“I will come with you,” her colleague said.
“No. I need to work alone. I think clearer when there’s silence, the absence of chatter. Then I need to sleep on what I observe,” she said. “By morning I will have an answer.”
“I will send a guard to accompany you,” the Iranian scientist said, insisting, “He will be quiet. He doesn’t speak Korean or English.”
Knowing she couldn’t say no to the Iranian watchdog, Kim Dong-Sun nodded. She believed there would be no way to walk the shoreline alone. If she had to take out someone to make her escape, it might as well be a revolutionary guard sentry. She looked at her colleague, saying, “Wait for me for dinner. I will be back in two hours.”
He nodded to her. They saluted each other.
Dong-Sun headed out of the office with the guard in tow. She stepped out into the setting sun as she exited the building. She would need to wait for dusk before she would attempt her escape, first by neutralizing the watchman, then searching for a car to steal in the parking lot. Outside, she noted that there was only one surveillance camera on the far end of the lot. She wondered if the lone closed-circuit TV cam was operational or even had its lens installed and software tested and operational.
Jenny walked the shoreline, past salt shapes, salt figures, and salt mounds, shadowed by the Iranian guard. She thought about the Book of Genesis and Lot’s wife, when the woman of lore stopped to look back at the destruction of Sodom—the fallout from a comet, Jenny now knew—and was turned into a pillar of salt.
The engineer looked behind Dong-Sun and identified the old shoreline with water markings on boulders. She saw a line of survey stakes driven into the ground, showing where a couple of the missile silos would be installed. She marked up the layout drawing, adding notes for more stakes to those locations.
When dusk finally arrived, Jenny began to make her move. She placed the plans on the ground and used large rocks to keep the wind from rolling the plans back up. Then she waved the guard over and asked him to take a look at the layout on the plans and the shoreline across the lake. As she pointed to the buildings around the rim of the lake, she showed the structures on the plans with the piers extending out into the dried lakebed. The guard looked over at the buildings, and then down at the plans, and then back again. As he studied the rim of the lake, Jenny lifted a heavy rock, raised it over her head, snuck behind him, and smashed the guard in the back of the skull, knocking him out cold, if not killing him, Cain and Abel style.
His slackened body collapsed on the plans; rills of blood dripped over the blueprints.
Jenny tossed Kim Dong-Sun’s hat toward the edge of the lake, suggesting she went missing in the water. Adjusting her eyes to the darkness, she backtracked her footprints to mislead those who found the guard that something bad happened to her, too.
At the edge of the parking lot, Jenny scanned the other side of the new base building for people—clear—while moving furtively toward the cars. With only two light poles installed, she needed to stay out of the lights to find a vehicle to snatch.
Jenny picked up her pace. She read about the history of bank robbers, how many who were successful planned little, taking only the risk to show up and improvise—which often caught the police in a different location, unable to respond. She took the same now-or-never approach on timing, too; that no one would come looking for her or the guard for another hour; that no one would arrive at the base that night to witness her escape; and that no emergency or fire drill would empty the building with the Revolutionary Guards Corps and missile scientists spilling out into the parking lot while she made off with one of their vehicles.
Timing and luck would play a pivotal role in aiding her escape.
Along the back of the parking lot, she combed the vehicles, hoping that the base didn’t have some strict policy on turning in the keys to the security personnel until it was time to leave. Jenny stayed low, sliding from car to car, pulling at locked door handles, peeking inside to see what tools or equipment she could steal. By the fifteenth or so car, she had found all the doors were locked and, other than a few Iranian newspapers and food wrappers in the front seat, the cars were empty, not worth breaking into.
Half dozen cars later, Jenny found an unlocked door. She slinked inside and searched for keys under the visor, no; under the seat and floor mat, no; and in the glove box, no. It too was empty. So she pried open the plastic housing of the ignition, ripped the colored wires from the steering column, leaving the neutral wire dangling, and hot-wired the car, starting the engine. She put the car in reverse, lifted the break, feathered the clutch, and rolled backward, eyeing the gas tank. She was in luck: There was half a tank of gas to travel over the mountainous roads, some washed out to a single lane in the lowlands and some bedded with gravel. She had enough fuel to take a one-way ride to the Iraqi border and on to the ISIS-repelled town of Erbil, where she would rendezvous with the Kurdish leader Behar.
