“He’s the one on the Yemen school drone strike?” the SAC asked, lifting a shotgun.
“No school. Terrorist safe house. His name is Bahdoon. He’s a psycho psychiatrist. A murderer. A terrorist. An enemy of the world. Like ISIS, he’s the ultimate propaganda machine,” she said, staring at Bahdoon wearing the gas mask.
“A bad MF,” he said.
“Not for long. The drone strike lie ends today, here and now.”
Jenny stepped past a pack of armed officers, moving furtively out into the open, closing on the Pratique Occulte leader, less than a block away. She felt her heart race. Step by step, marching forward. She aimed the assault rifle at Bahdoon’s gas mask, shouting, “We found your bombs on the hull of the chemical tanker. They are being disarmed.”
With a smartphone in his hand, the terrorist spoke through a mobile app to Jenny, and said in a machined voice, “Are you sure you have found them all?” He glanced behind him, eyeing the armed agents training weapons on him.
“We stopped the torpedo, too,” she said, stepping closer.
“That’s close enough,” he said via the smartphone, motioning her to stop.
“Sorry, I love close-quarter combat. Up close and personal,” she said, ignoring his gesture to stop. “I should have taken your ass down inside the UN when I grabbed Korfa.”
“That was you?” he said, a bit surprised by the revelation.
She sighted the scope at his scalp above the gas mask. “You see, when I was in Syria and Iran, I stood a lot closer to the enemy than where you are right now. I killed one Iranian Quds soldier by smashing a rock against his head. You should have seen all the brain tissue ooze out.”
“That’s enough,” he shouted into the mobile app. “Put down your weapon or I will blow us up.” He put his foot on the box again.
“I trained rebels in Syria to overthrow that government that failed to fight the ISIS pussies,” she said. “I trained the Free Syria Army on how to shoot, how to sabotage, how to avoid sarin gas attacks and Assad’s chlorine barrel bombs. Now I’m going to take down Pratique Occulte.”
“Try and I will kill all of us,” he said, unzipping his wet suit top, revealing that he also wore an explosive vest underneath.
“Two bombs. What’s with the vest, al Qaeda amateur hour?”
“I swear, I’ll blow us up,” he warned, waving the remote detonator in his hand.
Jenny sighted Bahdoon’s neck, as if she saw through the gas mask breathing hose and canisters. She scoped the crosshairs on his neck right above the plastic explosives vest. And in a blink of an eye, she fired a shot that tore through his collarbone, shattering it in half. The blast toppled Bahdoon to the ground, wounding him.
The law enforcement officials behind Bahdoon jumped back, others retreated many steps, yet still others dove and hit the ground. Bahdoon was still alive. He was still holding the remote detonator, but writhing on the pavement. Neither bomb had gone off.
With a trembling hand, Bahdoon held up the remote. Jenny fired the next salvo, blowing the device and several digits off his hand, chasing the agents to the rear, scrambling farther away as the remote bound and bounced across the asphalt, coming apart at cowering SWAT team members, who flinched and ducked for cover in anticipation of an explosion that didn’t go off.
Disarmed, badly wounded, and now impotent by failing to detonate the black box, Bahdoon rolled over, pulling the gas mask off his face, screaming in agony. With his good hand, he reached down to the bottom of the vest, feeling for a ripcord, which Jenny couldn’t allow him to pull. So she took aim and fired a third volley into the back of the terrorist, severing his spine. His hand fell limp to the pavement; his legs slackened.
Jenny held up a fist, holding the government agents and police officers back as she strode to the psychiatrist. She stepped on Bahdoon’s ankle, digging her heel into his foot, but there was no reaction. She knew he was paralyzed, fading fast. Bahdoon’s breaths were labored… soon hissing like a trapped snake… a gasp of expiring air, to which she remarked, “Karma.”
A pool of blood spread around him.
While he was still alive, Jenny placed the hot barrel of the assault rifle against his face. “I’m going to go to your hometown in Yemen and hunt the rest of your dogs and pigs down. Bleed them. Kill them one by one.” She added with salt, “You’re not forgiven, you’re destroyed.”
Chapter Ninety-Eight
In the water off Governors Island, Merk sat in the RHIB as the lead EOD diver peeled off the top of Merk’s shredded wet suit. He cut away and pulled off strips of rubber, exposing the grains and shrapnel of plastic, metal, and rubber that had been sandblasted against his skin, on his side, head, forearm, and back when the snipers opened fire on him.
In disrobing, Merk revealed the burn scar he suffered from the mission that went south off the coast of mainland China. Without that hellish nightmare, without Merk healing for a year from the burn wounds, bedridden, sitting idle as a log, recovering from numerous skin grafts, he wouldn’t have become a pacifist; he wouldn’t have learned how to communicate with dolphins.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Dolphin One?” the lead diver asked, pointing to the blackened grain terminal. “You’ll get better treatment there.”
“I’m good,” Merk said, peering at the chemical tanker and the ongoing EOD operation to disarm and dispose of the bombs attached to the hull.
The other EOD diver offered Merk a gas mask. He shook his head, saying, “The wind.”
“What about it?”
“It blows in the opposite direction than it did on 9/11. Today it blows toward Manhattan.” Merk looked over at the morning light shining on the army trucks that lined the FDR Drive. Troops, donning gas masks, turned away cars, ordered citizens to go inside buildings or seek shelter in the tunnel that connected the FDR Drive with West Street around the tip of Manhattan. He held up a rag, dipped it in water, and said, “This is all I need if the chlorine leaks.”
The lead EOD diver nodded, using tweezers to pull out fragments from Merk’s flesh.
At the chemical tanker, the EOD scuba diver surfaced with an inflatable bladder and the first bomb. Another pair of EOD divers carefully received and handled the device. They put it inside a lead-lined bag, lowered that into a steel gangbox, and slowly steered the RHIB toward Governors Island, where they would take the bomb into an underground bunker — turned into a disposal lab — and disarm it with robots and bomb technicians, wearing full Demon W Class-2 Suits with face shields and aerators, manufactured by Radiation Shield Technologies, in case the nuclear-detecting probe that Tasi used to scan the device malfunctioned.
In the other boat, Merk put on a navy-blue tee shirt as he watched the first bomb, stowed in the gangbox, be lifted on land, put on a cart, and driven to the center of the island to the freight elevator that would take the device underground for disposal. When Merk saw the cart disappear behind a bend of trees, he radioed the second cell of EOD scuba divers to remove the last remora bomb from the hull of the chemical tanker.
Underwater. The divers examined the surface area, seams, and canister — light metal wrapped in a plastic sheath — to see how the device was attached to the hull.