Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  He heard Tasi’s heartbeat, and then over her belly the echo of a second, rapid heartbeat. The heartbeats were as clear as a SEAL double tap. “Tasi is pregnant,” Merk rejoiced.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  THE CONVOY OF military trucks drove through, over, and around the mountains of northwest Iran on the way to the ancient holy city of Qom, south of Teheran. The slow, bumpy two-day grind wore on Agent Jenny King, who was disguised as the North Korean missile engineer Kim Dong-Sun.

  Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps kept her company for the ride. They hinted to King they were driving her to Fordow, one of seventeen known nuclear weapons sites in Iran. The secret site, in which UN inspectors only learned about in 2009, was built as a nuclear fuel enrichment plant at an old Revolutionary Guards Corps’ base. But Fordow wasn’t a missile site facility. So why were they taking Kim Dong-Sun there?

  The truck drove up a long, steep road. It followed the rough incline into the narrow gap of a mountaintop, crossed over the summit, and on the downward slope the hidden base of Fordow came into view in a dusty, rugged bowl of rock.

  A borrow pit sat next to the entrance with excavated earth, rubble, spoils, and a contaminated water aeration pond holding bluish-silver flowback water in a geotextile-lined pool. That reminded Jenny of chemical-laden hot fracking pools back in the states. Dusty gray roads swept this way and that around the base, with one road slanting down to the gate of an underground tunnel. The lone freestanding three-story building stretched as long as an aircraft carrier to the base of a mountain. The cover structure hid an ongoing dig of the underground facility to expand, Agent King figured, the 3,000 centrifuges that were already humming to enrich uranium from the eyes in the sky of satellites, spy planes, and stray drones.

  The truck drove down the road to the tunnel, rumbling, bouncing, jostling about, kicking plumes of dust in its wake before stopping at a gate. The driver handed papers to armed guards wearing masks. They checked the vehicle and then asked Dong-Sun for her passport and papers.

  Jenny King handed the North Korean engineer’s stolen passport with her photo replacing the real Dung-Sun’s photo. She explained to the guards that the Americans took her papers when she was kidnapped and hauled across the border into Iraq. With the papers missing, the guard made a radio call, eyeing with suspicion, and waited.

  A few minutes later, the Iranian nuclear engineer Ferdows, with whom she worked with at the missile site in the Syrian desert, emerged. The old scientist looked into the rear of the truck and saw the North Korean missile engineer sitting in her dirty uniform. He made eye contact with her; she nodded with a stone face. Ferdows put his hand on the guard’s shoulder, and whispered. The guard waved her to step out of the vehicle. He led her and Ferdows down into a side door of the underground facility. A pair of Revolutionary Guards trailed the engineers, entering a tunnel by way of an elevator shaft that traveled far down into the earth.

  If she wasn’t so tired or disoriented from the long ride—Ferdows had flown back to Iran from Syria, he told her—she might have counted whether the elevator rode down six stories or seven.

  The metal door lifted open. Ferdows led Dong-Sun down a passage, through a corridor, and into a heavily guarded weapons room. She figured that the hall of German-made centrifuges had to be nearby, behind one of the three walls in the large rectangular room, populated with scientists and Iranian army and naval officers, checking out the latest Iranian drone—great for photography, poor for taking out either soft or hard targets. Another table had disassembled parts of a torpedo and oddly, beside it, framed photographs of navy dolphins with Iranian divers.

  Jenny wondered if the dolphins were left over from the Soviet era. A decade ago, Russia had given Iran ten-to-twelve trained navy dolphins for Iranian waterparks. But did Putin’s Russia give Iran more dolphins? And what if the mammals never made it to the waterparks? Jenny knew from her own analysis that Russia had trained 500 dolphins in its marine mammal program, while the US NMMP at its peak in 1987 had 120 dolphins in the program, with 100 today.

  Did the Tehran government also take a dozen or so trained biosystems for military use? If so, it was the first she heard of it. And having dated Merk Toten on and off the past couple of years, he mentioned the first half of the story—Russian dolphins sent to Iran for waterpark entertainment—but not the other half for military purposes, which now began to sink in with her and make sense with all that was going on in the Persian Gulf, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.