Without fanfare, CIA clandestine operator Jenny Myung King left the world of Kim Dong-Sun behind. She drove by the under-construction and unmanned guardhouse. Unarmed, except for maybe a tire-iron in the trunk, she felt naked, exposed, but full of relief.
Driving west on Iran Route 26 took Jenny down through the mountains to Iran’s Kurdish-inhabited border city of Piranshahr. There she had a CIA asset that could drive her across the border to meet Behar. And when Jenny made it across the border without firing a single shot, she had a story to tell her “no gun” hero boyfriend Merk Toten how she accomplished the feat.
Jenny cracked the window and peered outside to the stars in the night sky.
She looked at her fingers gripping the steering wheel and eyed the black splatter dots and black streaks coating them. It was the blood of the Iranian Guard. The night was calm.
Chapter Sixty
UNDER THE GIANT canopy at Camp Lemonnier, the marines and the CIA and FBI agents joined the on-base SEALs, Merk, some of the NMMP team, along with the Azure Shell negotiators, Dante Dawson and Christian Fuller. They attended the twin memorial service for slain SEAL Commanding Officer Nico Gregorius and drowned Special Forces veterinarian Lt. Morgan Azar.
Their bodies were placed in flag-draped caskets, ready for the next day flight back to the United States via Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for final burial at Arlington Cemetery.
The Navy Marine Mammal Program team began planning the return of navy dolphins, Tasi and Inapo, Lt. Merk Toten, and half of the bioteam of biologists, technicians, assistants, and veterinarians to the United States, with the balance of NMMP staff being returned to Qatar for ongoing surveillance duties in the Strait of Hormuz and the lower Persian Gulf.
With moving closing words from a marine brigadier general on “sacrifice” followed by a solemn prayer given by the naval chaplain, the CIA agents and SEAL Lt. Commander Kell Johnston escorted Merk to the intel fusion center. A tall, well-groomed ONI attaché, dressed in navy white uniform, told Merk that the sea-mines planted near the Shining Sea were stolen from the last Iraq War, when the NMMP dolphins cleared mines from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers delta in the Persian Gulf in 2003.
Merk remembered the operation, since it was that mission that sparked his interest in navy dolphins as a member of SEAL Team Six. He had met the NMMP dolphin master who had trained the half dozen dolphins that were involved in the mine-clearing operation in the confines of the shallow waterway, where naval minesweeping craft couldn’t enter.
On the sea-mines planted around the container ship, Merk told the ONI attaché that the bombs planted on the starboard hull of the Blå Himmel were made by the Norwegian sniper, who was a diver familiar with oil rigs, undersea welding, tech dives, and marine engineering projects and inspections. In taking in the former SEAL’s observations, the ONI attaché asked Merk the relevance. He replied, “Not one device can be traced to al Qaeda, ISIS, Iran, Syria, Yemeni affiliates and offshoots, or the Somali pirates.”
Those words stopped the attaché cold. Merk and the others contin
ued to the door, showed their ID badges, which were scanned by marine guards, who let them into the fusion center one at a time.
Merk sat down in front of the wall screen. The ONI attaché entered last and closed the door behind him. He fixed his eyes on the dolphin whisperer; Merk eyed him back, and said, “The new war is here, isn’t? This isn’t the Paris terrorist attacks or the bombing of a Russian plane over the Sinai.” The room fell silent. All eyes fell on Merk. “So I will break protocol.”
“Lt. Toten, what do you mean by that?” the Asian American CIA agent asked.
“We’re chasing a fenemy … a ‘faceless enemy,’” he began to explain. “Sure, we know who they are. They’re the usual suspects. Let’s tag them with blame. Al Qaeda, some splinter group in Africa or Yemen, AQAP, bin Laden’s offspring, the Taliban, al Nursa, ISIS butchers, Somali pirates, Syrian rebels, the Iranian Quds force. Call it that and their names will pop up.”
“Your point being?” the ONI attaché sitting next to Merk asked.
“What if the hydra-head was connected? A lead brain overseeing fringe elements?”
