Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  Hail said, “We want to keep Stones surrounded by rocks so it doesn’t look out of place. If we want to set it down on the periphery of the brook, that would be OK, but it needs to be surrounded by rocks.”

  Renner said, “It’s not like anyone except the gardener walks this far down the brook, and we are only talking about for 24 hours. I think we have to depend on stealth here and take a chance.”

  “OK,” Hail conceded. “Set it down, Paige.”

  “Roger that,” she said, and tilted one of her flight controllers to the left. “There’s a patch of rocks further down the stream that looks dry. I’m going for that.”

  Grayson maneuvered Stones to the left a few yards and said, “This area looks good and dry. I’m coming down.”

  A foot above the edge of the stream, a drone that looked like a river-worn stone, lowered into place, nuzzling itself between four other river stones. The doors on its cylindrical propeller shaft irises closed, and the micro-hub turned into a rock.

  Unlike the other two drones that had touched down and were still streaming a video, the instant that Stones touched down, its stream went dark. Hail knew that the camera was still sending an image, but the camera was looking directly at a rock sitting next to it. That was no big deal. Stones had a specific purpose and sending back surveillance video wasn’t it.

  Hail stood up and began clapping his hands. The sound was loud in the quiet room.

  “That was a fantastic job, everyone,” he told his crew. “Everything worked out the way we planned it. I couldn’t ask for a better phase of this mission.”

  The rest of the crew pushed back from their stations and relaxed.

  “Let’s put all the hubs into sleep mode to save power, and I’d like all of you to put yourselves into sleep modes as well.”

  There was a smattering of laughter. A few of the pilots got up and stretched and began with idle mission chatter, burning nervous energy.

  Hail yelled out over the noise, “I need everyone to be back on station in five hours—that’s 7 a.m.”

  On his way out of the mission room, Hail shook Renner and Mercier’s hands.

  “So far so good,” he said to them.

  “Let’s just hope the big show tomorrow morning goes as well,” Mercier said.

  “Yep,” Hail agreed.

  Hail opened the massive iron door, left the mission center and headed toward his stateroom for a few hours of sleep.

  “Sleep,” he thought to himself. “Yeah, right.”

  Nizhny Novgorod, Russia—Volna Hotel

  T

  he hotel bed was soft, the sheets smooth and cool. She was lying on her side facing the Russian who was staring at the ceiling.

  Victor Kornev turned his head to look at her. He said, “Tonya, I have to attend a video meeting downstairs.”

  Kara said nothing. She looked at him inquisitively.

  Kornev repeated himself, softening a little, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I have to attend a business meeting downstairs. Do you have a room at this hotel?”

  Kara said nothing again and waited right up to the point where she felt that Kornev was becoming agitated.

  Finally, she responded, her voice soft and sexy, “Yes, I have a room here; did you want me to leave?” she asked in a tone that sounded as if the mere suggestion of asking her to leave would hurt her feelings.

  Kornev thought about it for a moment.

  Kara could tell he was mentally walking through his hotel room, analyzing it to see if anything on the premises could be compromised. He had made millions being careful, and this situation was no different. At that moment, she didn’t suspect that Kornev thought of her as anything other than a lucky one-night stand.

  “Sure, you can stay,” Kornev finally said. His body language changed, and he appeared more relaxed.

  That was a good answer. That meant she would have time to do what she needed to do. If it wasn’t for the sake of keeping up appearances, she would be gone before he got back from his meeting, and he would never see her again. But that might cast suspicion upon her and make a cautious Kornev very nervous.

  Kornev pulled Kara’s head close to him and kissed her forehead.

  “I will see you very soon,” Kornev said, getting out of bed, making no attempt to cover his nakedness.

  The Russian’s clothes were piled in a heap on his side of the bed. Kara watched as he pulled on his clothes. All the while, Kara made mental notes of everything she saw. Kornev had two distinct tattoos and several scars.

