Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  She clicked the safety off, gripped the pistol behind the swaying Dong-Sun, ready to fire. The engineer stood still, raising her hands. She looked back at Ferdows rolling over on his side feeling his clothes for the tablet. He found it under his shirt.

  A burly Baathist colonel stepped out of the jeep in a Syrian army uniform. He bore a thick mustache and scanned the stunned and wounded in a dark gaze. He reached inside the cab and pulled out a shotgun, leaned his elbows on the hood, aiming the barrel at the agents. Alan Cuthbert glanced over to his colleague. Coming to an accord with just a look, he thrust his hands above his head as he approached the jeep. He and the colonel exchanged a few words in Arabic, when the agent stopped. The Baathist colonel lifted the rifle off the hood and aimed at Cuthbert’s chest. The colonel checked a birthmark on the agent’s left forearm, saying, “Cuthbert, yes. Confirmed,” and waved the female agent to bring Dong-Sun over.

  With the wounded generals sprawled on the ground, writhing, moaning, immobilized, the colonel pushed the female agent aside, lifted the chin of Dong-Sun, and stared at her blank gaze.

  He twisted her around, as Alan Cuthbert bound her wrists behind her back with snap-ties. The female CIA agent pulled the North Korean engineer around the other side of the jeep, and dumped her in the backseat.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  AT THE BORDER, the CIA agents abandoned the jeep, stuck in a berm.

  They whisked Kim Dong-Sun with the ex-Saddam loyalist over the border. The Baathist colonel, a mole buried deep in Syria’s civil war, was the reason why the CIA was able to pull off the brazen daylight kidnapping. A battery of Iraqi Army soldiers and policemen applauded the capture. Behind the cordon, a quad of American military officials waited to bring the North Korean engineer inside for low-intensity interrogation.

  Dong-Sun scanned the dark-skinned faces of the Iraqis, then saw the pale American officers pulling back, opening a side door of Fort 24, a tan brick and bitumen building perched on an arid hill. An array of radio antennas pointed to the sky. Fort 24 had survived the Syrian civil war and the area of what ISIS once claimed in erasing the border between Iraq and Syria.

  Inside a small room with no mirrors or windows, the CIA agents dumped the North Korean in a chair, cut the plastic ties off her wrists, and pushed her seat up to a wood table with a glass of water on top. Dong-Sun finger-combed her hair out of her dusty face, took a sip of water, and studied the faces of Alan Cuthbert, the blonde female agent, then eyed a scruffy US Marine sergeant sitting between them. A fourth person entered the room. He was a short nerd dressed in civvis. He, she knew, was an interpreter on the surface, a CIA agent under the guise of a contractor specialist.

  Kim Dong-Sun shook her head. She reached across the table and took a pen and pad from the female agent, then began to scrawl in English a request and then drew a man with a beard.

  The note read: Let me speak to the man alone. Turn off the cameras to the room.

  Dong-Sun slid the note across the table to Alan Cuthbert, who read it. He smirked and slid the note over to the female agent, who motioned everyone to step outside.

  Cuthbert closed the door behind her, signaled to the camera in the corner of the ceiling to shut off, then sat down with the laptop and his smartphone, making sure they were recording their conversation. He then rolled out the blueprint of the missile launch site and stared at Dong-Sun, as if the engineer, based on a hard look, would divulge state secrets and plans in a second.

  “Kimchi, you don’t need an interpreter to talk to me. So tell me what these plans mean,” he said, flicking grains of sand out of his beard. “You’re a pretty good marksman for a woman.”

  Dong-Sun picked up on the racial slur and gender slight and frowned at the burly CIA agent. Sitting still like Buddha, Dong-Sun stared at Cuthbert, who lasered a death stare back.

  “What the hell? Why won’t you talk?”

  “Are we live with your bosses?” she said in a thick Korean accent, tapping the laptop.

  Alan Cuthbert nodded, saying, “Sure. We have an open live feed to CIA’s Sixth Floor Operations Center, with the CIA director and his team. They watched the kidnapping unfold live.” He then spoke to the laptop, announcing, “Director, this is Baghdad station chief at Fort 24 border crossing. We’re in possession of North Korean ballistic missile engineer, Kim Dong-Sun.” He wouldn’t state his real or any other name in front of her.

