Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  The CIA director shook his head. With mounting angst he badgered the analysts: “How long have they been breaking bread?”

  “Thirty … maybe thirty-six hours,” one Red Cell analyst replied.

  “Jesus.” He looked over at the SAD director, and ordered, “Mobilize whatever forces you have on the ground and kidnap that bitch before she leaves. You know what she’s doing? Well, I don’t need Clandestine Services to tell me. … She’s finishing plans to erect a long-range missile site aimed at Europe. Congress wants to handcuff our ability to interrogate key assets? Bloody idiots.”

  “You’re serious about snatching the engineer?” the director of operations spoke up.

  “Why not? The glare of the media might just shock them into action. Don’t forget they mocked our agents in the War on Terror with the AG’s show trial,” the CIA director said. “Every time I went to visit the president, his cabinet, and congressmen—who had lost faith in the war, who had lost their spine to back this agency, who had lost their way in Yemen, who had pulled out of that conflict prematurely without finishing the job—I got the sense that they didn’t fully appreciate what the stakes were. They didn’t get it. But now, now when the dust settles on this Syria-ISIS-Kurdish-Libya-Iranian shitstorm, they’ll wish they were no longer in office, that they were retired, spreading their gospel bile on the lecture circuit. Instead, they pushed their naïve bullshit agenda of peace on the world, underfunded and undermanned the war, and blocked the army’s surge required to defeat the Islamic militants—and defeat them by air. They never handed the baton to NATO or asked us to take charge and kill the enemy.”

  One satellite image appeared to show a guard standing on the roof of the school/terrorist safe house in the Jaar square. That caught the CIA director’s eye. He ordered analysts to look at past pictures of the roof at night for comparison, and then asked, “What’s an armed guard doing on the roof protecting an empty school building at night? Is he a villager or an AQAP tango?”

  The deputy DO wondered, too. Then the CIA director stepped over to a plasma screen showing dorsalcam images of a navy dolphin conducting swim-bys of the subsea, trans-strait oil pipeline, and then Iran’s laying of the sea-mines. He looked around the room, and challenged his staff: “Hey, Red Cell Team, tell me one of those dolphins triggered the release of the mine?”

  A female analyst spoke up: “Director, that’s affirmative. All spy satellites confirm the hit on an Iranian fishing cover ship. I spoke to Susan Hogue last night. She’s the head of the navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego. Hogue confirmed the direct action. One of the navy’s dolphin team members made it out alive; the other one was shot and drowned during the escape. He was a former Special Forces operator turned veterinarian. His name was Lt. Morgan Azar.”

  The CIA director shook his head to his deputies. Annoyed, he said, “Did you hear that? Tehran almost got us good with a fishing trip. Well, now we know what to look for when we retask our spy satellites. Is Red Cell operative Alan Cuthbert in position?”

  “Yes, director. He landed at Fort 24 two hours ago,” the analyst said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE THUDDING ROTORS vibrated Merk’s chest. They purred in his wrist as he absorbed the droning white noise, which made him drowsy until he nodded off. Soon REM sleep twitched his eyelids as the Black Hawk helicopter was en route to drop him and Navy SEAL Commanding Office Nico Gregorius, along with the dolphins, inside Somalian territorial waters.

  The transport helicopter crossed the Gulf of Aden flying above the surface of the sea under radar. The operation used the veil of night to penetrate Somali airspace, when few fishermen or pirates were out at sea, especially after the double hijackings.

  Backed by a lethal gunship in an Apache Longbow helicopter trailing a half klick behind, they were escorted deep into Somalia coastal waters. The Longbow was armed with eight “fire and forget” air-to-surface, RF-Hellfire missiles with advanced precision-kill weapon-system rockets, a platform designed for the littoral battlespace with the Longbow Fire Control Radar. Tasked with intercepting a pirate skiff—if for some reason the Somalis still lingered offshore—the pilot and copilot-gunner were ordered to track and follow, but not engage the target, since the aim was to gather intelligence on the location of the mothership, which still had not been located.

