The decision to take Tasi along was Merk’s alone. NMMP Director Hogue ordered that she receive health status and swim updates of the system on a daily basis, as a second check.
The NMMP had lost only one dolphin in its combat history of more than sixty years. And Merk remembered that dark day all too well. Neither Navy SPAWAR nor NMMP wanted to scuff its sterling record in New York Harbor. With the recent death of Lt. Morgan Azar, Merk didn’t want to put anyone or any MM system in harm’s way.
Merk toweled off. He watched the assistant handlers feed Tasi, Inapo, and the other dolphins. He met with the supervisor of the Mobile Vetlab clinic to make sure the hardboxes and the fleeced-lined stretchers were ready to move the dolphins when the time came to fly north to New York City.
* * *
ON THE HELICOPTER flight from Little Creek to the Pentagon, the SEAL Team Two navy commander joined Merk in going over the logistics of sneaking a dozen navy dolphins and tons of supplies into the City that Never Sleeps without raising an eyebrow.
When they landed, they were taken to a fifth floor conference room to meet with Naval Special Warfare Command, which oversaw all Navy SEALs and covert operations, including the implementation of the navy Dolphins with the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Units—EODMO.
Having received word that Lt. Toten didn’t want the systems exposed in New York by telegraphing to the terrorists that the DoD was going to use every detection system in its arsenal to intercept a dirty bomb, the Special Warfare admiral signaled an engineer to run a presentation.
The first slide in the deck showed a naval helicopter with a laser detection system that pinpointed objects that dolphins tagged as suspicious. In a Midwest accent, the admiral noted: “Lt. Toten, because it’s Fleet Week and there’ll be military exercises plus an air show, we’ll use a helicopter to fly around the harbor and laser-tag any discovery made by the MM systems. The show the navy puts on will be of a training exercise variety that shouldn’t draw suspicion.”
“Yes sir, Admiral, I agree. The dolphins won’t use floating markers or buoys to broadcast their locations in the water. Since a visitor might see a dolphin or two, I request that the systems won’t be saddled with anti-foraging muzzles or other hardware that’s easy to spot. We need to take a Spartan approach to keep the op in stealth mode,” Merk said, and then asked, “What other tools or equipment is the navy planning to use in the harbor?”
The engineer clicked the next slide. The admiral nodded to the engineer to answer Toten’s question: “The US-3 is an Unmanned Surface Sweep System or sea drone.” The image showed a thirty-six-foot-long, torpedo-shaped speedboat with magnetic and acoustic sweep capabilities.
A drone … dolphin drone, Merk thought, recalling what Jenny told him what she saw at the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility in Iran.
“Lt. Toten, if the US-3 wasn’t cool in a kind of Star Trek way, I wouldn’t deploy it. But under the same principle of Broadway theater for the Fleet Week crowds, we’ll deploy the US-3 to cruise up and down the Hudson River under the auspices of showing off the navy’s new unmanned drone. Remember, Fleet Week is a big recruiting tool for the armed services.”
“Yes, I am aware of that, sir. The helo and US-3 will dovetail nicely with the armed forces showcase. Admiral, are there any other details about the op I should know?”
“Affirmative. Just one addition to your request for MK-4 and MK-5 EOD Mobile Units,” the admiral said. “Because some waters in New York have low visibility, Special Warfare Command ordered a pair of MK-8 mine-detecting, mine-neutralizing dolphins to be flown direct to New York. When you set up there, be ready to receive them.”
“Sir, what are the names of those systems?” Merk asked.
“Ekela and Yon,” the engineer said. “It appears you have worked with those systems before.”
“Affirmative, sir. As a pod on a covert op, no less,” Merk said, wondering how those dolphins were doing. He would soon find out.
Chapter Seventy-Two
“RUTHLESS, MERK. YOU have to be ruthless,” Jenny said, wearing a blonde wig and holding a black baseball cap in her hand. Dressed in gray slacks and a white blouse, donning glasses, she gave yet a different look, style, and persona with the disguise. “We’re going to fly in the back door of New York through Westchester County Airport. A diplomat will escort us from there. You will be undercover until agents drive you to a CIA safe house in lower Manhattan,” she explained. “Like my plan?”
