Merk glanced at the photos now and then, and thought of the young boy he had met at the cove, his corroded skin, his arms covered in rashes and boils. Then Peder studied one close-up photo. It showed the backside of the half-buried boiler. He enlarged the image, turned the tablet sideways to read a faint inscription or serial number next to the welded seam of the lid on the container. It appeared as if the lettering had been grinded off, not faded from decay, barnacles, or rust. But erased. “Have you showed these to anyone?” Peder asked.
“You’re the first,” Merk said. “Can I trace the nuclear waste inside those containers?”
“How do you know it’s hot?”
Merk flipped through the gallery of photos, scrolled down, showing graphs of the nuclear probe readings Tasi took. For the first time, it dawned on Merk: Tasi was pregnant when he sent her down to search for, locate, and probe the toxic waste—but he didn’t know that she was six months pregnant. The readings from the yellowcake refuse, the nuclear waste, or the spent fuel rods punched him in the gut. He felt his shoulders go slack as a stone pressed against his heart with dead, cold weight.
He then thought back to the shock wave created by the blast from the sea-mine blowing up the Iranian fishing trawler. Did that have any impact on Tasi? Did it affect the mother-to-be or her unborn calf? Damn it, he thought, knowing he was a fool. He should’ve listened to Morgan Azar and kept the dolphins out of harm’s way. He now regretted more than ever the terrible risk he took, for Azar, for Inapo, for Tasi and her offspring. Now Merk had to see to it that Tasi wouldn’t be sent back to the Navy Marine Mammal Program in Point Loma; that he, and only he had to look out for her welfare and that of her calf; and that whatever mission grew out of the terrorist threat he had to make sure he worked with the dolphins, protocol and risks be damned.
“Is that it?” Peder asked, picking at his flaking sunburnt skin.
“You help me, I will help you,” Merk said, staring aimlessly at the back of the cavernous fuselage. “I need to know where the hot load came from.”
“I have an idea. But I’ll need this corner of the image blown up. Err, re-colored and rendered with contrast lightened so I can see it better.”
“Roger that,” Merk said. “When we land in Ramstein, you’re going to be debriefed by an FBI counterterrorism expert. Don’t worry, I’ll be sitting with you in the meeting.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
THE C-5 GALAXY landed on time at US Ramstein AFB. After taxing from the main runway, the transport plane pulled into the hangar, where the base’s military police met with the cargo master holding the flight manifest, observation log, and cargo inventory sheet. The ONI naval attaché deboarded the plane and greeted the base MPs.
A cordon of MPs led Merk, the ONI attaché, and Peder Olsen to waiting SUVs that drove them to Building No. 413. Ramstein Air Force Base Headquarters had been built inside a forest perimeter, which contained the base golf course, massive runway, and the nerve center of the US Drone Program, all housed in the confines of thick, tall pine trees.
The MPs took Merk and Peder down into the HQ’s intel room, where Merk Toten and Peder Olsen were introduced to FBI Special Agent Diane Wheelhouse. The auburn-haired agent was well dressed in a business suit and heels, her fingernails manicured with Ferrari-red nail polish. Special Agent Wheelhouse wore prescription sunglasses. She firmly shook Merk and Peder’s hands, and then made the ONI attaché go to the next room. There, he joined CIA analysts, a pair of FBI counterterrorism agents, and other DIA intel officers in an adjacent soundproof room, where they would watch and listen as the debriefing unfolded.
Merk sat down with the Norwegian mercenary.
“As I said, I am FBI Special Agent Wheelhouse. I will be conducting this interview, which is being recorded,” she said in a direct manner. “I’m jetlagged, landing only an hour before you did from LA. That’s nine time zones away. So what did this navy …” she looked at her notes, “… dolphin trainer tell you?”
“Er, what do you mean?” Peder asked.
“Your expectations? Did he promise you the world? Like, you’re going home today?”
“Nay, not at all,” he said, his facial muscles tightened, glancing over at Merk.
“Good. Today this is your home,” she said, clicking a remote.
