An hour later, the Delta Force cell was scrambled and flown to an undisclosed entry point near the border, north of Fort 24. The CIA analysts selected that location after reviewing satellite images captured on a sliver of land with the least foot and patrol traffic. It would be easy for the commandos to slip across the border.
Since Syria believed the CIA had already kidnapped the real North Korean engineer right out of General Adad’s summit in the desert, how much more flak could the US intelligence agency be hit with in taking the risk to go back over the border to retrieve the real engineer?
That’s how Jenny saw it; the CIA director agreed. But they couldn’t wait to see if Delta Force would succeed in the mission.
Chapter Thirty-Four
AGENT JENNY KING dressed up again as North Korean engineer Kim Dong-Sun. The platoon of Marines whisked her out of Fort 24 to a waiting helicopter. The Black Hawk flew across the desert spaces of ISIS-controlled Iraq to its northeast mountain border along Kurdistan, Iran.
As the first phase of the new Operation Fire Sanctuary unfolded, the CIA director phoned his counterpart in Tehran’s secret police, explained the mistake his agents made in crossing the border into Syria, and that he wanted to make the mistake go away by handing the North Korean engineer over to Iran in less than twenty-four hours of her capture, so Tehran could return her to her native country. The director also explained that, because of the ongoing civil war in Syria, the ISIS skirmishes in southern Iraq, where no victim was too small or young, and the numerous mass graves recently discovered, the US in no way was going to appease Syria by paying it tribute. With that, the director emphasized that it was in the best interest of both nations, regardless of what caused the sinking of an Iran fishing trawler laying sea-mines in the Strait of Hormuz, to move on and contend with the crisis of Sunni extremist flare-ups.
No word would leak to the press about the missile launch site, nor would Israel be notified of Syria’s plans to defend itself if Iraq fell completely into the lap of the enemy.
After a conference call with Tehran clerics, including the Iranian prime minister, Iran agreed to meet the US Marines ferrying the North Korean engineer at the Diyala province’s lone road border, controlled by the Kurds. Money from Washington would motivate Kurdish leaders to allow the crossing at its border. The CIA director called it an “expensive bridge toll.”
In the past, Kurdish demonstrators had blocked the main road in protest when Iran cut off the water supply from the al-Wind River, one of the five main tributaries that feed the Tigris River. But with the water flowing again into the fertile plains of Diyala, the main road was open—yet heavily guarded by Iranian soldiers, with the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guard en route to transport Dong-Sun. Without a Korean translator on the Iranian side at the crossing, the US figured the handing over of Kim Dong-Sun would run smoothly. What they didn’t have a handle on was where the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was going to take her once inside Iran. That became the CIA director’s chief concern.
Would they take King back to Tehran? To a military base? Or to a nuclear weapons site?
If the transfer went down without a hitch, both sides agreed to keep the real events that led to the shootout and kidnapping at the Syrian missile site under wraps. The CIA didn’t need any more negative press. The international media was still bashing the agency on the drone strike of the school in Jaar, Yemen, even after the agency put out evidence to the contrary that the structure wasn’t a school, but a terrorist safe house after all. The bodies of the children killed, the CIA suspected, were flown in from Syria and used as props. The press was investigating that new claim; the UN was looking into it as well.
The FBI’s request to take DNA samples was denied. Where did the bodies of the children disappear to in Jaar? Then a new problem arose. No one could find the corpses after they were supposedly driven to a hospital between Jaar and the coastal town of Zinjibar.
No matter what the CIA or UN would discover about those claims, the damage had already been done. The hatred toward the “Great Satan” United States had kicked into overdrive. The images of the bloodied bodies of children, along with the woman’s amputated arm—a teacher?—weren’t going away from the world’s collective memory or the social media channels anytime soon. The damage was fixed and indelible.
On the other hand, Syria didn’t need to be linked to a long-range missile program with North Korea while the country was being torn apart by civil war, threatened by the Islamic State, and propped up by Russia, while several in the US intelligence community were skeptical that all of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons—toxins, biologic chemicals, and lethal agents—had been destroyed aboard the Danish ship.
