Pier Nine was long and wide, about five hundred feet by a hundred feet, and enclosed. There were windows in the corrugated steel sides, but they were high above the surface of the bay. A faint glow from inside suggested someone had left a night-light on for them.
“This is it?” Daimler whispered.
“Yup.”
“What is it?”
“Follow me.”
McCory breaststroked his way to the corner of the dock, studying the wall facing the bay. There was a large rollup door in the center of it, indicating that the pier was actually two fingered, with open water between the fingers, inside the building.
It was.
He had to dive six feet down to find the bottom edge of the door, pull himself under, then rise slowly until his head broke the surface inside.
McCory used his left hand to wipe the polluted water from his eyes. His eyes were stinging badly. The inside of the building was partially lit from half a dozen ceiling-mounted bulbs.
And there it was.
Daimler’s head emerged soundlessly from the water beside him — the SEAL training had stayed with both of them.
“Jesus Christ!” he whispered. “What in the hell is that, Mac?”
“That’s mine.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“Come on.”
McCory swam quietly toward a ladder mounted on the right side of the pier. The ladder rungs were of steel bar, bent into U-shapes, and sunk into the concrete of the pier. When he reached the ladder, he worked his way slowly out of the water, aware of the greasy water sluicing off of him. He moved slowly, diminishing the noise, alert to the movement of any guard. But there was no guard. This was a classified project, but not a high priority one.
When he reached the top, five feet above water level, he rolled out onto the pier. His muscles yelled damnations at him, complaining about over-utilization. As Daimler climbed up beside him, dripping loudly, McCory unbuckled his belt and freed the plastic bag.
“How’s the knee?”
“Hurts like hell. You’re going to get a stack of medical bills, too.”
They stood up, and Daimler tested his weight on his knee. He could hobble along, but he, too, had lost his shoes. Unlike McCory’s feet, Daimler’s were no longer accustomed to barefooting it on alien surfaces. Ted Daimler’s feet were normally encased in lovingly hand-fitted leather appropriate to a Washington, D.C. attorney, who acquired large fees for introducing one set of influential people to another set of influential people.
Daimler looked daggers at him.
“Okay, I’ll spring for a pair of Reeboks, too.”
“Those maybe you can afford.”
With Daimler leaning on him, the two of them worked their way along the dock toward the boats. As outside the building, there was a lot of equipment parked on or bolted to the pier. Winches, bollards, welders, lathes, drill presses. Set against the walls were large, metal-clad cabinets that McCory guessed were ovens and casting machines. Everything inside the building was clean and appeared to be well maintained.
There were two boats backed into the slip, moored one behind the other on the right finger of the pier.
They appeared identical from the exterior view.
McCory’s practiced eye measured each of them at forty-four feet in length and about fourteen feet in width. Exactly as on the preliminary drawings. The bow was blunt, curving in abruptly from the sides, sharply angled toward the back and downward on the lower side. Along the gunwale edges, the deck also curved downward to meet the sides of the hull, the stern, and the bow. There wasn’t a sharp angle visible. No railings, no safety lines. Chocks and bitts were countersunk into the deck, hidden when sliding doors were closed over them.
There was no cockpit and no apparent cabin.
Instead, from the stern forward, the deck angled upward, curving to level at midships, flowing forward, then rolling into the compound-curved, black Plexiglas windshield eight feet back from the bow. Along the sides, more curved, black Plexiglas had been molded into the plastic sides. The sun would not reflect off of those windows, and nothing of the interior could be seen through them.
Nothing protruded from the sleek surface. No radio or radar antennae, no stanchions, no masts. The top of the craft was almost level with the dock, making its above-surface profile about five feet above waterline.
The night-lights sixty feet up didn’t provide much illumination, but there was enough to tell that the boats were finished in a flat medium blue that seemed to absorb light. On a sunny day at sea, they would be all but invisible. On a cloudy day, they would also blend into the ocean.
And that was the idea.
“It is a fucking boat, isn’t it, Mac? I mean, I’m just taking a wild guess.”
“Sure enough.”
“Not a sub?”
“Wasn’t planned that way.”
“How’d you know it was here?”
“Article in The Washington Post. There’s nothing like a hungry reporter delving into the Pentagon’s secrets, Ted. They’re better at revealing classified data than the KGB. They even had a fuzzy picture of it, taken during sea trials.”
“And you liked it, huh?”
“Hell, the minute I saw it, I knew it was mine.”
Daimler gave him a look that McCory knew was searching for his sanity.
“Not mine, really. It belonged to Devlin.”
“Your dad?” Daimler was beginning to get the picture. The attorney had met Devlin first in 1972.
“That’s right. He called it the SeaGhost.”
“What does the Navy call it?”
“I’m dammed if I know. X-twenty-two, I think.”
“So now you’ve seen it,” Daimler said. “What do we do about it?”
“I’m going to take it home.”
“Bullshit.”
McCory shook his head. “Nope. And I’m going to get myself a few spare parts, too.”
He pointed to the far corner of the building where three oddly shaped gray blobs rested on wheeled dollies.
Daimler sighed. “I’m not going to be surprised anymore. What are those?”
“Engines. They’re made from ceramic castings.”
“No shit? No radar echo?”
“You got it, my friend.”
McCory left Daimler standing on the dock, walked past the bow of the first boat until he found the hatchway, then sat down and dangled his feet just above the curved outer gunwale. Leaning way out, he was able to reach a recessed latch and pop it open. The hatch rose with hydraulic silence, like the doors on a classic Gull-wing Mercedes. Reaching out with his left foot, he wrapped his toes around the surgical rubber weather stripping at the bottom of the doorway, then pushed off the dock.
The interior wasn’t laid out quite like he had expected. A short, steep flight of three steps took him down to the inside deck level. He was in a narrow cross passage with another hatch on the starboard side. Several coiled lines hung on the bulkheads on either side, secured by Velcro loops. A couple of flashlights and two fire extinguishers were also mounted on the bulkhead. He noticed they were made of plastic. Midway across the corridor, there was a door leading aft and a corridor leading forward. The overhead was low, barely two inches above McCory’s six-two stance.
Dropping his vinyl bag on the deck, McCory tried the door. It opened easily, and he felt around until he found a light switch.
Flipped it. Bright light from several recessed overhead and bulkhead bulbs.
Cargo bay.
Or weapons bay. It depended upon the mission for which the boat was outfitted. Somebody was testing this boat as a weapons platform. Part of the cargo bay was taken up with a collapsed missile launch platform of some kind. Locked into racks along both sides were about forty slim, short missiles. They didn’t look like any missile he had ever seen before.