Merk reminded himself of being a carpenter, of his father telling him to “use the tools you got,” when he removed the dolphins from the slings and hardboxes. He placed them on stretchers, fed both during dual medical checkups, then set them in a rubber boat, covered in poly sheets to protect their sensitive skin from the sun’s ultraviolet rays and snooping eyes by local boaters. With a young assistant, Merk rode Ekela and Yon out to the harbor, steering clear of the thousands of tourists and commuters aboard the Staten Island ferries.
The Coast Guard ship, carrying Tasi and Inapo and two other dolphins from NMMP San Diego, crossed paths on the way to the grain terminal. The Coast Guard captain flashed a light, signaling Merk that four more biologic systems were being delivered.
If Pratique Occulte’s plan of attack were pushed up to the next day, Merk would have a lot of water in and around New York to cover with only a half dozen systems. Six dolphins to search a dozen or so moored international ships, to stand guard and scan landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, the Intrepid Museum, cruise ship terminals, the Chelsea Piers, the ferry slip at Whitehall Station, the South Street Seaport, and up the East River on Roosevelt Island. It would be a tall order for drones to carry out. And that’s not to mention all the points on the Brooklyn and New Jersey sides that flank the city.
The navy got bogged down in delivering the mine-detecting helicopter, too. That meant the sonar sweeping capability and the unmanned drone ship — both of which would cover a great deal of real estate up and down the harbor and rivers — would have to wait. In true government bureaucratic fashion, the logistics had become a headache, bordering on nightmare.
That afternoon, things got worse. Jenny sent Merk a coded text about the Pentagon’s retaliatory strike of General Adad’s jet. The parked jet was empty with no one wounded and zero casualties. In her anger at the shortsightedness of their superiors, she noted the casualties would mount on the US side of the Atlantic Ocean, because “the US sent the wrong message to the renegade general in Syria. Pratique Occulte will definitely strike now.”
Merk texted Jenny back: “Be a carpenter. Use the tools you have.” In a way, he was reminding himself of the predicament, that the Pentagon had put a crimp into his search plan.
Off Staten Island, around the bend from the ferry terminal, Merk steered the rubber boat to a Chinese-flagged, black-hulled cargo ship Hang Sun. He pulled the poly sheets off the dolphins, checked their dorsalcams and GPS tags, and signaled them to roll into the water.
Once in the harbor, he gave a second hand-sign directing Ekela and Yon to swim around the medium-size vessel, and return giving him one of three signs: first sign, raising a left or right flipper to signal some object had been found; second sign, a tap of their beak in his palm telling him they found a mine, bomb, or torpedo; and third, an echolocating click to signal “all clear.”
If they gave the tapping sign, Merk would place an emergency call to the Pentagon to summon navy SEAL divers, who were stationed nearby, to race out and inspect the object. Dorsalcam images, if not too blurry, might confirm what a discovered object might be: a false positive or a potential real threat. Like everything else with Operation Free Dive, the SEAL divers wouldn’t arrive until later that day.
The navy dolphins were taught to ignore empty cans, drum barrels, and containers they could differentiate with their sonar from solid explosive packs and sea-mines. A dolphin’s sonar is so sensitive and accurate that it could tell whether the hull of a ship came from Swedish steel or Japanese recycled scrap metal, by measuring the steel’s density at a distance.
With their GPS tags, Merk watched the dolphins’ progress above surface and below the vessel. The digital pings showed their movements on a digital map of New York Harbor superimposed on the laptop screen.
Ekela followed the mooring line down to the anchor that was buried in sediment. The dolphin found nothing, returned to the surface, breathed a pinch of air through her blowhole, and then swam around the bow before she dove below surface to search again.
Yon swam under the keel, filming the length of the seaweed-clad hull.
Nearly half hour later, the dolphins returned with both of them clicking in staccato bursts. Merk knew they didn’t find anything that was threatening; the dorsalcam images he downloaded confirmed as much.
Merk drove the dolphins to a pier at the end of Belt Parkway on the Brooklyn side of the harbor. Seeing people were fishing on the pier, Merk cut the motor halfway across from the Hang Sun, and allowed the dolphins to dive in the water and swim under the pier. With Yon towing a DPod to the pier, Merk watched their movement underwater via the dorsalcams.
Ekela darted down one row of pylons, weaving in and around them, grazing fishing lines, stirring a few people to believe they had fish nibbling on their hooks. Yon worked the other side of the pier, surveying for bombs or the odd object with side-sweeping echolocating clicks. Like the Hang Sun cargo ship, the pier was clean.
When the dolphins returned from the foray, Merk received a text from the navy SEAL team. They were at the NMMP staging area and were going to take Tasi and Inapo and the other pair of mine-searching dolphins out to the harbor to join the search.
Merk welcomed the news. But he needed a lot more help if they were going to find and interdict a mini nuclear device from detonating in the city waters.
Chapter Eighty
For Jenny it was all or nothing. At knifepoint, she made the digital engineer punch her in her ribs. The blow knocked her to the floor. She squirmed, sucking for air.
Curled in a ball, she lifted a bare foot and ordered the engineer to club the sole of her foot with a towel-bar she’d ripped off the bathroom wall. The blow drove shooting pain through her foot with an electrical jolt that shot up her spine. After the spasms subsided, Jenny straightened her body on the floor and stretched for several minutes, stilling the numbness. She gathered her senses, breathed short breaths, part bikram yoga, part Merk teaching her dolphin breathing techniques, until she was able to climb to her feet and limp to the bathroom. If she was going to lie her way into a secure facility like the UN, the pain and bruises had to be real.
In the bathroom, Jenny scrubbed her face clean, removing all signs of makeup. She looked behind the bathroom door, saw dust on the floor, squatted down, and rubbed the grime on her face, giving the impression she had been held captive in some cellar in the city.
Dressed one more time as North Korean engineer Kim Dong-Sun, making sure the collar was crooked, Jenny exited the apartment by the back stairs. At the ground floor, she disabled the alarm and stepped through a fire door, out onto the street in full view of UN headquarters.
With her clubbed foot still sore and throbbing, Jenny limped to the intersection across First Avenue from the UN’s main gate at the Visitor Centre overlooking the North Lawn.
A few passersby noticed her strange military getup and pronounced limp. But it was New York; on the opposite side of town sat Times Square, where adults dressed up as superheroes and nude women to drain tourists of money. Was the disguise a ruse, a Communist fashion statement, or was she from a rogue nation? Jenny ignored the gawkers and hobbled across the street.
A couple of security guards questioned her in English.
Jenny spoke fast in a breathless, fast-paced Korean, like a fire hose turned on high. The obscure words confused the guards, who didn’t understand the foreign language. She gave a guard a handwritten note in English and a forged North Korean passport to the other guard. She waited for a moment, and then shouted at the guards to hurry and let her into the UN.