Текст книги "Plague Ship"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“Which reminds me, Mr. Overholt,” Eddie said from the head of the room. “You will have our naval forces pulled far enough back from Bandar Abbas that any charge of American intervention by Tehran will prove fruitless?”

“There isn’t an American ship within a hundred miles of the port,” Overholt assured. “It took some doing to keep the Fifth Fleet brass from getting suspicions of their own, but we’re set on that end of it.” Cabrillo cleared his throat. “Let’s just do it. In twelve hours, we’ll have the proof you need to take the Russians to task. We all understand the risks, but if they mean that the Kremlin’s going to be forced to rethink selling arms to every mullah with deep pockets we have to go.”

“I know. You’re right,” Overholt sighed. “Juan, just be careful, okay?”

“Count on it, my friend.”

“Do you need me to stay on the line?” the veteran CIA officer asked.

“You know where to deposit the money once we’re out,” Juan replied. “Unless you want to know specifics of our operation, I think you should hang up.”

“You got it.” The line clicked dead.

Juan addressed the assembled officers. “Okay, we’ve been at this long enough. Are there any last-minute details that need to be cleared up before we adjourn?”

“The containers on deck,” Max said. “Should we start breaking them down at nightfall or wait until you return from the navy base and we’re under way? And what about the paint and the other camouflage measures?”

The stacks of containers littering the Oregon’s deck were so much window dressing, just another way for the crew to hide the nature of their ship. They could be folded flat and stored in one of her holds, altering her silhouette. The blue paint coating her hull and the green covering her upperworks was an environmentally friendly pigment that could be washed off using the fire-suppression water cannons mounted on the superstructure. Beneath the paint her hull was a patchwork of mismatched colors that looked as though they had been applied over a couple of generations of owners. That coating, however, was a radar-absorbing compound similar to the skin of a stealth fighter.

Metal plates had also been installed around key features of the ship to further distort her shape. A fairing over her bows that gave her a racier look would be removed. The twin funnels she was currently carrying would be dismantled and a large, oval stack erected to replace them. This funnel also acted as armor to protect her main radar domes, which were currently retracted into the amidships accommodations block.

To further change her appearance, the ballast tanks would be flooded to make her look like her holds were loaded with goods.

In all, it would take four hours and the work of every crewman aboard, but, when they were done, the Noregowould have vanished completely and the Oregonwould be sailing innocently down the Persian Gulf, flying, ironically, the Iranian flag, because that was where the ship was actually registered.

Juan thought for a moment before answering, balancing risk versus reward. “Eric, what’s the moon tonight?”

“Only a quarter,” the ship’s navigator and de facto weather-man said. “And the meteorological report calls for cloud cover after midnight.”

“Let’s leave everything in place until midnight,” Cabrillo told his crew. “We should be back aboard by two A.M. We’ll have a two-hour head start on the conversion work, but if something goes wrong we can put everything back quickly enough. Anything else?” There were a few head shakes and a general rustling of papers as everyone got ready to leave.

“We’ll meet in the moon pool at eleven hundred hours for final equipment checks. We launch the mini no later than eleven forty-five. If we’re late, we’re going to run into trouble with the tides.” Cabrillo stood to get their attention. “I want it clear to all department heads, and especially to shore operations”—he looked pointedly at Eddie Seng and Franklin Lincoln—“that there can be no slipups. We’ve got a good plan. Stick to it and everything will go as smooth as silk. The situation in this part of the world is bad enough without mercenaries getting caught trying to steal a couple of rocket torpedoes.” Linc grumbled good-naturedly, “You all know I got out of Detroit to get away from my friends who were boosting stuff.”

“Out of the frying pan . . .” Eddie grinned.

“. . . and into an Iranian jail.”

CHAPTER 2

YEARS OF WORKING WITH THE CIA HAD TRAINED Juan to function on very little sleep over long periods of time. It wasn’t until he’d founded the Corporation and purchased the Oregonthat he developed the mariner’s ability to fall asleep on command. After the boardroom conference, he’d returned to his cabin, an opulent suite more befitting a Manhattan apartment than a ship at sea, stripped out of his Captain Esteban costume, and fell into bed. Thoughts of the danger they’d be facing once the team was ashore kept him awake for less than a minute.

Without the need for an alarm clock, he awoke an hour before he was to report to the moon pool.

His sleep had been dreamless.

