The fifth site he envisioned was the Chelsea Piers, while the sixth he figured to be the piers flanking the Intrepid Museum at 42nd Street by the Circle Line cruise terminal.
Thinking like a pirate, Merk numbered the six targets in priority. The top three were the cargo vessel sailing into the harbor, the Intrepid Museum, and the Brooklyn pier in that order. He knew the other three locations, and still more minor ones, needed watching. But since the last six dolphins weren’t going to arrive until dawn, he had to plan ahead to get the most out of them.
A pair of FBI special agents entered the room — one a short female dressed in a business suit was the special-agent-in-charge (SAC), the other a young, bearded man wearing coveralls to blend in with the local citizens in Williamsburg and downtown Brooklyn. They sat on either side of Merk, checking out his laptop and the color-coded keyboard. He closed it.
The female SAC opened her laptop and showed Merk a map of the five boroughs and North Jersey, from Hoboken and Jersey City to Fort Lee and the George Washington Bridge. Dozens of blue and red stars populated the map in a shotgun spray, touching all zip codes.
“The red stars are where FBI and state police helicopters managed to get positive, false positive hits on radiation sources from medical devices, X-rays, MRI scanners in dental and doctor offices, and the like,” she said. “The blue stars are where the probes picked up nuclear density gauges.”
“Nuke what?”
“Soil compaction equipment that uses trace amounts of radiation to power the ground-penetrating probes,” the male special agent explained.
“So these blue tags are… construction sites, engineering and inspection offices, where the gauges are stored. Correct?”
“Yes, Lt. Toten. They’re also from pickup trucks, personal vehicles, and the homes of where the inspectors live, before they drive to a site the next day,” the SAC said.
“What about on the water? In the harbor, bays, or rivers?” Merk asked, noticing that, with the exception of one marina in New Jersey behind the Statue of Liberty, there were no stars in the harbor or anywhere around the island of Manhattan.
“Just the one in Jersey. The source of the hit hasn’t been determined yet,” the SAC said.
Merk stood up and headed downstairs to the ground floor.
“Okay, we’ll put more agents on board the commuter ferries in the morning,” the SAC called out, heading down the rusted stairs behind him.
“Now you’re talking. As long as your agents dress like New Yorkers and not FBI agents, they’ll be fine,” Merk said, stepping into the ground floor Vetlab.
He handed his laptop to a lab technician, answered the phone, and listened to Jenny berate him for not coming to the safe house to grill Korfa. He let her carry on and vent her frustration for succeeding and failing at the same time in capturing the warlord, but getting zero intel out of him in the way of operational plans.
After another minute of Jenny spewing guilt and profanities, Merk cut in, saying in a stern voice, “King? Listen. The bombs are not in the water yet. They’ll be there tomorrow when tango divers deliver them to the drop points. Bring Korfa to me.”
Chapter Eighty-Three
Merk assisted the MMS mobile veterinary crew in receiving the last of the biologic systems.
They cleared out the ground floor clinic of the first batch of dolphins, Tasi and Inapo, Ekela and Yon, and a pair of MK-8 dolphins. They sent those pods on night patrols, with each pod overseen by two-man EOD divers in RHIB boats. Two pods swam up each side of the East River to check around piers and bridge abutments; Tasi and Inapo cruised along the seawall of Battery Park City, where the Hurricane Sandy storm surge had breached lower Manhattan, flooding the Wall Street area for a week and closing the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel for a month.
At night, the navy RHIBs resembled police patrol boats. The main danger for EOD divers and the dolphins was the hazard of being struck by a boat or ferry, since poor visibility engulfed the harbor. Merk reminded the divers of that, to keep their heads on a swivel, and keep their eyes and ears open. They needed to record the times and routes of the ferries, and match them to a GPS waterway database maintained by the NY State Intelligence Fusion Center.
With the new arrivals — two pairs of MK-6 Atlantic bottlenose dolphins and one pair of MK-8 spinner dolphins, the first of their kind in NMMP’s long history — Merk got the staff of trainers, feeders, nutritionists, biologists, veterinarians, assistants, and the navy SEALs who provided security at the grain terminal on the same page. He told them his gut: “The schedule for the bombing will be pushed up from Memorial Day Weekend to likely Thursday morning, which is tomorrow. I feel our operation is being watched in the harbor.”
Merk glanced to the door and saw Jenny standing at the threshold, watching him take charge of the onsite NMMP team. He ambled over and greeted her.
“Korfa is outside,” Jenny said, looking on as the professionals treated, fed, and prepped the six new-arrival systems to be turned loose within the hour.
Merk nodded and stepped out of the grain terminal.
The Little Creek lieutenant commander and CIA digital engineer flanked an SUV; a pair of armed CIA agents stood behind the vehicle. They opened the hatch and pulled out the blindfolded pirate. Merk strode over to Korfa. To the shock of everyone, he removed the blindfold.
“Hey, Toten, what’re you doing?” the lieutenant commander asked, drawing a pistol.
“Grilling the Somali,” Merk said, wiping dirt, sleep, and grime out of Korfa’s eyes. “He needs to see who he’s going to talk to.” He checked the welt on the warlord’s face and glared at Jenny. She said nothing. Merk led Korfa, his hands cuffed in front of him, to the grain terminal and ribbed Jenny: “Bully.” She averted her eyes from his gaze.
“Toten, you got OpSec Level Five inside,” the lieutenant commander declared.
Jenny and the lieutenant commander trailed Merk, who escorted the warlord inside the mobile dolphin laboratory. He led Korfa out of the dark city night and into the “Magnificent Mistake” abandoned more than half a century ago. Merk took the pirate out of the slums of Hargeisa, out of the poverty and deserts of Somaliland, out of the tense meetings with Yemeni al Qaeda, AQAP, al-Shabaab, and Syrian generals, out of negotiations for hostages, out of ferrying migrants in a dhow, out of the temptation to pirate and hijack foreign ships, out of forming Pratique Occulte with Bahdoon and General Adad, and ushered him into the modern world, into Merk’s domain of big data, cloud analytics, technology, and US Navy dolphins.
When Korfa stepped across the threshold into the NMMP Mobile Vetlab, where teams of scientists, assistants, and personnel worked tirelessly to get the dolphins checked, fed, and out to the harbor to conduct subsea surveys, his eyes opened wide. The pirate was amazed at how the US military had transformed the run-down concrete building into a high-tech marine mammal lab.
Merk led Korfa around the lab with a pair of armed navy SEALs shadowing them. He took the warlord over to see the MK-8 minesweeping dolphins, saying, “This is the US Navy’s latest technology, its latest weapon in its arsenal, spinner dolphins.… A trained dolphin like this one is what I used in Berbera and Zeila to recon the hijack ships.”