“So is Azar. You could’ve had the systems killed, too.”
Merk shook his head, since he knew both Tasi and Inapo were very much alive. Two navy dolphins that should receive Medals of Honor for bravery under fire and carrying out tasks, not to mention their ability to improvise, got what? Some R&R downtime in a pool, a checkup, their teeth brushed, fed fish for their reward. That, Merk knew, was a bad deal.
Merk unzipped the top of his wet suit and pulled his arms out of the rubbery sleeves. He stripped down to his waist, revealing to Captain Whittal the faded Navy SEAL Trident tattoo on his right bicep and an orange-and-silver parang tattoo — “broken daggers” — on his right breast. But it was the left side that caught the captain’s eye. Like an aged map of the Louisiana Purchase, a burn scar covered the left flank of Merk’s back, wrapping around his side and arm and across his ribs up to his left breast. The sight of raw fused skin, tight as a snare drum, coarse like gravel, stopped the captain cold from pressing on with his verbal barrage.
Merk stood up, exhaled a calm breath, finding his center again, and asked, “Captain, when will the fins be released to my supervision?”
“Toten, we’re not talking about the systems right now. You have to give a deposition on the circumstances relating to Lt. Azar’s death. NMMP Director Hogue will do the grilling from San Diego. She will then see if the fact-finding discussion will require a JAG probe.”
“Look, I don’t want to feed Tasi and Inapo or even check their vitals. They need to be examined in water, in their environment, for post-traumatic stress. No different than soldiers coming back from the field of battle.”
“You and the biologic systems will be flown to the Naval Special Warfare Unit Three at the Asu Bahrain Navy Base at 1500 hours. You can examine them there,” Whittal said. Realizing he was no longer penetrating Merk, that his words were being ignored, that the dolphin whisper’s focus was elsewhere, that Merk had shut out the pain, compartmentalized it, pushed Azar’s death to the back of his mind, the captain said, “Toten, your request to use the French naval base here is denied. You’ll be stationed in Asu until your next mission, which should be soon.”
Merk grabbed a towel and headed to the captain’s quarters to shower and get changed.
After he got dressed, Merk returned to the conference room. On a live feed, he spent an hour answering questions from Naval Marine Mammal Program Director Susan Hogue and five ONI officers and investigators stationed on both US coasts and one at an undisclosed forward operating base in the Mid East. Merk filled the reports, one after the other, flipping through tablet screens, providing digital testimony on the events that transpired in the Strait of Hormuz, from Iran’s mine-laying operation and his decision not to abort, to ramming the Iranian pursuit boat that led to Morgan Azar being shot, his drowning, and death.
Hours later, Merk finished the paperwork and headed outside. He stepped into the intense wall of heat, but it was the industrial odor of the oil refineries and natural gas processing plants across the port that magnified the loss of Morgan Azar. He worried about the health of his dolphins, not enough to be distracting him from thinking about his girlfriend though. There in the mechanized port of oil and gas and steel, he recalled her fine scent, the touch of her hair flowing through his fingers, and the warmth of her flesh pressed against his body.
He remembered her and then looked down the terminal to the fenced-in officer’s recreation building. It housed an outdoor swimming pool, shielded from the sun under tent-like canopies.
He wondered how Tasi and Inapo were doing, how they were holding up in the pool of water, as he headed to the medical examiner’s office to read Morgan Azar’s autopsy report and see his body, his face, one last time.
Chapter Six
Smoke poured out of the collapsed roof. The bombed stone building, which centered the market square in Jaar, smoldered in hot rubble. Citizens’ faces wrought with despair and belligerence, looked on, their eyes red and inflamed like embers in a fire. Mob rage flared with more and more onlookers pouring into Market Square.
The surgically accurate CIA drone strike caved in the slab roof, collapsing stone walls on two sides. Rescue workers, villagers, and policemen pulled the bloodied, lifeless bodies of children out of the wreckage. They picked their way around the broken beams and piles of debris to a row of waiting ambulances turned into makeshift hearses.
How could the US blow up an elementary school? It was tragic to blow up the Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders — at the Kunduz hospital in 2015, but quite another thing to raze a school full of children when Navy SEALs were on the ground to laser-paint the target and signal intelligence, confirmed in order to avoid a repeated mistake. Perhaps worse, the American court system threw out a civil suit against the US president, congress, and the CIA for hunting down and killing Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born militant cleric who had joined AQAP, in a drone strike in Yemen 2011. The attack also killed al-Awlaki’s teenage son.
How would justice be served with militants and civilians being killed by drone strikes across a country shattered by civil war? And now children were dead. Yemeni soldiers joined the swelling throng that screamed, pumped fists, and waved knives, chanting “Death to America.”
The devastation of the drone strike tore open a school and not a terrorist safe house, as intelligence analysts had guaranteed with “ninety-eight percent accuracy.” It wasn’t the first time the controversial CIA drone program took innocent lives, or that children were victims of a remote, distant crime by the US’s autonomous, unmanned air vehicles.
Behind a news team filming the destroyed school, Bahdoon, the Yemeni-born, French-educated psychiatrist, videotaped the rescue operation. He captured the visceral anger of the people in the street with his smartphone. He adjusted his wire-frame glasses, filming as he looked for other dramatic pictures to shoot. A pair of tall, armed Somali warriors, dressed in rags, wearing light blue headscarves—hijabs—hovered in Bahdoon’s shadow. He stopped recording, removed his glasses, and wiped the dust out of his eyes. Bahdoon rubbed the lenses clean on his shirt and put the glasses back on. He saw a Yemeni soldier carry a woman’s arm out of the ruins and started filming again, capturing the grisly scene, tracking the soldier as he strode to a police vehicle and put the arm in the cooler, as if putting fish on ice.
The mob reacted to the dismembered arm. They screamed, shouting louder, cursing with bloodthirsty revenge. Some yelled for death. But the satellite that identified the CIA target hung in low earth orbit, while the CIA team that fired the drone’s Hellfire missiles sat in a climate-controlled mobile trailer in one of the secret drone bases in the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, or Djibouti, Africa. Each base was located more than five hundred miles away, making it hard to haul those responsible for the attack into the square to be stoned or beheaded.
Bahdoon was aware of that reality, just as he was cued into the power of social media. The videos he captured that day were already going viral around the world, not just on al Qaeda or ISIS websites, but across American and European channels, hitting news airwaves, Twitter feeds, YouTube, Facebook pages, and a myriad of social, mobile chat, and video platforms. Bahdoon the propagandist was keen on exploiting the social sentiment of the people against the West, who, he knew, would recoil in horror at the attack. Children blown to pieces, an elementary school destroyed. The school bombing put the US military machine on notice for days, if not weeks. And it might be the tipping point to force the CIA to scale back its drone operations in Yemen.