  Why wait for a missile site to be built in the Syrian desert when Iran was ramping up a plan to attack the West with an armed torpedo or a kamikaze dolphin? Both were low tech, both were disposable, both were low risk, high reward endeavors. The tactics made it easy to deny or to blame on someone else. So why not use both? she wondered. Why not attack the West with a torpedo or two and several navy dolphins? The possibility of a dolphin drone fascinated her. The thoughts about timing and logistics perked up her tired bones. She was awakened, riveted.

  With a notion of what Iran was capable of, the fatigue that permeated every pore and bone in her body vanished. She was alert again, thinking, contemplating, figuring out what the global plans were for the Iranian-Syrian-North Korean alliance, with a sprinkling of an al Qaeda offshoot. The possibilities blew her mind. Now King had to survive her deep foray into Iran’s nuclear weapons program and get word back to Langley that something nasty was going to be launched in the coming weeks. The mother of all terrorist attacks, out-dueling the Paris attacks.

  Ferdows stopped at the table. He met with a general and introduced the North Korean engineer he worked with in Syria, saying in Farsi, “This is the comrade who was kidnapped by the CIA. All forty-five kilos of her.” Laughter erupted. “Before she was taken, she taught Adad’s soldiers how to shoot straight. You should have seen the look on their faces.”

  The men rippled with laughter; a scientist banged the table joining the hilarity.

  “What a puny woman,” a revolutionary guard said with more bursts of laughter.

  “Don’t forget,” the scientist chimed in, “you only need a small amount of yellowcake to set off a big chain reaction.”

  The laughter spread, with Jenny finally joining in, even though she didn’t understand a single word. Even hardened Revolutionary Guard Corps could laugh. Who knew? When the joke had run its course and the laughter died down, Jenny scanned the weapons room and didn’t spot any other Asians in the space. She was grateful she wasn’t put on the spot to answer to a North Korean military officer, who might know the real Kim Dong-Sun.

  The scientists and engineers stepped back as Ferdows pulled Jenny toward the table. He swept his arm over the torpedo elements, guidance system, and unassembled parts. She looked at the pieces, but took a closer look of the trained dolphins in the photographs, seeing they were wearing devices on the pectoral fins and harnesses with spikes over their mouths.

  Ferdows asked: “Can we insert a load into the torpedo and still use the guidance system?”

  “Who designed this?” she asked, knowing the best defense to a technical question she knew little about was to ask more questions—since her training was on missiles, not torpedoes.

  Another bearded engineer unrolled the blueprints of the torpedo, which had American naval design logo and a DARPA stamp on each drawing.

  “Ah, American,” she observed in broken English. “Do you trust design?”

  “Of course,” Ferdows said with confidence. “General Adad’s Syrian Electronic Army hacked these plans last year from a naval contractor in San Diego.”

  “And the guidance system? Who designed it?” she asked, examining the parts.

  “Another American company in the Pentagon’s Iron Triangle,” Ferdows answered.

  “How much space will it lose from the new payload?” Dong-Sun asked.

  “Half a hand wide,” he replied, using his old wrinkled hand as a reference.

  “What are those animals? How will they be used?” Agent King asked
, pointing to the pictures of the Russian navy dolphins.

  “Six of them will go. They are escorts, some carrying a decoy payload, others the real device,” Ferdows said, adding, “We learned to trust technology over time.”

  “I trust humans less,” Agent King said. “Where are the dolphins now?”

  “En route from Canada,” he replied.

  Jenny now knew that America was the target for the attack in the West. In less than half an hour inside the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, she learned how the dirty bombs were going to be delivered—by water—coming into some port city in the United States. She didn’t push her luck in asking which city, as she was sure the real answer, if it were already selected, wouldn’t be shared with the engineers and scientists. She turned to Ferdows, announcing, “I need to eat, wash up, sleep on the torpedo design. I need to discuss this with my design team back in Pyongyang. Then I can have answer for you in the morning.”