“Incognito, like you.” Merk checked out her blonde tresses, handing her a flash drive.
* * *
THEY LIFTED OFF without incident. Jenny and her team of CIA operators went over details that were streaming in from the New York State Intelligence Fusion Center. The two-hour flight was all the time Merk needed to decompress, grab a power nap, and think about the best way he should go out in the city and draw attention to his visit. Only he knew he would use himself as bait, as chum, to draw the terrorist tiger sharks out in the open. He would keep Jenny in the dark about that tactic, knowing that without taking such risk they would know next to nothing about Pratique Occulte’s planned attack, except that it was going to originate in water around New York City.
* * *
GOING AGAINST FBI and ONI advice, Merk spent all of five minutes in the safe house in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. He didn’t care about protocol, potential threats to his life, or being a marked man. In the latter, he wanted to roam around in public to be seen and followed, as long as that meant flushing the terrorists out so they could pursue their quarry. If there were Syrians, Somali pirates, Iranian agents, or Yemen Shia warriors embedded in New York, he wanted to find out who they were and draw them out in the open.
So he began the chum operation by moving around the city, checking water extraction points for the dolphins, landmarks for Black Mass targets, and obstacles in the rivers for the systems to avoid; above all, to find a staging area for the Navy Marine Mammal systems to be housed and secure 24/7. NMMP needed space as much as secrecy, a place with easy access to the water that could hold a battalion of fifty marine biologists, armed security guards, assistant trainers, handlers, and veterinarians who were assigned to Merk to oversee Operation Free Dive.
Merk scouted the piers, warehouses, and the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier Museum along the Hudson River from the rooftop of a west side midtown hotel, drinking a light beer, enjoying the view. He saw old navy vessels in port, but not a Littoral Combat Ship that could be used to search the Hudson River for subsurface anomalies.
He took a subway down to the new World Trade Center, and strolled along the miles-long walkway of Battery Park City to the southern tip of Manhattan. He rode the Staten Island Ferry back and forth, eyeing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on the New Jersey side of the harbor, and Governors Island and Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront on the east port. Merk watched a cruise ship enter escorted by a tugboat, and scanned the Brooklyn Armory out toward the Belt Parkway, with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge looming in the background under the noonday sun.
After a quick bite, Merk strode through the streets that Hurricane Sandy submerged in the fall of 2012, from Wall and Broad Streets, to Pearl Street and many other narrow avenues. On one of the New York Stock Exchange’s blocked roads—to prevent a car bomb from going off—he watched a security guard circle an SUV holding a stick with a tiny mirror to search for bombs that might be planted under the vehicle.
Merk picked up a rent-a-car, using his real name and PenFed credit card. He drove across the Brooklyn Bridge. Not only was he out and about, leaving a long physical trail, but he left an electronic one as well. He took it one step further and kept his mobile phone on, inviting access to his location. He drove along the Brooklyn waterfront and didn’t notice federal vehicles, police cars, or terrorists shadowing him. He was alone; his plan seemed to be failing.
Having seen enough, he took the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on-ramp and drove on the elevated section of the highway by the Brooklyn-Bat
tery Tunnel. He glanced out to the harbor and saw a dark, abandoned, concrete structure with the name NEW YORK PORT AUTHORITY GRAIN TERMINAL faded on the giant box’s side.
After giving the old, tall structure a long look, he raced out to Coney Island. There he drove by the New York Aquarium, where dolphins used to put on a show. He doubled back heading west on the Belt Parkway around Bay Ridge and back toward Manhattan. He passed under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, rolled down the window, surveying the half dozen chemical and container ships moored across the harbor, waiting their turn to unload cargo heading into port, or riding out a storm before sailing to the Atlantic Ocean.