For the delivery of Kim Dong-Sun, the US Marines were given strict orders to make the flight to the border crossing comfortable for her. Getting the message, four young jarheads threw a blanket on a wooden crate in the rear of the cargo bay, plopped the North Korean engineer down, and gave her a canteen of water and an energy bar. Due to the logistics of ongoing ISIS strikes and bombings, the flight required a refueling at an air base outside of Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk. The northern city of Mosul had fallen to ISIS and became its stronghold.
For Jenny to convincingly play her role as the North Korean engineer, she slept on the first leg of the trip, feeling each burr of the rotor vibrate through the metal deck, up the slats of the crate, and drum into her thighs, buttocks, and spine.
The longest day she could remember just got longer.
When the helicopter landed to refuel, a marine sergeant and a Delta Force colonel climbed on board and checked the engineer’s condition. She opened one eye, saw the officers standing in front of her, and opened the other eye, then cursed at them in Korean. They stepped back, motioning the engineer to calm down. They showed her a map of where they were taking her, and then gave her a backpack and a cooler stuffed with fruit, yogurt, vegetables, and cereal.
Dong-Sun grabbed a lemon. She began peeling the rind, split it open, and squirted lemon juice in the face of the buzz-cut Marine sergeant. He squinted, his eyes watered as he wiped his face with the back of his hand, and then glared at her with wet red eyes.
On orders from JSOC, the Delta Force colonel handed Kim Dong-Sun two backpacks with woman’s clothes, size 0, that would fit her lithe frame, toiletries, and two envelopes of cash in the amount of twenty thousand dollars in denominations of twenties, fifties, and hundreds. She made a grouchy face and bit into the lemon, sucking on its sour juices to refresh her dried-out palette. Eating a lemon raw repulsed the marine sergeant—which was her point, to revolt him enough to make him deboard the helicopter when the refueling finished. He waved good-bye; she kissed him off and followed that with a staccato burst of Korean swear words that turned into an endless stream of profanity. Although he didn’t understand the meaning, he got the message loud and clear.
The sergeant stepped out of the helicopter, yelling, “Get the bitch out of Iraq ASAP.”
The CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff knew when they handed Kim Dong-Sun over to the Iranians they would search the backpacks of clothes and cooler of food in their search for any device that might be hidden. They would review her papers and North Korean passport, which Jenny took from the real engineer. And with a half year immersed in deep training of the real Kim Dong-Sun, from Jenny King modulating the engineer’s speech and stiff mannerisms, combined with slight modifications to her looks, she felt she could pull off the ruse—until she got to Tehran. There it would be anyone’s guess as to what would happen next, whom she would meet in person or by videoconference from North Korean military. So the risk of being caught as a double agent still lay ahead and increased the deeper she moved into enemy territory.
Knowing that gamble, the CIA station chief removed a brass button from her grey North Korean military uniform sleeve, opened it up, hollowed out the shell, inserted a micro GPS chip, sealed the button, and had it sewn back onto the sleeve. Once the marines handed her over to the R
evolutionary Guards Corps, Langley could track her movements through Iran, as long as she wore the uniform and didn’t go deep underground into one of Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities.
After refueling, the Black Hawk lifted off for the second leg of the flight.
Chapter Thirty-Five
AT THE COVE, the boy with the toxin-blemished skin picked up a rock, stooped over a sandstone slab, and scratched three letters: “I-U-U.”
Merk read the shorthand and recognized what it meant: “Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated.”
The ex-navy SEAL was taken aback by the teenager knowing the acronym about illegal ocean dumping. Merk figured he must have heard it used by fishermen or his parents or among some local villagers, like the Somalis who complained every day about the plight and hardship of their country being a dumping ground for the world. Merk had heard the rumors, he had seen some of the photographic evidence, now he heard the words direct from victims who lived there.
