The second bomb was attached differently than the first. A single screw had been inserted through a metal lip on the canister and drilled into the ship’s steel hull. No waterproof adhesive was used. It looked like a rush job to attach. One diver aimed a flashlight, while the other one took out a screwdriver. He tried to turn the screw, but the head just spun around. He felt the screw threads were stripped. The EOD diver checked the lip and signaled to cut the screw-head so the bomb could be removed off the hull.
The diver took out a mini rotary-saw and began to carefully grind the metal screw below the head. He then used a small crowbar and pulled on the screw, trying to free the bomb, when — a massive explosion caved in the hull in a concussion blast. The energy wave crushed the divers against the pier in a massive shock wave, blowing the steel hull open, slicing a huge gouge in the storage well that held the eight liquid chlorine tanks, ripping them apart in secondary explosions.
The blast was so powerful that it lifted the entire laden ship up a meter, before rocking it up and down in huge hull waves. Mooring lines snapped, tearing the vessel free. A klick away, Merk felt the shock wave vibrate in his chest and sternum.
The waves rippled out of the blast zone, pushing the ship out, before it listed on its side, taking on water as tons of liquid chlorine no longer under compression spilled out and reacted to the water, turning into a gas. Plumes of yellowish-green chlorine gas began to drift around the ship and envelope the pier. The broken tanks of compressed liquid chlorine poured out, mixing with the water and, in the evaporating process, expanding, becoming a huge gaseous vapor.
On the pier, the blast blew shrapnel and big chunks of steel through the chlorine transfer station, setting off a fiery explosion that blew open the pressurized mixture of chlorine in the tanks, railcars, and scrubber in an immense gas cloud spreading across the concrete deck. The shed where the acetylene tanks were stored blew apart in a massive ascending fireball.
In the grain terminal, the veterinary clinic team, the SEALs, along with Jenny and the digital engineer, who had just arrived, heard the loud explosion around the bend of the Red Hook Marine Terminal.
Shaken by the force of the blast, Jenny ran upstairs to get a better view.
On the third floor, Korfa drank a cup of tea when the explosion rocked the building. He stumbled out of the chair, knowing the bombs had just detonated. The Somali warlord clutched his chest to feign a heart attack. One of the shaken SEAL guards came over to Korfa to see if he needed medical attention, when the pirate tossed hot tea in the guard’s face, swatting the firearm out of his hand. He pushed the guard aside and dashed toward the grain elevator entrance in the front of the building, with the elevator shaft running down to the river.
Knowing Bahdoon’s bombs had detonated, Korfa had nothing left to live for. He didn’t want to be tied to the blast and be branded a terrorist. And he didn’t want to be blamed for one of the worst acts of terror in modern history, when he considered himself a liberator.
Korfa threw a chair behind him to block the other SEAL from giving chase. The SEAL took out a pistol and fired a shot at the fleeing warlord but missed, with the bullet ricocheting off the concrete wall. Korfa ran into the hallway leading to the boarded grain elevator shaft. The other SEAL fired a second shot that missed Korfa, who now sprinted and crashed through the plywood protection, which snapped in half. His body hurled over the cracked plywood board. Korfa plunged three stories below, smashing his head and shoulders on a pile of rubble in the elevator pit that broke his neck, instantly killing him, his body impaled by rebar.
At the rear stairwell, Jenny heard the gunshots and ran through the third floor to the SEALs standing by the elevator shaft. She stepped between them and saw Korfa sprawled at the bottom of the pit. The Somali pirate had committed suicide. He was now dead like his brother, Samatar.
Jenny nodded to the SEALs and dashed back through the third floor and raced up nine more flights of stairs to the roof.
On the roof, Jenny joined the SEAL snipers and engineers, who were watching the toxic cloud waft across the East River.
“Oh my god,” she mouthed, staring at the unusual sight. She called Merk’s Satcom and smartphone, but there was no reply. She feared the worst. But then the lieutenant commander pointed to the RHIB boat drifting in front of Governors Island. Jenny took his binoculars and zoomed on the boat. Jenny saw Merk and the EOD divers watching the chlorine cloud form around the crippled, listing ship.
Shocked, Merk and the EOD divers waved police and Coast Guard boats to evacuate the East River by the South Street Seaport and those agents on the helipad by Whitehall Station. The wind blew the lethal cloud to float across the East River.
Angered by the bomb going off, Merk Toten had had enough. He was no longer conflicted. His navy dolphins were in the water and he had no clue whether they had cleared the chemical tanker before the bomb exploded and the chlorine spilled out. He knew they would die if they surfaced and breathed the chlorine gas instead of air.
With EOD divers fixated on the gas clouds, Merk dipped the sonar-whistle in the water, calling Tasi and Inapo to swim over to his location. Within half a minute, both dolphins surfaced behind the RHIB, out of view of the EOD divers. Merk flashed a sign for Tasi and Inapo to dive below. He pulled off the tee shirt, slipped on swim fins, grabbed a dive mask, snorkel, and a pair of needle-nose pliers and rolled overboard without the EOD divers knowing he left them.
Merk dove down to the bottom of the harbor, expelling breaths now and then through the snorkel. He greeted both dolphins, pulling Tasi toward him, and with the needle-nose pliers he removed the dorsalcam and GPS chip from her dorsal fin. He hugged the dolphin, then removed the same items off Inapo’s dorsal fin. When he finished, he dropped the pliers to the riverbed, flashed a hand-sign of a dorsal fin over his heart, signaling they were free.
With the hand-sign, Tasi and Inapo nodded and floated over to Merk, rubbing their heads and beaks on his face, and then swam away… their tailfins fluking… their silhouettes fading in the grey water.…
Merk rose to the sunlit surface.
On the roof of the grain terminal, Jenny and the SEALs watched Merk surface and climb back into the rubber boat. The EOD divers appeared to ask him what he had done underwater, but he shook his head and waved them off, not interested to discuss it.
Jenny wondered, too. Knowing that she had taken out Bahdoon, that Korfa had killed himself, and that the last of the bombs went off, all she could do now was watch the gas cloud enshroud lower Manhattan and pray people had run for their lives to seek cover.
Chapter Ninety-Nine
A month later on the summer solstice, a salvage barge anchored off the coast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden lifted the last of a half dozen rusting tanks that held the radioactive waste a German nuclear contractor had illegally dumped in the sea that Tasi and Inapo had found on the seamount.
With the operation overseen by the USS New York, live images streamed back to the Pentagon and the UN, showing the retrieval of the toxic waste.
On the same day in the White House Situation Room, the CIA director, army general, and navy admiral, along with several cabinet members and intelligence officials watched live as a night-time double strike unfolded on plasma screens. A true Navy SEAL double tap.
Launched by the black diamond-shape of a F-117 Nighthawk, which flew above the clouds, the bunker buster bomb drilled into the ground, igniting a percussion blast, blowing open the steel-reinforced cap to General Adad’s bunker. The blast wave crushed everybody in the top level instantly. But the bunker buster projectile carried on, drilling down into the next concrete level, when its more lethal second payload — a tactical nuke — blew open the floor slab, burying the bunker levels below ground, killing everyone inside with a lethal fiery, radioactive blast.