Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  That was the year when the unified naval command was able to turn the tide against the outbreak of Somali pirates, but only to see such attacks bloom off the West Coast of Africa.

  Nico realized he couldn’t wait until dawn. He had to notify the command on board the USS New York to be on the lookout for the convoy of Range Rovers, with Nairobi, that was either in and around Berbera, or heading in one of two—no, three—directions; the third being the capital Hargeisa of Somaliland. If they drove to the capital, Nico figured it would be for a meeting at an office building or at the airport.

  The CO broke radio silence and sent an encrypted text to the USS New York, requesting a drone to fly over the roads heading out of Berbera. He then laid his tired body down to grab some shut-eye.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  DAWN AROUSED THE shimmering blue gulf.

  Adrift in the boat, Merk stretched his limbs, rising from a power nap, feeling the rays of the sun warm his body. He rolled over on his stomach and opened the laptop, accessed the Dolphin Code software, and then heard the winding of a motorboat engine. The sound grew louder. The boat approached rapidly, its motor revving high and higher with anger. Merk slipped the scarf over his head, wrapped it around his face to hide his American features and sat up.

  The motorboat closed on the craft Merk stole the night before. Two Somalis crouched in their boat: a motorman and a point man, who aimed an AK-47 assault rifle right at Merk. The point man wore the red-and-white Bedouin scarf; he motioned the motorman to cut the engine. Before Merk put his hands in the air, he pressed a yellow color-coded key—a distress signal for the dolphins to come to his aid. He listened to the point man shout obscenities, peppering him in a language he didn’t understand.

  Irritated by Merk’s silence, the point man cocked the gun as the motorboat hit the stolen craft. Merk tapped his ears, acting as if he were deaf. The Somali didn’t buy it and fired a warning shot over Merk’s head. He berated him. The gunman stepped on the gunwale to board. Trapped, Merk kicked the side hard, rocking the point man to fall into his boat. As he stumbled forward, Merk kicked the assault rifle out of the pirate’s hands and into the sea. The point man landed hard on his ribs. He rolled over holding his side, then whipped out a broad-blade dagger and lunged it in a backswing. Merk deflected the dagger, as the blade sliced through the wet suit sleeve, drawing blood. He grabbed the Somali’s biceps, pulled him in close, headbutted him, and then kneed him in the chest. The blast stunned the point man, knocking the wind out of him.

  When he fell back, Merk hooked the point man’s leg and rolled him overboard.

  The motorman stood up yelling, waving a pistol. Flush with anger, he stepped toward the bow when, virtually out of nowhere, Inapo soared out of the water, drilling the motorman in the back, disorienting him as he plunged into the sea.

  From behind, the point man reached up and grabbed Merk’s scarf and pulled it over his neck, twisting the cloth hard, strangling him. Choking, Merk lost his breath … his face turned beet-red … his nostrils flared as he snorted through his nose for air, spitting last gasps with his legs kicking and squirming.

  As he was about to pass out, Tasi breached behind the point man and swatted him with a hard tail whip, blasting the assailant under the surface. Merk felt the pirate’s limp hand slip off his neck, the scarf running through the man’s fingers. Merk opened his mouth in a silent scream for air, his mouth stretching wider and wider, gasping for air to breathe, to fill his lungs. Merk’s chest heaved and heaved until his throat finally pumped oxygen down into his lungs … er-huh … er-huh … er-huh … hyperventilating, a state of delirium. He saw the expanding blue sky above amid bursts of stars, sunspots that flashed before and dazzled his eyes.

  Tasi finished off the point man, nosing the lifeless body under the surface.

  Sucking air, Merk rolled over, coughing, twitching, spitting … out of breath, his lungs burned and bellowed until he grabbed his throat clutching the scarf. As he regained normal breathing, he looked around dazed, scanned the gulf … then turned over and panned the coast. He watched Inapo pull the motorman underwater, out of sight. Exhausted, Merk rolled over and rested his chest on his hands, looking at the reflection of his weary face in the bright water.

  Tasi fluked over and rubbed her beak against Merk’s face to comfort him. She squealed a sorrowful cry. “Tasi, think those kids are going to tell we’re here?”

