“No. She appears clean,” he said, puzzled. “Maybe a virus.”
“Well, that’s life. Wait till you take her back to the bioteam at Camp Lemonnier.”
“‘Life’?” Merk repeated, looking at Kell, then asked, “Do you have an audioscope?” Merk waved the sniper to join them. He led the SEALs into the water, pushed the rubber boat out, handed the tarp to Kell and the sniper to unfold, and then tapped Morse code on the hull.
Tasi surfaced. She moseyed over and, with help from the SEALs, slid inside the craft. Merk and the sniper rolled Tasi on her side. He motioned Kell to aim the audioscope on the belly of the dolphin, moving the nozzle from her chest, then along the digestive tract to the tail. Merk waded around, pulled the receiver out of Kell’s ear, motioning him to aim the audioscope.
He heard Tasi’s heartbeat, and then over her belly the echo of a second, rapid heartbeat. The heartbeats were as clear as a SEAL double tap. “Tasi is pregnant,” Merk rejoiced.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The convoy of military trucks drove through, over, and around the mountains of northwest Iran on the way to the ancient holy city of Qom, south of Teheran. The slow, bumpy two-day grind wore on Agent Jenny King, who was disguised as the North Korean missile engineer Kim Dong-Sun.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps kept her company for the ride. They hinted to King they were driving her to Fordow, one of seventeen known nuclear weapons sites in Iran. The secret site, in which UN inspectors only learned about in 2009, was built as a nuclear fuel enrichment plant at an old Revolutionary Guards Corps’ base. But Fordow wasn’t a missile site facility. So why were they taking Kim Dong-Sun there?
The truck drove up a long, steep road. It followed the rough incline into the narrow gap of a mountaintop, crossed over the summit, and on the downward slope the hidden base of Fordow came into view in a dusty, rugged bowl of rock.
A borrow pit sat next to the entrance with excavated earth, rubble, spoils, and a contaminated water aeration pond holding bluish-silver flowback water in a geotextile-lined pool. That reminded Jenny of chemical-laden hot fracking pools back in the states. Dusty gray roads swept this way and that around the base, with one road slanting down to the gate of an underground tunnel. The lone freestanding three-story building stretched as long as an aircraft carrier to the base of a mountain. The cover structure hid an ongoing dig of the underground facility to expand, Agent King figured, the 3,000 centrifuges that were already humming to enrich uranium from the eyes in the sky of satellites, spy planes, and stray drones.
The truck drove down the road to the tunnel, rumbling, bouncing, jostling about, kicking plumes of dust in its wake before stopping at a gate. The driver handed papers to armed guards wearing masks. They checked the vehicle and then asked Dong-Sun for her passport and papers.
Jenny King handed the North Korean engineer’s stolen passport with her photo replacing the real Dung-Sun’s photo. She explained to the guards that the Americans took her papers when she was kidnapped and hauled across the border into Iraq. With the papers missing, the guard made a radio call, eyeing with suspicion, and waited.
A few minutes later, the Iranian nuclear engineer Ferdows, with whom she worked with at the missile site in the Syrian desert, emerged. The old scientist looked into the rear of the truck and saw the North Korean missile engineer sitting in her dirty uniform. He made eye contact with her; she nodded with a stone face. Ferdows put his hand on the guard’s shoulder, and whispered. The guard waved her to step out of the vehicle. He led her and Ferdows down into a side door of the underground facility. A pair of Revolutionary Guards trailed the engineers, entering a tunnel by way of an elevator shaft that traveled far down into the earth.
If she wasn’t so tired or disoriented from the long ride — Ferdows had flown back to Iran from Syria, he told her — she might have counted whether the elevator rode down six stories or seven.
The metal door lifted open. Ferdows led Dong-Sun down a passage, through a corridor, and into a heavily guarded weapons room. She figured that the hall of German-made centrifuges had to be nearby, behind one of the three walls in the large rectangular room, populated with scientists and Iranian army and naval officers, checking out the latest Iranian drone — great for photography, poor for taking out either soft or hard targets. Another table had disassembled parts of a torpedo and oddly, beside it, framed photographs of navy dolphins with Iranian divers.
Jenny wondered if the dolphins were left over from the Soviet era. A decade ago, Russia had given Iran ten-to-twelve trained navy dolphins for Iranian waterparks. But did Putin’s Russia give Iran more dolphins? And what if the mammals never made it to the waterparks? Jenny knew from her own analysis that Russia had trained 500 dolphins in its marine mammal program, while the US NMMP at its peak in 1987 had 120 dolphins in the program, with 100 today.
Did the Tehran government also take a dozen or so trained biosystems for military use? If so, it was the first she heard of it. And having dated Merk Toten on and off the past couple of years, he mentioned the first half of the story — Russian dolphins sent to Iran for waterpark entertainment — but not the other half for military purposes, which now began to sink in with her and make sense with all that was going on in the Persian Gulf, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.
Why wait for a missile site to be built in the Syrian desert when Iran was ramping up a plan to attack the West with an armed torpedo or a kamikaze dolphin? Both were low tech, both were disposable, both were low risk, high reward endeavors. The tactics made it easy to deny or to blame on someone else. So why not use both? she wondered. Why not attack the West with a torpedo or two and several navy dolphins? The possibility of a dolphin drone fascinated her. The thoughts about timing and logistics perked up her tired bones. She was awakened, riveted.
With a notion of what Iran was capable of, the fatigue that permeated every pore and bone in her body vanished. She was alert again, thinking, contemplating, figuring out what the global plans were for the Iranian-Syrian-North Korean alliance, with a sprinkling of an al Qaeda offshoot. The possibilities blew her mind. Now King had to survive her deep foray into Iran’s nuclear weapons program and get word back to Langley that something nasty was going to be launched in the coming weeks. The mother of all terrorist attacks, out-dueling the Paris attacks.
Ferdows stopped at the table. He met with a general and introduced the North Korean engineer he worked with in Syria, saying in Farsi, “This is the comrade who was kidnapped by the CIA. All forty-five kilos of her.” Laughter erupted. “Before she was taken, she taught Adad’s soldiers how to shoot straight. You should have seen the look on their faces.”
The men rippled with laughter; a scientist banged the table joining the hilarity.
“What a puny woman,” a revolutionary guard said with more bursts of laughter.
“Don’t forget,” the scientist chimed in, “you only need a small amount of yellowcake to set off a big chain reaction.”
The laughter spread, with Jenny finally joining in, even though she didn’t understand a single word. Even hardened Revolutionary Guard Corps could laugh. Who knew? When the joke had run its course and the laughter died down, Jenny scanned the weapons room and didn’t spot any other Asians in the space. She was grateful she wasn’t put on the spot to answer to a North Korean military officer, who might know the real Kim Dong-Sun.
The scientists and engineers stepped back as Ferdows pulled Jenny toward the table. He swept his arm over the torpedo elements, guidance system, and unassembled parts. She looked at the pieces, but took a closer look of the trained dolphins in the photographs, seeing they were wearing devices on the pectoral fins and harnesses with spikes over their mouths.