Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  But the real glitz, the newest big toy that the weapon controllers liked to play with, was the ship’s new railgun. The railgun used electromagnetic energy known as the Lorentz force to hurl a twenty-three-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7, or five thousand miles per hour. The weapon fire guided high-speed projectiles more than one hundred miles, which made it suitable for cruise missile defense, ballistic missile defense and various kinds of surface warfare applications. The downside to the new railgun was that it took a tremendous amount of energy to fire. The upside was the Hail Nucleus had a 5000-Megawatt traveling wave reactor. This power plant supplied the ship with more than twice the energy potential of an old Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. So, the electricity to fire the beast wasn’t an issue. The railgun was hidden on deck inside two nuclear waste shipping containers that were connected end-to-end near the bow of the Hail Nucleus. The containers and railgun were mounted to a hydraulic lift that could swivel on an immense ball bearing base in a full 360-degree radius. Even though there was no warhead on the projectile, the kinetic energy of a wad of depleted uranium impacting a solid object was devastating. It typically left more dust than pieces. Either that or the shell cut a perfect hole through its target. The result from the impact of the projectile depended on the material itself. Solid objects that resisted the force were pulverized. Lighter objects with thin skins were typically bisected. A supplementary advantage to the kinetic round was that it left no trace of explosives, so that left investigators scratching their heads as to the cause of their airplane mysteriously falling from the sky.

  Only one of the six people in the ship’s security center looked up at Hail as he entered the room. Dallas Stone met Hail’s gaze and greeted him, “Hey, Marshall. How are you doing?”

  The rest of the crew then looked up and greeted their boss…their captain…their leader.

  Similar to the attire worn by the crew in the mission center, everyone in the security center was dressed casually. Hail had not instituted a dress code for his crew. It was bad enough that they worked full-time and lived on a ship that was rarely docked. So as long as they did their job and were happy, he couldn’t care less what they wore.

  The ship had several amenities that a typical sailor would not find on a typical cargo ship. For example, there was a large pool on the top deck that could be covered by a massive sliding hunk of steel with a flip of a button. Each crew member had a cabin the size of an efficiency apartment. There was a gaming area, a state of the art flight and driving simulator, wood shop, metal shop, sewing shop, electronic shop and an area to experiment with new creations, and a movie theater with popcorn and candy. The Hail Nucleus employed four excellent chefs that rotated their schedule. So, at any time during the day or night, a crew member could order a five-star meal. On the top deck, a running track outlined the perimeter of the ship. There was also a workout area with weights and treadmills, as well as an exercise room below deck in the air conditioning. On deck number seven, deep inside the ship, was a basketball court, a tennis court and a relatively small soccer field with artificial turf.

  Hail understood that amenities weren’t cheap, especially if it meant attracting talented minds. An attack drone could cost millions. If the difference between hiring a really smart designer who built a brilliant attack drone or a kind-of-smart guy whose drone crashed was the cost of a basketball court, the issue was a no-brainer. All one had to do was take a look at the Google campus, and the business sense was evident.

  “Is there anything going on?” Hail asked Dallas Stone, the head of his ship’s security center.

  Dallas rubbed his three-day beard. He was either starting to grow something new, or he was simply too lazy to shave it off. Dallas glanced at his monitors for a moment.

  “No, all quiet on the sea today,” Dallas confirmed. “Prince is secured to the blimp above us, floating at two thousand feet. Her radar and video screens are clear. No potential threats in the immediate area.”

  Dallas was in his early twenties, medium in every way: height, weight, looks and dress. The only thing that was above medium was his brain and his ability to analyze and react quickly to threats on the Hail Nucleus. Hail’s father had known Dallas Stone’s father, Mark Stone, who had been a young officer on several of the ships Hail’s dad had commanded. Dallas had been through the ROTC and wanted to fly jets. Mark Stone had heard about the little circus Hail was running and asked Hail for a favor. Instead of his son joining the Air Force, Mark Stone asked Hail if his son could join his menagerie. No father wants to see their son in danger. And Mark Stone knew that flying Hail’s drones was a lot safer than running midnight sorties in an F-35 over Libya.

  Hail looked over at Dallas Stone sitting there concentrating on his screens, and he realized that this young man might be the only person on the Hail Nucleus with any type of military training, albeit the training might be minor.

  Without turning to look at her, Hail asked the woman sitting next to Stone, “Taylor, what does Queen see?”

  The nineteen-year-old attractive blond sitting at the station to the left of Dallas, zoomed out her main monitor and reported, “Queen has been doing a 360-degree flight pattern at a fifty-kilometer distance from the Hail Nucleus. She is currently flying at an altitude of fifty-two hundred feet. Radar shows three tankers, two cargo ships, four fishing boats and two pleasure craft in our vicinity. The video feed that is being streamed from Queen shows no unusual activity taking place on the decks of any of those vessels. The vessels’ registrations are all clean and all check out.”

