The black, hockey puck — shaped DPod converted the data stream into digital whistles. Radio waves don’t travel well in saltwater. Like a submarine that deploys an antenna or buoy on the surface to enhance communication, Merk deployed the DPod to better stream video captured underwater by the dolphins’ dorsalcams.
Merk watched the screen and hit a second blue key, commanding the dolphins to conduct a swim-by of the trawler, and to breathe.
Lt. Azar zoomed night-vision binoculars on the trawler’s waterline and saw it was fully laden. He signaled to Merk that the fishermen weren’t heading to the Gulf of Oman to fish — not loaded with cargo, not at one knot. Something was up in the vessel, he agreed. But what? Another sign that the ship wasn’t bound for the fishing shoals could be seen by the naked eye: a pair of telescopic boom cranes — “rabbit ears,” Azar called them — were folded upright with not a single net attached to either hook.
The signal mast swayed back and forth. The low rumble of the engine ground to a halt. The ship drifted into position ready to perform its task.
“Let’s cut and run,” Azar said.
“Negative.”
“Merk, let’s abort. Play it safe.”
Merk refused, shaking his head. “We have to see what they’re up to.”
“We came here to collect data. You got it. Let’s bolt. The fins are at risk as much as we are,” Azar said, stabbing a finger in Merk’s chest.
Merk stared at him.
“You wanted this mission with no guns, no weapons. You got it. But not in a trade-off for the lives of the dolphins.”
Chapter Two
With doubt running through his mind, de-encrypted pictures began to stream from the dolphins’ underwater survey. Merk opened a dozen photos on a split screen. Infrared images showed not a pipeline, but its layout across the seabed. Concrete anchors with glow-sticks marked the trail. He turned the laptop around and showed the digital images to Morgan Azar.
“Shit hot. You got what we came for,” Azar said, tapping the laptop.
“Negative. We need to find out what that ship is up to.”
“Toten, pull out, goddamn it. Abort. You sound like you’re still a SEAL. You left spec warfare for a saner job in the Navy Marine Mammal Program. Remember?”
“The survey has changed,” he said, pointing to the colored keys. He raised a finger over the red abort key, and looked him dead in the eye: “Remember the chlorine gas. First Syria, now ISIS is using it against the Kurds.”
“You and I are like the dolphins you’ve trained. We follow orders. Fall in line. Keep the chain of command intact. There’s nothing for us here to improvise.”
Merk ignored Azar, focusing a pair of night-vision binoculars, panning across the sea to recon the vessel. He zoomed in on the cargo buried beneath the nets, but couldn’t identify what the fishermen were hiding. Fed up with arguing, Lt. Azar counted the number of men on board — eleven, about double the crew for a trawler that size, with another three to five, he figured, in the cabin.
The high-tech binoculars allowed both men to capture digital images of what they saw and relay them in real-time to SEAL Team Three command at the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Coordinating Council in Qatar; to CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida; and to a team of CIA analysts in Langley, Virginia.
“You and I know the CIA doesn’t have a single asset in Iran to ID the cargo,” Merk said.
Lt. Azar lowered the binoculars, and said, “That’s not our mission. You know we’re naked out here.” He sat by the outboard motor, waiting for the signal to start the engine. Merk dipped a sonar-whistle in the water; it pinged the dolphins’ name-whistles, calling them.
A few minutes later, one bottlenose dolphin surfaced, clearing its blowhole in a jet of spray and pinched a breath of air. Merk saw a shark bite on the dorsal fin and knew he was looking at Tasi, the female dolphin in the pod. Inapo, the other Hawaiian bottlenose dolphin, a 550-pound male, breached the surface alongside Tasi.
Merk waved them over. He checked the micro dorsalcams on both biologic systems and then inspected the GPS tags clipped to the base of their dorsal fins. He double-checked the tags to see if a mobile app worked on the tablet. The mobile device showed a split screen of the dolphins with their geocoords; the infrared shots of the dorsalcams captured a part of Merk’s face — or what he called a “hot selfie” for the thermal heat it picked up of his jaw and cheeks.
Merk fitted a sensor with a float tied to a short cord over Tasi’s rostrum. He flashed a hand-sign; the dolphin dipped below the surface flowing over to the trawler.
Inapo rose and pecked Merk on the lips. He petted the mammal and mounted a sensor device over the rostrum. With a slashing sign, the dolphin darted away to sweep under the vessel and tag the hull with a GPS tracker. Both the CIA and navy brass in the Pentagon would be privy to know where the fishing ship was heading — out to sea or back to port.
Merk waited another minute for the dolphins to get in position. He glanced back at Azar, gave a “now” look. The lieutenant started the motor, turned the throttle, and glided out to close on the slow-moving ship. As Azar steered the craft off the starboard flank of the trawler, Merk swiped the tablet awake. He tracked the dolphins’ movements onscreen: virtual blinking fins moved in real time, their positions triangulating every few seconds by a trio of military satellites.
Merk opened Dolphin Code, the intra-species software he invented with DARPA scientists and engineers. In communicating with the dolphins digitally, the software collected the data and stored it in the navy’s “Blue Cloud.” The color-coded program allowed Merk to press a single key or a series of keys to give the mammals up to 100 different goals, tasks, or commands to carry out in their vocalizations of trills and whistles.
With a swipe of a finger, Merk uploaded the radar tracker on the fishing trawler and superimposed it over the geospatial map of the Strait of Hormuz. That allowed him to monitor the dolphins’ progress in shadowing the vessel. He lifted the binoculars and zoomed on the lights of the trawler that dimmed near blackout… a couple of fishermen slid open the stern gate… other men pulled the nets off the hidden cargo, revealing iron spheres with contact spikes. Merk signaled to Azar that the fishermen were going to drop sea-mines into the strait. And yet, the articulating arms of the cranes never swiveled into position to perform the task; the mines were being deployed by another on-deck method.
The fishermen walked the lead anchors with a mooring cable off the back of the ship. Once the anchor slid out the gate, it pulled the mine into the water in a splash, and the mine disappeared in a carpet of foam. The operation told Merk that the Iranians were using a rail system mounted on the deck to slide the mines, an offloading method quicker than using the cranes.
Another quarter klick south, the fishermen planted the next two mines, one after the other sinking below the surface. The fishermen pulled the nets off the last piles, revealing four more sea-mines. The ship slowed in a drift, giving the crew time to set the mines in a cluster. When the next pair of mines dropped into the strait, Merk saw the ship’s waterline rise above the surface.
Lt. Azar cut the engine and let the RHIB glide. He paddled the craft by oar close enough to observe, far enough away to remain out of sight.
Merk pressed a Dolphin Code key, ordering Tasi to plant the float on a mine, and said to Azar, “Tasi is going to tag a mine for the admirals. The Pentagon needs this intel.”
Trailing in the wake of the fishing ship, Tasi received the signal via a transponder chip embedded behind her melon. The dolphin pinched a breath of air and dove under.
On the laptop, Merk watched Tasi plunge below… diving down…
He tracked her descent by watching the depth meter rollover as she made her way to the sea-mines. Merk knew the depth of the strait near the tip of Oman was twenty-five meters — about the draft of a fully laden supertanker. Alongside seven islands that Iran controlled in the strait, with an eighth belonging to Oman, the mines were being placed in thirty to fifty meters of water, right in the heart of the shipping lanes. The location of the seamines presented clear evidence of Iran’s intent to combat the United States at every turn and opportunity.