“Just ahead of the caboose.”
“It would have been located about right.” Randolph looked at Haynes. “Did you look into the ice bunkers?”
“Sure, nothing in them but ice.”
Burkett looked slightly puzzled. Randolph explained: “At each end of the car is a compartment into which ice is loaded through hatches in the roof. Fans blow from the ice into the body of the car and cool the load.”
Burkett put the question: “Did you look under the ice, Haynes?”
“No. Why should I?”
Randolph picked up the phone, and after a short delay, got the Mexican freight depot on the line. He asked the sleepy agent: “Have you moved a PFE 72127 out of the Taller Mecanico in the last few days?”
The answer came abruptly. “In and out. Iced this afternoon. Crossed it this evening. Who’s calling?”
Randolph hung up gently. “That car was in Suarez’ shop for awhile.”
“Let’s go,” said Burkett, “and let’s go carefully. The man who shot Gomez is dangerous.”
Haynes complained bitterly that he would be missing the excitement because duty kept him at the custom house. But there was nothing to hold Randolph.
Burkett chose to ride with him. “You don’t have to get involved any deeper in this.”
Randolph said, “I just want to show you how wrong you are, thinking that I’m mixed up in it any way.”
“Lots of things pointed at you. For instance, uranium was missing from the Project. Some day we’ll learn how it was smuggled out. The loss was discovered almost immediately. Two things helped us: it had vanished apparently the same day you, Smetana, and Henrietta left. They never got to New York where they were due. Nobody knew where you were until I saw you here, but you were high on the suspect list. We had to work fast. There was no time, for investigation. So don’t blame me too much for jumping you.”
Randolph said, “Forget it,” watching the yellow strip of dusty road reel up under the wheels of his hurrying vehicle. “The immediate question is — where to stop the train?”
“On the road to the Papago village that lies out there along the border?” Burkett waved his hand toward the east.
“Yes. We race the train to the crossing. We park on the track and hope it stops in time.”
“They’ll stop,” Burkett promised, “if I have to blow the engineer off his seat with a shotgun.”
That kind of action was not necessary. The train was crawling at a bare five miles per hour as it approached the crossing.
Burkett, with Randolph, questioned the crew while the other men went over the train from head to rear end, with ready guns and strong flashlights. They found no one.
“If the assassin was on this train,” Burkett finally concluded, “He got off. And for all we know he could be out there in the brush with us in his sights right now.”
He looked at Randolph.
It gave Randolph a creepy feeling. Of them all, he probably had the greatest reason to believe the gun sights might be trained on him. He was conscious of his vulnerability when he joined the agents as they swarmed all over car PFE 72127 like harvester ants in an ant hill.
They tossed chunks of ice from the bunkers to the ground in complete disregard for the preservation of Crown Produce Distributor’s valuable load of sweet-smelling cantaloupes.
They found no atom bomb. They found nothing that remotely resembled one.
But after they had removed the ice from the head-end bunker, they did find something not normally kept in such a place.
They found Smetana’s body.
All of his fingers had been broken. His toes were flattened as though they had been beaten and smashed with a hammer. There was a small blue hole in the middle of his ice-cold forehead. The back of his head was a mass of hair and clotted frozen blood.
“He didn’t give away any secrets voluntarily,” Burkett said.
Randolph could also acknowledge that. He could also remember what he knew and what he had heard of the beatings, humiliations, and mental tortures to which Smetana had subjected Henrietta during their married life.
They wrapped Smetana in a blanket from the caboose, laid him on the ice in which he had been entombed. He was frozen so stiff that it indicated he had been that way for some little time.
“He was an unpleasant man,” Randolph said. “We had standing orders never to speak to him, when he came into any of the areas we guarded. His mind was always ’way out. He would have any man fired who disturbed his calculations.”
He wished he knew more about what had transpired after Smetana had entered Santo Tomas. He wished Gomez had lived to tell. Now they might never know who shot the scientist.
Burkett dispatched an agent into San Manuel for a driver and a pickup to transport Smetana’s body back to Santo Tomas. Burkett signed a release for the conductor, warning the crew to remain available for questioning. Then the late train moved out fast to meet its schedule.
In the gray light of that quiet day’s dawn they unloaded the entire car of its cargo. Clear to the duckboards on the floor. Long before they had lifted out and examined the last crate, Randolph had given in to a growing despair.
But Burkett put it into words. “Somewhere we have misread our leads. We’re off on a side trail into a box canyon.”
They were standing, dirty, damp, and disheveled, beside the track. There was suddenly nothing more to be done. Burkett was gloomy. His investigation was collapsing around him.
“Here we stand,” he said, “in the middle of the great Indian reservation, with our fingers up our noses and somewhere a madman has control of a blast maybe big enough to hoist a hundred and fifty thousand people into outer space.”
“There is radio,” Randolph said. “Pass the word. A massive net could be thrown around Phoenix with Army and Air Force personnel. A search could be made of every conveyance from a baby carriage to a Diesel tanker.”
“And aircraft?”
“Those, too.” Randolph studied the railroad car. “And this. Those are thick walls. There could be spaces hollowed out between them in the insulation.” He looked down at the heavy tracks. “It may be possible for a clever machinist to design a device that would look like a part of the rolling gear. Have them leave the car here, Burkett, and ask for someone with detection instruments to go over it.”
“I’m away ahead of you there,” Burkett said. “I radioed a request when we were at Santo Tomas. Technicians are on the way.”
There was nothing more for them here. They loaded Smetana into a pickup truck that the agent had commandeered. A shiny-faced fat Papago driver had no words and no interest in the blanket-wrapped body. He took off toward Santo Tomas. The pickup clattered tinnily over the washboard road with its tailgate chains rattling loudly in this quiet desert dawn.
An early trucker, wheeling a tarpaulin-covered one-and-a-half ton stake truck, thumped slowly over the railroad crossing in the pickup’s dust. The discouraged men standing by the unloaded car could hear both vehicles for a long time.
Now the agents could load themselves into vehicles and depart. For Randolph, again alone with Burkett, there was a vision of a long cold shower and twelve hours of sleep.
“Somebody is going to be unhappy about those cantaloupes,” he said.
“Don’t bother me with details,” Burkett said. “They are the least of my worries.”
Randolph had an idea of the way Burkett felt. This just wasn’t the kind of job you worked at for eight hours and then walked off and forgot.
The early morning sun was laying its orange paint and blue shadows across the land. The smell of stirred dust along with the background odors of mesquite and creosote bush came through the open window. Randolph drove around a long bend in the road. Ahead was the big tarpaulined stake body truck, using all of the road. It pulled slowly over at the command of Randolph’s horn.