Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  She chose the General Assembly Building, which had been closed down for a complete construction overall until the GA’s 69th Session in September 2014. The GA was the main area to search, with the Security Council, the Secretariat’s Cafeteria, and the Dag Hammarskjöld Library as other areas to probe. For her, they would all become hot nodes in her intense manhunt.

  On a hacked blueprint of the newly renovated UN building, Jenny circled the second floor and the Secretariat’s Cafeteria as two places to begin the search. If she went in as a kidnapped North Korean asylum seeker, maybe UN security would lead her to Korfa.

  The intercom buzzer rang.

  “That’s Dong-Sun’s gear,” Jenny said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. When I enter the UN, where are you going to be?”

  “In the van parked across the street.”

  Jenny patted the data engineer on the shoulder. He answered the intercom buzzer, telling the front desk to let the delivery be made to the apartment.

  Kim Dong-Sun’s clothes had arrived from Langley.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  THE FIRST HALF dozen dolphins arrived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. They were shipped up the New Jersey Turnpike in ordinary rent-a-trucks, then were transferred onto a US Coast Guard ship and ferried across the Hudson River to the Brooklyn grain terminal.

  Because of the ongoing security investigation into the network breach, the NMMP’s usual communication line to inform Merk the dolphins were on their way was not used. Instead, he received one secure phone call telling him in code the marine mammal systems’ estimated time of arrival. That was it.

  The whole military hacking spy game was one of the reasons why Merk, in concert with DARPA computer architects, engineers, and scientists, created the Dolphin Code software. If communications were ever hacked, the stolen data would amount to little more than strings of acoustic noise that couldn’t be deciphered. So the translation of more than 200 directives from the color-coded keys would be impossible. Only a handful of directors and admirals with the highest levels of navy security clearance had access to the Dolphin Code Rosetta key, which was kept offline in vaults at three different secure locations around the country.

  Set up in twenty-four hours at the grain terminal, the MMS Mobile Vetlab Unit received the Pacific bottlenose dolphins, Ekela and Yon. Merk had trained the pair in Hawaii more than a year before for an operation in Southeast Asia. Now the biosystems were back under his command in waters with the industrial noise signal of a big port city that would be foreign to them.

  Merk reminded himself of being a carpenter, of his father telling him to “use the tools you got,” when he removed the dolphins from the slings and hardboxes. He placed them on stretchers, fed both during dual medical checkups, then set them in a rubber boat, covered in poly sheets to protect their sensitive skin from the sun’s ultraviolet rays and snooping eyes by local boaters. With a young assistant, Merk rode Ekela and Yon out to the harbor, steering clear of the thousands of tourists and commuters aboard the Staten Island ferries.

  The Coast Guard ship, carrying Tasi and Inapo and two other dolphins from NMMP San Diego, crossed paths on the way to the grain terminal. The Coast Guard captain flashed a light, signaling Merk that four more biologic systems were being delivered.

  If Pratique Occulte’s plan of attack were pushed up to the next day, Merk would have a lot of water in and around New York to cover with only a half dozen systems. Six dolphins to search a dozen or so moored international ships, to stand guard and scan landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, the Intrepid Museum, cruise ship terminals, the Chelsea Piers, the ferry slip at Whitehall Station, the South Street Seaport, and up the East River on Roosevelt Island. It would be a tall order for drones to carry out. And that’s not to mention all the points on the Brooklyn and New Jersey sides that flank the city.

  The navy got bogged down in delivering the mine-detecting helicopter, too. That meant the sonar sweeping capability and the unmanned drone ship—both of which would cover a great deal of real estate up and down the harbor and rivers—would have to wait. In true government bureaucratic fashion, the logistics had become a headache, bordering on nightmare.

  That afternoon, things got worse. Jenny sent Merk a coded text about the Pentagon’s retaliatory strike of General Adad’s jet. The parked jet was empty with no one wounded and zero casualties. In her anger at the shortsightedness of their superiors, she noted the casualties would mount on the US side of the Atlantic Ocean, because “the US sent the wrong message to the renegade general in Syria. Pratique Occulte will definitely strike now.”

