Peder slapped the floor with his other hand, crying, “Uncle, uncle. Stop. Stop it.”
Merk rolled over the sniper’s back, sprung to his feet, and ripped his long-sleeve shirt open, tearing it off, revealing his burn-scarred flesh and the orange and silver “Broken Daggers” tattoo on his right breast. It was the tattoo of the Navy SEAL trident on Merk’s biceps that told Peder everything he needed to know about Merk Toten, a former SEAL Team Six member.
Merk pulled a chair over and sat down waiting for the Norwegian to get up.
Peder shook his numbed hand and wrist, rubbing his elbow as he rose to his knees. He eyed Merk’s warped flesh, which looked like melted candlewax. He wringed his wet hair with his fingers, and sat down in a new chair across from the dolphin whisperer, muttering, “Sorry, didn’t know.”
“Norseman, you do know something,” Merk said. Peder looked in Merk’s eyes and said nothing. “Let me help you. Norway has been soft on terror for a long time, but not you. In summer 2011, the socialists, forever on a terrorist holiday, allowed a super lone wolf to bomb government buildings with a slow-acting, large-volume fertilizer bomb, blasting out the facades in a shock wave. But the madman wasn’t done. What did the Norwegian police and authorities do? Nothing. Your goddamn government did squat to prevent the lone wolf from taking a Sunday drive up the highway, past toll booths, cruise deep into the countryside, take a ferry ride, and assassinate seventy kids and adults at a summer camp island. Great shit. Impressive.”
Peder stared at the navy dolphin trainer, who clearly showed his US Navy SEAL counterterrorism background. “Ja,” he finally spoke up. “Add the Norwegian telecom giant Telenor to the list of defense failures. In 2013, they were breached by Chinese or Iranian hackers, who injected fifty Trojan horses through a zip file in one email sent to all thirty thousand employees. The phishing attack allowed the hackers to sit and wait, like a sniper, like me, a finger on the trigger, and then on one late Friday night in Oslo wipe all the data from Telenor’s executives’ laptops, desktop, and mobile devices. That was really embarrassing.”
“Yeah, it was,” Merk agreed. “Now, I need your help. A terrorist strike on the West is in motion. And I’m going to stop it.” Peder opened his mouth about to say something, but then stopped. He looked at the floor and then watched Merk step to a wall screen. With a remote, the dolphin trainer clicked on the drone image of the Blå Himmel supertanker anchored in Berbera. The image had two red circles embedded on it, one marking the roof of the bridge, where Peder fired the shots, and the other all the way across the deck to the bow, the blood pool where he felled Samatar. “What did you fire?… Two, maybe three shots?” Merk asked; Peder nodded. “Your job as a vessel protection detachment guard was to protect the ship from a pirate attack. But you left the tanker vulnerable to just that. Why? Did you make that decision?”
“Nay, the shipowner.”
“Oh, the owner,” Merk scoffed, asking, “Why single out a pirate a klick away? Why not shoot the other pirates scurrying across the deck, hundreds of meters closer to you?”
“Who knows why?”
“Goatshit. You know why!” Merk screamed and clicked the next image showing a split-screen of the dorsalcam images of the bombs that were planted underwater on the supertankers’ hull. “Squarehead, don’t play dumb with me.” Merk clicked the next image showing a similar type of bomb used in underwater demolition to decommission an old oil rig. “This is your work from Norway’s offshore oil industry, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t plant the bombs, I swear,” he said.
“No, you made them, stored them on the tanker, for the pirates to plant on the hull when they brought the ship to port,” Merk said. “They don’t make bombs like that in Somalia.”
A single tear broke down Peder’s face. His hands began to tremble.
Merk noticed both and put the remote down, then said with force, “You and the pirates are goddamn pawns to something much bigger than hijacking ships. It’s for a spectacular attack, isn’t it? The two ships were taken by design. The piracy was a dry run, wasn’t it?”
“Ja, shit.”
“Shit? People are going to die. Radicalism is spreading. Who paid you to kill Samatar?”
“Don’t know,” his somber voice cracked.
“Who gave the order?”
“Korfa.”
“Who does he work for?”
“Something, er, like… Svarte Occult.”
“Black Occult? Who the hell are they? A splinter group?”
Peder shook his head no.
Merk ran Korfa through his mind. It all began to make sense. A hard rap banged the steel door. Merk ignored the noise and the shouts to open it.
He looked hard at Peder, saying, “If you’re holding anything back, I will hunt you down in prison or your homeland. You got it?”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Deep in the bowels of Fordow nuclear fuel plant in Qom, Iran, Kim Dong-Sun emerged from the R&D laboratory. After vetting the missile engineer with questions that only she would know about her kidnapping in the Syrian desert with General Adad, Ferdows gave Quds security an all-clear that Kim Dong-Sun was one and the same person he worked with in Syria.
Ferdows took Dong-Sun on a brief tour of the plutonium enrichment plant.
In recent years, Qom had taken over 20 percent of the centrifuges processing yellowcake from the US-targeted Natanz facility. So the Israeli Stuxnet worm, planted in the computer system in June 2010, had no impact on Iran’s overall capability to enrich uranium; neither did the nuclear treaty with the US in 2015. Stuxnet was a mere speed bump in the process. Jenny saw with her own eyes that Iran wasn’t going to comply with any nuclear arms agreement.
Having written a brief in the round Korean script on what elements should be included in retrofitting a missile guidance system for a torpedo, she handed it to Ferdows and requested to be transferred to a project for her missile engineering expertise.
Ferdows studied the document, but couldn’t read Korean. “This is?”
“The new design,” Kim said without emotion. “If you need a translation, email it to my colleague at the Syrian missile site or to your contact in North Korea.”
“I will. What does it say? Are you recommending a fix?” the scientist asked.
“Smaller capacitor inserted sideways will give you the eight centimeters you need,” she pointed out on the sketch. “A tight fit. But don’t use Silicon Valley’s commercial GPS system. That’s not reliable.” He looked at her perplexed. “When you control the steering of a torpedo near the surface, you can’t risk the satellites’ triangulation being off,” she replied. “Have the Syrian Electronic Army hack into the Pentagon and use the US military’s GPS system. It’s far more accurate.”
“But that’s hidden behind a strong firewall.”
“Yes, for you, but not me,” she said. “I can show the cyber Syrians how to get inside.”
Ferdows nodded, thinking her recommendations over, especially the one about hacking the US military GPS network. That was a good piece of insight. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I am ready to fly to the new missile site at Lake Urmia you mentioned,” she said. “By the way, what happened to the old missile facility?”