“Let Korfa convulse for show. When that happens, call an ambulance and take him to a hospital off UN grounds.” He gave her a new dart. “C’mon, King, you like to throw things.”
Jenny held the dart with a finger on the tail and tossed it hard, exploding it in the purple dye across the plywood. “Yes. That’ll work fine the next time I seduce you.”
Merk’s Satcom vibrated. It was NMMP Director Susan Hogue calling for an update. “Toten here,” he answered, listening to his boss, and then replied, “Yes, director, I’ve seen the pictures. There’s more?… Of course there is, it’s on the Internet. Affirmative.” He ended the conversation with his boss and stared at Jenny, telling her: “They believe NMMP’s on-premise servers and Pentagon Cloud have been hacked. They’re trying to confirm it.”
“More pictures of you on the Belt after the scuffle?” Jenny said. She pulled a Heckler & Koch MK23 pistol with a silencer out of her jacket pocket, and showed the firearm to Merk, saying, “Time to retaliate.”
“You can’t bring that into the UN.”
“Maybe not.”
He held up the spent dart, and reminded her, “We need Korfa alive.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Inside the White House Situation Room, the CIA director and Pentagon military leaders looked at a wall screen with the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. The president gave the green light to bomb what the NRO’s intelligence unit estimated was General Adad’s 40 million dollar private jet parked on an airstrip in a northeast Syrian desert — a former ISIS stronghold. They looked at a live UAV image of the jet sitting on the tarmac at night, through an infrared lens. A blur. Little detail. It was a long shot. All they had to go by was some Red Cell analysis, along with known locations of Agent King’s movements in the same area months before when she scouted the desert for the new missile launch site guised as North Korean missile engineer Kim Dong-Sun.
A four-star army general requested to see the spy photos of the Syrian jet parked on the runway in Hargeisa Airport a week earlier. A CIA engineer showed a split-screen of the two jets side by side. The jets looked like twins to all who were present.
“That’s Adad’s bird, all right,” a navy admiral confirmed on a gut feeling. “Blow it to hell.”
“Mr. President, permission to fire?” the army general asked.
The president signaled yes, by moving two fingers in a chopping motion.
The army general gave the order by telephone to CIA drone reachback operators in Fort Meade. Ten seconds later, the drone fired the first of three Hellfire rockets at the jet.
Within seconds, the trio of Hellfire missiles blew apart the fuselage and wings of the jet, sheering the nose off, blasting the tail section back from the wreckage in a skidding fireball. The bursts of flames lit up the infrared lens.
As the blast radiated outward, in ascending fiery clouds of smoke and debris, the CIA director remarked, “That should send Syria and its Black Mass affiliates a loud message.”
“Well done, gentlemen,” the president said, congratulating the DoD executives.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
As she waited for the arrival of the North Korean Army uniform, Jenny secured access to an empty upper floor apartment across First Avenue from the United Nations Headquarters.
Tudor City was an elevated, tree-lined, eleven-building enclave built in the late 1920s on the east end of 42nd Street. Rising above the city streets, the tall brick buildings encompassed a pair of parks with stairs that swept down to 42nd Street and First Avenue, built at a time when factories and slaughterhouses stood where the UN headquarters would eventually be built. The pair of Tudor City buildings that faced the East River had small windows to prevent residents from looking at the industrial eyesores of the day.
In that rented one-bedroom apartment, Jenny and a geeky CIA digital engineer set up a surveillance nest. They took turns: One of them watched the UN’s front entrance, driveway with international flags, and North Lawn, and peered into the iconic, all-glass, newly renovated headquarters with binoculars. The other agent reviewed a marked-up set of plans, trying to identify where inside the UN Korfa might be hiding. Once Jenny got inside, she would need as few places as possible to search for the warlord.
“How are you planning to break into the UN? You going in disguised as a journalist?” the CIA digital engineer asked.
“No. I’m going to be the North Korean missile engineer Kim Dong-Sun one last time.”
The digital engineer nodded, knowing cyber teams from the NSA and CIA had started to hack into UN communications networks, sifting through thousands of emails, cloud notes, and millions more texts and instant messages generated in the last month to see when Korfa, whether by name or code name, popped up in the UN data dump. The longer the spy agencies hacked the UN nerve center, the more Jenny believed Korfa operated off the grid, leaving little to no electronic footprint to be discovered. Terrorists had learned how to go dark thanks to Edward Snowden, a traitor in Jenny’s eyes, who should one day be tried for treason.
She chose the General Assembly Building, which had been closed down for a complete construction overall until the GA’s 69th Session in September 2014. The GA was the main area to search, with the Security Council, the Secretariat’s Cafeteria, and the Dag Hammarskjöld Library as other areas to probe. For her, they would all become hot nodes in her intense manhunt.
On a hacked blueprint of the newly renovated UN building, Jenny circled the second floor and the Secretariat’s Cafeteria as two places to begin the search. If she went in as a kidnapped North Korean asylum seeker, maybe UN security would lead her to Korfa.
The intercom buzzer rang.
“That’s Dong-Sun’s gear,” Jenny said.
“Really?”
“Yes. When I enter the UN, where are you going to be?”
“In the van parked across the street.”
Jenny patted the data engineer on the shoulder. He answered the intercom buzzer, telling the front desk to let the delivery be made to the apartment.
Kim Dong-Sun’s clothes had arrived from Langley.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
The first half dozen dolphins arrived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. They were shipped up the New Jersey Turnpike in ordinary rent-a-trucks, then were transferred onto a US Coast Guard ship and ferried across the Hudson River to the Brooklyn grain terminal.
Because of the ongoing security investigation into the network breach, the NMMP’s usual communication line to inform Merk the dolphins were on their way was not used. Instead, he received one secure phone call telling him in code the marine mammal systems’ estimated time of arrival. That was it.
The whole military hacking spy game was one of the reasons why Merk, in concert with DARPA computer architects, engineers, and scientists, created the Dolphin Code software. If communications were ever hacked, the stolen data would amount to little more than strings of acoustic noise that couldn’t be deciphered. So the translation of more than 200 directives from the color-coded keys would be impossible. Only a handful of directors and admirals with the highest levels of navy security clearance had access to the Dolphin Code Rosetta key, which was kept offline in vaults at three different secure locations around the country.
Set up in twenty-four hours at the grain terminal, the MMS Mobile Vetlab Unit received the Pacific bottlenose dolphins, Ekela and Yon. Merk had trained the pair in Hawaii more than a year before for an operation in Southeast Asia. Now the biosystems were back under his command in waters with the industrial noise signal of a big port city that would be foreign to them.