She wrapped her legs around his waist allowing him to thrust all the way inside her—deeper, stronger, faster. She moaned; he snorted until … he felt the pressure build and her body tremble as they climaxed together in a wild, jolting hot spasm.
They spent the rest of the evening in bed touching one another, kissing, caressing, and talking about life late into the night. They didn’t need sleep; they needed each other without the wind-blown sand of the Mid-East or the toxic water from the Gulf of Aden.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
“BLOWING UP MOSUL,” Jenny shouted, “destroying Muslim shrines, tombs, and icons, the Paris attacks has turned the world against ISIS. But this new group—Pratique Occulte—operates in the shadows with big ambitions to take down their enemy. That scares me. They work like me.”
Agent King stared out the CIA-chartered jet window to the cotton-ball clouds below. Disguised as a private business jet flying across the Atlantic Ocean to Washington, DC, Jenny sat with Merk and a young female CIA analyst in the plane’s digital room. Wearing glasses and dressed in a business suit, Jenny let the analyst lead the meeting. She thought the presence of an outsider peering into their unique worlds, into their separate missions, would benefit discovery and connect the terrorist links they might have overlooked.
The trio went over details and observations that Jenny and Merk had made during their missions. With Peder Olsen being detained by the FBI Counterterrorism Unit at Ramstein AFB, Merk questioned whether he would be of use anymore. But the Norwegian sniper did tip Merk off that the radioactive waste sitting that Tasi found came from Germany. Like the country’s march toward clean, renewable energy by decommissioning its nuclear reactors in the south, it came with a cost, with a dirty, seedy underbelly. Merk posited the idea that if Peder did hire a planner, bomb-maker, or some type of scout in the United States, the fact that the mercenary was in US protective custody made it unlikely he would be sought after anymore.
Listening to that reasoning, the CIA analyst coaxed Merk and Jenny to see what dots beyond Olsen could be connected, what common traits or trends might be pulled from their missions, and what extraneous data could be discarded. The process of elimination began on that flight. What US cities would Pratique Occulte target? What landmarks in those cities? And what type of weapons or bombs could they use from the water?
That got Jenny thinking. She turned to Merk and inquired about the pirate hostage negotiations: Who was in charge? How did it go down? And was there any digital image or recording to analyze? Knowing that Dante Dawson was involved, Merk accessed the Navy’s Blue Cloud, used a biometric scan, and entered a secure vault containing the Somali mission, where the records were kept, including the trade of cash for hostages at the Somalia-Djibouti border. He opened video clips and still images, rummaging through them, trying to pick an outlier, when his eyes seized on the small-frame pirate wearing a gas mask.
Merk played the audio. They listened to the chat between Dante and the gas mask man, who spoke through a mobile app. “Who’s the tango?” Merk asked, referring to the terrorist.
“Can’t make out his face. But look there.” Jenny pointed to a shock of straight black hair. “That’s not a Somali’s wild locks. It’s groomed.”
Merk then noticed lighter brown skin between a glove and the long sleeve on the man’s wrist, asking, “Is that Mid-Eastern blood? … Egyptian? … Yemeni? … Syrian?”
“Could be Iranian,” the CIA analyst said, typing the file name in an email and sent it to digital analysts in Langley to see what they would come up with in their search for an identity to the mystery pirate. Jenny sent the same information to CIA Agent Alan Cuthbert, who had kidnapped her in the desert.
As they waited for replies, Jenny scrawled a list of items on a Smart Board:
• Missing fissile material from Iran’s Fordow nuke facility
• ISIS-stolen uranium from Iraq university
• ISIS-stolen chemical weapons from Syria and Iraq? What type of gas agents?
• What kind of dirty or suitcase bomb?
• Syrian missile site and Syrian Electronic Army collaboration?
• Iranian guidance system for torpedoes
• Russian navy dolphins in Canada or US? How many?
• North Korean missile guidance technology—stolen from America
• Korfa’s US connections and network?
• Middle East man in gas mask—a dark omen?
