With permission granted, a nurse led Merk into the room.
Peder Olsen was deep in slumber; there were gauze bandages wrapped around second-degree burns, with cortisone cream covering blisters on his face, forehead, and neck. Merk recognized the lowest level of a burn ward and remembered his days aboard a ship recovering from one skin graft procedure after another. Olsen had an IV drip with heart and brain monitoring wires strung across his torso and head like computer cables that seemed to be more for show than anything else for the strapping mercenary.
Merk stepped around the other side of the bed and examined Peder’s right hand. It was swollen and burnt red by the sun. The ring finger on the same hand, where Norwegians wear their wedding bands, showed a redder sunburned ring around the finger where the band had sat wedged for years. Merk suspected Peder had removed his wedding band prior to boarding the Blå Himmel for the high-risk assignment of being the ship’s hired gun. What he didn’t know was whether the Norwegian was a mercenary, or something more, such as an informant or an embedded asset gathering intel for NATO or Norway’s Special Forces.
“When was he awake last?” Merk asked the nurse.
“Nine hours ago,” she said, reading the patient’s chart on a tablet.
“When he’s up, inform the XO. I need to speak to him.” Merk exited the room.
In the CDC, Merk stood to the rear alongside a technician and surveyed those seated around a conference table: Naval engineers, a weapons officer, an ONI officer, a communications officer, the commander, the XO, and a tired SEAL CO Nico Gregorius, who reclined in a seat with a knee resting on the edge of the table. Nico scratched his day-old stubble.
On the wall, banks of flat- and curved-screen monitors and computer terminals kept the ship’s twenty-eight officer crew up to date on shipping activity in the gulf, live shots from Predator drones, and the latest news on the pirates, Somalia, and the owners of the hijacked ships. A wall screen replayed the night-vision video the SEALs captured of the passing vessels. Seeing that Merk was in the CDC, a technician played the clip of the SEALs and a platoon of marines boarding the US container ghost ship, Shining Sea.
The infrared video revealed little about the pirates or the missing crew. Other than a pool of blood from one of the wounded or slain crewmen, there was little to go on. The pirates either aborted the hijacking of the ship or followed through to abandon the vessel in the first place.
Merk wondered: Was it a logistical mistake that caused the pirates to leave the Shining Sea early? Or did they do it as part of a master plan?
What was unique about the double hijackings: The pirates successfully seized two ships on the same day in the same shipping lane. They escalated violence at the start of boarding both vessels. Perhaps more under the radar, the Somali pirates returned to the heavily internationally patrolled Gulf of Aden to target the ships, after expanding their territory into the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean off the coast of Kenya. But did they have help?
The high-echelon targets were always oil and gas and its wealthy owners, from Arab nations and royal families, to the Western oil conglomerates that serviced them. Why did the pirates hijack the container ship? Merk wondered. The commander motioned him to speak.
“What do you have on scope and timing with the MMS pod?” Merk asked.
“You’ll be airborne with your marine mammal systems at 2100 hours zulu. We use the cover of night to drop you inside the twelve mile international line off the coast of Somalia, with geocoords that are equidistant between the provinces of Somaliland and Puntland,” the commander said. “Nico will ride with you, conducting his own inland recon. He’ll provide cover for you and the MM systems.”
Merk checked the red-eyed SEAL CO, saying, “Nico, you got the stamina for this?”
“No worries. I sleep one hemisphere of the brain at a time, like your fins.”
The navy personnel erupted with laughter.
Grinning, Merk nodded in approval, liking the CO’s knowledge of dolphin neurobiology.
“You’ve come a long way, Toten, from your hellish survey last week. The scope of the clandestine op is in here,” the commander said, sliding a black folder stamped “Top Secret” across the table. “After you commit the details to memory, the XO will relieve you of the brief. This op doesn’t exist. Not when you get captured. Not when you return. It has no code name.”
“Fine. I’m a phantom,” Merk said, glancing around the room. “Why the Somali pirates? Why now? Why are we getting involved in an FBI procedure?”
“We got word. Somali pirates had help,” the commander began to explain. “AQAP and the Syrian Electronic Army, maybe others. We wonder if the attacks on the two ships were ordered by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran or by the Houthi rebels they sponsor in Yemen. The mullahs might seek revenge for your mission that blew up their mine-laying operation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
“Revenge is not my cup of tea,” Merk said. “Iran has all the motivation it needs to undermine the US. Like them, we’re all birds in a cage, following orders, honoring hierarchy.”
Chapter Seventeen
In a ground floor conference room at CIA Headquarters, the CIA director, a graying, athletic man with a politician’s suave looks, nodded while handing over a blue border folder meant for the State Department, marked “Top Secret.” “The Azure Shell team will be a day late to negotiate with the pirates,” the CIA director told the deputy DO. “Does the FBI know that?”
“You’re supposed to be at the White House PDB in an hour,” the deputy DO said.
“I canceled that BS fest. I’ve been called back here on a couple of fronts,” the CIA director said. “Let’s go to the Seventh Floor.”
On the Seventh Floor of Langley, down the hall from his corner office and private kitchen, the CIA director broke off a videoconference with the head of MI6, Britain’s foreign counterterrorism division. A disagreement erupted over what was happening in tracking the movement of tribesmen and the Syrian Electronic Army personnel in the Empty Quarter Desert, the growing unrest in Jaar, and other onetime al Qaeda stronghold cities in southern Yemen.
The poor arid country, led by a fragile government and an even weaker economy — oil exports account for ninety percent of Yemen’s GDP — had to defend hundreds of miles of oil pipelines against saboteurs. Two main pipelines ran from the southwest corner of the Empty Quarter in the Massila oilfield to ports along the Gulf of Aden, with a third pipeline running west to the Ras Isa oil terminal on the Red Sea.
The argument with the intelligence ally was enough to send the CIA director bolting out of the conference room and head down to the Sixth Floor Ops Center. There he huddled with his deputies, including the head of the CIA’s ultra-secret Special Activities Division, SAD, an ex-navy SEAL from SEAL Team Six, and senior analysts from the CIA’s Information Operations Center Analysis Group — IOC/AG. Surrounded by wall screens, a pair of desktops, tablets, a plasma TV, fed with an array of real-time surveillance devices pulled from a global network of military, spies, informants, and high-tech eavesdropping devices, the director let his eyes absorb intel on the two red-hot fronts: the reigniting ISIS-inflamed civil war in Syria, Iraq, and pan North Africa, and the resurgence of AQAP in Yemen.