Merk gave Korfa a fish to feed the dolphin. A trainer flashed a sign; the spinner opened its mouth and Korfa dropped the fish on its tongue. After the animal swallowed the fish, it received a syringe of kelp juice with vitamins. A lab technician turned on an oversized battery-powered toothbrush and began brushing the dolphin’s yellow, conical-shaped teeth.
“Tomorrow, these mammals are going to stop the double bombing,” Merk declared.
“Triple bombing,” Korfa corrected, checking Merk’s eyes. There was no reaction.
Despite Jenny trying to beat the answer out of the pirate, Merk had just pried the first piece of intel out of the warlord by building a bond, an affinity with him. He led Korfa to the back of the building and up the metal stairs to the third floor café. He waved three assistants on coffee break to leave, and for the chefs to prepare a hot meal for his guest. He sat him down, held up his cuffed hands, and pointed to the lieutenant commander to unlock the handcuffs. With a pissed-off look, Merk glared at the SEAL. The hard look forced Jenny to step forward. The lieutenant commander shook his head, ordering the SEALs to take seats at corner tables, while radioing more SEALs to come up to cover the exits.
Jenny unlocked the handcuffs and tossed them to the CIA digital engineer. She stepped into the kitchen and pushed a cart with snacks, juice, and water over to Korfa. The warlord pointed at cranberry juice; Merk handed it to him and opened a bottle of water for himself.
Merk opened his laptop, clicked through folders, and opened images of the bombs Peder made for the pirates to plant on the hull of the supertanker. “Here’s the first ship you hijacked.”
“Not going to ask me about the New York plan?”
“What, the triple bombing?… No; why would I do that when I know how it’s going down?” Merk said, using psychology to earn the pirate’s trust, while goading him to talk without the threat of beating him. “Korfa, we’ll come back to the tanker in a minute.” Merk clicked open the video files of the dorsalcams capturing rusty containers dumped offshore. He pulled up an audio recording of the radioactive decay screeching higher as Tasi nosed the nuclear probe closer to the container. Inapo’s dorsalcam filmed the action from afar.
“What’s that?” the warlord asked, not understanding the discovery or why the navy dolphins were searching the Gulf of Aden’s seafloor for toxic waste.
“Your freedom point,” he said. “I met a Somali child in a cove. The boy had scars and lesions on his skin worse than mine.” Merk rolled up his sleeve and showed his burn scars. “This was from a fire. The boy I met… his came from radioactive waste leaking to the surface.”
“Yeow, cup…” Korfa uttered, his voice sad. “Many Somali children like the boy you met, they used to go fishing, used to swim, now scared, scarred. They don’t play in the sea.”
Merk’s mobile phone vibrated. He opened a message and saw an alert that the next pod of dolphins was being sent out to the harbor. He slid the phone across the table to Korfa, saying, “I promised the boy that I’m going to find out who did the illegal dumping. These files are now with a government body that will take action for the illegal dumping.”
Merk opened the photos of the supertanker. “Korfa, you came to New York to fulfill a vow you made against the United States. That’s why you’re here. You had your brother killed during the hijacking, because he had gone over to the dark side of ISIS. But Bahdoon and his Iranian sponsors are no better. They will use you and then stomp your carcass when they’re finished with you.”
The warlord nodded; he knew that was true.
Chapter Eighty-Four
Inside a dark, second floor abandoned office at the half empty South Street Seaport, Bahdoon and the Syrian Electronic Army engineer Qas viewed multiple New York City street cameras that he had hacked into. The engineer watched downtown Manhattan street views and intersections, switching from block to block, down the East River to the southern tip of Manhattan and around the waterfront up Battery Park City. Bahdoon scanned the empty streets in and around the old, decaying Domino Sugar refinery plant. The only traffic he saw was the ebb and flow across the Williamsburg Bridge, just south of the factory’s yard on the water.
“How does it look?” Qas asked in Arabic.
“All clear. Any signs of the American dolphins?” Bahdoon asked. He turned on a burner mobile phone, dialed a number, and waited for a man to answer the call. When he heard a Russian tongue on the other end, he said, “Let’s meet tomorrow for lunch.”
The shorthand code to an Occulte sleeper point man was an “all go” directive, instructing the Russian to release a pair of Iranian Navy dolphins into the East River now.
Bahdoon leaned over to Qas and watched the hacker take control of the South Ferry Terminal’s rooftop camera. Qas remotely redirected its aim from the Staten Island Ferry slip and pointed the lens a hundred yards out to the dark waters of the harbor. He controlled the camera, first picking up small bow waves from a police whaler putting around the Battery Park seawall. It then tracked a party yacht farther out, heading in the opposite direction. As he swiveled the camera around, zooming the lens in and out, it picked up ripples in the surface. Qas enhanced the contrast of the infrared lens and zoomed on the wavelets. He and Bahdoon saw a dorsal fin slice through the water, a dolphin rolling through the surface taking a breath with its blowhole.
“Where there’s one navy dolphin, there are two,” Qas said.
With those words, the second navy dolphin breached a little farther out.
“Should we go after them?” Bahdoon asked.
“No, not yet. Let’s learn where they are operating first, so we can kill the trainer,” Qas said with a hyena laugh, scratching his battle scar.
Bahdoon switched city camera locations to the Brooklyn waterfront, looking for activity across the river. “Do you have access to cameras on Governors Island?” he asked in English.
“Not yet. Will soon,” Qas said, opening a different city operating system and database. He typed lines of code to override the pre-programmed and time-synced commands.
On the vacant, decaying concrete pier of the Domino Sugar plant a couple of Russians took the cab off the bed of a six-wheel, heavy-duty pickup truck. A third Russian, the point man, stood lookout. He scouted the streets at the front of the building, the deck on the Williamsburg Bridge above, and panned the bend of the East River — clear of police patrols.
The burly men pulled tarps off a pair of Iranian Navy dolphins. The men checked the dolphins’ conditions, fiddled with GPS tags strapped to their pectoral fins, and poured jugs of water over their epidermises to keep them moist.
The point man strapped anti-foraging cones with spikes over the beaks of each dolphin so they wouldn’t be distracted searching for food in the rivers of New York. He lowered the tailgate, jumped in the truck, and backed it up to the edge of the pier. He and his men climbed into the bed, stood on each side of one dolphin, grabbed hold of the 500-pound mammal’s flippers and tail fluke and heaved the creature out of the tailgate.
The first dolphin flew off the truck bed, landing in the river in a thunderous splash.
The men looked around to see if anyone had heard the splash. The point man barked orders to push the second dolphin into the water. They launched the other dolphin out of the pickup truck. It dove into the river in a spray, disappearing in a wash of foam.
The men jumped off the truck, closed the tailgate, and scanned the river. They didn’t see the dolphins again. The mammals swam away, leaving no trace of their arrival.
Bahdoon received a text from the point man that the Iranian dolphins had been delivered to the East River. “They’re in,” he said, referring to the dolphins swimming south to the harbor.