  High up on his right arm was an inked Hammer and Sickle, a symbol of the USSR. Black and red. The ring around the sickle, as well as the star that interlaced through the sickle, was black. The sickle itself was red, with a smattering of white starbursts. The white gave the impression the sickle was made of metal and the sun was glinting off its edges. It looked military and had aged. The colors were faded enough that she suspected the work dated back a decade or more.

  On the inside of his left arm was a name. As Kornev dressed, the name flashed into view and then was gone. After two more sightings, Kara pieced together the Russian letters as Кристина, which translated to Kristina.

  Kara also noticed an ugly wound that had not healed well on Kornev’s left shoulder. It looked like the result of a gunshot from a large caliber weapon delivered at close range. It had made a hole big enough that a shallow indentation remained after healing. The area at the top of Kornev’s pectoral muscle had been cut away and improperly sutured, leaving his chest uneven. As Kornev turned to locate his socks, she noticed an equally ugly scar on the opposite side of his shoulder where the bullet had exited.

  Part of Kara’s job was intelligence gathering. Being able to positively identify Kornev under any circumstance was important. Positive physical identification was critical, and indexing tattoos and old wounds was much better than trying to match a face to a photograph. If one of Kornev’s many enemies got ahold of him and left him dead in a field, maybe even decapitating him and taking his hands, the CIA would still be able to make a positive ID from the tattoos and scars that Kara documented in her mind. After her assignment had been completed, all that information would be typed up and added to Kornev’s file in the CIA database.

  It took Kornev less than two minutes to get dressed. He leaned over to kiss the top of Tonya’s head. He didn’t say goodbye or see you later. He simply walked out of the bedroom. A moment later, Kara heard the front door of the hotel suite close with a light click.

  She waited for a minute in case Kornev had forgotten something. When she was relatively sure he was gone, Kara whipped off the satin sheets and quickly hustled out into the front room of the suite. Wasting as little time as possible, she adjusted her dress while walking over to a small desk-like piece of furniture. The table looked like something you could buy at IKEA, but sturdier. It was made of blond wood, chrome and glass. The table could suffice as an extra surface to hold an opened piece of luggage, but Kornev had been using it as a desk.

  Kara went directly for his phone charger that was plugged into the socket on an ornate lamp. Moving quickly, she unplugged the charger from the lamp and removed the white iPhone cable that was plugged into its port. His phone charger was a little different than most of them she had seen. In a perfect world, it would have been the common white charger that Apple sold in the millions and provided in the package with each iPhone. But this was an aftermarket unit. It was black, not white, and smaller than the original Apple charger.

  Kara knew that time was her biggest enemy. Kornev had not told her when he would be back. He had said, “I will see you very soon,” But how long was very soon? Five minutes? A half hour? Kara tore a few sheets of paper from the notepad sitting next to the lamp. She folded them over once, twice and then once more, creating a thick square of paper.

  Not bothering to put on her shoes, Kara cupped the iPhone charger in her hand, picked up her purse from the floor and opened the front door to the room. Trying to look casual, she glanced i
nto the hallway. Kara looked left for a moment and then right. She was pleased that the hallway was empty. She was also pleased that Kornev didn’t have any type of security detail. He must have felt that personal security wasn’t needed since he was in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, colloquially shortened to Nizhny by most Russians. She was told by her intelligence handlers that Kornev employed bodyguards if he ventured to foreign lands. If Kornev had his guards with him at the Volna Hotel, they could not have prevented her from completing her current assignment. But guards would have certainly made it more difficult.

  Kara stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back. Her mother had always told her that posture was everything when it came to finding a good husband. “What man in the world would want a slouching woman?” What man, indeed?

  With perfect posture, Kara stepped into the hallway. She checked the hallway again, turned around and inserted the folded paper into the area of the doorjamb where the bolt met the strike plate. Being careful not to smash her fingers, she closed the door gently on the paper sheets.

