The pirate warlord stared at Nairobi as he dipped the washcloth, wringed it damp, and dabbed it on the stiff muscular biceps and forearms of the corpse Samatar. She saw for the first time vulnerability in Korfa’s hardened eyes. When he pointed to the Qur’an, she no longer saw a warrior, a pirate, or a warlord, but a believer in both his faith and lifting his oppressed people out of the thrall of poverty. That made it difficult for her to spy on the charismatic, warlike man.
Samatar’s eldest of three sons, a fourteen-year-old boy, limped over to his uncle Korfa and handed the robe and tunic his father had worn on his march to Mecca a decade earlier. Knowing the religious significance of Samatar’s clothes, Nairobi opened the Qur’an, looked at Korfa, and waited for his guidance on which chapter and verse to read.
Without looking back at her, Korfa said, “An Nur. Medinan Twenty-Four. Forty-Six.”
She flipped through the Qur’an until she came to the Chapter An Nur (“The Light”), and read from verse 46: “We have indeed sent down Signs that make things manifest: and Allah guides whom He wills to a way that is straight. (47): They say ‘We believe in Allah and in the Apostle and we obey’: but even after that some of them turn away: they are not Believers.”
Samatar’s eldest son began to recite a prayer next. Korfa grabbed Nairobi’s wrist, squeezing the bangles, and whispered, “Nai, I want the name and country of the sniper.”
Chapter Thirty
East of Berbera, Nico drove up and down the coast, reconning the seascape to make sure that the location where he dropped Merk off was isolated so the dolphin whisperer could remotely com with the dolphins without being spotted. They settled on a strand five klicks outside the harbor, where the beach came to an end, transitioning from flat sand to terraces of stone slabs. Around a point, a broken cove formed a shelter with boulders backed by rocky mounds.
Merk stripped off the Bedouin headdress, grabbed his gear, and told Nico that he had forty-eight hours to gather intel on the pirates before they exited out of Somalia somewhere west.
The SEAL CO nodded, watched Merk pick his way over the boulders and disappear down in the cove. He turned the vehicle around and drove to Berbera. From the GPS vector of the Chinese military Satcom he gave Nairobi, her vehicle sat halfway up the Sheikh Mountains Pass.
For the next hour, Merk dug in, setting up a surveillance nest within the confines of the cove. He stored MREs, canteens of water, and other foodstuffs in different nooks and crevices, wary that the items needed to be safe from high tide that could flood the cove, turning it into a tidal pool. He changed out of his clothes into a wetsuit, took a pair of digital binoculars, and scouted the horizon on the gulf. He panned the sea searching for skiffs, the large dhows like the mothership, and larger vessels like freighters and tankers. The sea was mysteriously empty, still. With the hijacked Norwegian tanker found in Berbera, he expected to see navy ships. But there were none. The absence of a decisive naval response made the view all the more strange and disconcerting, yet at the same time it whetted his curiosity.
Merk settled down in the shade of the mounds, monitoring the progress of Tasi and Inapo. He was replaying a clip of the dolphins trailing an armed Somali Coast Guard boat heading out to sea, as opposed to moving west along the littoral to the stranded oil tanker near Berbera harbor. That told Merk either the Somali government was on the take with the pirates or they had intel that an ambush would await them at the port city. He copied and pasted the geocoords of Blå Himmel into the Dolphin Code and transmitted it along with the location of the cove so that the systems would swim to him first. He needed to inspect their condition before directing them to head on to scout the harbor and keep watch over the tanker for the next twenty-four hours. The dolphins would be tasked to monitor all activity surrounding it.
For a while, the dolphins tracked the Somali Coast Guard out to sea. With a click of the Dolphin Code colored keys, Merk directed Inapo to swim under the hull of the motorboat, fluke sideways as he had been trained to do, plant the dorsalcam on the fiberglass bottom, and roll away. The dorsalcam had an adhesive strip that when pressed would seal it to the surface and break from the dorsal fin when the mammal pulled away. Hidden inside the pencil-rod cam sat a GPS tab with a motion sensor, which recorded the speed of a body in water. Although minus one dorsalcam until he fitted Inapo with another, Merk could track the movements of the Somali Coast Guard boat, relay that information to the US Navy, which in turn could watch it with a drone, spy plane, or military satellite to see if they rendezvoused with any of the pirates.
After tagging the boat and confirming it via Tasi’s dorsalcam, the Coast Guard boat headed out to the gulf.
Merk called the dolphins back to shore.
Chapter Thirty-One
Nico drove up the foothills into the high mountain elevations of the Sheikh Pass. The GPS indicated that Nairobi had parked her vehicle inside the compound that he had passed on the right as he drove up a steep incline. He rose back and forth on a switchback mount, rolling out onto a plateau. He pulled off the road behind a guardrail and hid the car out of sight of passing vehicles. He took out a folding stock sniper rifle, communication gear, a backpack with food and water, and hiked a good way from the vehicle.
The CO set up a surveillance nest on a bluff. The ledge held a commanding view of the valley below, with mountain streams cutting across and running under the Sheikh Pass. In the background, he noted the road snaked down the foothills and curved toward Berbera in the heat haze sea far away.
With the high-powered telescope, Nico spotted the camouflage canopies housing a slew of luxury cars. Then he saw Nairobi’s vehicle parked under the dead tree. He zoomed on four guards roaming the premises inside the compound.
Chewing on an energy bar, the CO reminded himself he had to wait and be patient for Nairobi to emerge out of the underground complex.
Chapter Thirty-Two
As the sun arched across the midday sky, the dolphins made their way toward the cove. Merk monitored all the channels he had at his disposal, but was disappointed by the inactivity of the US military. The drone had neither returned nor been replaced.
Both the sky above and the gulf in front of him were empty, at least from his viewpoint, while the dorsalcam attached to the hull of the Somali boat showed images every now and then of the Coast Guard pulling over fishing skiffs for inspections and to conduct interviews as the few remaining resources of the Somali government tried to string together bits of intel and feed them to the offshore naval forces. Perhaps NATO and the international navies were busy tracking down the other hijacked ship, the Shining Sea.
Merk opened a backpack. He took out a scuba mask, a pair of swim fins, mini trimix tank with a regulator, and a backup dorsalcam. As he checked the equipment, children’s voices broke the silence. Like wind chimes, they were soft and airy at first, but then became more pronounced. He glanced around the cove, closed the laptop, and shoved it in the backpack, stowing it sideways in between boulders. He left the scuba gear on a stone shelf and stepped out of the cove to see the young visitors.
He made sure he didn’t step on a seashell or stone that would announce his arrival. Merk stretched his arms and gripped a boulder like a globe, craning his head around it to spy on the kids. Rising slowly, he peered over the rocky surface until he spotted the first boy, a young Somali about six years old. Behind him his pal with a bushy afro waded into the surf. They idly skipped stones across the water, uttering a few words in their native tongue. Although Merk didn’t understand the language, from their light tone, he felt the children were doing what kids have done for millennia: play, explore, socialize, and interact with nature.