Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  Hail leaned over to the lieutenant and yelled, “Put me down there.” Hail pointed at a spot on the ground below at what was rapidly approaching.

  The soldier looked at him, then looked at where he was pointing and then asked, “What are you talking about? My orders are to take you to the White House.”

  Hail shook his head no.

  “I’m going to walk to the White House. I want you to drop me off there, in that clearing between the Vietnam Memorial and the Constitution Gardens.”

  The lieutenant shook his head adamantly, no. “No way, my orders were to—”

  “I don’t care about your orders,” Hail growled at him. “Either you drop me off right there, or turn this tub around and take me back to my plane. I’ll let you explain to the president why I didn’t make my lunch date with her.”

  The lieutenant looked confused and worried.

  The lieutenant said, “Even if I wanted to, look, there are people down there.”

  “They’ll move,” Hail argued. “I mean, if you saw a massive helicopter coming down on your head, wouldn’t you move?”

  The lieutenant hoed and hummed, and Hail could tell that the soldier wanted to tell the pushy man to go screw himself, but the thought of being responsible for canceling a lunch with the president had the lieutenant conflicted.

  In the end, the lieutenant put on a headset and talked into a microphone to the pilots up front. Through his headset, the lieutenant instructed the main pilot to set them down in the grassy area in front of the memorial.

  At first, the main pilot looked confused, and Hail thought he was going to have to argue with him as well. But after a moment or two, the pilot simply rotated the craft into a position directly above the grassy area very slowly lowered the machine down to earth. The few people that were lunching, sleeping or drinking below scattered as the wind turned into a breeze, into a squall, which turned into a tornado. By the time the Sikorsky’s skids sunk into the Washington soil, Hail couldn’t see a single person anywhere in sight.

  The lieutenant looked pissed as he yanked open the door.

  “Don’t wait for me, I’ll walk,” Hail told the soldier.

  Hail jumped out of the chopper, and before he could even clear the blade wash, the rotors began to spin up. It’s just natural that almost everyone ducks in the proximity of a helicopter taking off, which was silly. The machine’s giant blades are well above head level, and when they began to take on lift, they actually bend up toward the sky moving even further away from head-level. Even so, Hail ducked his head as he walked out from under the big helicopter blades. Paper, sticks, leaves, trash—anything that wasn’t heavy or growing into the earth went flying. Hail shielded his face as dirt and dust tried to sneak into the tiny slits that had become his eyes.

  Memorial for the Five—Washington, D.C.

  A

  s the wind began to die down, Hail was able to open his eyes and see where the hell he was walking. Directly in front of him sat five small monoliths. The tips of each tower were about thirty feet high. Each tower was a different color, the stone having been mined from the countries where the incident had taken place.

  That’s the way it was commonly referred to—an incident. But it wasn’t an incident to Marshall Hail. It was the rapture. It was a million nuclear explosions. It was the planet being hit by a meteor the size of the moon. It was too big to even put into words, and the word incident was an insult to him.

  Then it had been referred to by the date, similar to 9/11. But that wasn’t how it got its name. It got its name by way of introduction. It got its name by reference. It got its name by every person who ever brought up the subject, starting with the words The Five.

  FIVE commercial jets were shot down in FIVE different countries, by FIVE surface-to-air shoulder-held rockets, by FIVE separate terrorist organizations, within FIVE minutes of one another. When newscasters talked about the incident, it always began with THE FIVE airplanes that were—etc.—etc.—etc.—

  The horror, the outrage, the crimes against humanity, against families, against children, against the civilized world would become something as simple as THE FIVE.

  Hail didn’t really care what it was called. There was no pleasant way to refer to the carnage that had taken place that day just two years ago. The families of those souls who were lost didn’t give a damn what it was called. They just wanted their loved ones back, and no name, no matter how caring or elegant or compassionate, was going to do that. Hail thought that THE FIVE was just about as good as any other name.

  On the highest point of this manmade hill was the only reference to his wife and little girls that he would ever see. He had never had the strength to come visit the Memorial for The Five. Hell, he barely had the strength to get out of bed. People might argue that time heals old wounds. Hail knew that time didn’t heal his old wounds. Each year the scars healed, but his heart got heavier. He felt one day it would fall out and become as inert as stone. The only way to stop that process was to reverse the process and that’s why Hail was in Washington. That’s why he had built up his business—his arsenal. That’s why he still got out of bed every day. That’s why he hadn’t stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It sure as hell wasn’t to go on living. He had done enough of that, and where had that gotten him?

  Hail trudged up the hill. His back hurt, but his heart hurt more. He could already feel the tears beginning to form before he had walked up to look at the first of five stones.

  It was made of Colorado Yule Marble, the exact marble used to carve the Lincoln Memorial. The white obelisk sat in a perfectly straight line with the other four. Large slabs of black slate had been laid on the ground, creating a base in which the five pillars had been set. It was a pleasant 75°F outside, but Hail guessed that any kid who had stepped onto the shale surface in bare feet during a hot summer day had not stayed long.

  The monolith he was standing in front of stood far left of the remaining memorial stones. It represented Virgin Atlantic Flight 1082. Hail regarded the gleaming marble’s surface, but none of the letters carved into the stone indicated the flight number. In fact, it didn’t give any indication of the flight, country or any other information. Just a list of names–lots of names. Each name represented someone who had perished on that flight. But Hail knew that it was flight 1082 originating from Orlando, Florida returning to Gatwick Airport in London. It had been a huge airplane, a Boeing 777, flying at full capacity with 660 passengers and crew on board. Embedded in the bright marble were 660 names, chiseled in long endless columns. The first name started down low. And when the last name had been etched in high enough where it was difficult to touch or see, then the engravers had started in on another column of names. When there was no more room for more columns, the chisel moved to another side of the pillar.

