Countdown to Terror (10 page)

"Of course not," Joe said sarcastically. "He just wants to light up our lives with this thing." He lunged like a crazy man, trying to kick out at the coffin-bomb. His cuffs and the weight of the coffin he was attached to kept him well short of his target.

"I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful, guys," Shauna MacLaren said. "But I'm starting to wish I'd stayed with the gang from the Hungry Guardsman. At least then I wouldn't know what was going to happen."

She shut her eyes and turned her face away from the coffin.

Joe stopped looking at the bomb, too. He was half-turned away from it, trying to get his left pocket in range of his bound hands. Singh hadn't searched his prisoners—and maybe, just maybe, he'd wind up paying for that oversight.

Twisting himself very uncomfortably, Joe finally managed to jam a couple of fingers into his pocket. He fumbled around until he found the short three-sided file.

He'd popped in a couple of tools when they'd gone back to the hotel. There was no way—or time—to file through the chains on the handcuffs. But the handle on the file was thin enough to be used as a lockpick. Now, if only he could get it out ... His fingers groped for the end of the file. They touched it, lost it, grabbed it again, only to have it slip away. He rubbed his fingertips against his pants. They were getting slick with sweat. He tried again. Got it! Delicately, he pulled the file from his pocket, trying to position his other hand so he could get a better grip on it.

Up above, the cellar door suddenly slammed open. Joe jumped and lost his precarious hold on the file. It tinkled as it hit the floor, but the noise was lost as Fellawi skipped down the stairs.

"I forgot to turn off the soldering iron," he said, shaking his head. "Very bad habit. Dangerous."

He unplugged the tool, brought it back into the private office, then started up the stairs again.

"I don't believe this guy," Frank said. "He sets things up to fry us with an atom bomb, then worries about the dangers of electrical fires. Unbelievable!"

"It probably makes sense from his point of view," Shauna said. "A fire might set the bomb off prematurely."

"Before he's reached Stony Strand, you mean," Joe said. "What kind of name is that, anyway?"

"It's a small town near the southwest tip of Nova Scotia," Shauna told him. "A fishing village, really. Some of my friends at school come from there. It's very pretty."

"Well, I think it's drawing the wrong kind of tourists," Joe groused.

Frank glanced over at him, his hands busy behind his back. "Did Singh give you any slack on your cuffs? Can you get a hand free?" He struggled a moment more, then shook his head. "Mine are on too tight."

"Mine, too," Joe said.

"How about you, Shauna?" Maybe Singh had taken it easy on the girl.

But she shook her head. "If they were any tighter, they'd be cutting my hands off."

"We've got to figure some way out of this," Frank insisted.

"I almost had one," Joe said, "but it slipped through my fingers." He explained what had happened.

Joe threw himself again at his bonds. "If I get my hands on that Fellawi ... "

"That's a pretty big if right now," Shauna said. But seeing that the Hardys hadn't given up trying to escape shook her out of her own misery.

"Are there any other tools in your pocket you could use as a pick?" she asked.

Joe shook his head. "That was the only thing thin enough to reach inside."

"Where did it fall?"

"It came down behind me somewhere." Joe scraped around with his running shoe. Then he heard a tiny grating sound beneath his heel. "Here it is."

Carefully scuffing his foot forward, he brought the file into sight.

"It sure looks skinny," Shauna said.

"Let's not mention how useless it is sitting down there." Joe tried a couple of contortions, seeing how close he could get a hand to the floor. But he couldn't even get within two feet of the floor.

"There's no way to reach the stupid thing." Joe brought his foot back, ready to kick the file across the floor. But Shauna stopped him, stretching out her foot to tap his ankle.

Joe looked down at her foot, beginning to get an idea. He waited until he heard the front door slam and a car pull away — final proof that the Assassins were really gone.

"Look," he said to Shauna. "I've got an idea that's pretty far-out, but it might just work to get us out of here."

An hour and a half later they were still working on it. Joe and Shauna had kicked off their shoes and scraped off their socks. Now, with their bare feet, they were trying to pick up the file and get it into Joe's hands.

