Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  It was the first time he held a gun in decade. And it was cold.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  IN THE SAFE house by the sea, Nico introduced Merk to the Kenyan secret police officer, a CIA asset code-named Nairobi. For the past five years, she had infiltrated the pirates’ hostage-for-ransom supply chain in southern Somalia, working with US military and intelligence advisors. The CIA moved Nairobi north to the breakaway region of Somaliland and, within a year, she had infiltrated the outer circle of enforcers, negotiators, arms runners, skiff captains, fishermen, gunners, and boarding crews that reported to the pirate brothers Korfa and Samatar.

  “I’m a deal away from being inside the last ring of nine mothership captains,” Nairobi said, not amused by being caught off guard by the dolphin splash attack.

  “Nine, hmmm?” Merk mouthed, glancing at Nico with a look of doubt.

  “No wonder AQAP has moved in to partner with the radical Islamists of al-Shabaab,” Nico said, playing along Merk as he watched Nairobi’s facial expressions.

  “And the pirates,” Merk added.

  The Kenyan army had trained agent Nairobi to be a money broker with the shipowners and insurance side of the hostage-for-ransom business. On the surface, she worked to release scores of hostages, while infiltrating deeper into the pirate underworld to identify the names, contacts, and key leaders who populated the complex web of Somalia warlords; Islamic assassins, both local and Yemeni-based terrorists; and the pirates in the trade of hijacking ships. Then there was the brutally effective ISIS war fueled by a winning propaganda machine, drawing thousands of Western believers, wannabes, converts, and disillusioned and disconnected citizens. Radical Islam offered them hope. An out. A job. A goal. Free society offered them nothing, failing the youth by offering a wage-suppressed, debt-ridden, slavery subsistence.

  “What’s your story?” Merk asked,

  Nairobi ignored him. She didn’t input any KorSam—Korfa and Samatar—piracy network information on a computer, but rather on a piece of paper she folded and stored out in the open, wedged in the pages of a children’s book about Noah’s Ark in a bookcase, which she showed Nico. Other times, she went on to explain to him, she posed as a UN humanitarian coordinator negotiating terms with the warlords to deliver food and aid to the poorest villages. Still other times she acted as a double agent, spying on and planting true and false intelligence with the pirates about the Islamic militants and their common enemy, the United States. All of those activities in aggregate allowed her to move freely within the pirate towns and among the local fishermen without raising an eyebrow of suspicion. But as a woman, she had limited access in the Somalia cities and regions controlled by the misogynist, male-dominated world of Islamic extremism.

  Nairobi worked around that handicap by using her body for sex-as-trade bait when she needed to barter with the money-as-religion warlords, pirate leaders, planners, and negotiators. Few could resist the five-foot-ten, walnut-brown skinned woman with a dimple on her right cheek, a vivacious smile framed with long hair braided into a tail now resting on her broad shoulders like a snake. Nairobi had an athlete’s muscular, powerful build. As a foreigner living in Somalia for five years, she used the cover story of being a fugitive from Kenya, forced to flee her country after killing a politician in a sex-triangle scandal.

  The CIA planted that story in Kenyan newspapers and Somali media outlets to give the story heft and authenticity, she told Nico, insisting that the “rumors grew into legend.” Her favorite: she had cut off the balls of the politician, slit his throat, and bled him to death face down in a hammock, while barbequing antelope with his political enemy. She neither confirmed nor denied the story, since Islamic radicals despised the leaders of Kenya, calling them infidels and the next target of Al-Shabaab extremists.

  After listening to her exploits, Merk refused to be swept in by her ardent speech on US—Kenyan relations, or be taken by her sultry, thoroughbred good looks. He kept a distance and remained skeptical about Nairobi until the day she proved her loyalty in action, not words. Nico noticed the cold shoulder and nudged Merk with a knee and gave him a look to be social.

  “What’s your real story? Beyond war?” Merk asked, taking out a new Dolphin Code laptop from a waterproof bag.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any children? Any desires or wants in life?”

  “Yes, I have two children. A boy and a girl. Eight and three,” she said.

  “Do they have cool names like my dolphins?”

