.”

“We’re not going to use divers to carry them up. In fact, we’re not going to carry them up at all.”

“Then how do you expect to deliver them to the kidnapper?” Paul asked.

Annja looked at the three men standing before her and said, “We’re not going to bring up the gold. We’re going to bring up the entire aircraft.”

The resulting silence at her announcement was finally broken by a cynical laugh from Garin. “That plane has to weigh twenty, maybe twenty-five thousand pounds and that’s before you add the weight of the gold. How on earth do you expect to lift that off the bottom of that lake?”

“With half a dozen float bags and your helicopters, of course,” she replied, smiling.

The idea was relatively simple, she explained. They would have one of Garin’s helicopters bring in several float bags, the kind used in underwater salvage operations to help right sunken ships or bring smaller vessels back up to the surface. When packaged for deployment the bags were about three feet long and two feet wide, making them easy to transport. When they were activated, however, they expanded into cylinders nine feet in length.

The group would break up the ice to provide an area of open water. They would then secure several of the bags to the underside of the aircraft, activate them simultaneously, and float the wreckage right up to the surface of the lake. From there they would attach cables to the aircraft and use a pair of Garin’s helicopters to either tow it to shore or lift it out of the water entirely, depending on the condition of the plane once they got it to the surface.

“How do you know it isn’t going to break into a hundred pieces when you activate the floats?” Paul asked.

Annja had to admit that she didn’t, not for certain. “I’m willing to take that chance. From what I could see the aircraft was pretty intact. I don’t think it crashed at all.”

“Then how did it get down there?” Reinhold wanted to know.

“The pilot probably made a controlled landing on the ice, perhaps thinking it was a flat stretch of ground and not realizing what it actually was. Before he could evacuate the aircraft, the ice must have cracked open, sending the plane to the bottom of the lake with the pilot still in it.”

It was a reasonable explanation for the condition of the plane and it matched the details as they knew them. Besides, it just felt right to her and she’d learned to trust her gut.

If the plane had made a controlled landing, the frame would still be structurally sound and they shouldn’t have any problem at all bringing it back up to the surface.

Or so she hoped.

After a bit of discussion the others came around to her way of thinking and it was decided that they would make the attempt late the next afternoon, once the necessary gear had been flown in from Munich.

With a plan in place, it was time to call it a day. Annja was exhausted after all she’d been through and she was asleep within seconds of her head hitting the pillow.

* * *

T
HE THUNDER OF
helicopters woke her up just after nine the next morning. She got dressed and stepped out of the shelter in time to watch two big AgustaWestland helicopters, like the one that had carried them from Jamaica, land nearby. Along with the floatation bags, the helicopters were carrying a team of four divers with experience in the kind of underwater salvage work she needed. Annja was pleased that she wouldn’t have to figure out how to place the floatation bags where they would do the most good, but concerned that there were now four strangers who knew what they were doing. Word could spread rather quickly, as the presence of their mystery diver indicated, and the more people involved the easier it would be for the truth to leak.

Her concerns, however, were put to rest when Garin explained that the divers were part of his personal security force and could be trusted to keep their mouths shut about what they did and saw during the operation. They were here to do their jobs and that was it; nothing else mattered to them. Garin paid them quite handsomely to insure that.

By early afternoon small thermite charges had been used to break up the ice on the surface of the lake, and the divers had taken the floatation bags to the bottom and securely attached them to the wreckage of the aircraft in the appropriate locations. Once that was complete, the team was ready to make its first try at bringing the aircraft to the surface.

Because Griggs’s attempt to follow the mystery diver’s tracks back to their place of origin had failed,
Garin made sure to post several other members of his armed security team at various points around the lake, just in case someone tried to interfere with their attempt to recover the aircraft.

Satisfied that they had done all they could to ensure a successful conclusion to their salvage operation, Annja gave the order for the floatation bags to be deployed.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, slowly at first but with increasingly greater frequency and agitation, the surface of the lake began to bubble and churn as the mass of the aircraft began pushing up from below.

The tail of the plane broke the surface first, followed quickly by the glass of the canopy up front. Soon the entire aircraft was sitting on the surface of the lake, visible in the midday sun for the first time in seventy years. Cheers broke out all around the lake as those on site—both workers and security—felt the thrill of victory at the recovery mission’s success even if they didn’t know what it was all for.

Annja wasn’t ready to cheer quite yet; they still needed to lift the plane out of the lake and onto dry land, but she did indulge in a smile that her on-the-fly idea had actually worked. She hadn’t let it show, but she’d been nervous as heck that the whole thing would just fall apart when the floatation devices began their push for the surface.

Hopefully the second step will go as smoothly as the first
.

Even as she thought it, the helicopters were moving
in and positioning themselves over the wreck. Cables were lowered to the four divers in the water, who secured them to the chains holding the floatation devices to the aircraft. This way there wouldn’t be any direct pressure on the plane’s fuselage, which she hoped would increase their chances of getting the plane out of the lake intact.

When the divers were finished securing the cables, they swam away from the wreckage so that they wouldn’t be hit by any falling debris should things go awry. When the lead diver gave her the signal, Annja brought the handheld to her mouth, depressed the talk button and said, “You are go for lift.”

She crossed the fingers of her other hand even as the words were leaving her mouth.

After that, there was nothing to do but watch and hope.

The helicopters began a steady lift, moving in tight formation and in unison with each other to keep the force being applied to the aircraft’s frame as even as possible. The wreckage creaked and groaned, as if protesting being taken from its watery grave, but nevertheless it began to rise slowly into the air, water streaming off it at every angle.

Foot by foot the aircraft rose above the water and took to the air once more, perhaps for the final time.

The helicopters carried the Junkers away from the lake and set it down in the snow on the far side of the camp, where another team of Garin’s men were waiting to release the tow cables and free the choppers of their burden.

Annja’s radio crackled to life. “Big bird to base. Mission accomplished.”

She had done the impossible!
Now
she felt like cheering.

After posting guards around the aircraft, the team returned to the command center. It was one o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, which made it three in the morning back in the States, at least, on the east coast, but Annja didn’t care. She pulled out her cell phone and punched in the number the kidnapper had given her.

The phone rang several times before it was picked up.

“Hello?” Annja said.

A series of clicks echoed down the line before the kidnapper’s voice sounded in her ear.

“Have you found the aircraft?” he asked.

“I have. You can pick up the gold anytime you want.”

His voice sounded a little different this time, as if there was an accent hiding under his excellent English. She wondered if it had been there the last time they’d spoken or if it was just an artifact of the quality of the connection between them.

“Gold?” the voice asked. “You believe it is the gold that I’m after?”

Annja’s blood ran cold. Something was wrong, and she was suddenly afraid that she knew what it was.

Still, there was no sense in admitting defeat at this point. She’d play the game as long as she could, hoping the kidnapper might give something away during the course of their conversation that would help to locate Doug.

Annja plunged ahead. “I do, yes. The original crates have rotted away, so I’d suggest that you bring new ones with you when you come to pick it up. Now let me speak to Doug.”