  Testing her work, she pushed on the door and it opened a few centimeters, indicating that the bolt was being held open by the paper. Confident that she would be able to get back into the room, Kara again closed the door carefully, turned and began walking briskly toward her own room four doors down the hall.

  Kara reached into her purse and removed her room’s keycard. Her room number was 407, and it was closed and locked as it should have been. Afraid she would see a mystified Kornev come around the corner, she hurriedly opened her door and entered. During her entire stay at this hotel, she had spent less than five minutes in this room. When she had arrived, she had done some touchups to her makeup but went directly down to the bar. Her mission had been dependent on being on display when Kornev went to the bar for Happy Hour, just as he had done the night before.

  The first night that Kornev had spent in the bar had not been very exciting for him. Her CIA support team had told her that Kornev had sat at the bar and watched a high school hockey game on television. The only other people that had been in the bar were two old couples that sipped wine and retired early.

  Kara found her large green suitcase still sitting next to her front door where she had left it. She would have loved to jump into the shower and cleanse the Russian’s scent off her, but there was no time for that. She tossed her suitcase onto the bed and turned on the wall lamps on either side of the bed.

  It had a central zipper that circled the main section. She unzipped the suitcase completely and opened the flap. Inside were a few clothes and a massive selection of phone chargers–hundreds. Each charger was inserted into a plastic slot fused into a thick plastic sheet. Each sheet had ten rows and five columns of chargers with chargers on the front and back. There were ten sheets of plastic. The CIA tech who had packed her bag had not told her how the chargers would be organized. As she gazed down at them, the only order Kara could make out was that they were arranged by color and size. That would seem to make sense if whoever was trying to locate a charger was in a hurry, which she was, so the arrangement worked in her favor.

  The charger she held in her hand was black, so she removed all the white sheets of chargers until she found the first selection that had nothing but black phone

  chargers. She began the process by holding up Kornev’s charger in front of each charger nestled in its clear pocket.

  Nothing on the first sheet. They were all too large. She flipped over to the backside of the first sheet and repeated the comparison with each of the new candidates.

  Nothing again. She set that sheet aside and began on the next batch. She was optimistic about finding a match. The next set of black chargers were still too big, but they continued to get smaller. She completed her scan, found nothing that matched, flipped over the sheet and searched the backside.

  Halfway through, she said, “Yes,” as she reached down and pulled open the Velcro seal that secured a small black phone charger.

  Under the direct light of the lamp, she held up Kornev’s phone charger against the one she had selected. They looked identical. She placed them next to one another and inspected them from every angle until she was confident the chargers were an exact match.

  Confident in her find, she placed Kornev’s charger in the night table drawer next to the bed. She put the replacement for Kornev’s phone charger in her purse. Her watch told her that five minutes had expired since she had left Kornev’s room. Not bad. Kara collected all the sheets of chargers she had removed and returned them to the suitcase. She closed the flap but didn’t bother zipping it. She moved quickly to the door. Rolling her shoulders back into pretty girl position, Kara stuck her head out and performed a quick hallway inspection. Seeing no one, she stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind her.

  An older couple unexpectedly exited their room as Kara was passing. Kara greeted them with the Russian salutation “Добрый вечер,” which meant good evening and was used any time after 6 p.m. The old man’s eyebrows rose when he looked at Kara. Dressed in a cocktail dress, her red hair in disarray and not wearing shoes, she guessed she looked like a high-class hooker that was sneaking out of a room with her trick’s wallet. Nevertheless, the couple politely returned said “Good evening” in Russian, and they walked down the hallway in the opposite direction, whispering to one another.

  Kara made it back to Kornev’s room. She gently pushed on the door and was relieved to see that the paper holding open the bolt was still in place. Using her index finger and thumb, she held the edges of the paper and opened the door. Once inside, she placed the paper in her purse. No sense in leaving strange folded objects in plain sight. She walked over to the desk.

