Chapter 6: Senate Subcommittee

With Silas Croft’s affidavit and his subsequent cooperation, the Navy moved with unprecedented speed. The revelation of eighteen compromised frigates, vital for convoy protection in the Atlantic, sent shockwaves through the highest levels of the defense establishment. There was no burying this.

An emergency closed-door hearing was convened by the Senate Subcommittee on Naval Procurement, held not in Washington D.C., but right here in Philadelphia. The urgency was palpable.

I received my summons first, a formal, crisp document delivered by a naval aide. It felt like a lifetime had passed since I was simply an inspector, checking welds in a noisy shipyard. Now, I was a key witness in a scandal that threatened to unravel wartime confidence.

Douglas Hallowell was summoned next. I imagined the fury on his face, the frantic phone calls he must have made to his political connections. But this time, his influence wasn’t enough. The sheer scale of the fraud, combined with the active ships at risk, had forced their hand.

The hearing took place in a sterile, temporary courtroom set up in a federal building downtown. It lacked the grandeur of a permanent courthouse, but the gravity of the proceedings was undeniable. Two senior senators, their faces etched with concern, sat at the head of a long, polished table. Behind them, a row of grim-faced naval officers.

Hallowell arrived flanked by a phalanx of expensive lawyers. He was impeccably dressed, his navy suit sharp, his demeanor outwardly calm. But I saw the tension in his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes. He caught my gaze from across the room, a brief, venomous glare that promised retribution. I met it steadily. There was nothing more he could threaten me with now.

When my turn came, I walked to the witness stand, the wooden railing cool beneath my fingers. I took the oath, my hand steady. The room was silent, save for the low hum of the ceiling fans.

“Mr. Higgins,” Senator Caldwell, a stern-faced man from Georgia, began, “please recount, in your own words, what you discovered at Delmarva Shipbuilding.”

I spoke slowly, clearly, detailing the discrepancies in the logs, the forged notarizations, the abnormal consistency of the stress test results. I spoke of the hours I spent verifying, cross-referencing, the growing dread in my gut.

“I believed,” I concluded, looking directly at the senators, “that Mr. Hallowell had systematically defrauded the Navy, putting our fighting men at sea in grave danger, all for corporate greed.”

Hallowell’s lawyers immediately objected, citing speculation, but the senators overruled them. The accusation hung in the air, a heavy, undisputed truth. The stakes were impossibly high. Not just for Hallowell, or for me, but for the war effort itself.