Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

He found a rubber tree that overhung the wall and, after a look in each direction, disappeared in its foliage. He dropped onto the lawn. Moving from bush to bush, he reached the big house.

The lawn lights intensified the shadows. As long as he didn’t expose himself to the red, green, blue and yellow shimmer, they would dazzle anyone looking out of the windows.

Duff moved along the wall behind thick crotons.

There were four men in the library, drinking cocktails. Dinner guests, Duff imagined.

No women. There were three or four servants in the kitchen and pantries; they, also, were men. At the back of the house, a concrete driveway and a paving-stone walk led to the dock where the yacht was moored. Two decks, about eighty feet long. A motor was running somewhere aboard her; she showed lights.

Duff barely managed to hide himself in time when a rear door opened and a man carried a carton of supplies to the ship. The man wore a white coat and Duff heard him speak to someone on board.

“Last load?”

“Yeah.”

The yacht — he couldn’t see her name — was going to sail soon. He tiptoed into the darkness of overhanging vegetation; his eyes searched the nearby grass and shrubs and planks swiftly, not very expectantly, but with care. When he saw at the base of tree a second square like the one now in his pocket, he smiled, slightly, grimly. Perhaps she had struggled to cover what she had done; perhaps she’d managed it secretively. But she’d left two tiny markers.

He didn’t risk retrieving the second one; he was already on the pier, near the yacht.

Instead, he walked along the sea wall a short distance, stepped over a short stretch of water and clambered aboard the boat near the bow. He could hear men talking in one of the cabins, aft; a smell of cooking came from the galley. He hid behind a lifeboat lashed to the triangle of deck at the bow.

The back door of the big house opened; men came down the walk. Duff had an instant in which he saw with horror a silent foot close beside him before there was a shocking flash and he lost consciousness…

He was in pain; the moaning sound he heard was his own voice. He was tied and gagged. And he was on a moving ship. He thought for a while that he was blindfolded and then he realized the place where he lay was pitch-dark. There had been a woman in the room because he could smell perfume. Presently he thought it was the kind Eleanor used. The engines of the boat slowed. ‘ Duff heard voices outside.

“Hello, Coast Guard!”

Thinly, the answer came. “Making a check of outgoing boats, Mr. Stanton!”

“Come aboard! Taking a little party for a cruise!”

“No need to board you, Mr. Stanton! Go head!”

The water roughened. Duff knew they were outside the bay. At sea. He heard a murmur in the dark and thought it was Eleanor’s voice. Excitement surged through him. If he could let her Know he was there — that the groaning she must have heard had been his! He tried to make a clearer sound, but the gag stifled him.

He doubted his senses then. All this was hallucination, nightmare. But she continued to murmur, and presently he noticed her complaining had a single form. A long moan and two little moans afterward. He moved his mouth in what might have been a near-grin if he had not been gagged. Telegraphy had been a hobby of his, long ago. And he’d taught the Morse code to Charles, Marian and Eleanor. If she was using it, she was signaling his initial: D. He started a series of moans to spell out “Eleanor,” but he’d gone only as far as the second e when she signaled back, “Duff.”

So, for minutes, they alternately made sounds. In that time Eleanor stated, “Heard a noise at sinkhole. Looked. Was grabbed. Brought here. By whom?”

He prepared to reply in the dark, but to his dismay, a third voice spoke, “Very darn ingenious’“ And all the lights went on.

It was a big cabin with two bunks and modernistic furnishings. On a tubular chair sat a man of about sixty — tall, gray-haired, wearing a white dinner jacket — one of the men Duff had seen in the house drinking cocktails. Beyond him on the other bunk Duff could see a female knee and the brown dress Eleanor wore.

“I’m Stanton,” the man said.

Duff made a sound. Then, realizing Stanton had listened in on their conversation, Duff moaned in code, “Ungag us.”

The man bent over Duff. His expression was cold. He had high cheekbones, rather pale gray eyes — features that spelled his Slavic ancestry— features vaguely familiar through newspaper photographs of important Miamians giving parties, heading charity drives.

Stanton stared at Duff a moment and then spoke, “I’ve been waiting for you to come around ever since we cleared the Coast Guard.” He paused. “Your — visit — wasn’t precisely expected. But we took no chances. You were seen coming over my wall.” He turned to Eleanor. “I think you both know why you’re here, in a general way. My yacht is heading for an island in the Bahamas. A small one, uninhabited and far from any others. We won’t be spotted there, even from the air, because that island”—he smiled chillily—“has been arranged so that my yacht’s hidden when she’s in. It has been a transshipment point for cargo from — another country. Cargo brought here by me. Your interrogation won’t begin till we reach that island, a while before daylight. I’m glad we have Miss Yates along. We’d intended to question her. But it will be more effective to use her as a means to get the truth out of you, Bogan.”

Duff could feel his muscles freeze. “What truth?” he painfully signaled.

Stanton leaned over him for a moment, bracing himself on the far partition for support as the yacht rocked heavily. His face was passive. He might have been talking about the weather, which was warm, clear and breezy. “Through the unfortunate fact that you got onto Ellings’ part in our work, Bogan, my value to my cause has suffered.” He was silent as, apparently, he thought of his cause. He shrugged. “Ellings believed for some time that he had you — and the FBI — fooled by the device he’d had prepared for just such a meddlesome discovery as you made. But when we found his stratagem hadn’t been entirely effective, we had Ellings destroy himself. And went on with our — assignment.”

The ship heaved and he balanced again. “You and Miss Yates will also be destroyed.

But it is necessary for us to learn, before your deaths, precisely how much information about my activities the FBI has. This will be painful — as painful as certain trained men on board can make it — for you both. We cannot judge whether our work is accomplished and will stand up or whether it must be done over by others, until we have made certain that neither one of you — and you especially, Bogan — has held anything back. Anything. That means the last hours will be — rugged — for you both.”

He went out. Minutes later three men carried Duff to another stateroom. Its light was extinguished. Sweat-soaked, Duff lay in the darkness, trying to get his mind to work at all.

Here and there in American cities the bombs had certainly been planted and were waiting for an unknown zero hour. The FBI, the Army, all intelligent services, surely knew that now. But not at what sites, in what cities.

After torturing and killing Eleanor and him, Stanton would be able to decide whether to flee the country or to go back to his palatial home, his business affairs, his social prominence and his underground activity. What he had to know was whether the FBI had connected him in any way with Ellings or with the gigantic man — evidently Stanton’s own disguise — or with the sinister boxes.

Duff clamped his teeth on his gag. He writhed in the ropes that rawly confined him.