ramming it upwards into the man’s face. It was the killer blow Ben had taught him, a massive upwards punch at the base of the nose that would splinter the bone and drive the fragments into the brain.
The Russian went limp in Jack’s hands. His mask quickly filled up with blood, his eyes still open behind it, like some ghastly avant-garde artwork. Jack ripped off the man’s mask and hood, spraying dollops of blood everywhere. His nose was a mess of blood and mucus and protruding bone fragments, and his eyes were covered in a film of red. Suddenly they flickered and he bellowed, pushing back from Jack and scrabbling to the far side of the chamber. He still had the knife in his hand and he leapt forward, swinging. Jack swerved sideways and caught the man’s head in a massive swipe with the flat of his hand, pushing it sideways into the wall. He had wedged his feet against the rock, and as he held the man, who seemed to hang there, limp again, he realized that the razor-sharp halite crystals on the cavern wall had driven into the Russian’s head. The man lurched again, snorting blood, his eyes crazed, and dragged his head backwards as Jack pressed on it, leaving a smear of blood and skin along the wall of the chamber.
Jack let go, and drew back, panting. The man would not go down. The Russian heaved himself half out of the water and stood there, panting, his head a blood-soaked mess, still holding the knife. Jack remembered the miners’ tools Costas had mentioned, on the ledge. He dropped down underwater, reaching blindly, and felt a handle. He wrapped his hand around it and pulled, releasing it from the salt accretion. It was a pick, with a flat, adze-like blade on one side, and a long, flat-ended spike on the other. He reared upwards out of the water, lurching sideways to give himself enough room to swing the pick in both hands. The man lunged again with the knife, missing and staggering back to the ledge. Jack swung the flat end of the pick, catching the man below the left ear, sinking it into his neck. He pulled the blade out and flipped the pick to the spike, bringing it back and swinging again, as hard as he could. The spike caught the man in the same place and went through his neck, protruding out of the other side in a geyser of blood. The man’s tongue lolled out, dripping blood, and he made a terrible gurgling noise, his eyes rolling upwards in their sockets.
Jack shook and shook until the pick came free, the man’s body flopping like a rag doll. He staggered sideways, finding a better foothold, and then drove the pick again into the Russian’s head. This time it came away easily as the man’s head split open. Jack was bellowing with rage. He struck again and again, until the head was unrecognizable pulp. You bastard. You bastard. Nobody messes with my daughter. He realized he was yelling himself hoarse, bringing the pick down again and again, slower now, his visor flecked with blood. He stopped, and dropped back into the water, panting. He felt sick to the stomach, exhausted beyond belief, but as if a terrible burden of guilt and anger had been released from him. The adrenalin was pumping through him like a massive painkiller. It felt good.
He sank back into the water, tensing his arms to stop them from shaking, and forced himself to concentrate on his equipment. He had to stay focused. He checked his hoses and helmet. The only damage was the scrape on his suit, and that had not punctured. He was panting hard, too hard, and he tried to calm himself. He looked at his helmet readout, and realized that a red warning light had been flashing, hardly visible with the blood all round. It was telling him that it was time to surface. The rebreather tanks were running low, and they were only a few minutes from crossing the decompression threshold. He checked his wrist computer, and did a swift calculation. Five minutes more would take him to the limit of the safety margin. He dropped back down, looking up to see the smudge of the body on the surface and a darkness in the water that seemed to follow him, swirling tendrils of blood that hit the rocky base of the tunnel and slowly pooled in cracks and fissures. He reached Costas, who was still entirely focused on the bomb, and came up slowly beside him, trying to control his breathing, to calm himself, to slow the sound of his heart, which was still pounding in his ears.
‘Problem solved?’ Costas said, without looking round.
‘One down, two to go,’ Jack said hoarsely.
‘I heard it all,’ Costas said distractedly. Jack saw what Costas was doing, and suddenly forgot about what had just happened. Costas had pocketed his tools and was in the final stages of unscrewing the fuse from the bomb. He released it, held it up and then pocketed it, keeping one hand pressed into the fuse pocket. ‘For my collection.’ He moved his head to get his lamp beam angled correctly, and peered into the socket. ‘Yep, ZUS-40. God damn it. I knew it.’
