Free Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters by Alex Archer Page B

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