Free Countdown to Terror by Franklin W. Dixon Page A

all the things he'd seen. Now ... Frank sat on the grass, smiling as Joe shot a flash picture of Shauna with his camera. Joe frowned at the result.
    "Look at this," he complained. "The picture's all foggy—as if it had already been exposed. What do you think, Frank? Is it bad film? Or did I break the cam — "
    Joe broke off when he saw Frank looking at the film as if it were a nightmare come true. "Come on, it's just a bad picture."
    "Take another one," Frank ordered him. "Just shoot—anything."
    Shrugging at Frank's weird reaction, Joe took another picture of Shauna. It was just as foggy as the first.
    "This isn't a new load of film, is it?" Frank sounded as if he were interrogating Joe. "You took a perfectly clear shot of me in the airport."
    "It's the same film," Joe said. "What's the big deal?"
    "I know how the film got ruined," Frank said. "Remember how the camera fell on that little metal canister inside the dummy? That's what did it."
    "Did what?" Shauna asked.
    "It irradiated the film." Frank looked at them with growing horror in his eyes. "That metal slug had a little pellet of something very radioactive inside. That's why those guys were so upset when we opened up the coffin and found it."
    His voice dropped lower as he stared at the ruined prints. "We just saw a piece of an atomic bomb."

Chapter 13
    "AN ATOMIC BOMB?" Shauna said, stumbling over the words in disbelief. "Here in Halifax? You must be joking."
    Frank shook his head, ice growing in his stomach. "Actually, it makes a terrible sort of sense. Halifax is a big port city, with lots of ships—and people—passing through from all over the world. It's a Canadian city, a perfect place for the Assassins to launch a plot against the U.S. And there are three thousand miles of friendly border to smuggle it across—unless they bring it down by boat."
    He looked slowly from the pictures to Shauna. "In fact, I couldn't think of a better place on the East Coast to assemble and build a nuclear bomb."
    She stared at him in complete shock. "Well — we've got to do something about it! Tell the government! Tell the police!"
    Joe sighed deeply. "We can try," he said.
    "Try?" Shauna burst out.
    "I think what Joe is trying to say is that we don't have much hard proof," Frank explained. "A lot of things have happened — bombs going off, people getting hurt, even killed. But the police would have to take our word to pull it all together."
    "And cops aren't exactly eager to take a kid's word about something like this," Joe finished up for him. "They think we get weird ideas from watching too many spy movies and just tune us out."
    Joe shook his head. "The one contact we had on the force was Gerry Dundee. He found out something fishy was going on at Forte Brothers, and they shut his mouth for him."
    "We played it very straight, telling the police everything that happened since we arrived in town," Frank said. "And the detective in charge just shrugged it off."
    "Think how he'd react if we came in and told him that his case ties in with some kind of nuclear terrorism plot." Joe's lips were a hard, thin line.
    "But this is important!" Shauna wailed. "Think about it for a minute," Joe said gently. "If you hadn't been along with us and we told you this story, would you believe it?" "I ... well, I would — " Finally, Shauna nodded. "I would think you were out of your minds. Back at the Hungry Guardsman, when you first started telling me all this stuff, I thought you were pulling my leg. Then that guy tried to blow the place up!"
    Frank smiled. "Explosions are usually a good way to persuade people. But I'm afraid we can't depend on somebody planting a bomb at police headquarters when we go to talk to them." His smile faded. "We need some proof—something a lot stronger than foggy pictures and a story about a coffin. They won't go for a search warrant unless we have some solid proof."
    "Luckily, we don't need search warrants— and we know where to find some proof." Joe began