“Where’s your dive mask?” the lead diver asked, handing him a towel.
“Smacked off by a dead dolphin,” Merk said, pressing the towel to his forehead. “Call in backup teams; we got two devices at the starboard fore.”
Merk reached for the radio on his scuba vest and called Jenny, informing her that the ship was rigged to blow. Then he told the EOD divers to go over and disarm the twin bombs, neither device being radioactive. But a chlorine-laden ship was all the blast material the terrorists needed to unleash holy hell and maximum destruction.
Chapter Ninety-Five
Merk held on to Tasi and Inapo as the EOD divers raced over to the chemical tanker. He bled from a cut to the cheek and a gash to the forehead. He floated by the EOD RHIB until the backup SEAL teams arrived and hauled him out of the water.
Merk picked up a Satcom, pressed a global emergency number that connected him with SEAL Team Two command in Little Creek, the admirals at the Pentagon, Jenny, and the NYPD, FBI, DHS, NMMP, and CIA at the Intelligence Fusion Center, and shouted: “The chem tanker is hot. Syria hot. And ready to blow.” He took a breath. “It’s fully loaded with chlorine. Clear the area. Clear Brooklyn waterfront. Clear lower Manhattan… Now, now, now.”
Merk knew if there was acetylene in the vicinity the torch gas wouldn’t need any flame to ignite. What he didn’t know was Jenny had started the evacuation process at the terminal.
On the other side of the vessel, Jenny heard the frantic call. She cleared the foreman and workers away from the chlorine transfer operation, waved her agents off the ship, and then ran toward the digital engineer driving over to pick her up.
The car fishtailed around and skidded to a stop. The front door flung open. Jenny hopped in, closed it, and spoke to Merk, saying, “I’m out of there. On Bahdoon’s tail now.”
“Jenny, is there any acetylene gas on the dock?” Merk asked on a different channel.
“Not that I saw. Maybe. Why?”
He didn’t answer. The digital engineer sped toward the gate. Jenny rolled down the window, aiming the assault rifle at the guard to open it. He complied, opening the gate as the car drove out of the terminal, nearly clipping the guard. “What’s hot?” the digital engineer asked.
“A bomb to detonate a bigger bomb,” she said, feeling a rush of adrenaline kick in. “Merk’s dolphins found two devices planted on the chem tanker. If the chlorine goes off a lot of people are going to die gruesome deaths.”
“What the f — you mean?…” he began to say in disbelief.
“A mega bomb,” she said, pointing down the street. “Not radioactive, but a chain reaction of chlorine liquid to gas.… Head to Third Avenue under the BQE. Bahdoon is on foot.”
The digital engineer weaved in and out of cars, swerved through a stop sign, drove down an empty sidewalk, chasing a stray dog into traffic, and dodged hitting a slew of vehicles.
He drove around the ramps and walls of the double-stacked BQE intersection that tied to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, located a half-mile from Third Avenue.
Back at the terminal, near the chemical tanker, stood a toolshed.
Inside, a dozen acetylene gas tanks were turned on, open full, with gas filling the shed, leaking out the seams and cracks, enveloping the area.
Chapter Ninety-Six
The EOD divers listened to Merk as they viewed the dorsalcam images the dolphins had captured of both devices. They shook their heads as Merk crawled into another dive team RHIB that would ferry him and the dolphins out of harm’s way over to Governors Island.
As the RHIB drove Merk away from the disposal operation, the backup team of EOD divers steered their craft around the bow of the chemical tanker. From the photos and videos they analyzed, there didn’t appear to be any timing device that would trigger the bomb. So they tied off the boat to the pier, away from the first planted bomb, in order not to disturb it.
One EOD diver put on an air tank, swim fins, and dive mask. He slipped into the river and reached back into the boat, lifting a waterproof sack filled with tools, and slung it over his shoulder.
He dove underwater, swimming first under the keel to make sure that bottom hull and port side were clear of remora bombs. Once confirmed they were safe, he made his way under the bow to the starboard side, and flippered along the hull to the bomb.
The diver opened the sack, twisted a chemlight on, inserted it in a slot on his wet suit vest, and pulled out a magnifying lens to study granular detail of the device, from how it was attached to the hull — metal clamps with some type of waterproof adhesive — to what the bomb was packed with, Semtex-H with titanium microfiber accelerator, he figured. He noted the device didn’t have a det cord, timer, or an obvious way to trigger the bomb remotely.
Why? the diver wondered. He took out a wand and ran it over the bomb, confirming it was non-radioactive, but still appeared lethal.
There were two of them positioned near the bow, adjacent to the cargo hold where the last eight chlorine gas tanks remained, fully laden.
Chapter Ninety-Seven
Brooklyn police officers shutdown Third Avenue, Brooklyn, under the BQE Expressway.
At 62nd Street, the NYPD’s Hercules team and SWAT unit cordoned off the far end of the broad roadway, which ran three lanes wide in each direction with a broad parking area that divided the center median. A cell of four armed Navy SEALs snipers stood at 50th Street. A group of FBI agents took tactical positions behind the steel columns on the center island, while on both sidewalks more agents and police officers aimed guns and rifles from behind vehicles, light poles, parking lots, and storefronts.
At the first light of dawn, CIA agent and gun enthusiast Jenny King couldn’t believe all of the firepower and show of force for one cornered terrorist, Bahdoon, who weighed a little more than she did. The Yemeni psychiatrist stood in the middle of the roadway, donning a gas mask, just as he did when he traded hostages for cash at the Somali-Djibouti border with Dante Dawson and Christian Fuller of the Azure Shell hostage negotiation team backed by US Marines.
Jenny saw the photos. This time, Bahdoon stood alone with no hostages. But still he felt he was in charge, in a position of strength and power. He had leverage. In his right hand he held a remote stem, a transmitter to detonate a bomb. And the bomb appeared to be in the black metal box resting on the pavement. He put his foot on the box, mimicking a pirate, then took it off and gently kicked the device. What kind of explosive was stuffed in the box was another question that no one seemed to know.
Restrained by a burly sergeant, a bomb-sniffing canine barked and yelped, pointing at the box. Jenny watched the German shepherd and figured the bomb was real by the dog’s reaction. Was it packed with explosives, such as dynamite? Or did it contain a chemical or nerve agent? Or was it a hybrid of both gas and a C-4 type explosive spiked with shrapnel?
Bahdoon looked around, surrounded by agents, police, and a wall of firepower. The reason no one had fired at him yet was the remote he gripped in his hand. If it was a pressure detonator, then if someone shot or killed him, he would release the grip on the pressed-down button, drop the remote, setting off the black box bomb.
For the first time she could remember, Jenny witnessed a terrorist negotiate over an unexploded ordnance. That gave Bahdoon leverage in keeping the police and agents at bay, and from shooting him. And that didn’t sit well with Jenny at all.
Understanding the implications, Jenny stepped out of the car, carrying an assault rifle. She showed her CIA credentials to police officers, told them and an FBI special agent-in-charge that she would talk to the terrorist Bahdoon. “You see that bastard. He’s the propaganda czar of the new terrorist group Black Mass,” she said to the FBI SAC. “He’s the evil man who lied about the school in Yemen being destroyed by a CIA drone last month. He staged the scene with bodies of children flown in from Syria. And I took down his terrorist operation in Syria.”