  “What are their names?” she asked, showing Nico and Merk where she hid a machete behind the bookcase.

  “Tasi and Inapo. Female and male. Both I trained for a year in Guam and then Hawaii.”

  “It must be beautiful in the Pacific. I’ve never been, just online.”

  “And the names of your children? True African names?”

  “Akello, the boy. His name means ‘Born After Twins.’ His father was a twin,” she said. “My daughter is named Fathiya. It means ‘Triumph’ in Swahili.”

  “What do they like to do?” Merk asked, sat down and swiped on the laptop. Using an eyeball-vein scan he accessed the secure hard drive.

  “Akello likes to carve wood. Makes alligator heads from logs, eagles from a large branch, and tribal masks from bark,” Nairobi explained with mist in her eyes; she clearly missed them.

  He uploaded satellite images, photographs, topographical maps, and sea-lane charts, then opened a pane of a live shot of the drone patrolling the Somalia coast, hunting for the missing vessels and pirate mothership. By integrating an array of live feeds, maps, and digital pictures, he identified the lagoons, coves, estuaries, valleys, ridges, and mountain landmarks by image, name, land contours, and GPS coordinates. The Dolphin Code program streamed a live split-screen of the micro-dorsalcams worn by both Tasi and Inapo, from their point of view, swimming in tandem along the shallows of the Somali coast.

  “And Fathiya? Her name sounds so close to the English word ‘faith,’” Merk noted.

  “Fathiya likes to play the piano and sing.”

  Merk verified that the dorsalcams were acoustically sensitive to whenever a dolphin echolocated the space ahead, transmitting the biosonar feedback to the laptop, where it transcribed the frequency into an acoustic signal. With another software program developed by a military vendor in San Diego, the wavelengths were translated into a shadowy image, like that captured by ground-penetrating radar. Image quality was not high-definition or detailed, but it gave Merk insight on whether the dolphin was targeting a small fish or a something larger like a tuna, shark, boat hull, or sea-mine.

  Merk ran a program that extracted the images the drone captured at night with a high-res infrared camera. It catalogued each subject, while displaying the geocoords with time rolling over in seconds and minutes in the lower right corner. Using the GPS data, Merk directed the systems to head to a specific location to conduct a sea level swim-by for a closer look. The first target was a cluster of ten skiffs scattered on shore. Some were flipped over; others pulled halfway on land; still others were dumped with bows stacked in all directions. It seemed as if the skiffs had been abandoned overnight. With the cluster sitting two-dozen klicks west of the safe house, it would take the dolphins a few hours to reach. Yet, the littoral environment was as a good place to start the search and surveillance mission.

  After hiding the outboard motor in a toolshed, and deflating the rubber boat and stowing it in a shallow cave along with food rations, water, and SEAL body armor, Nico opened the rifle case and pulled out a quad of American, Israeli, German, and Russian assault rifles. He handed them to Nairobi, along with boxes of ammunition. She opened a false door behind a wine cabinet and stored the weapons inside, except the AK-47. Nico opened the next barrel-bag and dumped a pile of euros and dollars across the table. Merk took notice; the piles of cash made him uneasy. Merk stared at Nico, but the CO averted his gaze. The SEAL handed over hundreds of thousands of euros and dollars to Nairobi. To be used. To be sp
ent. To buy off the pirates. And to bribe warlords and officials. None of the freewheeling purchases sat well with Merk, since it exposed the CIA to a blind spot to buy intel in a land of spies, thieves, and double agents.

  Nico ignored Merk. He used his Greek charm and flair, and engaged Nairobi in jovial talk. He feigned interest when the CIA asset ran through options on the places to hide inland if the pirates or Islamic militants closed on the safe house. She told him where to hide, who to watch for, and which way to escape. The well-rehearsed list made Merk suspicious. He wondered when was the last time a CIA agent sat down with Nairobi, vetted her, and debriefed her face-to-face, despite him connecting with her children stories; they were real, he knew. Taking the cue from Merk’s mood, Nico stepped outside to scope the layout of the safe house for webcams, listening devices, and signs of watchers outside.

