Merk didn’t know the answer. But the data he collected on their behavior, sleep, and eating patterns might point to a sudden outburst or breakdown in discipline. Still, he was going into uncharted territory with them, and any other pod of navy dolphins he had worked with in the past for that matter.
When the Black Hawk reached the insertion point a few miles off the coast of Somalia, it hovered off the coast, halfway between Bosaso and Maydh, an ancient holy Arabian city in the Sanaag region that centered Somalia’s north coast. The Black Hawk’s cargo door opened; a pair of SEAL divers jumped backward into the sea.
The helicopter’s cargo bay opened. In patchy water, the cargo master lowered a Zodiac inflatable boat to the divers. In succession, the cargo master made the delivery of arms, ammo, food, supplies, and equipment down to the divers. Tasi and then Inapo were lowered in their hardboxes to the sea. When the lamb’s wool — lined stretchers sank below the surface, the dolphins wiggled out of the slings and swam around the drop zone, inspecting the perimeter to guard the divers.
After the hardboxes were hoisted back up to the cargo bay, a winch lowered Merk and Nico into the Zodiac. The divers handed supplies to them and were lifted up to the helicopter.
Merk flashed a hand-sign to the dolphins, signaling them to leap onto the rubber boat. Tasi landed on board a liner draped over the starboard gunwale in a spit of spray. Merk strapped her down and rubbed the shark-bite dorsal fin for good luck. Then Inapo dove under the hull of the Zodiac, corkscrewed up, and slithered onto the opposite gunwale. Merk held Inapo in place, pulled the strap over the mammal’s missile-shaped body, tying him down.
Nico turned south to the empty sea, flipped down night-vision goggles, and scanned the silhouette of the rocky horizon in the distance. The Longbow pulled alongside, hovering fifty feet above the waves, its four main rotor blades whooshing in the air, rippling creases in the sea. Its reverse-tricycle landing gear deployed as if it were going to set down on the water. The pilot and copilot-gunner, who used FLIR and the Longbow radar mast that can see through fog, searched ahead to make sure the sea space was clear. With a flash of a laser pointer from the cockpit, Nico signaled they were heading to shore. He turned on the engine and rode the craft; Merk stretched out between the dolphins, keeping them calm on the bumpy ride to shore.
Behind the CO, Merk watched the helicopters bank away. First, the transport and then the Longbow swept back toward the USS New York. He gazed in Tasi’s eye to check her mood. She appeared calm. Inapo gave off a different, moody vibe.
Nico gunned the inflatable boat. The stiff wind rippled Merk’s face, which was blackened with grease paint like an ex-Navy SEAL. To calm the dolphins down, Merk drummed his fingers on the rubber tube. Even with the muted droning noise of the outboard motor and the vibrations from the bumpy ride, the dolphins listened to Merk’s fingers through their jawbones resting on the gunwales. Having been raised by his navy father, Bill Toten, hopping from base to base, the one constant was his old man teaching Merk the dots and dashes of Morse code since he was a child. In turn, Merk passed that communication of sound on to the dolphins he trained. He tapped his fingers in dots and long dashes, signaling the dolphins to rest, to shut down one hemisphere of the brain and slumber in a state of half awake, half asleep. The last series of dashes — taps — relaxed Inapo enough to halt the mammal’s dead-eyed look and squeak at Merk.
The dolphins would ride on the rubber boat close to shore, before being released. Had the mission been set in the hostile arena of the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, or near the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, where the Islamic State, the Kurds, and Iraqi forces were fighting over the Kuwaiti oil fields, Merk would have found a way to deep-six their mission.
For Nico the ride in to Somalia was different. The admirals and analysts at Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had originally identified the barren island of Jasiira Maydh, eight miles north of Maydh, for Merk and Nico to set up a staging nest. On further analysis of the mile-long rocky island with football-stadium-high bluffs, no vegetation or fresh water, and a lunar, fissure-torn, guano-covered surface, the island gave the CO and brass at SOCOM pause. It would have put Merk and Nico offshore, out in the open with little relief from the sun, while being stuck on a rock with no escape route. So the gambit to operate onshore in a CIA safe house was estimated by some analyst to be less risky.
Less than a mile offshore, in front of a one-story box sticking up on the toe of a hill, Merk zoomed on an object floating on the sea a couple hundred yards ahead. He held up a fist for Nico to shut off the engine. The inflatable boat slowed to a glide, then to a drift rocking in the waves. The CO trained night-vision binoculars on the dark object. Initially, he thought it was a bough of driftwood or a dhow. In the choppy sea, the object bobbed, making positive ID harder.
After a long moment, a pair of silhouettes, human figures, could be seen kneeling in the object that grew into the outline of a fishing skiff. Merk listened over the whistle of the wind until he heard the faint throttle of an outboard motor. He looked back at Nico and flashed two fingers for two fishermen. The CO unzipped a shoulder bag and took out a folding-stock rifle with a night-vision scope. He opened the stock and aimed the rifle at the fishermen; Merk reached over and lowered the barrel, shaking his head. Nico gave a hard look; Merk took out an audio-telescope, turned it on, and aimed the acoustical nozzle in the direction of the skiff. He slipped on earpods, and listened to the engine drown out sound in the distance.
Merk played with the squelch fader on the transceiver until he filtered out the static noise of the fisherman’s putting engine, while tuning up the sound of their voices. As he zeroed on the idle, but insect-like chatter of their foreign tongue, he realized they weren’t pirates or terrorists. He could sense that by the tone of small talk. Still, they had eyes, ears, and tongues that could spread the word to the pirates if they spotted the small US cell inside Somalia waters.
Knowing secrecy was paramount, Merk unclipped the straps on the dolphins. With his twin hand-signs, the dolphins leapt off the rubber boat and sliced under the waves. They raced toward the fishing skiff, fluking across the surface. When they came within a short distance of the craft, they dove under, mirroring one another’s moves, silently communicating.
Merk motioned Nico to watch at the skiff closing on their position, when one dolphin leapt over the boat, grazing a fisherman.
Startled, the man ducked; his mate shut off the motor. They turned on flashlights and panned the sea searching for the wraith that unnerved them. The man stood up to shine the light at a steeper angle below the surface, looking here and there — when the other dolphin shot up, rammed the boat from behind, jolting it hard. The fisherman stumbled and dropped the flashlight into the sea. Spooked, his mate motioned him to sit down as he started the engine, and sped off into the night, racing away from the area.
Merk and Nico shared a laugh and then picked up paddles to row ashore.
Chapter Twenty
The box on the dark horizon, when up close, became a white seaside house on a mound with a dock jutting into a lagoon. Merk glanced at Nico, signaling that the house was their destination. When they drew within a hundred meters of shore, the outline of a person pacing in front of the seaside villa stood out as the new concern.