“That would be worse than Western converts or the ISIS-embedded flood of Syrian refugees to Europe and North America,” the attaché agreed.
“A super alliance. An alliance with a common goal to attack our interests, distract us, decoy us, divert us, bait us, to get us to chase our own tail, to blame others, to hunt ghosts in shadows, to put America in its place, with a long-term goal to destroy our freedoms. What would the next evolution of the al Qaeda and ISIS doctrine look like? Yet be cloaked in stealth.”
The intel officers at the table looked at one another, wondering where Merk was going with the insight. Merk sat forward, took three glasses of water, and aligned them in a triangle. “Syria-Somalia,” he said, touching one glass, then the second glass, “Iran-Yemen,” and then the third, “North Korea … this is not George Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil.’ It’s a new paradigm, run not at the top by each rogue entity, but by unseen middle layers. That’s far more dangerous.”
“Come again?” Kell Johnston uttered. “The planning doesn’t come from fanatics and dictators, but from military generals and warlords fed up with taking orders from their leaders?”
“Now throw in borderless al Qaeda, American and Euro jihadists, the Somali pirates, their ilk, and all the copycats and wannabes,” the ONI attaché added with a look of concern, coming to grips with a cold new reality. The CIA agents gazed at one another.
Merk pointed at the attaché, saying, “Every piece of intel we gather is either a false lead, a trapdoor, a diversion, or some item that can’t be verified, that can’t be traced back to its rogue source, yet falsely accuses another party. And then we have another problem.” He dropped a teabag into the middle glass of water and they watched the water change color, with the tea leaching out of the bag, spreading around the glass. “We need to read their tea leaves to know what they are planning to do next. Set off a dirty bomb, an incendiary device?”
“Okay, Toten, you’re onto something,” the Asian American CIA agent said. “We have another slice of evidence for you.” He aimed the remote at the wall screen and clicked images of a US drone and a Longbow Apache attack helicopter that shot the inferior Iranian drone out of the sky. More infrared images showed that the wreckage of the drone had fallen into the outer bay off Zeila, near the shoals of Ceebaad Island, where Merk and the dolphins operated the night before, collecting intel on the hijacked ship. “We downed the Iranian drone three hours ago,” he said. “Now do you think it’s untraceable?”
Chapter Sixty-One
DAWN. WITHOUT INFORMING the CIA agents, Merk and the ONI attaché took Peder Olsen out of the brig and escorted him with a pair of MPs to a nondescript warehouse. Inside, Tasi and Inapo were housed until they were going to be transported back to the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia.
“Hey, Toten?” Dante called out, running over.
Merk wheeled around to the hostage negotiator. He spotted the mobile phone in Dante’s hand and put his hand up to halt him. He motioned the ONI attaché to take Peder into the warehouse, where he would join them in a moment.
“Merk, listen—”
“Dante, don’t break my rules about PDAs and the biologic systems,” Merk said, pointing at the mobile phone. “My op is classified. Turn the device off.”
“What? You mean, your fins being stationed here?” he said, pointing to the warehouse.
“Turn it off, damn it,” Merk said, growing incensed. “You breached my op’s secrecy.”
“I was just going to tell you—”
“Piss off, Dawson. You were inside enemy territory. You engaged the pirates in Hargeisa and at the border. You operated from a runway shared with a Syrian diplo jet,” Merk said. “Ten-to-fucking-one Syrian Electronic Army hackers were on board. They scanned and hacked you.” He snatched the phone out of Dante’s hand and examined it. “Maybe they’re listening now.”
Merk held his finger to his lips to keep quiet, turned the device off, and handed it back to him. He moved away from his ex-SEAL commanding officer as if the man had contracted Ebola.
Inside the warehouse, Merk joined the ONI attaché, Peder Olsen, and a team of US Special Forces biologists and veterinarians, who were conducting last-minute prep work to get the dolphins ready for dry transport to the new Camp Lemonnier airfield, and then load them onto a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane that would fly them back to the US with half the NMMP team.
Merk led Peder between the two inflatable pools filled waist-deep with salt water. The pools were ringed with tall orange net fences.
“Are these your trained dolphins?” Peder asked.
