Once back inside of his office, Mr. Taylor motioned for Eddie and Teena
to be seated. Then he picked up the phone and made two quick calls. They
also must have been local calls, Eddie thought, for within five minutes
two men hurried into the office. Both were dressed in normal summer
business clothes.
Eddie’s father introduced the dark-haired one in the light-tan suit as
Mr. Paul Evans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The other man was
tall, light-haired, and blue-eyed. His name was Walter Jamison. He was
from the Drake Ridge atomic reactor. Eddie’s father didn’t explain what
either man was doing there, but Eddie had no doubts that their main
interest was recovery of the stolen radioisotope. Probably they had been
around the Oceanview College campus ever since the theft had taken
place.
“All right, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said after the two men sat down. “Start
from the beginning and give us the whole story. Don’t leave anything
out. Teena, you see that he doesn’t.”
Eddie didn’t know exactly what his father meant by the whole story. But
he started with the day when he and Teena had come upon the two men at
the cove. He told about their somewhat strange actions, and the puzzling
sight of the sealed metal tube lying in the bottom of the rowboat. He
mentioned how the men had not had it with them when they returned the
boat to Anderson’s Landing a while later.
He told about seeing the men fishing out over the sand bar the Saturday
after that, and again today.
Then, to Teena’s surprise, he brought in yesterday’s lone hike out to
the cove. He told of his curiosity over the tracks leading to the
abandoned fisherman’s shack set back from the top of the bluff, and how
he had been greatly surprised, at peeking through the crack in the door,
to see the chubby man named Roy Benton inside, as well as a bright metal
cylinder—like the one they had just taken apart in the
laboratory—standing in a corner of the shack.
“Probably it was the same tube you just took apart,” Eddie said. “When
Teena and I were rowing out to Cedar Point this morning, we saw the two
men coming down the bluff carrying something shiny. Later, looking back
from Cedar Point, we saw them anchored over the sand bar. Probably over
the same place we found the cylinder.”
“It figures,” Mr. Evans, the FBI man said. “For the sake of argument,
let’s say the two men are spies. Could be even more than two here at the
college or working at Acme Aircraft.”
“Spies!” Teena gasped in disbelief.
“Maybe they’re both hiding at the shack,” Eddie said excitedly. “You’d
better go arrest them!”
“Not so fast,” Mr. Evans said. “Arresting them isn’t nearly so important
as finding out where the remainder of the radioisotope is hidden.
Getting hold of the rest of those missing blueprints also is much more
important than arresting two men.”
“In fact,” Mr. Jamison added, “arresting them too early might tip off
the whole operation, and everyone would run for cover before we could
pin anything down.”
Just then Teena’s father came hurrying into the office. “Sorry I
couldn’t get here sooner, Steve,” he said to Mr. Taylor, “but we were
trying to locate another very important set of blueprints. More secret
guidance-system parts. I absolutely can’t figure how those blueprints
can keep disappearing, and—”
Eddie’s father held out the rolled-up blueprints which had been inside
the metal tube. “These wouldn’t happen to be the ones, would they, Tom?”
he said.
One glance, and Mr. Ross’s face took on an expression of mixed pleasure
and amazement. “They certainly are!” he exclaimed. “But how—”
The FBI man interrupted. He brought Teena’s father up to date on the
story thus far. Mr. Ross looked over toward Teena and Eddie. As pleased
as he seemed over the recovery of at least part of the missing
blueprints, he appeared even more concerned over something else.
“If I had had any idea that you two were getting mixed up in anything
like this,” he said, “I’d have insisted that you stay home and play
scrabble or checkers or something safe.”
“We—we weren’t mixed up in anything, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said quickly. “At
least, we sure didn’t know we were, and—”
“I believe,” the FBI man cut in, “that we’d better get down to cases. We
may not have much time to solve this problem. Let’s see what we have to
go on thus far. Then we’ll try to plan our next move.”
