On one wall screen, a microcam, snaked inside a pole of a tent in the Syrian desert near the Iraqi border, captured a female North Korean missile engineer, Kim Dong-Sun, seated with four Syrian Army generals and a fellow North Korean scientist. They discussed the blueprint design of a missile launch site through an interpreter. The talks were going down live.
The CIA director shook his head. With mounting angst he badgered the analysts: “How long have they been breaking bread?”
“Thirty… maybe thirty-six hours,” one Red Cell analyst replied.
“Jesus.” He looked over at the SAD director, and ordered, “Mobilize whatever forces you have on the ground and kidnap that bitch before she leaves. You know what she’s doing? Well, I don’t need Clandestine Services to tell me.… She’s finishing plans to erect a long-range missile site aimed at Europe. Congress wants to handcuff our ability to interrogate key assets? Bloody idiots.”
“You’re serious about snatching the engineer?” the director of operations spoke up.
“Why not? The glare of the media might just shock them into action. Don’t forget they mocked our agents in the War on Terror with the AG’s show trial,” the CIA director said. “Every time I went to visit the president, his cabinet, and congressmen — who had lost faith in the war, who had lost their spine to back this agency, who had lost their way in Yemen, who had pulled out of that conflict prematurely without finishing the job — I got the sense that they didn’t fully appreciate what the stakes were. They didn’t get it. But now, now when the dust settles on this Syria-ISIS-Kurdish-Libya-Iranian shitstorm, they’ll wish they were no longer in office, that they were retired, spreading their gospel bile on the lecture circuit. Instead, they pushed their naïve bullshit agenda of peace on the world, underfunded and undermanned the war, and blocked the army’s surge required to defeat the Islamic militants — and defeat them by air. They never handed the baton to NATO or asked us to take charge and kill the enemy.”
One satellite image appeared to show a guard standing on the roof of the school/terrorist safe house in the Jaar square. That caught the CIA director’s eye. He ordered analysts to look at past pictures of the roof at night for comparison, and then asked, “What’s an armed guard doing on the roof protecting an empty school building at night? Is he a villager or an AQAP tango?”
The deputy DO wondered, too. Then the CIA director stepped over to a plasma screen showing dorsalcam images of a navy dolphin conducting swim-bys of the subsea, trans-strait oil pipeline, and then Iran’s laying of the sea-mines. He looked around the room, and challenged his staff: “Hey, Red Cell Team, tell me one of those dolphins triggered the release of the mine?”
A female analyst spoke up: “Director, that’s affirmative. All spy satellites confirm the hit on an Iranian fishing cover ship. I spoke to Susan Hogue last night. She’s the head of the navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego. Hogue confirmed the direct action. One of the navy’s dolphin team members made it out alive; the other one was shot and drowned during the escape. He was a former Special Forces operator turned veterinarian. His name was Lt. Morgan Azar.”
The CIA director shook his head to his deputies. Annoyed, he said, “Did you hear that? Tehran almost got us good with a fishing trip. Well, now we know what to look for when we retask our spy satellites. Is Red Cell operative Alan Cuthbert in position?”
“Yes, director. He landed at Fort 24 two hours ago,” the analyst said.
Chapter Eighteen
The thudding rotors vibrated Merk’s chest. They purred in his wrist as he absorbed the droning white noise, which made him drowsy until he nodded off. Soon REM sleep twitched his eyelids as the Black Hawk helicopter was en route to drop him and Navy SEAL Commanding Office Nico Gregorius, along with the dolphins, inside Somalian territorial waters.
The transport helicopter crossed the Gulf of Aden flying above the surface of the sea under radar. The operation used the veil of night to penetrate Somali airspace, when few fishermen or pirates were out at sea, especially after the double hijackings.
Backed by a lethal gunship in an Apache Longbow helicopter trailing a half klick behind, they were escorted deep into Somalia coastal waters. The Longbow was armed with eight “fire and forget” air-to-surface, RF-Hellfire missiles with advanced precision-kill weapon-system rockets, a platform designed for the littoral battlespace with the Longbow Fire Control Radar. Tasked with intercepting a pirate skiff — if for some reason the Somalis still lingered offshore — the pilot and copilot-gunner were ordered to track and follow, but not engage the target, since the aim was to gather intelligence on the location of the mothership, which still had not been located.
In the Black Hawk, the napping Merk sat on the floor of the cargo bay. He had made it a point not to hang with the dolphins. Close ties with the advance biologic systems, as the Navy Marine Mammal Program referred to its dolphins, was frowned upon. No excessive bonding or close relationships with the sea mammals. Merk understood the game and heard it all before. He held his back to the dolphins.
Tasi and Inapo were lying in slings suspended in hardboxes with gurney-casters, the brakes in locked position. Thin poly sheets draped the dolphins’ bodies, with slits cut for the dorsal fins, blowholes, and eyes. Articulating branches of micro-sprinklers sprayed their epidermis, keeping the sea mammals’ skin moist during air transport, which dried them out, stressed them by bumping their core-body temperature up toward feverish levels. That was another health problem Merk wanted to avoid at the start of a mission.
A replacement Army Special Forces marine biologist — it would have been Lt. Azar had he not died in the Strait of Hormuz — monitored the mammals’ vital signs, recording medical data on a tablet. After she finished the spot check, she prepared liquid vitamins mixed with minced kelp, kale, and Norwegian fish oil, and loaded the concoction into a handful of oversized syringes. She opened a cooler and inspected the fresh herring and mackerel the Pacific bottlenose dolphins consumed as reward during training exercises that consisted of locating mines or unexploded torpedoes.
Feeling a burr in his behind, Merk awakened. He opened his eyes. Disoriented for a second, he refocused his whereabouts and then reminded himself that the new op was not an undergoing training exercise. The mission was real. It was the second live littoral operation within a week for Tasi and Inapo inside enemy water. He wondered how they would perform, how they would fare under stress, how they would still remain an asset in the age of drones, robots, mobile apps, digital intel, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things. The navy dolphins were moving sensors; and it was his job to collect the data.
Over the next twenty-four hours Merk would learn just how well his year of training Tasi and Inapo at a secret base in Guam had paid off. The NMMP brass would be evaluating him. “Conflicted” or not, as Captain Davis Whittal labeled him in the debriefing on what happened in the strait, Merk had to look beyond weapons and passivity and balance following orders that put the dolphins in harm’s way versus his desire to one day set them free in the wild.
On a tablet, Merk watched the drone video of the missile strike on the school in Yemen. He looked at the time of the attack and realized it took place within forty minutes of the Iranians dropping mines in the strait. He didn’t believe in such “rainbow” coincidences; there had to be a connection. But what?
SEAL mode came creeping back into Merk’s mind.
Chapter Nineteen
On the way to Somali, Tasi and Inapo appeared calm on the surface; their vitals and core body temperature were normal. Stress didn’t show up in their behavior, not during dry transport, not when he trained them in Guam and then later for NMMP and DARPA brass under a top-secret cover on a remote Hawaiian island. How would they react to a second mission in a week?