“Roger that. They are,” the reachback operator said, watching the ensuing inferno on an infrared live-feed.
Chapter Five
“GODDAMN IT, TOTEN, you don’t know your ass from your elbow. What were you thinking taking on the Iranian Guard Corps?” Captain Davis Whittal shouted, circling Merk like a trapped prey.
Merk sat in the middle of the captain’s conference room at the Jebel Ali US Naval Base in the United Arab Emirates. He stared at the fit young captain’s waist, then watched the veins in his neck throb with each biting word.
“Merk, you were unarmed, unfocused, and had no goddamn backup. Lt. Azar is dead. Dead … so rein yourself in, sailor. …” The captain paced back and forth. “I don’t care what black program you work for. You’re still in the United States Navy. We don’t lose good men on a hunch, or gut instinct. What were you going to do when they spotted you? Huh?” He nudged Merk’s shoulder.
Numb, Merk sighed, reflecting on the loss and stared aimlessly at the floor. Captain Whittal walked away, then turned 180 and stepped back, hovering over Merk, who began to pluck hairs from his eyebrow, one by one, in an unconscious self-mutilating trance.
“The cause of death is being determined as I rip your ass apart.” Captain Whittal leaned in Merk’s face and, dropping his voice a few decibels, said, “And yet you somehow got valuable intel last night out in the strait. Shit, what am I to do with you?”
Looking up at Whittal, Merk had nothing to say; the death of Azar cast an immense shadow over him and his reputation like an ice overhang.
“Toten, why didn’t you abort when you spotted the Iranians? Why did you ignore Morgan Azar’s pleas to pull out and bolt? ONI investigators are going to need to know the whys. And they will find out when they grill you. … Tehran is foaming at the mouth to attack us in retaliation,” the captain said.
“Retaliation? For what? The puke Quds Force didn’t know we were there?”
“You’re not listening. Read my lips and let my words sink in. … You’re no longer a SEAL, lieutenant. You haven’t been for a while. You left that branch of the navy a decade ago. You had one objective last night,” Captain Whittal railed, kicking a chair across the room with such force that it crashed into a wall. “Beyond getting your teammate killed, you broadcasted to the Ayatollah that US Navy dolphins are spying on them in their water.”
Whittal kept chiding Merk, tapping his shoulder, bumping him, getting in his glum face, shouting: “You could’ve lost the Dolphin Code to the enemy, instead of the sea.”
“But I didn’t, did I? Next time, I’ll tether the laptop to my leg,” Merk said, pissed off.
“Shit, Toten, you’re conflicted.”
“Conflicted?”
“Affirmative. Like I said, ‘your ass from your elbow,’” the captain shrieked. “What were you doing last night? Were you in Six mode? … Do you miss being a trained assassin?” He stepped away and paced in front of the dolphin whisperer. “I’m asking, because when my SEALs conducted inventory of the boghammer, they didn’t find anything. Just a spent flare gun shell.”
“Hell, I wish you could ask Lieutenant Azar about the flare. He fired it.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve permanently morphed into a no gun, pussy pacifist, or … are you just a puke lifer, like your navy mustang father?”
“Leave my old man out of this. He’s dead.”
“So is Azar. You could’ve had the systems killed, too.”
Merk shook his head, since he knew both Tasi and Inapo were very much alive. Two navy dolphins that should receive Medals of Honor for bravery under fire and carrying out tasks, not to mention their ability to improvise, got what? Some R&R downtime in a pool, a checkup, their teeth brushed, fed fish for their reward. That, Merk knew, was a bad deal.
Merk unzipped the top of his wet suit and pulled his arms out of the rubbery sleeves. He stripped down to his waist, revealing to Captain Whittal the faded Navy SEAL Trident tattoo on his right bicep and an orange-and-silver parang tattoo—“broken daggers”—on his right breast. But it was the left side that caught the captain’s eye. Like an aged map of the Louisiana Purchase, a burn scar covered the left flank of Merk’s back, wrapping around his side and arm and across his ribs up to his left breast. The sight of raw fused skin, tight as a snare drum, coarse like gravel, stopped the captain cold from pressing on with his verbal barrage.