Eddie listened as Mr. Evans reviewed the situation point by point. Two
men—the one called Simms and the other known as Roy Benton—were involved
in stealing the blueprints and the radioisotope. Mr. Evans didn’t seem
at all worried about capturing them when the time was ripe. On each of
the last three Saturdays, including today, Eddie and Teena had seen them
fishing, or pretending to be fishing, over the sand bar in Moon Bay.
“We might assume, then,” the FBI man said, “that on the past two
Saturdays the men’s real purpose for going out in the boat was to drop
other metal tubes overboard. Other tubes similar to this one.”
“And remember,” Mr. Taylor said, “the first time Eddie and Teena saw
them was the very Saturday after the isotope was stolen from the
college.”
“Right,” Mr. Jamison said.
“So,” the FBI man picked up the line of thought, “the question is why
the men dropped the metal tubes out on the sand bar. It’s a fairly safe
bet that each tube contained a little of the radioactive material, plus
other blueprints. Let’s assume that the reason behind the whole thing is
to smuggle the blueprints out of the country.”
“That would go for the isotope, too,” the man from Drake Ridge said. “It
was a new secret isotope, you know. Various foreign governments would
like to get their hands on it.”
“But the men didn’t talk like foreigners,” Eddie said.
“Of course, they wouldn’t,” Mr. Evans said. “Might not even be
foreigners. Unfortunately, there are a few greedy people who will do
almost anything for money.”
“Even spy?” Teena said, aghast.
“Even spy,” Mr. Evans said. “But what we need to find out is how anyone
is managing to smuggle the stuff out of here.”
“Probably by boat,” Mr. Jamison said.
“The Coast Guard keeps close tabs on all boating,” Mr. Evans said. “And
the bay’s too shallow to allow ocean-going ships inside.”
A thought sprang into Eddie’s mind. “Mr. Evans,” he said, “I found a
rubber strap on the beach last week. It looked like a strap broken off a
swim fin or something like that. It—it has some foreign printing on it.
I have it at home.”
His announcement had an immediate effect. “That should give us a real
clue,” the FBI man said quickly. “It makes sense, too, that the
cylinders would be recovered by skin divers. Perhaps foreign divers
similar to our own frogmen.”
“It would have to be done after dark,” Mr. Ross said. “Otherwise they
would be seen. And how could anyone locate a small cylinder like that
under ten feet of water at night.”
“I think I can answer that,” Eddie’s father said. “In fact, Eddie and
Teena found that answer. It could be located with a Geiger counter.”
“That’s it,” the FBI man agreed. “For instance, they could use a rubber
boat to sneak in under cover of darkness. They would know the
approximate location of the cylinder.”
“How?” Teena’s father asked.
“By some established plan. Probably by triangulation. They could use the
lighthouse for one reference point. Perhaps some other signal light on
shore would give them a second point.”
Quickly, Eddie told him about seeing the heavy-duty battery lantern in
the shack. “They might use it for a signal light,” he said.
“Very possible,” Mr. Evans agreed. “Anyway, a little quick figuring
would locate the spot on the sand bar where the men had dropped the
cylinder. A Geiger counter could pinpoint it quickly. The diver would
recover the cylinder, climb into his rubber boat, and paddle back out—”
His words dwindled away to thoughtfulness.
“Paddle back out to what?” The man from Drake Ridge voiced the thought
that was in all their minds.
Eddie wondered if the same answer that immediately occurred to him was
shared by the others. Although soon after the article had appeared in
the Oceanview newspapers most readers had discarded it as nothing more
than an unfounded rumor, Eddie had never quite forgotten it. Nor had the
Coast Guard officially withdrawn its belief of what had been sighted by
its radar equipment that Saturday night two weeks ago.
Now there seemed no argument. It was, in fact, the only logical method
by which the isotope and the plans could be smuggled away without
detection.
“The submarine!” Eddie exclaimed.