  In the Black Hawk, the napping Merk sat on the floor of the cargo bay. He had made it a point not to hang with the dolphins. Close ties with the advance biologic systems, as the Navy Marine Mammal Program referred to its dolphins, was frowned upon. No excessive bonding or close relationships with the sea mammals. Merk understood the game and heard it all before. He held his back to the dolphins.

  Tasi and Inapo were lying in slings suspended in hardboxes with gurney-casters, the brakes in locked position. Thin poly sheets draped the dolphins’ bodies, with slits cut for the dorsal fins, blowholes, and eyes. Articulating branches of micro-sprinklers sprayed their epidermis, keeping the sea mammals’ skin moist during air transport, which dried them out, stressed them by bumping their core-body temperature up toward feverish levels. That was another health problem Merk wanted to avoid at the start of a mission.

  A replacement Army Special Forces marine biologist—it would have been Lt. Azar had he not died in the Strait of Hormuz—monitored the mammals’ vital signs, recording medical data on a tablet. After she finished the spot check, she prepared liquid vitamins mixed with minced kelp, kale, and Norwegian fish oil, and loaded the concoction into a handful of oversized syringes. She opened a cooler and inspected the fresh herring and mackerel the Pacific bottlenose dolphins consumed as reward during training exercises that consisted of locating mines or unexploded torpedoes.

  Feeling a burr in his behind, Merk awakened. He opened his eyes. Disoriented for a second, he refocused his whereabouts and then reminded himself that the new op was not an undergoing training exercise. The mission was real. It was the second live littoral operation within a week for Tasi and Inapo inside enemy water. He wondered how they would perform, how they would fare under stress, how they would still remain an asset in the age of drones, robots, mobile apps, digital intel, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things. The navy dolphins were moving sensors; and it was his job to collect the data.

  Over the next twenty-four hours Merk would learn just how well his year of training Tasi and Inapo at a secret base in Guam had paid off. The NMMP brass would be evaluating him. “Conflicted” or not, as Captain Davis Whittal labeled him in the debriefing on what happened in the strait, Merk had to look beyond weapons and passivity and balance following orders that put the dolphins in harm’s way versus his desire to one day set them free in the wild.

  On a tablet, Merk watched the drone video of the missile strike on the school in Yemen. He looked at the time of the attack and realized it took place within forty minutes of the Iranians dropping mines in the strait. He didn’t believe in such “rainbow” coincidences; there had to be a connection. But what?

  SEAL mode came creeping back into Merk’s mind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ON THE WAY to Somali, Tasi and Inapo appeared calm on the surface; their vitals and core body temperature were normal. Stress didn’t show up in their behavior, not during dry transport, not when he trained them in Guam and then later for NMMP and DARPA brass under a top-secret cover on a remote Hawaiian island. How would they react to a second mission in a week?

  Merk didn’t know the answer. But the data he collected on their behavior, sleep, and eating patterns might point to a sudden outburst or breakdown in discipline. Still, he was going into uncharted territory with them, and any other pod of navy dolphins he had worked with in the past for that matter.

  When the Black Hawk reached the insertion point a few miles off the coast of Somalia, it hovered off the coast, halfway between Bosaso and Maydh, an ancient holy Arabian city in the Sanaag region that centered Somalia’s north coast. The Black Hawk’s cargo door opened; a pair of SEAL divers ju
mped backward into the sea.

  The helicopter’s cargo bay opened. In patchy water, the cargo master lowered a Zodiac inflatable boat to the divers. In succession, the cargo master made the delivery of arms, ammo, food, supplies, and equipment down to the divers. Tasi and then Inapo were lowered in their hardboxes to the sea. When the lamb’s wool–lined stretchers sank below the surface, the dolphins wiggled out of the slings and swam around the drop zone, inspecting the perimeter to guard the divers.

  After the hardboxes were hoisted back up to the cargo bay, a winch lowered Merk and Nico into the Zodiac. The divers handed supplies to them and were lifted up to the helicopter.

  Merk flashed a hand-sign to the dolphins, signaling them to leap onto the rubber boat. Tasi landed on board a liner draped over the starboard gunwale in a spit of spray. Merk strapped her down and rubbed the shark-bite dorsal fin for good luck. Then Inapo dove under the hull of the Zodiac, corkscrewed up, and slithered onto the opposite gunwale. Merk held Inapo in place, pulled the strap over the mammal’s missile-shaped body, tying him down.