Merk stood up, exhaled a calm breath, finding his center again, and asked, “Captain, when will the fins be released to my supervision?”
“Toten, we’re not talking about the systems right now. You have to give a deposition on the circumstances relating to Lt. Azar’s death. NMMP Director Hogue will do the grilling from San Diego. She will then see if the fact-finding discussion will require a JAG probe.”
“Look, I don’t want to feed Tasi and Inapo or even check their vitals. They need to be examined in water, in their environment, for post-traumatic stress. No different than soldiers coming back from the field of battle.”
“You and the biologic systems will be flown to the Naval Special Warfare Unit Three at the Asu Bahrain Navy Base at 1500 hours. You can examine them there,” Whittal said. Realizing he was no longer penetrating Merk, that his words were being ignored, that the dolphin whisper’s focus was elsewhere, that Merk had shut out the pain, compartmentalized it, pushed Azar’s death to the back of his mind, the captain said, “Toten, your request to use the French naval base here is denied. You’ll be stationed in Asu until your next mission, which should be soon.”
Merk grabbed a towel and headed to the captain’s quarters to shower and get changed.
After he got dressed, Merk returned to the conference room. On a live feed, he spent an hour answering questions from Naval Marine Mammal Program Director Susan Hogue and five ONI officers and investigators stationed on both US coasts and one at an undisclosed forward operating base in the Mid East. Merk filled the reports, one after the other, flipping through tablet screens, providing digital testimony on the events that transpired in the Strait of Hormuz, from Iran’s mine-laying operation and his decision not to abort, to ramming the Iranian pursuit boat that led to Morgan Azar being shot, his drowning, and death.
* * *
HOURS LATER, MERK finished the paperwork and headed outside. He stepped into the intense wall of heat, but it was the industrial odor of the oil refineries and natural gas processing plants across the port that magnified the loss of Morgan Azar. He worried about the health of his dolphins, not enough to be distracting him from thinking about his girlfriend though. There in the mechanized port of oil and gas and steel, he recalled her fine scent, the touch of her hair flowing through his fingers, and the warmth of her flesh pressed against his body.
He remembered her and then looked down the terminal to the fenced-in officer’s recreation building. It housed an outdoor swimming pool, shielded from the sun under tent-like canopies.
He wondered how Tasi and Inapo were doing, how they were holding up in the pool of water, as he headed to the medical examiner’s office to read Morgan Azar’s autopsy report and see his body, his face, one last time.
Chapter Six
SMOKE POURED OUT of the collapsed roof. The bombed stone building, which centered the market square in Jaar, smoldered in hot rubble. Citizens’ faces wrought with despair and belligerence, looked on, their eyes red and inflamed like embers in a fire. Mob rage flared with more and more onlookers pouring into Market Square.
The surgically accurate CIA drone strike caved in the slab roof, collapsing stone walls on two sides. Rescue workers, villagers, and policemen pulled the bloodied, lifeless bodies of children out of the wreckage. They picked their way around the broken beams and piles of debris to a row of waiting ambulances turned into makeshift hearses.
How could the US blow up an elementary school? It was tragic to blow up the Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders—at the Kunduz hospital in 2015, but quite another thing to raze a school full of children when
Navy SEALs were on the ground to laser-paint the target and signal intelligence, confirmed in order to avoid a repeated mistake. Perhaps worse, the American court system threw out a civil suit against the US president, congress, and the CIA for hunting down and killing Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born militant cleric who had joined AQAP, in a drone strike in Yemen 2011. The attack also killed al-Awlaki’s teenage son.
How would justice be served with militants and civilians being killed by drone strikes across a country shattered by civil war? And now children were dead. Yemeni soldiers joined the swelling throng that screamed, pumped fists, and waved knives, chanting “Death to America.”
The devastation of the drone strike tore open a school and not a terrorist safe house, as intelligence analysts had guaranteed with “ninety-eight percent accuracy.” It wasn’t the first time the controversial CIA drone program took innocent lives, or that children were victims of a remote, distant crime by the US’s autonomous, unmanned air vehicles.
