Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  Paige Grayson moved into action mode. She made some selections on her screen and said, “Opening the hatch on Stones.”

  “Switching control to Beatles,” Knox announced, pulling up a new screen and pressing the corresponding icon.

  From inside the core of Stones rose the drone called Beatles. It was identical in every way to B-52s, except that it had a fully charged battery and had not been chewed on by a big bird.

  “Anyone watching for the bird?” Knox asked as he carefully flew the drone toward the breakfast table.

  “Does it matter?” Hail said. “Just complete the mission, and be quick about it before he comes out. If the bird makes another run, then it makes another run. There is nothing we can do about it.”

  Knox didn’t reply. He simply concentrated on keeping the drone flying low to the ground. After traversing what seemed like miles of bricks, Knox began to gain altitude as he neared the table.

  The tiny drone buzzed louder as Knox increased thrust and spun the rotors faster. Plates, silverware and glasses of various shapes and sizes filled with liquid of different colors came into view as the drone crested the edge of the table.

  “All right, easy now, Alex. We only have one shot at this,” Hail cautioned.

  “But no pressure, right?” Knox shot back sarcastically.

  The dishes and glasses on the table were so close to the drone that they looked like small buildings in front of the camera.

  Knox found the glass of orange juice in the spot where it had sat the last three mornings. He worked the controls until Beatles was hovering directly over the glass.

  “Are you sure you’re in place?” Hail asked.

  “As close as I’ll ever be, Skipper,” Knox confirmed.

  “OK,” Hail said, “Bombs away.”

  Since Knox’s hands and feet were busy, Hail pushed the icon on his monitor labeled BOMBS AWAY.

  A tiny valve opened and allowed a small amount of compressed air into a chamber inside Beatles’ tail. The air pressure pushed out a squirt of clear liquid that landed directly in the glass of orange juice below.

  “We’ve got company!” Fox warned.

  On Styx’s monitor, Fox noticed the sliding glass door was being opened. “It’s Kim,” Fox added.

  “Go, go, go!” Hail yelled at Knox.

  Knox whipped both flight sticks to the right. The tiny drone whirred and buzzed and went rocketing off, totally out of control.

  “Get it out of there,” Hail told Knox.

  Knox squeezed both triggers on his controllers, pouring full power into the drone’s rotors. The video was nothing more than colorful static that flew by. Knox made no effort to fly the drone; he just needed to get it as far away as possible. Seconds later and five feet in the grassy area, the drone struck a tree at full throttle and disintegrated on impact. It went from a buzz, to a pop and then to complete silence. The big screen that was showing the video being streamed from Beatles went black, and a message popped up that read NO SIGNAL DETECTED.

  “Are we good?” Hail asked his team.

  Knox released his controllers and shook out his cramping hands. He checked his instruments and saw that everything was dead.

  Satisfied that Beatles was dust, Knox announced, “We’re good here,” and gave everyone a thumbs-up.

  “We are good up here too,” Fox said. “Kim didn’t see anything. He is sitting down now.”

  The loss of both B-52s and Beatles was inconsequential. Even though each drone cost ten thousand dollars to build, the crew understood that their mission was only a one-way trip. Neither drone was designed with enough battery life to make it back to their mother drones. It was a suicide mission for the pico-drones. They were the kamikazes of Hail’s fleet of drones.

  The crew watched the video feed from Styx. Everyone in the mission center was quiet and pensive.

  “If anyone wants to leave, then feel free to do so. There are no judgements here. What you are going to see is not going to be fun or pretty.”

  Hail looked at the faces of his crew. They continued to watch the video feed from Styx. No one left.

  *_*_*

  Fox refocused the camera and zoomed in tight on Kim seated at his table. It was understood that there was a certain degree of error involved with Beatles’ mission. There was really no way to know for sure that the liquid dispensed from Beatles had found its mark and had landed inside the glass. The drone was too small to have more than one camera, and the camera it did have only showed a view from the front. There was no camera underneath the drone. But the rim of the glass had been right in front of the camera, so if the load had exited the craft the way in which it was designed, gravity should have done its job.

