While Merk stayed out of sight, a third voice of another boy shouted directly above him. Startled, he looked up at an older boy, with coffee-brown skin and a fixed smile, pointing out to sea. Then the other two boys called out pointing at Merk as they waded deeper in the surf. The older boy looked down at Merk, who stepped away from the boulder raising his hands to show he was unarmed.
The older boy’s grin froze, his lips started to tremble. Nervous, he asked in broken English with a Somali accent, “Who are you?”
Realizing that the other boys had turned their attention to the sea, Merk gazed beyond them and saw Tasi and Inapo gliding to shore. Taking advantage of the timing, Merk answered, “I am fisherman.”
“You, fish?” the older boy asked nervously. “With what?”
“Dolphins,” Merk said, pointing to the dolphins moseying over to the boys in the water, each species checking the other out. Merk stepped into the sea. Not wanting to show too much or reveal what he was up to in their country, he flicked his wrist with an open-fingers sign to the dolphins. Tasi and Inapo rose out of the water sculling backward on their tails. They twisted around, dove into a wave in a splash, swimming out to sea.
“Wow,” the youngest boy said in amazement. “He fishes with dolphins.” His American English was better than his pals, which Merk figured out he likely picked up watching American TV on the Internet or a mobile phone.
“Why you here?” the older boy asked, climbing down from the boulder. “No tourists in our land. Tourists flew away like birds.”
Merk looked at him, and said coyly, “To learn why they flew away.”
“I know why,” the boy with the afro said, sticking his chest out with pride.
“You do? Why did they leave?” Merk asked.
The boy showed his right arm and back of his hand. His skin was pocked with scabs of dried blisters, clusters of strawberry pimples, and fresh wounds, as if burnt from inside out of his flesh. Merk took the boy’s hand and examined the breakout lesions more closely. Not wanting to speculate on what caused the scarring, he looked in the child’s sheepish eyes, which withdrew with eye contact, and asked, “What caused this?” Without waiting for the boy to come around to answer, Merk pulled up the left wetsuit sleeve and showed his own burn scar, saying, “Fire ate my skin. What harmed yours?”
“Water,” the older boy said, pointing out to sea.
“Water?” Merk followed his finger out to the horizon, and asked, “What kind of water?”
“Poison water.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
After listening to Agent Jenny King’s reasoning to save her blown cover as the North Korean missile specialist Kim Dong-Sun, the CIA director told his deputies to leave his seventh floor office. He sat forward and scanned his desktop, picked up a pencil, and snapped it between his fingers. After a pause, he called in a favor, striking a key on a laptop that connected him to the one army general he trusted in the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
As soon as the executive assistant patched the call in to the general, the CIA director dumped any pretense of word or tone. He left no doubt how Operation Sandblast Scree was in a tight spot, how it might be linked to the stolen hot load on the move across Syria, and how the CIA needed help to move back into Syria “tonight” to retrieve the real North Korean engineer. The only problem he saw for the US Special Forces would be taking the hostage and hauling her across a border that was now crawling with Syrian forces, Iranian Quds Force, and ISIS spies and scouts in the wake of kidnapping CIA Operator King as the North Korean engineer.
“General, all I want to do is bring the real missile engineer back to the Iraqi station for interrogation,” he said.
The general listened. He ran through a few “logistical challenges,” did some calculations in his head, and then said from a black ops vista it was not only “do-able,” but could be done that night. Still the old friend, feeling the director’s stress, rationalized with him not to think about international laws they might end up breaking, since the new operation would be blanketed under the auspices of national security if word ever leaked out about the operation.
Moreover, he told him that as for the “hermit kingdom,” the late Kim Jong-il deserved some cold retribution for torpedoing a South Korean submarine in spring 2010, as did his son Kim Jong-un, who enflamed the border relations by shutting down a joint-venture factory between the two Koreas, firing missiles, and threatening to attack America at the slightest provocation.
From that moment on, the army general formulated a clandestine operation, the existence of which neither the president nor his cabinet would know anything. To ensure the safety of embedding CIA operative Jenny King as the North Korean engineer into Iran, a senator on the Defense Intelligence Committee would be told the following day about the black op, with its details to emerge as the operation got under way. Another precaution the CIA director and army general took was to ensure the cover story about Agent Jenny King was between them, and that the marine helicopter pilot and crew who flew her across Iraq to the Iranian border would be told that they were transporting the real Kim Dong-Sun.
Speed, stealth, and secrecy were the elements needed for the success of the new operation.
It took little under an hour of poring over the pesky details and logistics Agent King had given to her superiors at the CIA, for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to task the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta — a.k.a. Delta Force — for the mission.
The JSOC general called the director and informed him that he had a Delta Force — DF — detachment in Baghdad ready for interdiction. In a video briefing, he said the DF cell would be airborne by nightfall, then slip across the border near Fort 24 to “re-acquire” the North Korean officer from the underground catch basin Agent King had temporarily stuffed her in until the agent’s mission in the Syrian desert was supposed to be over, forty-eight hours later. But that plan was fouled up when the CIA agents, dressed as journalists, kidnapped one of their agents, who was in deeper cover as part of SOG’s Clandestine Ops.
The JSOC commanders at Centcom, along with the CIA director, all knew how risky the operation would be, especially with the CIA attack on the Syrian missile launch site in the desert earlier that day. Those who knew General Adad understood the warhorse would use every resource to scour the desert searching for and finding links and evidence to nail the CIA to the cross for its role in the attack on his army, while derailing Syria’s plans to build a long-range missile site. The launch area and border would be teeming with soldiers in full-lockdown mode, itching for a firefight.
An hour later, the Delta Force cell was scrambled and flown to an undisclosed entry point near the border, north of Fort 24. The CIA analysts selected that location after reviewing satellite images captured on a sliver of land with the least foot and patrol traffic. It would be easy for the commandos to slip across the border.
Since Syria believed the CIA had already kidnapped the real North Korean engineer right out of General Adad’s summit in the desert, how much more flak could the US intelligence agency be hit with in taking the risk to go back over the border to retrieve the real engineer?
That’s how Jenny saw it; the CIA director agreed. But they couldn’t wait to see if Delta Force would succeed in the mission.