‘Three minutes, Costas.’
Keeping his fingers in the fuse pocket, Costas whipped out a handful of threaded plugs from his pocket, dropped several until there was only one in his hand, handed it to Jack, pulled out a socket wrench, took the plug back from Jack and leaned over, quickly screwing the plug into the fuse hole. ‘Okay. What happens is this. When I push the bomb out of the hole, it hits the floor of the cavern and arms itself. If it moves again after that, if it’s jolted, it goes off. It’s the only way we’re going to get it out of the entrance to the chamber.’ Without waiting for a reply, he finned back and then upside down, wedging his feet against the ceiling of the tunnel and pressing on the tail fins of the bomb. It tilted, and then slid out of the opening, clanging sickeningly on the floor of the tunnel and coming to rest about five metres down the slope, sliding part of the way.
‘That floor’s slippery as hell,’ Jack said. ‘Anything could move it.’
‘Okay. You’re in, Jack, then we go.’
Jack pulled himself into the aperture where the mine had been. The chamber was roughly square, about three by three metres. He looked quickly round. There it was. In the centre of the floor was a black metal box the size of a small suitcase. He reached down to the handle, and pulled. It was unlocked. Someone had opened it. Inside, he saw another metal case, about twenty centimetres across, with a Nazi swastika emblem on the top. He opened it, and stared, his heart pounding like a jackhammer.
It was there. But it wasn’t. He saw the shape, but only the impression, where the metal case had been formed to fit it. The reverse swastika. The palladion had been there, but it had been removed. The German officer. The story was right. But the Russians, their controller, must not know. He shut the smaller case, unrolled the mesh bag on his waist belt and shoved the case inside, then twisted around and powered out of the chamber, nodding at Costas and swimming hard alongside him away from the chamber, up the passage towards the lift shaft. Ahead of them he could see one of the other Russians, hanging in the water.
‘Well?’ Costas said, breathing hard.
‘Not there. But it once was. I’ve got the case, which will look convincing. The Luftwaffe officer must have come down here to get it, using the prisoners to shift the bomb, then armed it, maybe to look convincing to the guards, before they executed the Jews and he killed them. He probably dumped the lift cable from the top of the shaft.’ They were more than halfway back to the shaft now. Jack twisted on his back, still finning hard, and looked down to where they had been. The white haze in the water had mingled with the blood from the Russian. He twisted back, then realized he had seen something and turned again, stopping finning. ‘Come on,’ Costas said, pulling him. ‘We have to keep going up.’
‘Costas, something awful is happening.’
Costas stopped too, and they both stared. The body of the Russian was slowly sinking from the air pocket above, a dark shape in the dead man’s float, arms and legs hanging down, a haze of blood where the head had been. It hit the floor, bounced upwards in a macabre slow-motion dance, and then stopped. ‘Forget it,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Now let’s go.’
‘No. Look.’ Jack’s eyes were glued to the body. To his horror an arm lifted up, as if the Russian had come alive again, and then very slowly flopped back. The body began sliding, barely perceptibly. Sliding towards the bomb.
Jack glanced at his gauges. ‘We can go back. We can wedge it.’
‘No way. Going back down there means going beyond our no-stop deco time. And if we had to do a ten- minute stop on the way up, we’d run out of air.’
‘The shock wave from the explosion would kill everyone in the water anyway, right the way up to the top of the shaft.’
‘At least by carrying on and getting out we have a chance. Our Russian might take a breather from his dance of death and stay put. Now come on.’
They turned and powered back up the tunnel. Jack felt that every pulse of water from his fins was pushing a current back to the corpse, edging it ever closer to the bomb. He dared not look back again. But now there was another problem. The second Russian was barring their way. Jack pointed towards the shape in the bag at his waist, and did a thumbs-up sign. The man took out his knife. Not again. This time there was something wrong. It was the one who had been breathing heavily near the surface. Jack had noticed that he was a terrible diver, useless