  Kim sat back and allowed his servant to place a napkin in his lap and then reached over for the glass of orange juice.

  “Here it is,” Hail said, realizing that he sounded a little too happy.

  But he picked up his coffee mug instead and took a tiny sip. The coffee must have been hot because he quickly pulled the cup away from his mouth and made a face.

  The sliding glass door opened again, and one of Kim’s girlfriends came out to join him at the table. She was wearing a bikini under a colorful sheer cover-up.

  She said some words that sounded like good morning in Korean.

  He didn’t respond or even look at her. Instead he picked up a butter knife, sliced off a thick slab of butter and began to work it into his toast.

  “What an asshole,” Shana Tran said.

  “That he is,” Hail agreed. “And if he drinks his O.J. like a good boy, he will soon be a dead asshole.”

  His girlfriend took a moment to look over the table. Drinks had been poured for him, but as of yet, nothing had been poured for her. She looked directly at the single glass of orange juice that had been poured and began to reach for it.

  “Oh, no,” Mercier said. “I think she’s going to drink the orange juice.”

  The woman’s hand closed around the glass.

  A split second later, like lightning, Kim flipped over his butter knife and rapped the woman on the back of her knuckles with the knife’s thick handle.

  She flinched, let go of the glass and cried out in pain. She held the back of her hand and teared up, and Kim yelled something at her that could only have been, “Get your own orange juice.”

  The little Asian woman’s body visually shrank as she meekly leaned back in her chair and lowered her head.

  His servant had heard the commotion and came outside.

  Kim pointed at the orange juice and then pointed at the woman and told the servant to get her a glass.

  The woman raised her head and did her best to smile appreciatively.

  “Really teaching her a lesson, huh?” Shana Tran commented. “What a jerk.”

  A moment later, Hail’s team watched Kim reach over and pick up the glass of orange juice. He held it up in front of his girlfriend. Making sure she was watching him, he greedily drank half of the glass.

  “You haven’t seen jerking yet,” Hail remarked.

  Hail looked down and pressed his finger to his screen and started a digital timer on his right monitor.

  The servant returned with more orange juice and topped off his glass and filled an additional glass for the woman.

  The crew looked on, readying themselves for the spectacle to follow.

  “Are we still recording?” Hail asked Fox.

  “Yes, sir,” Fox responded.

  The image from Styx showed what would appear to be a common breakfast being consumed by a common Korean couple in a picturesque surrounding.

  But what was really happening 4000 miles away from the Hail Nucleus, a prostitute was about to witness the horrific death of a maniacal terrorist in a picturesque surrounding.

  At that exact moment, the metabolic compound was breaking down in Kim’s body.

  Hail looked at the timer on his monitor.

  “One minute,” he announced.

  During the planning of
Kim’s death, his lab staff explained to Hail that cyanide poisoning created a form of histotoxic hypoxia. The cells of the surrounding organism were unable to use oxygen. Once the brain no longer received oxygen, then it was lights out. This particular form of cyanide was more concentrated than the pill form, due to the fact that the pico-drone could only carry a tiny amount. Time was the tradeoff. It would take longer to do its damage, but Hail’s chemists assured his team that it would work just fine.

  “Two minutes,” Hail announced.

  Kim reached across the table and picked up his coffee cup again. Apparently, the man was confident the dark liquid was now cool enough to drink. As the cup touched his lips, Kim made another strange face; similar to the one he had made when he had burned his lips the first time. He pulled the cup back from his mouth an inch or two and grimaced. The coffee cup began to tremble in his hand slightly. He cleared his throat with a single cough. Brown hot liquid slid over the edge of the coffee cup and onto the table. Without warning, he stood up from the table with his coffee cup still in his right hand. His eyes were now wide, and he looked panicked and began to shake. A few seconds later, the coffee cup fell from his hand and landed on the glass table with a crash. Hot coffee splashed up from the table and landed on his girlfriend who began to scream.

