This isn't the hardest mission in H&D; it's not even particularly hard at all, overall - or else it's impossible, depending on you. It contains the worst, hardest single moment of any mission in the game, but only if you let it happen. You'll see.

MISSION: Gain entrance to a heavily guarded Kriegsmarine command center on the coast of Norway, turn off the alarm for the access tunnel, and enter the tunnel for the purpose of getting into the U-boat docks. This is one of those two-parters, in which the next mission forms a continuation of this one.

CONDITIONS: Daytime and sunny, but practically the whole mission is indoors.

THE OPPOSITION: Pretty much the usual number of guards, goons, and gorillas, but operating in such close quarters that you only deal with a few at a time - but even one is dangerous at such close range. The ones in the blue coveralls are particularly wicked: fast as the Devil and twice as mean.

PERSONNEL: Your squad makeup isn't all that important on this mission per se, because of the way things are laid out; working along the corridors of that building, it's rare that anyone but the man in the lead has a chance to shoot. So you'll be doing nearly all the shooting, and if it were just this mission you could have just about any bunch of yolds behind you and in fact a good player could lone-wolf it.

But, as noted, this is Part One of a two-part mission sequence. As with C3M3 and C3M4, you end one mission going into a tunnel and you start the next mission coming out of it; and so if you're making any effort at all to play fair with the story, you'll need to take along the same men that you're going to be using in the next one. (In this case you might as well, since there's no real penalty; they don't do much but follow you around.)

And the next mission is going to call for some fast and accurate shooting. So take at least one or two top guns; this is a good time to bring in McGatt. Whintson is excellent too.

For this mission, though, your ass is going to be mostly hanging in the wind. Wouldn't matter if you had Rambo behind you, he couldn't help you.

EQUIPMENT: Everybody gets an MP-44. You should carry a rifle in addition, with a modest number of rounds; it'll be a throwaway. Pack lots and lots of grenades, you'll need them - Mills only, there's no place for potato mashers where you're going.

AT THE START: Everybody's standing around by a truck surrounded by snowbanks. You're facing toward the sub complex but you can't see it from here.

PROCEDURE: Leave the others where they are - absolutely do not take anyone with you - and run northward. On your left a little way along is a garage with a sentry patrolling. Pause long enough to shoot him - he's pretty clueless, you shouldn't have any trouble - and continue onward, following the path to the left and then northward again.

You'll see a couple of huge concrete buildings. Go over beside the one on your left and climb up on the snowbanks piled up beside it and lie down. Move till you have a view of the area in front of the other building. You'll see people walking around, rather aimlessly.

Take the rifle and snipe them. Stay low and get the ones farthest out on the dock area first. Then move up a little and nail the ones in blue closer to the door. They only carry pistols but in the wonderful world of H&D they can and will hit you even at this distance, so be careful.

There are four people that you have to get: two MP gunners and two of the aforementioned Olympic pistol champions. Take your time and make sure they're dead.

When you've shot all four of them, two more will come running along the wharf from left to right. LEAVE THEM ALONE. DO NOT SHOOT THEM. DO NOT SHOOT AT THEM. DO NOT EVEN THINK HARSH THOUGHTS ABOUT THEM. TRUST ME ON THIS. If you kill them you will be setting yourself up for enormous difficulty and a fairly easy mission will have become damn near impossible. Give them plenty of time to get inside and get where they're going.

This is as good a time as any to bring up the others. Simplest is just to pile everybody into the truck and drive up to the side of the target building. You can go over and join them and then everybody can move around toward the entrance.

Oh, and you can throw away the rifle now.

Don't just walk up to the entrance. There are two guards appearing at intervals in the entryway. Stand where you've got a good view of the entrance and whack those two when they show up. You can have your people beside you for extra firepower but it shouldn't be needed.

(It does occasionally happen that one of those running guys stays around in the doorway and will come out at you when you show up. But if you give them time and don't crowd them they'll generally go on into the building. Just in case, though, be cautious moving up toward the entrance, and be prepared for the possible presence of more guards. This area is not entirely predictable.)

Go in now and stand watching that door to the right of the entrance. There is a guard on the way. You will hear the sound of his boots in the hallway in plenty of time to get set and shoot him when he appears. If he's wearing regular grey-green uniform you're OK. If he's got on a white jacket like yours then continue to wait, there's another one behind him.

Before going on, you may as well pause and bring the others in and let them scavenge MP-44 ammo off the various bodies lying around.

Move into the corridor, and go around the bend till you are looking down a long straight hallway. Watch the door at the far end; a guard will eventually walk by and you can blast him.

