Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  What the security officer and the UN staff didn’t know was the sedative artificially lowered Korfa’s heart rate to what appeared to be a life-threatening level. Jenny showed her hands, covered with purple dye, complaining, “Is the dog dying? What color blood do Somalis bleed?” Jenny knew she could only snatch Korfa; grabbing both terrorists would be too risky.

  Not wise to the purple dye as part of the animal tranquilizer, the translator rushed Jenny to the bathroom to wash up. The security officer put a pillow under Korfa’s head; he checked his pulse, which stabilized at a low rate, and then waited for the ambulance to show up.

  Three minutes later an ambulance pulled up to the UN.

  A minute after that, security guards rushed EMT workers into the lounge, rolling a gurney. They checked Korfa’s vital signs, put an oxygen mask over his face, placed the oxygen cylinder on a rack, and then put him on the gurney, strapping him down. The EMT technicians raised the gurney and rolled Korfa out, following the security officers, who led the way.

  Dong-Sun emerged from the bathroom with the translator, checking her uniform for holes and tears, then her hands and skin for cuts and scrapes. With the room clear, except for a pair of security guards taking a statement from Bahdoon, Jenny asked to be taken to another room and to have dinner before she would give her statement about the fight.

  The translator sat Dong-Sun down in the library next door and told her to wait there until she returned. Given the second gift in less than an hour, Jenny looked up at a security camera and broke the seal to a locked fire door, triggering the alarm. She headed down the stairs and broke out of the building, limped across First Avenue, and disappeared in Tudor City.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  TWO HOURS LATER at the CIA’s downtown safe house, Korfa came to, aroused by smelling salts.

  Dressed in black, Jenny splashed water in the warlord’s face. He shook his head, trying to rise out of the chair, but found his wrists bound to the armrests. She kicked Korfa in the balls—he doubled over in pain, coughing, spitting on the floor. He soon realized he had been stripped out of his clothes, wearing only boxer shorts. He saw two Band-Aids stuck on his skin where Jenny had stabbed him with the darts. She stared at the buffalo hump on his shoulder.

  “Good hangover?” Jenny asked, slapping Korfa in the ear.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Korfa shouted. “Why am I here? I demand to know.”

  “That’s my question for you,” she said, putting the barrel of a pistol to his head. “Why aren’t you in your homeland, Somalia? Why did you come here?”

  “Uh-uh-uh …”

  She smacked him with an open palm, shouting, “I didn’t hear you. Try again. How did you get into the United States? Who are your enablers?”

  Korfa lifted his head, blinked, wriggled his eyelids, and just stared at her.

  “Time is running out. My government just blew up General Adad’s lair,” Jenny said, playing a short clip of the Syrian jet being blown up on a tablet.

  Korfa looked up at her in shock. “What do you want from me?”

  “The details on the bombs,” she said. “They’re going off soon, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know the details.”

  “Lies!” she shouted, slapping the warlord in the face. “I need names, places, the bombs.”

  “I’m a knight, not a king or queen,” he said, referring to chess pieces. “But you’re a dead pawn when I am freed.”

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  “LATER? WE’RE SIX fins short, minus one drone boat—” Merk shouted, getting in the face of the SEAL lieutenant commander from Little Creek, who stood at the boat launch of the grain terminal.

  “The drone will be here tomorrow,” the Team Two lieutenant commander said.

  Merk’s smartphone vibrated. He looked at a text message from Jenny telling him she had captured Korfa and to come over to the CIA safe house in Manhattan to question the warlord. Merk showed the text to the lieutenant commander, saying, “Do you want to meet this bastard?”

  The officer read the message, saying, “Hell, yeah. Let’s bolt.”

  Merk went inside the main floor of the Vetlab Clinic inside the grain terminal. He stood by Tasi. She was placed in a fleeced-line sling suspended over a table, allowing a biologist to draw blood from the dolphin’s median notch on the tail. The biologist showed Merk the vial of blood, saying, “Need to compare this draw to the baseline we took when the system arrived.”

  “What? Every twelve hours?” Merk asked, annoyed, petting Tasi, talking softly to her. He eyed the biologist: “We need her in the water to have any hope of finding the device.”

