Nairobi had visited Samatar and Korfa plenty of times the past few years, at their home in Puntland, negotiating on a fishing skiff at sea, bartering a deal with the Somalia Coast Guard, making intel drops outside a mosque to win their trust, in another compound, or in a string of huts and safe houses closer to where she lived on the coast.
So the new secret location of Korfa’s hideout gave her pause. It demonstrated how fast the pirates had moved under the twins. They consolidated power, wiped out rivals in the north, and ramped up and executed plans. She also knew how Korfa and Samatar resisted overtures from Yemeni tribesmen, AQAP, and other militant Islamic groups to join and build up radical Islam in their homeland. But their form of Muslim worship was far more nuanced than the male-only, austere practice of the Taliban or the Saudi Arabian-sponsored Sunni Islam Wahhabis schools.
Korfa’s clan mixed religion with African mysticism; trusted their women to carry out segregated but important religious rites, functions, and doctrines. He didn’t like Somali women being covered up, not head to toe. With their burgeoning trade of money-for-hostages and double brass balls, the twin brothers branched out, expanding both their territorial empire and network of foreign sponsors and trade partners. Some even migrated to Nigeria to help ramp up the pirate attacks of Western Africa or support Boko Haram attacks in the north.
Like Alexander the Great, their father’s domain wasn’t big enough to contain their ambition. Now they saw moving beyond Somalia’s borders as the next step in their rise to power. That was the threat that scared the US intelligence agencies the most about Somali and why the Pentagon sent Nico, Merk, and the navy dolphins on the Black Lit to gather intel.
In the main entranceway of the cave, boxes of supplies were stacked to the ceiling. They contained items from dry goods and vacuum-packed food to arms and ammunition. Nairobi sensed Korfa’s men were preparing for something big, that they planned on being holed up for some time—all the supplies told her that. The pirates were ready to go underground, to live in the network of caves in the Sheikh Mountains for months or longer.
Sensing the chess move, Nairobi had mentally prepared for that day to discuss the hostages and how she could become the liaison in the negotiations with the foreign shipowners and insurance companies. But all that changed with the death of Samatar. Korfa was going to honor his brother before any business was going to be conducted, before he launched any plans seeking revenge. The more she thought, the more she realized the hostages were being held at some other location outside the compound in the mountain pass.
The elder led Nairobi into an alcove. It was dimly lit with oil lanterns. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw Korfa’s women—a curvy mistress, his graying aunt, and a couple of young female cousins—standing in a burial pit the guards had dug out by hand. The women draped light green cloth on the pit’s walls, chanting prayers in preparing the hole to receive the body.
Nairobi nodded politely, handed the purple cloth to the aunt, and stepped around the pit. At the back of the alcove, she saw Korfa cleaning the body of Samatar. She noticed the gunshot wound had been sewn up and Korfa had worked on preparing the body like a tree, rinsing the flesh of the trunk with holy water, moving down the boughs of the legs, wiping away the blood from the fatal wound, and wiping off Samatar’s arms.
The pirate warlord stared at Nairobi as he dipped the washcloth, wringed it damp, and dabbed it on the stiff muscular biceps and forearms of the corpse Samatar. She saw for the first time vulnerability in Korfa’s hardened eyes. When he pointed to the Qur’an, she no longer saw a warrior, a pirate, or a warlord, but a believer in both his faith and lifting his oppressed people out of the thrall of poverty. That made it difficult for her to spy on the charismatic, warlike man.
Samatar’s eldest of three sons, a fourteen-year-old boy, limped over to his uncle Korfa and handed the robe and tunic his father had worn on his march to Mecca a decade earlier. Knowing the religious significance of Samatar’s clothes, Nairobi opened the Qur’an, looked at Korfa, and waited for his guidance on which chapter and verse to read.
Without looking back at her, Korfa said, “An Nur. Medinan Twenty-Four. Forty-Six.”