“They are the ones who spotted your bombs under the supertanker, and then the next day the sea-mines around the container ship in Zeila bay,” Merk said, nudging Peder to stand between the pools. As Peder peered through the net at Tasi, Merk stepped back and nodded to Inapo in the other pool.
The dolphin fluked around in a circle and on the rotation whipped his tail, lashing a rope of water over Peder. The netting vibrated; the pool water sloshed back and forth like an overflowing bathtub. The Norwegian sniper shook off being doused, with water streaming down his face, dripping on the floor. He glared at Inapo, saying, “Ja, hell, I’m all wet, thank you.”
Inapo bobbed up and down in the pool, laughing, mocking the drenched Norwegian. Peder wringed his clothes and shook his hands dry. Inapo sculled backward on his tail and belly-flopped, splashing Peder again. Thoroughly soaked, he swore in all the Scandinavian languages at the dolphin, threatening to roast Inapo for dinner, when, from behind, Tasi splashed the Norseman with a flume of water. Peder turned and sneered at Tasi to stop—when both dolphins splashed him with furious whipping of their tails, chasing him behind Merk.
Peder raised his hands in surrender, backing away from the pools.
The dolphins spun around, clicking, squealing victory whistles, laughing, nodding.
Everybody broke out in laughter at the Norwegian mercenary’s expense.
“Ja, go get changed. We’re leaving to Ramstein AFB in an hour,” Merk said.
Chapter Sixty-Two
MERK SAT IN the flight deck of the C-5 Galaxy with the pilot, copilot, navigator, cargo master, and ONI attaché, waiting for the long runway to clear out a trio of incoming C-17 Globemaster III transport planes. The ONI attaché pointed to the first two planes, noting they were from the 18th Air Support Operations Group at Pope Field, North Carolina. It was the third aircraft that drew his attention: The 53rd Electronic Warfare Group from Elgin AFB, Florida.
Camp Lemonnier, which housed 1,800 servicemen and special operations forces, and the latest CIA drone base, was getting bigger, faster. As asymmetrical warfare became the future of the twenty-first century, it all added up to more than drone surgical pinpricks and air strikes to prevent the reemergence of ISIS and its savage attacks.
“Cyberwar is entering a new phase of nastiness,” the ONI attaché said. “The
cyber assault team is being flown here to bore into the Syrian Electronic Army and Iran’s cyberterrorists deployed by the Revolutionary Guards Corps.”
“That’s one threat to the US, but not the main one,” Merk said. “Why go after the hackers with computer code? Why not take out their bunkers? That will send a message.”
Not expecting to hear that from Merk, the former SEAL turned pacifist dolphin trainer, the ONI attaché exchanged glances with the cargo master. They watched the last Big Bertha C-17 Globemaster III land heavy, fully laden, rolling across the runway, which had been expanded a few years back to receive the larger transport planes. The jumbo jet reversed engines, slowing down as it rode toward the end of the runway. The copilot signaled everyone to take their seats.
Once airborne, Merk would go back to the cargo bay to debrief Peder Olsen.
Chapter Sixty-Three
TWO-DOZEN SOLDIERS FROM the 4th Platoon, Brave Battery, 2nd Battalion, sat with their gear, backpacks, and duffel bags on one side of the fuselage. Some were chatting up a storm, others were half asleep, a nod away from deep slumber. Across from them, four MPs stood watch over Peder Olsen, whom they seated in a folding chair as the mercenary tried to grab some shut-eye.
With a tablet under his arm, Merk climbed down from the flight deck and headed over to him. He put the tablet on Peder’s lap. “Take a look at these. Tell me what you think.”
Peder shook himself awake and looked up at Merk and then at an underwater photo of a rusty boiler-type vessel sitting on the seafloor. “Ja, okay. From where did you get this?”
Merk pulled up a chair and sat next to him, saying, “From your years as an offshore oil diver and a special forces expert in your homeland, show me.” He handed the Norwegian a stylus to mark photos on the tablet that intrigued him or sparked questions.
For the next half hour, Peder swiped back and forth through the photos that Tasi and Inapo had captured underwater of the illegally dumped drums, barrels, and oversized boilers off the coast of northern Somalia. Instead of the discarded oil drums being repurposed for Syrian barrel bombs they were used to store waste—toxic, radioactive waste.
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