As he was about to pass out, Tasi breached behind the point man and swatted him with a hard tail whip, blasting the assailant under the surface. Merk felt the pirate’s limp hand slip off his neck, the scarf running through the man’s fingers. Merk opened his mouth in a silent scream for air, his mouth stretching wider and wider, gasping for air to breathe, to fill his lungs. Merk’s chest heaved and heaved until his throat finally pumped oxygen down into his lungs… er-huh… er-huh… er-huh… hyperventilating, a state of delirium. He saw the expanding blue sky above amid bursts of stars, sunspots that flashed before and dazzled his eyes.
Tasi finished off the point man, nosing the lifeless body under the surface.
Sucking air, Merk rolled over, coughing, twitching, spitting… out of breath, his lungs burned and bellowed until he grabbed his throat clutching the scarf. As he regained normal breathing, he looked around dazed, scanned the gulf… then turned over and panned the coast. He watched Inapo pull the motorman underwater, out of sight. Exhausted, Merk rolled over and rested his chest on his hands, looking at the reflection of his weary face in the bright water.
Tasi fluked over and rubbed her beak against Merk’s face to comfort him. She squealed a sorrowful cry. “Tasi, think those kids are going to tell we’re here?”
Tasi trilled in agreement, splashing water in his face.
Chapter Forty-Three
Nico crawled out from under the canvas on the storage tank roof. He slithered to the edge and peeked over the wall. Below, he saw vehicles pull up to the oil depot office building. He looked at officials down by the beach examining the supertanker and saw the jeeps had driven away. It appeared the pirates weren’t going to offload any crude oil that morning, since other officials dressed in army fatigues inspected the offloading pier adjacent to the supertanker.
What he couldn’t figure out was what were the pirates going to do with the supertanker. It made no sense, unless they were going to use the two million barrels of oil on board as collateral to go along with the ransom for the hostages.
Nico stooped down on the platform that ringed the roof of the tank, hiding behind the knee wall and railing on top of it. He took out binoculars and scanned the supply dock where Berbera workers offloaded a small cargo ship, as if the hijacked supertanker listing across port didn’t exist. He panned farther out to sea, tracking a trio of fishing boats, dhows with no mothership, a sailboat, and then farther out still a motorboat with a lone man riding it in a loop around the outskirts of the harbor in line with the supertanker, and then abruptly cut the engine. Nico could make out the red-and-white checkered scarf, but not the man. He zoomed out of long focus and panned the bridge and decks of the supertanker, but didn’t see anyone on board.
The hostages had been offloaded and taken to an inland storage facility, that much he knew. The CO was about to stand up when he heard the gate to the fuel depot open below. Nico ducked and listened to the voices of three or four men enter the fenced-in area. He crawled behind the knee wall toward the ladder, and then peeked down the steps to see three military men and a manager of the oil depot. The manager pointed to the supertanker and then over to the three giant storage tanks inside the compound, implying they could offload the oil from the ship.
Out beyond the port, Merk adjusted the kufeya scarf on his head, typed commands on the laptop ordering the dolphins to split up and check both piers — the big supply dock that ran parallel to shore and a warehouse, and the long road that shot straight out from the oil depot to the fuel depot pier.
At the supply dock, Inapo swam underwater, gliding around the barnacle-coated pilings, and surfaced under the concrete deck. From the view on the dorsalcam, it didn’t appear to be much out of the norm. So Merk switched to a full-screen view of Tasi swimming under the fuel depot pier. She panned the fuel lines suspended over the edge, unconnected to the ship.
Tasi swam a figure eight under the pier, weaving in and out of the pilings toward shore and then glided back; then the dolphin dove under, swimming alongside the giant hull that listed out of the water. Beyond the keel being grounded, the rest of the ship appeared normal. Tasi’s probe didn’t detect leaking oil or a fuel spill.
The dolphin doubled back to the stern, then circled around the giant props. Trained to take a furtive breach and spy approach, Tasi rose behind the props, using the steel blades as cover. She pinched a breath with the blowhole and dove under again.
On the starboard side of the hull, which tilted several degrees, Tasi slowed her fluking. She coasted, inspecting the steel above and then below the surface. Amidships, she stopped when she found an odd box attached to the side of the hull in a depth of five feet.
Merk zoomed in and out with the dorsalcam, looking at what appeared to be a bomb.
How could that be? He wondered. It wasn’t there the day before when the SEAL team visited the ghost tanker after the hijacking. To what purpose would blowing a gaping hole in the vessel stuck in port do for the pirates, unless it was booby-trapped for another reason? Pirates hijack ships and take hostages for ransom, not mayhem. Or did Korfa change the formula?
Merk signaled Tasi to swim on, checking for another box. At the bow, on the same listing side, the dolphin found a second device. Now Merk had to break radio silence, just as Nico did, and send the digital images to the USS New York to be distributed and analyzed.
Time was now the crucial factor.
On the roof of the storage tank, Nico heard the officials climb the stairs. He crawled backward, peeked over the knee wall, and saw it was too high to jump. He looked at the rumpled canvas and ruled that out to hide under. So he crawled around the platform, moving away from the ladder opening. When the first man stepped onto the roof of the storage tank, he stopped and lay flat, hiding in the foot-well between the tank’s raised roof and the knee wall.
Nico slid out a pistol, placing it on his chest. He waited to see if they would walk over and spot him. He breathed a shallow breath, looked up to the spacious blue sky and listened.… The men chatted in Somali tongue, probably something about offloading the oil, storing it in the depot, confirming the capacity of the storage tanks. Perhaps they saw the canvas and wondered who left it behind. Perhaps they plotted what they would do if NATO or American forces stormed the bay to reclaim the vessel.
The men turned around and climbed down the storage tank. They left without discovering the SEAL hiding on top. Nico exhaled, holstering the pistol.
Chapter Forty-Four
Inside a giant empty hanger used to address thousands of Marines stationed at or about to be deployed from Camp Lemonnier, the US forward operating base located in Somaliland’s niche neighbor of Djibouti, a couple of CIA case officers sat at a round table with the micro security firm Azure Shell.
Dressed in blue jeans with a Somali flag tee shirt, ex-navy SEAL Team Six CO Dante Dawson drank iced herbal tea. An African American with a V-shaped body, thick mustache, and bulging biceps, Dante wanted more details than the CIA officers were willing to share with him and his partner, Christian Fuller, a former FBI counterterrorism sniper.
Fuller, a lanky Caucasian raised on a farm in Nebraska, didn’t trust CIA intermediaries; never did. Maybe it was the Beltway’s Bureau-versus-Agency rivalry, the penchant to blame one another. September 11 was the fault of the FBI for failing to track the terrorists learning how to fly at the US flying schools; while the CIA owned both the failure to kill Osama bin Laden prior to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the Benghazi raid on the September 11, 2012, when terrorists killed two navy SEALs and the CIA station chief to the region — a.k.a. the ambassador — at a CIA safe house. Either excuse rubbed the bearded Fuller the wrong way.