She flipped through the Qur’an until she came to the Chapter An Nur (“The Light”), and read from verse 46: “We have indeed sent down Signs that make things manifest: and Allah guides whom He wills to a way that is straight. (47): They say ‘We believe in Allah and in the Apostle and we obey’: but even after that some of them turn away: they are not Believers.”
Samatar’s eldest son began to recite a prayer next. Korfa grabbed Nairobi’s wrist, squeezing the bangles, and whispered, “Nai, I want the name and country of the sniper.”
Chapter Thirty
EAST OF BERBERA, Nico drove up and down the coast, reconning the seascape to make sure that the location where he dropped Merk off was isolated so the dolphin whisperer could remotely com with the dolphins without being spotted. They settled on a strand five klicks outside the harbor, where the beach came to an end, transitioning from flat sand to terraces of stone slabs. Around a point, a broken cove formed a shelter with boulders backed by rocky mounds.
Merk stripped off the Bedouin headdress, grabbed his gear, and told Nico that he had forty-eight hours to gather intel on the pirates before they exited out of Somalia somewhere west.
The SEAL CO nodded, watched Merk pick his way over the boulders and disappear down in the cove. He turned the vehicle around and drove to Berbera. From the GPS vector of the Chinese military Satcom he gave Nairobi, her vehicle sat halfway up the Sheikh Mountains Pass.
For the next hour, Merk dug in, setting up a surveillance nest within the confines of the cove. He stored MREs, canteens of water, and other foodstuffs in different nooks and crevices, wary that the items needed to be safe from high tide that could flood the cove, turning it into a tidal pool. He changed out of his clothes into a wetsuit, took a pair of digital binoculars, and scouted the horizon on the gulf. He panned the sea searching for skiffs, the large dhows like the mothership, and larger vessels like freighters and tankers. The sea was mysteriously empty, still. With the hijacked Norwegian tanker found in Berbera, he expected to see navy ships. But there were none. The absence of a decisive naval response made the view all the more strange and disconcerting, yet at the same time it whetted his curiosity.
Merk settled down in the shade of the mounds, monitoring the progress of Tasi and Inapo. He was replaying a clip of the dolphins trailing an armed Somali Coast Guard boat heading out to sea, as opposed to moving west along the littoral to the stranded oil tanker near Berbera harbor. That told Merk either the Somali government was on the take with the pirates or they had intel that an ambush would await them at the port city. He copied and pasted the geocoords of Blå Himmel into the Dolphin Code and transmitted it along with the location of the cove so that the systems would swim to him first. He needed to inspect their condition before directing them to head on to scout the harbor and keep watch over the tanker for the next twenty-four hours. The dolphins would be tasked to monitor all activity surrounding it.
For a while, the dolphins tracked the Somali Coast Guard out to sea. With a click of the Dolphin Code colored keys, Merk directed Inapo to swim under the hull of the motorboat, fluke sideways as he had been trained to do, plant the dorsalcam on the fiberglass bottom, and roll away. The dorsalcam had an adhesive strip that when pressed would seal it to the surface and break from the dorsal fin when the mammal pulled away. Hidden inside the pencil-rod cam sat a GPS tab with a motion sensor, which recorded the speed of a body in water. Although minus one dorsalcam until he fitted Inapo with another, Merk could track the movements of the Somali Coast Guard boat, relay that information to the US Navy, which in turn could watch it with a drone, spy plane, or military satellite to see if they rendezvoused with any of the pirates.
After tagging the boat and confirming it via Tasi’s dorsalcam, the Coast Guard boat headed out to the gulf.
Merk called the dol
phins back to shore.
Chapter Thirty-One
NICO DROVE UP the foothills into the high mountain elevations of the Sheikh Pass. The GPS indicated that Nairobi had parked her vehicle inside the compound that he had passed on the right as he drove up a steep incline. He rose back and forth on a switchback mount, rolling out onto a plateau. He pulled off the road behind a guardrail and hid the car out of sight of passing vehicles. He took out a folding stock sniper rifle, communication gear, a backpack with food and water, and hiked a good way from the vehicle.