  “Yes. But this is what Director Hogue wants. Tasi’s pregnant,” the biologist said.

  Merk ignored the biologist. He put his arm around the dolphin and flashed the sign of two fingers forming a dorsal fin over his heart, reminding her to be strong.

  Tasi whistled, knowing she would return to searching New York Harbor.

  Outside, Merk climbed into a black SUV with the lieutenant commander driving. As he drove the battered road toward the gate guarded by a Special Forces detachment, who were guised as EPA engineers in hazmat suits, he said, “You know, Toten, you left your SEAL balls back in Somalia.”

  “Really? My brains, too?”

  “Yeah, the fins have clouded your head. You gotta think like the pirates.”

  With that last line, Merk stuck his foot over on the driver’s side floor and slammed on the brakes. The SUV skidded to a stop at the gate; the guards jumped out of the way.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Gotta go back.” Merk popped open the door.

  “Toten, what am I going to do with the Somali pirate?”

  “Grill him. See if he has balls.”

  The SEAL gave Merk a dirty look. Merk hopped out of vehicle and sprinted back to the grain terminal.

  Inside, Merk pushed through the congestion, grabbed his laptop, and ran upstairs to be alone. On the third floor, he sat down at a café table with a couple of chefs sitting in a nearby lounge, taking a coffee break. He began to pull up dorsalcam images of the bombs planted on the starboard hull of the supertanker Blå Himmel. The only details he was missing from the videos were in his mind: Who planted the bombs in the harbor? And when were they planted after the ship was brought to port?

  He banged the table, yelling, “Damn it!” He stood up and paced, shouting to the ceiling, “Korfa, you allowed me to get close … you allowed me to film the rigged ships … you watched the fins and me to see how we operated. Shit. Why have I been so blind?”

  Merk knew a scuba diver had attached the bombs on the supertanker after it was ported, using something like a magnet or adhesive. But when did the diver plant the bombs? Was there more than one diver? Did it happen after Merk fended off the Somali pirates in the skiff he stole? Or earlier, when he met the children with the toxic lesions on their skin? And were they watching him now? If he and the dolphins cleared a ship or pier, would that give Pratique Occulte an opportunity to double back and plant a device with no worry of being caught?

  What Merk needed to look for were divers who could move at a moment’s notice to plant a bomb or launch the Iranian torpedo. He pulled up a digital map showing New York Harbor. With his finger he marked six areas where the divers could enter the water and plant the bombs without much trouble. They could either die with the explosion, like an ISIS suicide bomber, or slip out of the water and disappear on foot, by car, or public transportation, like the Boston Marathon bombers. If the terrorists delivered Russian dolphins to New York, the new wrinkle represented a different problem for Merk and his dolphins to sniff out and defend against.

  “Lt. Toten?” a voice shouted downstairs.

  “Up here,” he yelled. Merk digitally marked the first location: a seawall between South Street Seaport and the Brooklyn Bridge. He circled the second location on the Brooklyn side of the East River with a loading dock, container cranes and warehouses not far from the grain terminal
. On the third location, he selected a ship sailing into New York port—that would be passing through in the morning. He needed the next day’s manifest of all the cargo ship deliveries. The fourth target had to be the Statue of Liberty Ferry in Battery Park, as the exit strategy from an island would trap the terrorist—if he chose to live.

  The fifth site he envisioned was the Chelsea Piers, while the sixth he figured to be the piers flanking the Intrepid Museum at 42nd Street by the Circle Line cruise terminal.

  Thinking like a pirate, Merk numbered the six targets in priority. The top three were the cargo vessel sailing into the harbor, the Intrepid Museum, and the Brooklyn pier in that order. He knew the other three locations, and still more minor ones, needed watching. But since the last six dolphins weren’t going to arrive until dawn, he had to plan ahead to get the most out of them.

  A pair of FBI special agents entered the room—one a short female dressed in a business suit was the special-agent-in-charge (SAC), the other a young, bearded man wearing coveralls to blend in with the local citizens in Williamsburg and downtown Brooklyn. They sat on either side of Merk, checking out his laptop and the color-coded keyboard. He closed it.