  Dong-Sun managed a razor-thin grin. She took a sip of water, and—slammed the glass down on Cuthbert’s fingers. He yelled, grabbing his hand in pain. She lunged across the table, chopped the off-balance agent across the forehead and pushed him to the floor, rolled over the table and locked the steel door, putting a chair against the doorknob. She smashed the glass, took a jagged shard and hovered it over Cuthbert, motioning him to stay on the floor. The engineer then spun the laptop toward her as guards banged on the door, trying to break into the room.

  She showed her face and spoke into the laptop mic in American English: “This is CIA Agent Jenny Myung King of SOG Clandestine Services. Hi, Director, I can see you …” Jenny King eyed the shocked and speechless Alan Cuthbert still on the floor. She repeated her name, her senior CIA officer rank and pay level of GS-15, and then revealed the top-secret code name of the missile site Special Ops mission she was involved in: “Operation Sandblast Scree.”

  She ripped off her North Korean army tunic, tossed it on the floor, shouting, “Your field morons have blown my cover.” She banged her fist on the door, yelling, “Wait. Stop the noise. Wait a minute.” As Cuthbert climbed off the ground, signaling to the camera that he was “okay,” Jenny spoke to the laptop: “They have ruined nine months of deep surveillance. They have blown my clandestine op. They have wasted thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars paying off local assets. Now let me bring the Langley ass-clowns of Red Cell up to speed … I already kidnapped the real Dong-Sun thirty-six hours ago. The person you need to interrogate is Syrian General Adad and the Iranian nuclear scientist Ferdows. But your pack mules left them in the desert. Isn’t that right, Alan Cuthbert?”

  Agent Jenny King turned away and sat on the edge of the table, burying her face in her hands to absorb her frustration. She looked up at the ceiling, shouting, “God, you guys suck.”

  Feeling sick to his stomach, Cuthbert kicked the chair away from the door and opened it, eying the woman he thought—no, he believed—was the real North Korean engineer, “Sorry, Agent King.”

  “Worse than kidnapping me was leaving Ferdows’s tablet behind,” Jenny said.

  “What’s on his tablet?” Cuthbert asked, rubbing his forehead.

  “Tehran’s plans of moving hot material across the Syrian deserts to Homs … from there to the West and maybe the US to detonate,” she said. “This is the closest we have ever gotten.”

  Mouthing he was sorry again, Cuthbert sat down and said, “We can make this right.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said, as the real CIA station chief stood at the threshold of the door.

  “Yes, King, I can,” he said, then swung the laptop around to face him, as he explained his on-the-fly plan for Agent King with the CIA executives. “We send the North Korean King back to Iran to make the CIA’s gross mistake of kidnapping her go away.”

  “Alan, that might work,” she admitted. “They don’t know I’m a CIA agent.”

  “No one does in here. Except a few of us,” he said.

  The station chief stepped inside the room and shut the door, motioning Cuthbert to hold it a minute while he stood on a chair and pulled the cable out of the camera.

  “Go on, Alan, tell me how you will make it work,” she said, dropping the glass shard on the table.

  “Tehran has screwed us ever since the 2015 nuclear treaty. They set me, the agency, and the US up to fail in Yemen with the planted bad intel on the drone strike.”

  “You mean the terrorist headquarters that was actually be an elementary school, where body parts of children were pulled from the
rubble?” she said.

  “Yes, that one. Funny thing, we accidentally got back at them the same night when a US Navy dolphin op uncovered a Quds fishing trawler mining the Strait of Hormuz.”

  “Was that survey run by Merk Toten?” she asked.

  He nodded yes.

  “Did Merk make it out alive?” she asked, concerned about the health and well-being of her boyfriend.

  “You can say that. I sat down with him for his next mission. He’s now deep in a Black Lit op in Somalia. Like you, it doesn’t exist.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Pirate ship, mothership, citizenship.

  Those were the words that flickered through Merk’s mind as he observed the destitute poverty—the hovels, the lean-tos, the shantytowns—that dotted the broken coast of rocky coves and sea cliffs amid stretches of pristine sandy beaches, one with the rusting hull of a hijacked ship run aground.