  Both of his hands flew up to his neck, and he clutched at it as if he were trying to choke himself. As he stood there, immobile, trying to choke himself, his entire body began to shake and convulse. His face had turned beet red. One hand flew away from his neck and began to reach across the table toward the woman, as if beckoning her for help. The screaming she had let out when the hot coffee had splashed on her was nothing compared to the scream she belted out now. Kim looked like he was trying to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was some guttural choking sounds as if he had swallowed his tongue.

  He had now become a zombie. He let go of his throat and both of his hands rose out in front of him. His eyes widened and his eyeballs looked like they were ready to pop out of his red face. His girlfriend scuttled her chair backward across the bricks and continued to scream. Two servants opened the sliding glass doors and came running out. One of them approached him and tried to assess the situation. The servant quickly determined there was very little he could do for his boss, who couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk and was making weird zombie choking sounds. The servants had good intentions, but they were not fast enough to catch their boss when he fell.

  In one great convulsive act, he straightened up as if a rigid pole had been driven up his spine. He then grabbed at his chest with both hands and fell forward onto the glass table. Kim’s face smashed into the bowls, plates and glassware. The force of the North Korean’s body landing on the table shattered the glass top inward, and he continued to fall forward. His feet came off the ground, and his body cartwheeled over the thick table rail that had supported the glass. With all his weight on the rail, the opposite side of the table lifted off the ground, and the frame went shooting up onto its side.

  The microphone on Styx had been optimized to pick up speech at a distance. The sound of Kim falling through the table was so loud inside the Hail Nucleus that one would have thought that a car had crashed into a glass factory.

  “Damn!” Knox yelled, verbalizing what everyone else was thinking.

  Kim’s body finally relaxed and came to a rest faceup, his white suit covered in crystal shards of colorful china, brown coffee stains and orange blotches from the deadly juice. His face was still bright red, which was a telltale sign of cyanide poisoning.

  On the screen, Hail watched his former girlfriend jump out of her chair and run inside the house. The servants began picking their way through the rubble, negotiating broken glass and what was left of the misshapen frame of the table.

  Mercier used his right hand to trace a cross over his heart.

  Tanner Grant said, “Damn, if the cyanide didn’t kill him, then the glass table sure the hell did.”

  Under her breath, Shana Tran said, “Goodbye to bad garbage.”

  Gage Renner stared in disbelief as if he was waiting for someone to rerun the footage so he could be sure that the man was dead.

  The remainder of the crew began to talk amongst themselves. Some conversations were animated; others were factual and a few were stilted and sullen.

  *_*_*

  Hail looked down at the timer. He pressed STOP, and the meter read 00:03:23.

  Hail told Renner, “Please save a copy of Kim taking his table faceplant to my NAS. I have an e-mail to write.”

  “No problem,” Renner responded.

  “If he comes back to life, you will notify me immediately,” Hail joked.

  “You will be the first to know,” Renner smiled.

  The hubbub in the mission center wound down and then drifted off to nothing. Everyone wanted to hear what Hail had to say.

  Hail got to his feet and looked around the room, nodding his head in approval. He bunched up his face and then smiled. For a moment, to the crew it looked as if Hail was a little choked up and was trying to hold back a tear.

  Hail rubbed his stubbly chin and thought about his wife and his kids.

  When he spoke, his voice sounded distant, as if he were physically in the room, but his soul was a million miles away.

  “We are all here for the same reason,” Hail began softly. “We all do what we do for the same reason. And, today we have done something good. Something that will make a difference. Something that will change how the game is played. And don’t fool yourselves for a moment. This is a game to all these tyrants. A game played with human lives.”

  Hail paused for a moment and looked back at the screen. His servants were slapping him softly in the face; a rudimentary method of revival.

  “Not even your supreme leader is going to be able to bring that guy back,” Hail thought.