  Taylor was a refugee of sorts. Hail had discovered her living near the docks in the Port of Charleston. Taylor had tried to steal some food that was waiting to be loaded onto the Hail Nucleus. The girl had been busted and then delivered to Hail by the port authority officers. Hail was asked if he wanted to press charges. Instead, Hail had brought Shana Tran into the room. She had a friendly demeanor that women liked. He asked the officers to leave them alone so Hail and Shana could have a talk with Taylor. After about an hour, it was apparent to both Hail and Tran that all Taylor needed to turn her life around was a purpose. At that time, she had only been seventeen years old. And in the last two years, since the young woman had decided to stay on the ship, she had never told Hail her last name. But Hail knew it. Before they had even left Charleston that day, he had Taylor’s background investigated. Hail knew what had happened to her parents―well, parent. Her father was unknown and her mother was deceased. Taylor was their only kid. But she wasn’t a unique personality on the ship. Most of the crew on the Hail Nucleus had a gloomy history and had some issues to work out.

  “So much for what’s on the water,” Hail responded, “but what about the air?”

  A military-looking young man, Lex Vaughn, to Hail’s right answered, “We have two commercial aircraft within a two hundred-mile radius and five smaller aircraft on the scope. None of their paths are vectored in our direction, but of course we will watch them closely.”

  Hail nodded his head at Lex, comforted that the Hail Nucleus and its contents were safe for the time being. Lex Vaughn acted military, but Hail figured he had picked all that up from movies he had watched. Some of his crew used military terms such as “Roger that” and “Affirmative.” Sometimes they referred to distance in miles and at other times in kilometers. With no military training, Hail was always surprised how much movie talk his crew brought to the job.

  “Thanks, people,” he said, already turning to exit.

  “Thank you, sir,” his staff responded.

  His security staff was wound a little tighter than his mission crew, and he liked it that way.

  “If we don’t see you, have a good night,” Hail heard Stone say just before the door clanked shut. Hail turned to his right and began walking down the hall toward his stateroom. Have a good night; he had heard Dallas tell him.

  “I haven’t had a good night in two years,” he thought, and a wave of depression passed through him that was so intense it almos
t brought him down to his knees. It happened that way sometimes. Depression jumped on him fast—like a wild animal. He could go for days pretending that nothing was wrong—that nothing had happened—that the world had not really changed all that much, but it had.

  Marshall Hail’s entire world had been altered. All the people in it were different. Each one of them appeared more animalistic in some way. He understood that he had changed as well. He was different all the way down to his core. At one point, Hail would have considered himself a passive person. But now, he recognized that he had become more barbaric in the last two years. He had developed a savage side that he didn’t have before. He also possessed a new ability to be cruel. He fully realized that he had turned away from the light and was walking slowly into darkness. And making it all that much more detestable was that it had been a conscious decision on his part. Before, he had been put on the Earth to help people.

  Yet two years later, he had been reborn as a predator and had been left on the Earth to kill people. But in a strange way, he felt that the people he killed— their deaths would still help people in some way. He could reconcile his actions in a number of ways. But, when it came down to it, a prominent group of individuals were putting up large sums of money to make sure nasty people were removed from the planet. Hail didn’t feel it was up to him to judge. Other people had already taken on that task. He was simply there as the executioner—an exterminator of vermin that fed off the fear of others.

  Hail arrived at his stateroom, held up his prox card and entered his oasis. This was home. Well, this was one of his homes, but they were all identical. He had an identical stateroom on the Hail Atom, the Hail Electron, the Hail Proton and the rest of his full-size cargo ships. Each of his cargo vessels were exactly the same. Same mission center, same security center, same armaments, same everything. If one of his ships was upgraded in some manner, all of his ships would receive the same upgrade. The design of his ships was perfection, and even Hail, with his many flaws, knew not to mess with perfection. If one was perfect, then they all needed to be perfect.

  The living room he entered was stark and minimalistic. There was a leather couch, an end table, a matching reclining chair and a coffee table placed on a hardwood floor. He crossed through the living room and entered his bedroom. His bedroom could have been mistaken for that of a hotel. There was almost nothing in the room that personalized the space. No photos, curios, knickknacks or paintings.

  On his way to the shower, Hail caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He stopped and looked more closely, but he wasn’t looking at himself. Stuck in the corner of the mirror was a photo of his wife and two girls. Maybe the only item that personalized the space. He allowed his hand to reach out and touch the small piece of colorful parchment. He then glanced back up at the mirror in time to see a single tear form in his left eye and then streak down his cheek, leaving a thin glimmering trail of sorrow down his tired face. Hail rubbed the tear away and then squashed his face together between both of his large hands. There was a pressure forming in his head and massaging his face provided a little relief. He was under a great deal of stress. Tomorrow would be an important day, maybe the most important day of his life, and that was saying a lot. The billions that he had made during his lifetime were earned with a number of lifetime achievements, many great accomplishments to be proud of, but all of those didn’t mean anything to him now.