He strode into the bathroom, sat on a mahogany stool to remove his artificial leg, and hopped into the shower. With such a surplus of electricity, the Oregon’s water-heating system ensured that the lag time between turning the taps and a steaming shower was measured in seconds. Cabrillo stood under the near-scalding spray with his head bowed and water pounding his body. He’d accumulated a dozen lifetimes of scars over the years, and he vividly recalled the circumstances behind every one. It was the blunt pad of his stump that he thought the least about.

For most people, losing a limb would likely be a defining moment in their lives. And during the long months of rehab, it had been for Juan as well. But, after that, he barely gave it a moment’s consideration.

He had trained his body to accept the prosthesis and his mind to ignore it. As he’d told Dr. Huxley early on in his physical therapy, “I may be crippled, but I won’t allow myself to be handicapped.” The prosthetic leg he’d worn throughout the day was designed like a human limb, with a covering of flesh-toned rubber to match his own skin color and a foot with toes that even had nails and hair to match those of his left foot. After toweling off, and finally shaving off the itchy beard, he went to his closet to retrieve a very different limb.

There was a section on the Oregondubbed the Magic Shop, and it was overseen by an award-winning Hollywood effects master named Kevin Nixon. It had been Nixon, working in secret, who had developed what Juan called his combat leg. Unlike the natural-looking prosthesis, this one looked like it had been left over from the Terminatormovies. Constructed of titanium and carbon fiber, combat leg version 3.0 was a virtual arsenal in itself. A Kel-Tek .380 pistol was secreted in the calf, along with a perfectly balanced throwing knife. The leg also contained a wire garrote, a single-shot .50 caliber gun that fired through the heel, and storage compartments for all manner of equipment Cabrillo might need.

Just fitting it over his stump and attaching a set of reinforcing straps helped Juan prepare himself mentally for the mission.

There were two reasons he’d started the Corporation. One, of course, was as a moneymaking venture.

And, from that perspective, it had done better than his wildest dreams. Each member could retire with what they had earned in the years since joining, and Cabrillo himself could buy a small Caribbean island, if he so chose. But it was the second reason for forming his own security force that kept him at it long after a normal man would have hung up his guns. The need for such a group was so great that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to stop.

In just the past year, he and the crew of the Oregonhad broken up a piracy ring that had been targeting ships carrying illegal Chinese immigrants and using them as slave labor at a remote gold mine, and they disrupted an ecoterrorist’s plan to steer a poison-laden hurricane into the United States.

It seemed that as soon as one job was complete there were two more equally deserving of the Corporation’s unique abilities. Evil was running rampant all over the globe, and the world powers were stymied to prevent its spread by the very morality that made them great. Though they worked under the guidance of Cabrillo’s own moral compass, he and his crew weren’t hampered by politicians, of any ilk, who were more concerned with reelections than results.

As Juan was dressing, the chief steward knocked on the cabin door and entered quietly.

“Breakfast, Captain,” Maurice said in his mournful English accent.

The steward was a veteran of the Royal Navy, having been forced into retirement because of his age. A rail-thin man with a shock of pure white hair, he carried himself ramrod straight, and remained unflappable no matter the circumstances. While Cabrillo himself could be a bit of a clotheshorse, nothing compared to the dark suits and crisp, white cotton shirts Maurice wore no matter the weather. In the years he’d been aboard the ship, no one had ever seen the steward sweat or shiver.

“Just set it on my desk,” Juan called as he strode from the bedroom adjoining his office. The room was done in rich woods, with coffered mahogany ceilings and matching display cabinets for some of the curiosities he had accumulated over the years. Framed as the centerpiece on one wall was a dramatic painting of the Oregonpounding through a raging storm.

Maurice set the silver service on the desk, frowning at the affront. There was a perfectly appropriate dining table in a nook in the chairman’s cabin. He removed the covers, and the smell of an omelet, kippers, and dark-roasted coffee filled the room. Maurice knew Cabrillo poured a small measure of cream in his first coffee of the day, so the steward had it ready by the time Juan plopped himself in his chair.

“So what’s the latest on young Mr. Stone’s Internet romance with the girl from Brazil?” Juan asked, and took a huge bite of egg.

Maurice was the shipboard clearinghouse for gossip, and Eric Stone’s numerous cyberaffairs was his favorite topic.

