The Smuggled Atom Bomb

He paced the porch, wondering what else might have happened to her, what less-horrifying thing. She had last been seen in the big yard, by Scotty and her mother, over near the banyan. He stood at the porch rail and looked at the black arcades beneath the trunks of the great tree. Had somebody been concealed there?

Suddenly, as if he had been told, Duff realized what had happened: Eleanor hadn’t previously known anything that had made her freedom on her existence a danger to “them.”

What had happened was that she had heard something from the lawn, down near the banyan.

He raced through the house, startling Mrs. Yates and the two children. “Be right back! Ten — fifteen minutes!”

He picked up the flashlight. In the barn, he shouldered a ladder.

Charles yelled, “Need me?”

“No, Charley! Stay with your mother.”

It was hard work moving through the jungle with the ladder. Time and again it hooked over trees and fouled up on boughs or vines so that he had to use his light, stop and maneuver. When, finally, he reached the sinkhole, he was panting heavily. He stood there, afraid to swing the beam of the electric torch. He shut his jaws and aimed the light down and around the edges. He didn’t see what he feared he would: a body. A girl’s body in a brown dress.

The ladder splashed in the water. It was, he noticed, abnormally muddy. Plenty of time to settle since he had roiled it. In the water, he plunged for balance as his feet settled uncertainly. His torch circled the recesses. All he saw was water, rock and innumerable roots.

A big moth flew through the light beam. He pushed forward under the rocky roof of the edge.

There were fresh tracks. He was sure of that. He was surer still when he could no longer find the one print that had held his attention, the mark of the side of a shoe on a foot that seemed legless. “They” had been in the pit that afternoon, taking the boxes away. But how had they kept from being seen?

Eleanor, because she had gone over to the banyan, must have heard a sound in the woods and gone to look. In daylight he could probably find the marks of her heels. She had gone to look. And that was that.

Where was she now? Alive? A prisoner? He groaned and only the walls answered sepulchrally. His flashlight fell sharply on the stones and threw sharp shadows. The recess was deeper than he’d thought. He waded back. It seemed to turn at a projecting wall.

Following the turn, Duff found a new feature of the sinkhole. An arch of limestone, shoulder-high, spanned some ten feet of water. He leaned and shone his light along its surface. The tunnel, half air and half water, led into the distance in a meandering line as far as he could see.

Some hundreds of yards away in. that direction was the overgrown real-estate development where Harry Ellings had had his furtive rendezvous with the gigantic man. And beyond those cracked sidewalks, cabbage palms and broken lampposts was the old rock pit, now used as a dump.

Sinkholes, if they held water, were sometimes connected, underground, with others.

This one could communicate with the water in the rock pit. In that case, the value of the Yates land to anyone wishing to store desperate cargo was self-evident. Such cargo could be unloaded at night in the old quarry and dragged through this tunnel to the place where he stood. It could then be buried in the soft ooze. And no one watching the house or its surrounding grove of jungle trees would see a sign of coming and going. Duff peered again.

Surely the boxes went out here that afternoon. Perhaps Eleanor also—

He started into the opening and changed his mind. The tunnel might go to the quarry.

It might be a blind pocket. It might have a hundred forks and turns; he could get lost underground. It was not sensible, not even sane, to explore alone. Taking gasps of air, he yelled “Eleanor!” repeatedly. Nothing came back but echoes.

He left the pit and raced toward the house. As he rounded the banyan tree he heard a distant siren.

Mrs. Yates saw him enter and paled. “You’re wet!”

“I’m all right. I was looking in that rock pit in the woods. Nothing. Don’t worry so, mother!”

He changed to dry clothes as rapidly as he could. When he came down, Higgins, with two men in business suits whom he’d never seen and two cops, had just come in. Duff jerked his head at the FBI man and they went to the kitchen, where he told Higgins about the sinkhole.

The men, soaking wet, yelling in the low, rocky passages, found a route to the quarry.

They found ample signs that men had used it — often and for a long time. They found evidence that vehicles had driven up to the quarry at a point different from the one used by dump trucks. But no trace of Eleanor.

Near midnight Higgins sat with Duff in the kitchen. Both were muddy to the waist.

But Higgins had been on the telephone for twenty minutes. He gulped coffee now and wiped a sticky forehead with a sodden handkerchief.

“Nothing!” he said to Duff. “No lead! Nothing new on the whole proposition. What we’ve got to do is go over it.”