Dolphin Drone

by James Ottar Grundvig

  “Full, what’s going down?” Dante whispered. “Why the gas mask?”

  “Psycho warfare? … Or he’s hiding his identity,” Fuller observed.

  Dante turned around and stared at Bahdoon, studying his posture, watching his hand motions and gait, his height—five-foot-six at most—weighing around 140 pounds. “Mm-hmm,” Dante agreed with Fuller’s assessment. “Film his ass so we can find out who he is.” The former FBI special agent nodded, and subtly clicked a button on his Satcom signaling the marine to zero in and film the pirates.

  Before the marine could target Bahdoon, the man climbed into the jeep and backed away. But Dante was able to film the gas mask pirate doing just that with his smartphone. A pair of Somali pirates stepped out of the Land Rover—they too were wearing gas masks. One led the harried Danish captain at gunpoint toward Dante at the border. The other pirate dragged a body bag out of the vehicle and dumped it on the ground—a clear sign of disrespect. Dante’s neck veins bulged. He was livid. He clenched his fists and bit his lower lip, gnashing his teeth.

  A couple of marines took aim at the Somali pirate escorting the captain to the border crossing. Dante held up a fist for the Marines to lower their weapons. The pirate, breathing hard through the gas mask filter, stopped the captain in front of Dante, pointing at the other suitcase of money, the firearm now pressed to the back of the captain’s head.

  Fuller took a couple of marines over the border with him to check on the contents of the body bag. A marine unzipped the bag; Fuller stooped over and matched the dead SEAL CO Nico Gregorius with photos of him. He pulled the CO’s dental records, and checked it against the teeth in the corpse’s mouth. They matched. He then scanned Nico’s finger- and palm-prints.

  Fuller looked back at Dante and nodded, then wiped a tear leaking from his eye. He and the marines carried the dead CO back across the border. Another marine carried the second suitcase across the border and placed it in front of the jeep. When the contents of the suitcase were inspected inside the Land Rover, the vehicle flashed its headlights, signaling the pirate to release the Danish captain.

  With the beat-up captain weak in the legs, Dante put his arm around the Dane and escorted him across the border, handing him off to a couple of marines, who took the Blue Heaven captain into medical care.

  Dante snapped a photo of the pirate heading back to the Land Rover, then turned around and crossed the border back to Djibouti.

  All that remained of the attacks were the hijacked ships. There, NATO and Centcom would call the shots on how to proceed to defeat or contain the pirate cells in Somaliland. But if it were up to Dante, he would have the CIA drone hovering above bomb the Land Rover right that minute and forget bargaining for the ships or the cargos.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  THE CIA AGENTS blocked Merk from talking to Dante about grilling the Norwegian sniper Peder Olsen, since Dante was no longer in the military. They insisted that the former SEAL CO could only be used as an intermediary in hostage negotiations. For Merk, they went further and put a call to their FBI counterparts in Washington to keep Merk away from Olsen altogether.

  The CIA shafted Merk. He felt the knife stab in his back. He knew something deeper was going on than the typical agency turf war. So he went to the intel fusion center to conduct the interview himself. He called on a favor from an E-9 Marine sergeant major, who led the Norwegian sniper into the dining hall. When Merk arrived, Peder sat on a chair backward, his meaty forearms folded on the backrest. The sniper stared at Merk with a cocky smirk. Noting his sunburn was on the mend, Merk motioned a young, green ONI officer to leave the building. The young naval intel officer said nothing as he exited the door. Merk double bolted the door and strode back to Peder.

  “So you are the dolphin trainer I heard about,” Peder said in a testosterone-fueled tone.

  Merk stood in front of the Norwegian sniper. “We’re not here to talk about dolphins. My op is classified.”

  “I’m not? Then what am I here for?” he asked, grinning a stupid smirk.

  Merk stepped over to a table next to Peder and poured a glass of water, saying, “No. You’re here for—” and splashed the water in Peder’s face. He recoiled. Merk grabbed his arm and pulled the Norwegian down, smashing the glass over his head. He kicked a leg off the chair and threw the sniper hard to the floor. Merk pulled Peder’s arm flat, twisting the hand at the wrist, grinding his elbow in Peder’s jaw, pinning his head to the ground. Merk put a knee on Peder’s flattened elbow, freeing his right hand that held a jagged shard of glass and waved it over the mercenary’s eyeball.