“Mr. Stone is beginning to suspect that he and the lady in question might have more in common than he was first led to believe,” Maurice said in a conspiratorial whisper.

Juan was opening the freestanding antique safe behind his desk as he listened. “That’s not usually a bad thing.”

“I am referring to gender, Captain. He thinks the lady may in fact be a man. Mr. Murphy showed me pictures he/she sent and proved they had been, how did he put it, ‘photoshopped’ to hide certain anatomical details.”

Cabrillo chuckled. “Poor Eric. The guy can’t even get lucky in a chat room.” He eased open the heavy door emblazoned with the name and logo of a long-defunct southwestern railroad. Nearly all the small arms kept aboard the Oregonwere stored in the armory next to the soundproof shooting range, but Juan preferred to keep his guns in his office. In addition to the arsenal of machine pistols, assault rifles, and handguns, Juan also kept stacks of money from various countries, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins struck from four national mints, and several small pouches of uncut diamonds. There was a particular forty-carat stone that he kept separate from the others that had been the gift of the newly elected president of Zimbabwe in appreciation for the Corporation’s efforts in releasing him from political prison.

“Dr. Huxley seems to have confirmed Mr. Murphy’s suspicions by checking the facial ratios of the individual’s face against norms for men and women.” As Maurice continued, Cabrillo checked over a semiautomatic pistol, the only weapon he was taking with him. Unlike the rest of his team, he wasn’t going in armed to the teeth.

He slurped the rest of his coffee and had another bite of omelet. Adrenaline was beginning to course through his veins and knot his stomach, so he gave the rich kippers a pass.

“So what’s Eric going to do?” Juan asked as he got to his feet.

“Obviously, he’s postponing his vacation to Rio de Janeiro until he can verify things one way or the other.

Mr. Murphy thinks he should hire a private investigator.” Cabrillo scoffed. “I think he should drop this whole Internet thing and meet women the regular way, face-to-face, in a bar over too many drinks.”

“Hear! Hear! One can’t overstate the social lubricating abilities of a few cocktails.” Maurice tidied Cabrillo’s desk and hoisted the serving dish to his shoulder, a fresh linen napkin over his other arm.

“We’ll see you when you return.”

That was as close as the steward would say to “Good luck.”

“Not if I don’t see you first,” was Juan’s customary reply.

They left the cabin together, Maurice turning right to return to the galley, Juan left. He took an elevator down three decks. The doors opened to a cavernous room lit with ranks of floodlights and smelling strongly of the sea. An overhead crane held the larger of the two submersibles the Oregoncarried, a sixty-five-foot Nomad 1000. The blunt-nosed mini-sub could carry six people, including a pilot and copilot. Clustered near her three bow portholes were armored xenon lamps and an articulated manipulator arm with a grip that could rip steel. The Nomad was rated for a thousand-foot depth, almost ten times as much as her little sister, the Discovery 1000, hanging suspended in a cradle above it, and was outfitted with a diving chamber, so swimmers could exit the craft while she was submerged.

Beneath the submersible, crewmen had already pulled the deck grating away to reveal a gaping pit that went all the way to the Oregon’s keel. The outer doors were still closed, but pumps were filling the swimming pool-sized opening in preparation for the launch.

Linc, Eddie, and Max were already sliding black wet suits over their swim trunks. Scuba equipment for all of them had already been loaded into the sub. Linda Ross stood with her arms crossed over her chest, watching Max with amusement. Hanley had served two tours in Vietnam as a Swift Boat captain and no longer cut the dashing figure he once had. He was having a hard time stretching the suit over his paunch.

He didn’t normally accompany a team on a shore excursion; however, he was the best marine engineer in the Corporation, and everyone agreed his expertise could come in handy.

“Come on, old boy,” Juan said with a grin, and patted Max’s belly. “I don’t recall you having this much trouble a few years ago.”

“It’s not the years,” he moaned, “it’s the pastries.” Cabrillo sat on a bench and, unlike the others, started to put a dry suit on over his clothes. “Linda, have you done your prelaunch checks?”

“We’re good to go.”

“And the cradle?”

“It’s secure,” Max answered for her with possessive pride. He’d designed it, and had overseen its fabrication in the Oregon’s machine shop.

Juan took a communications headset from an attending engineer and called up the Op Center. “Hali, it’s the Chairman. How’s it look out there?”

