The gunfire signaled two pirates to chase after the captain. The pirate with the rocket launcher wheeled around, kneeled, scoping the RPG at the jeep as it pulled up and shut off its headlights. The tall pirate sent more guards to grab the wounded pilot and drag him into the warehouse. Then the ragged Filipino first mate ambled out of the green building unescorted. The sight was strange, but for Dante it was the first mate’s catatonic stare that unnerved him.
The tall pirate, backed by armed guards, strode over to the jeep and pounded on the hood. The driver stepped out of the jeep, sweating, nervous, batting his eyes about. Finally, he looked at the tall pirate and opened the back door, waving the negotiators to come out. Dante and Fuller stepped out, each carrying a black laptop case slung over their shoulders.
They were led into the fish-processing warehouse. Once inside, the smell grew harsher, the lighting dimmer. The odor of the fish lingered, far more acute than outside in the alley.
The hostages were moved into a false-wall room, where Korfa’s double sat at the end of the wood table, donning shades and a kufeya scarf, with a laptop facing him. He motioned the Americans to wait as the bodyguards frisked and patted the hostage negotiators one more time.
“Can’t be too careful,” Korfa Double said in a British accent. “You shot my bro, Sama.”
“We didn’t shoot anybody,” Dante said calmly, not wanting to escalate a delicate first meeting into something intense or unwieldy. Hostage negotiations were always unpredictable, rarely by the book, and could turn upside down in a flash.
Dante stared Korfa Double in the eye. With the hostages stowed in an adjacent room, Korfa’s double was in charge. He wore an earsleeve, allowing the real Korfa to watch and coach the negotiations from the Syrian jet at the airport. With a webcam hidden in the ceiling streaming a live feed to Korfa, the double swung the laptop around showing Dante where the hostages were being kept—next door.
Guards waved the hostages out of a freezer. They were shivering, trying to warm up inside the humid plant, before they would be herded back into the freezer for another icing. “Twenty minutes in the freezer, ten minutes out,” the double said. “The longer our talks go, the worse shape they will be in. Maybe one or two will freeze to death if you talk too much.”
“Who ran away outside?” Fuller asked.
“The captain,” the tall pirate said, standing behind him. “There are no heroes.”
“Know—” the double said, opening meta images of street people of Hargeisa taking pictures and video of the Danish captain running for his life through the market and streets of the Hargeisa ghetto. “He won’t run far. Not with his white skin. How much ransom did you bring?”
“Right now? … A cool million,” Fuller said.
“That’s short by three,” the double replied. He waved Dante and Fuller to sit down and swung the laptop back to face him. They sat down and put their laptop bags on the table.
“Yeah, we know that. It’s by design. We’re dealing with two different shipowners in two different countries,” Fuller said.
“We will give another million dollars for the release of the Blå Himmel supertanker in Berbera and the release of the Shining Sea container ship we flew over in Zeila,” Dante said. “For the last million, we need her crew set free.”
“Ummm, maybe,” the double said.
“We give you this money for the hostages next door and the captain,” Dante said.
“Go out and catch him yourself,” the double said, shaking his head with laughter, his voice deep and calm like the real Korfa.
* * *
INSIDE THE SYRIAN jet, Qas, the young Syrian Electronic Army hacker, emerged from the back office. He sat down at a desk with multiple computer screens, and then set up the real Korfa to talk into a mic, coaching his double in the warehouse, as he watched the negotiations live.
“… Shipowners and insurance companies have another problem,” Dante said, remotely.
The real Korfa spoke into the mic, saying, “Don’t say a word. Let him speak.”
“Look, we know there are two bombs planted under the tanker in Berbera,” Dante pointed out. “They’re on the starboard hull.”
“To hell with the owner,” the double said. “Why look at me? The port guards did it to stop Americans from stealing the hijacked ship back at night.”
Korfa spoke into the mic: “Remember, we don’t trust you. We are trading ransom money for lives. The ship will come later, since you came short of cash.”
The double held up his finger, repeating word for word the first two lines. Fuller gave Dante a look, but kept silent.
General Adad sat down next to Korfa, watching the double repeat the words to the negotiators online. “Your double is good,” the general observed.
