‘This makes no sense,’ Adrienne said. ‘And why call the submarine the Neptune?’
‘I neglected to mention one other aspect of her construction that makes her extraordinary.’ Porter leaned on the platform’s wooden railing. ‘Her hull is made of aluminium, blended with certain alloys. An incredibly light-weight metal, so malleable that it can be moulded by hand.’
‘If I didn’t actually see that monstrous vessel down there, I’d swear you were joking.’
‘This,’ Porter said, ‘will be the only ship in the world that’s all hull. No interior of any kind.’
Adrienne stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter,
‘At last you’ve guessed.’
‘This is just a dummy,’ she said. ‘A mock-up.’
‘Correct. It isn’t actually a ship. Nancy gave me the tip-off for it when she said that the Russians want information on our new super-submarine. This means – at least I hope it does – that they know nothing whatever as yet about the real Neptune. They’ve caught wind of something going on here, and they’ve assumed we’re building a mammoth submarine either to find their sunken Zoloto or to raise it to the surface.’
‘So you’re obliging them by building this fantastic shell!’
‘The largest red herring on earth,’ Porter said. ‘The Director saw the potential the moment I mentioned the idea to him, and so did Richards, who stayed up all night to design the hull. Some of the men who are working down there at this moment aren’t welders. They’re sculptors.’
‘Do you mean that literally?’
‘I do. Flown in from Corporation headquarters. A couple of them have never worked in metal before, but they’re shaping up nicely. Pun intended.’
She looked down at the hull. ‘What a marvellous decoy. If the scheme works.’
‘It should. We’ll give it every opportunity. In the next day or so Nancy and I will be invited to the Richards house for dinner. By the way, it will be wise if you spend that evening elsewhere. I doubt if Nancy has fond memories of you.’
‘I prefer not to watch you two holding hands,’ Adrienne said, her voice tart.
He deemed it wise not to comment. ‘Richards will ask her to come to the yard for a tour. She won’t be taken anywhere near the real Neptune, of course. He’ll bring her here, and they’ll climb up to this platform. Just the two of them. Then Richards will be called below on a supposed emergency. He’ll go off to confer with somebody, and Nancy will be alone up here. For about five minutes,’
‘I hope she’ll be carrying her trusty mini-camera, and that she has a lot of film,’ Adrienne said.
‘Two rolls. One for Moscow and one for Peking.’
‘You’re smart, Porter. I disliked the whole plan of using the Wing woman this way, but you’ve established a perfect pipeline to the KGB. And presumably to the Chinese, too.’
‘The Russians will be certain to see the Zoloto connection,’ Porter said. ‘I’m guessing the Chinese know nothing about the lost Russian submarine, so they’ll simply believe we’re building this oversized whale for its own sake. That’ll give their naval intelligence people something to stew about,’
‘Do you see any bugs in your scheme?’
‘Several,’ he said. ‘An expert in submersibles might not be fooled by this decoy, but I’m assuming Nancy doesn’t know all that much about ships.’
‘I was graduated from her level a long time ago,’ Adrienne said, ‘and I was taken in by it. Completely.’
‘We’re improvising, of course, so it isn’t easy to develop a foolproof approach. I’m afraid there’s one obvious weakness in the plan/ ‘I think I’ve spotted it,’ Adrienne said. ‘If you make the Wing woman’s access to the decoy submarine too simple she may smell the proverbial rat.’
‘Precisely. As I see it, there are two alternatives. The first is that we drop enough clues to interest her, and hope she’ll do her own investigating. I’m afraid she lacks the intelligence to develop leads on her own, even if we point her nose in the right direction. The second approach is to take her direct to the phoney sub.’
‘Suppose she suspects what we’re doing?’
‘I’m hoping she won’t,’ Porter said. ‘Or that she’ll be just excited enough to accept her good luck without trying to find out whether her gift horse is a stuffed toy.’
‘There’s a risk involved.’
‘There’s a risk in everything we do,’ Porter said. ‘In a situation like this we’ve got to take chances.’
Adrienne frowned. ‘The long-range risks are even greater.’
‘Much. The Red Navy analysts will need time to study the photographs, of course. Eventually they’ll want more, particularly data on the power plants, blueprints of the unusual sail – and so forth. By that time the real Neptune will have dredged up the Zoloto submarine. If our luck holds. A gigantic hoax like this is either one hundred per cent successful or a total failure, with no in between.’
‘I like it.’
‘The other weakness is something I can’t measure. Marie Richards.’
‘I’m convinced Marie is legitimate,’ Adrienne said.
‘Maybe so.’ He told her in detail about the meeting with Marie and Franklin Richards in Seattle.
‘That sounds like her. I’m willing to bet my own career on her innocence.’
‘You have no proof.’
‘Only my feminine intuition. Which also tells me that the Wing woman is going to cause us some more problems before we’re done with her.’
Her dislike of Nancy was flattering, but he continued to avoid such discussions. ‘The reason I’m still apprehensive over Marie Richards,’ he said, ‘is because she’s the one person in this entire project whom we can’t control. She may be blameless, as you believe. If she isn’t, though, then God help us.’
‘You’re going to keep her under surveillance?’
Until the Neptune puts out to sea, and even then we’ll monitor her cables. On second thought, I believe the expedition should maintain radio silence except for emergencies.’
They looked again at the decoy, then descended the stairs to the ground.
‘So far,’ Porter said, ‘we’re doing okay. But as we get closer to sailing time, double your precautions against sabotage.’
Nancy Wing followed the shore road to the Richards shipyard, and was delighted by the way things were working out. Porter had expressed no interest in accompanying her, saying he was interested only in the defence projects to which he was assigned. His docility was a help, too, and it was no problem keeping him satisfied – and compliant.
She halted the convertible at the entrance gate, telling the chief guard on duty that Franklin Richards was expecting her.
He made a telephone call, then assigned a guard to ride with her and guide her to the administration building.
Richards greeted her in his handsome office, its walls lined with photographs of ships he had built. ‘You took my advice and wore pants,’ he said. ‘Good. We’ll be climbing some tricky scaffolding. Would you like a drink before we go, Nancy?’
‘No, thank you. I’ll need to be sober if I’m going to climb ladders.’
They drove to the decoy site in Richards’ Aston Martin, went through the formalities at both security gates, then climbed to the platform above the dummy ship, the workmen swarming below paying no attention to them.
‘You’re one of the first outsiders to see the Neptune,’ Richards said when they reached the makeshift observation platform. ‘The Navy will make an announcement about her construction in three months, when she’s scheduled to be launched.’