Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  “Did you read my report on what happened to the dolphin recon in the Strait of Hormuz? Iran must be behind Pratique Occulte,” he said.

  “Yes, I did. So you traded your friend’s life for more intel. It’s a horrible tradeoff, but with Iran and national security, I would make that trade every time,” Jenny said with relish. Her mobile phone vibrated. “Merk, the intel was critical. It matches up with everything I saw in the Iranian nuclear plant. And how Bahdoon screwed Cuthbert with the false intel on the terrorist safe house in Yemen. It was all a ruse to deliver bad publicity to the United States and draw away CIA drones so Iran could lay mines. They nearly pulled off a great one-two punch, if it weren’t for you and your fins.”

  Jenny read the text alert: “They found the green car … abandoned in downtown Brooklyn. Manhunt is on the way for the other tango, believed to be in the subway.”

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  INSIDE THE NEW York Intelligence Fusion Center, which unified the city and state police forces after 9/11 with federal agencies, from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to the CIA and NSA, an FBI special agent showed Merk dozens of screens on the live media wall. Surrounded by New York City’s new Command and Control Unit, deploying most of its 500 counterterrorism-trained Hercules Teams, Merk felt more like a SEAL than a dolphin trainer.

  Merk took in the angles, monitors, sensors, traffic cams, social mining sites, closed circuit TVs, NSA-hacked mobile phone data—emails, texts, photos, and video—and other audiovisual feeds from around the five boroughs and waterways of New York City, and saw what was missing. He whispered the discovery in Jenny’s ear.

  “Lieutenant Toten, would you care to share your thoughts with the rest of us?” the FBI special agent said, watching Merk whisper in Agent King’s ear again.

  “Sure.” Merk turned to the special agent. He stepped over to the screens, waved his hands about, saying, “For all of this visual virtuosity and digital analytics, you’re missing a key piece to the puzzle.”

  “Which is what, precisely?” the skeptical FBI special agent asked.

  “You won’t find squat with your technology,” he said.

  Jenny averted her eyes at Merk’s cringe-worthy statement.

  “Come again? We’ve spent more than 100 million dollars on sensors, cameras, data analytics, and drones of all sizes,” the special agent said defensively.

  “Wrong sensors,” Merk noted. “You need to locate a hot load with a low radioactive signature. It’s not going to advertise itself. It will be masked.”

  “We have a chopper flying over Staten Island right now,” the annoyed special agent said, pointing to a top screen that showed a live shot over the ocean side of the borough.

  “Right? You’re trying to locate heat from backpack nukes, the kinds that our Special Forces carried into war zones. You ever seen or worn one of those?” Merk asked, silencing the special agent and the entire room. “One FBI helo for multiple devices won’t cut it.”

  “Uh, Lt. Toten …” the New York City DHS Director spoke up. “We have two more radiation detecting helicopters en route to JFK. They are due to arrive at 2200 hours.”

  “Zulu,” Merk added with navy flair. “That’ll be good for tomorrow, good for the ground and good for parts of the sky. But it won’t do any good if the mini nukes are transported or planted in the waters around Manhattan.” Merk looked around at agents and police officers that surrounded him. “You want to stop the worst terrorist attack in US history and keep your names out of the media about this impending attack, then you’re going to need more than helos.”

  “What Lt. Toten is saying,” Agent King spoke up, “is we need to get on the same page and coordinate our efforts. New York has done a lot since 9/11. But you haven’t faced this threat vector before, even with your overseas officers.” With that, Jenny led Merk to a soundproof conference room, whispering in his ear, “You know, Merk, for a dolphin-loving introvert you’re one talkative man.” She goaded him into the glass room, locked the door, and sat at the table across from him.

  His NMMP laptop had been delivered and placed on the table. Merk turned it on, took out a pair of mobile phones from a utility belt, each downloaded with a mobile app of the Dolphin Code software, and said, “This is how we’re going to communicate when we’re apart, like dolphins. No one can hack our conversation, not even the NSA.” He spun the laptop around showing the color-coded keyboard, the commands organized by colors, groups, and tasks.