* * *
MERK SHOWED THEY had to work on the list from the top down. He told them to think in terms of cloaking data, erasing digital breadcrumbs, leaving few electronic prints that could be traced back to the fenemy of Iran, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and Somali pirates.
They knew sleeper cells were probably inside the United States already. On the gaps and bottlenecks of information, Merk, Jenny, and the CIA analyst ran through obvious targets for a sea-level bomb delivery. The usual terrorist targets of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, all fit the bill on the Eastern Seaboard, while the West Coast’s big three of Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco made the list. Then Merk added, “What about San Diego? Home to the Pac Rim Command, the Navy SEALs in Coronado, and NMMP on Point Loma?”
Jenny sat back and opened her eyes wide. “I got it. When’s Memorial Day?”
“In two weeks,” the CIA analyst said, lifting her glasses, eyeing Jenny and Merk.
“New York City’s Fleet Week, that’s it,” Jenny said with clarity. “A few years ago, Fleet Week didn’t happen because of the stupid sequester. But now …” As Jenny searched for a list of politicians and dignitaries attending Memorial Day celebration, her tablet pinged.
She opened Cuthbert’s reply, looked at the picture of the gas mask man side by side with a small Arab man wearing glasses, lurking in the back of the crowd at the drone strike protest in Jaar, Yemen. There the man stood outside the terrorist safe house the CIA bombed. She digitally blew up his face, clicked open a metadata tag, and read the caption: “‘His name is Bahdoon. A psychiatrist educated in France’ … so the French name, Pratique Occulte, makes sense.”
“He’s the brains behind Korfa’s Somali muscle,” Merk added.
“There’s another problem,” Jenny said. “If Bahdoon met Dante at the border and the SEA hackers breached his mobile phone … well, Merk, they know who you are.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
AFTER SPENDING MORE than eight hours in meetings with Jenny, her superiors, teams of analysts, and clandestine operators, the CIA put Merk up for the night at Langley. In the morning, he ate breakfast with Jenny and the CIA director in his seventh floor corner office.
The plan was moving forward. While they finished egg whites and bowls of fruit, two stories beneath them, a team of CIA analysts began to connect the dots with NSA intercepts, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other intel agencies that matched Bahdoon to Qas, the Syrian Electronic Army hacker, and General Adad, and the Somali warlord brothers. From there they knew the contacts supplied to them via Agent Jenny King on the Iranian scientists and the North Korean missile engineers.
The last gap they had to close was Korfa. Why did he order Peder Olsen to kill his brother Samatar? What would the Somali pirates gain from their pact with Pratique Occulte?
Narrowing the gap with Olsen’s Russian contact in America would prove difficult; Merk wrote it off. Instead, he told the CIA director that Olsen was now contaminated goods; he was radioactive and no longer needed as a fall guy to pull off a terrorist operation.
For Merk, the next phase was all about getting the supplies and pods of navy dolphins to New York without detection. That meant coordinating with SEAL teams, who would dress both in civilian clothes and military uniform to begin the search for the dirty bomb from either Iran or a stolen chemical weapons cache from Syria.
The claim of several Russian-trained dolphins and a couple of torpedoes deepened the nature and threat of the attack. But King’s eyewitness account did bear
out that dolphins and torpedoes were going to be used in some form, and that would limit the terrorist attack to one US city, and not two like during the 9/11 attacks that struck New York and Washington.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
MERK DROVE THROUGH Gate One at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, escorted by a guard to Gate Three and the base Pass Office. There he was given restricted clearance to the base. They drove him to a storage facility by the shore at Crescent Cove.
The boats and craft usually moored in the slips of the cove had been moved out to other marinas around the base. That was to facilitate the temporary installation of Marine Mammal Systems holding pens, where Tasi and Inapo took residence. Portable veterinary clinics were set up around the slips on land in tents and mobile trailers, while trainers and EOD divers began to ferry rubber boats into the slips.
Before Merk could reconnect with the dolphins he trained overseas, a SEAL Team Two commanding officer and an ONI official had to debrief him. They led Merk into the storage warehouse. Inside, Merk noted the building had little insulation and no soundproofing. He requested acoustic soundboards with cones be installed to dampen background noise that would impact the dolphins, while preventing passersby from eavesdropping.