The first room on the left is a supply room. There's a guard walking back and forth inside. The room adjoins the next one, so he may not be in sight yet. Listen for the sounds of his big flat jackbooted feet and when they recede into the next room, open the door and waste him when he comes back in. Or you could just go on past and leave him alone, but if you're a typical gamer you won't want to do that.

The other rooms along this corridor are unoccupied. One of them has some supplies but nothing you have any need for.

Time now to enter the main corridor, which runs all the way around the building. Approach the door and move over to the left, into the entryway of the last door, and toss a grenade so it bounces down the corridor to the right. There is a guard lurking there and this will delurk him.

Having killed him, go on through the door and turn to the left down the corridor. Easy, now, you're about to walk into a nasty spot. Go around the bend and get over against the wall on your right, where you can see up the corridor a little way past the bend. The first room on your left is unoccupied, so nobody's going to come at you from that direction.

The next one on your right is dangerous, though. There are two nasties inside and they're spoiling for a fight. A deserving case for a grenade or two, but just wait, hang onto your MP-44 and look down the corridor. There is a horrible man in an ugly grey-green uniform walking up and down in this area. Be cautious and alert as you move into position, because he may be right there already; he may be going into that next room on the right, or coming out of it. Anyway wait till you see him and drop the hammer on him.

Now it's not a bad idea to bring up a backup man. Move on around the bend of the corridor a little way but don't expose yourself to those two inside the room to the right. Crouch down and have your backup man stand behind you covering that doorway. On rare occasion it happens that one of the bastards inside decides to come out and attack, and you're going to have your hands full of grenade so you'd better have somebody ready to shoot.

Now grenade the room. You've got a pretty good angle from the corridor; you should be able to put one through the door readily enough. One should be enough but give it two just to make sure.

Don't try to enter the room yet. There is another horrible man up the corridor past that room, waiting to do something horrible to you. If you move cautiously to your left, looking straight up the corridor, you might be able to see him and bust him with a good solid burst from the MP-44. (He's easy to spot; he's wearing one of those white jackets.) Or sometimes you can make out his shadow. However, if you can't see him - sometimes he hides around the bend - just lob a grenade up the hallway and dismantle him.

Go in now and check out the room you grenaded, just because there's some cool stuff to look at. Take a breather while you look around. You're already through most of the hardest part.

Following the clothing room, the next door on the left is the entrance to the tunnel. STAY AWAY. If you try to open it the alarm will go off and drive you crazy and it won't open anyway.

No, the doorway you have to be concerned with is the next one on the right. It may be closed or open; there doesn't seem to be any pattern. Beyond it is a side corridor that branches into a Y shape. One guard walks along it. Check around the corner and see if the coast is clear and then step into the corridor and wait and shoot the guard when he appears.

After shooting the guard, run down the corridor and take the right branch. None of the doors along the corridor have any importance. You will find this branch comes out into a barracks-type room with lockers and mysterious rags hanging on lines. Nobody's there, no need to grenade it. Just go on through and you'll find yourself in the main corridor again, this time on the other side of where you came in. Check the map to orient yourself.

Turn left and walk down the main corridor until you see a side passage opening off to your left. Stop; don't go any farther. Go into third-person and sidle as necessary and have a look around the corner, into that passageway.

This is the Doorway To Hell. See if it's open.

As you will see by the map, the door at the end of this passage opens onto a large room, at the end of which is a much smaller room; and off that smaller room is another small room - and that is where you have to go to complete this mission. That second small room is the office where they keep the key to the tunnel that you're trying to get at, and also where they turn the alarm system on and off.

And that big room contains several Germans who want very badly to kill you, and they've got that door covered.

So if the door is closed then you've really stepped in the shit. If you just walk up and open it you will die and the only uncertainty is which of them will get you first.

It is just barely possible, with perfect timing and great luck, to kick open the door and simultaneously back up fast, firing into the room, so that you kill one of the guards immediately and back away before the others can shoot you. Then you can get the others by various means. I've done it, and pulled it off on some attempts, back before I found out how to avoid getting in this situation, but it is a ghastly experience and I don't recommend it to anyone. You will almost certainly be hit badly, and there's a better than fifty-fifty chance you will be killed, but there's no other answer; if that door is closed life has just become nasty, brutish, and probably short for you.

Various suggestions have been made, all of them useless. Somebody said you could set off a charge of explosive and blow the door open. No you can't; you can set off the charge, but all this will do is make you wait a long time till the fire goes out - the door will be undamaged and the men behind it unharmed. If you try shooting it with a Panzerfaust the door will not be damaged, but you will. And this bunch of enemy AIs will not go for the old scratch-at-the-door trick; they're not going to come out. You're going to have to go in.

