Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  The video was high definition and crystal clear; however, the people on the ground were still very small. Even so, Hail could clearly make out a long rifle being delivered into the hands of Kim Yong Chang by one of his servants. It only took about ten seconds for the general to point the gun skyward and to fire two quick shots.

  “Damn,” Hail said.

  Without looking up from his monitor, Renner reported, “Diagnostics show that the actuator controlling the right wing is out. Don’t know if it’s physically gone, wasted or the wiring is damaged.”

  “Losing altitude,” Knox reported, talking over Renner. “We need to figure this out before Eagles lands in their pool.”

  Hail considered his options, and none of them were good. The pickup and delivery drone, code name Foghat, was waiting patiently for dust off, four feet under water in a tributary of the Nam-Gang River. That placed Foghat’s location thirty miles away. Too far away to do them any good right now.

  And then, BOOM-BOOM, another report from the gun on the ground popped through the speakers, and both of the video feeds from the Eagles’ cameras went black.

  “Oh, man,” yelled Knox. “That was a bad one. I think they just shot Eagles’ head off.”

  Realizing that his mission options were being eliminated by the second, Hail asked, “Can we make it to the river?”

  Renner responded by saying, “If you want to make it to the river, Eagles will have to do a burn cycle to gain some altitude.”

  “Can we do a burn with the bird’s head gone?” Hail asked. “Isn’t the air intake on the front of the drone?”

  “I don’t know how hot things are going to get, but really, what’s the downside to it?” Renner asked rhetorically.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” Hail agreed. “Knox, do a burn and see if you can get Eagles out of theater. I’d like to save that drone, if at all possible. If it flies, then fly it.”

  “Will do,” Knox responded.

  Pushing an icon on his control monitor labeled ROCKET IGNITION, Knox waited for something, or possibly nothing, to happen. With the bird’s cameras out of commission and with no visual reference, Knox was completely reliant on the drone’s avionic gauges and dials that were displayed on his fourth monitor. He watched the airspeed indicator rise as the rocket propelled the drone forward.

  “Fifteen seconds left on the burn,” reported Renner.

  “Yeah, yeah. This looks good,” Knox said in an upbeat tone. He pushed his feet into the control pedals and watched the altimeter gauge climb.

  Suddenly and without warning, the avionics display went blank and was replaced with two words: SIGNAL LOST

  “Ah, damn. We just lost the uplink to Eagles,” Knox yelled. His tone was pleading as if he expected someone to help him.

  To the right of Knox sat Shana Tran, who was in charge of communications. Tran said, in a matter-of-fact yet firm tone, “You’re low and flying between two tall hills. Acquiring a signal in that area, and at that low altitude, is problematic at best.”

  Unlike her two co-workers, Renner and Knox, Shana always dressed nice. Typically, she wore a dress that showed off her long legs. She was tall for an Asian woman, but she liked being tall. Tall, smart and sexy. Yeah, all that worked for her just fine.

  “Well, excuse the hell out of me and my headless bird,” Knox shot back.

  “Stay cool,” Tran told him. “You will be out of the hills in what―twenty seconds? And you’re still gaining altitude from the burn, so you should reacquire anytime now.”

  Five seconds clicked by with nothing on the monitors but a handful of frozen words. The eerie sound of wind flapping through the room was gone as well.

  Shana Tran looked confident in her assessment of the communications issue and she was far from panicking. Instead of getting all worked up about it, she inspected her red fingernail polish to make sure there were no chips. She periodically glanced back at her monitors after each finger. Tran’s MIT degree focused on satellite communications and computer science. When it came to mission planning that involved network, Wi-Fi and satellite communications, Hail trusted her completely.

  The avionics display in front of Knox flickered twice and then snapped back on.

  “Are we good?” Tran asked everyone in the room, but her question was intended for Knox.

  “Yeah, we are good.” Knox said, still shaken by the outage. He was pleased to see that the bird had gained almost five hundred feet and was headed in the direction of the Taedong River.

  “No, we’re not,” Renner yelled a moment later. “We’re on fire!”

  *_*_*

  Down on the ground, Kim Yong Chang grunted the Korean words, “Got it,” as he released the trigger of his hunting rifle.