The ONI liaison entered the request on a tablet, captured pictures of the bare corrugated metal walls, and sent the photos in with the request.
Merk told them the building had to be converted on the fly to receive more sea mammals from NMMP San Diego. It had to be ultra-clean for the veterinary clinics to operate, treat the dolphins, give medical checkups, feed them, and store, prep, and process food. He then requested two emergency generators be delivered in case of a storm or blackout.
Sitting down in chairs around a dolphin’s transport hardbox, the ONI official asked Merk about his thoughts on how he would sweep the waterways around New York City with the marine mammals. Merk shook his head at the man in uniform, and then looked at the Team Two CO. “Sir, I can’t answer that question with any confidence until one, I review a map with contours tonight; two, know how many biologic systems will be under my command; and three, confirm the first two with an aerial flyover and swim-by of Manhattan.”
“Fair list. Anything else, Lt. Toten?” the Team Two CO asked.
“Yes. What other minesweep ops, equipment, choppers, drones, and seaborne gadgets can Big Blue send to New York for Fleet Week?”
“Good call, Toten. Let me look into that,” the ONI official said.
“If the navy sends in the cavalry, it will scare off the tangos. Then we’d lose them until they blow up another target in a different city,” Merk said. He turned to Team Two CO: “Sir, Big Blue better coordinate our efforts with the CIA or we might screw this up. I need to be part of those discussions and learn what the biosystems will be exposed to.”
“Roger that, Merk,” he said. “Your sea daddy Admiral Quail Sumner has already set that pre-recon meeting up for tomorrow at 1100 hours. It will be held at the Pentagon.”
“That works, sir.”
They stepped outside. Merk strolled around Crescent Cove docks and slips, inspecting the dozen floating ten-by-ten enclosures that had been installed. They were moored between the slips as temporary holding pens. Coolers and fish cleaning tables were erected on each one of the floating pontoons that supported a marine mammal pen.
Tasi and Inapo swam around their enclosures. Below the surface, each enclosure was draped with netting that allowed the marine systems to swim out of the cove to be taken to sea for training exercises. Both dolphins looked in good shape. They were relaxed, rested, well-fed, out of the stressful environment of the Strait of Hormuz and the Somalia coast. They enjoyed the sun and warm weather along the Virginia coast, a setting familiar to both of them.
In adjacent pens, a pair of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins had been flown up from the Florida Keys, their littoral training exercise cut short by the national security emergency. Having never worked with those navy dolphins before, Merk observed their behavior, tuned into their traits. One appeared to be rambunctious, the other docile and relaxed. Neither one measured up to the gregarious Tasi or the obsessive-compulsive Inapo.
Within seventy-two hours, six to eight more dolphins flown in from the navy Marine Mammal Program on Point Loma peninsula, across San Diego Bay, would join the quad of biologic systems. More MMS personnel would be flown in from Coronado SPAWAR to support the mobile veterinary clinics and mobilize the staging area in New York City.
Merk met with the veterinary clinic supervisor. Together they double-checked supplies, reviewed inventory including food, gear, and dolphin accessories, such as GPS tags, dorsalcams, nuclear probes, and the types and amounts of food they would need in Little Creek and then in New York. Merk voiced his concern about the low number of transport hardboxes—about half of what would be required—but said he would make due with whatever SSC San Diego would provide for the operation.
The supervisor told Merk that he would call NMMP and follow up to finalize the details.
Minutes later, a CIA agent and the Team Two CO drove Merk to the Naval Network Command Center at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach for a meeting that would get the ball rolling.
Chapter Seventy
INSIDE, THE NAVAL Network Command Center, Merk, the CIA agent, and the Team Two CO met with the SEAL Team Two Navy Commander (O-5). He was a tall, trim, graying man with an angular face and creased forehead. They saluted the commander; he saluted back, motioning them to take a seat. Via a videoconference on a wall screen, he put Merk in touch with NMMP Director Susan Hogue in San Diego—they hadn’t spoken since the death of Morgan Azar.
