It would be another minute before she replied. Merk drifted off Battery Park City in the rubber boat, waiting on a response from Tasi and Inapo’s underwater survey, when Jenny texted: “Tangos smoked out in the open. What’s our blind spot?”
Searching for an answer, he thought about it and mouthed the words blind spot, looking around the harbor. That’s it, he thought. He saw swaths of dark open space, few lights in the nightfall, gaps between a ferry to Jersey City and a booze cruise circling around the tip of Manhattan. He noticed that night there weren’t as many military, law enforcement, or spy agencies out on the water. Why? What were they waiting for? he wondered.
Merk felt like he sat in the rubber boat with Morgan Azar in the Strait of Hormuz: alone, without the cover of drones, with backup teams miles away. Except now he wasn’t spying on an Iranian fishing trawler laying sea-mines in the Persian Gulf, but searching for a bomb, a device, a torpedo, a terrorist, anything that would stand out in New York Harbor. Merk sensed Pratique Occulte was going to launch the attack that night. He felt it when he saw the video of Bahdoon being flushed out of UN headquarters, making an escape. Time was no longer on the United States’ side. Whatever his schedule was, Bahdoon was going to accelerate it to ensure success.
Merk sent Jenny a message: “What are our weak points?”
“Our weak spots. Lack of intel on where and when the attack will take place,” Jenny replied. You’re right, King, he thought. We are blind. How do we change that?
“Keep hunting,” Merk texted Jenny, and put the mobile phone down. With a swipe he awoke the laptop to see where the six pods of dolphins were located at that moment.
Behind him, deep sonorous rotor blades thudded the air, fast approaching. Merk felt the power and vibrations in his chest. He knew it was a military helicopter. He turned and looked up at the blinking lights of a wide-body Navy minesweeping helicopter—finally—the one that the admiral ordered when Merk first arrived at Little Creek. But the helicopter showed up in New York City at night, not during the day for Fleet Week show. That meant if terrorists were watching the Hudson River, they would see the helicopter wasn’t part of the Memorial Day air show, but a high tech snooper that could detect all sorts of bombs and devices in the water.
Angered by the untimely arrival of the helicopter and the lack of the robotic drones in the water he was promised, Merk flipped the night-vision goggles down and read the laminated marine log of ships coming to and from New York Harbor. He saw the ships that were docked, the tankers that were in port, and those that were going to embark the next two days out to the Atlantic Ocean.
Then he looked up and saw in the darkness a silhouette of an EOD RHIB following two dolphins in front of the Statue of Liberty. They were heading north up the Hudson River. “What the hell?” Merk said, radioing the EOD divers. They failed to answer the call. A moment later, they sent a text to him, reading: “Navy sea daddy ordered us to retask to the Intrepid.”
They were going to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum at 46th Street on the West Side Highway. The Pentagon, in its cover-its-ass mode, shorted Merk a pair of navy dolphins. Instead of a dozen, he had now only ten at his disposal, and they were scattered. They had been summoned to guard the ships and submarines ported around the museum. What irritated Merk more than losing a pair of MMS was the third-party way in which he learned about the change in plans. He didn’t hear about it from the Pentagon, Centcom, an admiral, or Director Susan Hogue at the Navy Marine Mammal Program, but from EOD divers under his command in the field. Flush with anger, he smacked the outboard motor and punched a box of flares.
* * *
JENNY FLASHED SIGNS dispatching three two-agent teams to search the Brooklyn Container Terminal buildings one by one. Over the roof of a warehouse, she saw the bridge and, to the right, the container boxes stacked on top of the cargo ship’s foredeck. Above them the tall container lift sat idle against the night sky. She looked at the marine log on the smartphone, read the name of the Chinese flagship, then glanced over at a chemical tanker ship moored behind it.
Seeing the second ship triggered a reaction. It was the same empty feeling she had when General Adad’s soldiers escorted the CIA agents, disguised as journalists, back to the missile site in the Syrian Desert. A knot in her stomach tightened; she texted Merk.
* * *
ONE POD OF Navy dolphins weaved back and forth under the length of a supertanker moored off Staten Island. The lead dolphin scanned the hull with the nuclear probe, while the trailing dolphin clicked the ship’s bottom with its sonar, searching for cavities or anomalies.