  Peder slapped the floor with his other hand, crying, “Uncle, uncle. Stop. Stop it.”

  Merk rolled over the sniper’s back, sprung to his feet, and ripped his long-sleeve shirt open, tearing it off, revealing his burn-scarred flesh and the orange and silver “Broken Daggers” tattoo on his right breast. It was the tattoo of the Navy SEAL trident on Merk’s biceps that told Peder everything he needed to know about Merk Toten, a former SEAL Team Six member.

  Merk pulled a chair over and sat down waiting for the Norwegian to get up.

  Peder shook his numbed hand and wrist, rubbing his elbow as he rose to his knees. He eyed Merk’s warped flesh, which looked like melted candlewax. He wringed his wet hair with his fingers, and sat down in a new chair across from the dolphin whisperer, muttering, “Sorry, didn’t know.”

  “Norseman, you do know something,” Merk said. Peder looked in Merk’s eyes and said nothing. “Let me help you. Norway has been soft on terror for a long time, but not you. In summer 2011, the socialists, forever on a terrorist holiday, allowed a super lone wolf to bomb government buildings with a slow-acting, large-volume fertilizer bomb, blasting out the facades in a shock wave. But the madman wasn’t done. What did the Norwegian police and authorities do? Nothing. Your goddamn government did squat to prevent the lone wolf from taking a Sunday drive up the highway, past toll booths, cruise deep into the countryside, take a ferry ride, and assassinate seventy kids and adults at a summer camp island. Great shit. Impressive.”

  Peder stared at the navy dolphin trainer, who clearly showed his US Navy SEAL counterterrorism background. “Ja,” he finally spoke up. “Add the Norwegian telecom giant Telenor to the list of defense failures. In 2013, they were breached by Chinese or Iranian hackers, who injected fifty Trojan horses through a zip file in one email sent to all thirty thousand employees. The phishing attack allowed the hackers to sit and wait, like a sniper, like me, a finger on the trigger, and then on one late Friday night in Oslo wipe all the data from Telenor’s executives’ laptops, desktop, and mobile devices. That was really embarrassing.”

  “Yeah, it was,” Merk agreed. “Now, I need your help. A terrorist strike on the West is in motion. And I’m going to stop it.” Peder opened his mouth about to say something, but then stopped. He looked at the floor and then watched Merk step to a wall screen. With a remote, the dolphin trainer clicked on the drone image of the Blå Himmel supertanker anchored in Berbera. The image had two red circles embedded on it, one marking the roof of the bridge, where Peder fired the shots, and the other all the way across the deck to the bow, the blood pool where he felled Samatar. “What did you fire? … Two, maybe three shots?” Merk asked; Peder nodded. “Your job as a vessel protection detachment guard was to protect the ship from a pirate attack. But you left the tanker vulnerable to just that. Why? Did you make that decision?”

  “Nay, the shipowner.”

  “Oh, the owner,” Merk scoffed, asking, “Why single out a pirate a klick away? Why not shoot the other pirates scurrying across the deck, hundreds of meters closer to you?”

  “Who knows why?”

  “Goatshit. You know why!” Merk screamed and clicked the next image showing a split-screen of the dorsalcam images of the bombs that were planted underwater on the supertankers’ hull. “Squarehead, don’t play dumb with me.” Merk clicked the next image showing a similar type of bomb used in underwater demolition to dec
ommission an old oil rig. “This is your work from Norway’s offshore oil industry, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t plant the bombs, I swear,” he said.

  “No, you made them, stored them on the tanker, for the pirates to plant on the hull when they brought the ship to port,” Merk said. “They don’t make bombs like that in Somalia.”

  A single tear broke down Peder’s face. His hands began to tremble.

  Merk noticed both and put the remote down, then said with force, “You and the pirates are goddamn pawns to something much bigger than hijacking ships. It’s for a spectacular attack, isn’t it? The two ships were taken by design. The piracy was a dry run, wasn’t it?”

