Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  A moment later, everyone in the Oval Office watched him reach over and pick up the glass of orange juice. He held it up in front of the woman. Making sure she was watching him, he greedily drank half the glass’s contents.

  A server returned and topped off Kim’s glass and filled an additional glass for the woman.

  For two long minutes nothing happened. The man chewed on some toast. The woman looked like she was afraid to drink her orange juice. She remained in her chair with her head down.

  The man who was supposed to be Kim reached across the table and picked up his coffee cup. As the cup touched his lips, he made a strange face. He pulled the cup back from his lips, and he made another face that looked more like a grimace. The coffee cup in his right hand began to tremble slightly, and he coughed once.

  Everyone in the Oval Office appeared to be spellbound.

  The president and her staff quietly watched the video as Kim stood up, his coffee cup still in his hand. He began to shake, then tremble, and then the cup fell from his hand. Hot coffee splashed onto the woman, who screamed out in pain. Both of Kim’s hands went up to his neck, as if he was trying to choke himself and his face turned beet red. One hand came away from his neck and he began to reach across the table toward the woman. The woman screamed louder.

  The president was tempted to look away but sensed the train wreck approaching.

  Kim made loud choking sounds and staggered a few steps forward, arms extended in front of him. The woman scooted her chair away from the table as two servants appeared from the sliding glass doors. Kim straightened up as if he had been Tasered and grabbed at his chest while falling forward onto the glass table.

  “Oh my God!” the president called out.

  Joanna Weston was an attractive woman, but for those few seconds she looked anything but attractive. Her face was warped with shock.

  Rodgers guessed that she hadn’t watched many men die during her career in government.

  The director of the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence looked concerned but remained silent, opting to gauge the president’s reaction before committing to a position.

  The general, on the other hand, looked pretty damn happy. He smiled and muttered the words down you go, asshole as Kim finished his table dive.

  Rodgers pressed the PAUSE button on the remote and explained, “The video continues for about ten minutes—long enough for us to know that the man on the video is dead. Our best guess is that a fast-acting poison was delivered into a drink or possibly a dart.”

  “A dart?” the president asked. She had recomposed herself but still looked shaken.

  Well, we’re just guessing here,” Rodgers said. “We can rule out a few things. This wasn’t a gunshot. A gunshot would look much different than what we just saw. Our analysts believe what we saw was the result of a poisoning. All the pieces fit. Kim’s weird motions, his choking, his loss of muscle control. Our experts say that his blushing or red color would indicate that a cyanide compound was used.”

  The general stood up and pointed at the frozen screen.

  “OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that this man is Kim Yong Chang, and he was poisoned and he is dead. My first question is how?” The general held out his arms, hands up, as if waiting to receive the answer in the form of a thrown football.

  Rodgers noticed that the general liked to use his hands when he talked, at times using great swooping gestures and pantomime.

  “If it was indeed Marshall Hail who did the hit, then we don’t know how he got to him,” Rodgers responded in a confident tone.

  “How did they get the video?” the general asked, tossing his hands in the air. “The video is high quality, maybe even high-def. Did Hail have a goddamn camera crew sitting in the North Korean’s pool?”

  “We don’t know that either,” replied Rodgers, inadvertently taking a small step back from the large general who was crowding him.

  The general looked back at the screen and shook his head. He pointed at the screen again.

  “This just doesn’t make sense. We have known where this scumbag Kim has been for years. We’ve known that Kim Yong Chang is the mind behind obtaining missile technology for his esteemed leader. But what we didn’t know was how to get to him.”

  The general paused for effect. He had the room’s attention. His voice was loud and imposing.

  Continuing, the general said, “So, you’re telling me that the combined power of the United States Armed Forces couldn’t get to Kim Yong Chang, but a—a—” the general trailed off.

  He started over, “Other than nuclear power, what the hell is Marshall Hail into?”

  The general turned and looked directly at Rodgers, staring him down, daring him to say something other than what they all wanted to know.

  Rodgers responded by pressing the tiny button on the remote control. A biography of Marshall D. Hail came up on the screen. The photo contained within the data looked like it was taken by a professional photographer. Hail was holding up a miniature model of a traveling wave nuclear reactor. Hail was smiling and looking very proud of his accomplishment.

  Rodgers continued, “This photo was taken when Hail won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hail was in his early thirties. He was on top of his game, but not yet a billionaire. That came later.”

  The director of the CIA, Jarret Pepper, opened his iPad and began flipping through screens.

  Rodgers considered reading all the data on the screen and then decided to go in another direction.

  “OK, almost everyone in this room knows something about Marshall Hail, unless they have been living under a rock. So why don’t we cut to the quick and find out what we all know so we can focus on what we all don’t know? Does that make sense to everyone?”

  Without waiting for a response, Rodgers looked at the man in uniform and asked, “General Ford, can you please start us off, considering that you knew Marshall Hail’s father?”

  The general turned away from Rodgers and softened a little. He looked at the president and softened a little more. Rodgers guessed that must have been the teddy bear face the president saw in Ford.

