The moment he tracked Tasi, the torpedo-shape of Inapo sliced behind him, grazing Merk with his pectoral fin. The gentle bump at high speed spun Merk into a barrel roll. Tumbling backward like a top, he let go of his knees, stretched out his legs, and unfolded his body to arrest the spinning motion. But in doing so, he was vulnerable to being hit by Tasi.
Merk turned around, crossed his arms, and blocked a heavy blow with her snout. The force of Tasi spearing him, the combat diver, jarred the snorkel out of his mouth. With the dive mask knocked cockeyed, salt water flooded his eyes, temporarily blinding him. Inapo swung over, butted Merk back down, snatched the dislodged snorkel, and swam it to the surface, separating the breathing apparatus from the diver.
Above, the muted sound of footsteps strode across the floating metal dock.
Tasi, the navy dolphin with a shark bite scar on the back blade of her dorsal fin, breached the surface, tossing the snorkel onto the dock. The snorkel spat out a rill of water as it landed at the feet of a naval attaché in white uniform, wetting his patent leather shoes. Behind him stood CIA agent Alan Cuthbert, dressed in camouflage army fatigues.
Merk took an elevator ride up to the surface with Inapo. Cupping his hand on the dolphin’s beak, he let go as they soared out of the cove. Merk twisted his body a quarter turn, landing his butt on the dock. He rolled backward and sprang to his feet, dripping wet in front of the naval attaché.
Out of uniform, Merk wasn’t obligated to salute the higher-ranking officer. Instead, he extended his wet hand and shook the attaché in a firm grip. Alan Cuthbert looked on in disbelief, eyeing the water running down the ridges and striations of the burn scar that covered the left side of Merk’s body. “Am I fired, heading back to San Diego?”
“Negative, Lt. Toten. You’re hired, going to Somalia,” said the naval attaché, looking over at Tasi and Inapo spying on their conversation.
“Really, sir?” Merk said, shocked to hear it after failing to save the life of Lt. Morgan Azar in the Strait of Hormuz. “Excuse me, sir.” Merk turned to Tasi and Inapo, who floated — waiting for the next command. He signaled his fingers in pinchers to go “eat.”
The dolphins swam across the cove, hidden behind a tall sand-colored blind that kept the marine mammal holding pens away from prying eyes in the Persian Gulf. Tasi and Inapo fluked to a female animal handler. She dangled fish in a bucket. The dolphins breached and struck their bodies in a loud midair slap. They bounced apart and splashed into the cove. Tasi and Inapo resurfaced in front of the handler, clearing their blowholes in jets of mist.
“Finesse and force,” Merk said, pointing to the dolphins. “Tasi the female is all brains, very cunning. The male, Inapo, is loaded with testosterone like a bull.”
“I can see that. Tasi and Inapo… they are the Guam-bred systems, aren’t they?” The naval attaché took a towel from an animal handler and gave it to Merk to wipe off. “Toten, Special Ops Command has a new assignment for the MMS. It’s Black Lit.”
Merk understood the code words for “blacks ops in the littoral environment” — “Black Lit” — as more than classified. The mission would be clandestine in nature as opposed to covert action. That meant the op would conceal the sponsor, in that case the US Navy, instead of merely concealing the mission. In the former, the president would have zero knowledge that it existed, since it was off the books in the black budget. In the latter, the profile of a covert mission was grounded in an intel briefing with the executive-in-chief, often with Congressional oversight. Merk became curious as to why he was called to participate in a Black Lit operation.
“Where can we talk?” Alan Cuthbert asked.
The naval attaché looked around, not sure where to talk to in utmost secrecy. Merk pointed to a naval salvage ship on the other side of the blind, and said, “I was told the ship has a dive chamber on board. It seats eight. The stainless steel doors and walls dampen all outside noise. Close to soundproof.”
“Pure oxygen, I’ll take it,” the attaché said, leading Merk to the chamber.
Stationed in an annex of the US Navy Base in Asu Bahrain, northwest of the Qatar peninsula, the Navy Marine Mammal Program’s half-dozen dolphins were on loan to train and guard naval ships stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Merk toweled off and slipped on a “Go Navy” tee shirt. He led the naval attaché and Alan Cuthbert into the high-pressured hyperbaric diver chambers, or HBOTs. Sent overseas from one of six Norfolk, Virginia, rapid dive units, the HBOT was the ideal place to talk in private.
Once inside the cramped quarters, which had chairs, a wood table, and a bench, the chamber operator with a saturation technician closed the steel door and locked it shut. Merk hadn’t seen Alan Cuthbert since they worked together in ferreting out an al Qaeda infiltrator in Hawaii a few years back.
The naval attaché picked up on the familiarity between the men, and asked, “Merk, how did you guys know each other?”
“It was a discussion about methods.”
Cuthbert looked at Merk and then at the attaché, but said nothing.
“Methods? On what? Interrogation? Tracking terrorists?”
“Interspecies communication,” Merk said. “We compared notes on dolphin spy-hopping versus man-made CIA Predator drones. Drones that one day be made for the sea to replace Tasi.”
The attaché nodded, pretending he understood, and showed images on a laptop. A grainy infrared video showed a SEAL team boarding the US-flag container ship at 2217 hours. He said: “Toten, the Shining Sea was one of two vessels hijacked yesterday. When the SEALs boarded the ship, they didn’t find any sailors. The bridge, main deck, engine room, and panic room were empty. No crew. Not even the body that spilled the blood during the pirate attack.”
“I read the briefs. Like the captains being off-loaded into the pirate mothership. Does the evidence suggest the pirates transferred the American crew to the Blå Himmel?” Merk asked. “The oil cargo must be richer than the goods stored in those containers, no?”
The naval attaché showed footage from a Predator drone trailing the tanker heading to Somaliland. He explained that they never found the pirate mothership, and went on in detail about the lone escapee, Peder Olsen, the former Norwegian Special Forces sniper turned mercenary. He played a video on his mobile phone of Peder, sunburned, doused with a bucket of water, barely audible, confirming a kill before abandoning ship.
“The spec warrior wasn’t the captain, but a hired gun. He must have killed a big lion and knew it,” Merk said. “Why else abandon the hostages? He lived to fight another day.”
“You read his actions like you know him,” Cuthbert said, tapping the table.
“Gut, SEAL gut.” Merk looked at the naval attaché, asking, “The pirate killed by Peder, who was he?” The attaché shrugged. So Merk turned to Cuthbert: “What list does the CIA and FBI share on the most wanted pirates in Somalia?”
“We have a dossier of three dozen inner-circle pirates from the Horn of Africa,” he replied, “with ten of them operating in the north provinces along the Gulf of Aden.”
“Anyone you know on that list?”
“A pirate named Samatar. His name translates to ‘Doer of Good,’” Cuthbert said.
“Who’s his warlord?”
“No one. Co-warlords. He shared power with his brother, Korfa, in Puntland.”
Merk sat back with a quizzical look, then turned to the attaché: “Has anyone contacted Peder’s family in Norway?”
“Sure. The Norwegian shipowner must have done that,” the attaché sort of answered.
“You might want to inform his family about the pirate he took out. They’re going to need twenty-four hour protection. Then I’d be concerned about why the supertanker is heading to Somaliland closer to the Red Sea instead of Korfa’s home state of Puntland,” Merk said.