C4M3

That Little Old Bomb Maker, Adolf

This one is fun and not all that hard. Couple of dangerous spots but if you're careful and don't get impatient there's no reason anybody should get hurt.

MISSION: Destroy facility making "heavy water" for German nuke program. Just ignore that part; the designers obviously didn't know Johann Sebastian Shit about heavy water or its production, but if you just say it's a nuclear weapons research lab it works. You've got to smash the bloody thing, all right?

CONDITIONS: Night. A little snow falling. Most of the action takes place indoors so it doesn't matter.

THE OPPOSITION: Fairly numerous - the debriefing screen lists 26 enemy killed, at the end - but mostly either spread out where they can be dealt with one by one, or bunched up close enough to be taken out together. No heavy weapons of any kind.

PERSONNEL: Any four reasonably good men can handle this one.

EQUIPMENT: One explosive charge. One submachine gun or MP-44 for each man - whatever you like, doesn't much matter, the ranges are short and there's not that much shooting anyway. Lots and lots of grenades for you, both kinds but especially Mills type, as many as you can carry and I hope you're good with them because they're the key to successful completion of this mission.

AT THE START: You're standing outside the compound wall by the side gate, near the river bank, where you've left your extremely familiar-looking boat. It's snowing.

PROCEDURE: You can get right down to business on this one. There's a gate right over there; go up to the side of it and use third person to spot the two guards standing beside it inside the wall. Drop a grenade on them - potato masher works well, hang onto your Mills bombs.

There's also a sentry walking around inside the wall. So before you start with the grenades, have a couple of your men stand where they can see through the gate, and when he comes by they can shoot him. He'll probably make it easier by wandering out the gate to see what's going on.

Don't go in the side gate. Go on along beside the wall till you come to a kind of angle, and look over the wall and spot the two sentries standing inside the front gate beside the guard shack. Grenade them too.

Now run past the front gate and around to the outside entrance to the garage. As you come up by the truck a couple of Nazi bastards will run out of a doorway to your left. Gun them down - one of them may stay inside the room, in which case you'll have to smoke him out - and take possession of the office.

Go over to the door under the photo of the late A. Hitler and open it. There's nobody in the next room but you can admire what they've done with the place.

The next room, however, is occupied. One man, and he's not what you'd call friendly. Grenade him. You can do this either through the door ahead of you, or by having one of your men come up and open the outside door and toss a grenade in through that. You will notice something very peculiar about this man: he turns black and vanishes as you come in. I have no idea what the hell that's all about.

When you've killed the occupant, it's time to take over the last room in that block. This one is tougher. You can't use the same technique because this is one of those grenade-free zones that you occasionally run into in H&D - no matter where you put the grenade, it will go wild, or if you do get it through the door then when it goes off everybody dies. I don't know if this is a bug or somebody's idea of making it more "interesting" in which case may they die of the chicken pox.

Anyway the man inside this room is a really fanatical Nazi with a serious attitude. The best way to get him is to have a couple of your men open the outside doors, and then go way across the compound, over by those railroad cars - swing wide and go behind the cars, don't let him get a shot at you - and move down to the car on the end and over toward that snowbank until you can get a shot at him. You may have to move up onto the snowbank before you can see him.

You can hose a lot of lead through the doorway with your MP-44, or (I'd suggest) go back through the garage and take a scoped rifle off one of those two goons you just shot. This is another one who'll vanish mysteriously. The room contains a lot of useless junk which you will have no need for: Panzerfausts, rifles, MPs etc. There's a box of grenades marginally worth picking up, that's about it.

At this point you need to stop and lay an ambush. Take all three of your men out through the main gate - where the railroad tracks go - and lay them down alongside or on the tracks, facing inward through the gate. Give them Guard commands pointing to the area at the side of the little guard shack.

Leave them there and go back to yourself. Time now for a truly strange little journey.

Go in through the front door of the big building. The gag is that this is an old brewery which the Nazis are using as a front to hide their secret nuclear research. Hey, I know it's silly, of course it's silly, this is H&D. Just shut up and go in. You'll be surrounded by lots of huge vats and pipes and suchlike, and you'll see beer barrels all over the place, and it's not going to be easy to concentrate on the mission but be strong and quit thinking about all that beer and let's go.

At the back of the "brewery" you'll find a pair of big dark sinister-looking doors. Open them both - before long you're going to be coming back through them and you're going to be in a bit of a hurry - and before you will be a tunnel, roughly cut in the rock and lit by a garish red light. In fact it looks like the entrance to Hell, and if you screw up the next part it will be.

Move along this lurid-looking passageway - it's safe, nobody will shoot at you yet - and through the intersection up ahead. Once past the intersection, stop. Crouch down. Get over against the right wall. It's about to get moderately tough.