  Inland, he glimpsed garbage strewn near the poor dwellings; worn clothes dried on the same lines as fishing nets; elderly men drinking spirits in the shade with armed Somali militants looming in the background, smoking rolled cigarettes.

  On the leeside, the turquoise blue sea boasted the ocean’s wealth. Sitting there day after day, cooked by the copper-hot Somali sun, lured their eyes to gaze out at the sea and dream about the riches of the world passing by in the shipping lanes every day. The Gulf of Aden seemed to be their only hope in a destitute land, to seek and steal a fortune. Whether it was trawling the shoals for fish, depleted after years of overfishing by foreign ships, or extracting money in the hostage-for-ransom trade that, after rising from the shadow of obscurity in 2008, had been successful for the “Pirates of Puntland,” who became a scourge for international shipping and a model for Nigerian pirates to copy the same business model.

  Of the thousands of ships and vessels, box carriers and oil tankers that passed the coast of Somalia each year, why wouldn’t a warlord dispatch packs of youths on skiffs to steal from the rich? It was only money. Just numbers. Money for lives and cargo. They usually received the money; the hostages often got released unharmed. Yet it grew into an arms race.

  Pondering the limitations they were about to face in the search for the pirates, an alert flashed on screen: “Receiving Com.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  MERK LOWERED HIS sunglasses and eyed a pane open on the laptop. An aerial shot of a new drone flying over the coast near Somalia’s western port city of Berbera came into view.

  At an altitude of two miles, the drone’s high-resolution eye captured the long strand of beaches that marked Berbera, once a tourist hot spot for European divers. Now it was all but deserted. Beyond a couple of beached fishing boats, with nets draped over them, or a few youths sauntering barefoot on the sandy hook peninsula of the natural harbor, there was a row of unused fishing boats strung together at a single anchor, a wrecked dhow tilting on a sandbar.

  A quarter mile west of the port by the fuel storage tanks, the immense black-orange hull of the Blå Himmel rose out of the shallow water, listing starboard. Its watermark visible, exposing the lower hull to splotches of barnacles, the bow of the supertanker had run aground half a football field from shore.

  Waves passed on both sides of the ship, as if the hull acted like a man-made jetty to buffer beach erosion. But as Merk enlarged the shot full-screen, he saw no one lingering by the vessel in the surf, on its decks, in the bridge, or anywhere else onboard. Even the on-land fuel depot was deserted. He didn’t see an oil slick, which meant the double-hulled Blå Himmel sat on a soft bed of sand. That told him the pirates knew where they would strand the ship, on the sandbars of Berbera, daring international forces to come inside Somalia’s territorial waters to retrieve it.

  Was it a trap? He wondered.

  The drone’s camera, controlled remotely by UAV operators out of Chabelley Airfield at Djibouti base, zoomed on the fore starboard deck to a dried puddle of what appeared to be blood. The more Merk studied the red swatch, running it across an imaginary sight line of a sniper back to the top of the bridge at the stern of the ship, some 750 feet away, the more he was convinced the blood belonged not to the captain or crew, but to the slain pirate leader, Samatar. He wouldn’t need blood type or forensic analysis. What the Norwegian mercenary, Peder Olsen, whispered to him was enough for Merk to know that the pool of blood belonged to the dead pirate leader.

  Off the bow several rows of footprints dotted the beach to and from the sea. Some prints were defined step for step; others were rubbed out, as hostages must have been dragged against their will through the sand. Merk was certain the pirates had a greeting committee when they arrived late that night. But what he didn’t see, such as wheel ruts from vehicles hauling cargoes or hostages away, puzzled him.

  Before Merk informed Nico on what he observed, the gap to gather intel just grew larger. Directed to swim to the next bight in the coast populated with fishing huts but with no slips or docks, a dozen klicks outside of Berbera, the dolphins wouldn’t arrive to the site for a few hours. He would then decide whether to move to the stranded supertanker when they arrived.

  From the GPS chip in the Chinese cell phone, which kept a tab on Nairobi, Nico said she had driven past the fifty klicks she mentioned. She took a fork in the road, deviating from the coast at Berbera, driving inland south through a pass in the Sheikh Mountains. With Nairobi continuing on that road, Merk knew there would be several more hours of intel blackout—at least on his side—of what was taking place near or away from the tanker. That spelled trouble since the first seventy-two hours after a hijacking is the most critical time to locate hostages and learn their fate.