  Both of his girlfriends had yelled, “No. No,” in high-pitched unison. “Don’t shoot the bird,” they had pleaded with Kim. But he had ignored them and shot the bird just the same.

  Kim lowered the rifle from his cheek and watched the bird jerk to the left, doing its best to maintain flight while dealing with a fresh gunshot injury.

  “It’s OK. Look it’s OK,” one of the ladies said. “It’s still flying.”

  “Not for long,” Kim stated in a confident tone and put the rifle back up to his eye. Utilizing a scope, he lined up the bird in the crosshairs and then led it a little.

  “Don’t, don’t,” both women began chanting.

  “Shut up,” Kim told them as he squeezed off two more quick rounds.

  The gun barked and bucked against Kim’s shoulder as two shells ejected from the side of his weapon. He lowered the gun and waited for the effect. He thought he saw the eagle’s head pop off, but as the bird flew away, he decided that it must have been a clump of feathers. After all, no bird could fly without its head. Less than ten seconds later, the tall trees at the edge of his property obstructed his view, and then the bird was gone. Kim handed the gun back to his waiting servant and noticed tears forming in his girlfriends’ eyes.

  “Silly women,” was all he had to say to them.

  Kim Yong Chang sat back down at the table, put a cloth napkin back in his lap and began to eat some toast.

  *_*_*

  “Can the bird be seen by Kim?” Hail asked, his tone measured yet urgent.

  Knox responded, “No, we’re already a kilometer off the target.”

  Comforted with the news, Hail smiled and said, “Well, that’s good. Nothing like shooting an eagle and watching it catch on fire. That’s normal, right? I mean that happens every day, doesn’t it?” he said sarcastically.

  “About a kilometer to the river,” Knox announced.

  Renner,” Hail asked, “How bad is the fire? Can it fly? Are we going to make it to the water?”

  Renner checked his diagnostic screen.

  Renner hummed concern in the back of his throat before saying, “I really don’t know, Marshall. It’s going to be close. When the bird’s head was shot off, the bullet must have clipped the front end of the rocket tube and angled the exhaust port into Eagles’ tail feathers. Even though those feathers are synthetic and fire resistant, it melted the hell out of a lot of them. I think we are going to have an issue with horizontal control.”

  “Check it, Knox,” Hail ordered.

  Alex Knox pushed the foot pedals down and then let them back up.

  “Very sluggish,” Knox reported. “Down is no problem, but up may be an issue.”

  “Down is never a problem,” Hail commented. “That’s why God invented gravity.”

  Turning his chair thirty degrees toward Tanner Grant, their current mother drone pilot, Hail asked, “What’s the dust-off status of Foghat?”

  “Not going to happen in the time frame we have, Skipper,” Grant responded grimly. He typed on some keys and reported, “Thirty seconds to blow the ballast and surface and then another two minutes to get airborne. At best speed, we are ten minutes away, so—”

  “So, I hate to lose Eagles,” Hail interrupted. His tone was gruff and combative. “A g
azillion hours went into that design. If there is any way to save that bird—” His words trailed off.

  Hail wanted to save the drone, but deep down he knew that it was irretrievable. The bird had to go away. It couldn’t fall into anyone’s hands, no matter whose side they were on.

  Finally, giving in to the inevitable, Hail said, “Grant, keep Foghat under water until nightfall, and let’s get these loose ends tied up.”

  “Yes, sir,” the eighteen-year-old responded. Grant was another gaming flight champion, but the boy had also mastered helicopter and car driving skills. Hail had hired him by telling him he was going to fly F-35s for the Air Force. It was a lie, but it wasn’t a complete lie. Grant had actually flown the new jet in one of Hail’s simulators.

  If Shana Tran’s opinion meant anything, Grant was the best looking of the current mission crew. He was clean with blond, short-trimmed hair, good cheekbones and dressed in nice clothes, khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt that had the Hail company logo stitched into the fabric. Shana thought that Grant could even be considered cute, if he ever removed his face from a monitor long enough for someone to notice.

  “Twenty seconds until splashdown,” Knox reported.

  Except for the sound of the omnipresent wind pouring in from the command center’s speakers, the room was silent. No one spoke. They just waited.