  Merk texted Jenny back: “Be a carpenter. Use the tools you have.” In a way, he was reminding himself of the predicament, that the Pentagon had put a crimp into his search plan.

  Off Staten Island, around the bend from the ferry terminal, Merk steered the rubber boat to a Chinese-flagged, black-hulled cargo ship Hang Sun. He pulled the poly sheets off the dolphins, checked their dorsalcams and GPS tags, and signaled them to roll into the water.

  Once in the harbor, he gave a second hand-sign directing Ekela and Yon to swim around the medium-size vessel, and return giving him one of three signs: first sign, raising a left or right flipper to signal some object had been found; second sign, a tap of their beak in his palm telling him they found a mine, bomb, or torpedo; and third, an echolocating click to signal “all clear.”

  If they gave the tapping sign, Merk would place an emergency call to the Pentagon to summon navy SEAL divers, who were stationed nearby, to race out and inspect the object. Dorsalcam images, if not too blurry, might confirm what a discovered object might be: a false positive or a potential real threat. Like everything else with Operation Free Dive, the SEAL divers wouldn’t arrive until later that day.

  The navy dolphins were taught to ignore empty cans, drum barrels, and containers they could differentiate with their sonar from solid explosive packs and sea-mines. A dolphin’s sonar is so sensitive and accurate that it could tell whether the hull of a ship came from Swedish steel or Japanese recycled scrap metal, by measuring the steel’s density at a distance.

  With their GPS tags, Merk watched the dolphins’ progress above surface and below the vessel. The digital pings showed their movements on a digital map of New York Harbor superimposed on the laptop screen.

  Ekela followed the mooring line down to the anchor that was buried in sediment. The dolphin found nothing, returned to the surface, breathed a pinch of air through her blowhole, and then swam around the bow before she dove below surface to search again.

  Yon swam under the keel, filming the length of the seaweed-clad hull.

  Nearly half hour later, the dolphins returned with both of them clicking in staccato bursts. Merk knew they didn’t find anything that was threatening; the dorsalcam images he downloaded confirmed as much.

  Merk drove the dolphins to a pier at the end of Belt Parkway on the Brooklyn side of the harbor. Seeing people were fishing on the pier, Merk cut the motor halfway across from the Hang Sun, and allowed the dolphins to dive in the water and swim under the pier. With Yon towing a DPod to the pier, Merk watched their movement underwater via the dorsalcams.

  Ekela darted down one row of pylons, weaving in and around them, grazing fishing lines, stirring a few people to believe they had fish nibbling on their hooks. Yon worked the other side of the pier, surveying for bombs or the odd object with side-sweeping echolocating clicks. Like the Hang Sun cargo ship, the pier was clean.

  When the dolphins returned from the foray, Merk received a text from the navy SEAL team. They were at the NMMP staging area and were going to take Tasi and Inapo and the other pair of mine-searching dolphins out to the harbor to join the search.

  Merk welcomed the news. But he needed a lot more help if they were going to find and interdict a mini nuclear device from detonating in the city waters.

  Chapter Eighty

  FOR JENNY IT was all or nothing. At knifepoint, she made the digital
engineer punch her in her ribs. The blow knocked her to the floor. She squirmed, sucking for air.

  Curled in a ball, she lifted a bare foot and ordered the engineer to club the sole of her foot with a towel-bar she’d ripped off the bathroom wall. The blow drove shooting pain through her foot with an electrical jolt that shot up her spine. After the spasms subsided, Jenny straightened her body on the floor and stretched for several minutes, stilling the numbness. She gathered her senses, breathed short breaths, part bikram yoga, part Merk teaching her dolphin breathing techniques, until she was able to climb to her feet and limp to the bathroom. If she was going to lie her way into a secure facility like the UN, the pain and bruises had to be real.

  In the bathroom, Jenny scrubbed her face clean, removing all signs of makeup. She looked behind the bathroom door, saw dust on the floor, squatted down, and rubbed the grime on her face, giving the impression she had been held captive in some cellar in the city.