The CO set up a surveillance nest on a bluff. The ledge held a commanding view of the valley below, with mountain streams cutting across and running under the Sheikh Pass. In the background, he noted the road snaked down the foothills and curved toward Berbera in the heat haze sea far away.
With the high-powered telescope, Nico spotted the camouflage canopies housing a slew of luxury cars. Then he saw Nairobi’s vehicle parked under the dead tree. He zoomed on four guards roaming the premises inside the compound.
Chewing on an energy bar, the CO reminded himself he had to wait and be patient for Nairobi to emerge out of the underground complex.
Chapter Thirty-Two
AS THE SUN arched across the midday sky, the dolphins made their way toward the cove. Merk monitored all the channels he had at his disposal, but was disappointed by the inactivity of the US military. The drone had neither returned nor been replaced.
Both the sky above and the gulf in front of him were empty, at least from his viewpoint, while the dorsalcam attached to the hull of the Somali boat showed images every now and then of the Coast Guard pulling over fishing skiffs for inspections and to conduct interviews as the few remaining resources of the Somali government tried to string together bits of intel and feed them to the offshore naval forces. Perhaps NATO and the international navies were busy tracking down the other hijacked ship, the Shining Sea.
Merk opened a backpack. He took out a scuba mask, a pair of swim fins, mini trimix tank with a regulator, and a backup dorsalcam. As he checked the equipment, children’s voices broke the silence. Like wind chimes, they were soft and airy at first, but then became more pronounced. He glanced around the cove, closed the laptop, and shoved it in the backpack, stowing it sideways in between boulders. He left the scuba gear on a stone shelf and stepped out of the cove to see the young visitors.
He made sure he didn’t step on a seashell or stone that would announce his arrival. Merk stretched his arms and gripped a boulder like a globe, craning his head around it to spy on the kids. Rising slowly, he peered over the rocky surface until he spotted the first boy, a young Somali about six years old. Behind him his pal with a bushy afro waded into the surf. They idly skipped stones across the water, uttering a few words in their native tongue. Although Merk didn’t understand the language, from their light tone, he felt the children were doing what kids have done for millennia: play, explore, socialize, and interact with nature.
While Merk stayed out of sight, a third voice of another boy shouted directly above him. Startled, he looked up at an older boy, with coffee-brown skin and a fixed smile, pointing out to sea. Then the other two boys called out pointing at Merk as they waded deeper in the surf. The older boy looked down at Merk, who stepped away from the boulder raising his hands to show he was unarmed.
The older boy’s grin froze, his lips started to tremble. Nervous, he asked in broken English with a Somali accent, “Who are you?”
Realizing that the other boys had turned their attention to the sea, Merk gazed beyond them and saw Tasi and Inapo gliding to shore. Taking advantage of the timing, Merk answered, “I am fisherman.”
“You, fish?” the older boy asked nervously. “With what?”
“Dolphins,” Merk said, pointing to the dolphins moseying over to the boys in the water, each species checking the other out. Merk stepped into the sea. Not wanting to show too much or reveal what he was up to in their country, he flicked his wrist with an open-fingers sign to the dolphins. Tasi and Inapo rose out of the water sculling backward on their tails. They twisted around, dove into a wave in a splash, swimming out to sea.
“Wow,” the youngest boy said in amazement. “He fishes with dolphins.” His American English was better than his pals, which Merk figured out he likely picked up watching American TV on the Internet or a mobile phone.
“Why you here?” the older boy asked, climbing down from the boulder. “No tourists in our land. Tourists flew away like birds.”
Merk looked at him, and said coyly, “To learn why they flew away.”
“I know why,” the boy with the afro said, sticking his chest out with pride.
“You do? Why did they leave?” Merk asked.