  Hail reached down and touched his wife’s face. She was so beautiful, and she had always told him how handsome he was. Maybe he had been handsome years ago. But the man that was looking back at him in the mirror looked fatigued and worn-out, as if he spent much of his time snorting crank or shooting some other destructive drug. Hail felt he had aged ten years in only a matter of two. His hair, at one time, had been an attractive shade of light brown, but now it was turning prematurely grey. The lines in his long and strong face, character lines as his wife had referred to them, now appeared to be deep furrows that carved a sorrowful and cross expression into his face.

  The man in the mirror looked down again and touched each of his twin girls’ faces on the photograph. Blond and eight-years old forever, frozen in the photograph taken moments before their flight from Istanbul to their connecting flight to America. It had been so long since he had last seen them. He missed them so much that it made his heart hurt.

  Hail removed his shirt and looked himself over again, taking in the big picture. Once in great shape, his six-foot-one, 220-pound frame, was now wilting. Just like that. A big-ole tree that was beginning to shrivel up and lean. He knew he needed to stay in shape and told himself that he would work out tonight. But as one side of his brain was already confirming the appointment, the other side of his brain knew that it wasn’t going to happen. He was going to spend the evening scanning and documenting all 72 hours of video that was shot by the dead drone, Eagles. If the mission was on for the next day, then the intelligence that could be disseminated from the video would be vital. No actionable intelligence meant no mission. Simple as that. The workout would have to wait, but the shower was important. It would revive him. It would allow him to refocus.

  Taking another quick glance at the photograph, Hail reluctantly left the image and entered the bathroom. He was met by yet another mirror above the bathroom sink. He saw something new in that mirror that he hadn’t seen in the other. He saw a killer. As of yet, as of today, he wasn’t a killer. But tomorrow he would be an official killer. A killer of his fellow man. A murderer? No. In his mind there was big difference between a killer and murderer. Murder implied that a crime had taken place. The person he would kill tomorrow, and those that would follow, were all murderers. Hail was the yin to the murderers’ yang. He was the force that would offset the glob of human sewage that had slipped all the way down the purulent hill and just needed that little extra nudge to allow it to fall over the rim and tumble into the pit of Hell.

  Hail got into the shower and started counting to 120. He didn’t realize he was counting inside his head. Since he was a small child, his father, Tucker M. Hail, had made him take military showers. His father was big time military. The regulation two-minute shower got sent down the family ranks until it landed on him. He had taken a two-minute shower for so long that if he was forced to stay under the water for three full minutes, he would just have to stand there and do nothing for an extra sixty seconds. And doing nothing wasn’t part of Marshall Hail’s DNA. Doing nothing meant no movement. No movement meant no advancement. If you were not moving forward, then you were technically moving backward, because everyone else around you was moving forward. If you didn’t move forward, you were going to be left behind, and if that was the case, then why even exist? He didn’t know if that was yet another piece of military training his father had instilled in him, or maybe it was just his own philosophy. A suit he had grown into.

  The timer in Hail’s head reached two minutes, and he stepped out of the shower and dried off. He only allowed himself ten seconds for that task. The rest of the bathroom activities were allocated a scant sixty seconds, and then he exited the bathroom. Hail was thankful that his dad had not set a time limit on taking a dump. Rules like that could really screw up a kid.

  Hail’s wife and his children thought that his lickity-split showers were funny, but he didn’t agree. Hail didn’t appreciate feeling like an oddball. He enjoyed fitting in. Unlike the other techno-nerds at MIT, Hail felt he was one of the few who could invent as well as sit in the boardroom and sell. Most of the time, those two traits didn’t exist in the same person. And if they did, they came at a price. Some other important social skillset would have typically have been omitted. But anyone who knew Marshall Hail would be hard-pressed to find a flaw in his character.

  Hail stopped long enough in the bedroom to pull on some underwear and a pair of grey sweatpants. He had stopped wearing button up pants. One day, an extra inch of fat had appeared around his waist and from that point on, button up pants had become uncomfortable. Stretchy pants felt m
uch better.

  In a room adjacent to his bedroom was a mini control room—his office. It was outfitted with four large monitors and one giant monitor the size of a big screen TV. A fast computer interconnected all the gear. Hail considered lying down in bed to view Eagles’ video footage, but he felt he might drift off and waste a good amount of the afternoon. There was still the possibility of falling asleep even if he was sitting in his comfortable high-back chair in his small office. But upright and attentive was more practical than recumbent.

  Shirtless, wearing only his grey sweatpants, Hail walked into his little office. He tried to recall the last time he had slept. It had to have been sometime within the last twenty-four hours, but nailing the exact time really didn’t matter, so he abandoned the query and sat down in front of his wall of monitors.

  Hail logged in and clicked on an icon labelled Hail NAS. Inside that folder were about thirty other folders. He clicked on the folder called Eagles Video. Inside that folder were scores of folders that contained dozens of video files that Eagles had recorded from its time flying above the North Korean compound. Hail opened a text editor and then opened the first video file of Eagles on station in Kangdong. As the video streamed across his large screen, Hail began to type out dates, times and related notes.