“He should be. He went to acting school in London,” Korfa said.
* * *
IN THE ROOM, the Korfa’s double repeated the claim, “You dare come here short of cash?”
“Best we can do on short notice,” Fuller interjected, pounding the table.
The Korfa double gave the former FBI special agent a hard look, then glared at Dante, saying, “Hand over the money, walk out with those next door. When we catch the captain, we will bring him to Zeila in exchange for half a million dollars.”
Dante looked at Fuller and communicated with his eyes, blinking Morse code for doing the deal. Fuller nodded as he contemplated the revised offer. He tapped his index finger on the table, and then opened his laptop bag, showing stacks of one hundred dollar bills. Dante proceeded to do the same, swung his laptop case around, pulling out stacks of euros.
“Let’s do this,” Dante said. He stood up and extended his hand to shake with Korfa Double to seal the deal. But the double removed his sunglasses and stared coldly at the ex-SEAL. “Okay, we will see you next in Zeila with the other hostages,” Dante said.
“You won’t see me there. You will see the ghost of my brother Samatar,” the double said cryptically, not once raising his hand to shake.
Dante and Fuller stepped away from the table. The tall pirate escorted the Americans out the door into the vacant alley. They would wait for the hostages to be turned over to them by the jeep. The big transport truck waited by the end of the alley.
Ten minutes later, the hostages were taken out of the freezer one last time and herded outside. They were shaking, quivering, flashlights blinding their eyes, disorienting them further. At the rear of the line, psychiatrist Bahdoon walked alongside the turned first mate, chatting with him, and handed the Filipino an amulet of a Somali two-faced animal deity: one face of a bull, the other of a cow.
The amulet had roots in pre-Islamic Somali myth. Bahdoon said of the figure: “This is your protector, the god Waaq. The universe is balanced on the bull’s horn. You belong to Pratique Occulte now.” The doctor touched the single horn on the amulet.
* * *
IN THE SYRIAN jet, Korfa and General Adad watched the hostages being led out of the fishing warehouse. He pointed at Bahdoon talking with the first mate, and boasted, “My doctor flipped that man in less than two days. He’s now a follower of the Occulte.”
“Korfa, you know why we met tonight,” the general said, sipping scotch. “The whole world has turned against ISIS, against the old regime. The West keeps arming the rebel army, along with Qatar. They accuse the old guard Syria of using chemical weapons.”
“Yeow. We Somalis are labeled dogs and pirates. We are beneath the Western standard of living, education, skin color, religion,” Korfa complained about the overt racism.
“Osama bin Laden taught us something. He taught Islamic people after the fallout of the Arab Spring that we need to act loose, decentralized, yet come together against the force of the Great Satan and hit the devil from all sides,” General Adad said. “In the world’s eye, Syria is scarred. That’s what’s shown on the news. But we are fighting with our brothers Hezbollah, AQAP, and Iran, with Iraq erupting with sectarian violence against ISIS, ignited by the S
yrian civil war, with recruits from Assad’s old regime.”
“In America, Pratique Occulte has cells, but not with my dark skin,” the warlord said.
Qas looked out the window to a second Black Hawk landing at the far end of the runway.
“Good, they are going to fly the hostages out of the country,” Adad said to Qas, and then looked at Korfa, “Do you have what you need?”
“Yeow. Ready to go. Pick a city, choose one, choose a day, choose a time. Bahdoon and I will act against the target.”
“In three days I will choose. Inside the borders of my Syria is not where we will fight the enemy,” he said, pointing to Qas, “Meet the captain of the two stolen ships.” General Adad stood up, stepped over to the window, and saw the gate open. Outside, the jeep drove onto the tarmac and then the truck followed with the hostages. As General Adad watched the unloading of the hostages into the helicopters, he aimed his finger like a gun and pulled an imaginary trigger at the helicopters, saying, “‘Black Hawk Down’… again.”
Chapter Fifty
AT CAMP LEMONNIER, the Black Hawk helicopter refueled and a new crew of pilots, on standby, climbed into the cockpit to fly Merk and the dolphins to the next mission.