In the rubber boat, Merk watched the underwater survey of the infrared dorsalcams on the laptop. He switched to the next pod conducting a swim-by of a cargo ship anchored outside the Verrazano bridge near the Belt Parkway. But he had lost the third nuclear tracking pod to the systems guarding the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier Museum. He knew the pair of marine mammals would spend the rest of the night protecting the navy ships moored upriver; that left Merk’s current deployment of MM systems spread too thin to be effective. He had to take the risk of pulling back the outer pods. He did so, putting his career and the dolphins’ lives on the line.
Chapter Ninety
EYEING THE CHEMICAL ship, Jenny moved toward the loading pier. She put a call into Langley, requesting a drone, deployed over New York City, to be retasked to scan the Red Hook area in search of suspicious actors or activity.
She received a text message from Merk that he was splitting the East River twin pods. One would continue north to conduct surveillance of the river around the United Nations and Roosevelt Island by the Queensboro Bridge. The other pod was called back to survey the ships at the Brooklyn Container Terminal.
Informed that the terminal was run by a private company and not the City of New York, Jenny called the NY State Intelligence Fusion Center and told them to review the terminal’s security cameras’ videos in an electronic search for Korfa’s men or Bahdoon.
The more she studied the marine terminal in front of her, the more she saw something amiss. Like Merk, she began to think like a terrorist. By sunrise, she knew there would be a swarm of laborers, dockworkers, and managers coming to work that would make a morning detonation tempting for any terrorist—but on the Brooklyn side of the river. Blue-collar workers as the target for Pratique Occulte made little sense, however.
She scanned down the piers, spotting a freight train parked by the stern. The second ship was confirmed to be a special chemical vessel, not a cargo or container ship. She read the marine log. The offloading of chemicals would continue at seven in the morning.
Jenny directed her team to head to the ship, as she pulled up the name of the vessel with its bill of lading of what was being transported. A quick search of the list spooked her: 20,000 deadweight tons of liquid chlorine stowed on board in protective drums. The chlorine would be transferred via special hoses to a chemical-transport railcar. That explained the railroad tracks.
Chapter Ninety-One
A TEXT FROM Jenny showing a photo of the chemical ship carrying chlorine gas alarmed Merk. There was no time for him to scream at agency heads in New York or top brass in the Pentagon. He had to act fast. He sent a text to the EOD diver boat monitoring the MK-4 dolphins in the lower East River, directing them to conduct a swim-by of the loading dock by the chemical ship.
Unable to see from where a threat might arise, Merk picked up and tracked the navy helicopter flying down the Hudson River, fifty feet above the water, sweeping its sonar side to side trying to detect objects, from torpedoes to mines. Eyeing the silhouette of the minesweeper swerving as it cruised downriver, he saw a glint of light, a glow like a torch on the water out of the corner of his eye. Merk shut off the motor, kneeled down, and picked up a secure Satcom. He looked across to Jersey City and saw the Hudson River Ferry coast toward the Battery Park City landing, a quarter klick to his right. He pressed a number on the Satcom, and then hit a key on the laptop directing Tasi and Inap
o to swim over and intercept the incoming boat.
“EOD Two here,” the SEAL diver said.
“Check the Staten Island Ferry starboard and port hulls,” Merk ordered into the Satcom, changing the plans for the EOD dive team from the chemical tanker to the Staten Island Ferry filled with hundreds of people. Were two ships going to be blown up simultaneously?
Merk put the Satcom down. On the laptop’s triple-split screen, he watched the dolphins. The center pane showed a digital map of the Hudson River with the dolphins’ locations tracked by GPS tags. On the right pane, he watched Tasi’s POV of the dorsalcam skimming the surface. On the left screen, he glimpsed Inapo rising, breaching, stealing a breath with the blowhole as rolls of white water washed over his melon, before diving down again heading toward the ferry.
Seeing the dolphins would reach the ferry in less than thirty seconds, he picked up the laptop to watch the survey of the boat’s hull when the minesweeping helicopter flew overhead and straight out to the harbor, where another Staten Island Ferry headed toward Manhattan. Merk opened the metal flare box. He took out a loaded flare gun, unclicked the safety latch, and then waited for the dolphins to reach the boat. He took aim at the ferry—“This is for you, Azar.”
