Delta Force knew that the highway ended a mile or so from where they stood. If those in the vehicle conducted a patrol from inside the cab, they would return by the route they came in short order. By the time Delta Force reached the manhole cover on the side of the road, they saw the vehicle headlights begin turning around in the distance to head back.
A pair of commandos pried opened the manhole cover. The DF CO stuck a snub-nose flashlight down into the catch basin, made sure there were no booby-traps and that the hostage was alone. The flashlight lit up the gritty concrete box. In the corner sat a bound and gagged Kim Dong-Sun, her pants caked with mud from washout sediment that gathered on the concrete floor.
The tired, frail North Korean engineer shielded her eyes from the bright light.
One by one, Delta Force commandos lowered into the catch basin. They understood if Syrians in the vehicle spotted them slipping into the hole or stopped to inspect the catch basin, the operation would be blown and they would likely die in a firefight, trapped below ground in a concrete coffin with the North Korean scientist the CIA had kidnapped.
Delta Force CO pulled the manhole cover back in place as the headlights straightened down the road and beamed on the catch basin. He stepped down, shut off his flashlight, and waited. The commandos hunkered down, aiming their assault rifles at the manhole cover, saying not a word. Shafts of light flickered through the finger holes in the manhole cover. The vehicle passed by without stopping.
Another minute ticked away before the DF CO signaled the field medic to check on the condition of the hostage engineer. The medic, with the help of another Delta member, gave Kim Dong-Sun water, setup an IV drip in her arm—she was dehydrated and shivering. After five minutes, the medic gave her a sedative to put her out for a few hours. He let the IV run its course for another few minutes—making sure she would be alive when they crossed back over the border—before he removed the needle, swabbed the puncture, pressed a Band-Aid, and then put her 105-pound body in a sling.
Commandos lifted her up to the manhole, as the others raised her out of the catch basin.
With an all-clear signal, Delta Force hauled the North Korean engineer from the area. Four men carried the sling for a klick, and then the other four Delta Force warriors carried the load for the next klick. Each cell took turns carrying Kim Dong-Sun the six miles back to the border crossing and into Iraq, where they rendezvoused with a Humvee.
CIA operator Alan Cuthbert ended up driving the North Korean engineer to a waiting helicopter that would fly them to a secret CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia. Upon arrival at the base in the Saudi mountains, CIA agents prepared to interrogate the real Kim Dong-Sun for days.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
NIGHT. FOUR HOURS after the Black Hawk landed at the main road border crossing in Diyala, Iraq, a squad of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps piled out of two army trucks.
A cordon of US marines backed by a Kurdish battalion escorted Kim Dong-Sun—a.k.a. CIA agent Jenny King—to a Kurdish leader named Behar. In the dim light, Jenny noticed that Behar’s face was scarred. She wondered what caused it, pointing to the wounds. Behar looked at her, and after a pause, said, “Chlorine gas. Barrel bombs dropped from Russian helicopters.”
Behar walked Kim Dung-Sun over the border and handed her North Korean passport and papers to the lead revolutionary guard, a tall, bearded man with sun-creased face. He reviewed the papers, handing it back to his assistant. She gulped, waiting for the papers to be confirmed. The assistant whispered in the unkempt lead guard’s ear; he nodded once and waved the North Korean engineer to follow him to the trucks.
Agent Jenny King walked now into enemy territory, about to be driven deep into Iran.
Keeping her undercover act in line, Jenny knew better than to look back at Behar or the US marines who ferried her to the Iranian border. Such a glance would raise a flag with the revolutionary guards, and maybe plant a seed of suspicion about her true identity.
Waving a flashlight, the lead guard put the North Korean engineer in the back of the truck with a squad of bearded soldiers. The truck turned around with the second army truck and drove Agent King on her way deep into Iran, heading up the mountain pass in darkness.
CIA Agent Jenny King wouldn’t know her destination until she arrived. She estimated that it would be sometime the following day, if she was lucky.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
NIGHT FELL ON the Sheikh Pass in Somaliland.