The boy nodded, tapped his foot on “IUU,” and then pointed out to the gulf.
“You have toxic dumping in the Gulf of Aden?” Merk said in disbelief. Shielding his eyes, he peered out to the sun-bright sea.
“Long ago,” the boy said.
“Got it. The collapse of your government in 1992,” Merk said, panning the horizon. “How far out?”
“Not too far. A kilometer or two,” he said.
“Bastards.” Merk ran his fingers over the boy’s toxic burn scars. He opened the laptop, uploaded the Dolphin Code program, telling Tasi and Inapo to swim to shore. “We’ll make a deal. I send my dolphins to search for the poison water, and you don’t tell anyone that I came here. If you do, I go to jail, and the dolphins will be in trouble.”
“Yeow,” said the eldest child, patting his friends on their shoulders.
The scarred boy nodded, rubbing his scars on Merk’s burn-scar left arm, as if he were making a blood oath of secrecy, a pact to keep their silence.
As the navy dolphins swam to shore, the boys got excited. They saw the glint of the micro, pencil-thin dorsalcams and metal tags—GPS tracking—mounted at the base of the dorsal fins. High-tech dolphins. They had never seen anything like those creatures in their lives.
Merk took out a four-inch probe with an elastic strap and waded into the water. He flashed a hand-sign to Inapo to lift his pectoral fin so Merk could mount the probe. He flicked on a switch, ran the probe like a wand through the air, and saw a tiny blue light flicker rapidly. Knowing the probe was working, Merk floated in between the dolphins, introducing them to the children. “This is Tasi. In Guam, her name means ‘Ocean.’”
“Tasi? Ocean? Cool,” the youngest child repeated.
“Tasi was bitten by a shark on the fin right here—” he showed the shark-bite scar on the dorsal fin. The boys sighed, feeling for the dolphin; the child with the toxic skin rubbed his wound, petting the dolphin in solidarity. “This is Inapo. In Guam his name means ‘Wave.’”
“Wave and Ocean, great,” the eldest child said.
Merk tapped the dolphins behind the melon. In a flash, Tasi and Inapo somersaulted, brushed Merk’s legs, swerved underwater, and darted out to sea.
“Where’s Guam?” the eldest boy asked.
Merk waded out of the shallows, shook the water off of his legs and arms, squeezing excess water out of his hair, and said, “It’s on the other side of the world. Close to Japan.”
“Wow,” the boy said.
“Go. Don’t say a word. I will help you,” the dolphin whisperer said, then took a picture of the kids with a tablet, and learned where they lived, in two houses on the same street.
Merk waded back into the water. He knew he had to keep what the dolphins discovered a secret until he left Somalia.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE DOLPHINS SWAM a few miles offshore, towing a DPod with them for enhanced subsurface communication. They dove beneath the waves … diving down, down, down … following the undersea shelf. They split apart along opposite sides of a wall, descending beneath the surface.
Tasi glided down to a plateau at a depth of 500 feet.
* * *
ON SHORE, MERK sat out of sight in the shade of the cove. He tracked the dolphins’ deep dive on a 3-D undersea map of the gulf, knowing that its deepest floor was near Yemen, more than a mile deep. At 2,000 feet he would recall the dolphins if they didn’t find anything. That would allow them time to swim up to the surface to breathe before he would decide what to do next: dive or abandon the search. Even dolphins can be exposed at extreme depths.
* * *
DEEP UNDERWATER, TRAINED to explore subsea landmarks, Tasi spotted a ledge and, farther below, a slope that flattened out between broken ridges. She fluked down, inspecting the brown coral seabed, and began echolocating the marine life.
The dolphin glided up and over a series of swales, before spotting a seamount ahead. As she closed on the mound, man-made debris came into view. First, a couple of pieces of steel she pinged with biosonar, then the rusted lid of a drum, and then on the other side of the mount three long boiler-sized containers, the near one half-buried in sand.
The middle boiler leaked a trail of air bubbles rising out of a tiny hole like an eelworm.