  Dressed one more time as North Korean engineer Kim Dong-Sun, making sure the collar was crooked, Jenny exited the apartment by the back stairs. At the ground floor, she disabled the alarm and stepped through a fire door, out onto the street in full view of UN headquarters.

  With her clubbed foot still sore and throbbing, Jenny limped to the intersection across First Avenue from the UN’s main gate at the Visitor Centre overlooking the North Lawn.

  A few passersby noticed her strange military getup and pronounced limp. But it was New York; on the opposite side of town sat Times Square, where adults dressed up as superheroes and nude women to drain tourists of money. Was the disguise a ruse, a Communist fashion statement, or was she from a rogue nation? Jenny ignored the gawkers and hobbled across the street.

  A couple of security guards questioned her in English.

  Jenny spoke fast in a breathless, fast-paced Korean, like a fire hose turned on high. The obscure words confused the guards, who didn’t understand the foreign language. She gave a guard a handwritten note in English and a forged North Korean passport to the other guard. She waited for a moment, and then shouted at the guards to hurry and let her into the UN.

  The note read, “Seeking asylum from CIA abuse.”

  By charter and treaty, the United Nations was international territory and no part of it resided in the United States or New York City, where it physically existed. In short, the UN was out of the jurisdiction of US officials at the federal, state, and local levels.

  The first guard handed the note to the other, saying, “This woman is from North Korea. Can you believe it? How did she come all the way to New York from overseas?”

  Reading a second note, the other guard said, “She’s an army colonel kidnapped by the CIA. Wow … that’s why she’s here. She must have escaped.”

  “Kidnapped?” the first guard said, flipping through the pages of her passport to see if it had been stamped by customs agents entering the United States. But the guards didn’t find any US stamp. In fact, the last stamps were months old, with one belonging to Syria and then a few weeks later from when she entered Iran. But neither country showed an exit stamp. The first guard asked Dong-Sun for a US visa. She looked blankly at the guard, shrugged, and shook her head pretending not to understand, then said in thick Korean accent, “Ghost plane.”

  Jenny pointed to the first note that requested asylum from the US for fear she would be attacked again, kidnapped, and tortured in the CIA’s rendition program. She then handed Merk’s flash drive to the other guard with a note wrapped around it, with a label reading: “Toxic Illegal Dumping by the West in the Gulf of Aden.”

  The guard gripped the flash drive and motioned the other guard to take her inside.

  Stunned, the guard led Jenny through the gate. He spoke on a radio requesting the chief of security and a Korean translator to meet the North Korean visitor.

  At the metal detector, Jenny as Dong-Sun emptied her pockets and took off her military hat. She removed the hat and handed it to the guard. He put it in a container and ran it through the X-ray machine. She placed a wallet, a pen, some Syrian and Iranian coins, and North Korean money in another basket. As the female X-ray examiner studied the contents in the baskets, Jenny watched the guard out of the corner of her eyes.

  Stone-faced, emotionless, with her eyes not making contact with any one guard, Kim Dong-Sun stepped through the metal detector, wearing a short wooden chopstick that pinned her hair in a ball on the back of her head. The chopstick didn’t trigger the alarm.

  Another UN security guard swept a metal-detecting wand over her limbs, then up and down her torso. She neither blinked nor moved, standing like a statue, giving a sniper’s stare straight ahead. The guard waved her to step through.

  After a short wait, a security detachment led Kim Dong-Sun upstairs to the second floor library and asked her to take a seat until a translator arrived.

  The guards spoke to one another, mentioning she was like the other asylum seeker that came to the UN the day before from Somalia. Pretending not to listen, the UN security detail confirmed for Jenny that Korfa was on the premises. She sat still and waited, staring at a glass of water that was offered to her, with her face devoid of emotion.

  When the Korean translator arrived, she took Dong-Sun into an empty office with a view of First Avenue. There, she was offered to sit down and tell her story.