  “Ten seconds,” Knox said. He checked his latitude and longitude headings as he eased the drone down toward the river below. He bent the joystick to the left and pressed both pedals down half an inch.

  “You got it, dude,” Grant encouraged his fellow pilot.

  “Deploy the antenna float,” Hail ordered.

  Shana Tran hesitated for a moment and then touched a red icon on her screen and reported, “COMM antenna float has been deployed.”

  “Five, four, three, two, one and splashdown,” Renner reported as if they had just returned from space.

  A large whooshing sound shot through the room’s speakers, and then the command center went deathly quiet. No wind. No water sounds. Nothing.

  Hail let the room decompress for a few moments. He felt a sickness in his stomach that he got when he let people down. He had let himself down.

  He asked Tran, “Do we still have an uplink with Eagles?”

  “Yes, sir. The float is up, and the drone is online,” Tran replied, watching an active data stream on her monitor being exchanged with the sunken drone.

  Whereas the mother drone, Foghat, who had dropped Eagles on station three days ago was fully submersible but Eagles was not. The birdlike drone was designed to contend with heavy rain. Therefore, its vital computers, cameras and control motors would remain in service, but it wasn’t designed to be under water. When Hail had asked for the communications antenna to be deployed, everyone knew why. The mission crew understood that only one signal could be sent to the drone via that communication link.

  Hail took some time to think over the situation. He looked around at the eight people in front of the individual consoles. They were busy typing and pressing icons, collecting information they anticipated Hail might request.

  He loved this place, this room. It had taken over two years to complete, but it was everything he had hoped for. It was his future. It was his new beginning.

  Behind the sixteen command stations were two more stations that sat a foot higher on an upper tier. And behind those analysts’ stations, up one more tier, was Hail’s captain’s chair. The stations behind the pilots were reserved for the mission analysts.

  Pierce Mercier was sitting in one of them. The other analyst station to his right was empty. Pierce Mercier’s main area of expertise was wet craft. He was their ocean, river, reservoir, pool and basically anything wet expert. He was also an expert in anything plant, animal or insect. Mercier had a funny French accent, and the Hail crew constantly made fun of him. He was tall, quiet, refined and polished in a manner that most of Hail’s young crew was not. Marshall had hired Pierce directly from the École Polytechnique (ParisTech) after reading a few of his published papers on Oceanography. Mercier was in his forties and a contemporary that could talk directly to Hail. As a bonus to the mission crew, Mercier acted as a father figure to the young pilots.

  “What are the chances of recovering Eagles from the river?” Hail asked Mercier.

  Mercier had anticipated the question and instantly responded, “Not good. We are talking about twenty feet down, heavy silt, fast current and the bird will weigh at least twice its flight weight considering how much water it’s taking on.”

  Hail didn’t respond.

  Mercier felt he should say something more, something positive and added, “I don’t think we can save it remotely. But if we put divers into the water, we could get it back. But that is not going to happen, is it? That’s not what we do.”

  Hail let out a big, long breath, an action as close to defeat as Marshall Hail would ever exhibit in front of his crew. He then composed himself, rubbed his chin with a long contemplative stroke and said in a poised tone, “No my friend. That is not going to happen.”

  Hail swiveled his massive chair toward Renner. “How much video did we record?”

  Renner glanced at a screen and responded, “About 72 hours.”

  “That should be enough,” Hail said to himself.

  Marshall Hail, aboard the Hail Nucleus bunched his lips together and shook his head slightly, recalling how proud his avionic engineers were the day they had completed the build of the astounding birdlike drone. As the tech guys ran Eagles through its paces, everyone involved felt like little kids with the coolest toy on the block. The drone wasn’t perfect out of the gate, but then most ground-breaking technology is rarely good to go on the first go-around. After a few months of tweaking, the half-million-dollar bird was ready to go on its first mission. None of them would have guessed that the demise of the aircraft would come at the hands of a crazy North Korean politician who shot it out of the sky with a hunting rifle.

  Hail took in another long breath and let it out slowly. It was his method of dealing with anxiety.

  “Blow it up,” he told Knox.

  “Are you sure, Skipper?”

  Hail didn’t say anything; he just nodded once and tensed his jaw muscles.