A wall screen behind Merk showed a split-screen of joint US-Norwegian intelligence agents rummaging through Peder Olsen’s house in Stavanger, Norway, and Norwegian police officers rifling through his summer cabin up in the mountains. She clicked the next image that showed a live shot of still more Interpol agents going through the offices and home of the Blå Himmel shipowner in Bergen. She clicked another image, pulling up emails and cloud services that Peder had used, then zoomed on a half dozen emails addressed to a charity organization in the Puntland autonomous state. “You recognize these emails? What does P.O. stand for?”
“Pratique Occulte,” he said, sinking in the chair.
“Black Mass? Nice. Is that the new terrorist group with no affiliation to any other org?”
“Uh, ja, I suppose. Um, how did you know the name?”
“It’s my job to know. I get around. Who was on the receiving end of your emails?”
“Warlord Korfa.” His voice cracked.
“It wasn’t him. You were communicating with a CIA asset from Kenyan intelligence code-named Nairobi. She has just been confirmed tortured and murdered. Her raped, bloodied body dumped this morning by her pirate captors. The same terrorists who hijacked the supertanker you were supposed to be guarding, but instead you helped steal,” the FBI special agent said, holding up a flash drive. “You used one of these to inject malware into the tanker’s nav system, didn’t you?”
“My god …”
“God’s not here. Nairobi is just one person in a growing list of people who will die,” she said, slamming the notepad on the table. She tapped a pen on the table. “Both she and Korfa are being used to mask a much greater enemy alliance,” Wheelhouse said, pointing the pen in his face. She clicked the next image, showing the bombs planted on the hull of the tanker.
Peder felt sick to his stomach. He nodded, admitting those were the bombs he had made for the pirates and stored on board the ship before he killed Samatar and escaped.
“Tell me about the bombs,” Special Agent Wheelhouse said, pushing the edge of the table into Peder’s chest to get his full attention. “Spit it out,” she shouted. “You two are not the only bomb experts in this room. What do you think I studied for my master’s degree after 9/11? What did the FBI teach me at Quantico after that?”
Diane Wheelhouse adjusted the focus of her high-tech sunglasses, capturing all sorts of biometric data from Peder’s reactions: facial contortions, body movements, thermal reactions, the tics, tells, and much more, relaying the data stream to the observation room next door.
* * *
IN THE OBSERVATION room, the intel agents and officers were impressed with how FBI Special Agent Wheelhouse steered the interrogation, drawing out all kinds of biometric data and emotional response so the analysts in the room and back in Langley and Quantico could use it to dive deep into the psyche of the Norwegian sniper. They needed her to turn Olsen over to become an informant.
“I thought the director told her to go easy,” an FBI counterterrorist expert said.
* * *
IN THE INTERROGATION room, Diane Wheelhouse hammered away at the facade, at the manhood of Peder Olsen. “What’s the makeup of the plastic explosives you used?”
“Let’s see …” He sighed. “The accelerator blasting cap tubes were—”
“Not the trigger, the material. Tell me,” she said, glancing down at the tablet.
“C’mon, Peder, what did you use?” Merk asked, leaning across the table.
“Ja, ja. They probably found it,” he said, exasperated. “Uh, it was Semtex-H …”
“From where?” Wheelhouse pressed, raising her voice again.
“Libya. Err, the same kind of plastique u
sed in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.”
“What else went into the brick?” Merk prodded.
“A few chemicals that introduce more internal oxygen to speed up the expansion of the blast, you know … titanium microfibers to guarantee flashpoint,” he said, looking lost.
“Well, we know it’s not slow-acting fertilizer or one of Assad’s chlorine barrel bombs, don’t we. How many more of these bombs did you make?” she asked, texting a message to the agents next door in the observation room.
“What do you mean, more bombs?”
“Where are you storing the rest of the material? Who was your goddamn supplier? People are going to die,” Wheelhouse yelled. The special agent stood up and stabbed her finger into Peder’s flaking, sunburnt forehead. “Wake up, troll, or you might find yourself dead.”
“Umm … Agent Wheelhouse, you want to lighten up a little,” Merk said.