Tasi dove under the bow wave of the ferry, while Inapo tracked her movement outside, passing the boat. The dolphin sliced through the wake and circled back to follow the boat.
Underwater, Tasi zigzagged along the port side of the ferry with the nuclear probe, but didn’t pick up a reading. She fluked down to the bottom and shot back up to the starboard side, while Inapo cut across the hull, spying on a cylindrical, cigar-shaped object. Trained to identify and tag torpedoes buried in sand, to see one out in the open attached to the hull had to be like pinging the round sphere of a sea-mine in the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t belong.
Tasi swam alongside the torpedo. She moved the nuclear probe side to side, sweeping it across the back, middle, and front of the small brass torpedo. But the probe didn’t pick up a single hit of any kind. No static feedback. No detection of radiation. Not even a minor leak.
* * *
ON THE RUBBER boat, Merk sat back in disbelief. Why isn’t the torpedo hot with waste? he wondered. Did Jenny swallow disinformation during her visit of Iran’s nuclear plant?
He sent a message to Tasi to double-check the torpedo. Nothing. A third time. Again, no reading. Was it a decoy? Did Tasi find a decoy? Or did the nuclear probe malfunction? What about the torpedo? Was it packed with a different kind of explosive?
Not liking the latter possibility, Merk continued to aim the flare gun at a point ahead of where the ferry would be in a few seconds and then fired.
The hot projectile shot out in a comet streak of bright white light. It sizzled toward the cabin of the ferry and burst across the windshield, deflecting into the water in a spat of smoke. Seeing the warning shot, the captain slowed the ferry down to a crawl before he hit the engines hard and shut them off. The boat plowed into a swell, arresting its momentum; it rocked back and forth and lurched in undulating waves slowing the craft down to drift and bob.
Merk read a number on a chart and called the ferry captain, telling him to stay put as he called for backup to arrive. He picked up the Satcom and called the Intelligence Fusion Center to confirm they were viewing the same torpedo object fastened to the starboard hull of the ferry. He requested emergency boats to remove the passengers and a SEAL ordnance disposal team to disarm and remove the torpedo.
He then called the EOD Two diver, saying, “You see the torpedo my fins probed with the dorsalcam? That’s what you’re looking for on the bottom of the ferries. Like remoras on sharks.”
* * *
IN THE SOUTH Street Seaport dark office, Qas and a team of Iranian Revolutionary Guard hackers had broken into the NMMP on-premise cloud and breached its firewall.
The penetration occurred through a router, an email loaded with a Trojan horse link that was opened by one of the dolphin handlers at the Point Loma headquarters from Merk’s email address. The hack enabled Qas to spy on the same dorsalcam images and GPS tracking movements of the navy dolphins in and around the rivers and harbor of New York City.
Qas glanced at a second laptop and watched the Iranian Navy dolphins seek out the EOD divers and MK-4 team heading toward the Staten Island Ferry. The Syrian engineer retasked the Whitehall Ferry Station roofcam and swiveled it back toward the incoming ferry, which was a few hundred yards out and closing. He wanted to watch the intercept by the navy dolphins, as Bahdoon had suggested, and then get the video uploaded to social media sites and channels to continue the viral, negative propaganda surge against US imperialism.
The Syrian Electronic Army engineer sent a coded message to Bahdoon and watched the GPS dots close on one another. Qas stood up, stepped over to the door, and banged on it twice.
One of the Somali guards tapped the door back. He and the other guard picked up their barrel-bags and headed up the fire stairs to the roof. They were about to become a new layer in the plan to trap and kill the US Navy dolphin trainer Merk Toten.
Inside the office, Qas logged off, closed the laptop, stuffed it into a backpack. He killed the lights and headed out the door, bolting down the long dim corridor in the opposite direction of the Somali guards, heading up the stairwell to the roof of the three-story structure.
Like operating from the tent in the Empty Quarter Desert, when Qas hacked into the navigation system of the supertanker and guided it to the Somali pirates’ ambush, he wanted to stay ahead of US intelligence agencies and the military that were hunting for him.