  The female SAC opened her laptop and showed Merk a map of the five boroughs and North Jersey, from Hoboken and Jersey City to Fort Lee and the George Washington Bridge. Dozens of blue and red stars populated the map in a shotgun spray, touching all zip codes.

  “The red stars are where FBI and state police helicopters managed to get positive, false positive hits on radiation sources from medical devices, X-rays, MRI scanners in dental and doctor offices, and the like,” she said. “The blue stars are where the probes picked up nuclear density gauges.”

  “Nuke what?”

  “Soil compaction equipment that uses trace amounts of radiation to power the ground-penetrating probes,” the male special agent explained.

  “So these blue tags are … construction sites, engineering and inspection offices, where the gauges are stored. Correct?”

  “Yes, Lt. Toten. They’re also from pickup trucks, personal vehicles, and the homes of where the inspectors live, before they drive to a site the next day,” the SAC said.

  “What about on the water? In the harbor, bays, or rivers?” Merk asked, noticing that, with the exception of one marina in New Jersey behind the Statue of Liberty, there were no stars in the harbor or anywhere around the island of Manhattan.

  “Just the one in Jersey. The source of the hit hasn’t been determined yet,” the SAC said.

  Merk stood up and headed downstairs to the ground floor.

  “Okay, we’ll put more agents on board the commuter ferries in the morning,” the SAC called out, heading down the rusted stairs behind him.

  “Now you’re talking. As long as your agents dress like New Yorkers and not FBI agents, they’ll be fine,” Merk said, stepping into the ground floor Vetlab.

  He handed his laptop to a lab technician, answered the phone, and listened to Jenny berate him for not coming to the safe house to grill Korfa. He let her carry on and vent her frustration for succeeding and failing at the same time in capturing the warlord, but getting zero intel out of him in the way of operational plans.

  After another minute of Jenny spewing guilt and profanities, Merk cut in, saying in a stern voice, “King? Listen. The bombs are not in the water yet. They’ll be there tomorrow when tango divers deliver them to the drop points. Bring Korfa to me.”

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  MERK ASSISTED THE MMS mobile veterinary crew in receiving the last of the biologic systems.

  They cleared out the ground floor clinic of the first batch of dolphins, Tasi and Inapo, Ekela and Yon, and a pair of MK-8 dolphins. They sent those pods on night patrols, with each pod overseen by two-man EOD divers in RHIB boats. Two pods swam up each side of the East River to check around piers and bridge abutments; Tasi and Inapo cruised along the seawall of Battery Park City, where the Hurricane Sandy storm surge had breached lower Manhattan, flooding the Wall Street area for a week and closing the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel for a month.

  At night, the navy RHIBs resembled police patrol boats. The main danger for EOD divers and the dolphins was the hazard of being struck by a boat or ferry, since poor visibility engulfed the harbor. Merk reminded the divers of that, to keep their heads on a swivel, and keep their eyes and ears open. They needed to record the times and routes of the ferries, and match them to a GPS waterway database maintained by the NY State Intelligence Fusion Center.

  With the new arrivals—two pairs of MK-6 Atlantic bottlenose dolphins and one pair of MK-8 spinner dolphins, the first of their kind in NMMP’s long history—Merk got the staff of trainers, feeders, nutritionists, biologists, veterinarians, assistants, and the navy SEALs who provided security at the grain terminal on the same page. He told them his gut: “The schedule for the bombing will be pushed up from Memorial Day Weekend to likely Thursday morning, which is tomorrow. I feel our operation is being watched in the harbor.”

  Merk glanced to the door and saw Jenny standing at the threshold, watching him take charge of the onsite NMMP team. He ambled over and greeted her.

  “Korfa is outside,” Jenny said, looking on as the professionals treated, fed, and prepped the six new-arrival systems to be turned loose within the hour.

  Merk nodded and stepped out of the grain terminal.

  The Little Creek lieutenant commander and CIA digital engineer flanked an SUV; a pair of armed CIA agents stood behind the vehicle. They opened the hatch and pulled out the blindfolded pirate. Merk strode over to Korfa. To the shock of everyone, he removed the blindfold.

