Chapter Eighty-Eight
An hour later, a police cruiser found the Kenyan-licensed sedan parked at a Brooklyn waterfront restaurant parking lot. Police and FBI vehicles raced to the restaurant. Jenny and the CIA digital engineer showed up several minutes later.
Agent King got out of the car and took control of the scene. The police entered the closed restaurant and searched for suspects hiding inside. They found the chef and a couple of assistants cleaning the kitchen, but no one else.
Not wasting time, Jenny called for a helicopter with FLIR to search the area. She wanted to see if any human heat-signatures would pop up in a night search along the river and waterfront streets, the way the image of the final wounded Boston Marathon bomber was found hiding in the boat in a backyard in 2013.
Jenny strode to the river. She looked past the Brooklyn Bridge. A football field out from where she stood, right in front of her, a police whaler cruised down the middle of the river heading to the harbor. What she didn’t see was the two Iranian dolphins swimming on either side of the boat’s wake. The rogue dolphins were trained to swim in stealth, take as few breaths as possible, temporarily shutting off their echolocating sonar — like SEALs going radio silent — until they reached the open water of the harbor. The anti-foraging devices helped remind the marine mammals of that. They used the boat’s wake to mask their movements from other navy dolphins, which were canvassing both sides of the river, but not the shipping lane in the middle.
Jenny took out a pair of night-vision binoculars and aimed it toward Red Hook, where the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel plunged under the East River, connecting Kings County to Manhattan. She panned the rooftops of the terminal buildings, scanned the warehouses and piers, snapping photos with a high-tech cam. She sent those pictures directly to Merk and the CIA, bypassing the Intel Fusion Center.
It wasn’t spite that drove her, but incompetence and the interagency turf war that, since the failures of 9/11, still hadn’t fully rid itself of ego and deadwood. Agent King didn’t have time to explain, educate, or coddle managers and department heads. She had to move fast, be flexible; there was no time for chain-of-command decision-making or problem solving by committee.
Jenny returned to the abandoned sedan and met with the FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge and two NYC police detectives. She showed them images on her smartphone she took of the Atlantic Yards, the waterfront terminals and warehouses, saying, “We have a lot of ground to cover beyond this car.” She knew the bomb squad was a waste of time; she felt the vehicle parked out in the open on the Brooklyn side of the river was a ruse by Bahdoon to throw police and FBI off his trail — and it worked.
For a water detonation to achieve maximum damage, Brooklyn was the place to go: Lots of areas to hide, in full view of Wall Street and government buildings on lower Manhattan, with swaths of water frontage to slip into unnoticed and plant a device or two.
Merk was right, she thought.
The police popped open the trunk of the abandoned vehicle. Swept it for radioactive material. It was clean. They then summoned their bomb-sniffing dog. The German shepherd pranced around the vehicle, sniffing the ground, then the bumper. The dog climbed into the trunk. It sniffed and barked, raising its paw to signal alert. Dog, alert. The dog made a hit.
The FBI agents called in bomb technicians to check the sedan for explosive materials, det cord, triggers, and any residue of accelerant. Jenny knew it would be the latter, a honeytrap set by Bahdoon that would gum up more valuable resources.
The terrorists were experts in planning, in tying up resources with diversions to lead first responders astray while the real plot unfolded. That was the hallmark of an al Qaeda strike, from which Bahdoon took the model, borrowed heavily, and shaped as his own.
Unlike the FBI, Jenny didn’t care about trace evidence. That was all the FBI ever cared about, drips and drabs of facts for some future court case. She was never fond of US courts. As an arena of action to settle disputes, the court system lacked her killer instinct.
Jenny went on foot, flanked by the pair of CIA agents. They ambled toward the Brooklyn Container Terminal along the waterfront. She reasoned the piers, loading cranes, and buildings were as a good place as any to search for clues on where the terrorists might launch an attack from, use to leverage, and decipher what their plan might be to strike the city.
When they reached the pier outside the gate, Jenny saw railroad tracks cut under the perimeter fence. She took out her smartphone, viewed the railroad tracks on a digital map, then texted Merk a warning.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
“I’m near your site,” read Jenny’s decrypted Dolphin Code message on Merk’s mobile phone. He thought about it for a moment and realized she was roaming around the Brooklyn waterfront by Red Hook near the Magnificent Mistake grain terminal.
He texted her back: “Not there… I’m out in the harbor.”
It would be another minute before she replied. Merk drifted off Battery Park City in the rubber boat, waiting on a response from Tasi and Inapo’s underwater survey, when Jenny texted: “Tangos smoked out in the open. What’s our blind spot?”
Searching for an answer, he thought about it and mouthed the words blind spot, looking around the harbor. That’s it, he thought. He saw swaths of dark open space, few lights in the nightfall, gaps between a ferry to Jersey City and a booze cruise circling around the tip of Manhattan. He noticed that night there weren’t as many military, law enforcement, or spy agencies out on the water. Why? What were they waiting for? he wondered.
Merk felt like he sat in the rubber boat with Morgan Azar in the Strait of Hormuz: alone, without the cover of drones, with backup teams miles away. Except now he wasn’t spying on an Iranian fishing trawler laying sea-mines in the Persian Gulf, but searching for a bomb, a device, a torpedo, a terrorist, anything that would stand out in New York Harbor. Merk sensed Pratique Occulte was going to launch the attack that night. He felt it when he saw the video of Bahdoon being flushed out of UN headquarters, making an escape. Time was no longer on the United States’ side. Whatever his schedule was, Bahdoon was going to accelerate it to ensure success.
Merk sent Jenny a message: “What are our weak points?”
“Our weak spots. Lack of intel on where and when the attack will take place,” Jenny replied. You’re right, King, he thought. We are blind. How do we change that?
“Keep hunting,” Merk texted Jenny, and put the mobile phone down. With a swipe he awoke the laptop to see where the six pods of dolphins were located at that moment.
Behind him, deep sonorous rotor blades thudded the air, fast approaching. Merk felt the power and vibrations in his chest. He knew it was a military helicopter. He turned and looked up at the blinking lights of a wide-body Navy minesweeping helicopter — finally — the one that the admiral ordered when Merk first arrived at Little Creek. But the helicopter showed up in New York City at night, not during the day for Fleet Week show. That meant if terrorists were watching the Hudson River, they would see the helicopter wasn’t part of the Memorial Day air show, but a high tech snooper that could detect all sorts of bombs and devices in the water.
Angered by the untimely arrival of the helicopter and the lack of the robotic drones in the water he was promised, Merk flipped the night-vision goggles down and read the laminated marine log of ships coming to and from New York Harbor. He saw the ships that were docked, the tankers that were in port, and those that were going to embark the next two days out to the Atlantic Ocean.