“Radar shows the normal procession of tankers heading in and out of the Gulf. There’s a containership that pulled into Bandar Abbas’s main dock about two hours ago, plus a handful of feluccas and dhows.”

“Nothing from the naval base?”

“They’re quiet. I’ve scanned all frequencies, and, other than normal blather between ships at sea, there’s not much going on.”

“I hope you’re honing your language skills.” It was a joke between the two. Hali Kasim was the son of Lebanese parents but couldn’t speak a word of Lebanese or Arabic, one of four languages in which Cabrillo was fluent.

“Sorry, boss, I’m letting the translating algorithms of the computer do the work for me.”

“Eric, Murph, you guys set to go?”

When Cabrillo was sending a team ashore, there were no better officers to have manning the ship’s navigation and weapons systems than Stone and Murphy.

“Yes, sir,” the two said in unison. Murph added, “We are locked and loaded and ready to be goaded.” Juan groaned. Murph’s newest hobby was slam poetry, and, despite the crew’s repeated assertions to the contrary, he thought he was a master of the edgy street genre. “Stand by for a comm check once we’re secured in the Nomad.”

“Roger that,” Hali replied.

Linc and Eddie gathered up the waterproof bags containing their weapons and gear and climbed atop the mini-sub. They vanished into the hull through the small hatch. Max and Cabrillo followed them up, Juan giving the thick steel hull a superstitious slap before descending into the submersible. The ride to shore would take an hour, so they took their seats along the mini’s flanks rather than cram half the team into the two-man dive chamber. All four of them would don their scuba equipment during the trip in.

Linda Ross wiggled her way past Juan and Max and took her place in the pilot’s seat, a low-slung chair surrounded by banks of switches, dials, and computer monitors, their glow giving her face an eerie green cast.

“How do you read me, Oregon?” she asked after settling her own headset over her tousled hair.

“Five by five.” Their communications system used 132-bit encryption and cycled through frequencies every tenth of a second, so the chance of intercept and decryption was zero.

The men in the back of the submersible also checked in. The dive helmets they were to wear had integrated ultrasonic transceivers to allow easy communications among themselves, the Nomad, and the Oregon.

“Okay, you can open her up,” Linda ordered.

The lights in the moon pool were dimmed, so as not to show underwater, as the keel doors slowly hinged open. The mechanism that lowered the submersible was engaged. The mini-sub lurched suddenly and then began its stately descent. The warm Gulf water soon lapped against the portholes, before the vessel sank to its neutral buoyancy point. The clamps were disengaged, and the Nomad bobbed free.

Linda activated the ballast pumps, slowly drawing water into the tanks, and gently eased the sub out through the bottom of the Oregon’s hull. Though she had done it dozens of times, her motions were careful and deliberate. She watched the depth gauge and the laser range finder mounted on the top of the submersible, to ensure they had cleared the keel.

“Nomad is free,” she said, when they were twenty feet below the hull.

“Closing the doors. Oregonover and out.”

Linda descended another forty feet, until the seafloor was just a yard or two below the mini, and set her course for the Bandar Abbas naval base. She kept her speed to just above a crawl so the sound of the propellers churning the water wouldn’t alert any attentive sonar operators in the area, although with the amount of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz it would be next to impossible to single out the whisper-quiet Nomad amid the acoustical clutter.

They were at risk of visual detection because the waters were so shallow, forcing her to leave off the external lights. She would have to rely on the LIDAR system, or Light Detection and Ranging system, which used a series of reflected lasers to map out the terrain immediately in front of the sub. She would get them to the base by following the three-dimensional computer representation of their surroundings.

The LIDAR could detect objects as small as a soda can.

“This is your pilot, up here in the cockpit,” she called over her shoulder. “We will be cruising at an altitude of negative forty-eight feet at a speed of three knots. Our estimated arrival time at our destination is approximately sixty-two minutes. At this time, you may use approved electronics, and don’t forget to ask an attendant about our frequent-flier program.”

“Hey, Pilot, my peanuts are stale,” Linc called up to her.

“Yeah, and I want a blanket and a pillow,” Eddie added.

Max chimed in, “While you’re at it, a double Scotch would hit the spot.” Listening to the banter over the next half hour, one would have never known they were about to infiltrate Iran’s most heavily secured naval facility. It wasn’t that they weren’t aware of the risks. It was just that they were too professional to let that wear on their nerves.