Nico had spent most of the day in the surveillance nest passing time, waiting for something to happen. Hurry up and wait was the SEAL motto he recalled on surveillance ops. Like most of the dreary assignments, he knew not much happened over long stretches of time. He setup a mini tripod with a webcam that digitally captured activity inside the compound gate of anyone entering or exiting the mountain hideaway.
After Nairobi had arrived, Nico saw little activity at the entrance, other than a changing of guards. Only later did one other vehicle show up, around dusk. Nico replayed the video, watching it on a smartphone. It showed a slight man with Arab features wearing glasses step out of a jeep. The SEAL CO found that odd, since almost everyone in the compound was of African origin. And here arrived a Middle Eastern businessman, well dressed in a gray tunic and wearing glasses.
The sight of Bahdoon arriving at Korfa’s compound threw Nico off. The CO replayed the video, trying to see if he captured a clean shot of Bahdoon’s face for a screen grab, so he could run the image through the DIA, Office of Naval Intelligence, the CIA, and FBI terrorist databases to see if there was a match, and with it a name and background.
Nico knew whatever was taking place inside the compound had to be important. What he couldn’t figure out: What side was Nairobi on? Did she serve two masters? The CIA and the Somali pirates? He didn’t know, but he recalled Merk’s caution.
Then a tall man dressed in fatigues and wearing red-and-white kufeya scarf led Nairobi outside. He whispered in her ear as a phalanx of armed guards escorted them to three waiting Range Rovers—all ransom money vehicles in Nico’s eyes.
Bahdoon weaved through the wall of guards and stepped inside the second Range Rover with the Tall One and Nairobi.
Is the Tall One the “Ferryman?” Nico asked himself.
Nairobi and the Tall One sat in the backseat of the second Range Rover; Bahdoon rode shotgun in the front passenger seat. That meant she was leaving her vehicle behind, along with the tracking device that Merk planted on the car.
“Damn it. How the hell am I going to follow her now?” Nico said aloud.
The CO wanted to track Nairobi and the pirates, but couldn’t. At least not right away. He saw trailing the convoy close behind as a fool’s errand, since night would reveal the headlights of his vehicle. Nico would have to wait for them to drive a good distance before he shadowed them. Waiting to see which way the convoy turned when it left the compound, he wondered if the pirates would make a right up the hill toward him and drive on to the small shantytown of Burco, a haven for smugglers, pirates, and recruits. Or left, down the Sheikh Pass to Berbera by the sea, where there was a prison and oil installation near the harbor pier.
When the compound gate opened, the first Range Rover turned left, followed by the second vehicle, and then the third. They were all heading down to the harbor, where the hijacked tanker ran aground in shallow water. Nico not only had to wait for all three vehicles to clear the dark road below, but he had to wait for a pair of guards to finish smoking cigarettes. They flicked the butts on the ground and stepped back inside the compound, closing the gate.
With a single guard on sentry duty inside the compound, Nico climbed in the Chinese vehicle and started the engine. He kept the lights off as he turned around, and steered the SUV downhill, keeping his foot off the gas until he coasted by the compound. And then he floored it.
Nico switched on the headlights and headed toward Berbera, in what he suspected would be the start of a long night.
Chapter Forty
BEING A FORMER Navy SEAL, Merk knew he couldn’t stay in the cove that night. His cover was compromised, no matter how cautious and quiet the children might be. He figured one of them would say something, a word, a passing remark of a dolphin, a visit by an American. Nor could he travel along the coastal road, as he was unsure whether Somalia had put checkpoints in place or had enacted a curfew. And traveling down the beach was not an option, since he felt at some point he would be spotted out in the open.
He directed the dolphins to swim ahead west and locate a small boat, while he followed them down the beach on foot. Merk kept his head on a swivel, glancing behind to make sure the strand was deserted, listening for voices of people and the sounds of passing vehicles. He panned the sea for activity, surveying the beach ahead. It appeared empty. The eerie stillness along the beach was punctuated by gentle waves whispering every now and then, as they ebbed and flowed.
