Henry heard the crunch of shoes on crusted sand and looked up, with the slightest movement of his face, and over him was silhouetted the bulk of a man. The man skirted the edge of their hideaway, stopped, and stared up at the ridge of the dunes. Despite the warmth of the night, the man wore black, zippered coveralls and a black helmet. His face was blackened, so that only his eyes shone whitely. His hands, sooty like his face, gripped a stubby gun with a circular magazine. The barrel weaved and probed like the head of a snake with eyes of its own. There was no sound except the breathing of this man. With every exhalation, he wheezed. Several times it seemed that he looked directly down on them, and Henry’s stomach knotted and all his muscles tensed, awaiting a red spurt of flame and the impact of a bullet. Yet the man did not see them. He turned away and walked up through the yielding rice grass, the gun muzzle still weaving in a short arc. When he was out of sight, Nina drew in her breath in a low sob. Henry’s hand tightened on her back and she was still except for quivering that came in spasms. A hundred yards to the south, where the shell road was, a light winked twice.
The landing craft gave birth to something else. Incredibly, it birthed a car, a four-door sedan with whitewall tires, shining as if it had just been rolled off the showroom floor. It had the lines of a Buick. The car slid down the ramp, bounced through a wavelet, and achieved dry, hard-packed sand. Henry thought there were four figures inside, but he could not be sure. The car stopped on the beach, and another man loped down the ramp, waded through the water, walked to the car and spoke to the driver. It seemed to Henry that they were shaking hands, and then the car moved again. Just before it swung into the shell road and vanished between the dunes, its lights came on. Henry could have sworn that it bore an orange-and-blue Florida tag, although the distance was too great to make out numbers.
Soon they heard the car whining south, fast, on AIA. Before the reflection of its lights paled in the sky, the armed men were returning to the landing craft. As if they had practiced the maneuver often, they heaved at its metal sides while its engine roared in reverse. When it was free of the beach the men scrambled aboard and its ramp came up. After it had backed beyond the breakers, the landing craft swung in a sharp circle, gathering speed. Its return to sea was much faster, and somewhat noisier, than its approach.
They watched, motionless, until they saw it join the mother ship. There was a soundless merger, almost as if the smaller boat had been swallowed. Then the whole mass sank straight into the sea. “It was a submarine, all right,” Henry said. He was startled by the sound of his own voice. He realized that these were the first words either had spoken since the landing, which seemed so long ago. He looked at his watch. Since he first sighted the hump in the sea, not more than fifteen minutes had passed. He rose to his feet, his knees stiff, his legs cramped.
Nina got up, too, and held on to his arm and leaned her head against his chest. “My stomach hurts,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.” She retched, but she wasn’t sick. He supported her as they started back for the car. When they reached the top of the dunes, both of them began to run.
This incident occurred on the day Russia announced that it had achieved equality with the United States in the production of thermonuclear weapons, a condition thereafter known as H-Parity. Had it been reported immediately, no doubt the car would have been traced, the men captured, and the country alerted.
It was not reported, for one of those curious personal reasons that so often alter the course of history, although when they reached the car Henry had every intention of reporting it. Even as he jammed his foot on the starter of his father’s old Plymouth he was estimating times and distances. The Buick was headed for St. Augustine, but the nearest phone was at the Oasis, the lunch stand and liquor store at the edge of Ponte Vedra, in the opposite direction. If he could get to the phone before the Buick got through St. Augustine, the men would be trapped, for this whole stretch of coast is actually an island, bounded by the Atlantic on the east, by the inland waterway on the west, the St. Johns River to the north, and Matanzas Inlet on the south. So when he swung the Plymouth onto the highway, he headed north.
He got the old Plymouth up to eighty and then hit a pothole and almost went off the road and he slowed to seventy, remembering the condition of the tires and what his father would say if he wrecked the car. His father was a carpenter and the car necessary for his transportation and livelihood and it wasn’t paid for yet.
Nina had been shaking the sand out of her shoes and trying to do her face and comb her hair. Now she looked up, saw that the dunes were on the right, and said, “Henry, where are we going?”
“The Oasis,” he said. “We’ll call the police from there.”
“What’ll you say?”
“Say we saw a whole pack of spies, or something, land on the beach.”
“Spies!” When she said the word aloud it sounded much too melodramatic to be real. Sounded like something you saw in the movies or on television or read in Steve Canyon.
“Spies for sure,” he said. “Never heard of dope runners with a submarine.”
“Dope runners could have a submarine, couldn’t they?”
“No. Only navies have submarines.”
He slowed for a jog in the road and she said, “Henry, who’ll you call?”
“The St. Augustine police or St. Johns County sheriff.”
“Why not the Navy base at Mayport, if you think they really are spies?” Mayport, at the mouth of the St. Johns, was an operating base for carriers. Sometimes there were two or three carriers and half a dozen destroyers at Mayport, loading fresh air groups and new planes for service in the Mediterranean.
“Maybe I’ll call Mayport after I call the police,” Henry said.
“Won’t it be on the radio and in the papers?”
“Sure.”
They were silent for perhaps a minute, each with the same thoughts. Then Nina said, “Henry, I really ought to be home right now.”
“I know it.”
“You know what he’ll do, don’t you?”
“No.”
“I mean when he finds out where we were.”
Henry took his foot off the accelerator. Nina had told her parents she was going to a late movie in Jacksonville, an imperative white lie. And Henry was deathly afraid of her father. Deputy Sheriff Pope, he had heard, had killed two men and shot others. He knew for a fact that Mr. Pope had beaten up a middle-aged tourist who had made a pass at Nina—beaten him so badly he almost died in the hospital. If they reported what they had seen, Mr. Pope would certainly hear of it. Even if the FBI and the police and the Coast Guard and the Navy agreed to keep their names out of the papers, the word would still get around to all the law enforcement people, and that meant to Mr. Pope.
“Are you stopping?” Nina asked.
“No, I was just thinking.” Henry looked at the speedometer and found that he had slowed to thirty.
“Well, I know what my pop will do to me,” she said. “He has an old razor strap. He hasn’t used it on me in years. But he will now. When he finds out we were at our place instead of the movies you know what he’ll think. And he’ll beat me. He’ll run me away from home.” Her right hand crept back over the narrow ridge of her left shoulder, as if she could feel the bite of the strap.