"Throw down your weapons or I'll be forced to shoot you," the man's threatening voice ordered.
The captain stepped forward.
"Don't say a word!"
The negotiation was over. A burst of gunfire cut down three soldiers and wounded the professor.
"I'm not kidding around, I'm not thinking of negotiating with any of you. You can be absolutely sure that I will kill all of you without thinking twice about it."
"OK, OK!" the captain shouted and threw his gun to the ground.
The fourth soldier disarmed himself as well and bent down to aid his comrades in arms. Luckily, all of them had only suffered flesh wounds in the thigh.
"How are you men doing?" the captain asked anxiously.
"We're all right," they answered.
The shooter had no intention of killing them even if his calculations weren't so accurate.
"Get up, Olaf!"
"..."
"I said to get up!"
"He's seriously wounded," Jürgen replied.
Unfortunately, one of the bullets had ricocheted off the rocks and struck the professor in the back, passing through and exiting his chest and leaving him gasping for breath.
"Why did you do that?" the professor asked without raising his voice much.
A middle-aged man appeared from the shadows of a darkened section of the back wall almost directly over the submarine.
"What a shame! I wasn't trying to kill you... at least not that way."
The white-haired man, his face lined with wrinkles caused more by bitterness than the passing years, looked down scornfully at the group he had at his mercy, almost directly beneath his feet.
"You're making a mistake," said the professor.
"Making a mistake?! I'm making a mistake? The one who made a mistake was that son of a bitch offspring of the Nazi captain who stole my Julia away from me. His race doesn’t just exterminate millions of Jews. It also betrays its friends and forgets its commitments."
"You were the one who went away."
"How dare you! You know very well that I had to come out here to check for myself that everything was in order so we could move it to Europe."
"But you disappeared for an entire year," the professor said and coughed, spitting out some blood.
"Look at what happens to you here. In the blink of an eye, you're cut off from the rest of the world. Naturally, our fathers picked the perfect place to hide the gold."
"Julia didn't know."
"She was my wife and Fritz was my friend."
"They fell in love."
“They betrayed me."
"No."
"And you, what do you know? You didn't have go into your own house and see how the love of your life was rocking the child of your best friend in her arms."
"Our fathers..."
"To hell with our fathers!" he said, finally calming down. "To hell with our fathers and their damn ideas about how to balance the scales and make the world better. None of that has mattered to me for years now."
"But why did you kill Samuel's son? He didn't have anything to do with any of this."
"But he brought you to me."
"So, now you've got me," mumbled the tired professor.
"The best part is that you brought Fritz's son here with you."
"You're making a mistake."
"You made the mistake by bringing him to me. And the dream of our parents will die with him."