  “Like fins? How’s that going to work, Blue?” she asked, tapping the menus on the Dolphin Code app. “Pretty cool. Not bad for a geek who likes to swim more than have sex.”

  Merk shook his head at her last comment, “Low blow.”

  “Hmmm, I believe you would like that right about now.” She fiddled with the app.

  He spoke into his mobile phone, saying, “King likes to hold wood.”

  She looked up at him, grinned, and chortled, “Never on the first date.” As she heard the words spoken by Merk, she heard dolphin trills come out of the speaker of her mobile phone. It startled her. Jenny looked at the screen and now saw his words—King likes to hold wood—written out in text format. “What the hell …? How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t. DARPA did with my input. That and a few trained fins,” he said with a wry smile. “If our phones are hacked, the cyber thief will only see sound waves.”

  “Data obfuscation.”

  “Dolphin obfuscation.”

  “Pure genius, Merk,” she said, standing up. She picked up a remote, aimed it at a plasma screen. “The terrorist who attacked you today was part of the P.O. sleeper cell. He has a refugee visa from Homs, you know, that Syrian destroyed city. What the hell is he doing with Korfa? Unless he went to the other side?” She clicked the next slide, showing the other terrorist, the one who drove away, being arrested, handcuffed, pulled out of a New York subway, and thrown into an armored police vehicle. “The NYPD Hercules Team made the collar. He’s of Syrian descent, too, from Dabiq, with an older and forged visa that predates Syria’s 2011 civil war.”

  “Okay. Enlighten me.”

  “They are assassins only. There may be more; the world now knows what you look like. But if we’re going to stop the attack vector, we have to intercept Bahdoon, take out Korfa and his Somali henchmen, and capture the core of the Syrian Electronic Army that’s here in New York. We don’t do that, they’ll green-light the operation and detonate whatever devices they have.”

  “Let’s start with Korfa,” Merk said. “He’s determined, but a sacrificial lamb for Pratique Occulte. If you were a well-known Somali pirate, where would you hide in New York?”

  “In plain sight.”

  “What? Does Somalia have an office here in the city?”

  “You mean, a consulate or embassy? Sure, it’s on East 61st Street and York Ave,” she said, confirming the address on her mobile phone.

  “What about the United Nations?”

  “Christ,” she looked at him in surprise. “My god, brilliant. The UN is international territory. It’s a safe haven. He’d be protected there.”

  “Practically untouchable,” he pointed out.

  “We need to make a short list of the most likely locations of where the warlord would hide and have those buildings watched 24/7.”

  “And you’ll need to break into one of those places to hunt him down,” he stated. “We’re not dealing with the cherry founder of WikiLeaks. Korfa is one dangerous MF.”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  LATE THAT NIGHT, disguised as a livery cab driver with Indian features, Merk visited the first of three sites. He drove by an empty warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard off Flushing Avenue, between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. But he felt the location was set too far back from the water to be effective; he also didn’t like operating below the higher vantage points of both bridges, where he and the dolphins could be watched. And there was too much traffic and activity, so he scratched the Navy Yard off the l
ist of possible sites for the MMS staging area.

  He drove out to the Brooklyn Armory Terminal, but came away with the same reservation about the site. Although it was ideally suited, located on the waterfront with sweeping views of the harbor and lower Manhattan, it was too busy for an industrial area.

  Merk then drove to the abandoned, black concrete structure he saw the day before in Red Hook, near the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in the New York Port Authority Grain Terminal. He learned city officials had long referred to the terminal as the “Magnificent Mistake.”

  For Merk, the dirty, soot-covered, concrete box structure was isolated, well fortified for protecting the NMMP Mobile Vetlab Unit and to keep the navy dolphins from prying eyes. More critical, the structure appeared bombproof. It was a bunker. The tall structure offered a commanding view to scout New York Harbor from its upper floors and roof.

  So he parked the car and climbed up the rusting metal stairs in a decayed stairwell covered with graffiti. The cracking and chipping of paint reminded him of the Somali boy’s scarred arms. On the roof, he peered around. On the backside, he saw cars, buses, and trucks stuck in traffic on the BQE overpass, which could see him and other navy scouts or snipers, so he would have come up with some sort of blind to obstruct their views. Other than that, the Magnificent Mistake was a prize location to run a stealth dolphin operation.

