“Who’s that? Anyone expecting us?” Merk whispered, knowing the hijacked ships were far west in the next state of Somaliland. He dialed the binoculars, zooming to see if the guard was armed. Although he didn’t see a rifle in the hands or slung over the shoulder, it didn’t mean the guard was unarmed. Merk motioned Nico to proceed with caution. Again, the “all clear” intel on land from the Office of Naval Intelligence, Navy SEALs, and CIA was off — by a mile. The safe house wasn’t empty. Nico had some explaining to do, but it wasn’t going to happen then.
Merk took out a high-pitched whistle and blew it. The call, silent to human ears, summoned Tasi and Inapo to swim back to the rubber boat and ride them to shore. There, Merk would observe whether the safe house was indeed safe, or was an advanced CIA hideout that had its cover blown. He aimed the audioscope and listened to the guard’s flip-flop sandals crunch on the granular surface. The footsteps paced back and forth, stopped, pivoted 180 degrees, then strode back. Without another guard to chat with, the sounds detected were of little use. He faded out the footsteps and eavesdropped on other sounds in the background. Beyond the wind chafing the eaves of the Spanish tile roof there was nothing audible to note.
Unable to wait for Nico to announce a Plan B — if there was one — Merk needed to take a closer look of the guard to see whether he was armed. With a nod that he was going in, Merk slipped on dive goggles, snapped his feet into swim fins, and rolled over the gunwale.
The water was balmy with a strong leeward current.
Tasi glided over and offered her dorsal fin; Merk grabbed hold and hitchhiked a ride to shore. He stayed low as Tasi rode him in, plowing through the waves that rose in the surf. The black crests rolled, breaking in streams of heavy white foam. Feeling a wave lift him, Merk released his grip and bodysurfed to shore. He kept his head up, hands out in front to block against any rocks striking his face, and glided in on the breaking swell.
The surf washed Merk up a stony beach. As it ebbed with another wave about to break on top of him, he heard footsteps crunch toward him and then stop. He saw sandals with black feet and polished toenails, which froze him. He was staring at a woman’s feet. But the sound of a handgun cocking stilled him. Merk felt another wave break over his legs as he pulled the dive goggles off and looked up at a tall, built African woman with long braided hair that slipped down the back of her shirt, aiming a handgun at his forehead.
Merk raised his hands; being caught spiked his blood pressure. Then out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed one of the dolphins skimming the shallows, sliding sideways. And with a burst, the dolphin tail-whipped a column of water over the guard. Drenched and startled, the woman slipped and fell. Merk grabbed her ankles, pulled her toward him. He pinned her face to the ground with his forearm, and wrested the handgun from her grip.
“Who are you?” she spat out in English with a Kenyan accent.
Merk held her down, removing the magazine from the pistol and emptied the bullet from the chamber, wondering the same question about her.
It was the first time he held a gun in decade. And it was cold.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the safe house by the sea, Nico introduced Merk to the Kenyan secret police officer, a CIA asset code-named Nairobi. For the past five years, she had infiltrated the pirates’ hostage-for-ransom supply chain in southern Somalia, working with US military and intelligence advisors. The CIA moved Nairobi north to the breakaway region of Somaliland and, within a year, she had infiltrated the outer circle of enforcers, negotiators, arms runners, skiff captains, fishermen, gunners, and boarding crews that reported to the pirate brothers Korfa and Samatar.
“I’m a deal away from being inside the last ring of nine mothership captains,” Nairobi said, not amused by being caught off guard by the dolphin splash attack.
“Nine, hmmm?” Merk mouthed, glancing at Nico with a look of doubt.
“No wonder AQAP has moved in to partner with the radical Islamists of al-Shabaab,” Nico said, playing along Merk as he watched Nairobi’s facial expressions.
“And the pirates,” Merk added.
The Kenyan army had trained agent Nairobi to be a money broker with the shipowners and insurance side of the hostage-for-ransom business. On the surface, she worked to release scores of hostages, while infiltrating deeper into the pirate underworld to identify the names, contacts, and key leaders who populated the complex web of Somalia warlords; Islamic assassins, both local and Yemeni-based terrorists; and the pirates in the trade of hijacking ships. Then there was the brutally effective ISIS war fueled by a winning propaganda machine, drawing thousands of Western believers, wannabes, converts, and disillusioned and disconnected citizens. Radical Islam offered them hope. An out. A job. A goal. Free society offered them nothing, failing the youth by offering a wage-suppressed, debt-ridden, slavery subsistence.
“What’s your story?” Merk asked,
Nairobi ignored him. She didn’t input any KorSam—Korfa and Samatar — piracy network information on a computer, but rather on a piece of paper she folded and stored out in the open, wedged in the pages of a children’s book about Noah’s Ark in a bookcase, which she showed Nico. Other times, she went on to explain to him, she posed as a UN humanitarian coordinator negotiating terms with the warlords to deliver food and aid to the poorest villages. Still other times she acted as a double agent, spying on and planting true and false intelligence with the pirates about the Islamic militants and their common enemy, the United States. All of those activities in aggregate allowed her to move freely within the pirate towns and among the local fishermen without raising an eyebrow of suspicion. But as a woman, she had limited access in the Somalia cities and regions controlled by the misogynist, male-dominated world of Islamic extremism.
Nairobi worked around that handicap by using her body for sex-as-trade bait when she needed to barter with the money-as-religion warlords, pirate leaders, planners, and negotiators. Few could resist the five-foot-ten, walnut-brown skinned woman with a dimple on her right cheek, a vivacious smile framed with long hair braided into a tail now resting on her broad shoulders like a snake. Nairobi had an athlete’s muscular, powerful build. As a foreigner living in Somalia for five years, she used the cover story of being a fugitive from Kenya, forced to flee her country after killing a politician in a sex-triangle scandal.
The CIA planted that story in Kenyan newspapers and Somali media outlets to give the story heft and authenticity, she told Nico, insisting that the “rumors grew into legend.” Her favorite: she had cut off the balls of the politician, slit his throat, and bled him to death face down in a hammock, while barbequing antelope with his political enemy. She neither confirmed nor denied the story, since Islamic radicals despised the leaders of Kenya, calling them infidels and the next target of Al-Shabaab extremists.
After listening to her exploits, Merk refused to be swept in by her ardent speech on US — Kenyan relations, or be taken by her sultry, thoroughbred good looks. He kept a distance and remained skeptical about Nairobi until the day she proved her loyalty in action, not words. Nico noticed the cold shoulder and nudged Merk with a knee and gave him a look to be social.
“What’s your real story? Beyond war?” Merk asked, taking out a new Dolphin Code laptop from a waterproof bag.
“What do you mean?”
“Any children? Any desires or wants in life?”
“Yes, I have two children. A boy and a girl. Eight and three,” she said.
“Do they have cool names like my dolphins?”
“What are their names?” she asked, showing Nico and Merk where she hid a machete behind the bookcase.