As Merk drove, eyeing the long-hull ships anchored across the narrows on the Staten Island side of the harbor, he realized the scope of finding bombs in and around the eleven-mile long island of Manhattan was going to be a vast, long, and monumental task. It would prove especially true when factoring in that he was going to deploy no more than a dozen dolphins to cover such large bodies of water.
As he drove the last stretch on the Belt Parkway toward Leif Ericson Park at 66th Street and Fourth Avenue, Merk looked out at the ships on the long throat that led into New York Harbor between northern Staten Island and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Consumed in deep thought, Merk failed to notice a dark green car shadowing him in his right blind spot. He lifted a mobile phone to take a picture of a Chinese flagged freighter across the channel, when the car slammed into the front right panel of Merk’s vehicle, ramming it against the concrete median barrier. Brakes screeched. In a jolt airbags deployed from the steering column and door panel. The seat belt pulled taut as Merk’s face slammed into the airbag, scraping his cheek and forehead.
Merk heard a car door open and knew the assassin was coming for the kill. Locked in place, he frantically searched his pants pocket, pulled a knife out, and cut the seat belt away. With his left hand, he reached down for the seat recliner to lower the seat back when the first rounds swept across the windshield, ripping the interior of the car, bursting the airbag, blowing the rearview mirror apart. With all his force, Merk slammed his back against the seat, snapping the recline lock all the way back, in effect breaking the seat. That allowed him to roll into the backseat and pop open the rear door.
More bullets strafed the vehicle, chewing up the windows, roof, and hood of the car. The seats were being torn to pieces as Merk slithered low out of the vehicle. He looked under the car and saw a pair of black boots with jeans, as the assassin stopped to reload the next magazine.
In the cacophony of shells tearing into the vehicle a third time, other vehicles screeched to a halt; horns honked; people abandoned their cars and SUVs, screaming as they fled and retreated from the ambush. Merk rose up the concrete median barrier, glimpsed the head of the lanky assailant—a Middle Eastern man with olive skin, cropped brown hair—and rolled over the wall into the southbound lane of traffic. And then—
A car reacted to the firing and jammed on the brakes. Sliding into the concrete barrier, it just missed hitting Merk. Two more cars avoided the new crash, while other southbound vehicles skidded and screeched to halt, with a couple of them colliding in fender-benders.
The terrorist stepped cautiously around the front of the vehicle. He peered inside the cab, seeing the shredded airbags, cut seat belt, and surveyed the broken seat pushed to the back—nothing. He looked down at the asphalt, but didn’t see a trail of blood. He peered down the Belt Parkway, noticing the cars on his side of the northbound lanes had stopped, with other desperate motorists backing away, while others still abandoned their cars and fled on foot.
The assassin turned away from the panic and toward the median divider. …
On the other side of the barrier, Merk pinned his back against the concrete, making his body area small. He looked up at the crash victim in the car, and watched the injured man raise his head, his one eye opening with blood streaming down his face. The airbag in his vehicle didn’t deploy. When his open eye widened with fear, the injured man tried to close the door in a futile attempt to escape. Merk kicked it shut and reached up as the gunman stuck the assault rifle over the side. Merk grabbed hold of the hot barrel, pulling the assassin down.
Bursts of gunfire pelted the asphalt around Merk, like the nose of a jackhammer, hitting him with spats of flak from the shrapnel and asphalt. The assassin’s trembling hands refused to let go, as the weapon’s recoil tried to shake Merk’s strong grip. Merk refused. He reached up and pulled the terrorist over the barrier, slamming his face into the blacktop. Merk rolled on top of him and headbutted the assassin in a jarring blow. Blood poured from the assassin’s nose.
With speed, Merk chopped the side of the assassin’s head and then struck his throat, cracking cartilage with a fierce blow, knocking the terrorist out cold. Merk’s killer instinct had returned. With rifle in hand, Merk pivoted on one knee, raised the barrel as if to fire the weapon, and watched the other terrorist scramble back to the green car, jump in it, and drive off.
Injured, bruised with scrapes to his face, a welt on his head and blood running from his nose and lips, Merk pulled the magazine out and watched the green car speed away. The car dashed off the parkway on the Belt’s last exit.