* * *
ON SEEING THE boilers through Tasi’s infrared dorsalcam, Merk typed code to the DPod directing Inapo to swim over to Tasi to inspect the discovery with the special probe.
Minutes passed. Merk watched the blinking GPS lights of the dolphins converge on screen. He opened a split-screen, watching the POV of the dorsalcams as Inapo joined Tasi in examining the boilers. Inapo swam around the backside and hovered over the farthest of the three boilers, lowering the pectoral fin with the probe inches from the rusted steel wall; a reading pinged. The probe caused a sine wave spike that jolted the needle on a digital meter. Realizing what Inapo found, Merk ordered the systems to swim to the surface out of harm’s way and return to shore.
When he heard a squeal sound chiming over the laptop, Merk stood up. He imagined himself in the Somali boys’ shoes, watching the wealth of the world cruise by the beaches day after day, bypassing the broken land. The footage captured would remain a guarded secret, even from the navy, until Merk had a chance to review the findings. For the moment, he was happy to get Tasi and Inapo out of there. But the discovery gave him pause. Were the pirates just out for ransom money? Or was revenge of being poisoned fueling their anger toward the West?
If it were the latter, then maybe the Somali pirates would join terrorist affiliates planning to attack the United States. That would fundamentally change how Washington and the CIA had understood and analyzed piracy in the Horn of Africa. It would profoundly change how the West would have to deal with the new threat vector. But who were their sponsors?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
THE CROSSING OF the broken Syrian border in the south was going to be a major undertaking for Delta Force with a lot at stake. The exposure of time, doing it under the cover of night, combined with the space—a six-mile jaunt across open desert to where the real North Korean engineer had been stowed by CIA agent Jenny King—put the commandos in the line of fire.
In order to clear a path and stay out of sight of ISIS scout teams, roving Syrian rebels, and patrols of the Syrian Army, Delta Force team needed to create a diversion.
At 2120 hours a klick south of Fort 24, a tanker truck blew apart in an ascending fireball. The explosion could be seen and felt for miles. The blast wave rocked the CIA station and shook several Syrian soldiers in the area on the other side of the border. They raced to the border, took cover, and trained assault rifles on the burning wreck.
North of Fort 24, the Delta Force cell of eight commandos led by a seasoned CO crossed the border on foot. They stayed north of a river, followed its winding path miles into Syrian territory. They used night-vision goggles and a pair of audioscopes to sweep the terrain, making sure the path was free and clear as they moved a quarter klick at a time.
The
Delta Force CO checked the geocoords at the six-mile mark. He scanned the dark horizon north and spotted a row of palm trees planted alongside a new highway—a road to nowhere, since the Islamic State and local tribesmen cut it off from the oil-rich towns.
Amid the chaos of the Syrian civil war, Damascus claimed to the UN that the new road was a “feeder” highway for farmers. But US intelligence knew better. The Syrian military had built the road with the plan to transport arms and supplies to the missile launch site that was under construction, while it built up an array of camps to launch an offensive against ISIS when the time was right to drive the terrorists from the eastern border region.
The Delta Force CO split his team in two. He sent one cell along the east side of the road, while leading the other cell down the west side, with both cells to converge in the middle of the road, until they located the catch basin that held the real Kim Dong-Sun.
By the time they reached the two-lane highway, with gutters and culverts yet to be completed, a pair of headlights, like beady snake eyes, slinked down the road from the west.
The DF CO hid his cell behind crates of materials and precast concrete pipe. The other Delta Force cell, unable to find similar cover, hit the ground and rolled into a swale, lying flat on top of their weapons so that the metal wouldn’t catch or reflect light as the vehicle drove by.
For a long, tense moment they kept still, feeling their hearts race, listening to the vehicle approach, the tires whining louder and louder across the concrete pavement, the light beams expanding wider, until the vehicle passed by as if riding directly over them. It would be another minute before the vehicle drove far enough down the road to where the commandos felt secure to climb to their feet and move on to search for the catch basin.
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