Feeling sick to his stomach, Cuthbert kicked the chair away from the door and opened it, eying the woman he thought — no, he believed — was the real North Korean engineer, “Sorry, Agent King.”
“Worse than kidnapping me was leaving Ferdows’s tablet behind,” Jenny said.
“What’s on his tablet?” Cuthbert asked, rubbing his forehead.
“Tehran’s plans of moving hot material across the Syrian deserts to Homs… from there to the West and maybe the US to detonate,” she said. “This is the closest we have ever gotten.”
Mouthing he was sorry again, Cuthbert sat down and said, “We can make this right.”
“No, you can’t,” she said, as the real CIA station chief stood at the threshold of the door.
“Yes, King, I can,” he said, then swung the laptop around to face him, as he explained his on-the-fly plan for Agent King with the CIA executives. “We send the North Korean King back to Iran to make the CIA’s gross mistake of kidnapping her go away.”
“Alan, that might work,” she admitted. “They don’t know I’m a CIA agent.”
“No one does in here. Except a few of us,” he said.
The station chief stepped inside the room and shut the door, motioning Cuthbert to hold it a minute while he stood on a chair and pulled the cable out of the camera.
“Go on, Alan, tell me how you will make it work,” she said, dropping the glass shard on the table.
“Tehran has screwed us ever since the 2015 nuclear treaty. They set me, the agency, and the US up to fail in Yemen with the planted bad intel on the drone strike.”
“You mean the terrorist headquarters that was actually be an elementary school, where body parts of children were pulled from the rubble?” she said.
“Yes, that one. Funny thing, we accidentally got back at them the same night when a US Navy dolphin op uncovered a Quds fishing trawler mining the Strait of Hormuz.”
“Was that survey run by Merk Toten?” she asked.
He nodded yes.
“Did Merk make it out alive?” she asked, concerned about the health and well-being of her boyfriend.
“You can say that. I sat down with him for his next mission. He’s now deep in a Black Lit op in Somalia. Like you, it doesn’t exist.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Pirate ship, mothership, citizenship.
Those were the words that flickered through Merk’s mind as he observed the destitute poverty — the hovels, the lean-tos, the shantytowns — that dotted the broken coast of rocky coves and sea cliffs amid stretches of pristine sandy beaches, one with the rusting hull of a hijacked ship run aground.
Inland, he glimpsed garbage strewn near the poor dwellings; worn clothes dried on the same lines as fishing nets; elderly men drinking spirits in the shade with armed Somali militants looming in the background, smoking rolled cigarettes.
On the leeside, the turquoise blue sea boasted the ocean’s wealth. Sitting there day after day, cooked by the copper-hot Somali sun, lured their eyes to gaze out at the sea and dream about the riches of the world passing by in the shipping lanes every day. The Gulf of Aden seemed to be their only hope in a destitute land, to seek and steal a fortune. Whether it was trawling the shoals for fish, depleted after years of overfishing by foreign ships, or extracting money in the hostage-for-ransom trade that, after rising from the shadow of obscurity in 2008, had been successful for the “Pirates of Puntland,” who became a scourge for international shipping and a model for Nigerian pirates to copy the same business model.
Of the thousands of ships and vessels, box carriers and oil tankers that passed the coast of Somalia each year, why wouldn’t a warlord dispatch packs of youths on skiffs to steal from the rich? It was only money. Just numbers. Money for lives and cargo. They usually received the money; the hostages often got released unharmed. Yet it grew into an arms race.
Pondering the limitations they were about to face in the search for the pirates, an alert flashed on screen: “Receiving Com.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Merk lowered his sunglasses and eyed a pane open on the laptop. An aerial shot of a new drone flying over the coast near Somalia’s western port city of Berbera came into view.
At an altitude of two miles, the drone’s high-resolution eye captured the long strand of beaches that marked Berbera, once a tourist hot spot for European divers. Now it was all but deserted. Beyond a couple of beached fishing boats, with nets draped over them, or a few youths sauntering barefoot on the sandy hook peninsula of the natural harbor, there was a row of unused fishing boats strung together at a single anchor, a wrecked dhow tilting on a sandbar.
A quarter mile west of the port by the fuel storage tanks, the immense black-orange hull of the Blå Himmel rose out of the shallow water, listing starboard. Its watermark visible, exposing the lower hull to splotches of barnacles, the bow of the supertanker had run aground half a football field from shore.
Waves passed on both sides of the ship, as if the hull acted like a man-made jetty to buffer beach erosion. But as Merk enlarged the shot full-screen, he saw no one lingering by the vessel in the surf, on its decks, in the bridge, or anywhere else onboard. Even the on-land fuel depot was deserted. He didn’t see an oil slick, which meant the double-hulled Blå Himmel sat on a soft bed of sand. That told him the pirates knew where they would strand the ship, on the sandbars of Berbera, daring international forces to come inside Somalia’s territorial waters to retrieve it.
Was it a trap? He wondered.
The drone’s camera, controlled remotely by UAV operators out of Chabelley Airfield at Djibouti base, zoomed on the fore starboard deck to a dried puddle of what appeared to be blood. The more Merk studied the red swatch, running it across an imaginary sight line of a sniper back to the top of the bridge at the stern of the ship, some 750 feet away, the more he was convinced the blood belonged not to the captain or crew, but to the slain pirate leader, Samatar. He wouldn’t need blood type or forensic analysis. What the Norwegian mercenary, Peder Olsen, whispered to him was enough for Merk to know that the pool of blood belonged to the dead pirate leader.
Off the bow several rows of footprints dotted the beach to and from the sea. Some prints were defined step for step; others were rubbed out, as hostages must have been dragged against their will through the sand. Merk was certain the pirates had a greeting committee when they arrived late that night. But what he didn’t see, such as wheel ruts from vehicles hauling cargoes or hostages away, puzzled him.
Before Merk informed Nico on what he observed, the gap to gather intel just grew larger. Directed to swim to the next bight in the coast populated with fishing huts but with no slips or docks, a dozen klicks outside of Berbera, the dolphins wouldn’t arrive to the site for a few hours. He would then decide whether to move to the stranded supertanker when they arrived.
From the GPS chip in the Chinese cell phone, which kept a tab on Nairobi, Nico said she had driven past the fifty klicks she mentioned. She took a fork in the road, deviating from the coast at Berbera, driving inland south through a pass in the Sheikh Mountains. With Nairobi continuing on that road, Merk knew there would be several more hours of intel blackout — at least on his side — of what was taking place near or away from the tanker. That spelled trouble since the first seventy-two hours after a hijacking is the most critical time to locate hostages and learn their fate.
Another alert flashed on the laptop. The webcams Nico and Merk had installed in Nairobi’s house chimed in a live feed. Merk blew up the cams into a multi-view screen, showing: outside the front of the house, inside the kitchen, and in the living room. He tapped Nico’s arm, nudging him to look at the laptop. Nico scanned the road ahead, checked the rearview mirror — they were alone — and pulled over. They looked at a pair of intruders peeking in the windows, checking the property on both sides of the house, and then picked the lock and entered the front door.