Chapter Thirty-Five
At the cove, the boy with the toxin-blemished skin picked up a rock, stooped over a sandstone slab, and scratched three letters: “I-U-U.”
Merk read the shorthand and recognized what it meant: “Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated.”
The ex-navy SEAL was taken aback by the teenager knowing the acronym about illegal ocean dumping. Merk figured he must have heard it used by fishermen or his parents or among some local villagers, like the Somalis who complained every day about the plight and hardship of their country being a dumping ground for the world. Merk had heard the rumors, he had seen some of the photographic evidence, now he heard the words direct from victims who lived there.
The boy nodded, tapped his foot on “IUU,” and then pointed out to the gulf.
“You have toxic dumping in the Gulf of Aden?” Merk said in disbelief. Shielding his eyes, he peered out to the sun-bright sea.
“Long ago,” the boy said.
“Got it. The collapse of your government in 1992,” Merk said, panning the horizon. “How far out?”
“Not too far. A kilometer or two,” he said.
“Bastards.” Merk ran his fingers over the boy’s toxic burn scars. He opened the laptop, uploaded the Dolphin Code program, telling Tasi and Inapo to swim to shore. “We’ll make a deal. I send my dolphins to search for the poison water, and you don’t tell anyone that I came here. If you do, I go to jail, and the dolphins will be in trouble.”
“Yeow,” said the eldest child, patting his friends on their shoulders.
The scarred boy nodded, rubbing his scars on Merk’s burn-scar left arm, as if he were making a blood oath of secrecy, a pact to keep their silence.
As the navy dolphins swam to shore, the boys got excited. They saw the glint of the micro, pencil-thin dorsalcams and metal tags — GPS tracking — mounted at the base of the dorsal fins. High-tech dolphins. They had never seen anything like those creatures in their lives.
Merk took out a four-inch probe with an elastic strap and waded into the water. He flashed a hand-sign to Inapo to lift his pectoral fin so Merk could mount the probe. He flicked on a switch, ran the probe like a wand through the air, and saw a tiny blue light flicker rapidly. Knowing the probe was working, Merk floated in between the dolphins, introducing them to the children. “This is Tasi. In Guam, her name means ‘Ocean.’”
“Tasi? Ocean? Cool,” the youngest child repeated.
“Tasi was bitten by a shark on the fin right here—” he showed the shark-bite scar on the dorsal fin. The boys sighed, feeling for the dolphin; the child with the toxic skin rubbed his wound, petting the dolphin in solidarity. “This is Inapo. In Guam his name means ‘Wave.’”
“Wave and Ocean, great,” the eldest child said.
Merk tapped the dolphins behind the melon. In a flash, Tasi and Inapo somersaulted, brushed Merk’s legs, swerved underwater, and darted out to sea.
“Where’s Guam?” the eldest boy asked.
Merk waded out of the shallows, shook the water off of his legs and arms, squeezing excess water out of his hair, and said, “It’s on the other side of the world. Close to Japan.”
“Wow,” the boy said.
“Go. Don’t say a word. I will help you,” the dolphin whisperer said, then took a picture of the kids with a tablet, and learned where they lived, in two houses on the same street.
Merk waded back into the water. He knew he had to keep what the dolphins discovered a secret until he left Somalia.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The dolphins swam a few miles offshore, towing a DPod with them for enhanced subsurface communication. They dove beneath the waves… diving down, down, down… following the undersea shelf. They split apart along opposite sides of a wall, descending beneath the surface.
Tasi glided down to a plateau at a depth of 500 feet.
On shore, Merk sat out of sight in the shade of the cove. He tracked the dolphins’ deep dive on a 3-D undersea map of the gulf, knowing that its deepest floor was near Yemen, more than a mile deep. At 2,000 feet he would recall the dolphins if they didn’t find anything. That would allow them time to swim up to the surface to breathe before he would decide what to do next: dive or abandon the search. Even dolphins can be exposed at extreme depths.
Deep underwater, trained to explore subsea landmarks, Tasi spotted a ledge and, farther below, a slope that flattened out between broken ridges. She fluked down, inspecting the brown coral seabed, and began echolocating the marine life.
The dolphin glided up and over a series of swales, before spotting a seamount ahead. As she closed on the mound, man-made debris came into view. First, a couple of pieces of steel she pinged with biosonar, then the rusted lid of a drum, and then on the other side of the mount three long boiler-sized containers, the near one half-buried in sand.
The middle boiler leaked a trail of air bubbles rising out of a tiny hole like an eelworm.
On seeing the boilers through Tasi’s infrared dorsalcam, Merk typed code to the DPod directing Inapo to swim over to Tasi to inspect the discovery with the special probe.
Minutes passed. Merk watched the blinking GPS lights of the dolphins converge on screen. He opened a split-screen, watching the POV of the dorsalcams as Inapo joined Tasi in examining the boilers. Inapo swam around the backside and hovered over the farthest of the three boilers, lowering the pectoral fin with the probe inches from the rusted steel wall; a reading pinged. The probe caused a sine wave spike that jolted the needle on a digital meter. Realizing what Inapo found, Merk ordered the systems to swim to the surface out of harm’s way and return to shore.
When he heard a squeal sound chiming over the laptop, Merk stood up. He imagined himself in the Somali boys’ shoes, watching the wealth of the world cruise by the beaches day after day, bypassing the broken land. The footage captured would remain a guarded secret, even from the navy, until Merk had a chance to review the findings. For the moment, he was happy to get Tasi and Inapo out of there. But the discovery gave him pause. Were the pirates just out for ransom money? Or was revenge of being poisoned fueling their anger toward the West?
If it were the latter, then maybe the Somali pirates would join terrorist affiliates planning to attack the United States. That would fundamentally change how Washington and the CIA had understood and analyzed piracy in the Horn of Africa. It would profoundly change how the West would have to deal with the new threat vector. But who were their sponsors?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The crossing of the broken Syrian border in the south was going to be a major undertaking for Delta Force with a lot at stake. The exposure of time, doing it under the cover of night, combined with the space — a six-mile jaunt across open desert to where the real North Korean engineer had been stowed by CIA agent Jenny King — put the commandos in the line of fire.
In order to clear a path and stay out of sight of ISIS scout teams, roving Syrian rebels, and patrols of the Syrian Army, Delta Force team needed to create a diversion.
At 2120 hours a klick south of Fort 24, a tanker truck blew apart in an ascending fireball. The explosion could be seen and felt for miles. The blast wave rocked the CIA station and shook several Syrian soldiers in the area on the other side of the border. They raced to the border, took cover, and trained assault rifles on the burning wreck.
North of Fort 24, the Delta Force cell of eight commandos led by a seasoned CO crossed the border on foot. They stayed north of a river, followed its winding path miles into Syrian territory. They used night-vision goggles and a pair of audioscopes to sweep the terrain, making sure the path was free and clear as they moved a quarter klick at a time.