  “Ja, shit.”

  “Shit? People are going to die. Radicalism is spreading. Who paid you to kill Samatar?”

  “Don’t know,” his somber voice cracked.

  “Who gave the order?”

  “Korfa.”

  “Who does he work for?”

  “Something, er, like … Svarte Occult.”

  “Black Occult? Who the hell are they? A splinter group?”

  Peder shook his head no.

  Merk ran Korfa through his mind. It all began to make sense. A hard rap banged the steel door. Merk ignored the noise and the shouts to open it.

  He looked hard at Peder, saying, “If you’re holding anything back, I will hunt you down in prison or your homeland. You got it?”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  DEEP IN THE bowels of Fordow nuclear fuel plant in Qom, Iran, Kim Dong-Sun emerged from the R&D laboratory. After vetting the missile engineer with questions that only she would know about her kidnapping in the Syrian desert with General Adad, Ferdows gave Quds security an all-clear that Kim Dong-Sun was one and the same person he worked with in Syria.

  Ferdows took Dong-Sun on a brief tour of the plutonium enrichment plant.

  In recent years, Qom had taken over 20 percent of the centrifuges processing yellowcake from the US-targeted Natanz facility. So the Israeli Stuxnet worm, planted in the computer system in June 2010, had no impact on Iran’s overall capability to enrich uranium; neither did the nuclear treaty with the US in 2015. Stuxnet was a mere speed bump in the process. Jenny saw with her own eyes that Iran wasn’t going to comply with any nuclear arms agreement.

  Having written a brief in the round Korean script on what elements should be included in retrofitting a missile guidance system for a torpedo, she handed it to Ferdows and requested to be transferred to a project for her missile engineering expertise.

  Ferdows studied the document, but couldn’t read Korean. “This is?”

  “The new design,” Kim said without emotion. “If you need a translation, email it to my colleague at the Syrian missile site or to your contact in North Korea.”

  “I will. What does it say? Are you recommending a fix?” the scientist asked.

  “Smaller capacitor inserted sideways will give you the eight centimeters you need,” she pointed out on the sketch. “A tight fit. But don’t use Silicon Valley’s commercial GPS system. That’s not reliable.” He looked at her perplexed. “When you control the steering of a torpedo near the surface, you can’t risk the satellites’ triangulation being off,” she replied. “Have the Syrian Electronic Army hack into the Pentagon and use the US military’s GPS system. It’s far more accurate.”

  “But that’s hidden behind a strong firewall.”

  “Yes, for you, but not me,” she said. “I can show the cyber Syrians how to get inside.”

  Ferdows nodded, thinking her recommendations over, especially the one about hacking the US military GPS network. That was a good piece of insight. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. I am ready to fly to the new missile site at Lake Urmia you mentioned,” she said. “By the way, what happened to the old missile facility?”

  “Badr near Teheran? A few years ago, Badr missile site suffered an explosion that destroyed two buildings.”

  “How did that happen? Saboteurs?”

  “The revolutionary guards, who run the facility as they do here, said it was sabotaged. It could have been an accident. … Who knows? The Guard Corps are rebuilding the site now, hardening the fifty missile silos there,” Ferdows said.

  She nodded and followed Ferdows into the communication room.

  If I get out of Iran alive, one bomb will misfire, she thought to herself, calculating that when the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the military GPS satellite network, she would have the Pentagon redirect the torpedo from harm’s way and alert Merk about the Russian navy dolphins.

  But for that to happen, she had to get out of Iran.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  THE HELICOPTER RIDE over the mountain ranges of Kurdistan in northwest Iran was about to deliver Jenny a great deal closer to Iraq, the Kurds, and pockets of ISIS, all less than one day’s drive to the border. Her immediate goal of exiting the hardline country with the Ayatollah’s vow to destroy Israel and attack America became her only task, her singular goal, her only mission.

  Sitting in the cargo bay with armed revolutionary guards, she avoided eye contact. She shut her eyes to feign taking a nap. Jenny, dressed as Kim Dong-Sun, began to run a slew of what-if scenarios with their potential outcomes, good and bad, in her mind when the helicopter touched down before sunset at the Lake Urmia missile site.