A klick or two down the beach, a ping chimed from the laptop. Merk stopped, pulled the laptop out of the backpack, opened it, and saw a small craft with an outboard motor through Tasi’s dorsalcam. He took out a pair of night-vision binoculars to see if he could spot the boat and dolphins down shore. Panning the silhouettes along the bight coastline, he spotted a few houses, a pile of nets with a couple of boats pulled on shore, then further ahead off a point the dolphins swimming around the moored craft just offshore. Merk hit a key on the laptop instructing Tasi and Inapo to stay put until he got there.
Merk slid the laptop in the backpack, slung it over his shoulder, jogged down the beach.
When he arrived, he eyed a small run-down house with its lights out. The shades were drawn; a truck parked out front. But it was a couple of dilapidated wooden chairs by the back door that hinted to Merk there were people sleeping inside. He waded into the water up to his waist, quietly slipped the backpack in the boat, and then untied the line of the Boston whaler at the mooring buoy. Unable to untie the last knot, Merk took out a serrated knife and frayed the rope one strand at a time, cutting the line to give it the effect that it had frayed apart.
He rolled on board and signaled Tasi to push the craft away from shore. He then tied a loop on one end of the rope, slipped it over Inapo’s snout, and signaled the dolphin tow the boat out to sea. But Inapo gave Merk a quizzical look. Merk waved the dolphin over, looked him in the eye, and said, “Don’t go soft on me now. We can’t make noise until we are out there,” he pointed. Inapo squeaked a high-pitched whistle, and towed the boat out to sea.
A half klick offshore, Merk pulled the ripcord several times until the engine turned over. With a deep throttle, he revved the power and pushed the prop into the water, taking off. Tasi and Inapo broke away from the boat and swam ahead toward the piers of Berbera, where Merk could faintly make out the silhouette of a small cargo ship listing in the harbor. Based on the size, he knew that the abandoned, rusting ship was neither the hijacked supertanker Blå Himmel nor the American-flagged container ship Shining Sea.
Merk cut the engine and, for the next few hours, let the boat drift as he monitored the dolphins searching the piers and inner harbor of Berbera. At daybreak, the dolphins would survey the supertanker. The dolphins’ underwater reconnaissance netted Merk zilch on the activities of the pirates. The piers weren’t patrolled; only a couple of jeeps were spotted on the beach by the tanker, as the pirates surely kept an eye on their prized catch. He wondered what Nico was up to in shadowing Nairobi in her quest to break into the pirate’s inner circle.
Under a starlit night, Merk lay down to get some shut-eye. He used a backpack for a pillow, felt the sensation of floating. At dawn, they would resume the search.
Chapter Forty-One
NICO DROVE AROUND the seaport of Berbera. After midnight the town became a virtual ghost town. Other than a few thugs and teenage gangbangers loitering on the streets, there was little activity. The prison lights were banked dark, except for the perimeter fence with a couple of downspout lights flooding the grounds under the watchtowers.
Across a field, a pair of guards patrolled the giant fenced-in oil depot. But like the other buildings in Berbera, many of them were older structures designed in Ottoman architecture. He didn’t dare drive around the storage tanks to the beach where the jeeps had been spotted earlier watching the supertanker grounded by the steel pier that jutted from the onshore fuel depot.
Nico drove down a deserted street and parked the vehicle under a tree. When he climbed out, he checked the front and back seats to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind with the US military brand.
On foot, Nico strolled down one deserted street after another, looking in the driveways, spying on the parking lots behind office buildings, gas stations, and 500-year-old mosques, while staying out of lines of sight from a man milling about a street corner. Nothing turned up in the way of sighting any of the Range Rovers or Nairobi. Did they drive on to Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland? And was it to another warlord or a rendezvous at the airport?
Nico eyed the buildings for a high vantage point that he could climb, stay out of sight in daylight, as he searched the coastal city for a clue to the whereabouts of the convoy.