Marines stored supplies of MREs and thirty gallons of water on board, alongside dolphin first-aid kits, sheepskin-lined tarps, coolers of fresh fish, extra laptop batteries, Satcoms, ammo, flares, Kevlar vests, helmets, and night-vision goggles.
In the mess hall, Merk wolfed down three turkey burgers, sans the bread. Then he ate a bowl of fruit salad, seaweed salad, kelp, spinach, and carrots, and chased it all down with fresh cranberry juice and a quart of milk.
Merk took a shower. He checked his body for cuts, sores, and boils. He applied a cloth to the cut on his forearm and lifted his chin to inspect his neck where the pirate strangled him. He didn’t see any deep marks or bruises. He snapped an aloe stalk, dripped the aloe juice on the burn scar of his left forearm, and kneaded it into the damaged skin. Looking in the mirror, he had a flashback of clutching the dolphin that saved his life. In doing so, the dolphin’s body spared half of his torso from being burned, while the creature succumbed to the sea of flames.
The navy dolphin, which ended up dying in his arms minutes after he caught fire, dove him underwater to extinguish the flames. That dolphin was the only biologic system in the US Navy Marine Mammal Program to die in combat. It was a distinction Merk never wanted to own.
After putting on shorts and a SEAL Team Six tee shirt, Merk joined the CIA agents, who had grilled Dante Dawson and Chris Fuller earlier, in the joint agency intel fusion center. There they briefed him, SEAL Lt. Commander Kell Johnston, and a SEAL sniper on the next mission—the dorsalcam reconnaissance of the US container ship Shining Sea above and below the surface.
Merk was fine with taking the meeting. He wanted to clear the air on a few items. He didn’t have to wait. The CIA case officer dropped drone photographs of small craft and navy dolphins searching the sea. Merk slid the photos, one after the other, to Kell Johnston, who studied them carefully.
“You know who they are?” The agent pointed at the soldiers in the boats.
“Sure. Iranian motorboats and … former Soviet-trained navy dolphins,” Merk said, nailing the answer. “Strait of Hormuz is where they’re searching, correct?”
“Affirmative,” the agent said. “What could they be looking for, lieutenant?”
“Well, either there was a leak on our top secret mission,” Merk began to explain, “… or one of the revolutionary fishermen survived our collision.”
“I choose the latter,” the case officer said.
“Can you confirm that?” Kell Johnston asked.
“You’re both on a need-to-know basis,” the Asian American agent interjected.
“Of course. The CIA toils only in the shadows,” Merk said. Unimpressed with the CIA, he handed the photographs back to the case officer. “Your search is fruitless. It’s like pissing in the wind. You won’t find anything.”
“How do you know that?” the steamed case officer asked, pulling up the operation’s inventory list on a tablet. “I see you lost a—”
“Laptop. It was ruined by the salt water when it sank ninety feet to the bottom. And the DPod, I sank that remotely when I returned to base,” Merk replied. “And I lost Lt. Morgan Azar to a selfish, stupid move on my part. I got the intel at the expense of my friend’s life. Nothing sucks more than that. It’s been like a bone spur embedded in my heart. The feeling won’t go away. How about you? What part of your humanity have you sacrificed on a mission?”
“Lt. Toten? Really?” the Asian American agent said.
“If I were you, I’d focus on the dolphins in the photos, not the Iranian guards.”
Frustrated with the answers, the case officer turned on a digital wall map showing two large islands off the coast of Zeila. Sacadadiin Island was the larger of the two islands, about half the distance closer to shore of the bombed ancient city. Dense vegetation and thick mangroves covered most of the terrain, partially inhabited, visited daily by fishermen, tour boats, and others.
A few miles into the gulf stretched a sandbar-like spit of an island called Ceebaad. That forlorn land was sparsely covered with a quilt work of scrub pine, low green bushes, and wind-swept sedge grass. Barren and sandy in some spots, a rubble coast surrounded the elongated triangle-shaped island.
The case officer said, “There’s no fresh water on Ceebaad, little on Sacadadiin Island.”