  “Hey, Toten, what’re you doing?” the lieutenant commander asked, drawing a pistol.

  “Grilling the Somali,” Merk said, wiping dirt, sleep, and grime out of Korfa’s eyes. “He needs to see who he’s going to talk to.” He checked the welt on the warlord’s face and glared at Jenny. She said nothing. Merk led Korfa, his hands cuffed in front of him, to the grain terminal and ribbed Jenny: “Bully.” She averted her eyes from his gaze.

  “Toten, you got OpSec Level Five inside,” the lieutenant commander declared.

  Jenny and the lieutenant commander trailed Merk, who escorted the warlord inside the mobile dolphin laboratory. He led Korfa out of the dark city night and into the “Magnificent Mistake” abandoned more than half a century ago. Merk took the pirate out of the slums of Hargeisa, out of the poverty and deserts of Somaliland, out of the tense meetings with Yemeni al Qaeda, AQAP, al-Shabaab, and Syrian generals, out of negotiations for hostages, out of ferrying migrants in a dhow, out of the temptation to pirate and hijack foreign ships, out of forming Pratique Occulte with Bahdoon and General Adad, and ushered him into the modern world, into Merk’s domain of big data, cloud analytics, technology, and US Navy dolphins.

  When Korfa stepped across the threshold into the NMMP Mobile Vetlab, where teams of scientists, assistants, and personnel worked tirelessly to get the dolphins checked, fed, and out to the harbor to conduct subsea surveys, his eyes opened wide. The pirate was amazed at how the US military had transformed the run-down concrete building into a high-tech marine mammal lab.

  Merk led Korfa around the lab with a pair of armed navy SEALs shadowing them. He took the warlord over to see the MK-8 minesweeping dolphins, saying, “This is the US Navy’s latest technology, its latest weapon in its arsenal, spinner dolphins. … A trained dolphin like this one is what I used in Berbera and Zeila to recon the hijack ships.”

  Merk gave Korfa a fish to feed the dolphin. A trainer flashed a sign; the spinner opened its mouth and Korfa dropped the fish on its tongue. After the animal swallowed the fish, it received a syringe of kelp juice with vitamins. A lab technician turned on an oversized battery-powered toothbrush and began brushing the dolphin’s yellow, conical-shaped teeth.

  “Tomorrow, these mammals are going to stop the double bombing,” Merk declared.

  “Triple bombing,” Korfa corrected, checking Merk’s eyes. Ther
e was no reaction.

  Despite Jenny trying to beat the answer out of the pirate, Merk had just pried the first piece of intel out of the warlord by building a bond, an affinity with him. He led Korfa to the back of the building and up the metal stairs to the third floor café. He waved three assistants on coffee break to leave, and for the chefs to prepare a hot meal for his guest. He sat him down, held up his cuffed hands, and pointed to the lieutenant commander to unlock the handcuffs. With a pissed-off look, Merk glared at the SEAL. The hard look forced Jenny to step forward. The lieutenant commander shook his head, ordering the SEALs to take seats at corner tables, while radioing more SEALs to come up to cover the exits.

  Jenny unlocked the handcuffs and tossed them to the CIA digital engineer. She stepped into the kitchen and pushed a cart with snacks, juice, and water over to Korfa. The warlord pointed at cranberry juice; Merk handed it to him and opened a bottle of water for himself.

  Merk opened his laptop, clicked through folders, and opened images of the bombs Peder made for the pirates to plant on the hull of the supertanker. “Here’s the first ship you hijacked.”

  “Not going to ask me about the New York plan?”

  “What, the triple bombing? … No; why would I do that when I know how it’s going down?” Merk said, using psychology to earn the pirate’s trust, while goading him to talk without the threat of beating him. “Korfa, we’ll come back to the tanker in a minute.” Merk clicked open the video files of the dorsalcams capturing rusty containers dumped offshore. He pulled up an audio recording of the radioactive decay screeching higher as Tasi nosed the nuclear probe closer to the container. Inapo’s dorsalcam filmed the action from afar.

  “What’s that?” the warlord asked, not understanding the discovery or why the navy dolphins were searching the Gulf of Aden’s seafloor for toxic waste.