Then he looked up and saw in the darkness a silhouette of an EOD RHIB following two dolphins in front of the Statue of Liberty. They were heading north up the Hudson River. “What the hell?” Merk said, radioing the EOD divers. They failed to answer the call. A moment later, they sent a text to him, reading: “Navy sea daddy ordered us to retask to the Intrepid.”
They were going to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum at 46th Street on the West Side Highway. The Pentagon, in its cover-its-ass mode, shorted Merk a pair of navy dolphins. Instead of a dozen, he had now only ten at his disposal, and they were scattered. They had been summoned to guard the ships and submarines ported around the museum. What irritated Merk more than losing a pair of MMS was the third-party way in which he learned about the change in plans. He didn’t hear about it from the Pentagon, Centcom, an admiral, or Director Susan Hogue at the Navy Marine Mammal Program, but from EOD divers under his command in the field. Flush with anger, he smacked the outboard motor and punched a box of flares.
Jenny flashed signs dispatching three two-agent teams to search the Brooklyn Container Terminal buildings one by one. Over the roof of a warehouse, she saw the bridge and, to the right, the container boxes stacked on top of the cargo ship’s foredeck. Above them the tall container lift sat idle against the night sky. She looked at the marine log on the smartphone, read the name of the Chinese flagship, then glanced over at a chemical tanker ship moored behind it.
Seeing the second ship triggered a reaction. It was the same empty feeling she had when General Adad’s soldiers escorted the CIA agents, disguised as journalists, back to the missile site in the Syrian Desert. A knot in her stomach tightened; she texted Merk.
One pod of Navy dolphins weaved back and forth under the length of a supertanker moored off Staten Island. The lead dolphin scanned the hull with the nuclear probe, while the trailing dolphin clicked the ship’s bottom with its sonar, searching for cavities or anomalies.
In the rubber boat, Merk watched the underwater survey of the infrared dorsalcams on the laptop. He switched to the next pod conducting a swim-by of a cargo ship anchored outside the Verrazano bridge near the Belt Parkway. But he had lost the third nuclear tracking pod to the systems guarding the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier Museum. He knew the pair of marine mammals would spend the rest of the night protecting the navy ships moored upriver; that left Merk’s current deployment of MM systems spread too thin to be effective. He had to take the risk of pulling back the outer pods. He did so, putting his career and the dolphins’ lives on the line.
Chapter Ninety
Eyeing the chemical ship, Jenny moved toward the loading pier. She put a call into Langley, requesting a drone, deployed over New York City, to be retasked to scan the Red Hook area in search of suspicious actors or activity.
She received a text message from Merk that he was splitting the East River twin pods. One would continue north to conduct surveillance of the river around the United Nations and Roosevelt Island by the Queensboro Bridge. The other pod was called back to survey the ships at the Brooklyn Container Terminal.
Informed that the terminal was run by a private company and not the City of New York, Jenny called the NY State Intelligence Fusion Center and told them to review the terminal’s security cameras’ videos in an electronic search for Korfa’s men or Bahdoon.
The more she studied the marine terminal in front of her, the more she saw something amiss. Like Merk, she began to think like a terrorist. By sunrise, she knew there would be a swarm of laborers, dockworkers, and managers coming to work that would make a morning detonation tempting for any terrorist — but on the Brooklyn side of the river. Blue-collar workers as the target for Pratique Occulte made little sense, however.
She scanned down the piers, spotting a freight train parked by the stern. The second ship was confirmed to be a special chemical vessel, not a cargo or container ship. She read the marine log. The offloading of chemicals would continue at seven in the morning.
Jenny directed her team to head to the ship, as she pulled up the name of the vessel with its bill of lading of what was being transported. A quick search of the list spooked her: 20,000 deadweight tons of liquid chlorine stowed on board in protective drums. The chlorine would be transferred via special hoses to a chemical-transport railcar. That explained the railroad tracks.
Chapter Ninety-One
A text from Jenny showing a photo of the chemical ship carrying chlorine gas alarmed Merk. There was no time for him to scream at agency heads in New York or top brass in the Pentagon. He had to act fast. He sent a text to the EOD diver boat monitoring the MK-4 dolphins in the lower East River, directing them to conduct a swim-by of the loading dock by the chemical ship.
Unable to see from where a threat might arise, Merk picked up and tracked the navy helicopter flying down the Hudson River, fifty feet above the water, sweeping its sonar side to side trying to detect objects, from torpedoes to mines. Eyeing the silhouette of the minesweeper swerving as it cruised downriver, he saw a glint of light, a glow like a torch on the water out of the corner of his eye. Merk shut off the motor, kneeled down, and picked up a secure Satcom. He looked across to Jersey City and saw the Hudson River Ferry coast toward the Battery Park City landing, a quarter klick to his right. He pressed a number on the Satcom, and then hit a key on the laptop directing Tasi and Inapo to swim over and intercept the incoming boat.
“EOD Two here,” the SEAL diver said.
“Check the Staten Island Ferry starboard and port hulls,” Merk ordered into the Satcom, changing the plans for the EOD dive team from the chemical tanker to the Staten Island Ferry filled with hundreds of people. Were two ships going to be blown up simultaneously?
Merk put the Satcom down. On the laptop’s triple-split screen, he watched the dolphins. The center pane showed a digital map of the Hudson River with the dolphins’ locations tracked by GPS tags. On the right pane, he watched Tasi’s POV of the dorsalcam skimming the surface. On the left screen, he glimpsed Inapo rising, breaching, stealing a breath with the blowhole as rolls of white water washed over his melon, before diving down again heading toward the ferry.
Seeing the dolphins would reach the ferry in less than thirty seconds, he picked up the laptop to watch the survey of the boat’s hull when the minesweeping helicopter flew overhead and straight out to the harbor, where another Staten Island Ferry headed toward Manhattan. Merk opened the metal flare box. He took out a loaded flare gun, unclicked the safety latch, and then waited for the dolphins to reach the boat. He took aim at the ferry — “This is for you, Azar.”
Tasi dove under the bow wave of the ferry, while Inapo tracked her movement outside, passing the boat. The dolphin sliced through the wake and circled back to follow the boat.
Underwater, Tasi zigzagged along the port side of the ferry with the nuclear probe, but didn’t pick up a reading. She fluked down to the bottom and shot back up to the starboard side, while Inapo cut across the hull, spying on a cylindrical, cigar-shaped object. Trained to identify and tag torpedoes buried in sand, to see one out in the open attached to the hull had to be like pinging the round sphere of a sea-mine in the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t belong.
Tasi swam alongside the torpedo. She moved the nuclear probe side to side, sweeping it across the back, middle, and front of the small brass torpedo. But the probe didn’t pick up a single hit of any kind. No static feedback. No detection of radiation. Not even a minor leak.