Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  “Your freedom point,” he said. “I met a Somali child in a cove. The boy had scars and lesions on his skin worse than mine.” Merk rolled up his sleeve and showed his burn scars. “This was from a fire. The boy I met … his came from radioactive waste leaking to the surface.”

  “Yeow, cup …” Korfa uttered, his voice sad. “Many Somali children like the boy you met, they used to go fishing, used to swim, now scared, scarred. They don’t play in the sea.”

  Merk’s mobile phone vibrated. He opened a message and saw an alert that the next pod of dolphins was being sent out to the harbor. He slid the phone across the table to Korfa, saying, “I promised the boy that I’m going to find out who did the illegal dumping. These files are now with a government body that will take action for the illegal dumping.”

  Merk opened the photos of the supertanker. “Korfa, you came to New York to fulfill a vow you made against the United States. That’s why you’re here. You had your brother killed during the hijacking, because he had gone over to the dark side of ISIS. But Bahdoon and his Iranian sponsors are no better. They will use you and then stomp your carcass when they’re finished with you.”

  The warlord nodded; he knew that was true.

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  INSIDE A DARK, second floor abandoned office at the half empty South Street Seaport, Bahdoon and the Syrian Electronic Army engineer Qas viewed multiple New York City street cameras that he had hacked into. The engineer watched downtown Manhattan street views and intersections, switching from block to block, down the East River to the southern tip of Manhattan and around the waterfront up Battery Park City. Bahdoon scanned the empty streets in and around the old, decaying Domino Sugar refinery plant. The only traffic he saw was the ebb and flow across the Williamsburg Bridge, just south of the factory’s yard on the water.

  “How does it look?” Qas asked in Arabic.

  “All clear. Any signs of the American dolphins?” Bahdoon asked. He turned on a burner mobile phone, dialed a number, and waited for a man to answer the call. When he heard a Russian tongue on the other end, he said, “Let’s meet tomorrow for lunch.”

  The shorthand code to an Occulte sleeper point man was an “all go” directive, instructing the Russian to release a pair of Iranian Navy dolphins into the East River now.

  Bahdoon leaned over to Qas and watched the hacker take control of the South Ferry Terminal’s rooftop camera. Qas remotely redirected its aim from the Staten Island Ferry slip and pointed the lens a hundred yards out to the dark waters of the harbor. He controlled the camera, first picking up small bow waves from a police whaler putting around the Battery Park seawall. It then tracked a party yacht farther out, heading in the opposite direction. As he swiveled the camera around, zooming the lens in and out, it picked up ripples in the surface. Qas enhanced the contrast of the infrared lens and zoomed on the wavelets. He and Bahdoon saw a dorsal fin slice through the water, a dolphin rolling through the surface taking a breath with its blowhole.

  “Where there’s one navy dolphin, there are two,” Qas said.

  With those words, the second navy dolphin breached a little farther out.

  “Should we go after them?” Bahdoon asked.

  “No, not yet. Let’s learn where they are operating first, so we can kill the trainer,” Qas said with a hyena laugh, scratching his battle scar.

  Bahdoon switched city camera locations to the Brooklyn waterfront, looking for activity across the river. “Do you have access to cameras on Governors Island?” he asked in English.

  “Not yet. Will soon,” Qas said, opening a different city operating system and database. He typed lines of code to override the pre-programmed and time-synced commands.

  * * *

  ON THE VACANT, decaying concrete pier of the Domino Sugar plant a couple of Russians took the cab off the bed of a six-wheel, heavy-duty pickup truck. A third Russian, the point man, stood lookout. He scouted the streets at the front of the building, the deck on the Williamsburg Bridge above, and panned the bend of the East River—clear of police patrols.

  The burly men pulled tarps off a pair of Iranian Navy dolphins. The men checked the dolphins’ conditions, fiddled with GPS tags strapped to their pectoral fins, and poured jugs of water over their epidermises to keep them moist.

  The point man strapped anti-foraging cones with spikes over the beaks of each dolphin so they wouldn’t be distracted searching for food in the rivers of New York. He lowered the tailgate, jumped in the truck, and backed it up to the edge of the pier. He and his men climbed into the bed, stood on each side of one dolphin, grabbed hold of the 500-pound mammal’s flippers and tail fluke and heaved the creature out of the tailgate.