Bloody scary, innit? You have no idea.

Fortunately there is no need to get into this situation in the first place. There is a way to see to it that that door is open.

Just don't shoot those two running guys at the beginning.

I'm serious. It's one of those trigger things. If you kill those two as they run then the door will be shut when you arrive and then everything will become truly dreadful. If you leave them alone, the door will be open.

This is why I said don't take anybody with you at the start. If you've got another man along he'll shoot those two and then you're in the shit.

Understand, I can't absolutely guarantee this; we're talking about H&D after all, in all its unpredictable glory. But I've never known it to fail and I've run this mission a lot of times, trying to find the key to this problem.

If it doesn't happen to work when you try it, my advice is to dump the mission and start again. When you find that door closed it's just not worth going on. And after all it doesn't take all that long to run the mission up to this point.

Having said all that - just because the door's open, don't assume everything's going to be easy. Those Krauts are still in that room and they're still ready for trouble.

Bring up a backup man - one with good shooting and reflexes - and move him where he can cover the doorway. A fast sidestep is a good idea; usually there won't be any Germans visible through the doorway but it's better to be cautious.

Now crouch down and get out your collection of fine products from Mills. Time to throw a little grenade party for the Master Race. You want to move to one side after tossing them, so the blast doesn't come back down the passage at you - this being H&D, you never know. Put one somewhere to the left of the doorway; there are two guards there. Throw in a couple more after it, just to be sure. Then cross the passage and throw a few so they go to the right of the door. Don't stint on the grenades, you might as well use plenty. Immediately to the right of the door is a particularly dangerous blue-uniformed thug, so you want to be sure and eliminate him, but there's another one farther back, toward the rear of the room, and you have to get him too.

Don't use up all your Mills bombs, though. You may need one or two a little later.

When the blasts and (with luck) the screams have died away, use the lookaround trick to check out the interior of that room. There should be four bodies on the floor. If anybody's still vertical, grenade some more.

If they're all dead - wait, wait. Stop. Before you go through that door, there's something you need to know.

There's one more covering that door. He's one of those two runners you let go by at the start. Hey, you pay for everything one way or another.

He's in that little room opening off the end of the big one, off to your right as you go in the door. He's behind some boxes and he's got a good shot at you through the open doorway.

I don't know any magic tricks to get him out of there. The doorway is in the wrong place to grenade him without showing yourself. You can, if you're fast and a good shot, try to simply sidestep through the door and shoot him. You'll probably get hit but if your character has good endurance and hasn't been hit so far, you might get away with it.

My own answer to this problem, arrived at after much experimentation, is to do a high-speed sidestep through the door, firing blindly in his direction but not slowing down to take aim, and keep on going till I'm past his line of fire. Another way you could do this would be to go to a crouch and do one of those tumbling-roll moves (hit your strafe-left and run keys simultaneously) and keep going in the same way; or for that matter it might be possible to do it with a running jump, though I've never tried it.

The idea is to get across that part of the room, past his line of fire. Once you've done that, you can just walk around and up to the door and grenade him.

Once you've smoked him, you can walk through the little room, stepping over his worthless carcass and pausing to take his pistol, and turn left and open the door to the office.

Be very alert and have your gun ready when you do this.

You will be met by a pencil-necked little geek at a desk. In all probability that will be the only person in the room - but now and then it happens that he's got company. So ignore him at first; be watching for a gunman standing beside him. (Probably in a white camo jacket, so you'll spot him right away.) If there's a guard in the room, focus on shooting him. Don't worry about the geek; he's unarmed.

Walk up to the geek and threaten him. He will assure you that he has turned off the alarm, and will beg you not to harm him. I always shoot him; he's unarmed but he's still a God-damned Nazi - or he works for them, which is just as bad - but you might prefer to leave him alive. If you shoot him the game counts it as a civilian death, but there's no penalty. H&D isn't judgmental about these things.

There is a key on the desk. Be sure and take it.

Now if you like you can wander around and check out the various rooms; some of them are rather interesting. The supply rooms contain various munitions, almost all of it totally useless for your purposes. (Why a naval base would have a supply of Panzerfausts is anybody's guess.) Probably you'd prefer to just get the hell out of there.

Bring all the men together - you can use a map command if you like - and give them a follow-me, and lead the way to the tunnel entrance. Open the door and go down the steps and into the tunnel till you are stopped. When the others catch up you'll have completed the mission.

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