“Hell no. Get in line, sailor,” she said. She shook her head at Peder and clicked the final image of a digital map of Olsen’s black market network. “Hey, Viking Virus, you recognize any of the names in your network tree on the screen?”
Peder looked at the Venn diagram connecting him to clouds of terrorist organizations in Libya Dawn with the bomb-makers, warlord brothers in the Somali Pirates, Yemeni al Qaeda, and the Syrian Electronic Army. Diane pressed the remote adding a top-level cloud, showing new links down to the middleware of pirates, ISIS, and al Qaeda affiliates backed by an image of Syrian General Adad, Iranian nuclear scientists, and North Korean missile engineers.
“Svarte Occulte,” Peder mouthed, shocked by what he saw.
“Olsen, you are a pawn in all this, just a minnow. You know that?” she said. “A lot of people are going to die in the next couple of weeks, unless we intercept them, disrupt their plans, roll up their terrorist network. Do you understand? If it happens, you will die. I’ll see to it.”
Peder nodded ja.
“Korfa has gone missing. He or someone in his inner circle will carry out the attack in the US. The FBI needs to drill down into his network. Are you going to help? Or should the Bureau send you back to Norway in a body bag?” she asked.
His eyes watered; he took a breath. “There’s an American I’ve been chatting with …”
“Really? Who was it?”
“I don’t know his name. No emails … never any emails or texts. Phone calls only made from the shipowner’s office. Er, he had a Russian accent,” he said.
“Do you have his number?”
He shook his head. “It changed every week. He always called from a new burner phone.”
Diane turned around and looked up at a hidden camera in a light fixture, saying, “Do you hear that? Check all of Peder’s phone records—after work hours—the loading dock, and go back to the Blå Himmel crew who were just released. Confirm Olsen’s story.”
She waved for Merk to leave the room. When he stepped out and closed the door, she took a picture of Peder with the tablet, informing him, “You cooperate, and you might end up in a cozy prison in Norway. You screw me, I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your life in a shit hole prison in Yemen.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
IN THE OBSERVATION room, Diane Wheelhouse handed over the high-tech glasses to the CIA station chief of Kaiserslautern—“K-Town”—where Ramstein AFB was situated in southwest Germany. The agent told him that she needed to go over some notes with the navy dolphin trainer, to grab some R&R, and then pick up the intel discussion in the morning.
“Great job, Special Agent Wheelhouse.” The FBI counterterrorist expert congratulated her for extracting a ton of information from the Norwegian sniper in a short amount of time.
“It’s Agent Roundhouse to you,” she said amid laughter of the other agents.
Overhearing her words with the station chief, the ONI attaché informed Merk, “Go debrief with her. But don’t leave the base. You and I will have dinner late.”
“Roger that,” Merk said, eyeing the medals on the attaché’s white uniform; there was no Purple Heart or medal for bravery.
* * *
OUTSIDE, SPECIAL AGENT Wheelhouse flashed her FBI credentials to an FBI driver of one of the SUVs, slipped him 100 euros, and told him she needed the vehicle for a few hours, after arriving jetlagged from Los Angeles. She opened the backseat door for Merk, who stepped in and closed it. Wheelhouse climbed into the driver’s seat, clicked the seat belt lock, and drove down the winding base road to the main gate.
Special Agent Diane Wheelhouse looked at Merk in the rearview mirror, and slowly pulled off a red-auburn wig. She unfurled her long jet-black hair, hand-combing the silk strands down her shoulders. She took off the sunglasses and eyed Merk in the mirror again, this time radiating warmth with her black eyes. Jenny King smiled broadly for the first time in months.
“Jesus, Jenny, you were good in there,” Merk said.
“Is that all you have to say, in what … almost a year?” Jenny asked.
“My god, great to see you. What’s up with your pasty white skin?” he said.
“I played Ms. North Korea,” she replied, and cooed in a sexy voice—“So Merk, what should we do in Ramstein? Go bowling? Stay at the base inn? Drink beer with the ensigns?”
“Well, I-I-I—”
“Well, I reserved a suite at a luxury hotel in Kaiser-whatever.”