The boy showed his right arm and back of his hand. His skin was pocked with scabs of dried blisters, clusters of strawberry pimples, and fresh wounds, as if burnt from inside out of his flesh. Merk took the boy’s hand and examined the breakout lesions more closely. Not wanting to speculate on what caused the scarring, he looked in the child’s sheepish eyes, which withdrew with eye contact, and asked, “What caused this?” Without waiting for the boy to come around to answer, Merk pulled up the left wetsuit sleeve and showed his own burn scar, saying, “Fire ate my skin. What harmed yours?”
“Water,” the older boy said, pointing out to sea.
“Water?” Merk followed his finger out to the horizon, and asked, “What kind of water?”
“Poison water.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
AFTER LISTENING TO Agent Jenny King’s reasoning to save her blown cover as the North Korean missile specialist Kim Dong-Sun, the CIA director told his deputies to leave his seventh floor office. He sat forward and scanned his desktop, picked up a pencil, and snapped it between his fingers. After a pause, he called in a favor, striking a key on a laptop that connected him to the one army general he trusted in the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
As soon as the executive assistant patched the call in to the general, the CIA director dumped any pretense of word or tone. He left no doubt how Operation Sandblast Scree was in a tight spot, how it might be linked to the stolen hot load on the move across Syria, and how the CIA needed help to move back into Syria “tonight” to retrieve the real North Korean engineer. The only problem he saw for the US Special Forces would be taking the hostage and hauling her across a border that was now crawling with Syrian forces, Iranian Quds Force, and ISIS spies and scouts in the wake of kidnapping CIA Operator King as the North Korean engineer.
“General, all I want to do is bring the real missile engineer back to the Iraqi station for interrogation,” he said.
The general listened. He ran through a few “logistical challenges,” did some calculations in his head, and then said from a black ops vista it was not only “do-able,” but could be done that night. Still the old friend, feeling the director’s stress, rationalized with him not to think about international laws they might end up breaking, since the new operation would be blanketed under the auspices of national security if word ever leaked out about the operation.
Moreover, he told him that as for the “hermit kingdom,” the late Kim Jong-il deserved some cold retribution for torpedoing a South Korean submarine in spring 2010, as did his son Kim Jong-un, who enflamed the border relations by shutting down a joint-venture factory between the two Koreas, firing missiles, and threatening to attack America at the slightest provocation.
From that moment on, the army general formulated a clandestine operation, the existence of which neither the president nor his cabinet would know anything. To ensure the safety of embedding CIA operative Jenny King as the North Korean engineer into Iran, a senator on the Defense Intelligence Committee would be told the following day about the black op, with its details to emerge as the operation got under way. Another precaution the CIA director and army general took was to ensure the cover story about Agent Jenny King was between them, and that the marine helicopter pilot and crew who flew her across
Iraq to the Iranian border would be told that they were transporting the real Kim Dong-Sun.
Speed, stealth, and secrecy were the elements needed for the success of the new operation.
It took little under an hour of poring over the pesky details and logistics Agent King had given to her superiors at the CIA, for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to task the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta—a.k.a. Delta Force—for the mission.
The JSOC general called the director and informed him that he had a Delta Force—DF—detachment in Baghdad ready for interdiction. In a video briefing, he said the DF cell would be airborne by nightfall, then slip across the border near Fort 24 to “re-acquire” the North Korean officer from the underground catch basin Agent King had temporarily stuffed her in until the agent’s mission in the Syrian desert was supposed to be over, forty-eight hours later. But that plan was fouled up when the CIA agents, dressed as journalists, kidnapped one of their agents, who was in deeper cover as part of SOG’s Clandestine Ops.
The JSOC commanders at Centcom, along with the CIA director, all knew how risky the operation would be, especially with the CIA attack on the Syrian missile launch site in the desert earlier that day. Those who knew General Adad understood the warhorse would use every resource to scour the desert searching for and finding links and evidence to nail the CIA to the cross for its role in the attack on his army, while derailing Syria’s plans to build a long-range missile site. The launch area and border would be teeming with soldiers in full-lockdown mode, itching for a firefight.
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