But all that dried up with thirty minutes to go. The shore team started putting on their scuba gear, checking and rechecking each other’s equipment as they went. When they were suited up, Juan and Linc slid their way into the phone booth-sized air lock. There was a hatch in the ceiling of the claustrophobic chamber that could be opened from the cockpit or from inside the air lock, but only when the pressure on each side of the armored door was equalized. To save time, Juan hit the controls that allowed seawater to slowly fill the chamber. The water was blood warm as it climbed up their bodies, pressing in on Juan’s dry suit. Juan had to smooth out the wrinkles so the suit wouldn’t chafe. Both men had to work their jaws to ease the pressure on their inner ears.

When the level was just below their necks, Cabrillo hit the button again. There was no need to put on their dive helmets until the last moment.

“How are you doing back there?” Linda’s voice was tinny and distant through the helmet.

“Why is it I always get stuck in this thing with the biggest member of the crew,” Juan cried theatrically.

“’Cause Max’s belly’s too big to fit in there with Linc, and Eddie would be squashed like a bug,” Ross said.

“Hey, man, just be thankful I don’t take a deep breath,” Linc joked in his deep baritone.

“Chairman, the LIDAR is picking up the submarine pen’s doors. We’re about fifty yards away.”

“Okay, Linda. Put us on the bottom to the right of the dry dock’s entrance.”

“Roger.”

A moment later, the Nomad shuddered slightly as Linda settled it onto the sandy seafloor. “Powering down all nonessential equipment. Whenever you’re ready.”

“What do you say, big man?” Cabrillo asked Lincoln.

“Let’s do it.”

Juan put on his helmet, making sure the locking rings to keep the suit watertight were secure and that he was getting sufficient air from the tanks. Cabrillo waited until Linc gave him the dive signal for “OK” before opening the flood valve again. The water quickly rose to the air lock’s ceiling. He doused the lights and hit another toggle to open the door.

The hatch swung upward, releasing a small amount of trapped air. The bubbles were silver-white in the gloom, but with waves lapping against the enclosed pier they wouldn’t be spotted.

Juan hoisted himself out of the dive chamber and paused on the submersible’s upper deck. Without lights, the water was as dark as ink. Cabrillo had grown up in southern California and had been drawn to the sea for as long as he could remember. He graduated from skin diving to scuba diving and from body boarding to surfing in his early teens. He was as comfortable in water as a seal and was almost as powerful a swimmer. The darkness only enhanced the calm he felt whenever he dove.

Lincoln emerged from the Nomad a moment later. Juan closed the hatch, and together they waited for Eddie and Max to cycle through. Once they were all out of the submarine, Cabrillo chanced turning on an underwater flashlight, shielding the beam from the surface with his hand.

The Iranian submarine pen had been built by first excavating a six-hundred-foot-long, hundred-foot-wide trench from the ocean eastward into the desert. Over this, they erected a reinforced-concrete shell, supposedly eight feet thick and capable of withstanding a direct bomb hit. It had been built before the U.S.-led invasion of neighboring Iraq, and the Iranians must be well aware that some of the bunker busters in the American arsenal now could level the entire structure with a single hit. To the south and north of the dry dock sat the main piers of the naval base, while administration buildings, machine shops, and barracks sprawled for two miles inland.

On the seaward side of the pen were two massive doors that swung outward hydraulically. Inflatable bladders sealed the gap between the bottom of the door and a cement pad to keep water from flooding into the building. Short of explosives or a couple of hours with an acetylene cutting torch, the doors were impenetrable.

Cabrillo finned away from the doors, leading his team through the stygian realm. Every few moments, he would flash his light along the barnacle-encrusted seawall protecting the base from the ravages of the ocean. After fifty feet, the beam settled on what he had been searching for. There was a four-foot-wide culvert in the wall, a dark hole that fed the pumps to drain the dry dock. Careful to protect the light, he inspected the metal grille embedded in the concrete that prevented anything from swimming up the conduit. The steel was only slightly corroded, while the concrete maintained its integrity. It took him over a minute of careful inspection to spot the wires at the top and bottom of the six metal rods.

One way to protect against tampering was to rig the grates with motion detectors, but with so many curious fish in the Persian Gulf the alarms would sound almost constantly. The easier way was to run an electric current through the metal, and if the connection was ever cut guards would be alerted that someone had removed part of the grille.

