“Was that bunker buster the nuclear-tip option?” the president asked.
“Affirmative, Mr. President. A B-61. That was payback for the fifty-six New Yorkers who died from the chlorine gas bomb,” the CIA director said.
“Excuse me, Mr. President,” the navy admiral chimed in. “The next earth-penetrating weapon is about to hit its target at oh-one-hundred hours Tehran time. It will strike the hard target in three minutes and counting. The Fordow Nuclear Plant will be hit by the next B-61 bunker buster. That should get the mullahs’ attention.”
Chapter One Hundred
Dawn the next day. Merk’s cell phone vibrated with a message. Under covers with Jenny in a Washington, DC, five-star hotel suite, he read it out loud: “Two trained dolphins spotted off Long Beach Island, NJ… Jesus,” he sat up. “Today’s the day we go find them.”
Merk and Jenny showered, packed up, and took an Acela train to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. There they rented a car and drove across the Ben Franklin Bridge on Route 70 East heading toward Long Beach Island. At a circle in the Pine Barrens, Merk took Route 72 East, driving through a long green corridor flanked by scrub pine forests and sand — the New Jersey Pine Barrens being one of the great watersheds in the Garden State.
Merk handed Jenny his smartphone and told her to search his contact list for the Holgate Marina and reserve a powerboat to charter. “Guess I no longer have to swim off my anger about the health of the dolphins,” he said.
“What did NMMP Director Hogue say about Tasi and Inapo disappearing?” Jenny asked, texting the marina on the availability of a powerboat.
“What could she say? She probably figured I had a hand in it. But after the bomb going off and the chlorine spill, she knew the navy was lucky not to lose a couple of more systems. Can you imagine video of dolphins on the news dying in the line of duty? It’s one thing for people to die in a drone strike, for extremists to kill and slaughter people, but it’s whole different orbit to see beautiful animals die,” he said.
“Merk, you once told me that navy dolphins are trained to return to the nearest base when out at sea.”
“Yes. Like a million times around the world for the past half-century, with few exceptions.”
“So what will prevent Tasi and Inapo from returning to the naval base at Virginia Beach in, say, a few weeks, as they swim south?”
Merk looked at Jenny and, with a slight grin, said, “Because I untrained them.”
At the Holgate Marina on the bay side of Long Beach Island, Merk and Jenny carried a couple of barrel bags and a cooler on board a twenty-five-foot bowrider powerboat. Merk drove the boat out of the marina, cruising south around the marshlands of a national wildlife refuge at the southern tip of Long Beach Island.
Once out where the ocean surf met the bay, Merk pushed the throttle down and rode the bowrider over a series of waves, cresting and slamming through the last swell, and then opened the power, cruising the boat up the ocean side of the long barrier island.
Knowing that fishermen had spotted two Navy-like dolphins on the northern part of the island off Barnegat Lighthouse, Merk decided to take a chance trying to reunite with Tasi and Inapo. He had released both dolphins to the wild a month ago in New York Harbor, after the bomb blew open the chemical tanker and the chlorine spread across the waterfront and over the East River to lower Manhattan. Merk would soon learn the effective range of the sonar-whistle and whether he would be lucky enough for the dolphins to respond to their whistle-names if they were still in the area.
Dropping anchor, Merk stripped down to a bathing suit. He put on oversized swim fins, grabbed a dive mask and the sonar-whistle, and then plunged in the water. Jenny took off her tee shirt, wearing a white bikini underneath, applied suntan lotion to her now-tanned skin — no longer the pasty white of the North Korean engineer Kim Dong-Sun she had impersonated for a year.
Underwater, Merk turned on the sonar-whistle and wrapped its string around his wrist, swimming about. He leisurely circled the boat, floating, swimming backward, and doing the sidestroke and then the breaststroke; other times he gently flippered around. He checked the anchor line as he swam by, and made a figure eight in front of the bow. He roamed around, sometimes on the surface, sometimes beneath it, all the while keeping the sonar-whistle in the water to ping the high-pitched whistles of Tasi and Inapo’s birth names.
After a couple of hours, Merk tied the sonar-whistle to the ladder. He climbed on board to have lunch with Jenny. She had turned over on her stomach, catching sun as she read an e-book on the Pacific War in World War II.
“Any luck?” she asked, sitting up, adjusting her sunglasses.
“Not a peep,” he said, taking a kale smoothie from the cooler.
She grabbed a mango smoothie and sipped. “Did we miss them?”
“Maybe. Let’s stick around longer. I don’t think they made it as far south as Brigantine in less than a day.”
“Okay. Why not?”
“It took them a month to mosey their lazy tails halfway down the Jersey Shore. They don’t appear to be in a rush. Maybe it’s the Atlantic bottlenose dolphins migrating north from Florida up here and to Long Island. It’s summer. So who knows what they bumped into?” Merk said, downing the kale smoothie. “Maybe they’re part of a pod or a herd now.”
“How did you do it?” Jenny asked.
“Do what?”
“Deprogram them. Doesn’t that take several months?”
Shielding his eyes from the sun, Merk looked in Jenny’s eyes and said, “It started at the beginning of my training with them, about a year ago. I taught them that if I got hurt, like what happened to Morgan Azar, they would have to go survive on their own. I broke several NMMP cardinal rules with Tasi and Inapo. The biggest was bonding with them, which the program frowns upon. But out of view of handlers and navy personnel, I broke down the barriers, turned their shyness into strength, made them resilient, and turned that all into self-reliance. I made Tasi and Inapo support each other without me. They would survive in the wild only as a pair.” Merk chugged water and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Like you and me.”
Out of nowhere, Tasi breached off the side, arcing high through the air and splashing down. Then Inapo surfaced, sculling backward and splashed water across the bow, playfully laughing at Merk and Jenny, who both got soaked. Not wasting time putting on the swim gear, Merk dove into the water. Jenny stood up, removed her wet sunglasses, and toweled off. She lifted the other cooler on the seat, opened the lid, and began to toss fish into the sea.
Tasi rode Merk around in a circle; Inapo darted over and snatched the fish floating on the surface. Tasi fluked over, as Merk let go of her dorsal fin. Jenny fed Tasi three mackerels in a row. Each time, the dolphin opened her mouth and gulped the fish whole down her throat.
Jenny climbed down the ladder eased into the water. She enjoyed the mirth of swimming with the Navy-trained dolphins. For the next half hour, the foursome played around, toyed with each other, mimicking emotions and mirroring one another.
The bond for Jenny was surreal after all she had been through in the coarseness of war and the male-dominated cultures of Syria, Iran, and North Korea. She realized how much her job had taken a toll on her psyche, her spirit, her body and well-being, and how much she missed being with Merk, being a part of his unique, special bond the dolphin whisperer had with his dolphins. They would always be his dolphins. It was truly a gift.