Around the corner, down the passage to your left, a whole shitload of mean-ass Germans are waiting with the intention of killing you. They're well sheltered by a bunch of beer barrels, too, and they've got a clear field of fire at the mouth of the tunnel you're crouching in.

Grenade time. In fact it's grenade time from here on. I hope you brought plenty.

Get out the Mills bombs - potato mashers are no good at this point, you have to be able to do bounce shots. Move a little closer to the tunnel entrance, but not far enough that you can be hit. (Look at the shape of the entrance, especially down near the floor, and consider the implications, and allow for that.) Get where you can see as far down the passage as possible without exposing yourself.

You want to bounce your shot off the far wall of the tunnel so it will go on down the passageway and get those dickheads waiting for you. You can use the underhand toss but actually it's not the best answer in this spot; it doesn't have enough power to get the grenade all the way back in there. If you'll go to third person and bend your guy forward as far as he can bend, so that his upper body is almost horizontal, and then do a regular overhand throw at 100% strength, you can get a grenade pretty far down that tunnel.

(I strongly recommend you save before you begin. Grenades in a tight spot like this are tricky enough in real life, but given H&D's notorious grenade bugs...you better save.)

Put at least four Mills bombs down that passageway, as far as you can get them. Really blast the everlasting shit out of them. Creep up beside the doorway and look around the corner in third person and see if anybody's still alive. If in doubt, throw another grenade or two. If there's even one he'll get you the instant you come out of that tunnel.

When you've silenced all opposition, go back to your gun - just in case - and come out of the tunnel. Just look at the bodies. That's what was waiting for you. Eegh.

Go down the passageway but not to the end. Stay over on the right, and stop as you get to the corner where it turns to the right. Don't go past that point. You've got two problems. There are three Germans in that little room over on the left, and another one down at the other end of the corridor to the right, watching for you.

Out with the grenades again, and put at least three into that little room. Use them liberally, you've got some more grenade work ahead but for most of it you can use potato mashers - you only need to save a couple of Mills bombs and in a pinch you can get by without any. Blow that little room to hell. When you're sure nothing could possibly be alive in there, toss in one more anyway. There's one bastard in particular who hides behind these big boxes and is hard to kill.

Now to deal with the gunman down the other way. If you step out into the passageway he'll shoot you and there isn't any practicable way to grenade him from where you are. You need to get closer. This is how you do it: put away your gun, so you're not sticking anything out in front of you. Step just barely around the corner and move sidewise along the wall, staying up against the rock so tight you rub your nose or your ass - depending on which way you're facing - raw. He's got a blind spot to his left and he can't see you if you really glue yourself to that wall.

In just a little way the passage opens up and you can step into a better position and turn to face in his direction. He's over by a well-lit doorway against the back wall, separated from you by a partition hardly higher than your head. Get out the grenades again and toss him a little potato masher present.

You'll see now that you're in a big underground room that has been divided up by a system of not very high partitions. Turn to your right and there's another German lurking in the next room; drop an egg on him. A Mills bomb is better for this one because of the angle.

There's one more in that big room, over in the southeast corner, near that truck. Try grenading the truck. Sometimes the explosion will get him. If it doesn't then grenade him in the conventional way. Be very careful because he's right by a partition on the other side of which are the explosive barrels you came for; if you drop a grenade in there it's all over. If this makes you too nervous you can go through the door and smoke him out with gunfire, but that's a pretty risky expedient.

Once you've gotten him, there's only one more remaining. He's in the room with the barrels, but he's way back by the far wall so you can grenade him without coming dangerously close to them. Use a Mills bomb, though, if you've got one left; it's safer.

While potato mashers work well in here, you must be careful not to throw too high, because if they hit the ceiling they'll explode, possibly with dire consequences. Really it's better to just carry enough Mills bombs for the job.

When you've cleared the various compartments of the big room, you can wander around checking the place out. It's got a pleasantly weird, B-movie-mad-scientist look, complete with spooky lighting. Like something on Mystery Science Theater.

The barrels are over by the partition wall. Set the explosive charge against the one in the middle, and then execute the classic military maneuver known as taking off like a stripe-assed ape.

However, on your way out, you should have time enough to pause and strip some of the stiffs in the tunnel. You can never have too much MP-44 ammo after all.

At some point while you were jiving around down there, you may have noticed the icons showing activity on the part of your men. When you come running out the brewery door you will be struck by the number of bodies lying strewn about the courtyard. When you entered the lab area it set off a trigger and a bunch of excitable yoyos came charging out of that guard shack (must have been really crowded in there, but then you hear these stories about the SS) headed for the brewery, and your boys shot them in the back. Delete the guard commands and get the poor sods up off the frozen ground, for God's sake.

In a moment you will hear a muffled explosion. Shortly after that you will get a completion message.

There's nothing left to do but scavenge up anything worth scavenging (not much - most of the stiffs are carrying MP-40s) and then everybody go pile into that truck in the garage. Start it up and drive out toward the road and that's all.

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