"It isn't just a delay tactic," Victoria muttered, her eyes fixing on the distant, shadowed outline of Dry Dock 4, surrounded by heavy perimeter fencing and obscured by canvas staging sheets. "He's buying time to move something. Or to hide the fact that something isn't there."
Chapter 12: Ghost Vessels
The fog rolled in off the Chesapeake around midnight, thick and cold as wet wool. It swallowed the towering gantry cranes and turned the sodium floodlights of Atlantic Deepwater into dim, orange halos suspended in the blackness.
Victoria pulled her dark beanie low over her ears. She was dressed in non-reflective black workwear, a heavy tactical flashlight clipped to her belt beside a secure digital camera and a handheld thermal imaging sensor. Beside her, Marcus checked his tablet, its screen dimmed to the lowest red-spectrum setting.
"Security patrol passed the north gate three minutes ago," Marcus whispered, his breath puffing into the night air. "Their circuit takes twenty minutes. The perimeter camera on the east fence line has been on a looped fiber feed for the last five minutes, courtesy of our liaison at the Inspector General's office."
"Good," Victoria said. "Let's move."
They slipped through a cut section of the chain-link fence near the timber-stacking yards, avoiding the main asphalt thoroughfares where security vehicles routinely patrolled. They moved through the labyrinth of steel plates, timber cribbing, and stacked shipping containers, their boots making no sound on the gravel pathways.
Dry Dock 4 lay at the farthest edge of the yard, tucked into a deep basin dredged out of the river channel. According to the federal manifest, Dry Dock 4 was currently housing the USS Idaho, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine undergo structural conversion to test the prototype $800 million Silent-Drive Propulsion System (SDPS)—a secret project fully funded by the grant Victoria was auditing.
As they reached the edge of the dry dock berth, the air grew colder still, smelling heavily of stagnant river water and diesel exhaust. The cavernous concrete trench stretched three hundred feet down and fifty feet deep.
Victoria stepped up to the edge of the guardrail and looked down.
Below them lay the immense, cylindrical mass of a submarine hull, resting on massive concrete keel blocks. The hull was shrouded in heavy blue industrial tarps and scaffolding frameworks, glowing faintly under a few auxiliary work lamps.
"There she is," Marcus murmured. "The Idaho."
Victoria pulled the thermal sensor from her utility belt and aimed it down at the hull. She clicked the trigger. The small LCD screen illuminated, displaying a false-color spectrum of heat signatures.
She froze.
"Marcus," she said quietly. "Look at this."
Marcus leaned over her shoulder. "What am I looking at? It’s cold."
"It’s not just cold," Victoria said, her voice dropping into a razor-thin tone. "It's uniform. A hull of that density, even deactivated, should show ambient heat differentials between the pressure hull, the ballast tanks, and the interior spaces. Look at the readouts. The internal mass profile is completely flat."
"That's impossible," Marcus said. "The SDPS reactor integration frame alone weighs seventy tons. It should be radiating at least some residual thermal mass from the climate-controlled installation rig."
"Unless there is no installation rig," Victoria said.
She pointed toward a metal gangway that descended into the dark depths of the dry dock floor. "We’re going down."
They descended the narrow steel stairs, their shoes clicking softly against the frozen iron steps. Reaching the floor of the dry dock, the immense hull towered above them like an iron whale stranded on a concrete reef.
Victoria stepped up to an open maintenance hatch on the lower starboard flank of the vessel—a access port cut into the outer hull designed to allow technicians to haul heavy propulsion machinery into the internal bay.
She unclipped her high-intensity flashlight and clicked it on. The beam of brilliant white light cut through the gloom inside the hatch.
Victoria stopped dead in her tracks.
Marcus squeezed up beside her, shining his own light inside.
The interior was hollow.
There were no high-density silent-drive turbines. There were no titanium-alloy acoustic dampening beds. There were no fiber-optic bus conduits or pressurized hydraulic control manifolds.
The interior of the massive vessel was filled with ton after ton of unworked scrap steel—rusted girders, crushed automotive engines, and iron ballast blocks—welded together in crude, heavy frames to simulate the structural weight and center of gravity of an operational nuclear propulsion module.
"My God," Marcus breathed, his face draining of color. "It’s a shell. It’s an empty pipe filled with garbage."