As they waited for replies, Jenny scrawled a list of items on a Smart Board:
• Missing fissile material from Iran’s Fordow nuke facility
• ISIS-stolen uranium from Iraq university
• ISIS-stolen chemical weapons from Syria and Iraq? What type of gas agents?
• What kind of dirty or suitcase bomb?
• Syrian missile site and Syrian Electronic Army collaboration?
• Iranian guidance system for torpedoes
• Russian navy dolphins in Canada or US? How many?
• North Korean missile guidance technology — stolen from America
• Korfa’s US connections and network?
• Middle East man in gas mask — a dark omen?
Merk showed they had to work on the list from the top down. He told them to think in terms of cloaking data, erasing digital breadcrumbs, leaving few electronic prints that could be traced back to the fenemy of Iran, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and Somali pirates.
They knew sleeper cells were probably inside the United States already. On the gaps and bottlenecks of information, Merk, Jenny, and the CIA analyst ran through obvious targets for a sea-level bomb delivery. The usual terrorist targets of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, all fit the bill on the Eastern Seaboard, while the West Coast’s big three of Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco made the list. Then Merk added, “What about San Diego? Home to the Pac Rim Command, the Navy SEALs in Coronado, and NMMP on Point Loma?”
Jenny sat back and opened her eyes wide. “I got it. When’s Memorial Day?”
“In two weeks,” the CIA analyst said, lifting her glasses, eyeing Jenny and Merk.
“New York City’s Fleet Week, that’s it,” Jenny said with clarity. “A few years ago, Fleet Week didn’t happen because of the stupid sequester. But now…” As Jenny searched for a list of politicians and dignitaries attending Memorial Day celebration, her tablet pinged.
She opened Cuthbert’s reply, looked at the picture of the gas mask man side by side with a small Arab man wearing glasses, lurking in the back of the crowd at the drone strike protest in Jaar, Yemen. There the man stood outside the terrorist safe house the CIA bombed. She digitally blew up his face, clicked open a metadata tag, and read the caption: “‘His name is Bahdoon. A psychiatrist educated in France’… so the French name, Pratique Occulte, makes sense.”
“He’s the brains behind Korfa’s Somali muscle,” Merk added.
“There’s another problem,” Jenny said. “If Bahdoon met Dante at the border and the SEA hackers breached his mobile phone… well, Merk, they know who you are.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
After spending more than eight hours in meetings with Jenny, her superiors, teams of analysts, and clandestine operators, the CIA put Merk up for the night at Langley. In the morning, he ate breakfast with Jenny and the CIA director in his seventh floor corner office.
The plan was moving forward. While they finished egg whites and bowls of fruit, two stories beneath them, a team of CIA analysts began to connect the dots with NSA intercepts, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other intel agencies that matched Bahdoon to Qas, the Syrian Electronic Army hacker, and General Adad, and the Somali warlord brothers. From there they knew the contacts supplied to them via Agent Jenny King on the Iranian scientists and the North Korean missile engineers.
The last gap they had to close was Korfa. Why did he order Peder Olsen to kill his brother Samatar? What would the Somali pirates gain from their pact with Pratique Occulte?
Narrowing the gap with Olsen’s Russian contact in America would prove difficult; Merk wrote it off. Instead, he told the CIA director that Olsen was now contaminated goods; he was radioactive and no longer needed as a fall guy to pull off a terrorist operation.
For Merk, the next phase was all about getting the supplies and pods of navy dolphins to New York without detection. That meant coordinating with SEAL teams, who would dress both in civilian clothes and military uniform to begin the search for the dirty bomb from either Iran or a stolen chemical weapons cache from Syria.
The claim of several Russian-trained dolphins and a couple of torpedoes deepened the nature and threat of the attack. But King’s eyewitness account did bear out that dolphins and torpedoes were going to be used in some form, and that would limit the terrorist attack to one US city, and not two like during the 9/11 attacks that struck New York and Washington.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Merk drove through Gate One at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, escorted by a guard to Gate Three and the base Pass Office. There he was given restricted clearance to the base. They drove him to a storage facility by the shore at Crescent Cove.
The boats and craft usually moored in the slips of the cove had been moved out to other marinas around the base. That was to facilitate the temporary installation of Marine Mammal Systems holding pens, where Tasi and Inapo took residence. Portable veterinary clinics were set up around the slips on land in tents and mobile trailers, while trainers and EOD divers began to ferry rubber boats into the slips.
Before Merk could reconnect with the dolphins he trained overseas, a SEAL Team Two commanding officer and an ONI official had to debrief him. They led Merk into the storage warehouse. Inside, Merk noted the building had little insulation and no soundproofing. He requested acoustic soundboards with cones be installed to dampen background noise that would impact the dolphins, while preventing passersby from eavesdropping.
The ONI liaison entered the request on a tablet, captured pictures of the bare corrugated metal walls, and sent the photos in with the request.
Merk told them the building had to be converted on the fly to receive more sea mammals from NMMP San Diego. It had to be ultra-clean for the veterinary clinics to operate, treat the dolphins, give medical checkups, feed them, and store, prep, and process food. He then requested two emergency generators be delivered in case of a storm or blackout.
Sitting down in chairs around a dolphin’s transport hardbox, the ONI official asked Merk about his thoughts on how he would sweep the waterways around New York City with the marine mammals. Merk shook his head at the man in uniform, and then looked at the Team Two CO. “Sir, I can’t answer that question with any confidence until one, I review a map with contours tonight; two, know how many biologic systems will be under my command; and three, confirm the first two with an aerial flyover and swim-by of Manhattan.”
“Fair list. Anything else, Lt. Toten?” the Team Two CO asked.
“Yes. What other minesweep ops, equipment, choppers, drones, and seaborne gadgets can Big Blue send to New York for Fleet Week?”
“Good call, Toten. Let me look into that,” the ONI official said.
“If the navy sends in the cavalry, it will scare off the tangos. Then we’d lose them until they blow up another target in a different city,” Merk said. He turned to Team Two CO: “Sir, Big Blue better coordinate our efforts with the CIA or we might screw this up. I need to be part of those discussions and learn what the biosystems will be exposed to.”
“Roger that, Merk,” he said. “Your sea daddy Admiral Quail Sumner has already set that pre-recon meeting up for tomorrow at 1100 hours. It will be held at the Pentagon.”
“That works, sir.”
They stepped outside. Merk strolled around Crescent Cove docks and slips, inspecting the dozen floating ten-by-ten enclosures that had been installed. They were moored between the slips as temporary holding pens. Coolers and fish cleaning tables were erected on each one of the floating pontoons that supported a marine mammal pen.