Victoria moved her light slowly across the rusted interior. "It’s not a submarine retrofit," she said, her voice icy and precise. "It’s a five-thousand-ton decoy. They built an external structural shell out of structural steel plate, stuffed it with iron scrap to hit the displacement metrics for harbor inspection tenders, and drew eight hundred million dollars out of the Treasury."
She clicked her camera into action, the shutter firing rapidly as she documented the fraudulent interior.
"Where did the money go, Victoria?" Marcus asked, staring at the rusting scrap inside the multi-hundred-million-dollar vessel. "Eight hundred million dollars doesn't just evaporate into thin air."
"It didn't evaporate," Victoria said, snapping a clear, wide-angle shot of a rusted engine block welded to a structural beam. "It was siphoned. And now we know why Lawrence Croft needed forty-eight hours."
Suddenly, the heavy concrete walls of the dry dock echoed with the sharp, harsh metallic scrape of a heavy gate being thrown open above them.
The brilliant glare of four high-intensity halogen floodlights snapped on around the perimeter of the pit, washing over Victoria and Marcus in blinding white light.
"Miss Vance!" a voice boomed down from the lip of the dry dock, amplified by a bullhorn. "I believe I informed you that Dry Dock 4 was a restricted zone."
Victoria raised her hand to shield her eyes, looking up into the glare. Standing at the top of the gangway, framed by two armed security guards, was Lawrence Croft.
Chapter 13: Submerged Secrets
"Keep the camera rolling, Marcus," Victoria whispered out of the corner of her mouth, her voice utterly devoid of panic. She didn't flinch, nor did she retreat into the shadow of the hull. She stood her ground on the wet concrete floor of the dry dock, her chin raised, looking up at the silhouette of Lawrence Croft.
"Mr. Croft," Victoria called up, her voice carrying clearly through the damp pit. "I see your security team is as responsive as your accounting division. Though I suspect your accounting division uses a much larger shredder."
Croft walked down the first flight of steel stairs, stopping at the middle landing. The light from the surface cast long, menacing shadows across his face.
"You're trespassing on a Department of Defense operational site, Victoria," Croft said, his voice stripped of the cheerful warmth he had displayed earlier in the day. "That carries severe consequences. National security consequences."
"National security?" Victoria let out a cold, sharp laugh that echoed off the hollow steel hull behind her. "You are standing over five thousand tons of rusted scrap metal, Mr. Croft. You took eight hundred million dollars of federal taxpayer money earmarked for naval defense infrastructure, and you bought junk iron and sheet metal. This isn't a national security asset. It's a crime scene."
Croft’s eyes narrowed, but he did not lose his composure. He rested his hands on the railing of the landing, looking down at her like a stern headmaster.
"You think you understand what you're looking at," Croft said smoothly. "You're an accountant, Miss Vance. You look at numbers on a ledger and steel in a dock and you think you’ve solved the universe. You have no idea how the real world operates."
"Explain it to me then," Victoria said, taking a step toward the base of the stairs, holding her camera visibly at her side. "Help me audit the reality, Lawrence. Where is the money?"
Croft looked at her for a long moment. Then he made a subtle gesture to the two guards standing behind him. They remained at the top of the stairs, blocking the exit.
"Do you really think eight hundred million dollars stays in a shipyard?" Croft said quietly. "Do you think a single shipyard CEO can sign off on a disbursement of that magnitude without three dozen hands in the pot?"
"I know how corruption networks function," Victoria replied. "The shipyard is the terminal node. Where did the capital branch out?"
"The money built this region," Croft said, his tone turning fiercely defensive. "It kept three major port facilities solvent when the commercial shipping contracts dried up. It funded the political action committees of six sitting members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It paid off the local port authority commissioners who were ready to sell Pier 9 to a commercial Chinese shipping conglomerate. It kept fifteen thousand families in Hampton Roads fed and housed!"
"You're describing a slush fund, Croft," Victoria countered coldly. "An illegal, unmonitored offshore laundering engine. You didn't save Hampton Roads. You skimmed millions off the top into shell accounts while distributing the rest to buy political immunity."