Behind a news team filming the destroyed school, Bahdoon, the Yemeni-born, French-educated psychiatrist, videotaped the rescue operation. He captured the visceral anger of the people in the street with his smartphone. He adjusted his wire-frame glasses, filming as he looked for other dramatic pictures to shoot. A pair of tall, armed Somali warriors, dressed in rags, wearing light blue headscarves—hijabs—hovered in Bahdoon’s shadow. He stopped recording, removed his glasses, and wiped the dust out of his eyes. Bahdoon rubbed the lenses clean on his shirt and put the glasses back on. He saw a Yemeni soldier carry a woman’s arm out of the ruins and started filming again, capturing the grisly scene, tracking the soldier as he strode to a police vehicle and put the arm in the cooler, as if putting fish on ice.
The mob reacted to the dismembered arm. They screamed, shouting louder, cursing with bloodthirsty revenge. Some yelled for death. But the satellite that identified the CIA target hung in low earth orbit, while the CIA team that fired the drone’s Hellfire missiles sat in a climate-controlled mobile trailer in one of the secret drone bases in the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, or Djibouti, Africa. Each base was located more than five hundred miles away, making it hard to haul those responsible for the attack into the square to be stoned or beheaded.
Bahdoon was aware of that reality, just as he was cued into the power of social media. The videos he captured that day were already going viral around the world, not just on al Qaeda or ISIS websites, but across American and European channels, hitting news airwaves, Twitter feeds, YouTube, Facebook pages, and a myriad of social, mobile chat, and video platforms. Bahdoon the propagandist was keen on exploiting the social sentiment of the people against the West, who, he knew, would recoil in horror at the attack. Children blown to pieces, an elementary school destroyed. The school bombing put the US military machine on notice for days, if not weeks. And it might be the tipping point to force the CIA to scale back its drone operations in Yemen.
Bahdoon knew how to pull the psychological levers. He was educated in France and the United States. In less than a day the bombing would turn into a damning indictment against the US drone program with the UN, countries around the world, and Western journalists coming to report on the horror. So Bahdoon ordered the locals to line up the grieving, distraught parents. Their images would raise global awareness with their fury directed at the United States, the “Great Satan,” who destroyed the school in the drone strike.
After filming an elderly husband and wife embracing in pain over the loss of their child, Bahdoon turned off the videocam. He stepped to the Somali guards and said in their native tongue, “Call the scout at the dock and ask him how many Coast Guard ships are in port.”
One Somali guard took out a mobile phone and called a scout at the seaside pier in Zinjibar. During the war on terror, both Jaar and Zinjibar had been fought over, captured, taken back, recaptured, and lost again to AQAP fighters—a.k.a., Ansar al-Shari’a—in their ongoing battle with CIA-sponsored Yemeni government forces, which ultimately lost to the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The Somali guard listened and nodded again and again. He flicked two fingers, letting Bahdoon know there were two Coast Guard cutters in port.
Bahdoon stepped behind the Somali guards to make a call to the highlands north of Jaar in Rub’ al Khali—the Empty Quarter—one of the largest sand deserts in the world, stretching from Yemen and south Saudi Arabia, east across Oman into the UAE.
Speaking Arabic, Bahdoon said, “Imran, take the camels to the well.” He ended the call without receiving confirmation on the other side; he grinned at the Somali guards and wiped dust off his brow. Bahdoon had something far more powerful than a civil lawsuit in a US court on his smartphone. He had the raw images of a CIA drone strike on the “innocent lambs of Yemen.”
He tweeted the photos dripping with blood on jihadi and Twitter accounts he hacked.
Chapter Seven
AN A-FRAME TENT sat at the base of a sand dune. Camels slurped water in a trough, watched by a few tribesmen. The animals were showpieces for US military satellites and spy drones, in case a UAV was retasked to watch the tent from above.
Inside the tent, Qas, a twenty-five-year-old hacker from the Syrian Electronic Army, scraped dust off his scarred face as he watched Imran listen to Bahdoon’s coded message. He kept his hands by the laptop keyboard, wary that the NSA or the US National Reconnaissance Office could hack his keystrokes. Imran, a beefy, mustachioed Syrian army sergeant, turned off the satellite phone, and repeated the coded message in Arabic to Qas: “Take the camels to the well.”