“We’ll setup a camouflage blind to provide cover for Toten and the dolphins to operate,” Kell Johnston said.
The agents showed the SEALs the locations of where they should position perimeter cameras to watch for boat traffic around the island. The Asian American agent gave Merk a flash drive with a one-page document that identified several targets for the dolphins to carry out surveillance activities.
The case officer took a remote and clicked on a split-screen showing Korfa and the Korfa Double. “You need to study this,” he told Merk.
“Why? I’m a marine mammal recon guy, not a cold warrior SEAL,” Merk said.
“Hey, Toten, you’re the one who asked to conduct an exit interview of the Norwegian sniper before we send him back to Norway,” the case officer said, getting annoyed.
“Run that by me again.”
“Lt. Toten, on the right is the real pirate warlord Korfa. We are one 100 percent sure with our facial-recognition software from photos taken by one of our assets—”
“Nairobi?”
“Yes. Based on her work for the past five years.” The agent took a laser pointer and ran the red dot on the 81 percent match of the facial features in the double’s face. His cheeks were millimeters too high; the nose five degrees more crooked; the lips thinner and mouth one size smaller, among other features from the hairline, including distance between eyebrows across the bridge of the nose. “It was a close match. It fooled the hostage negotiators. But they secretly filmed Korfa’s double. Sunglasses in a dark room became a dead giveaway.”
“What are you going to do with Nairobi?” Merk asked.
“Break off contact until we need her again,” the case officer said.
“If her cover is blown, are you going to let her be raped and tortured?” Merk asked. “She has children. Young beautiful kids.”
“Like the navy, we follow orders. Not from sunny San Diego, but from the analysts and directorates in Langley,” the case officer countered.
Merk looked at the lieutenant commander, saying, “Kell, maybe you want to get word out to CO Gregorius. Nico is still in Berbera. Have you heard from him?”
“Toten, stay the fuck out of this. You’re not a SEAL anymore,” the case officer snapped.
Frustrated by the careless disregard for the professionals who put their lives on the line, Merk pounded the table and stormed out of the meeting, saying, “You better pray I drown.”
* * *
AT ZERO DARK hundred, Merk and the dolphins we
re loaded on board the Black Hawk; a cell of four navy SEALs and Lt. Commander Kell Johnston joined the flight. The helicopter swooped over the Mandab Strait heading toward a rendezvous with the Shining Sea.
Chapter Fifty-One
WITHIN HALF AN hour the helicopter reached the insertion point in the gulf, crossing some invisible border between Djibouti and Somaliland that stretched across the dark water to Yemen.
The cargo bay opened. A basket lowered a pair of SEAL divers into the bay north of Ceebaad Island, some eight miles offshore. They checked the surroundings, saw a laser-signal from the cargo master, and the basket lowered the SEAL sniper with Lt. Commander Kell Johnston into the water.
The divers escorted them on shore, pulling a floatation box of guns and ammo, and dragged it onto the rock-strewn beach. As Kell took out infrared binoculars and panned the northern half of the island to make sure they were alone, the divers swam back to the drop zone. Once clear, they signaled the cargo master to lower the dolphins, one at a time, followed by Merk, with the biosystems’ supplies stowed in an inflatable rubber boat with an outboard motor.
Using night-vision goggles, the SEALs cleared the island one area at a time.
Above, the Black Hawk pilots deployed the FLIR system, scanning the distance of the long island, which narrowed to a point in the south. The infrared didn’t pick up any heat signature of man or animal. Merk and the SEALs backup team stood alone on Ceebaad, at least until the next morning. Lt. Commander Johnston and the SEAL sniper dragged the boat and supplies on shore. They dug three pits in the patches of sand, placed the supplies in the holes, and covered the objects with camouflage cargo nets.
Once set, the Black Hawk hoisted the divers on board and banked away in stealth mode, flying back to the forward naval expeditionary base in Djibouti.
While Lt. Commander Kell Johnston discussed the night sentry duty with the sniper, from mealtime to sleep time, how and when to search the barren island with no fresh drinking water, Merk waded into the sea. He splashed the water with his hand and, within a minute, Tasi and Inapo emerged from slumbering in the black water.
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