  “Make sure it’s by sunrise,” Ferdows said. “The general wants to fly you out to the new missile site in the Kurdish mountains tomorrow morning. The recipient will choose a target in the next few days. Torpedoes need to be ready for shipment.”

  “So soon,” Dong-Sun nodded. She took out an old North Korean–made digital camera, and captured pictures of the torpedo and its guidance system. She overheard the engineers speak in Farsi, but zeroed in on two French words their talk included: Pratique Occulte.

  Why those strange words? she wondered.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  AT DAWN, AMID orange sunlight shafting through clouds over the Gulf of Aden, a pair of Longbow attack helicopters shadowed the Black Hawk that picked up Merk, the dolphins, and the SEALs along with the supplies. The camouflage nets and foxholes were abandoned for the pirates or fishermen to figure out how they ended up on Ceebaad Island.

  Merk said not a word to a female biologist about Tasi being pregnant. Both dolphins were cleared for the mission, so Merk would let the NMMP bio-staff run tests and conduct exit checkups on Tasi and Inapo to see what they might find, if anything, about Tasi’s pregnancy.

  If the second group of hostages were going to be traded and released for ransom money, then Merk was sure that he and the navy dolphins’ tour of duty of Somalia were over, and they would either be sent back to Qatar or across the ocean to NMMP in San Diego. They had exceeded their duty, serving the navy, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community.

  * * *

  BACK AT CAMP Lemonnier, the mobile NMMP team separated the dolphins to run full medical examinations. The CIA agents, with Dante Dawson in tow, took Merk to the brigadier general’s private dining facility to eat breakfast and do a deep dive on the intel he gathered.

  Merk gave his order to the waiter for cranberry juice, sashimi, seaweed salad, and bowls of blueberries and steamed vegetables. He gazed around reading the somber looks on the agents’ faces, then nudged Dante under the table. The ex-navy SEAL CO gave Merk an oh-shit stare, and said, “CO Nico Gregorius tried to rescue Nairobi last night …” His voice trailed off.

  “He did what?” Merk said with a look of surprise.

  “Nico shot the Korfa double that Fuller and I met. In a firefight in trying to rescue Nairobi, the warlord and his henchmen killed Nico,” Dante said, looking long and hard at Merk.

  “CIA asset Nairobi is presumed dead,” the CIA case officer added.

  “Jesus. Nairobi? Her daughter Fathiya, Triumph, what happens to her?” Merk mouthed in disbelief. It was just the other day that he grabbed her by the leg and pulled her down as he came ashore on Somalia the first time. For Nico he was less surprised. Merk understood the danger of the assignment for himself, the dolphins, and in particular for the SEAL CO, as they had been there numerous times before. But for Nairobi it was somehow quite a shock. Perhaps it was related to his feelings he had about Tasi being pregnant in some subconscious way. At that table seated with those men, Merk Toten felt more conflicted about his hardened SEAL past and what to do with the navy dolphins than ever before: release them to the wild or defend the United States, bound to come under attack.

  Whatever his decision, Merk couldn’t let Tasi birth a calf in the confines of the Navy Marine Mammal Program. He would have to break protocol, something that had been drilled into him by his Navy mustang father since he was a child.

  “Nicholas was able to film and record parts of the firefight. When he was bleeding on the floor, his last act of bravery was to wipe the Satcom clean,” the Asian American agent said. “Sorry, man, my condolences.” He patted Merk on his shoulder.

  Merk downed a glass of water. “When’s the Norwegian mercenary going to arrive?”

  “He’s here. Landed an hour before you arrived,” the case officer said.

  “Dawson, you and I need to chat with him after breakfast.”

  “I can’t, Toten. Tight window. Better eat fast. I’m outta here at 1100 hours. Will be driving to the Somaliland border to make the next trade of money for hostages.”

  “Dante, don’t you question that? The release of the hostages is happening way too fast. My fin found a dead sailor tied to the propeller of the Shining Star. That’s a warning General Custer would have heeded entering Indian country.”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  AT NOON, THE Marine-led convoy drove the Azure Shell hostage negotiating team to the coastal border between Djibouti and Somaliland.

