After a sweep of the grounds outside, scouting the mountain range to the south with night-vision binoculars, Nico returned, informing Merk that Nairobi drove west along the coast, and that there were no signs of spies, surveillance nests, or audiovisual devices. He told him that he set up motion sensors to guard the house on the landside, while hanging the audioscope and a webcam under the eaves of the roof. After setting up the squawk box, which would alert them of an intruder by sight or sound, Merk showed Nico a pencil-rod webcam set behind a painting, whispering, “Let’s get out of here. Don’t have a good vibe on a safe house that isn’t safe.”
“Got a second car outside,” Nico said, searching the drawers for the keys.
“Let’s tail her. I can work remotely with the fins.” Merk double-checked the images downloaded from the drone. Using the Dolphin Code software to com with the drone, he followed the stream of live shots with a coded timer in the lower right corner of the screen. It showed there was six hours of drone flying time before the USS New York would call it back.
Merk closed the laptop and stuffed it and the tech accessories into a backpack. Outside, Nico hopped into the driver’s seat of Nairobi’s second car, a Chinese SUV. Merk kicked the rear fender to feel the metal density in the body of the vehicle. The soft resonance told him the car was made of scrap metal; it would rust shortly after a crash.
Merk sighed and climbed into the vehicle. He folded a red-and-white checkered square Bedouin scarf, called the kufeya, into a triangle and placed it on his head. He fitted an igal of camel wool over his skull, securing the scarf in place. The igal was decorated with fine metallic beads and threads.
The CO glanced over and chuckled at Merk’s headgear: “You’re so busted.”
“Yeah, well, Nico. Think tribal.”
As Nico drove off, Merk opened the laptop and watched the dolphins near the cove of the first target area he tasked them to sweep. Tasi surfaced and glided toward shore. The dorsalcam picked up the first cluster of skiffs pulled halfway out of the water. Inapo swam ahead, circled back, and surveyed the cove from the other side — as he was trained to do.
In unison, they worked the key points of the cove with each system taking turns leaping on the edge of shore. That allowed them to digitally capture shots they couldn’t get in the surf. It also enabled them to place their jaws on the beach to feel for vibrations through their jawbones, tuning in on any vehicle passing by on the coast road.
“You miss her?” Nico asked.
“Who?”
“Your girlfriend. The one you see twice a year.”
“I don’t know why I agreed to this. To come into enemy territory. Am I mad? This is crazy to go this deep again?”
“Yeah. She’s military right? Banging some marine?”
Merk shook his head, and replied, “No, Nico. She’s smarter than you. She’s CIA intel. You know, an analyst.”
“Why would a geek be interested in a puke SEAL retread like you?”
“Who knows? Maybe she has a thing for dolphins and I’m her bridge to a free swim with the fins.”
As Nico needled him, Merk began to phase out his words and think of her, as he swiped different panes of the quad split screen in and out of zoom to see the progress of the dolphin’s surveillance along the coast. Nothing special came out of the images Tasi and Inapo captured. A pile of used fishing nets told Merk the skiffs belonged to fishermen, not pirates.
With neither Tasi nor Inapo picking up vibrations of intruders or vehicles, they swam to the next target a few kilometers west — one of two marinas that a year before were not visible from any spy plane or satellite, but were captured earlier that night for the first time by the drone.
Merk knew drones were useful and effective beyond blowing up terrorist targets, hospitals, or schools. But unlike navy dolphins, they had to return to base to recharge, refuel, or rearm.
Merk gazed out of the window to the dark sky over the dark sea, thought of his girlfriend, her dark eyes with a spark of life in them, and then remembered grabbing hold of Nairobi’s calves as he pulled her down when he climbed on shore in Somalia. He knew the next few days would be different, hectic, dangerous, with little time to think about any women.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Deep into the morning, Merk deployed the dolphins farther west in a search for the Somali pirates, when a series of high-pitched whistles came back, not from Tasi or Inapo, but from the drone. Within the software, embedded between the trills, flashed a message that the Dolphin Code software began to decipher and translate the sounds into a broken string of words.
Merk read the message, recognizing that it didn’t originate from the USS New York or the NATO pirate task force, but from CIA headquarters in Langley. Should he trust its content? Was it a coded message meant for Nairobi? Or did he receive something else?
In the chain of words he felt a wave of anticipation that it might be his girlfriend trying to contact him. But then within the words was a latent message, a code within a code. Bracing himself, he read every word with dread: “Hot… Load… Gone… Missing… in Syria.”
Anticipation gave way to disbelief. Merk knew what those words meant — a dirty bomb or some sort of hot material, chemical, chlorine, radioactive, or biological, was on the move in war-torn Syria. There were few assets on the ground to stop it.
What the hell? Did the CIA confirm this? he wondered, keeping the news from Nico. Merk recalled Iran’s attempt to plant sea-mines in the Strait of Hormuz and then the images of the CIA strike on the terrorist safe house in Jaar, Yemen, on the same night, within the same hour. Something wasn’t right and he finally made the connection. Whoever gave the false intel to CIA Agent Alan Cuthbert was also sponsored by Iran. It was the diversion of luring three CIA drones away from the Persian Gulf that night to fly over Yemen airspace that told Merk that the propaganda tsunami of striking a school and the mining of the Strait of Hormuz were coordinated at least a month in advance.
But who was the mastermind behind those dual, seemingly unrelated events?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Along the Iraq border, north of the Syrian town of Abu Kamal on the Euphrates River, stretched a chain of burnt-out forts and outposts that lay in ruins from the ISIS offensive in the spring of 2014. With the help of Iranian air power and battalions, by agreement with the Syrian government, a 100-mile stretch of desert had been carved out, driving the ISIS forces farther north into Syria and across Iraq, then down along the reinforced border with Saudi Arabia.
Strengthened with US military backing and Russian sorties, the Kurdish army with thousands of Iraqis cleared out a similar terrorist haven of ISIS fighters on their side of the border. That left a joint venture between US Special Forces advisors and the Iraqi police task force to monitor the refugees and insurgents flowing over the broken border crossings.