  In Korean, Jenny said, “The CIA agents kidnapped me twice. First in Syria, then inside the Iranian border. They flew me to America and did this to me.” She pulled up her army jacket and undershirt, showing the fresh bruise on her ribs. “They beat my foot. Why? What did I do? I don’t know. Doesn’t America respect women? Doesn’t America respect North Korean Army officers? Doesn’t America respect civil engineers? I am an engineer.”

  “Tell me, what questions did the CIA ask you?” the translator inquired.

  “Look—” Dong-Sun pointed out the window to a government van parked across the street with the digital engineer and two other CIA agents waiting inside, who were all part of Jenny’s team. “Arrest them,” she shouted. When the translator only nodded, writing down notes, Jenny stood up and shouted a screed about torture, about waterboarding and punishment, about food and sleep deprivation, and other forms of abuse and torture to break her will. “But it didn’t break my will. I was strong. That’s how I escaped. That’s why I’m here. Now I want to go home. But they want to kill me. They want to hunt me down.” She pointed to the van again.

  In glancing at the van, the translator replied in Korean, “You’re going to have to stay here tonight until we can get representatives from Pyongyang on the phone tomorrow to speak to the US State Department, which is closed right now.” The translator tapped her watch.

  Kim Dong-Sun gave a stiff nod and was led to the lounge area behind the library until arrangements could be made on-site for her to sleep somewhere in the newly renovated UN headquarters. The translator led Jenny into the lounge, where the Somali warlord Korfa was playing chess with another man, the diminutive Bahdoon. She asked to go to the bathroom.

  Inside, Jenny locked the door. She opened the cuffed sleeves on the army jacket, removed the false buttons, ripped open a sewn seam, and pulled out tubes of one dart from each sleeve. In each button was a mini-packet of liquid tranquilizer she poured into the two tubes.

  She removed the chopstick, twisted it open breaking a glue seal, removed two needles, and attached each one to the darts. She checked the inky fluids inside the plastic darts, then stored one dart in each jacket pocket along with the broken chopstick. She bit her lip, saying to the mirror, “I can’t believe they are both here. Wow, two birds in the hand, Jenny.” She flushed the toilet and washed her hands. Shaking her hands dry, the now-armed Kim Dong-Sun stepped out of the bathroom. The translator handed her a laptop and offered her a seat near Korfa’s chair. The Korean missile engineer whispered to the translator, “Who is he?”

  “He’s an exile from Somalia. He couldn’t go to the Somali consulate in New York, since the US government
calls him a terrorist,” the translator explained.

  Jenny dropped the laptop on a sofa next to Korfa. He looked up at her in a cold stare. She eyed him back and shouted in Korean, “Swine. You are rude. I can’t stay in the same room with a pirate. I’m an army colonel. I’m a missile engineer. Not a killer beast like this animal.”

  Confused by the language, but not by the tone of her voice, Korfa stood up and towered over her, drilling a colder stare. But the 105-pound engineer stood firm. He started jabbering in his Somali tongue, shouting in her face. When she had enough, she kicked the chessboard over, chasing Bahdoon away as a fight was about to break out.

  The translator stepped between them. Jenny tossed her aside and struck Korfa in the temple with a lightning blow. Stunned, he threw a punch. But in his telegraphing it, she ducked under his fist and, pulling out a dart, stabbed it in Korfa’s side. Feeling the pinch of the needle, the hot fluid injected into him, Korfa wrestled her down, knocking over the coffee table and chairs. On the floor, Jenny plunged the second dart into his thigh—enough tranquilizers to immobilize 1,000 pounds of dolphins—driving the needle deep, before quickly pulling it out.

  As the translator and Bahdoon jumped in to separate them, Korfa lost strength and then consciousness. The translator pulled Jenny off, while she slid the darts into her jacket pockets.

  UN security rushed in and examined Korfa. They kept Kim Dong-Sun away from the motionless warlord. One security officer put his finger on Korfa’s pulse, shouting, “Call 9-1-1. Get an ambulance, fast. He’s fading.”