On first glance, he noted too many of the Berbera buildings were low-rise, one and two stories high. His eyes fell on the giant oil storage tanks that covered several acres by the water. The depot would be the best place to setup a surveillance nest. But the oil storage tanks had drawbacks. For one, he would have to slip by the guards unnoticed; who knew what the sentry detail would be the next day or whether the pirates would be offloading crude oil from the hijacked ship.
Second, he confirmed the pirates were stationed on the backside of the depot in the jeeps.
Third, once the sun came up the next morning, hiding on top of the storage tank would grow hot in a hurry even with the white albedo paint reflecting the rays of the sun out to space.
But what concerned him was that if they offloaded the tanker the next day, Nico would have workers crawling over the storage facility. Still, that location put him in the center of town, with an eye on all four main roads leading out from the port city—the Sheikh Pass where he came from, the other inland road to Hargeisa to the southwest, and the coastal roads that stretched east and west. Nico opted to find a way atop one of the tanks, slipping past the guards unnoticed.
Nico cut through a few yards, pulled a worn canvas off a boat, rolled it on the ground, and threw the roll over his neck and shoulders like an oxen yoke.
He moved like a wraith across the street, hiding behind a car outside the oil depot fence. He saw that the perimeter chain-link fence wasn’t crowned by razor-wire, and found only one security camera—aimed at the front gate. He figured he could get into the depot without much trouble. Seeing that the storage tanks ran a dozen deep back to the sea, he decided to follow the road to a deserted office building, staying out of sight of the guards.
Behind the main facility, he spotted three giant storage tanks inside another fenced-in compound guarded by a single security guard with no camera. The guard hung out by the gate, tugging on the fence fabric, idle and bored. The guard picked up stones and tossed them, just passing the hours until he would be relieved. At no time did he lift his head to check on the fuel tanks that towered over him. Nico looked back at the main depot. He waited for the patrolling guard to make his loop around the facility, and then followed the fence perimeter toward the sea of the smaller depot. On the backside by the beach, Nico picked the rear corner to climb the fence. He put on a pair of cut-proof gloves.
He stabbed his fingers in the chain-link mesh and scaled the corner of the twelve-foot high fence. When he reached the top, he pulled the sharp forks down, wired it to the post, then swung his body up and over the top, with a prong grabbing onto his pants, tearing into his thigh. He pulled at the snag, freeing his leg, and slid down the fence to the ground. Knowing he had his tetanus shot four years ago, the SEAL CO ignored the metal cut to his thigh. Nico checked the jeeps. No movement. He didn’t see the guard, so
he selected the rear storage tank, the one closest to the pier where fuel supplies were offloaded into gas mains, and climbed the steps.
Up a flight of stairs that circled halfway around the tank, Nico scaled a ladder and reached the roof of the oil tank. Once on top, he stayed low, checking the surroundings. The only vantage point taller than the storage tanks was the supertanker bridge run aground. The listing vessel appeared abandoned, not an ideal location for pirates to take position—not when NATO commandos might swoop in at any moment.
But if a pirate or Somali official took a tour of the ship the next day, they might spot Nico hiding on the roof. So he unrolled the canvas with the plan to crawl under it just before dawn broke to hide in plain sight.
For the next hour, Nico panned the quiet port city and streets with night-vision goggles. He searched for a sign on the whereabouts of Nairobi or the Range Rovers. But after a long hour, he knew he had lost them. Nairobi and Korfa must have driven off in some other direction out of town. But where? Back east toward Nairobi’s house? Or west to Djibouti border at the mouth of the Red Sea?
Across the border in Djibouti, the US built up the naval expeditionary base, Camp Lemonnier, to patrol the Somali pirates around the Horn of Africa, support the Arab Spring uprising since 2011 that spread across northern Africa into the Middle East, and train and sponsor rebels in Yemen to suppress AQAP and Houthi militia.
Today, “Camp Lemonade,” as Nico referred to it, fed the Syrian rebels arms and weapons in the CIA’s quest to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while operating at the newest drone base. Camp Lemonnier provided critical infrastructure support for NATO’s anti-piracy campaigns launched, in concert with the Japanese military, on patrols that covered the Gulf of Aden from the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa since 2010.
Dolphin Drone Page 13