On the rubber boat, Merk sat back in disbelief. Why isn’t the torpedo hot with waste? he wondered. Did Jenny swallow disinformation during her visit of Iran’s nuclear plant?
He sent a message to Tasi to double-check the torpedo. Nothing. A third time. Again, no reading. Was it a decoy? Did Tasi find a decoy? Or did the nuclear probe malfunction? What about the torpedo? Was it packed with a different kind of explosive?
Not liking the latter possibility, Merk continued to aim the flare gun at a point ahead of where the ferry would be in a few seconds and then fired.
The hot projectile shot out in a comet streak of bright white light. It sizzled toward the cabin of the ferry and burst across the windshield, deflecting into the water in a spat of smoke. Seeing the warning shot, the captain slowed the ferry down to a crawl before he hit the engines hard and shut them off. The boat plowed into a swell, arresting its momentum; it rocked back and forth and lurched in undulating waves slowing the craft down to drift and bob.
Merk read a number on a chart and called the ferry captain, telling him to stay put as he called for backup to arrive. He picked up the Satcom and called the Intelligence Fusion Center to confirm they were viewing the same torpedo object fastened to the starboard hull of the ferry. He requested emergency boats to remove the passengers and a SEAL ordnance disposal team to disarm and remove the torpedo.
He then called the EOD Two diver, saying, “You see the torpedo my fins probed with the dorsalcam? That’s what you’re looking for on the bottom of the ferries. Like remoras on sharks.”
In the South Street Seaport dark office, Qas and a team of Iranian Revolutionary Guard hackers had broken into the NMMP on-premise cloud and breached its firewall.
The penetration occurred through a router, an email loaded with a Trojan horse link that was opened by one of the dolphin handlers at the Point Loma headquarters from Merk’s email address. The hack enabled Qas to spy on the same dorsalcam images and GPS tracking movements of the navy dolphins in and around the rivers and harbor of New York City.
Qas glanced at a second laptop and watched the Iranian Navy dolphins seek out the EOD divers and MK-4 team heading toward the Staten Island Ferry. The Syrian engineer retasked the Whitehall Ferry Station roofcam and swiveled it back toward the incoming ferry, which was a few hundred yards out and closing. He wanted to watch the intercept by the navy dolphins, as Bahdoon had suggested, and then get the video uploaded to social media sites and channels to continue the viral, negative propaganda surge against US imperialism.
The Syrian Electronic Army engineer sent a coded message to Bahdoon and watched the GPS dots close on one another. Qas stood up, stepped over to the door, and banged on it twice.
One of the Somali guards tapped the door back. He and the other guard picked up their barrel-bags and headed up the fire stairs to the roof. They were about to become a new layer in the plan to trap and kill the US Navy dolphin trainer Merk Toten.
Inside the office, Qas logged off, closed the laptop, stuffed it into a backpack. He killed the lights and headed out the door, bolting down the long dim corridor in the opposite direction of the Somali guards, heading up the stairwell to the roof of the three-story structure.
Like operating from the tent in the Empty Quarter Desert, when Qas hacked into the navigation system of the supertanker and guided it to the Somali pirates’ ambush, he wanted to stay ahead of US intelligence agencies and the military that were hunting for him.
Outside, the Somalis knelt on the roof. They assembled sniper rifles, attached scopes, and aimed, zoomed, and adjusted the sighting as they panned the lower part of the East River, from the Brooklyn Container Terminal across to Governors Island.
Through the scopes, they scanned the black water, waiting for the action to come to them.
Chapter Ninety-Two
MK-4 dolphins swam on both sides of the RHIB, while the EOD divers angled toward the Staten Island Ferry that was slowing down to make a broad turn to dock in the slip.
The EOD diver flashed a hand-sign for the dolphins to swim ahead and quick-search the ferry, when out of nowhere one of the Iranian dolphins rammed its anti-foraging cone, armed with a steel spike, into the hindquarter of the US Navy dolphin. The jarring blow wounded the creature. The EOD divers watched in horror as the Iranian dolphin rammed the mammal again, snapping the spike off and rolling the injured dolphin underwater.
One diver lifted a spear gun; the other pulled out a pistol as they searched the inky dark water for a sign of the rogue animal.
The other MK-4 Navy dolphin darted under the RHIB, hunting for the attacker, when the Iranian dolphin struck the injured dolphin again as it floated to the surface to breathe. The EOD diver called Merk, shouting, “Mayday, mayday, we got a dolphin war.”
The EOD diver fired the spear gun at the rogue dolphin, grazing its dorsal fin with the spear. Wounded, it tried to swim away when the second Navy dolphin headbutted the Iranian dolphin in the belly, flipping it over. Stunned and injured, the rogue dolphin dove below. The divers pulled the wounded navy dolphin on board and attended to the metal shaft impaled in its side. The dolphin squirmed in shock, in need of immediate medical care.
Responding to the mayday call of the EOD divers, Merk led Tasi and Inapo racing down the seawall of Battery Park City, rounding Whitehall Station.
They headed toward the RHIB bobbing in the wake of the Staten Island Ferry, which slowed its engine as it bounded off timber pilings of the ferry slip.
At that moment, Merk realized the ferry hadn’t been checked for a planted remora-type device. He pounded the gunwale in Morse code taps and dashes, signaling Tasi to swim over to the ferry as he and Inapo continued on to the EOD divers.
Merk swept the rubber boat behind the RHIB so as not to rock it with the wake of his rubber boat. He pulled up alongside. Inapo joined the other navy dolphin and dove down to the harbor floor to finish off the injured rogue dolphin.
“What do you have?” Merk shouted over the idling motor.
“Our system was attacked by a rogue fin,” the EOD diver shouted back, showing Merk the steel spike sticking out of the dolphin’s side.
“Just one?” Merk asked, puzzled. “Makes no sense. They operate in pairs.”
The EOD diver shrugged, holding up one finger.
“No way,” Merk said, scanning around the harbor. First to the Staten Island Ferry that just docked, but was not letting passengers off, then over to the chemical ship, Jenny started to search at the Brooklyn Container Terminal, and back across to Governors Island, where a mini fleet of SEALs in four RHIBs raced out, heading around Manhattan to the Hudson River ferry that was drifting with the torpedo still attached to its starboard hull.
Merk took out the mobile phone and texted Jenny to keep her head on a swivel for a second Iranian dolphin. He waved the EOD divers to take the injured dolphin back to the grain terminal to be treated by the NMMP veterinarian staff for the injury it sustained.
Inapo breached behind Merk, squealing.
Merk turned to Inapo tilting his side, nodding, whistling that the first rogue dolphin was at the bottom of the harbor. Merk replayed Inapo’s dorsalcam video and saw that he and the other MM system took turns beating and ramming the wounded mammal into submission, driving its lifeless body into the muddy trough, where it succumbed to its injuries and drowned.