Ferdows asked: “Can we insert a load into the torpedo and still use the guidance system?”
“Who designed this?” she asked, knowing the best defense to a technical question she knew little about was to ask more questions — since her training was on missiles, not torpedoes.
Another bearded engineer unrolled the blueprints of the torpedo, which had American naval design logo and a DARPA stamp on each drawing.
“Ah, American,” she observed in broken English. “Do you trust design?”
“Of course,” Ferdows said with confidence. “General Adad’s Syrian Electronic Army hacked these plans last year from a naval contractor in San Diego.”
“And the guidance system? Who designed it?” she asked, examining the parts.
“Another American company in the Pentagon’s Iron Triangle,” Ferdows answered.
“How much space will it lose from the new payload?” Dong-Sun asked.
“Half a hand wide,” he replied, using his old wrinkled hand as a reference.
“What are those animals? How will they be used?” Agent King asked, pointing to the pictures of the Russian navy dolphins.
“Six of them will go. They are escorts, some carrying a decoy payload, others the real device,” Ferdows said, adding, “We learned to trust technology over time.”
“I trust humans less,” Agent King said. “Where are the dolphins now?”
“En route from Canada,” he replied.
Jenny now knew that America was the target for the attack in the West. In less than half an hour inside the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, she learned how the dirty bombs were going to be delivered — by water — coming into some port city in the United States. She didn’t push her luck in asking which city, as she was sure the real answer, if it were already selected, wouldn’t be shared with the engineers and scientists. She turned to Ferdows, announcing, “I need to eat, wash up, sleep on the torpedo design. I need to discuss this with my design team back in Pyongyang. Then I can have answer for you in the morning.”
“Make sure it’s by sunrise,” Ferdows said. “The general wants to fly you out to the new missile site in the Kurdish mountains tomorrow morning. The recipient will choose a target in the next few days. Torpedoes need to be ready for shipment.”
“So soon,” Dong-Sun nodded. She took out an old North Korean — made digital camera, and captured pictures of the torpedo and its guidance system. She overheard the engineers speak in Farsi, but zeroed in on two French words their talk included: Pratique Occulte.
Why those strange words? she wondered.
Chapter Fifty-Five
At dawn, amid orange sunlight shafting through clouds over the Gulf of Aden, a pair of Longbow attack helicopters shadowed the Black Hawk that picked up Merk, the dolphins, and the SEALs along with the supplies. The camouflage nets and foxholes were abandoned for the pirates or fishermen to figure out how they ended up on Ceebaad Island.
Merk said not a word to a female biologist about Tasi being pregnant. Both dolphins were cleared for the mission, so Merk would let the NMMP bio-staff run tests and conduct exit checkups on Tasi and Inapo to see what they might find, if anything, about Tasi’s pregnancy.
If the second group of hostages were going to be traded and released for ransom money, then Merk was sure that he and the navy dolphins’ tour of duty of Somalia were over, and they would either be sent back to Qatar or across the ocean to NMMP in San Diego. They had exceeded their duty, serving the navy, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community.
Back at Camp Lemonnier, the mobile NMMP team separated the dolphins to run full medical examinations. The CIA agents, with Dante Dawson in tow, took Merk to the brigadier general’s private dining facility to eat breakfast and do a deep dive on the intel he gathered.
Merk gave his order to the waiter for cranberry juice, sashimi, seaweed salad, and bowls of blueberries and steamed vegetables. He gazed around reading the somber looks on the agents’ faces, then nudged Dante under the table. The ex-navy SEAL CO gave Merk an oh-shit stare, and said, “CO Nico Gregorius tried to rescue Nairobi last night…” His voice trailed off.
“He did what?” Merk said with a look of surprise.
“Nico shot the Korfa double that Fuller and I met. In a firefight in trying to rescue Nairobi, the warlord and his henchmen killed Nico,” Dante said, looking long and hard at Merk.
“CIA asset Nairobi is presumed dead,” the CIA case officer added.
“Jesus. Nairobi? Her daughter Fathiya, Triumph, what happens to her?” Merk mouthed in disbelief. It was just the other day that he grabbed her by the leg and pulled her down as he came ashore on Somalia the first time. For Nico he was less surprised. Merk understood the danger of the assignment for himself, the dolphins, and in particular for the SEAL CO, as they had been there numerous times before. But for Nairobi it was somehow quite a shock. Perhaps it was related to his feelings he had about Tasi being pregnant in some subconscious way. At that table seated with those men, Merk Toten felt more conflicted about his hardened SEAL past and what to do with the navy dolphins than ever before: release them to the wild or defend the United States, bound to come under attack.
Whatever his decision, Merk couldn’t let Tasi birth a calf in the confines of the Navy Marine Mammal Program. He would have to break protocol, something that had been drilled into him by his Navy mustang father since he was a child.
“Nicholas was able to film and record parts of the firefight. When he was bleeding on the floor, his last act of bravery was to wipe the Satcom clean,” the Asian American agent said. “Sorry, man, my condolences.” He patted Merk on his shoulder.
Merk downed a glass of water. “When’s the Norwegian mercenary going to arrive?”
“He’s here. Landed an hour before you arrived,” the case officer said.
“Dawson, you and I need to chat with him after breakfast.”
“I can’t, Toten. Tight window. Better eat fast. I’m outta here at 1100 hours. Will be driving to the Somaliland border to make the next trade of money for hostages.”
“Dante, don’t you question that? The release of the hostages is happening way too fast. My fin found a dead sailor tied to the propeller of the Shining Star. That’s a warning General Custer would have heeded entering Indian country.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
At noon, the Marine-led convoy drove the Azure Shell hostage negotiating team to the coastal border between Djibouti and Somaliland.
At the request of the Pentagon, the Djibouti Coast Guard followed the meet off coast to ensure that no pirates were going to do an end around at the point of exchange. The arid strip of land — near Zeila — was located a couple of miles inland from the sea where eighteen Oromo immigrants from Ethiopia had died of thirst and starvation some years back. Dante shared that piece of history with Christian Fuller, who rolled his eyes, and said, “Is that our omen or the dead man tied to the prop? Great, let’s trade money for the living on the grave of the dead.”
A half-mile back a pair of Black Hawk helicopters supported the six-vehicle convoy on the Djibouti side of the border. But it was the CIA drone that flew high across the border that added another layer of security, filming the ruins of Zeila, the mine-clustered Shining Sea in the bay, and the fifty-mile wasteland desert that stretched inland to Hargeisa.