  “I’m sure that we all know that Marshall Hail’s father was Tucker M. Hail, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was a four-star Fleet Admiral. For those of you who are not familiar with the military ranks, that is the highest rank the Navy has to offer. It is equivalent to the General of the Army.”

  Ford paused for a moment and considered what else he could say about Tucker Hail that had any relevance to the matter before them.

  “I was a few years behind Tucker ― actually a decade,” Ford corrected himself. “By the time I was moving up in the higher ranks, Tucker was on the verge of retiring from both the service and politics. From what I heard, Tucker was proud of his son, but not proud like a life-long tough military man would be of a son who opts to go to MIT instead of West Point. Don’t get me wrong, I suspect that Tucker was proud of his son. I mean, hell, his boy was a Nobel Prize winner, but Tucker would have much preferred Marshall to be a soldier. Does that make any sense?”

  The president spoke with a measure of aversion in her tone, “Not really, General. Marshall’s father sounds like a piece of work to me, although I’m sure his service to our nation was impeccable.”

  No one argued the point with the president.

  “What I know about Marshall Hail,” the president continued, “is that he was some kind of whiz kid. He went to MIT and was a marvel in physics. He then took the TerraPower traveling wave reactor design, the nuclear company Bill Gates chaired around 2015, and redesigned the reactor so it would efficiently burn our old nuclear waste. I know from reading probably the same stuff you gentlemen have read over the years, that Marshall Hail made a fortune by installing his new reactor in dozens of countries. To my knowledge, five of his new reactors have recently been installed and activated in the United States.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly where Hail made his money,” General Ford said.
“We can’t forget the contribution the United States made to Hail Industries.”

  “And what’s that?” the president asked.

  The general considered how best to phrase his facts. After a moment, he decided there was no way to sugarcoat it, so he said, “Hail bargained a deal with the United States government to collect and remove all of the nuclear waste we had stockpiled since our first reactors went online in 1958. Hail agreed to transport our entire nuclear waste stockpile out of the United States. Where? We didn’t care. And that stockpile included the 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride we had in our storage yards.”

  “And what’s the significance of that?” the president asked.

  “Well, Hail’s new traveling wave reactor burns nuclear waste as fuel. Our nuclear waste as fuel. So those new Hail Nuclear power plants you were referring to, we’re actually buying back our own nuclear waste from Hail’s company. Sure, Hail Industries packaged it up so it will burn correctly in their reactors, but it cost Hail virtually nothing, and he is selling our own nuclear waste back to us for millions.”

  General Ford looked at everyone looking at him. He finished up his little speech with, “So that’s where his fortune came from. All the countries around the world acquire Hail’s reactors cheaply, but the fuel bundles cost them a pretty penny and Hail owns it all.”

  The room was silent for a moment as they all absorbed the general’s information.

  “How was he able to set up that deal?” the president asked.

  “It was a combination of things,” the general told the group. “First, it was perfect timing. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository near Las Vegas was a total bomb, no pun intended,” the general laughed. No one else did.

  “We spent billions of tax payers’ money on literally a hole in the ground and never put a single neutron of nuclear waste into the facility. So along comes Hail who says he will ship every stick and barrel of nuclear waste off of our continent, as long as he gets it for free.”

  “You said it was a combination of things. What were the other factors?” the president asked.

  “His father was the appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Do you have any idea how much political power Marshall could bring to bear on the issue? It was a no-brainer for the administration at the time to green-light the deal. We had a problem with storing our nuclear waste, and Hail was the solution. What no one understood at the time was that Hail already had a solution, but he didn’t have any fuel to burn in his reactors, and that was his problem.”

  Finally, Rodgers spoke up. “We can’t fault Hail for inventing a brilliant reactor, or understanding the lay of the land better than all us non-MIT graduates. His reactor takes high-level nuclear waste and burns it for a decade until it’s low-level waste that can be literally thrown away. Just the stockpile of nuclear waste fuel that Hail has right now can safely power the world for the next hundred thousand years. And I want to emphasize that his traveling wave reactors are a completely new design and they are safe. They don’t come with any of those scary problems that people are always afraid of when they think of nuclear.”

  “Are you referring to the meltdowns, the China syndrome?” the president asked Rodgers.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Rodgers confirmed. “The first safety design change is that the Hail traveling reactor operates at atmospheric pressure, so there is no chance of blowing the roof off the containment vessel, which happened in the Chernobyl disaster. Another safety feature is the reactor uses liquid sodium as the coolant instead of water. That means the plants don’t have to be built next to large water supplies such as rivers and oceans. This eliminates flooding and tsunami issues, which happened in the Fukushima disaster. This eliminates the issue of water contamination, and by way of design, Hail’s new reactors cannot meltdown. We need to face the fact that Hail built the perfect energy machine. Drop in a fuel bundle of our own nuclear waste and you can power an entire large city for ten years. It’s pennies for power instead of dollars. We are as close to the end of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels as we have ever been.”

