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A short distance later the underwater tunnel seemed to narrow, and the bottom began to rise. Pitt moved cautiously, his eyes straining into the gloom. He lifted his free hand above his head and felt it break the surface. He rolled over on his back and shined the light. The surface flashed and rolled like unleashed mercury from his movements a few centimeters in front of his face mask.
Like some unspeakable creature rising from the deep, his rubber-helmeted head with mask and regulator, eerily illuminated by the dive light, broke the cold water into the musty damp air of a small chamber. He lightly kicked his fins and softly bumped into a short flight of concrete stairs. He crept up and pulled himself onto a level floor.
The sight he feared did not materialize, at least not yet. Pitt found no bodies of the German Navy dive team. He could see where they had scraped their fins across the slime of the concrete floor, but that was the only sign of them.
He carefully examined the walls of the chamber, finding no protrusion that appeared threatening. At the far end, the dive light lit up a large rust-coated metal door. He stepped awkwardly up the steps in his fins and approached the door. He leaned against it with his shoulder. The hinges turned in their pins with incredible ease and silence, almost as if they were oiled sometime in the past week. The door swung inward, and then quickly returned as Pitt released the pressure, forced back by springs.
"Hello, what have we got here?" The words were audible, but Mancuso sounded as if he was gargling through the acoustic speaker on his breathing regulator.
"Guess what's behind door number one, and you win a year's supply of Brillo pads," said Giordino in a masterpiece of dry-rot humor.
Pitt pulled off his fins and knelt down and cracked the door a few more centimeters. He studied the threshold for a moment and gestured at the bottom edge of the rust-encrusted door. "This explains the severed phone and safety lines."
Giordino nodded. "Cut by the sharp bottom edge of the door after the divers entered and the spring system slammed it closed."
Mancuso looked at Pitt. "You said you solved the other half of the puzzle."
"Yeah," muttered Giordino, "the choice part, like what killed the German Navy's finest."
"Gas," Pitt answered curtly. "Poison gas, triggered after they passed beyond this door."
"A sound theory," agreed Mancuso.
Pitt flashed his light on the water and saw the approaching air bubbles of Reinhardt and his teammate.
"Frank, you stay and keep the others from entering. Al and I will go it alone. And whatever happens, make damn sure everyone breathes only the air from their tanks. Under no circumstance are they to remove their regulators."
Mancuso held up an acknowledging hand and turned to greet the next team.
Giordino leaned against a wall, crooked one leg, and removed a fin. "No sense traipsing in there like a duck."
Pitt removed his fins too. He scraped his rubber boots across the rough concrete floor to feel what little grip they had across the slick surface. The friction was nil. The slightest loss of balance and he'd go down.
One final check of his tank pressure on the computer. Enough breathing time at atmospheric pressure for another hour. Free of the cold water, the air temperature stood at a point where he was reasonably comfortable in his dry suit.
"Mind your step," he said to Giordino. Then he pushed the door half open and stepped inside as lightly as though he was walking a tightrope. The atmosphere went abruptly dry, and the humidity dropped off to almost zero percent. He paused and swept the light beam on the concrete floor, carefully searching for trip-strings and cables leading to explosive detonators or poison gas containers. A thin broken fish line, gray in color and nearly invisible in the dim tight, lay snapped in two almost under his toes.
The light beam followed one end of the line to a canister marked PHOSGENE. Thank God, Pitt thought, deeply relieved. Phosgene is only fatal if inhaled. The Germans invented nerve gas during World War II, but for some reason lost in the dim past, they failed to rig it here. A fortunate stroke for Pitt and Giordino and the men who followed them. The nerve-type agent could kill on contact with flesh, and they all had skin exposed on their hands and around their face masks.
"You were right about the gas," said Giordino.
"Too late to help those poor seamen."
He found four more poison gas booby traps, two of them activated. The phosgene had done its deadly work. Bodies of the Navy divers lay in contorted positions only a few meters apart. All had removed their air tanks and breathing regulators, unsuspecting of the gas until it was too late. Pitt did not bother trying for a pulse. Their blue facial color and unseeing eyes gave evidence they were stone dead.
He played the light into a long gallery and froze.
Nearly eyeball to eyeball a woman stared back at him, her head tilted in a coquettish pose. She smiled at him from an adorable face with high cheekbones and smooth pink skin.
She was not alone. Several other female figures stood beside and behind her, their unblinking eyes seemingly locked on Pitt. They were naked, covered only by long tresses that fell almost to their knees.
"I've di
ed and gone to Amazon heaven," Giordino muttered in rapt awe.
"Don't get excited," Pitt warned him. "They're painted sculptures."
"I wish. I could mold them like that."