  Tasi trilled in agreement, splashing water in his face.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  NICO CRAWLED OUT from under the canvas on the storage tank roof. He slithered to the edge and peeked over the wall. Below, he saw vehicles pull up to the oil depot office building. He looked at officials down by the beach examining the supertanker and saw the jeeps had driven away. It appeared the pirates weren’t going to offload any crude oil that morning, since other officials dressed in army fatigues inspected the offloading pier adjacent to the supertanker.

  What he couldn’t figure out was what were the pirates going to do with the supertanker. It made no sense, unless they were going to use the two million barrels of oil on board as collateral to go along with the ransom for the hostages.

  Nico stooped down on the platform that ringed the roof of the tank, hiding behind the knee wall and railing on top of it. He took out binoculars and scanned the supply dock where Berbera workers offloaded a small cargo ship, as if the hijacked supertanker listing across port didn’t exist. He panned farther out to sea, tracking a trio of fishing boats, dhows with no mothership, a sailboat, and then farther out still a motorboat with a lone man riding it in a loop around the outskirts of the harbor in line with the supertanker, and then abruptly cut the engine. Nico could make out the red-and-white checkered scarf, but not the man. He zoomed out of long focus and panned the bridge and decks of the supertanker, but didn’t see anyone on board.

  The hostages had been offloaded and taken to an inland storage facility, that much he knew. The CO was about to stand up when he heard the gate to the fuel depot open below. Nico ducked and listened to the voices of three or four men enter the fenced-in area. He crawled behind the knee wall toward the ladder, and then peeked down the steps to see three military men and a manager of the oil depot. The manager pointed to the supertanker and then over to the three giant storage tanks inside the compound, implying they could offload the oil from the ship.

  * * *

  OUT BEYOND THE port, Merk adjusted the kufeya scarf on his head, typed commands on the laptop ordering the dolphins to split up and check both piers—the big supply dock that ran parallel to shore and a warehouse, and the long road that shot straight out from the oil depot to the fuel depot pier.

  At the supply dock, Inapo swam underwater, gliding around the barnacle-coated pilings, and surfaced under the concrete deck. From the view on the dorsalcam, it didn’t appear to be much out of the norm. So Merk switched to a full-screen view of Tasi swimming under the fuel depot pier. She panned the fuel lines suspended over the edge, unconnected to the ship.

  Tasi swam a figure eight under the pier, weaving in and out of the pilings toward shore and then glided back; then the dolphin dove under, swimming alongside the giant hull that listed out of the water. Beyond the keel being grounded, the rest of the ship appeared normal. Tasi’s probe didn’t detect leaking oil or a fuel spill.

  The dolphin doubled back to the stern, then circled around the giant props. Trained to take a furtive breach and spy approach, Tasi rose behind the props, using the steel blades as cover. She pinched a breath with the blowhole and dove under again.

  On the starboard side of the hull, which tilted several degrees, Tasi slowed her fluking. She coasted, inspecting the steel above and then below the surface. Amidships, she stopped when she found an odd box attached to the side of the hull in a depth of five feet.

  Merk zoomed in and out with the dorsalcam, looking at what appeared to be a bomb.

  How could that be? He wondered. It wasn’t there the day before when the SEAL team visited
the ghost tanker after the hijacking. To what purpose would blowing a gaping hole in the vessel stuck in port do for the pirates, unless it was booby-trapped for another reason? Pirates hijack ships and take hostages for ransom, not mayhem. Or did Korfa change the formula?

  Merk signaled Tasi to swim on, checking for another box. At the bow, on the same listing side, the dolphin found a second device. Now Merk had to break radio silence, just as Nico did, and send the digital images to the USS New York to be distributed and analyzed.

  Time was now the crucial factor.

  * * *

  ON THE ROOF of the storage tank, Nico heard the officials climb the stairs. He crawled backward, peeked over the knee wall, and saw it was too high to jump. He looked at the rumpled canvas and ruled that out to hide under. So he crawled around the platform, moving away from the ladder opening. When the first man stepped onto the roof of the storage tank, he stopped and lay flat, hiding in the foot-well between the tank’s raised roof and the knee wall.