After a quick round of introductions, the navy commander spoke to Director Hogue, saying, “We need to move fast and coordinate our efforts on the fly with SPAWAR. We need to do so under a total press blackout. No FBI, no local police privy to NMMP counter ops.”
“No tripping the alarm bells that will chase the terrorists away. I’m fine with that plan,” Director Hogue said, understanding the absolute need for secrecy of the operation. She focused on Merk: “Lt. Toten, we need a full list ASAP of what you’re planning to do for the marine surveillance in New York, including Mobile Vetlab items, quantity, gear, etc.”
“Yes, Director Hogue. We can start by sending MK-4 mine-detecting systems and MK-6 combat diver systems to Little Creek, until I find a temporary home for them in New York. The NMMP team can load the transport plane with accessories, transport slings, devices, and teams of personnel, just like we were sending the systems overseas,” he said.
When she received and confirmed the order, she would email the list back to Merk and the SEAL navy commander, and other officials on a need-to-know basis in the Pentagon.
Merk turned to the ONI official and the navy commander. He asked for a list of all navy ships, aircraft, and drones that would be in New York for the Fleet Week and Memorial Day celebrations. He needed to see what the SEALs, CIA, and other spy agencies were planning in terms of deploying drones, divers, land-based cams, underwater cams, and helicopter sweeps searching for nuclear materials. He felt the latter would pose problems, as the sensitive scans would tag the wrong kind of radioactive material, generating a slew of false positives, such as medical X-ray machines and nuclear density gauges used by inspectors testing soil compaction. Giving off hot reads would add layers of complexity, coordination issues, and confusion, while overt stress by the authorities might scare off the terrorists.
The CIA agent showed Merk a digital map of radioactive sensor buoys that ringed the waters thirty miles out in the ocean, in Long Island Sound, and off the 137-mile coastline of the Jersey Shore. Set up in the shipping lanes and routes of local pleasure craft and fishing boat traffic, the buoys could detect nuclear material being smuggled into the US from box carriers and cruise ships, to yachts and sailboats.
Merk was impressed with what he saw. But he pointed out that the stolen nuclear material was likely already in the New York area, having been smugg
led across the porous border of Canada and New England. He told Director Hogue and the others that he was going to conduct the waterborne searches himself, in order to do it right, and that going the path of a hundred cooks would only jeopardize the operation. The data would flow from him and the dolphins to them and the other intel agencies in real-time analytics.
The navy commander concurred, warning, “We have no room for error in New York. Tens of thousands of lives are at stake, including your own.”
Merk understood that. Failing to prevent an attack of that magnitude would kill lots of people and ruin numerous military and political careers. The collective guilt from such a debacle would be overwhelming. So he grabbed a pad and sketched the island of Manhattan, locating small islands in the East River he drew from memory, then the Hudson River, from the tip of Manhattan north past West Point, sketching the bridges and tunnels that crossed the rivers.
Chapter Seventy-One
MERK SPENT THE morning in the water with Tasi to make sure she was healthy enough for recon duties in New York. Had it been any other operation, at any other time, in which the lives of thousands of people weren’t exposed to an overhang of a massive terrorist attack, he would have sent her back to NMMP to give birth.
In the cove, Merk cupped his hand on Tasi’s beak. She rode him around underwater. First in a figure eight, then in an ever-widening loop, more than once grazing his side against the netting of the enclosures. Surfacing at near minute intervals to allow Merk to catch a breath of air, while she burst a breath through her blowhole, Tasi dove under and propelled him out to Little Creek inlet and the sea beyond.
There, Tasi surfaced with Merk for a breath, and then returned to the cove where she glided over the sandy bottom. She allowed Merk to feel the strength of her flukes. With a powerful thrust, she showed she was fit for duty—no excuses. He got the message. He tapped her to speed ahead, slow down, then motioned her to circle around a mooring line. In each turn and transition, the dolphin proved agile, nimble, and responsive. Still, Merk needed to give the pregnant dolphin rest before her next assignment and more downtime in between surveillance runs once they arrived in New York.
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