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"The last thing they'll expect is for us to rush out the tunnel shooting," he said to Gunn. "You take Number Six. I'll try for the helicopter."
Gunn wiped his soiled glasses clean on his sleeve and nodded. "Better let me go first. You won't have a chance at firing at the helicopter if Number Six isn't eliminated."
Giordino was hesitant to let the little deputy director o
f NUMA take on an almost suicidal job. He was about to voice a protest, when Gunn raised his weapon and disappeared into the fire and smoke.
Gunn stumbled and sprawled on his chest in the tunnel, staggered to his feet and ran forward again, fearing that bullets would cut him down the second he materialized from the residue still pouring from the tunnel entrance. But Number Six was incapable of believing anyone was still alive inside, and he had let down his guard while talking with the pilot of the helicopter.
Gunn's disadvantage was that he could hardly see, and he had no idea where Number Six might be standing in relation to the archway. His glasses filmed with soot, his eyes running, he scarcely discerned a vague figure in black standing ten yards away and to the right of the archway. He squeezed the trigger and opened fire. His bullets flew wide around Number Six without striking flesh. The searcher spun around and snapped off five shots at Gunn, two missing but one striking him in the calf of his left leg, the others pounding into the body armor and sending Gunn reeling backward. Then, unexpectedly, Giordino burst through the smoke with all three guns blazing and nearly tore the head off Number Six. Without hesitation, he swung the barrels of the three guns skyward and opened up on the belly of the helicopter, sending nearly three thousand rounds a minute tearing into the thin metal.
Stunned at what he witnessed below, seeing two men in the same uniform as the searchers' shooting at each other, the pilot hesitated before taking any action. By the time he set up to fire the machine gun mounted under the nose of the M-C Explorer, Giordino was pouring a startling volume of bullets into the unarmored helicopter. As if a sewing machine were stitching a hem, the constant stream of fire moved up the side of the fuselage and sprayed through the windshield into the cockpit. Then all went silent as the rifles' ammo magazines ran empty.
The Explorer seemed to hang suspended, then it abruptly lurched, fell out of control, crashed into the side of the mountain three hundred yards below the archway, and burst into flames. Giordino dropped his rifles and rushed to the side of Gunn, who was clutching his wounded leg.
"Stay where you are!" Giordino ordered. "Do not move."
"Merely a scratch," Gunn forced through clenched teeth.
"Scratch, hell, the bullet broke your tibia. You've got a compound fracture."
Gunn looked up at Giordino through the pain and managed a tight grin. "I can't say I think a hell of a lot about your bedside manner."
Giordino didn't pay any attention to Gunn's heroics. He pulled out a lace from his shoe and made a temporary tourniquet around the thigh above the knee.
"Can you hold that for a minute?"
"I guess I'd better if I don't want to bleed to death," Gunn groaned.
Giordino ran back into the tunnel, through the smoldering chamber, and from behind the cave-in retrieved his backpack, which contained a first-aid kit. He was back in a few minutes and worked swiftly, proficiently, disinfecting the wound and doing his best to stem the flow of blood.
"I'm not even going to think about setting it," said Giordino. "Better to let a doctor do it in Cape Town." He didn't want to move the little man, so he made him as comfortable as possible and covered him from the drizzle with a plastic sheet out of his backpack. His next chore was to call the admiral, report on Gunn's wound, and beg for a quick rescue.
When he finished his conversation with Sandecker, he put the phone in his pocket and stared at the burning helicopter on the mountain slope below.
"Insanity," he said softly to himself. "Pure, unadulterated insanity. What cause can possibly motivate so many men to kill and be killed?" He could only hope the answers would come sooner rather than later.
"One hundred and sixty feet to the bottom," said Ira Cox, staring into the sinister hole in the ice that marked the grave of the smashed and sunken U-boat. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Repairs to the Polar Storm's engine room and bridge by the Navy damage-control team won't be completed for another two hours," explained Pitt. "And since the ship carried Arctic diving equipment on board, I can't pass up the opportunity to investigate inside the sub's hull."
"What do you expect to find?" asked Evie Tan, who had accompanied Pitt and a small crew from the ship.
"Logbook, papers, reports, anything with writing on it that might lead to who was in command and what hidden location she sailed from."
"Nazi Germany in 1945," Cox said with a little smile, but not trying to be clever.
Pitt sat on the ice and pulled on his swim fins. "Okay, but where has she been hiding for the last fifty-six years?"
Cox shrugged and tested Pitt's underwater communication system. "Can you hear me okay?"
"You're blasting my eardrums. Turn down the volume."
"How's that?"
"Better," Pitt's voice came over a speaker set up in an operations tent beside the opening in the ice.