A piercing whistle droned through Merk’s ears and burrowed into his skull. Dazed, Merk tried to shake the whistling sound, to no avail.
He searched the roadway on the northbound side, looking for his mobile phone. Some fifty feet back up the road he saw it lying in three pieces. Holding the rifle in one hand and the magazine in the other, Merk stepped to the crashed car, opened the door, and asked the injured driver if he could use his cell phone to make a call on behalf of the US Navy. The injured man nodded in pain.
Merk gave the rifle and magazine to the bloodied man to hold; he looked up in wonder. “I hate guns,” Merk said, tapping Jenny’s number. As it started to ring, he put two fingers on the man’s bloody neck and felt his pulse. Merk made a gesture to the injured man letting him know that he was going to live, when Jenny King answered the call.
“Hey, Memo, are you listening? … A tango tried to take me out on the Belt Parkway. His partner escaped in a banged-up green Buick,” Merk said.
“Got it, Blue,” Jenny replied, not wanting to use Merk’s name either for OpSec reasons. “You and I will need a secure way to communicate going forward. I was right. SEA hacked Dante’s smartphone in Somaliland. The tangos know what you look like.”
Sirens wailed and chirped in the background; the police were on their way.
Merk felt relieved. He realized that for the first time in months he was standing on US soil. It was good to be home, even if he was under the duress of a terrorist attack.
Chapter Seventy-Three
POLICE CRUISERS AND motorcycles escorted the ambulance after it picked up the unconscious terrorist on the Belt Parkway, placed him on a gurney, and put the gurney into an ambulance with a pair of FBI agents making sure the handcuffed terrorist wouldn’t come to and try to escape.
A CIA agent filed Merk into a black SUV with dark tinted windows. He slid over to the middle seat next to an upset Jenny King, who gave her lover a hard look as a CIA medic stepped in, closed the door, and attended to the cuts and abrasions Merk suffered in the car crash and firefight. The medic said in a demure voice, “You don’t follow rules, do you?” Merk smiled.
“Don’t ever pull that crap again. Next time ask me to cover your dorsal fin. You grab an assault rifle from a terrorist and do what? You give it away?” Jenny shouted in disbelief.
“Will I be on the news tonight?”
“The news? Hell yes,” she said, flicking his ear with her finger. “Merk, you’re not a SEAL anymore. This is the twenty-first century and social media dominates.” She held up her mobile phone. “Look at the Twitter feeds coming out of the local TV stations. … Pictures taken by drivers of the accident.” Jenny showed him the pictures and videoclips of Merk dazed, of him hiding behind the median barrier, of him wrestling the assassin, of him handing the rifle wh
ile tending to the injured driver as he made a call, of him inspecting the bullet-ridden crashed rent-a-car. “Very photogenic. I’m sure the admirals and Director Hogue will be pleased to see this.”
“Okay, okay, got it. So I went viral … Kim, er King, whatever your name is.”
“Kiss off, Merk.”
“Jenny,” he whispered, nodding his head across the narrows to a chemical tanker ship moored off Staten Island, “Look at that ship. The cargo is already here.”
She leaned over and blew in his ear, “What cargo?”
“The items you saw in Iran’s nuclear facility. The torpedo … the animals in the picture of Russian navy dolphins … they’re all here,” he said. “I know it. It’s churning my gut.”
Stunned, she sat back, knowing he was right. Guarding the container ports, airports, and borders now was a useless exercise, a waste of money. But there was no turning around the Titanic of big government and getting it off red alert status. Jenny surmised that the only items left for the terrorists to transport across the ocean would be a handful of operators: Korfa, Bahdoon, and a few others. But even they, she now believed, were already in the New York City area, which gave her the chills. If she could use an alias and a disguise many times, if she could impersonate a North Korean missile engineer, she knew Korfa and Bahdoon could step into someone else’s shoes, too, do the same as her, and enter the United States without trouble. Add betrayed Somali refugees, Yemeni sympathizers, and American jihadists, and the Pratique Occulte sleeper cell was already operating in the United States.
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