Forbidden Area Read online

  Dedication

  For Dodie

  Contents

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  About the Author

  Also by Pat Frank

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  one

  THERE IS no lonelier stretch of beach on the Atlantic than the twenty miles between Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine, in northern Florida. A few hundred feet inland Highway AIA parallels the surf, but the coquina road is narrow, pocked, and avoided by wary tourists. It is no scenic drive. High dunes wall the highway from the sea, and where there are no dunes the ocean is curtained by cabbage palms and stunted magnolias fighting for root space in dense palmetto thickets. On a June night in the full of the moon this beach was inhabited only by a boy and a girl lying on a blanket in a white, spoon-shaped hollow between two dunes.

  Henry Hazen and Nina Pope, both high school seniors from St. Augustine, had been there before. They called it “our place,” and used it for immature love-making, and confidences, and for dreaming. They did not consider their dreams unreasonable. Nina wanted to go to New York and get a job as a secretary, either to some big business executive or a Broadway producer. She would have her own apartment with full-length mirrors, a built-in dressing table, and a stall shower with sliding glass doors. Henry wanted to be a researcher, or anyway an engineer, for some big electronics company. He would like to find this job in Miami, although he would fly to New York to see Nina, weekends. When he became chief of research, or owned his own company, or invented something really big, like radar, she would give up her job and they would get married. They would live in one of those new Miami houses where when you woke up you pressed a button, the bedroom wall opened, and you rolled out of bed into your own private swimming pool. All this might have to wait a few years. She didn’t know how to type, as yet, and he had just signed up in the Marines.

  Just south of their hideaway an unmarked road, simply twin ruts packed with oyster shell, twisted through the dunes from AIA to high-water mark. Since this road was used, on occasion, by the beach buggies of fishermen after red bass, Henry refrained from turning in and blocking it. If he and Nina were seen and recognized, word of it might get back to Nina’s father, a dark, brooding, violent man, and a deputy sheriff. Instead, Henry eased his car into a palm-shrouded pocket off the shoulder of the highway. Then, carrying blanket and swim suits, they climbed across the dunes to the seclusion of their hollow. His caution, or timidity, undoubtedly saved their lives.

  This was likely their last date for a long time, and yet their talk faltered. They were a little sad, and a little frightened, for closing a chapter of youth is a small death, with all the chapters-to-come an uncertain hereafter. On Monday Nina would start a secretarial training course at the St. Augustine business school, and on Tuesday Henry would leave for a training camp in the Carolinas. So they swam for a time in the dark waters beyond the breakers and then walked the beach hand in hand until the soft south wind dried them. They returned to the intimacy of their hollow and lay on the blanket, faces to the stars, shoulders touching but thoughts already diverging ahead. Henry raised himself on his arm, thin and knobby as a bamboo pole, and looked down on her face. Nina was a frail girl, small-boned and slender, patches of freckles on her nose and shoulders. Their classmates thought her mousy. Henry thought her beautiful. He leaned over and kissed her and she responded for a moment, her body arching to meet his. Then she pushed him away. “It’s late,” she said. “We’ve got to go. Turn your back while I dress.”

  He wanted to protest. He wanted to say that this would be their last chance for a long time. But he saw that she was gone from him, her mind on something else entirely. He rose to his feet and turned his face to the sea.

  “Now don’t look,” she said.

  “You’ll never get hurt by a look,” Henry said. Nevertheless he did not look. It was their ritual.

  Soon she said, “Okay, you can look now.”

  He didn’t turn or answer. He was witness to an astonishing sight. Where there had been only water before, there was now a black hump in the sea. It lay less than a mile offshore, solid as a reef.

  “What’s the matter?” Nina asked.

  “We’ve got a visitor,” he said, and pointed.

  She stepped beyond him up the slope of their hollow until she could see over the rim. “Where did it come from?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. All of a sudden it was just there.” He felt uneasy. He didn’t want to say that it had popped straight up out of the sea, but now that he thought of it, that’s what must have happened.

  “Maybe it’s a whale,” she said. “A dead whale.”

  “I don’t think so,” Henry said. “It’s too high out of the water to be a dead whale. Anyway, I think it’s bigger than a whale. Must be a ship, but it’s a funny-lookin’ ship. No masts, no lights.”

  “It could be an oiler,” she said. “I’ve seen oilers in the carrier base at Mayport. It could be an oiler in distress.”

  “No it couldn’t,” Henry said. “If it was an oiler broke down or something, there’d be a lot of Navy out there with it. Now it could be a menhaden boat that lost its masts in a storm, except there hasn’t been any storm. It looks more like a big ship, capsized.” He hesitated a moment and then added, “Or a submarine.”