  Nico turned south to the empty sea, flipped down night-vision goggles, and scanned the silhouette of the rocky horizon in the distance. The Longbow pulled alongside, hovering fifty feet above the waves, its four main rotor blades whooshing in the air, rippling creases in the sea. Its reverse-tricycle landing gear deployed as if it were going to set down on the water. The pilot and copilot-gunner, who used FLIR and the Longbow radar mast that can see through fog, searched ahead to make sure the sea space was clear. With a flash of a laser pointer from the cockpit, Nico signaled they were heading to shore. He turned on the engine and rode the craft; Merk stretched out between the dolphins, keeping them calm on the bumpy ride to shore.

  Behind the CO, Merk watched the helicopters bank away. First, the transport and then the Longbow swept back toward the USS New York. He gazed in Tasi’s eye to check her mood. She appeared calm. Inapo gave off a different, moody vibe.

  Nico gunned the inflatable boat. The stiff wind rippled Merk’s face, which was blackened with grease paint like an ex-Navy SEAL. To calm the dolphins down, Merk drummed his fingers on the rubber tube. Even with the muted droning noise of the outboard motor and the vibrations from the bumpy ride, the dolphins listened to Merk’s fingers through their jawbones resting on the gunwales. Having been raised by his navy father, Bill Toten, hopping from base to base, the one constant was his old man teaching Merk the dots and dashes of Morse code since he was a child. In turn, Merk passed that communication of sound on to the dolphins he trained. He tapped his fingers in dots and long dashes, signaling the dolphins to rest, to shut down one hemisphere of the brain and slumber in a state of half awake, half asleep. The last series of dashes—taps—relaxed Inapo enough to halt the mammal’s dead-eyed look and squeak at Merk.

  The dolphins would ride on the rubber boat close to shore, before being released. Had the mission been set in the hostile arena of the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, or near the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, where the Islamic State, the Kurds, and Iraqi forces were fighting over the Kuwaiti oil fields, Merk would have found a way to deep-six their mission.

  For Nico the ride in to Somalia was different. The admirals and analysts at Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had originally identified the barren island of Jasiira Maydh, eight miles north of Maydh, for Merk and Nico to set up a staging nest. On further analysis of the mile-long rocky island with football-stadium-high bluffs, no vegetation or fresh water, and a lunar, fissure-torn, guano-covered surface, the island gave the CO and brass at SOCOM pause. It would have put Merk and Nico offshore, out in the open with little relief from the sun, while being stuck on a rock with no escape route. So the gambit to operate onshore in a CIA safe house was estimated by some analyst to be less risky.

  Less than a mile offshore, in front of a one-story box sticking up on the toe of a hill, Merk zoomed on an object floating on the sea a couple hundred yards ahead. He held up a fist for Nico to shut off the engine. The inflatable boat slowed to a glide, then to a drift rocking in the waves. The CO trained night-vision binoculars on the dark object. Initially, he thought it was a bough of driftwood or a dhow. In the choppy sea, the object bobbed, making positive ID harder.

  After a long moment, a pair of silhouettes, human figures, could be seen kneeling in the object that grew into the outline of a fishing skiff. Merk listened over the whistle of the wind until he heard the faint throttle of an outboard motor. He looked back at Nico and flashed two fingers for two fishermen. The CO unzipped a shoulder bag and took out a folding-stock rifle with a night-vision scope. He opened the stock and aimed the rifle at the fishermen; Merk reached over and lowered the barrel, shaking his head. Nico gave a hard look; Merk took out an audio-telescope, turned it on, and aimed the acoustical nozzle in the direction of the skiff. He slipped on earpods, and listened to the engine drown out sound in the distance.

  Merk played with the squelch fader on the transceiver until he filtered out the static noise of the fisherman’s putting engine, while tuning up the sound of their voices. As he zeroed on the idle, but insect-like chatter of their foreign tongue, he realized they weren’t pirates or terrorists. He could sense that by the tone of small talk. Still, they had eyes, ears, and tongues that could spread the word to the pirates if they spotted the small US cell inside Somalia waters.

