“Okay. Enlighten me.”
“They are assassins only. There may be more; the world now knows what you look like. But if we’re going to stop the attack vector, we have to intercept Bahdoon, take out Korfa and his Somali henchmen, and capture the core of the Syrian Electronic Army that’s here in New York. We don’t do that, they’ll green-light the operation and detonate whatever devices they have.”
“Let’s start with Korfa,” Merk said. “He’s determined, but a sacrificial lamb for Pratique Occulte. If you were a well-known Somali pirate, where would you hide in New York?”
“In plain sight.”
“What? Does Somalia have an office here in the city?”
“You mean, a consulate or embassy? Sure, it’s on East 61st Street and York Ave,” she said, confirming the address on her mobile phone.
“What about the United Nations?”
“Christ,” she looked at him in surprise. “My god, brilliant. The UN is international territory. It’s a safe haven. He’d be protected there.”
“Practically untouchable,” he pointed out.
“We need to make a short list of the most likely locations of where the warlord would hide and have those buildings watched 24/7.”
“And you’ll need to break into one of those places to hunt him down,” he stated. “We’re not dealing with the cherry founder of WikiLeaks. Korfa is one dangerous MF.”
Chapter Seventy-Five
Late that night, disguised as a livery cab driver with Indian features, Merk visited the first of three sites. He drove by an empty warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard off Flushing Avenue, between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. But he felt the location was set too far back from the water to be effective; he also didn’t like operating below the higher vantage points of both bridges, where he and the dolphins could be watched. And there was too much traffic and activity, so he scratched the Navy Yard off the list of possible sites for the MMS staging area.
He drove out to the Brooklyn Armory Terminal, but came away with the same reservation about the site. Although it was ideally suited, located on the waterfront with sweeping views of the harbor and lower Manhattan, it was too busy for an industrial area.
Merk then drove to the abandoned, black concrete structure he saw the day before in Red Hook, near the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in the New York Port Authority Grain Terminal. He learned city officials had long referred to the terminal as the “Magnificent Mistake.”
For Merk, the dirty, soot-covered, concrete box structure was isolated, well fortified for protecting the NMMP Mobile Vetlab Unit and to keep the navy dolphins from prying eyes. More critical, the structure appeared bombproof. It was a bunker. The tall structure offered a commanding view to scout New York Harbor from its upper floors and roof.
So he parked the car and climbed up the rusting metal stairs in a decayed stairwell covered with graffiti. The cracking and chipping of paint reminded him of the Somali boy’s scarred arms. On the roof, he peered around. On the backside, he saw cars, buses, and trucks stuck in traffic on the BQE overpass, which could see him and other navy scouts or snipers, so he would have come up with some sort of blind to obstruct their views. Other than that, the Magnificent Mistake was a prize location to run a stealth dolphin operation.
Merk used the Dolphin Code mobile app to communicate his findings to NMMP, which in turn shared the information with the CIA, the navy brass in the Pentagon, and the New York Intelligence Fusion Center through a direct high-speed, fiber-optic pipe.
Merk spent another twenty minutes on the roof. He peered down at a chemical tanker unloading its cargo at a nearby terminal. He looked below to a rusty trolley stuck, frozen in time, on the abandoned tracks in Red Hook. He photographed the Gowanus Canal on the terminal’s backside and knew it was polluted, just not as badly as it was back in the 1970s and 1980s.
He figured he could ferry the dolphins through the canal and out to the East River to be inserted in cleaner water, and upon return hoses would spray the bad chemicals and pollutants off their epidermis. He also made a mental note to tell the trainers, helpers, and marine biologists to make sure they instructed the dolphins to swim above the surface in the canal and not dive under, to prevent contaminated water from filling their blowholes. The Vetlab team would have to take water tests, in case any of the marine mammals became sick with infection or virus.
Merk made his way down the building, floor by dirty floor. He looked out broken windows to the lights of New York Harbor, at the dilapidated grain feed equipment and broken conveyor belts lying about. The air had an acrid, musty odor to it. He made a mental note to set up fans and humidifiers. The Navy Dolphin Mobile Team would have to draw power to the building or get it turned back on by Con Edison without any questions being asked.
Outside of a fast retrofit, Merk felt lucky he had stumbled on something of immediate value. He and the marine mammal systems could hide in New York City in plain sight, just like Korfa.
Chapter Seventy-Six
By the time Merk and Jenny arrived at 0600 hours at the grain terminal, navy personnel were already removing trash and debris from the ground floor, taking the refuse out to a Dumpster in bags and large chunks. A couple of chemists were testing the water around the abandoned facility to determine whether the presence of toxins and heavy metals could harm the dolphins’ lungs, immune systems, and epidermis. Merk didn’t want a repeat of a vulnerable system, like Tasi, being exposed to toxic waste.
Those who worked outside on the grain terminal grounds wore hazmat suits, since that was the cover story the Pentagon and NYPD used to chase curious people away.
Inside the ground floor, a crew of carpenters began laying down sleeper planks and then subfloor plywood over the dirty and degraded concrete floor. Other laborers installed acoustic-absorbing foam panels on the walls, as if the two-foot-thick walls needed more soundproofing.
Jenny looked around at the unfolding operation, nudged Merk in the side, reminding him, “We need to finish this off, Merk. Don’t forget, be ruthless.”
“How about you?”
“I got a break on Korfa,” she said, picking up the backpack and handing it to Merk. She leaned over and whispered, “We tapped the Somali embassy on 61st Street. It appears he has a few friends in high places. The phone calls have been traced back to the UN.”
“So he’s here.”
“You told me Korfa was in the UN. But you never told me how to get him out.”
Merk gave her a look, grinned, and opened the backpack, pulling out an oversized plastic pistol. He loaded a plastic dart with a metal tip into the handgun.
“What’s this?”
“Korfa’s sleeping pill,” Merk said, then fired a shot at a sheet of plywood. The dart struck in a burst of purple ink, sticking in the wood. “A tranquilizer dart for dolphins.”
“Cool. Really, cool. What’s with the dye?”
“Need to know when the dart hits a dolphin. The dye washes off in salt water after a few days.” He pulled the dart out and handed it to Jenny.
She studied it, asking, “Okay. But how can I get the dart gun past UN security?”
“You don’t have to. Just carry a couple of darts into the UN and stab him—”
“If I get that close.”