  At the request of the Pentagon, the Djibouti Coast Guard followed the meet off coast to ensure that no pirates were going to do an end around at the point of exchange. The arid strip of land—near Zeila—was located a couple of miles inland from the sea where eighteen Oromo immigrants from Ethiopia had died of thirst and starvation some years back. Dante shared that piece of history with Christian Fuller, who rolled his eyes, and said, “Is that our omen or the dead man tied to the prop? Great, let’s trade money for the living on the grave of the dead.”

  A half-mile back a pair of Black Hawk helicopters supported the six-vehicle convoy on the Djibouti side of the border. But it was the CIA drone that flew high across the border that added another layer of security, filming the ruins of Zeila, the mine-clustered Shining Sea in the bay, and the fifty-mile wasteland desert that stretched inland to Hargeisa.

  What the CIA didn’t notice at first, or anyone else at Camp Lemonnier, was that when General Adad landed at Hargeisa Airport, he did more than deliver Qas and another Syrian Electronic Army hacker to Korfa. Adad also dropped off an Iranian-made Hemaseh—“Epic”—drone, which Qas and an engineer had assembled in the hangar after the first group of hostages was flown out of Somalia. Way up in the blue over the Somaliland border, the Epic Drone flew a mile higher than the American UAV. With camera and infrared equipment stolen by Chinese hackers from the US military and a defense contractor, the Iranian drone began to track the movements of the UAV, while capturing the border meeting high up in the sky.

  Bahdoon, the Yemeni psychiatrist, drove a jeep to the border. He parked the vehicle and pulled a gas mask over his head and face. He adjusted the straps, made sure the filter cartridge canister was set. He opened the door and stepped out unarmed. He walked by himself toward the border, to where Dante and Fuller stood waiting with steel cases of cash in hand for the trade. A cordon of armed marines backed the Azure Shell negotiators, along with the Coast Guard at sea, Black Hawks a klick behind, and the US drone at five thousand feet.

  “Look at this scorpion,” Dante said to Fuller, a bit miffed by the gas mask.

  “I see it, stinger and all.”

  “Hey, Somali, take the mask off. The air is fine out here to breathe,” Dante shouted.

  “Christ, what happened to wearing al Qaeda black pajamas?” Fuller said, eyeing the buttoned-down, khakis-wearing doctor.

  Bahdoon waved Dante to cross the border to confer on behalf of the hostages’ release. Using a mobile phone app as a voicebox, he asked, “Do you have all the money this time?”

  “Yes. For the dead American SEAL, the Danish captain,
and hostages from the Shining Sea,” Dante said, pointing to the suitcases. “The money is all here, two million large.”

  “No, no, no. What about the ships?”

  “You’re emptying oil as we speak in Berbera. You mined the container ship off Zeila. You killed a sailor and tied him to the propeller. Now you want more money for bad behavior? It’s not going to fucking happen,” Dante said, standing his ground.

  Bahdoon didn’t argue the points. He stood where Korfa didn’t dare to stand, near the border, in fear of being shot like his brother or assassinated like his body double. The warlord wasn’t about to take any chances. Bahdoon nodded and ambled back to the jeep. He pressed a number on a mobile phone, summoning a bus to drive the hostages to the border.

  Both sides waited for the olive-green bus to arrive. Dante and Chris Fuller waited and watched, when finally the bus pulled around the dusty bend and arrived at the gate.

  As the hostages climbed out of the bus, shielding their eyes from the bright sun, which they hadn’t seen in days, one Marine began filming the release. In good faith, Dante stepped over the border and dropped off one case of money. Until he saw the Danish captain and CO Nico Gregorius in a body bag, he wasn’t going to release the other case of money.

  A young pirate handler picked up the suitcase and carried it on board the bus, to see if all of the money was there. Five minutes went by when the bus flashed its headlights, signaling that the trade had been accepted. It took another few minutes with no sign of activity in the bus that gave Dante pause. He started to wonder if the final trade would go down at all. Just when he was about to tell Fuller to enact Plan B, a Land Rover drove up behind Bahdoon at the border. For a long, tense moment the Land Rover, too, sat idling.