  Knowing secrecy was paramount, Merk unclipped the straps on the dolphins. With his twin hand-signs, the dolphins leapt off the rubber boat and sliced under the waves. They raced toward the fishing skiff, fluking across the surface. When they came within a short distance of the craft, they dove under, mirroring one another’s moves, silently communicating.

  Merk motioned Nico to watch at the skiff closing on their position, when one dolphin leapt over the boat, grazing a fisherman.

  Startled, the man ducked; his mate shut off the motor. They turned on flashlights and panned the sea searching for the wraith that unnerved them. The man stood up to shine the light at a steeper angle below the surface, looking here and there—when the other dolphin shot up, rammed the boat from behind, jolting it hard. The fisherman stumbled and dropped the flashlight into the sea. Spooked, his mate motioned him to sit down as he started the engine, and sped off into the night, racing away from the area.

  Merk and Nico shared a laugh and then picked up paddles to row ashore.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE BOX ON the dark horizon, when up close, became a white seaside house on a mound with a dock jutting into a lagoon. Merk glanced at Nico, signaling that the house was their destination. When they drew within a hundred meters of shore, the outline of a person pacing in front of the seaside villa stood out as the new concern.

  “Who’s that? Anyone expecting us?” Merk whispered, knowing the hijacked ships were far west in the next state of Somaliland. He dialed the binoculars, zooming to see if the guard was armed. Although he didn’t see a rifle in the hands or slung over the shoulder, it didn’t mean the guard was unarmed. Merk motioned Nico to proceed with caution. Again, the “all clear” intel on land from the Office of Naval Intelligence, Navy SEALs, and CIA was off—by a mile. The safe house wasn’t empty. Nico had some explaining to do, but it wasn’t going to happen then.

  Merk took out a high-pitched whistle and blew it. The call, silent to human ears, summoned Tasi and Inapo to swim back to the rubber boat and ride them to shore. There, Merk would observe whether the safe house was indeed safe, or was an advanced CIA hideout that had its cover blown. He aimed the audioscope and listened to the guard’s flip-flop sandals crunch on the granular surface. The footsteps paced back and forth, stopped, pivoted 180 degrees, then strode back. Without another guard to chat with, the sounds detected were of little use. He faded out the footsteps and eavesdropped on other sounds in the background. Beyond the wind chafing the eaves of the Spanish tile roof there was nothing audible to note.

  Unable to wait for Nico to announce a Plan B—if there was one—Merk needed
to take a closer look of the guard to see whether he was armed. With a nod that he was going in, Merk slipped on dive goggles, snapped his feet into swim fins, and rolled over the gunwale.

  The water was balmy with a strong leeward current.

  Tasi glided over and offered her dorsal fin; Merk grabbed hold and hitchhiked a ride to shore. He stayed low as Tasi rode him in, plowing through the waves that rose in the surf. The black crests rolled, breaking in streams of heavy white foam. Feeling a wave lift him, Merk released his grip and bodysurfed to shore. He kept his head up, hands out in front to block against any rocks striking his face, and glided in on the breaking swell.

  The surf washed Merk up a stony beach. As it ebbed with another wave about to break on top of him, he heard footsteps crunch toward him and then stop. He saw sandals with black feet and polished toenails, which froze him. He was staring at a woman’s feet. But the sound of a handgun cocking stilled him. Merk felt another wave break over his legs as he pulled the dive goggles off and looked up at a tall, built African woman with long braided hair that slipped down the back of her shirt, aiming a handgun at his forehead.

  Merk raised his hands; being caught spiked his blood pressure. Then out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed one of the dolphins skimming the shallows, sliding sideways. And with a burst, the dolphin tail-whipped a column of water over the guard. Drenched and startled, the woman slipped and fell. Merk grabbed her ankles, pulled her toward him. He pinned her face to the ground with his forearm, and wrested the handgun from her grip.

  “Who are you?” she spat out in English with a Kenyan accent.

  Merk held her down, removing the magazine from the pistol and emptied the bullet from the chamber, wondering the same question about her.