  The first dolphin flew off the truck bed, landing in the river in a thunderous splash.

  The men looked around to see if anyone had heard the splash. The point man barked orders to push the second dolphin into the water. They launched the other dolphin out of the pickup truck. It dove into the river in a spray, disappearing in a wash of foam.

  The men jumped off the truck, closed the tailgate, and scanned the river. They didn’t see the dolphins again. The mammals swam away, leaving no trace of their arrival.

  * * *

  BAHDOON RECEIVED A text from the point man that the Iranian dolphins had been delivered to the East River. “They’re in,” he said, referring to the dolphins swimming south to the harbor.

  “Will they perform?” Qas asked.

  “Yes. The Revolutionary Guards Corps had help from Russian trainers,” Bahdoon said.

  He removed his glasses and inserted contact lenses, so he wouldn’t stand out in public. He patted Qas on the back, saying, “Allah be with you,” and stepped outside the office.

  In the corridor, Bahdoon selected two of four Somali guards to go with him, leaving the other duo behind to protect Qas, who remotely monitored the police, navy, and United States Coast Guards’ activities.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  ACROSS THE RIVER at the grain terminal, Merk watched the last pod of the spinner dolphins being carried outside on stretchers and loaded into a rubber boat. He approached CIA Agent Alan Cuthbert, who just arrived, saying, “I need your help to go upstairs and hang out with Korfa.”

  “What for, Toten?” the agent asked.

  “Company. Don’t want him bored. Chat with him. Strike up a conversation. Ply him with beer and wine. I don’t care, as long as he talks and keeps talking. Tell him I screwed you.”

  “Am I going to wear a wire?” Cuthbert asked.

  “Damn, you’re good,” he said. “Yeah, we need a transcript so your team at the CIA, mine at NMMP, and ours at the Pentagon and Fusion Center can have bathroom reading material.”

  Merk slid the laptop into a waterproof bag, stuffed that into a backpack, then took his gear out to a rubber boat that he would operate alone. Going solo gave him the flexibility to move quickly to any pod. With the navy dolphins trained to spot enemy divers, other dolphins, mines, and torpedoes in the water within a kilometer, no matter how dark or murky, Merk would have the ability to react fast when something broke. The only restraint he had: just half of the dozen dolphins were fitted with nuclear probes.

  The SEAL lieutenant commander followed Merk outside and handed him the port manifest of the ships coming and going in New York Harbor that Thursday. Merk took the one page, double-sided manifest laminated in plastic, and listened to the lieutenant commander reassure him: “Toten, if you need backup, ping me. I’ll be stationed on Governors Island with four platoons of SEALs, EOD divers, and Team Six snipers.”

  “Ready for war in an urban setting, huh? I’m sure New Yorkers will love that.”

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  JENNY AND THE digital engineer drove around lower Manhattan on the East River looking for a sedan with diplomatic plates registered to Kenya. To her, it was a sick inside joke with Pratique Occulte. She understood the historical reference given by the propagandist Bahdoon. Osama bin Laden’s attack on the West be
gan with the US embassy bombings in Kenya on August 7, 1998, eight years to the day after the American military forces arrived in Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield in preparation for the First Gulf War in 1990.

  Al Qaeda always chose significant dates to attack Western targets. It was one of the tools terrorists used to instill fear in exploiting psychological warfare. That’s why she scoffed at the Obama Administration denying and then running interference on the September 11, 2012, attack of the US diplomatic mission—a.k.a. CIA Station—in Benghazi, Libya, when the building was under fierce gunfire and then overrun by 150 al Qaeda terrorists: a terrorist attack; not a video.

  From that day forward, she would do whatever it would take, use whatever means and force necessary, to eliminate the world’s bad actors, dictators, and terrorists, laws be damned. That was the ruthless side she wanted to unleash in Merk, which he had once possessed as a SEAL cold warrior.