  The worst-case scenario: Jenny would be exposed by her North Korean colleagues for being an imposter, in which case she would have to fight her way out of the base and then find a way to leave the country to Iraq, which was close enough by vehicle, but not on foot. The latter would take days. She also understood the longer she met with the real Dong-Sun’s North Korean fellow engineers and scientists at the new missile site, the greater the risk of her being exposed as a CIA spy.

  Upon landing, Agent King needed to move quickly. She had to find the quickest, most discrete way to vanish, to make her way over the Kurdistan Mountains to the border of Iraq. She had to escape. She had to make it. She had to give all the intelligence she collected to the directorates in Langley so they could act, with terrorist city and targets still unknown.

  * * *

  THE HELICOPTER SLOWED down as it approached the base under construction. Behind it, the big bowl of depleted salt water Lake Urmia spoke about the severity of the region’s drought, which like ISIS extended from Syria through northern Iraq to the northwest corner of Iran. Lake Urmia looked like Las Vegas’s dying Lake Mead—with Iran’s overbuilding of dams accelerating its death. Urmia once was a favorite resort for thousands of Iranians. She saw several abandoned houses with ghost docks on the far side of the lake, a stark reminder of the summer days when Iranians used to flock to the resort to bathe and water ski.

  Out the window in the foreground, Kim Dong-Sun saw three helipads, a long warehouse structure, and a parking lot half filled with Iranian, Russian, and Chinese-made cars. One of those cars, she posited, was going to come into play as her exit strategy.

  When the helicopter landed, the Revolutionary Guards Corps walked Dong-Sun across the helipads to the rear entrance of the building. The door opened and an Iranian military officer greeted her. He led her to a debriefing room, where she was introduced to an Iranian scientist, a European engineer—a defector? she wondered—and what she feared was one of her North Korean colleagues. She didn’t recognize the Korean engineer; and he didn’t give her a hint that he knew Kim Dong-Sun either. So far, she was lucky.

  The North Koreans greeted one another with a slight nod. In their native tongue, he congratulated her on the books and white papers she wrote over the years, shaping the missile program from duds falling short of their mark to a new, more robust, more accurate generation of North Korean missiles and guidance systems, stolen from American defense contractors.

  She saw a set of plans spread out across the table. Aware of her homeland custom, she could neither point to her colleague nor wave him to pass the plans across the table—since in Korea it was considered rude and bad W
estern manners. Instead, she lowered her hand, turned it with her palm open facing up, and moved her hand forward. The North Korean engineer bowed to her request and slid the plans across the table to her.

  “What do you want to see, Lady Kim?” the Iranian scientist asked.

  Also lucky for Jenny, she had studied the satellite, drone, and spy plane images a month before on the Lake Urmia base being built. She noted a third helipad had been built since she saw the recon photos, but recalled there were no silos excavated as of that date, while the parking lot had doubled in size from what she recalled in the helicopter arriving to the base.

  Jenny had also spent days studying the shrinking salt lake, some 85 percent in less than two decades. A bad mix of changing climate and man-made pressures caused Lake Urmia’s death spiral. With drought the real threat to the region, the lake would soon dry up. Iran had hired a Belgium environmental science and engineering firm to restore the lake. The European company, which was hacked by the NSA, had previously resurrected the Dead Sea from a similar fate. But she doubted they would have success in Iran. Too many dams, built too fast. But then she realized Lake Urmia’s restoration project was going to be Jenny’s ticket out of Iran.

  Dong-Sun spread the plans open. She studied the topography, where the missile pads would be installed in Phase II, and where the half dozen silos would be excavated, cored, and sleeved in Phase III of the project. She pointed to the south bend of the lake, asking “Is this where the shoreline resides today?”

  “Good question,” her North Korean colleague said.

  “I believe that’s the shoreline today,” the Iranian scientist said, not quite sure.

  She put the drawings together, rolled them up, and said, “I need to go outside and conduct a survey of the missile silo locations.”