“Kaiserslautern,” Merk said, completing the Germanic name. “You do know it’s called K-Town by the troops here. My father loved the place. It was a party town back in his day.”
“The only K-Towns I know are Koreatowns. And they’re located in New York, DC, LA, and Seoul.” She pulled up to the gate guardhouse, powered down the window, and asked the MP who approached the vehicle, “I just landed from Camp Lemonnier in North Africa. Do you know any good restaurants nearby?”
The guard first mentioned there was a good German beer hall in the center of K-Town, and then, perhaps trying to flirt with her, said, “Oh, no, wait … there’s Charles BBQ and the African Grille,” he said excitedly, opening the gate for the attractive Asian woman.
Jenny thanked the guard and drove through, with Merk sitting behind her, out of view of the MP. “Okay, Blue, you can come up for air now. We’re off base.”
“Are we following orders tonight?” he asked with a smirk.
“When have we ever followed orders?” Jenny asked, turning the SUV onto the main road. She headed toward the city of Kaiserslautern, with a population of 100,000 people.
It would be her night to finally let loose, to get lost with her lover and polar opposite in emotion and personality—she the gun aficionado, he the “no gun” hero.
Chapter Sixty-Six
IN THE GRAND hotel suite, Jenny ordered room service, while Merk prepared to take a whirlpool bath in the oversized bathtub. He shouted, “Hey, King, why are you living large tonight?”
She popped open a bottle of champagne. “I’ve been earning two paychecks for the past nine months. Haven’t been able to spend any money from either one. Funny thing is I’ll never see what I earned in my North Korean bank account.”
“What else?”
“The Revolutionary Guards Corps … I was lucky if the pigs bathed every third day. Many reeked of body odor, the spices they ate bled through their stinking pores. Talk about gross,” she said. “Reminds me of that dry seaweed smell from the crack of your dorsal fin. Do you still carry that fine odor, honey?”
“You know, another two months inside the Iranian nuclear facility, and your white skin would turn porcelain white.”
“And then what, honey? I thought you are attracted to me any way I come,” she cooed.
“Yeah, that’s great and everything, but …” he began to say, but when he turned around his naked, tall, lean body to her—she grinned, holding two glasses of champagne. Wearing only a towel wrapped around her breasts and torso, she handed both flutes to Merk. He put them down by the whirlpool and turned back to admire her standing naked when the towel hit the floor, as
she flipped a bar of soap in her hand. “So that’s why they call you Special Agent Glass-figure-house—”
“Madhouse to you, sailor,” she said and drilled the bar of soap into his chest. She lunged at him, pushing him down into the whirlpool. She tugged at his hair and kissed him on the face, on his lips, and over his mouth, their hot, wet tongues thudding, nurturing one another. She grabbed his cock and stroked it, rubbing her supple breasts and hard nipples against his body. Jenny massaged his balls, running his groin against hers, kissing him passionately. Merk bit her lips, kissing down her chin and swan neck, sliding his tongue over her breasts, as he sucked on her nipples, biting them, then kissing them softly, clutching her buttocks.
“Hmmm, roger that,” she swooned, running the tip of his penis against her vaginal lips, arousing her clitoris to stir an orgasm. Being naked with Merk fired up her hollows hot and wet.
Merk slid inside Jenny. He began to make love to her in the bathtub, in the water, where he was born in the sea. Like teenage lovers who hadn’t seen each other since summer, Merk and Jenny groped and humped in unison. She kissed him, pulling on and twisting his wet locks, biting and sniffing the strands. He thumped her, nibbling on her earlobe, caressing her neck.
Room service entered and, upon hearing the lovemaking emanate from the bathroom, left the cart of food and stepped out of the presidential suite.
“Do you love your fins more than me?” she whispered, riding him faster, faster.
“Huh, uh … you … of course,” he said, felt a shudder, breathlessly licking her shoulder. “One fin is … pregnant.”
“By you?” she teased, squeezing her thighs, pumping up and down.
“No,” he chortled, delirious, and rolled her over in the tub, pumping her harder.
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