  Nico slid out a pistol, placing it on his chest. He waited to see if they would walk over and spot him. He breathed a shallow breath, looked up to the spacious blue sky and listened. … The men chatted in Somali tongue, probably something about offloading the oil, storing it in the depot, confirming the capacity of the storage tanks. Perhaps they saw the canvas and wondered who left it behind. Perhaps they plotted what they would do if NATO or American forces stormed the bay to reclaim the vessel.

  The men turned around and climbed down the storage tank. They left without discovering the SEAL hiding on top. Nico exhaled, holstering the pistol.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  INSIDE A GIANT empty hanger used to address thousands of Marines stationed at or about to be deployed from Camp Lemonnier, the US forward operating base located in Somaliland’s niche neighbor of Djibouti, a couple of CIA case officers sat at a round table with the micro security firm Azure Shell.

  Dressed in blue jeans with a Somali flag tee shirt, ex-navy SEAL Team Six CO Dante Dawson drank iced herbal tea. An African American with a V-shaped body, thick mustache, and bulging biceps, Dante wanted more details than the CIA officers were willing to share with him and his partner, Christian Fuller, a former FBI counterterrorism sniper.

  Fuller, a lanky Caucasian raised on a farm in Nebraska, didn’t trust CIA intermediaries; never did. Maybe it was the Beltway’s Bureau-versus-Agency rivalry, the penchant to blame one another. September 11 was the fault of the FBI for failing to track the terrorists learning how to fly at the US flying schools; while the CIA owned both the failure to kill Osama bin Laden prior to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the Benghazi raid on the September 11, 2012, when terrorists killed two navy SEALs and the CIA station chief to the region—a.k.a. the ambassador—at a CIA safe house. Either excuse rubbed the bearded Fuller the wrong way.

  “You’re going to have to do better than the goatshit you’re passing off as intel,” Dante said, a bit pissed, feeling jetlagged. “We have ransom money to deliver. Money for lives. So what else can you agency pukes tell us about the second hijacked ship? The container vessel—”

  “Shining Sea,” injected the CIA case officer.

  “Affirmative. Where’s she now?”

  “Offshore in Zeila, the ancient city across the border in Somaliland,” the case officer said. “Not far from here.”

  “Good. And the supertanker sits idle in Berbera, affirmative?” Dante pressed.

  “Yes,” said the other CIA agent, who was an Asian American with a boyish face.

  “We’re not delivering ransom money for the ships,” Fuller said, unhappy with the dentist approach of pulling teeth to extract answers from their agency counterparties.

  “The warlord Korfa, where’s he? Have you set up an open line to com with him for ongoing talks?” Dante asked.

  “Uh, we don’t know,” said the case officer with a shrug.

  “Great. What else are you holding back? It’s what we need to know before we cross the border into pirate country,” Dante griped, standing up. He flexed the pecs on his barrel chest. At first, they didn’t answer. “Fuller, give me the Satcom.” Fuller handed the Satcom to Dante. He keyed in a password, entered a code, and connected direct to Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida. “This is former SEAL Team Six Dante Dawson of Azure Shell calling the DCI rep of the 1st Special Forces Op Detachment Delta.”

  “Okay, okay.” The Asian American agent waved his hands to end the call. “Do not call Delta Force.”

  “Sure. You were saying?”

  “We don’t know where Korfa is. But we do know his brother was shot dead on board the tanker, with his body brought to a compound along the Sheikh Pass. A SEAL tailed Korfa into Berbera, but he lost him in the port city.”

  “Keep going.”

  “We got word from the SEAL that our asset, codenamed Nairobi, disappeared with the Ferryman,” he explained.

  “And …?” Fuller patted the kid agent on the shoulder.

  “There’s a plane from Syria en route today to Hargeisa Airport. We believe there’s a connection between the Somali hijackings and the regime in Syria,” he explained.

  “Roger that. It’s called blood money,” Fuller said, dripping with sarcasm.

  “Two for two. What other details could we use to save our lives and the butts of the hostages?” Dante asked, staring hard at the Asian American agent.

  “There’s one more,” the case officer said. “US navy dolphins just recorded what looks like bombs attached to the hull of the tanker run aground in Berbera.”

  “Jesus, man, my old pupil … Merk Toten on the scene?” Dante said with a broad grin. “Damn. Has the CIA or navy intel confirmed whether the objects are bombs?”

