When they reached the boat, the EOD divers pulled Merk on board. He tossed the goggles off, put on a weight-belt, slapped swim fins on his feet, and pulled a dive mask with a maskcam over his head; the divers fitted a tank of trimix gas onto his buoyancy control vest and rolled him overboard.
“Stay alert. There’s another rogue dolphin out here. They always swim in pairs,” Merk warned, and inserted the regulator in his mouth. He cupped his hand over Tasi’s snout and let the pregnant dolphin propel him back to the chemical tanker.
In navy SEAL fashion, the high-tech rebreather left no trail of air bubbles to track Merk’s movement underwater. The EOD divers had access to Merk’s maskcam video only, but could message him on the dive-watch he was wearing.
On the ship, Jenny got word of a “hot pursuit” in Brooklyn off Hamilton Avenue under the BQE Expressway near the Sanitation Department facility. She looked over the side for Merk, but didn’t see any sign of him. He was gone. She motioned the EOD divers that she had to leave. They waved back signaling they would get word to him.
As Jenny deboarded the ship, the EOD divers uploaded the tanker’s spec sheet and confirmed it was unloading liquid chlorine. They saw the two ships docked at the Brooklyn Container Terminal had been searched hours earlier separately by FDNY and NYPD, and then four hours before by tandem MK-8 spinner dolphins. Each search cleared the vessel as clean. But after hearing Merk’s story about the dolphins surveying the hijacked supertanker run aground in Somalia and hearing about the terrorist safe house turned into a drone-struck school in Yemen from Alan Cuthbert, she began to think like Bahdoon and that he would plant and arm the bombs at the last possible hour. Merk was right. The terrorists were already in the city with the bombs, just that they were mobile and not planted yet, like the Brussels airport bombing in 2016.
Topside, CIA agents searched the ship for crewmen and dockworkers, who might be still on board the vessel, to evacuate them. Jenny ran over to the railcars that were being filled with liquid chlorine in the complex chlorine transfer operation. She couldn’t believe what she saw. They weren’t going to continue to unload the contents of the ship the next morning; they were doing it right then and there that night. And no one from the Intel Fusion Center, federal or local, had put a stop to the operation.
She clicked photos of the bulk chlorine liquid tanks, noting they had one liquid transfer line that connected the ship’s tanks to a transfer hose with a remote shutdown valve. With her smartphone, she videotaped the canister of dry air that was being pumped into the tank at high pressure to suppress any vapor flash; the hoses had emergency isolation valves on both ends. She recorded the chlorine vapor flowing into a giant scrubber, filled with a caustic solution, tagged with the symbol for danger on the outside of the scrubber vat, all of which circulated through an educator. A heat exchanger that pumped cold water removed the heat from the air, while the liquid turned into a vapor filled into the railcar.
The two workers involved with the transfer operation wore fire-retardant suits with neck-dams, masks, and aerators. It was at that moment that Jenny grasped the magnitude of the danger of what a bomb could do to the ship.
Jenny grabbed the foreman and ordered him to shut down the operation, showing her CIA badge and assault rifle. The foreman called the terminal manager. After a conference call with the NYPD, the foreman shutdown the chlorine transfer operation. Not trusting anyone, Jenny stood by to make sure they shut the process down in a hurry, but safely, and then cleared the area. She asked the foreman how many railcars had been filled with the transfer of liquid to chlorine gas, to which he held up four fingers. She ordered him to move the railcars out of the terminal.
Jenny King turned back to the ship, signaled an agent on the deck. She called him on the smartphone and asked how many chlorine tanks were still to be emptied in the bowels of the ship. After an on-deck conference, he flashed eight fingers.
Upset, Jenny accessed the Fort Meade CIA agents operating the drone and opened a window on her smartphone, where she viewed a live aerial shot of what looked like the Pratique Occulte propaganda merchant Bahdoon on the run. He was on foot, dressed in black, wearing Body Glove shoes, dripping a trail of water.
She figured he had to have been in the river in the past thirty minutes.
Jenny called the digital engineer to come over and pick her up. They had to head to the Third Avenue roadway under the BQE to intercept the terrorist mastermind.
Chapter Ninety-Four
Underwater, Merk rode Tasi as she swept the nuclear probe along the tanker’s starboard hull by the pier. In the darkness, he listened for the probe to sound an alert, but like the decoy torpedo, the device didn’t detect any sign of a dirty nuke or hot load.
At the bow, Inapo located a pair of devices attached to the fore of the chemical tanker and swam back, tapping his beak on Merk’s shoulder twice, alerting him there was a bomb attached to the ship. Merk pushed Tasi to swim ahead, then latched on to Inapo when, suddenly, the dolphin reacted to an unseen threat. Unnerved, Inapo twisted and dumped Merk, and darted down the hull of the ship.
At the bow, the second rogue dolphin struck Tasi, hammering her against the steel hull. The wild creature headbutted a dazed Tasi again, knocking the nuclear probe off her beak. The animal tail-whipped Tasi and speared her into a pier piling.
Just as the rogue dolphin was about to finish Tasi off, Inapo torpedoed the creature broadside, smashing it back, driving it off the pregnant dolphin. But instead of fighting or holding its ground, the kamikaze dolphin corkscrewed around Inapo and slipped away, swimming toward the bombs attached to the hull to try to detonate them by ramming.
Peering through the dive mask, Merk stared down the rogue dolphin and slammed his forearm on the dolphin’s melon as its beak smashed into his dive mask, cracking the lens open like an eggshell. Water rushed into his face. It overwhelmed his senses, blurred his vision, constricted his ability to breathe.
As water filled the cavity, Merk ripped the dive mask off and gulped one last breath from the regulator before he discarded it. He crossed his lower legs, unclipped the weight-belt, letting it sink, and braced for the next blow. The rogue dolphin speared him, snapping his head against the hull. Battered, he expelled his last breath, crossed his arms, and blocked the dolphin trying to hit him in the face again. The force of the blow against his arms slammed the back of his head into the hull, rocking him to near blackout.
Programmed to finish him off, the rogue dolphin fought with Merk instead of trying to detonate the bomb. That delay, that hesitation allowed Inapo to soar back and slam the dolphin into the hull, knocking it out cold. Tasi flew over, ramming the concussed dolphin down into the murky depth, where it spun around upside-down, mouth ajar, tongue sticking out, sinking in a lifeless drift below.
Inapo nosed Merk up to the surface. Fighting the easing pressure that drove him to pass out from the rapid ascent, Merk’s face broke the surface. He cleared his mouth, blew a couple of breaths, gasping for air, hyperventilating until his lungs emptied and filled with air again.
Tasi rose up and joined Merk. She cleared her blowhole in a spray, inhaling a breath. She rubbed her beak against his face. Feeling her wet, coarse skin, he grinned and latched on to her as she swam him around the tanker and over to the EOD divers.
Merk let go of Tasi and grabbed on to the RHIB. He was bleeding from his face and forehead; a welt crowned the back of his head, which he rubbed.