Seconds passed. “Where is he?” asked one of the men, moving closer to see for himself. The submersible’s cabin lights were off.
“I don’t know,” said the engineer. He called up through the hatch. “Moritz?” No answer. Giving his companions a look of concern, he tried again. “Moritz! What’s the problem?”
“Yours,” said Eddie, stepping out of the gloom and firing the rifle down the shaft.
The nail round hit the engineer in the face and went straight through his head, bursting out behind one ear in a bloody spray. The man standing beside him only had time to flinch in shock before a second sharpened spike plunged into the top of his chest and ripped open his heart. Both corpses crashed down on the deck.
The third man turned to flee. Behind him, Eddie dropped from the docking port with a bang. Another shot, and six inches of steel punched through the running man’s upper back to clang off the bulkhead beyond.
There was only one exit from the chamber. Eddie stepped over the bodies and opened a hatch to find a flight of steep metal stairs leading down into the submarine’s engine room. Two more crewmen were in the compartment, one staring up at him in stunned surprise, the other already sprinting toward a door. The Englishman tracked him and fired. The recoil from a nail round was different from that of a bullet, but when the first smacked noisily into a bank of batteries just behind his target he immediately adjusted—and the next shot hit home, tearing into the man’s neck.
He snapped the gun back at the other engineer—who was diving for a control panel. Eddie fired, but the man had already slapped his hand down on an alarm button—his last act on earth before the nail pierced his skull. A siren sounded, red lights flashing.
Nina emerged from the docking chamber. “So much for the stealthy approach!”
“It’s not really my thing anyway.” Eddie switched the ASM-DT to conventional ammunition and ran down the stairs. “Okay, what’s a good thing to break?”
As well as the batteries, the two-deck-high room housed a pair of diesel engines for use when the submarine was on the surface, plus electrical generators and hydraulic pumps. But what caught his eye were two identical sets of machinery, complex networks of pipes and valves connected to large metal cylinders. Both systems were hooked to overhead ducts that led through the forward bulkhead into other parts of the sub. Eddie was no engineer, but it seemed a safe bet that the machines were part of the submarine’s air supply. “Nina!” he shouted as he hurried across the room. “Find an intercom and tell Glas we want to talk to him.”
She descended the stairs, spotting a panel with a telephone-like handset near the door. “What if he refuses?”
“Then he’ll have trouble breathing!” He reached the nearer of the two machines. A prominent warning sticker told him that the device was an oxygen generator, using chemical reactions both to create and to recycle the life-sustaining gas, and that the greatest potential danger from it was potassium chlorate burns. That was, in an odd way, reassuring: Since it didn’t store compressed oxygen in pressurized tanks, there was far less risk of an explosion.
He still retreated to what he hoped was a safe distance before taking aim. “Okay, Nina, get down!” He waited for her to duck behind the batteries—then fired.
The bullets tore into the generator’s pipework. A pump shattered, gas escaping with a shrill hiss. The rest of the machinery rattled furiously for several seconds before rasping to a stop. Warning lights flicked on.
Nina hesitantly raised her head. “What did you do?”
“Took out one of their oxygen generators. There’s a backup, but I’ve got enough bullets left to fuck that up too. Get on the phone and let them know. Oh, and say that if they try to force their way in here, we’ve wired the place to blow.”
“We have?”
“No, but they don’t know that!”
He found a toolbox and took out a crowbar as Nina went to the intercom and picked up the handset. “Hello, hi,” she said into it. “This is Nina Wilde calling for Harald Glas—I guess you know me, since you’ve been trying to kill me for the past week. I just wanted to tell you that we’ve destroyed one of your oxygen generators, and we’ll take out the other one if we don’t hear from you in, oh … thirty seconds?”