“Will they perform?” Qas asked.
“Yes. The Revolutionary Guards Corps had help from Russian trainers,” Bahdoon said.
He removed his glasses and inserted contact lenses, so he wouldn’t stand out in public. He patted Qas on the back, saying, “Allah be with you,” and stepped outside the office.
In the corridor, Bahdoon selected two of four Somali guards to go with him, leaving the other duo behind to protect Qas, who remotely monitored the police, navy, and United States Coast Guards’ activities.
Chapter Eighty-Five
Across the river at the grain terminal, Merk watched the last pod of the spinner dolphins being carried outside on stretchers and loaded into a rubber boat. He approached CIA Agent Alan Cuthbert, who just arrived, saying, “I need your help to go upstairs and hang out with Korfa.”
“What for, Toten?” the agent asked.
“Company. Don’t want him bored. Chat with him. Strike up a conversation. Ply him with beer and wine. I don’t care, as long as he talks and keeps talking. Tell him I screwed you.”
“Am I going to wear a wire?” Cuthbert asked.
“Damn, you’re good,” he said. “Yeah, we need a transcript so your team at the CIA, mine at NMMP, and ours at the Pentagon and Fusion Center can have bathroom reading material.”
Merk slid the laptop into a waterproof bag, stuffed that into a backpack, then took his gear out to a rubber boat that he would operate alone. Going solo gave him the flexibility to move quickly to any pod. With the navy dolphins trained to spot enemy divers, other dolphins, mines, and torpedoes in the water within a kilometer, no matter how dark or murky, Merk would have the ability to react fast when something broke. The only restraint he had: just half of the dozen dolphins were fitted with nuclear probes.
The SEAL lieutenant commander followed Merk outside and handed him the port manifest of the ships coming and going in New York Harbor that Thursday. Merk took the one page, double-sided manifest laminated in plastic, and listened to the lieutenant commander reassure him: “Toten, if you need backup, ping me. I’ll be stationed on Governors Island with four platoons of SEALs, EOD divers, and Team Six snipers.”
“Ready for war in an urban setting, huh? I’m sure New Yorkers will love that.”
Chapter Eighty-Six
Jenny and the digital engineer drove around lower Manhattan on the East River looking for a sedan with diplomatic plates registered to Kenya. To her, it was a sick inside joke with Pratique Occulte. She understood the historical reference given by the propagandist Bahdoon. Osama bin Laden’s attack on the West began with the US embassy bombings in Kenya on August 7, 1998, eight years to the day after the American military forces arrived in Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield in preparation for the First Gulf War in 1990.
Al Qaeda always chose significant dates to attack Western targets. It was one of the tools terrorists used to instill fear in exploiting psychological warfare. That’s why she scoffed at the Obama Administration denying and then running interference on the September 11, 2012, attack of the US diplomatic mission — a.k.a. CIA Station — in Benghazi, Libya, when the building was under fierce gunfire and then overrun by 150 al Qaeda terrorists: a terrorist attack; not a video.
From that day forward, she would do whatever it would take, use whatever means and force necessary, to eliminate the world’s bad actors, dictators, and terrorists, laws be damned. That was the ruthless side she wanted to unleash in Merk, which he had once possessed as a SEAL cold warrior.
In less than a month, Agent King had used a rock to bludgeon an Iranian guard at Lake Urmia missile facility to make her escape from Iran; a catch basin to kidnap and stow a North Korean missile engineer in the desert of Syria to get inside General Adad’s inner circle; a dolphin tranquilizer to snatch a Somali pirate warlord from inside the United Nations; and a red-haired wig to pump the Norwegian Special Forces sniper of intel at Ramstein Air Force Base.
Jenny didn’t care. Results, not laws or tactics, were what drove her to win at every phase in the shadow war. She wasn’t going to let an ideologue politician, a deluded CIA deputy director, a green manager, or a lawyer get in the way of defending New York City from an attack that would dwarf 9/11 in magnitude and horror, the number of fatalities and wounded, not to mention the collateral damage and psychological scars it would leave for decades.
Jenny was keenly aware of anniversary dates — Fleet Week and Memorial Day — and their iconic meanings. Both the Kenyan mall attack and Benghazi station would pale in comparison if Pratique Occulte succeeded in setting off a dirty nuke somewhere in New York Harbor, and then blaming another organization in doing the evil deed, like the terror twins of ISIS and al Qaeda.
So she replayed videoclips sent to her in a five-hour delay from the Intel Fusion Center. It showed the Kenyan sedan picking up Bahdoon when he bolted the United Nations and ran across the North Lawn. UN security cameras, along with a traffic cam at 46th Street and First Avenue, filmed the Yemeni psychiatrist scurrying across UN Plaza. Additional cameras at 48th Street captured Bahdoon climbing over and scaling down a wall before leaping to the waiting car.
That was five hours ago, she thought, pissed at the delay. She knew Twitter’s tweets were instantaneous. So why did it take the fusion of the CIA-DHS-NSA-FBI-NYPD five hours to send her the video? Did a team of analysts have to review and get agency clearance before releasing it? Whatever happened to real-time data in the Digital Age? She was disgusted.
As she replayed Bahdoon dashing across the UN lawn over and again, she wondered: Did the US’s seventeen intelligence agencies and military armed forces take the 140-pound geek with glasses in Bahdoon as a serious threat? No. Did they not fear a few Somali pirates drifting around the city with a dirty nuke? No again. Or did they not care to notice them because of their skin color and the poor clothing they wore?
In the fenemy, there was no Osama bin Laden bogeyman or ISIS caliph to put on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
At the grain terminal, two teams of navy SEAL snipers ran up the exterior stairwell wearing night-vision goggles, carrying weapons and gear. One team fanned out across the south end of the roof. They kicked open a door to the dirty, dilapidated, three-story control bridge office that overlooked New York Harbor to the south toward the Verrazano bridge. On the north end of the terminal roof, the second team of SEALs took position, with four snipers hiding inside a narrow lookout tower with a commanding view of the southern tip of Manhattan.
In position, SEAL snipers began to search the water and edge along the harbor as they tried to spot any unusual activity or person out of place.
Fed up with the inertia, Jenny sent a text message to the Intelligence Fusion Center to dispatch CIA and FBI agents on patrols to canvas Battery Park City, the West Village, Tribeca south of the Holland Tunnel, the Chelsea Piers and West Side Drive, neighborhoods along the East River, and down the Brooklyn waterfront looking for the Kenyan-plate car and Bahdoon.
The police sent her a text message that the E-ZPass electronic toll system of the sedan crossing the bridges and tunnels had not been used in the past forty-one hours. Jenny concluded the vehicle was either still in Manhattan or had driven over to Brooklyn on one of the free East River spans in the Queensboro, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Brooklyn bridges.
Based on that likelihood, Jenny concentrated her forces in lower Manhattan. She secured additional help from NYPD patrols to canvass the Brooklyn piers and waterfront.