  “Not yet. The DIA is working on it with a squad of SEAL EOD divers in Coronado.”

  “Explosive ordnance divers,” Dante said, nodding to Fuller. He turned to the case officer, asking, “What’s our best entry point into Somaliland? Zeila, Berbera … or the airport?”

  After a long silence, the Asian American agent replied, “The airport in Somaliland. It’s inland, but that’s probably where the hostages were taken. We are retasking the one drone we have for Zeila to get first reports on the hijacked container ship.”

  “The State Department will put a call into the government in Hargeisa, requesting to open a line of talks between you and the pirates,” the case officer said.

  “Got it. You better not be missing any more details,” Dante said, pointing a finger at the agent. “What we learn, we’ll com through Langley, not you.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  THE BLACK HAWK helicopter lifted off from Camp Lemonnier. It banked north out over the Bab-al-Mandab Strait, the “Gate of Grief,” so named for the dangers it posed to sailors, captains, and cargo ships alike on navigating the narrows.

  The Azure Shell hostage negotiators, Dante Dawson and Chris Fuller, peered out the cockpit window. The southwestern corner of Yemen sat across the waters, on the other side the mouth of the Red Sea, with rugged mountains rising above a barren strip of desert.

  Ignoring the CIA’s guidance to fly directly to Hargeisa Airport, Dante called his “sea daddy,” four-star admiral Quail Sumner, at the Pentagon to receive clearance to fly over Zeila and inspect the hijacked container ship, Shining Star, from the air. He then clicked open a photo gallery on a tablet and swiped pictures taken of the Kenyan CIA asset Nairobi exiting the compound with Korfa; aerial drone photos of the listing tanker Blå Himmel; and underwater dorsalcam shots of the two planted devices on the ship’s starboard hull. The bombs looked real enough. He passed the tablet to Fuller to get his take as an ex-FBI counterterrorism specialist.

  The copilot glanced back at the Azure Shell team, asking, “Hey, Dawson, how many hostage negotiations have you guys pulled off?”

  “Six,” Dante replied.

  “Make that eight,” Fuller said.

  “How many together?” the copilot asked.

  “Did he say su
ccessful? … Uh, three,” Fuller said.

  “We handled a few million. But who’s counting when you’re talking about lives saved,” the former CO said. “We did lose two hostages when a teen pirate fired due to frayed nerves. The kid was a rookie. But hell, the gunfire did change the tempo of the negotiations after that.”

  “Did it make you nervous?” the pilot asked.

  “When you’re unarmed, middle of an empty desert with a drone, maybe, hovering in the sky covering your hind flank, sure, we perspired a bit,” Dante said.

  Fuller pulled up video clip interviews with the Blå Himmel mercenary, Peder Olsen, who had been transferred from the USS New York to the US forward base on Socotra Island, off the Horn of Africa, where the US military had been building up forces on that island and Masriah Island, off the coast of Oman, to counter the Somali piracy and prepare for a clash with Iran.

  The massive buildup began in early 2012. It was born out of Iran’s nuclear program and military threats to close the Persian Gulf, including the ISIS invasion of Iraq two years later. What Fuller found odd was that the USS New York flew Olsen to the US military base on Socotra and not the NATO counter-piracy base. Also left out of the ongoing negotiations with Somali pirates for the release of the two ships’ crews was United Kingdom’s Piracy Ransom Task Force, which didn’t exactly bother Dante Dawson or Fuller—their absence would make the duo richer. But it did make him wonder, why deliver Olsen there instead to the anti-pirate fusion center, which was established for NATO’s Gulf of Aden Operation Ocean Shield—OOS—initiative?

  Curious, Fuller accessed the OOS Somali dhow database through the global NATO Shipping Center, NSC. He opened both the Reuters AIS ship tracking system and the NSC weekly pirate report. But he didn’t find much, other than the dates and names of the hijacked ships. The dhow database wasn’t much help either. So he went back to the CIA Somali pirate database and accessed drone photos of the Norwegian supertanker, a schematic showing where Peder Olsen was—on the stern roof of the bridge—when he shot and killed the pirate leader Samatar 300 meters across the tanker at the bow of the ship. As an FBI and SWAT team sniper, Fuller wondered why Olsen decided to take that shot. Was that the only target he fired on the bow?