Juan pointed the wires out to Linc, the Corporation’s best infiltration specialist. Working mostly by feel, Lincoln rigged bypasses on three of the steel rods, using alligator clamps and lengths of wire to keep the current flowing. Next, he removed two squeeze tubes from his dive bag. He uncapped one tube and applied a bead of a gray puttylike substance around the ends of the bars. He then applied an equal amount of putty from the second tube over the first.

Inert when separated, the two compounds formed a caustic acid when combined. In less than a minute, the metal under the beads had been eaten away enough for Linc to snap them free, his loose wires still keeping the circuit closed and the alarms silent. He set the broken rods on the sand, making sure he didn’t touch the still-corrosive tips, and held the slack wires apart for Max, Eddie, and Juan to slip through before carefully sliding into the pipe himself.

Now that they were sheltered from prying eyes, Juan turned up the intensity of his dive light, its beam forming a white ring circling the curved sides of the conduit that seemed to retreat with the pace of his advance.

A fast shadow suddenly lunged at him. He struck out blindly as a darting shape passed him by. He caught sight of a dorsal fin and the rapier tail of a baby shark before it vanished behind him.

“Good thing we met him now and not in a couple of years,” Eddie quipped.

Cabrillo needed a second for his heart to slow before continuing down the constricting pipe. He was jumpier than he’d thought, and that didn’t bode well.

The conduit fed into a large valve that would be in the closed position if the dry dock was empty, but, in the two days the crew had been watching the facility, they had seen no indication the Iranians had pumped out the sub pen since their navy’s newest Kilo Class diesel-electric boat had been admitted.

The four men squeezed through the butterfly valve and into the monstrous pump that could drain the pen.

The impeller blades were made of bright ferrobronze that had been bolted to the hub.

Juan had come prepared for bolts, and, in case the blades had been welded, he carried a small torch. He pulled an adjustable wrench from a pouch on his thigh and attacked the bolts. The angles were awkward, and the nuts had been screwed in place by a pneumatic gun, so it took all his effort to get each of the twelve bolts started. One in particular had him straining so hard that pinwheels of colors exploded behind his tightly closed eyes. When the seal finally popped, the wrench kicked free, and Cabrillo sliced his hand on the scimitar-shaped blade. A small cloud of blood hung in the glow of his flashlight.

“Trying to get the shark to come back?” Max teased.

“So long as your big butt is between me and him, I’ll be fine.”

“It’s not big, just well padded.”

Juan finished with the bolts and set each of the eighteen-inch impeller blades aside. He had to unsling his scuba tank and wriggle beneath the pump’s hub to make it through. He waited on the other side for the men to join him and slide their tanks back in place.

The pipe continued for another dozen feet before turning ninety degrees. Cabrillo shut off his light, and, after waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust, could make out a pale, watery corona coming from around the bend. He cautiously swam closer, and when he reached the turn he ducked his head around for a quick peek.

They had reached the dry dock. The light was coming from fixtures mounted on the tall ceiling. The low level told him that there was just enough illumination for guards to patrol the pen but not enough for a slew of technicians to be working on the Kilo. As they had anticipated, there wouldn’t be more than a handful of men to subdue.

Cabrillo swam out of the pipe and dove down to stay along the concrete bottom, followed by Max, Linc, and Eddie. They made their way closer to the towering doors, where there was the least chance of there being guards. Juan checked their depth on his dive computer and held the men at ten feet for a minute, to allow the small amount of nitrogen bubbles that had accumulated in their bloodstream to dissolve.

With the patience of crocodiles emerging from a river in pursuit of prey, the four men approached the surface, hovering just below its silvery reflection in order to affix small periscopes to their helmets.

Capable of magnifying starlight so that it shone as light as day, the third-generation optics of the scopes had to be dialed back a bit as they slowly searched every corner of the dry dock from the security of the water.

The dry dock was wide enough for two ships to be serviced side by side, and each edge of the sub pen was flanked with raised cement jetties that ran almost the entire length of the building. They were littered with equipment, barrels of lubricant, piles of gear under tarps, small electric golf carts to make moving around easier, and a trio of forklifts. At the far end was a raised platform that stretched the width of the building. Part of it was glassed in to make an office or observation room, and under it, on each side, were enclosed spaces for secure storage. There was also an overhead crane on rails that could reach any part of the covered dock.