  In less than a month, Agent King had used a rock to bludgeon an Iranian guard at Lake Urmia missile facility to make her escape from Iran; a catch basin to kidnap and stow a North Korean missile engineer in the desert of Syria to get inside General Adad’s inner circle; a dolphin tranquilizer to snatch a Somali pirate warlord from inside the United Nations; and a red-haired wig to pump the Norwegian Special Forces sniper of intel at Ramstein Air Force Base.

  Jenny didn’t care. Results, not laws or tactics, were what drove her to win at every phase in the shadow war. She wasn’t going to let an ideologue politician, a deluded CIA deputy director, a green manager, or a lawyer get in the way of defending New York City from an attack that would dwarf 9/11 in magnitude and horror, the number of fatalities and wounded, not to mention the collateral damage and psychological scars it would leave for decades.

  Jenny was keenly aware of anniversary dates—Fleet Week and Memorial Day—and their iconic meanings. Both the Kenyan mall attack and Benghazi station would pale in comparison if Pratique Occulte succeeded in setting off a dirty nuke somewhere in New York Harbor, and then blaming another organization in doing the evil deed, like the terror twins of ISIS and al Qaeda.

  So she replayed videoclips sent to her in a five-hour delay from the Intel Fusion Center. It showed the Kenyan sedan picking up Bahdoon when he bolted the United Nations and ran across the North Lawn. UN security cameras, along with a traffic cam at 46th Street and First Avenue, filmed the Yemeni psychiatrist scurrying across UN Plaza. Additional cameras at 48th Street captured Bahdoon climbing over and scaling down a wall before leaping to the waiting car.

  That was five hours ago, she thought, pissed at the delay. She knew Twitter’s tweets were instantaneous. So why did it take the fusion of the CIA-DHS-NSA-FBI-NYPD five hours to send her the video? Did a team of analysts have to review and get agency clearance before releasing it? Whatever happened to real-time data in the Digital Age? She was disgusted.

  As she replayed Bahdoon dashing across the UN lawn over and again, she wondered: Did the US’s seventeen intelligence agencies and military armed forces take the 140-pound geek with glasses in Bahdoon as a serious threat? No. Did they not fear a few Somali pirates drifting around the city with a dirty nuke? No again. Or did they not care to notice them because of their skin color and the poor clothing they wore?

  In the fenemy, there was no Osama bin Laden bogeyman or ISIS caliph to put on the FBI’s most wanted list.

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  AT THE GRAIN terminal, two teams of navy SEAL snipers ran up the exterior stairwell wearing night-vision goggles, carrying weapons and gear. One team fanned out across the south end of the roof. They kicked open a door to the dirty, dilapidated, three-story control bridge office that overlooked New York Harbor to the south toward the Verrazano bridge. On the north end of the terminal roof, the second team of SEALs took position, with four snipers hiding inside a narrow lookout tower with a commanding view of the southern tip of Manhattan.

  In position, SEAL snipers began to search the water and edge along the harbor as they tried to spot any unusual activity or person out of place.

  * * *

  FED UP WITH the inertia, Jenny sent a text message to the Intelligence Fusion Center to dispatch CIA and FBI agents on patrols to canvas Battery Park City, the West Village, Tribeca south of the Holland Tunnel, the Chelsea Piers and West Side Drive, neighborhoods along the East River, and down the Brooklyn waterfront looking for the Kenyan-plate car and Bahdoon.

  The police sent her a text message that the E-ZPass electronic toll system of the sedan crossing the bridges and tunnels had not been used in the past forty-one hours. Jenny concluded the vehicle was either still in Manhattan or had driven over to Brooklyn on one of the free East River spans in the Queensboro, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Brooklyn bridges.

  Based on that likelihood, Jenny concentrated her forces in lower Manhattan. She secured additional help from NYPD patrols to canvass the Brooklyn piers and waterfront.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  AN HOUR LATER, a police cruiser found the Kenyan-licensed sedan parked at a Brooklyn waterfront restaurant parking lot. Police and FBI vehicles raced to the restaurant. Jenny and the CIA digital engineer showed up several minutes later.

