Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

He thought that the torture had already begun, not with the physical pain of lying there, but with the knowledge of what was to happen to the girl. For the rest of his life he was to dream occasionally about that long night of agony.

Toward morning the ship entered calm water, slowed, reversed and touched a dock.

Men came for him, blindfolded him and heaved him onto a stretcher. He felt the open air on his face. His bearers walked on planks and then on sand for a little way, and finally down half a dozen steps. A door slammed. He was dumped out on a cement floor. Soon the door opened again and the men moved in once more. He heard Eleanor murmur as she was tipped onto the concrete, and he heard the heavy door shut again. He tried to communicate with her as he had before, and was frightened because he got no response. She had probably fainted.

Nearby, in an adjoining room or cell, he heard steps, grunts, thumpings, as men moved objects about. A sick stretch of time went by and then the door came open, clanged shut. Hands ripped his blindfold away. He saw plain chairs, bare tables, two kerosene lamps, four men including Stanton, Eleanor’s form on the floor and four bare walls. An underground storage room on the island, probably camouflaged above, Duff thought. “

Start with the girl,” Stanton said to his men. “She’s out,” he added, after shaking her.

“Or pretending.” He gave her a terrific slap — a slap that knotted Duffs nerves. “Out,” he said.

“Open up the case. Get the ammonia.”

One of the men fiddled in a case that Duff could not see. He smelled ammonia.

Eleanor muttered.

Someone took the gag from Duffs mouth. He worked his jaws and tried to lick his lips with a dry, numb tongue.

Stanton came to him, stood over him, suddenly kicked him. “All right. Start talking.

From the beginning, and tell everything you know. The first run through it, we won’t hurt you — unless you hold out.”

Duff found that he could hardly speak at all. They poured a glass of water and gave it to him. Then a second. And he began to tell them the now-overfamiliar story, starting with the first instant of suspicion. He talked slowly, carefully, using time, yet without any real hope that delay would help. He told nearly all the truth because he knew that if they began to do to Eleanor such things as he had read they did, he would try to stop them with the truth anyway — or with lies or by any other method. If he had been alone, he would have held out to the end or as near the end as his sanity lasted.

There was nothing in anything Duff knew to suggest that Higgins had traced a connection to Stanton. And only one way Higgins might learn. That Stanton was a director of the trucking company would seem, to the FBI man, irrelevant. Some big shot had to own it—

some man exactly like Stanton. That Harry Ellings and Stanton had been allied in evil would not occur to any reasonable person.

Duff finished.

“That’s it?” Stanton asked. “All?”

“All.”

Stanton turned to a corner of the room that Duff couldn’t see. “Got that water boiling?”

Duff said, “I couldn’t add anything if you tore us both apart inch by inch! You must know that! Why not simply — kill us both?”

Stanton smiled a little. “Just to be certain. And besides, I owe you something special.

Because of you, they’ll find the one in New York!”

Duff began to pray.

And the door opened. Daylight showed.

“Boss!” a scared voice called.

“Hold it!”

Stanton left. He did not return. Ten minutes later the door opened and a man shouted,

“All out! Taking off! Leave ’em lay! A damn Coast Guard plane went over twice!”

Time passed. Duff thought he heard the ships engines. Then silence.

A while after that the chamber was filled with reddish light, a thunderous blast. A pressure wave banged Duff against the floor. The concrete walls cracked. Sand gushed into the room. It turned furnace-hot. He thought he was dying and realized, seconds later, that he could see sunlight in the swirling, wrecked chamber.

He rolled across the floor. He got his arms up against a sharp edge of rent metal. It took fifteen or twenty choking minutes to free his hands, as long again to untie his legs. Then he crawled to Eleanor. She was half covered with sand and her nose bled.

They began digging feebly with bits of debris. Before long they had made a way out.

The room where they had been was under the island sand. Around them now were barren dunes and coral escarpments, blue sea and blinding sun. In front, in the painful sunshine, they saw a tall stand of mangrove and the well-hidden mooring where the yacht had been tied.

They looked out to sea and spotted the yacht, hull down.

The island was small — not a mile around — and except for the concealed pier, the now-smoking storage cellars, a few palms, patches of weed and water birds, there was nothing but tropical ocean. Eleanor stood with him for a moment and then collapsed.

Duff carried her away from the wreckage of the underground chambers. “More dynamite might go off.” It was the first thing he had said.

He took her down the dunes to the beach and they washed in the limpid, warm salt water. Eleanor had a spell of shuddering and sobbing. He held her in his arms until she had mastered the spasm.

“What happened? Where is this?”

Duff shook his head. “Bahamas. It was their base. A Coast Guard plane came by twice. Might have been an accident. But probably Higgins is close to the answer. I left a note, anyhow! So they beat it. Blew up the works. But they’d built that cellar like a fort, luckily for us! The blast didn’t bring the ceiling down — which they probably presumed it would. Just caved the walls some.”

“Bury us?” she said in a sore-throat tone. “Alive?”

“Would they have cared which way?” The wind blew on them. The sun shone. “We’ll have to figure out how to get along here till somebody comes for us or till we can signal a boat going by,” he said.

“Let’s find some shade. We’ll sunburn.”

They moved to the shade of three coconut palms. The yacht was gradually lost on the blue emptiness of the Gulf Stream. For a while they lay on the sand, silent, resting.

Then Eleanor cried, “Look, Duff! Look!”

He barely glanced toward the sea. Then he threw himself on top of her and forced her to lie face-down on the earth. She gasped, struggled.

“Lie still!” he ordered.

A wave of pressure eventually swept the island, bending the trees; it was accompanied by an immense rumble. Only after that did Duff sit up. Far out on the sea a cloud made unforgettable by the news pictures rose toward the blue zenith. A many-hued, mushroom-shaped cloud with fire flashes eddying enormously in its midst.

“Atom bomb,” she whispered.

Duff spoke, too exhausted for emotion and yet unable to stop the working of his mind

“Maybe they destroyed themselves that way. Maybe they thought they — and it — would be captured. Maybe an accident. They could have got too many cases of uranium too close together — a last one, dropped down through a hatch. That might have done it.”

For perhaps an hour they watched the cloud rise, change shape in the strong winds aloft, and start to dissipate.

“Somebody else,” Duff had said, “should have seen it. Though there are darn few ships in these parts, I imagine.” His eyes moved from the distant, separating clouds to the beach; they followed its curve to the Bahama Banks, a glittering, empty infinitude of shallow sea. “Anyhow, it’ll show up on plenty of instruments and a slew of people will be down here, looking, pretty soon.”

Eleanor said, “Was it close enough to — to hurt us?”