  The people in the room looked at Rodgers for a moment and studied him.

  The president asked, “And how do you know all of this?”

  Rodgers looked uncomfortable for a moment and then confessed.

  “Marshall Hail is a personal friend of mine. But everything I told you is general straightforward information. You can read about it in MIT magazine. I’m just a little more versed on it because Marshall told me about it over and over and over, throughout the years as he was developing the technology.”

  Rodgers looked at everyone, looking at him, judging him.

  Rodgers added, “But to tell you the truth, I never fully believed Marshall. You hear all the time about a medical breakthrough that’s only a decade away or that we can travel through black holes to other dimensions, if we can only figure out how to fly at the speed of light and not disintegrate. Marshall’s new reactor was a lot like that. I thought he was close, but I really didn’t think he had it all figured out.”

  “Well, we all believe it now,” General Ford said. The big man was still on his feet and slowly pacing around the perimeter of the room. “Can we get back to the question of how Hail infiltrated North Korea, killed their top general, filmed it and still got out alive?”

  The president looked around the room. “Anyone have any ideas?”

  Rodgers raised his hand like he was in first grade.

  The president rolled her eyes. “Yes, Trevor.”

  “Well, one of the concerns our government had in allowing Hail to transport all of our nuclear waste out of the country was security. It was the same concern we had when we were considering transporting our own nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. But Hail had an answer for that. He hired dozens of MIT’s best aeronautic minds and their specialty was building drones.”

  The president nodded that she understood and Rodgers continued, “You see, Hail’s answer to the security problem was to build drones that could protect the shipments. The drone would fly above the trains, barges and even above his own ships that transport the waste overseas.”

  The general jumped in, “And we wanted this project to work. We wanted all the nuclear waste removed from U.S. soil, so we offered to provide Hail Hellfire missiles and other armaments that he could mount to his high-flying drones. That took the onus of security off of our government and made it a private contractor issue. If anything went wrong, then it would all be pinned on Hail Industries.”

  “I’m still not following what you just told me. How did Hail get into Korea?” the president asked.

  The director of the CIA, Jarret Pepper, who had been using his iPad to look up Hail in the CIA computers, finally added his voice to the conversation. “I think that Hail’s drone technology has matured beyond what we can imagine. I mean, common sense would indicate that he didn’t have boots on the ground in North Korea. He doesn’t own an army; he owns a business. A business that has top-of-the-line laboratories, manufacturing facilities, shipping and God-only-knows-what-else. For all we know, Hail has his own munitions factory. After all, ninety-percent of his facilities are located in foreign countries. And the countries in which he does have brick and mortar locations are indebted to him for the power he provides them. A red carpet is probably rolled out every time one of Hail’s ships docks in these poor countries.”

  General Ford added, “And he sells those reactors to the poor energy-starved countries at a discount. Hell, he may even give them away for free. There is no way for us to know the specifics. That’s why these third-world countries provide access to their ports and free land where Hail can build his plants.”

  The Director of National Intelligence, Eric Spearman, asked, “What kind of drone sits in a pool and takes high-def videos. Is it like a magical invisible drone of some sort?” he asked cynically.

  There was a lull in the conversation. Lots of questions had been ask
ed and not many answers had been provided.

  The president tapped her pen on her desk. She looked contemplative and then she said one word, “Why?”

  “Why what?” Rodgers asked.

  “Why did Hail want to kill Kim Yong Chang? What’s his motivation?”

  “Oh, that,” Rodgers said, looking down at the floor.

  “What do you know, Trevor?” she asked.

  “Well, Marshall Hail is kind of damaged goods.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Spearman said, and then looked around the room nervously, as if he had divulged a personal secret.

  “Hail lost his wife and his twin daughters in The Five,” Rodgers told the group.

  “Oh, my lord,” Joanna Weston said, putting her hands up to her face and shaking her head from side to side.

  The rest of the room paused for a moment of silence, which was a typical reaction when someone mentioned The Five.

  The president then slowly lowered her hands from her face and took in a breath so deeply that it made her rise in her big chair. In a quick huff, she let out the breath and said more than asked, “So we’re talking about revenge as the motivation; a billionaire that has his finger on the nuclear pulse of the planet and is out for a little payback. That has disaster written all over it. Does anyone agree?”

  “I don’t know,” General Ford stated. “I mean if we were to look at Hail as a weapon, then he is only as dangerous as where he is pointed. If Hail has developed technology that can kill anyone, anywhere, at any time, then that could be a great benefit to our nation.”

  The president looked at General Ford as if he were off his rocker.

  The general looked mystified.

  “Hail is an American,” the general said, as if Hail’s allegiance to the United States was absolute.

  The CIA man, Pepper, looked at the screen of his iPad.

  “His ships are registered Panamanian,” Pepper said. “His business is incorporated in Ireland. Hail doesn’t even own a home or property in America. Hell, Marshall Hail hasn’t entered the United States in over two years.”