  Agent King got out of the car and took control of the scene. The police entered the closed restaurant and searched for suspects hiding inside. They found the chef and a couple of assistants cleaning the kitchen, but no one else.

  Not wasting time, Jenny called for a helicopter with FLIR to search the area. She wanted to see if any human heat-signatures would pop up in a night search along the river and waterfront streets, the way the image of the final wounded Boston Marathon bomber was found hiding in the boat in a backyard in 2013.

  Jenny strode to the river. She looked past the Brooklyn Bridge. A football field out from where she stood, right in front of her, a police whaler cruised down the middle of the river heading to the harbor. What she didn’t see was the two Iranian dolphins swimming on either side of the boat’s wake. The rogue dolphins were trained to swim in stealth, take as few breaths as possible, temporarily shutting off their echolocating sonar—like SEALs going radio silent—until they reached the open water of the harbor. The anti-foraging devices helped remind the marine mammals of that. They used the boat’s wake to mask their movements from other navy dolphins, which were canvassing both sides of the river, but not the shipping lane in the middle.

  Jenny took out a pair of night-vision binoculars and aimed it toward Red Hook, where the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel plunged under the East River, connecting Kings County to Manhattan. She panned the rooftops of the terminal buildings, scanned the warehouses and piers, snapping photos with a high-tech cam. She sent those pictures directly to Merk and the CIA, bypassing the Intel Fusion Center.

  It wasn’t spite that drove her, but incompetence and the interagency turf war that, since the failures of 9/11, still hadn’t fully rid itself of ego and deadwood. Agent King didn’t have time to explain, educate, or coddle managers and department heads. She had to move fast, be flexible; there was no time for chain-of-command decision-making or problem solving by committee.

  Jenny returned to the abandoned sedan and met with the FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge and two NYC police detectives. She showed them images on her smartphone she took of the Atlantic Yards, the waterfront terminals and warehouses, saying, “We have a lot of ground to cover beyond this car.” She knew the bomb squad was a waste of time; she felt the vehicle parked out in the open on the Brooklyn side of the river was a ruse by Bahdoon to throw police and FBI off his trail—and it worked.

  For a water detonation to achieve maximum damage, Brooklyn was the place to go: Lots of areas to hide, in full view of Wall Street and government buildings on lower Manhattan, with swaths of water frontage to slip into unnoticed and plant a device or two.

  Merk was right, she thought.

  The police popped open the trunk of the abandoned vehicle. Swept it for radioactive material. It was clean. They then summoned their bomb-sniffing dog. T
he German shepherd pranced around the vehicle, sniffing the ground, then the bumper. The dog climbed into the trunk. It sniffed and barked, raising its paw to signal alert. Dog, alert. The dog made a hit.

  The FBI agents called in bomb technicians to check the sedan for explosive materials, det cord, triggers, and any residue of accelerant. Jenny knew it would be the latter, a honeytrap set by Bahdoon that would gum up more valuable resources.

  The terrorists were experts in planning, in tying up resources with diversions to lead first responders astray while the real plot unfolded. That was the hallmark of an al Qaeda strike, from which Bahdoon took the model, borrowed heavily, and shaped as his own.

  Unlike the FBI, Jenny didn’t care about trace evidence. That was all the FBI ever cared about, drips and drabs of facts for some future court case. She was never fond of US courts. As an arena of action to settle disputes, the court system lacked her killer instinct.

  * * *

  JENNY WENT ON foot, flanked by the pair of CIA agents. They ambled toward the Brooklyn Container Terminal along the waterfront. She reasoned the piers, loading cranes, and buildings were as a good place as any to search for clues on where the terrorists might launch an attack from, use to leverage, and decipher what their plan might be to strike the city.

  When they reached the pier outside the gate, Jenny saw railroad tracks cut under the perimeter fence. She took out her smartphone, viewed the railroad tracks on a digital map, then texted Merk a warning.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  “I’M NEAR YOUR site,” read Jenny’s decrypted Dolphin Code message on Merk’s mobile phone. He thought about it for a moment and realized she was roaming around the Brooklyn waterfront by Red Hook near the Magnificent Mistake grain terminal.

  He texted her back: “Not there … I’m out in the harbor.”