  While Nico searched the safe house for bugs and spycams, Merk typed a code directing the dolphins to follow the coast west and report back on any hot items along the way. He locked the GPS coordinates of the skiffs and uploaded them into the program, so that when the dolphins came within a klick a signal on the laptop would alert him they were about to arrive.

  Nairobi stripped out of her wet clothes. Underneath, she wore a tee shirt with no bra and Body Glove swim shorts, revealing her curvy glutes and long, sinewy thighs. The Kenyan agent changed tack and was all business when she stuffed the euro packs into money belts, stowed a couple of stacks of dollars next to the weapons behind the wine cabinet, taped another stack under the dining room table, and put the rest in a backpack. She stepped behind a blind, stripped out of her wet underclothes, got dressed. She stepped out from behind the blind and slipped into tattered navy blue coveralls, clothing likely taken from a mechanic of a hijacked ship, buttoned it to her breasts, revealing cleavage, and slung the backpack over her shoulder.

  Dangling car keys, Nairobi picked up a cooler and headed to the front door, announcing, “I will go to the fishing village west, some forty miles. I can buy intel on the hostages there.”

  Nico handed her a Chinese military Satcom; showed her how to use it, saying, “Nai, if you call, keep your observations brief and general. Don’t use names on the open channel.”

  “Sure, no names?”

  “Good. When you’re done, trade the Satcom to the pirates, so we can triangulate a GPS vector on Korfa’s whereabouts.”

  She nodded, stuffed the Satcom in the backpack, picked up a clothes bag, and headed out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “SHOULD WE TRUST her?” Nico asked, listening to Nairobi drive away.

  “You know her history?” Merk asked. “Her kids were real enough. That wasn’t rehearsed … Triumph, what a great name is Fathiya for a girl.”

  “Yeah, Merk. What you asked and what the CIA spooks told me.”

  “Let’s look for a means to shadow her. Then move out.”

  “I can tell you a dozen reasons why we should stay here tonight.”

  “Nico, you answered your question. We don’t know her, despite her children. If she’s a double or is being spied on, the safe house will be visited tonight. My dolphins are at sea. I can’t be separated from them. Not for a day.”

  “C’mon, Toten, we just got here.”

  “I’m not staying. Don’t trust this house.” Merk opened drawers, sifting through clothes, then rifled through a closet, pulling out scarves and towels to protect against the sun. “We go stealth, blend in. No body armor, no ammo, no guns.”

  “Now you’ve gone off the deep end. I’m not moving around the pirate mecca of the world, stripped of firearms. Not going to happen,” he said, picking up the AK-47 assault rifle.

  “You know how Nairobi has more muscles than we do. Bet more endurance, too.”

  “Toten, is that anyway to talk about our host?”

  “Go out and check the perimeter,” Merk said. “Look for trip wires, cams, hidden mics. See if the locals are watching us.”

  Nico grimaced, hit the lights, and bolted out the door. Merk glanced at the laptop and held a penlight in his mouth. He examined the ceiling fan and lighting fixtures for snooping devices. He didn’t see any on first pass, then swept wall to wall, checking under lampshades, behind furniture, artwork, and around a bulky TV set. After scouring the kitchen for bugs, Merk noticed Nairobi didn’t own a landline phone. Without a secure line, he wondered how she communicated with her CIA handler, if she did at all. Maybe she hadn’t done that in years. There was one way to confirm Nairobi’s CIA sponsorship, and that was the same with Merk’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who worked at the CIA’s Clandestine Services unit. But by infiltrating Somalia, there was no way he could risk trying to contact his lover while operating in a dark country, radio dead. And who knew whether she was working in some black operation herself at the time. All he could do was recall running his hands through her long hair the last time, taking a whiff of her scent, and being aroused—thoroughly aroused.

  After a sweep of the grounds outside, scouting the mountain range to the south with night-vision binoculars, Nico returned, informing Merk that Nairobi drove west along the coast, and that there were no signs of spies, surveillance nests, or audiovisual devices. He told him that he set up motion sensors to guard the house on the landside, while hanging the audioscope and a webcam under the eaves of the roof. After setting up the squawk box, which would alert them of an intruder by sight or sound, Merk showed Nico a pencil-rod webcam set behind a painting, whispering, “Let’s get out of here. Don’t have a good vibe on a safe house that isn’t safe.”