  *_*_*

  Hail continued addressing his crew, “You should all be very proud of yourselves and what we have accomplished. Your loved ones would be proud of you. I can guarantee that. Your country is proud of you, and I’m proud of you.”

  The crew in the Hail Nucleus’ mission room began clapping and cheering.

  Three thousand miles away, the crew in the Hail Proton’s mission room clapped and cheered.

  And five thousand miles further around the globe, the crews aboard Hail Laser, Hail Electron, and Hail Atom also celebrated a successful mission.

  They had all been watching the feed. They had all shared the same experience.

  Hail stoically walked to the door, pulled it open and stepped through to the other side.

  He turned around to make sure the watertight door was closed securely.

  He no longer heard the crew and knew they couldn’t hear him. Only then did he allow himself to scream the word “YES” and pump his fists in victory.

  Moscow, Russia—Sheremetyevo International Airport

  K

  ara saw the man, the guy who had been following her since she flew out of Nizhniy Novgorod at 05:00 a.m. on Aeroflot 1223. He was good. Better than most tails she had encountered during her time as a spy for the CIA.

  “Spy for the CIA,” she hummed, thinking it could be a glitchy pop song. “I was a spy for the CIA, something… something... something because crime don’t pay.” Maybe not. She was pretty happy right now. She had taken a Valium and a Xanax. It wasn’t great tradecraft to be super stoned while still on the job, but her fear of flying was debilitating enough that without the drugs, she would have either been climbing the walls or simply not flying.

  The guy that was tailing her was dressed in summer Russian attire, which for most Russians was anything they could afford. The man was clad in Levi's 569 loose straight jeans, Kara observed. But the ironic thing about this particular man was his choice in black T-shirts. The one he was wearing had three big letters that read KGB.

  Kara stifled a laugh. How audacious. Some people, even Russians, might not know that the KGB on the man’s shirt stood f
or Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, which translated to English meant Committee for State Security. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the KGB had been split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The original KGB no longer existed.

  The KGB guy was having coffee at the tiny café that looked out at the crowd waiting to board the connecting Aeroflot flight to Fairfax, Virginia. He was pretending to either be texting on his phone or possibly playing a game. But he was holding his phone at an odd angle. Most people typically held their phone so the back of it pointed toward the ground. But Mr. KGB was holding his phone almost perpendicular to the ground, so the back of the phone was pointing directly at her. Kara surmised that the man had the camera turned on and was watching her using his phone. Not the most inventive method of observation she had seen, but the man was wearing a T-shirt boasting a spy agency that had been dead for forty years. So, what could she expect?

  The T-shirt was kind of brilliant when she thought about it. After all, what spy would wear a shirt that said, “Hey, I’m a spy?” No one, that’s who. So, it was the perfect camouflage. Maybe she should consider wearing a CIA T-shirt.

  The airport was busy. Kara guessed more than 500 travelers were clustered between the two active gates preparing to board. She knew the man wouldn’t make a move with the number of witnesses around. And there could be other agents lurking around—men or women aligned with other countries that also had a vested interest in Kara and her mission.

  Kara couldn’t worry about all that, or she would go insane. The best way to deal with a clinger was one of four methods: Lose him, confront him, kill him or ignore him. Right now, Kara was tired. And she knew the man, so she opted for the fourth option. She ignored him.

  *_*_*

  In her hotel room in Nizhny, she had waited until Kornev had plugged his phone into the CIA’s charger for the night. Five minutes later, the data from the Russian arms dealer’s phone had been mirrored to her phone. In order to draw as little attention to herself as possible, she had dressed in comfy, baggy grey sweatpants with a matching shirt and white tennis shoes. All of her curves disappeared under the baggy fabric. Before she left, she removed as much makeup that came off with only soap and water. The bulk of everything she had brought went into her big suitcase. Ten minutes later, she was in a cab and headed for the airport. That resulted in zero hours of sleep. This assignment was starting to wear on her.