The guard first mentioned there was a good German beer hall in the center of K-Town, and then, perhaps trying to flirt with her, said, “Oh, no, wait… there’s Charles BBQ and the African Grille,” he said excitedly, opening the gate for the attractive Asian woman.
Jenny thanked the guard and drove through, with Merk sitting behind her, out of view of the MP. “Okay, Blue, you can come up for air now. We’re off base.”
“Are we following orders tonight?” he asked with a smirk.
“When have we ever followed orders?” Jenny asked, turning the SUV onto the main road. She headed toward the city of Kaiserslautern, with a population of 100,000 people.
It would be her night to finally let loose, to get lost with her lover and polar opposite in emotion and personality — she the gun aficionado, he the “no gun” hero.
Chapter Sixty-Six
In the grand hotel suite, Jenny ordered room service, while Merk prepared to take a whirlpool bath in the oversized bathtub. He shouted, “Hey, King, why are you living large tonight?”
She popped open a bottle of champagne. “I’ve been earning two paychecks for the past nine months. Haven’t been able to spend any money from either one. Funny thing is I’ll never see what I earned in my North Korean bank account.”
“What else?”
“The Revolutionary Guards Corps… I was lucky if the pigs bathed every third day. Many reeked of body odor, the spices they ate bled through their stinking pores. Talk about gross,” she said. “Reminds me of that dry seaweed smell from the crack of your dorsal fin. Do you still carry that fine odor, honey?”
“You know, another two months inside the Iranian nuclear facility, and your white skin would turn porcelain white.”
“And then what, honey? I thought you are attracted to me any way I come,” she cooed.
“Yeah, that’s great and everything, but…” he began to say, but when he turned around his naked, tall, lean body to her — she grinned, holding two glasses of champagne. Wearing only a towel wrapped around her breasts and torso, she handed both flutes to Merk. He put them down by the whirlpool and turned back to admire her standing naked when the towel hit the floor, as she flipped a bar of soap in her hand. “So that’s why they call you Special Agent Glass-figure-house—”
“Madhouse to you, sailor,” she said and drilled the bar of soap into his chest. She lunged at him, pushing him down into the whirlpool. She tugged at his hair and kissed him on the face, on his lips, and over his mouth, their hot, wet tongues thudding, nurturing one another. She grabbed his cock and stroked it, rubbing her supple breasts and hard nipples against his body. Jenny massaged his balls, running his groin against hers, kissing him passionately. Merk bit her lips, kissing down her chin and swan neck, sliding his tongue over her breasts, as he sucked on her nipples, biting them, then kissing them softly, clutching her buttocks.
“Hmmm, roger that,” she swooned, running the tip of his penis against her vaginal lips, arousing her clitoris to stir an orgasm. Being naked with Merk fired up her hollows hot and wet.
Merk slid inside Jenny. He began to make love to her in the bathtub, in the water, where he was born in the sea. Like teenage lovers who hadn’t seen each other since summer, Merk and Jenny groped and humped in unison. She kissed him, pulling on and twisting his wet locks, biting and sniffing the strands. He thumped her, nibbling on her earlobe, caressing her neck.
Room service entered and, upon hearing the lovemaking emanate from the bathroom, left the cart of food and stepped out of the presidential suite.
“Do you love your fins more than me?” she whispered, riding him faster, faster.
“Huh, uh… you… of course,” he said, felt a shudder, breathlessly licking her shoulder. “One fin is… pregnant.”
“By you?” she teased, squeezing her thighs, pumping up and down.
“No,” he chortled, delirious, and rolled her over in the tub, pumping her harder.
She wrapped her legs around his waist allowing him to thrust all the way inside her — deeper, stronger, faster. She moaned; he snorted until… he felt the pressure build and her body tremble as they climaxed together in a wild, jolting hot spasm.
They spent the rest of the evening in bed touching one another, kissing, caressing, and talking about life late into the night. They didn’t need sleep; they needed each other without the wind-blown sand of the Mid-East or the toxic water from the Gulf of Aden.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
“Blowing up Mosul,” Jenny shouted, “destroying Muslim shrines, tombs, and icons, the Paris attacks has turned the world against ISIS. But this new group — Pratique Occulte — operates in the shadows with big ambitions to take down their enemy. That scares me. They work like me.”
Agent King stared out the CIA-chartered jet window to the cotton-ball clouds below. Disguised as a private business jet flying across the Atlantic Ocean to Washington, DC, Jenny sat with Merk and a young female CIA analyst in the plane’s digital room. Wearing glasses and dressed in a business suit, Jenny let the analyst lead the meeting. She thought the presence of an outsider peering into their unique worlds, into their separate missions, would benefit discovery and connect the terrorist links they might have overlooked.
The trio went over details and observations that Jenny and Merk had made during their missions. With Peder Olsen being detained by the FBI Counterterrorism Unit at Ramstein AFB, Merk questioned whether he would be of use anymore. But the Norwegian sniper did tip Merk off that the radioactive waste sitting that Tasi found came from Germany. Like the country’s march toward clean, renewable energy by decommissioning its nuclear reactors in the south, it came with a cost, with a dirty, seedy underbelly. Merk posited the idea that if Peder did hire a planner, bomb-maker, or some type of scout in the United States, the fact that the mercenary was in US protective custody made it unlikely he would be sought after anymore.
Listening to that reasoning, the CIA analyst coaxed Merk and Jenny to see what dots beyond Olsen could be connected, what common traits or trends might be pulled from their missions, and what extraneous data could be discarded. The process of elimination began on that flight. What US cities would Pratique Occulte target? What landmarks in those cities? And what type of weapons or bombs could they use from the water?
That got Jenny thinking. She turned to Merk and inquired about the pirate hostage negotiations: Who was in charge? How did it go down? And was there any digital image or recording to analyze? Knowing that Dante Dawson was involved, Merk accessed the Navy’s Blue Cloud, used a biometric scan, and entered a secure vault containing the Somali mission, where the records were kept, including the trade of cash for hostages at the Somalia-Djibouti border. He opened video clips and still images, rummaging through them, trying to pick an outlier, when his eyes seized on the small-frame pirate wearing a gas mask.
Merk played the audio. They listened to the chat between Dante and the gas mask man, who spoke through a mobile app. “Who’s the tango?” Merk asked, referring to the terrorist.
“Can’t make out his face. But look there.” Jenny pointed to a shock of straight black hair. “That’s not a Somali’s wild locks. It’s groomed.”
Merk then noticed lighter brown skin between a glove and the long sleeve on the man’s wrist, asking, “Is that Mid-Eastern blood?… Egyptian?… Yemeni?… Syrian?”
“Could be Iranian,” the CIA analyst said, typing the file name in an email and sent it to digital analysts in Langley to see what they would come up with in their search for an identity to the mystery pirate. Jenny sent the same information to CIA Agent Alan Cuthbert, who had kidnapped her in the desert.