  Another alert flashed on the laptop. The webcams Nico and Merk had installed in Nairobi’s house chimed in a live feed. Merk blew up the cams into a multi-view screen, showing: outside the front of the house, inside the kitchen, and in the living room. He tapped Nico’s arm, nudging him to look at the laptop. Nico scanned the road ahead, checked the rearview mirror—they were alone—and pulled over. They looked at a pair of intruders peeking in the windows, checking the property on both sides of the house, and then picked the lock and entered the front door.

  Inside, the intruders moved from room to room, opening closet doors, inspecting the dishes in the sink, reading the labels on bottles in the wine cabinet, unaware there was a hidden closet behind the fine wines. They rifled through the mail Nairobi deliberately left on the table. Merk wondered if they would look under the table and find the stack of euros she had taped to the underside. After a few minutes in the kitchen, the intruders fanned out to different rooms. Any thought about Nico and Merk returning to the safe house vanished. As a result, their exit strategy out of Somalia would have to be rerouted. They could no longer go back the way they came to Puntland. There was no going back to the safe house at all.

  And that bothered Merk.

  “I’m going to drop you off at the beach so I can shadow Nairobi,” Nico said.

  “That should work.” Merk gazed out to the slivers of the blue sea blinking between the breaks of the bluffs and rock outcroppings as Nico drove along the coast.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE ARMED GUARDS wore blue jeans and white tee shirts. Khmer Rouge–like scarves draped their heads, shading their scalps from the intense spring sun.

  Their scowls grew sharper; the worry lines cut furrows in their foreheads. They stepped forward to block the entrance to the compound, flanked by crags halfway up the Sheikh Mountain Pass. With a glance, the guards raised AK-47s, aiming them at the windshield of the approaching car. The vehicle skidded to a stop.

  Powering down the window, Nairobi stuck out her hand and shook the silver bangles on her wrist, alerting the guard who was behind the wheel. One guard strolled over to the door, his swarthy face crinkled in the arid heat, his eyes bloodshot. He stole a glance at Nairobi’s cleavage, asking whom she wanted to visit. But when she answered, it wasn’t his boss Korfa she asked for, but the hostages of the Blå Himmel an
d the Shining Sea.

  The guard made a face, mulling her unusual request, in light of the slaying of Korfa’s brother Samatar. He looked back at the other guard. After a pause, he nodded at her. As the guard opened the fortified gate, the first guard banged his fist on the car door, asking her in the animal trader dialect of Somaliland’s modern city of Hargeisa, “Did you bring the cloth?”

  She lifted up a folded purple cloth with blurred bands of white and violet around the border. Then she held up an old edition of the Qur’an, showing the book’s frayed spine, the pages yellowed with age.

  The guard waved Nairobi through. She drove into the compound. Inside the gate, half a dozen teenage pirates carrying Uzis and AK-47s guided her to park under a dead tree, offering no shade from the heat. When Nairobi stepped out, an elder fisherman frisked her. He ran his hands over her thighs, swept them under her crotch, and squeezed her firm butt. She stood still, containing her disgust at being groped. She watched the leering eyes of the boys without complaint as the elder patted her blouse, grazed her ribs, pinched the wires under the bra. The elder removed her sunglasses and checked her eyes. The brightness dilated her pupils; she squinted.

  She covered her eyes, scanning a pair of new Audi sports cars parked under a camouflage canopy. They were stored in shade. Caught in the disequilibrium of the light and the news that she had arrived at the funeral of Samatar, Nairobi followed the elder into the dwelling fortified out of a natural cave. The pirate hideout, covered with wadis—sandy rivers—pouring down from the Sheikh Mountains into one of many springs and underground wells in and around the pass, was an ideal place that provided sanctuary to stay out of the prying eyes of US drones, satellites, and spy planes. Because it was located inland, away from the coast, away from any major city, the CIA rarely looked at the greenery and the mountains of western Somaliland. And until a week ago, Nairobi didn’t know of the compound’s existence.