  So gradually that for a moment Henry thought his eyes were wrong, the black blob on the silvered sea began to change shape. It looked as if it were splitting apart, like an amoeba under the microscope in biology class. Then there was no doubt of it. A small part did detach itself from the larger mass. At first the small part seemed to be drifting, but then it assumed purpose and direction, narrowed, and moved towards shore, its speed increasing until it created a thin, phosphorescent bow wave. Soon it was so close that they could hear the muffled throb of its engine.

  Henry had heard stories of dope and Orientals being smuggled in from Cuba, and he was certain that this was what they were witnessing. He pulled on his trousers over his swim trunks, slipped on his shirt without bothering to button it, and his shoes without tying the laces. He took his wrist watch from his trousers pocket and noted the time as he strapped it on. It was 12:15. He said, “Nina, we’d better get out of here right now.”

  She put her hand on his arm and said, “Why? This is exciting. Let’s watch.”

  He wanted overwhelmingly to attain the security of the car, or at least retreat to the top of the dunes. From the top of the dunes they could watch and then run for it. But he’d feel silly if it turned out that the big boat was just a disabled fisherman and the small one a boatload of men who needed help. He contained his fear, in the greater fear that Nina would think him yellow.

  When the boat was inshore of the breakers he recognized its shoe-box shape. It was a landing craft such as the Marines used. It grated on the sand, broached, straightened, and lunged to a stop, its stern still rising and falling to the surge of the surf. So shallow was its draught that its ramp dropped into only a few inches of water.

  Men started coming out of the bow, trotting down the ramp, ten or twelve of them, all carrying weapons, sub-machine guns strapped to their shoulders. They fanned out along the beach like fingers of a fist suddenly unclenched. They deployed in a purposeful manner, and then advanced on the dunes in a skirmish line like soldiers. One headed directly for their hollow, as if he knew they were there. It was too late to run for it now, not with the sand so white and the moon so brilliant.

  Henry dropped to his knees and pulled Nina to his side. He scrambled to the
left where a clump of rice grass bent over the lip of their hollow, drawing her along with him. They pressed themselves into the sand. They tried to mold their bodies to the shape of the grass’s feathery shadow. Henry’s arm, pushing down on the girl’s back, felt an uncontrollable shaking. He didn’t know whether it was her body or his hand that shook. In the space of a few seconds their world had gone crazy. Where only a few minutes before he had been thinking about the future, now there might be no future at all, for these men behaved like hunters moving across the field to flush rabbits or quail, guns held for snap shooting. The hollow was no longer a sanctuary. It was a trap, a convenient pit for killing.

  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.

  Suddenly they were coming up on the Oasis and Henry
saw that there was a light inside. He pulled up to the door and got out. Then he saw that the place was empty. It was closed, and it was locked. A light burned in the barred liquor storeroom, to discourage thieves.

  Henry didn’t get back into the car immediately. The desire for haste was gone. He felt, rather, as if he had been given a reprieve. He said, “I guess we can go on to the Innlet, and use the phone there.” The Innlet was an expensive motel, a bit further up the coast.

  Nina said, “Henry, can’t we go home? Honest, I’m scared. He might kill you, Henry.”

  Henry got back into the car. He did not immediately start the motor. He leaned his forehead on the wheel and tried to think. If there was any way they could report it without giving their names—But that would be silly. Nobody would believe him. They might not believe him anyway. If he called there was bound to be trouble, big trouble. Mr. Pope would take him apart. Finally he said, “Okay, we’ll go on back.” He started the car and headed south again, fast, but not as fast as they had come. He felt miserable, empty, a coward.

  After a while she leaned her head against his shoulder and said, “Henry, thanks.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “If we’d gone on to the Innlet I’m sure we’d have been too late anyway.”

  “I guess so.”

  “They must be through St. Augustine by now.”

  “Sure.” He told himself that after all Nina had begged him not to call, and the only reason he hadn’t called was to save her. That’s what he told himself, but he didn’t quite believe it. He wished she hadn’t said, “He might kill you, Henry.” If she hadn’t said that, he would have gone on until he found a phone.

  As they crossed the first bridge into St. Augustine he said, “Nina, you won’t mention this to anybody, will you?”

  “I should say not!”

  “Not to anybody at all!”

  “I promise, Henry.”

  They turned into the narrow street where she lived. It was two o’clock but all the lights were on downstairs in her house and he knew Mr. Pope was waiting up for them. He eased the car to a stop and opened the door gently. He took her as far as the steps, but he didn’t dare kiss her goodbye, he was that afraid of Mr. Pope.