Not wise to the purple dye as part of the animal tranquilizer, the translator rushed Jenny to the bathroom to wash up. The security officer put a pillow under Korfa’s head; he checked his pulse, which stabilized at a low rate, and then waited for the ambulance to show up.
Three minutes later an ambulance pulled up to the UN.
A minute after that, security guards rushed EMT workers into the lounge, rolling a gurney. They checked Korfa’s vital signs, put an oxygen mask over his face, placed the oxygen cylinder on a rack, and then put him on the gurney, strapping him down. The EMT technicians raised the gurney and rolled Korfa out, following the security officers, who led the way.
Dong-Sun emerged from the bathroom with the translator, checking her uniform for holes and tears, then her hands and skin for cuts and scrapes. With the room clear, except for a pair of security guards taking a statement from Bahdoon, Jenny asked to be taken to another room and to have dinner before she would give her statement about the fight.
The translator sat Dong-Sun down in the library next door and told her to wait there until she returned. Given the second gift in less than an hour, Jenny looked up at a security camera and broke the seal to a locked fire door, triggering the alarm. She headed down the stairs and broke out of the building, limped across First Avenue, and disappeared in Tudor City.
Chapter Eighty-One
Two hours later at the CIA’s downtown safe house, Korfa came to, aroused by smelling salts.
Dressed in black, Jenny splashed water in the warlord’s face. He shook his head, trying to rise out of the chair, but found his wrists bound to the armrests. She kicked Korfa in the balls — he doubled over in pain, coughing, spitting on the floor. He soon realized he had been stripped out of his clothes, wearing only boxer shorts. He saw two Band-Aids stuck on his skin where Jenny had stabbed him with the darts. She stared at the buffalo hump on his shoulder.
“Good hangover?” Jenny asked, slapping Korfa in the ear.
“Who the fuck are you?” Korfa shouted. “Why am I here? I demand to know.”
“That’s my question for you,” she said, putting the barrel of a pistol to his head. “Why aren’t you in your homeland, Somalia? Why did you come here?”
“Uh-uh-uh…”
She smacked him with an open palm, shouting, “I didn’t hear you. Try again. How did you get into the United States? Who are your enablers?”
Korfa lifted his head, blinked, wriggled his eyelids, and just stared at her.
“Time is running out. My government just blew up General Adad’s lair,” Jenny said, playing a short clip of the Syrian jet being blown up on a tablet.
Korfa looked up at her in shock. “What do you want from me?”
“The details on the bombs,” she said. “They’re going off soon, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know the details.”
“Lies!” she shouted, slapping the warlord in the face. “I need names, places, the bombs.”
“I’m a knight, not a king or queen,” he said, referring to chess pieces. “But you’re a dead pawn when I am freed.”
Chapter Eighty-Two
“Later? We’re six fins short, minus one drone boat—” Merk shouted, getting in the face of the SEAL lieutenant commander from Little Creek, who stood at the boat launch of the grain terminal.
“The drone will be here tomorrow,” the Team Two lieutenant commander said.
Merk’s smartphone vibrated. He looked at a text message from Jenny telling him she had captured Korfa and to come over to the CIA safe house in Manhattan to question the warlord. Merk showed the text to the lieutenant commander, saying, “Do you want to meet this bastard?”
The officer read the message, saying, “Hell, yeah. Let’s bolt.”
Merk went inside the main floor of the Vetlab Clinic inside the grain terminal. He stood by Tasi. She was placed in a fleeced-line sling suspended over a table, allowing a biologist to draw blood from the dolphin’s median notch on the tail. The biologist showed Merk the vial of blood, saying, “Need to compare this draw to the baseline we took when the system arrived.”
“What? Every twelve hours?” Merk asked, annoyed, petting Tasi, talking softly to her. He eyed the biologist: “We need her in the water to have any hope of finding the device.”
“Yes. But this is what Director Hogue wants. Tasi’s pregnant,” the biologist said.
Merk ignored the biologist. He put his arm around the dolphin and flashed the sign of two fingers forming a dorsal fin over his heart, reminding her to be strong.
Tasi whistled, knowing she would return to searching New York Harbor.
Outside, Merk climbed into a black SUV with the lieutenant commander driving. As he drove the battered road toward the gate guarded by a Special Forces detachment, who were guised as EPA engineers in hazmat suits, he said, “You know, Toten, you left your SEAL balls back in Somalia.”
“Really? My brains, too?”
“Yeah, the fins have clouded your head. You gotta think like the pirates.”
With that last line, Merk stuck his foot over on the driver’s side floor and slammed on the brakes. The SUV skidded to a stop at the gate; the guards jumped out of the way.
“Are you crazy?”
“Gotta go back.” Merk popped open the door.
“Toten, what am I going to do with the Somali pirate?”
“Grill him. See if he has balls.”
The SEAL gave Merk a dirty look. Merk hopped out of vehicle and sprinted back to the grain terminal.
Inside, Merk pushed through the congestion, grabbed his laptop, and ran upstairs to be alone. On the third floor, he sat down at a café table with a couple of chefs sitting in a nearby lounge, taking a coffee break. He began to pull up dorsalcam images of the bombs planted on the starboard hull of the supertanker Blå Himmel. The only details he was missing from the videos were in his mind: Who planted the bombs in the harbor? And when were they planted after the ship was brought to port?
He banged the table, yelling, “Damn it!” He stood up and paced, shouting to the ceiling, “Korfa, you allowed me to get close… you allowed me to film the rigged ships… you watched the fins and me to see how we operated. Shit. Why have I been so blind?”
Merk knew a scuba diver had attached the bombs on the supertanker after it was ported, using something like a magnet or adhesive. But when did the diver plant the bombs? Was there more than one diver? Did it happen after Merk fended off the Somali pirates in the skiff he stole? Or earlier, when he met the children with the toxic lesions on their skin? And were they watching him now? If he and the dolphins cleared a ship or pier, would that give Pratique Occulte an opportunity to double back and plant a device with no worry of being caught?
What Merk needed to look for were divers who could move at a moment’s notice to plant a bomb or launch the Iranian torpedo. He pulled up a digital map showing New York Harbor. With his finger he marked six areas where the divers could enter the water and plant the bombs without much trouble. They could either die with the explosion, like an ISIS suicide bomber, or slip out of the water and disappear on foot, by car, or public transportation, like the Boston Marathon bombers. If the terrorists delivered Russian dolphins to New York, the new wrinkle represented a different problem for Merk and his dolphins to sniff out and defend against.
“Lt. Toten?” a voice shouted downstairs.
“Up here,” he yelled. Merk digitally marked the first location: a seawall between South Street Seaport and the Brooklyn Bridge. He circled the second location on the Brooklyn side of the East River with a loading dock, container cranes and warehouses not far from the grain terminal. On the third location, he selected a ship sailing into New York port — that would be passing through in the morning. He needed the next day’s manifest of all the cargo ship deliveries. The fourth target had to be the Statue of Liberty Ferry in Battery Park, as the exit strategy from an island would trap the terrorist — if he chose to live.