It was like a stupid summer game they'd play to pass the time at the beach. Shauna would wrap her long toes around the file, and try to lift up her leg. The file would slip away and fall to the floor. They'd both scrabble desperately to make sure it didn't bounce out of reach. They they'd start all over again.

Finally, miraculously, Shauna had caught the file between her toes. She stuck her leg out almost straight from her hip, stretching as far toward Joe as she could.

"That's pretty incredible," Joe said. "How can you do that?"

"Twelve years of ballet classes." Shauna's voice showed a little tremor of strain. "How about doing your part now?"

Joe bent over, straining against his cuffs, aiming with his mouth for the file that wavered so temptingly in front of him.

He had it! The rough part of the file grated against his teeth, but he had a definite hold on it. He straightened up, the file sticking out of his mouth like a long, thin cigar.

"So far, so good," Shauna said. "But how do you get it down to your hands?"

Joe turned back, leaning his head as far over his shoulder as he could. Back, back ... he pressed against the side of the coffin. Then he opened his lips and let the file fall inside.

Shauna gasped. "All that, and you let it get away from you! We've had it!"

"It didn't get away from me." Joe continued to twist around, looking over his shoulder. "I pulled the little pillow over here to catch the file. And now—" He grunted, straining against the cuffs. "If I can just — Got it!"

Picking the cuff wasn't easy. But it was a lot easier than getting the improvised lockpick into position.

At last, all three of them were out of the cuffs, massaging their wrists.

"Well, let's call the police," Shauna said. "We've got more than enough proof for them now." She stared at the closed coffin-bomb as if she could hear it ticking away.

"That may be too dangerous," Frank said. "This is an Omar Fellawi bomb. His crazy ways of putting them together have blown up a lot of bomb-disposal types. It may take better experts than can be found in Halifax. And I don't think there's enough time left to fly anyone in."

"So what are you saying?" Shauna cried.

"He's saying that he's probably the only person in town who's beaten an Omar Fellawi bomb." Joe stared hard at his brother. "Do you think you can do it?"

Frank took a deep breath. "I don't think we've got much choice."

He approached the coffin, remembering how Fellawi had touched it first. Running his fingers along to find the tightening bolt, he found a small button and pushed it. Then, behind the handle, another button. And there was another one, down at the foot of the casket.

Frank picked up the cover. Nothing happened. He gasped when he saw the timer. More time had passed than he thought. "Okay," he said, "we know where the final assembly went in. If we get that out, and cut the detonator for the charge that's supposed to blow it into the other chunk of uranium, we should be home free."

He pulled out the circuit tracer from his pocket. "Joe, see if you can find me some wire clippers. And bring back that soldering gun."

Frank spent an hour of agony crouched over the big bomb, tracking circuits, disconnecting wires, slowly undoing what Fellawi had built. He'd found the cylinder of the final assembly. Fellawi had surrounded it with a maze of circuitry, including two of those infamous loops.

He found trap after trap and cut those circuits out. Sweat ran down his face, burning his eyes. He had to be absolutely perfect. It wasn't just his life on the line, or Joe's, or Shauna's. Frank was carrying an entire city on his shoulders.

At last he was ready to slide out the final assembly. He eased the cylinder out of its sleeve, the graphite lubricant making his fingers black and slippery.

Then he stopped. What was that over there, against the blackness? Frank traced along the outside of the cylinder with his finger. He could hardly see it, but he could feel it. Fellawi had set a booby trap like the wires looped around the plastique in his bomb in the Citadel. But this time he'd used a black wire against the black graphite.

Holding the assembly exactly where it was, he turned to Joe and said, "Get me some wire from the desk, please. And get your knife out for me."

With a nice big piece of wire and Joe's pocketknife, Frank was able to construct a loop of his own — a bypass loop. Now he had lots of room to slip the deadly cylinder out.

"Okay. One down, one to go." He let out a deep sigh. Whatever happened now, the city was safe.

It took another forty minutes to disarm the detonator. By the time he was done, Frank's hands were black, bruised, and scratched from fumbling around the insides of the bomb. But Omar Fellawi's deadly creation was now just a lot of junk machinery in a fancy coffin.

"Now it's time to call the cops," Frank said.

Maybe he was too tired from tackling the bomb. He should have foreseen the police reaction.