  Merk used the Dolphin Code mobile app to communicate his findings to NMMP, which in turn shared the information with the CIA, the navy brass in the Pentagon, and the New York Intelligence Fusion Center through a direct high-speed, fiber-optic pipe.

  Merk spent another twenty minutes on the roof. He peered down at a chemical tanker unloading its cargo at a nearby terminal. He looked below to a rusty trolley stuck, frozen in time, on the abandoned tracks in Red Hook. He photographed the Gowanus Canal on the terminal’s backside and knew it was polluted, just not as badly as it was back in the 1970s and 1980s.

  He figured he could ferry the dolphins through the canal and out to the East River to be inserted in cleaner water, and upon return hoses would spray the bad chemicals and pollutants off their epidermis. He also made a mental note to tell the trainers, helpers, and marine biologists to make sure they instructed the dolphins to swim above the surface in the canal and not dive under, to prevent contaminated water from filling their blowholes. The Vetlab team would have to take water tests, in case any of the marine mammals became sick with infection or virus.

  Merk made his way down the building, floor by dirty floor. He looked out broken windows to the lights of New York Harbor, at the dilapidated grain feed equipment and broken conveyor belts lying about. The air had an acrid, musty odor to it. He made a mental note to set up fans and humidifiers. The Navy Dolphin Mobile Team would have to draw power to the building or get it turned back on by Con Edison without any questions being asked.

  Outside of a fast retrofit, Merk felt lucky he had stumbled on something of immediate value. He and the marine mammal systems could hide in New York City in plain sight, just like Korfa.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  BY THE TIME Merk and Jenny arrived at 0600 hours at the grain terminal, navy personnel were already removing trash and debris from the ground floor, taking the refuse out to a Dumpster in bags and large chunks. A couple of chemists were testing the water around the abandoned facility to determine whether the presence of toxins and heavy metals could harm the dolphins’ lungs, immune systems, and epidermis. Merk didn’t want a repeat of a vulnerable system, like Tasi, being exposed to toxic waste.

  Those who worked outside on the grain terminal grounds wore hazmat suits, since that was the cover story the Pentagon and NYPD used to chase curious people away.

  Inside the ground floor, a crew of carpenters began laying down sleeper planks and then subfloor plywood over the dirty and degraded concrete floor. Other laborers installed acoustic-absorbing foam panels on the walls, as if the two-foot-thick walls needed more soundproofing.

  Jenny looked around at the unfolding operation, nudged Merk in the side, reminding him, “We need to finish this off, Merk. Don’t forget, be ruthless.”

  “How about you?”

  “I got a break on Korfa,” she said, picking up the backpack and handing it to Merk. She leaned over and whispered, “We tapped the Somali embassy on 61st Street. It appears he has a few friends in high places. The phone calls have been traced back to the UN.”

  “So he’s here.”

  “You told me Korfa was in the UN. But you never told me how to get him out.”

  Merk gave her a look, grinned, and opened the backpack, pulling out an oversized plastic pistol. He loaded a plastic dart with a metal tip into the handgun.

  “What’s this?”

  “Korfa’s sleeping pill,” Merk said, then fired a shot at a sheet of plywood. The dart struck in a burst of purple ink, sticking in the wood. “A tranquilizer dart for dolphins.”

  “Cool. Really, cool. What’s with the dye?”

  “Need to know when the dart hits a dolphin. The dye washes off in salt water after a few days.” He pulled the dart out and handed it to Jenny.

  She studied it, asking, “Okay. But how can I get the dart gun past UN security?”

  “You don’t have to. Just carry a couple of darts into the UN and stab him—”

  “If I get that close.”

  “Let Korfa convulse for show. When that happens, call an ambulance and take him to a hospital off UN grounds.” He gave her a new dart. “C’mon, King, you like to throw things.”

  Jenny held the dart with a finger on the tail and tossed it hard, exploding it in the purple dye across the plywood. “Yes. That’ll work fine the next time I seduce you.”