  Knox typed in a password and pressed an icon on the screen labeled SELF DESTRUCT. He held his finger on the icon as a timer began to count down. If he removed his finger, the countdown would be discontinued. As each digit was displayed, a bright red light pulsed under Knox’s finger. A loud mechanical female voice came through the room’s speakers and read off the numbers.

  “Ten, nine, eight—"

  No one in the room spoke. They all just waited for the end.

  At zero, the drone known as Eagles, the first and only one of its species, dematerialized at the bottom of the Taedong River in an explosion that was heard by no one.

  *_*_*

  “Eagles is gone,” Knox said softly.

  “Yeah, but it did its job and collected the data and video we needed,” Hail commiserated.

  Hail checked the time on his right monitor. It was 10:30 a.m., and the Hail Nucleus was running on time, nearing the South China Sea. Hail suddenly felt very tired.

  He turned toward Renner. “Can you copy all the video that Eagles shot to my NAS so I can review it tonight?”

  “Sure thing, Marshall,” Renner said.

  The rest of the crew was looking at Hail and waiting for any further instructions.

  “Do you need me here tonight when you clear Foghat out of theater?” Hail asked his crew.

  On behalf of the crew, Pierce Mercier responded, “No, we have it, Marshall. Take whatever time you need to plan what you want to do next.”

  “OK,” Hail said and slid out of his Captain Kirk’s chair and onto his feet. He stretched for a moment, noticing how stiff his 40-year-old body had become from just sitting in the chair for—for—How long had he been sitting in the chair? It must have been at least five hours. He needed to pe
e.

  “Let’s meet tomorrow and go over what we’ve been planning. If all the pieces fit, then I don’t see any reason why we can’t start the operation tomorrow night,” Hail told his crew. Hail looked around the room. “Does that sound good to everyone?”

  There were mumblings of “Yes, sir”, “Yeah”, “OK” and “That’s cool” that drifted through the sullen room.

  Marshall Hail exited the mission center and began the walk down the seemingly endless hallway of deck number six. He was both tired and exhilarated from the events that had transpired over the last three days. His lower back was bothering him, and he knew it would feel better if he did a work out. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  After walking about 500 feet, Hail stopped at a door that looked like all the other metal doors on the ship and reached for his badge. Thick black letters had been stenciled into the door’s shiny white paint that spelled the words: SHIP SECURITY. Hail used his proximity card to swipe himself in. The room behind the heavy metal door resembled a smaller version of the command and control center he had just left. There were four men and two women sitting behind control stations that also looked just like the control stations in the mission room.

  Two of the six people were in charge of flying the drone and drone-blimp combinations. Two others analyzed the radar, images and video that was streamed back from the airborne drones. And the other two were the killers. They operated the attack drone’s weapon systems, which consisted of two AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, two 70mm rockets and a 30mm automatic cannon with up to 1,200 high-explosive, dual-purpose ammunition rounds.

  The weapon controllers also operated the ship’s own weapons systems. The top deck of the Hail Nucleus had a perimeter of 2,112 feet. Spaced every hundred feet along the hull of the Hail Nucleus was a porthole. Behind the watertight automated porthole hatches sat two guns at the ready. Each set of guns was mounted to a reticulating platform. The Browning M2 .50 caliber Heavy Machine Gun, better known as the “Ma Deuce”, was mounted next to the XM307 ACSW Advanced Heavy Machine Gun. The Browning M2 could spit out 850 rounds per minute of armor-piercing incendiary rounds that could perforate an inch of hardened steel armor plate at a distance of a hundred yards. The XM307 was denoted as a heavy machine gun, but in fact it was a 25mm belt-fed grenade machine gun with smart shell capability. The XM307 could kill or suppress enemy combatants out to two thousand meters and destroy lightly armored vehicles, watercraft and helicopters at one thousand meters. The company who built the XM307 cancelled the project for the gun in 2007. Hail acquired the rights and had the gun redesigned and built exclusively for his ships to protect his land-based nuclear reactor installations. Surrounding the Hail Nucleus, twenty sets of the guns sat at the ready, fully loaded, each gun outfitted with thousands of rounds of ammunition, waiting to be remotely pointed and fired at a target.