  Instinctively, Kara looked back over her shoulder at the front door. Her paranoid side told her that Kornev could walk in on her at any moment. She retrieved Kornev’s original charging cable and plugged it into the new CIA phone charger and plugged the charger back into the lamp. Still paranoid, she checked the door, but Kornev had not walked back into the room. Nor did he walk into the room an hour later, or even an hour after that.

  Kara took the time to pen a letter she would leave when she ditched Victor Kornev to jump on a plane headed for the States.

  My Dearest Victor,

  Alas, I needed to leave on an important invite to attend the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Drop me an e-mail the next time you are someplace fun and want some company. Russia … not so fun.

  Your new friend, Tonya (Tonya Merkalov 123@gmail.com)

  Four hours later, Kornev opened the door and entered the room.

  Kara had her dress on, her shoes off and was watching Russian television; a fate worse than death as far as she was concerned. The show was a Russian sitcom called Univer. Continually translating the Russian to English was making her tired and agitated.

  Kornev saw her sitting on the couch. He said nothing. He walked to the couch and sat next to her. He reached over and took her hand in his. There was an uncomfortable silence when two people, two strangers had just been intimate.

  Kara remained silent. It was her method of control. She wanted Kornev to talk first so she could gauge his demeanor. Anything could have happened while he was gone; up to and including some source of Victor’s telling him that there was a CIA spy in his room. Kara had to remain vigilant and be able to react quickly and decisively if things got ugly. Her high-heeled shoes were sitting next to her on the couch. These were not shoes that could be bought from Macy’s. These were CIA-issued shoes. The long heels in each of the shoes were metal spikes. If swung into a semi-solid mass, the heel would peel away, allowing the spike to go deep into the target.

  Kornev was the first to talk.

  “How are you?” he asked in English.

  “Fine, and you?” Kara replied politely.

  “I’m good,” Kornev said, but his heavy Russian accent made good sound more like guwt.

  Kara was silent.

  “Are you hungry? Would
you like something to eat?” he asked.

  Kara was hungry, but she really didn’t want to hang around with Kornev any longer than she had to. If there had been no restrictions on her assignment, she would have ordered a big thick steak. And as she finished her last bite, she would have jammed the steak knife deep into Kornev’s neck, severing his jugular vein. She would have then calmly watched him bleed out as she slipped on her shoes, picked up her purse and exited the room without looking back.

  But they wanted Victor Kornev alive. Her bosses, and their bosses, wanted the man to continue breathing. If he was dead, then they wouldn’t know who he was working with. If Kornev was discovered with a four-inch steak knife sticking out of his neck, the CIA wouldn’t know what countries and terrorist organizations were actively buying arms and of what type. If Kornev was planted six feet under, a new arms dealer would take over the trade and they would have to start all over.

  The CIA’s phone charger—Kornev’s new phone charger—would indeed charge Kornev’s iPhone. But it was so much more than that. It was a very expensive, very special piece of CIA hardware. The first time that Kornev plugged his phone into the CIA charger, several unique things would happen. First, the charger would set up a peer-to-peer network with a similar charger that was plugged into Kara’s lamp in her room. The PLC, or power-line communication protocol, allowed a high-speed network to be established over hotel power lines that joined the rooms. The second thing that would happen was a small backdoor program would be installed on Kornev’s iPhone. That program would instantly start copying every bit of data to the empty phone in Kara’s room. The copy program would create an identical image of Kornev’s iPhone onto Kara’s phone.

  Once back in her room, Kara would connect her phone to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and securely transmit all the data to CIA headquarters. The CIA techs would create a virtual image of Kornev’s phone that would be mounted on the CIA’s computers. In essence, his phone now existed in the virtual world and could be accessed in a virtualized state on a CIA computer. No physical phone was required. From that point on, anytime Kornev charged his phone or connected to a Wi-Fi signal, the virtual phone at CIA headquarters would be instantly updated with any new or modified information. As long as Kornev took his charger with him, his iPhone would continue to update its virtual counterpart. With that information, the CIA intelligence team could access and review all of his chats, texts, e-mails and photos.