Outside, the Somalis knelt on the roof. They assembled sniper rifles, attached scopes, and aimed, zoomed, and adjusted the sighting as they panned the lower part of the East River, from the Brooklyn Container Terminal across to Governors Island.
Through the scopes, they scanned the black water, waiting for the action to come to them.
Chapter Ninety-Two
MK-4 DOLPHINS SWAM on both sides of the RHIB, while the EOD divers angled toward the Staten Island Ferry that was slowing down to make a broad turn to dock in the slip.
The EOD diver flashed a hand-sign for the dolphins to swim ahead and quick-search the ferry, when out of nowhere one of the Iranian dolphins rammed its anti-foraging cone, armed with a steel spike, into the hindquarter of the US Navy dolphin. The jarring blow wounded the creature. The EOD divers watched in horror as the Iranian dolphin rammed the mammal again, snapping the spike off and rolling the injured dolphin underwater.
One diver lifted a spear gun; the other pulled out a pistol as they searched the inky dark water for a sign of the rogue animal.
The other MK-4 Navy dolphin darted under the RHIB, hunting for the attacker, when the Iranian dolphin struck the injured dolphin again as it floated to the surface to breathe. The EOD diver called Merk, shouting, “Mayday, mayday, we got a dolphin war.”
The EOD diver fired the spear gun at the rogue dolphin, grazing its dorsal fin with the spear. Wounded, it tried to swim away when the second Navy dolphin headbutted the Iranian dolphin in the belly, flipping it over. Stunned and injured, the rogue dolphin dove below. The divers pulled the wounded navy dolphin on board and attended to the metal shaft impaled in its side. The dolphin squirmed in shock, in need of immediate medical care.
* * *
RESPONDING TO THE mayday call of the EOD divers, Merk led Tasi and Inapo racing down the seawall of Battery Park City, rounding Whitehall Station.
They headed toward the RHIB bobbing in the wake of the Staten Island Ferry, which slowed its engine as it bounded off timber pilings of the ferry slip.
At that moment, Merk realized the ferry hadn’t been checked for a planted remora-type device. He pounded the gunwale in Morse code taps and dashes, signaling Tasi to swim over to the ferry as he and Inapo continued on to the EOD divers.
Merk swept the rubber boat behind the RHIB so as not to rock it with the wake of his rubber boat. He pulled up alongside. Inapo join
ed the other navy dolphin and dove down to the harbor floor to finish off the injured rogue dolphin.
“What do you have?” Merk shouted over the idling motor.
“Our system was attacked by a rogue fin,” the EOD diver shouted back, showing Merk the steel spike sticking out of the dolphin’s side.
“Just one?” Merk asked, puzzled. “Makes no sense. They operate in pairs.”
The EOD diver shrugged, holding up one finger.
“No way,” Merk said, scanning around the harbor. First to the Staten Island Ferry that just docked, but was not letting passengers off, then over to the chemical ship, Jenny started to search at the Brooklyn Container Terminal, and back across to Governors Island, where a mini fleet of SEALs in four RHIBs raced out, heading around Manhattan to the Hudson River ferry that was drifting with the torpedo still attached to its starboard hull.
Merk took out the mobile phone and texted Jenny to keep her head on a swivel for a second Iranian dolphin. He waved the EOD divers to take the injured dolphin back to the grain terminal to be treated by the NMMP veterinarian staff for the injury it sustained.
Inapo breached behind Merk, squealing.
Merk turned to Inapo tilting his side, nodding, whistling that the first rogue dolphin was at the bottom of the harbor. Merk replayed Inapo’s dorsalcam video and saw that he and the other MM system took turns beating and ramming the wounded mammal into submission, driving its lifeless body into the muddy trough, where it succumbed to its injuries and drowned.
The video showed a raw aggression, a nastiness that few people are aware of in dolphins, not realizing that even the trained ones are often as wild as their wild brethren. Merk saved the digital file to the NMMP cloud.
Merk opened a new window to Tasi’s dorsalcam and watched her sweep back and forth under the broad hull of the ferry. She didn’t find any remora-type device attached, so that ferry, at least on the bottom, appeared clean.
Dolphin Drone Page 28