  “Got a second car outside,” Nico said, searching the drawers for the keys.

  “Let’s tail her. I can work remotely with the fins.” Merk double-checked the images downloaded from the drone. Using the Dolphin Code software to com with the drone, he followed the stream of live shots with a coded timer in the lower right corner of the screen. It showed there was six hours of drone flying time before the USS New York would call it back.

  Merk closed the laptop and stuffed it and the tech accessories into a backpack. Outside, Nico hopped into the driver’s seat of Nairobi’s second car, a Chinese SUV. Merk kicked the rear fender to feel the metal density in the body of the vehicle. The soft resonance told him the car was made of scrap metal; it would rust shortly after a crash.

  Merk sighed and climbed into the vehicle. He folded a red-and-white checkered square Bedouin scarf, called the kufeya, into a triangle and placed it on his head. He fitted an igal of camel wool over his skull, securing the scarf in place. The igal was decorated with fine metallic beads and threads.

  The CO glanced over and chuckled at Merk’s headgear: “You’re so busted.”

  “Yeah, well, Nico. Think tribal.”

  As Nico drove off, Merk opened the laptop and watched the dolphins near the cove of the first target area he tasked them to sweep. Tasi surfaced and glided toward shore. The dorsalcam picked up the first cluster of skiffs pulled halfway out of the water. Inapo swam ahead, circled back, and surveyed the cove from the other side—as he was trained to do.

  In unison, they worked the key points of the cove with each system taking turns leaping on the edge of shore. That allowed them to digitally capture shots they couldn’t get in the surf. It also enabled them to place their jaws on the beach to feel for vibrations through their jawbones, tuning in on any vehicle passing by on the coast road.

  “You miss her?” Nico asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend. The one you see twice a year.”

  “I don’t know why I agreed to this. To come into enemy territory. Am I mad? This is crazy to go this deep again?”

  “Yeah. She’s military right? Banging some marine?”

  Merk shook his head, and replied, “No, Nico. She’s smarter than you. She’s CIA intel. You know, an analyst.”

  “Why would a geek be interested in a puke SEAL retread like you?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she has a thing for dolphins and I’m
her bridge to a free swim with the fins.”

  As Nico needled him, Merk began to phase out his words and think of her, as he swiped different panes of the quad split screen in and out of zoom to see the progress of the dolphin’s surveillance along the coast. Nothing special came out of the images Tasi and Inapo captured. A pile of used fishing nets told Merk the skiffs belonged to fishermen, not pirates.

  With neither Tasi nor Inapo picking up vibrations of intruders or vehicles, they swam to the next target a few kilometers west—one of two marinas that a year before were not visible from any spy plane or satellite, but were captured earlier that night for the first time by the drone.

  Merk knew drones were useful and effective beyond blowing up terrorist targets, hospitals, or schools. But unlike navy dolphins, they had to return to base to recharge, refuel, or rearm.

  Merk gazed out of the window to the dark sky over the dark sea, thought of his girlfriend, her dark eyes with a spark of life in them, and then remembered grabbing hold of Nairobi’s calves as he pulled her down when he climbed on shore in Somalia. He knew the next few days would be different, hectic, dangerous, with little time to think about any women.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  DEEP INTO THE morning, Merk deployed the dolphins farther west in a search for the Somali pirates, when a series of high-pitched whistles came back, not from Tasi or Inapo, but from the drone. Within the software, embedded between the trills, flashed a message that the Dolphin Code software began to decipher and translate the sounds into a broken string of words.

  Merk read the message, recognizing that it didn’t originate from the USS New York or the NATO pirate task force, but from CIA headquarters in Langley. Should he trust its content? Was it a coded message meant for Nairobi? Or did he receive something else?

  In the chain of words he felt a wave of anticipation that it might be his girlfriend trying to contact him. But then within the words was a latent message, a code within a code. Bracing himself, he read every word with dread: “Hot … Load … Gone … Missing … in Syria.”