  Merk’s Satcom vibrated. It was NMMP Director Susan Hogue calling for an update. “Toten here,” he answered, listening to his boss, and then replied, “Yes, director, I’ve seen the pictures. There’s more? … Of course there is, it’s on the Internet. Affirmative.” He ended the conversation with his boss and stared at Jenny, telling her: “They believe NMMP’s on-premise servers and Pentagon Cloud have been hacked. They’re trying to confirm it.”

  “More pictures of you on the Belt after the scuffle?” Jenny said. She pulled a Heckler & Koch MK23 pistol with a silencer out of her jacket pocket, and showed the firearm to Merk, saying, “Time to retaliate.”

  “You can’t bring that into the UN.”

  “Maybe not.”

  He held up the spent dart, and reminded her, “We need Korfa alive.”

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  INSIDE THE WHITE House Situation Room, the CIA director and Pentagon military leaders looked at a wall screen with the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. The president gave the green light to bomb what the NRO’s intelligence unit estimated was General Adad’s 40 million dollar private jet parked on an airstrip in a northeast Syrian desert—a former ISIS stronghold. They looked at a live UAV image of the jet sitting on the tarmac at night, through an infrared lens. A blur. Little detail. It was a long shot. All they had to go by was some Red Cell analysis, along with known locations of Agent King’s movements in the same area months before when she scouted the desert for the new missile launch site guised as North Korean missile engineer Kim Dong-Sun.

  A four-star army general requested to see the spy photos of the Syrian jet parked on the runway in Hargeisa Airport a week earlier. A CIA engineer showed a split-screen of the two jets side by side. The jets looked like twins to all who were present.

  “That’s Adad’s bird, all right,” a navy admiral confirmed on a gut feeling. “Blow it to hell.”

  “Mr. President, permission to fire?” the army general asked.

  The president signaled yes, by moving two fingers in a chopping motion.

  The army general gave the order by telephone to CIA drone reachback operators in Fort Meade. Ten seconds later, the drone fired the first of three Hellfire rockets at the jet.

  Within seconds, the trio of He
llfire missiles blew apart the fuselage and wings of the jet, sheering the nose off, blasting the tail section back from the wreckage in a skidding fireball. The bursts of flames lit up the infrared lens.

  As the blast radiated outward, in ascending fiery clouds of smoke and debris, the CIA director remarked, “That should send Syria and its Black Mass affiliates a loud message.”

  “Well done, gentlemen,” the president said, congratulating the DoD executives.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  AS SHE WAITED for the arrival of the North Korean Army uniform, Jenny secured access to an empty upper floor apartment across First Avenue from the United Nations Headquarters.

  Tudor City was an elevated, tree-lined, eleven-building enclave built in the late 1920s on the east end of 42nd Street. Rising above the city streets, the tall brick buildings encompassed a pair of parks with stairs that swept down to 42nd Street and First Avenue, built at a time when factories and slaughterhouses stood where the UN headquarters would eventually be built. The pair of Tudor City buildings that faced the East River had small windows to prevent residents from looking at the industrial eyesores of the day.

  In that rented one-bedroom apartment, Jenny and a geeky CIA digital engineer set up a surveillance nest. They took turns: One of them watched the UN’s front entrance, driveway with international flags, and North Lawn, and peered into the iconic, all-glass, newly renovated headquarters with binoculars. The other agent reviewed a marked-up set of plans, trying to identify where inside the UN Korfa might be hiding. Once Jenny got inside, she would need as few places as possible to search for the warlord.

  “How are you planning to break into the UN? You going in disguised as a journalist?” the CIA digital engineer asked.

  “No. I’m going to be the North Korean missile engineer Kim Dong-Sun one last time.”

  The digital engineer nodded, knowing cyber teams from the NSA and CIA had started to hack into UN communications networks, sifting through thousands of emails, cloud notes, and millions more texts and instant messages generated in the last month to see when Korfa, whether by name or code name, popped up in the UN data dump. The longer the spy agencies hacked the UN nerve center, the more Jenny believed Korfa operated off the grid, leaving little to no electronic footprint to be discovered. Terrorists had learned how to go dark thanks to Edward Snowden, a traitor in Jenny’s eyes, who should one day be tried for treason.