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.