The shorthand meant cyber-hijacking a tanker in the Gulf of Aden.
But Qas froze. So Imran slapped him in the face. He grabbed the boy by the nape of his neck and shoved a pistol in his eye, growling, “You no longer work for Assad’s army, you work for me. You don’t obey me, I’ll cut open your scar and bleed you.”
The engineer nodded, carefully lifting his fingers over the keyboard, waiting for Imran to withdraw the firearm from his face. Qas was a tall, wiry-frame geek with a crooked nose, broken several times; a pair of scars from the civil war in Syria hardened his resolve. The wounds dated back to the start of the “Water War” in 2011, when Syrian farmers protested the politically driven water policies that crushed agriculture during a drought.
When Imran withdrew the pistol, Qas swiped the laptop awake. He clicked open a link to a slew of Trojan horses, malware that had been installed in the supertanker’s navigation system a month before with a flash-drive. It was an inside job. More viruses were installed remotely when the captain’s first mate opened a spear-phished email. With the viruses activated from their dormant state, Qas had monitored the ship for a week and now uploaded a superimposed map of the Gulf of Aden. He showed Sergeant Imran the oil tanker’s course running through the northern waypoints of the gulf, and asked, “How many degrees north do you want to pull the ship off course?”
“Degrees? Six,” Imran answered confidently, watching the ship’s blinking image move at sixteen knots. “Will they know?”
“How far they drift north? No. The hijacked Automatic Identification Systems transponders is double blind,” Qas explained. “We change the ship’s course. The pilot changes it back to what he thinks is right. But the new course sends the ship to where we want it to go.”
“Praise Allah. The tanker will be in range of the Somali team in thirty minutes,” Imran said, glancing at his watch.
“How much longer do we need to stay here? This tent’s hot as an oven,” Qas said.
“After the operation is carried out. We move tonight across the cooling sand,” Imran said.
Nodding, Qas said, “When the tanker comes in contact, I will disable the water cannons and other pirate defenses.”
Chapter Eight
THE ORANGE LEVIATHAN plowed through the Gulf of Aden laden with two million barrels of crude oil, heading west toward the Red Sea.
Low, slow, the three-football-fields-long supertanker followed the anti-pirate shipping lane waypoints off t
he coast of Yemen. This alternate course was made in an attempt to steer clear of the Somali pirates, who, after a steep decline in raids, hostage captures, and ransoms, began to crank up scouting activities again around the Horn of Africa, casing the ships that sailed into the waters every day, but not attacking them.
Of the 20,000 vessels that pass through the gulf each year, transiting to and from the Suez Canal through the Red Sea, Somali pirates used to attack one in 600 ships. Since 2011, that ratio had plummeted. The decline in the rate of attacks was due to the NATO-led counter-piracy program. That included erecting regional piracy call centers and the deployment of the Vessels Protection Detachments (VPD)—the hiring of armed guards placed on board the ships by the shipping companies. Two years after that strategy was implemented, it shifted piracy away from Somalia to West Africa, off the coast of Mali and Nigeria. Confident that the pirate attacks had waned in the gulf, frugal shipowners reduced the VPD crews to pairs and even a lone trained sniper. Such was the case for the Norwegian-owned, Singapore-flagged supertanker Blå Himmel—Blue Heaven.
On the bridge, Peder Olsen, a machined ex-counterterrorism sniper, stood by the ship’s Danish captain, as well as the pilot and first mate—both Filipinos. While they chatted in accent-rich English, Peder, from Norway, scouted the blue sea to identify potential threats. Hot, dehydrated, he had enough being in the sun, patrolling decks and catwalks. The broad-shoulder mercenary with cropped blond hair had a bad case of sunburn. It made his neck and scalp tender with pain.
Peder knew the scouting of the pirate boats was a passive activity. So he focused his attention on the ships and tankers that might smuggle Iranian oil and weapons through the gulf. He chugged a bottle of water, took off his sweaty tee shirt, wiped a damp towel across his strapping chest and arms, and pulled a clean tee shirt over his head. As he pushed his arms through the sleeves, he turned his focus to the sea when the pilot pointed to a pair of wooden dhows off the port side.
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