They'd gotten Detective Otley out of bed. He wore a suit and tie, but Joe had the suspicion that his shirt was actually a pajama top. Sitting in the office of the funeral parlor, he listened as the kids explained the connection to the attack on Dundee.

"So this is the fort he was talking about, huh?" He sleepily nodded his head.

His eyes opened a lot wider when they mentioned what was in the coffin in the storeroom. "An atomic bomb? And you disarmed it?" His tone was frankly disbelieving. "Well, if it won't go off, we may as well leave it for later this morning. I'm leaving a guard at this site, going home to sleep, and expect to see you this morning—at a more decent hour."

"But the Assassins will get away with the other bomb!" Joe burst out.

"Kid, I'm having a very hard time believing any of this," Otley told him. "And you're not helping things by yelling. I'll see you in the morning. Period."

"You might at least call the RCMP," Frank suggested.

"And wake them up at this ungodly hour with a story like this? Later for you, pal — much later."

Joe, Frank, and Shauna stepped out of the house into the predawn darkness.

"They'll be long gone by the time you get to see Otley," Shauna predicted gloomily.

"That means it's up to us to stop that bomb from leaving for the States." Joe turned to Shauna. "Do you know the way to Stony Strand?"

"SHOW YOU HOW to get to Stony Strand?" Shauna said. "I'll do better than that. We have to find a phone."

They got a lift back to their hotel from the police. While Frank and Joe got some soda from the machine in the hallway, Shauna went to work on the phone.

"All set," she said, smiling mysteriously when they returned to the room. "We have to be downstairs in half an hour to catch our ride."

"So, tell us more about this Stony Strand place," Joe said.

"It's about thirty miles from here, on the south coast," Shauna said. "About twenty thousand years ago, the last Ice Age scraped away all the topsoil from the area. Settlers called the place Stony Strand because the beaches are ledges of solid rock."

"Solid rock?" Frank said.

"Solid," Shauna repeated. "The first time I went down there, someone pointed out a graveyard. It was the last place in about twenty miles where the soil was deep enough for burying people."

Joe gave her a look. "That's a nice, pleasant thought to start off this little jaunt."

Half an hour later they stood outside the hotel in the predawn chill. They'd dressed as warmly as they could, and Shauna looked a little like a refugee in Joe's jacket.

The ride Shauna had promised turned out to be two rides — a car and a van. The guy who leaned out from the driver's seat of the car looked vaguely familiar.

"Frank and Joe Hardy, meet my friend Charlie Bell," Shauna said, taking care of the introductions. "He's a corporal up at the Citadel."

"That's where we saw you before," Joe said.

"I'm harder to recognize out of uniform," Charlie said with a grin. "But there are some good things about being a corporal."

He led the way to the van and opened the back door. Five guys sat in the back, besides the driver. "This is my squad," Charlie said. "Will's behind the wheel, and these are Robert, Ken, Doug, Jack, and Harry. Guys, meet Frank and Joe Hardy."

His corporal's guard was out of uniform. But Frank noted that each of the guys in the back of the van clutched the antique rifle he'd been using up at the Citadel.

"When Charlie called and told us what you'd done for us," one of the guys—Ken—said, "we thought you could use some reinforcements."

He grinned as he patted his big rifle. "It's a hundred and forty years old, but this is all the firepower we could get our hands on."

"Let's hope we don't need to use it," Frank said.

"Well, let's get this show on the road," Charlie said. "You guys will be riding with me. I'll be guiding Will."

"Remember how I said I had friends from Stony Strand?" Shauna said. "Well, Charlie's one of them."

Frank nodded. "I'm glad we have someone who knows the area."

They set off west from the downtown area, skirting an arm of the harbor, then heading inland for a while. The road looped its way to the south, then curved west again as it approached the south shore.

Charlie drove steadily through the murky dawn. Joe could hardly make out the landmarks Shauna pointed to. Frank was asleep in the back seat beside him.

Rolling to a stop at the crest of a hill, Charlie said, "We're here."

Frank roused himself to look down on a scene that should have been on a postcard. Stony Strand was little more than a village, a handful of gaily painted and weather-beaten houses scattered along the shore of a small cove. Piers lined an inlet from the cove, where fishing boats bobbed at anchor.