  Hail reached out and touched one of the names, Sarah Gartner. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know any of the people on this flight, but in a way, he knew them all. He knew how their relatives felt about their deaths. Every name on all five shafts of stone were intertwined at some level, a specific frequency of consciousness that those who had not been affected by the horror could never comprehend. Hail worked his big index finger inside the channel that formed the S in Sarah. Some sort of gold material, either gold leaf or maybe just golden paint, made each of the names stand out against the white marble. He snaked the tip of his finger from the top to the bottom of the S. Sarah Gartner. She was someone’s child, maybe someone’s wife, maybe a mother, maybe a grandmother. But she sure as hell didn’t deserve to end up on this slab with all the other meaningless deaths that this monument represented.

  Hail removed his hand and took a few side steps to his right, centering himself in front of the next stone. He had watched the news when The Memorial of The Five was being built. Hail knew what airline, what flight, what country and what group of human beings were being memorialized just by the colors of the stones. The obelisk he was standing in front of was cut from a beauti
ful piece of red granite. The reddish feldspar gave the granite its color, but it was broken up with quartz crystals that were semi-clear greyish and purplish in color. This stone represented the Paris to New York flight Air France 1082. Its destination had been John F. Kennedy International leaving out of the Charles De Gaulle Airport, but it never made its destination. None of the flights represented by these stones had ever made it. Like the Orlando flight, the Paris aircraft was a huge Boeing 777 with 451 passengers on board. Without counting them, Hail was certain that there were 451 names chiseled into the surface of the red granite in front of him and been colored in golden paint. It listed 451 people who never thought for a single second that this piece of hand-worked stone would represent their final resting place.

  Hail looked around and didn’t see any other people around him. He guessed that the helicopter might have scared off some but didn’t sense that was the case. He looked to his left, down the hill toward the Vietnam Memorial. There were maybe a hundred visitors at that site. And it made perfect sense when he thought about it. There were roughly 60,000 names inscribed into the walls of that memorial but only a fraction of that number on these five columns in front of him. Sixty thousand families lost someone in the Vietnam War. If ten family members loved each of those soldiers that yielded a potential of 600,000 visitors from them. That didn’t take into account all the other friends, soldiers, tourists and the general public that wished to pay their respects. In contrast, there were only 1,716 names on these stones, a mere 3% of the names compared to the adjacent memorial. But each of the names on the stones were just as important as the names on the memorial. Every death mattered to someone, except for the terrorists who had caused them.

  Next to the pretty red stone was a grey monolith. Simón Bolívar International of Maiquetía to George Bush Intercontinental. Caracas, Venezuela to Houston, Texas. United 1045. Boeing 737. Two hundred five names burrowed into grey sparkling granite. This had been a smaller plane so there were fewer names on the stone, but the monolith was the same exact size as all the others. Its smooth, warm sides reached skyward, narrowing as it rose until it came to a sharp merciless point that seemed to want to go higher if not clipped by a chisel and a budget.

  One pillar to the right was a rich, thick green granite stone. Swirls of light and dark green meandered through the stone with thin rivulets of black and grey separating one swirl from another. To Hail, it looked like a mint milkshake that had been locked in time after only a few seconds of mixing. Green had nothing to do with the doomed Mexico City International to Miami International flight, except the Mexican flag did have some green in it. The Boeing 737 had 190 passengers that were obliterated only two thousand feet off the ground. The American Airlines flight 264 had lasted less than thirty seconds before the 9K333 Verba Russian man-portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile had taken it down.

  Hail spent more time at the big green rock than he had at the others. Not because the names or the stone or the flight or the deaths interested him more than any of the others. He stayed there because he didn’t want to move to the next stone, the last stone in the row. He sensed his heart rate was increasing. He felt his heart push and strain to pump his thick, lifeless blood through veins he now cared little about. A rush of anxiety coursed through him as he left the green stone and approached the black obelisk to his right.

  It was called Taurus Black, a limestone from Turkey. It was as black as Hail’s mood. Lightning bolts of white danced on the surface and then tunneled deep into the hard stone. He looked at the top of the rock, afraid to look at the 210 names that were forever associated with this one stone. He looked up higher, past the top of the stone, past the haze that held in the city and on upward toward somewhere beyond, somewhere where life made sense and death never existed. He longed to go there. He wanted to hear his wife’s laugh. He wanted to hear the word Papa being said from thin lips suspended on tiny dainty voices. He wanted to smell strawberry shampoo in clean blond hair and sing stupid songs and read silly books and do all that stuff he had taken for granted.

  Then he lowered his eyes and right in front of him were those special names.

  Madalyn Hail. His wife’s name came first. Without giving it a conscious thought, Hail reached out and began running his finger through her name, tracing the lines, feeling the sharp edges of the stone press against his trembling hand. His wife’s name was on the rock, and his wife had been a rock through all the moves, crazy business ideas, all the locations and customers, distance, and months of separation, she had kept it all together. She had kept everything running. She was a rock who had determined that the family came first, even if it meant that the girls would be tutored wherever they happened to be, and that their education and happiness always came first. She was a great woman, and Hail knew she was irreplaceable. There was no other woman on the planet for him, and he would be alone until one day when he found her again—high above the five stones, somewhere in paradise.

  His finger now fell to the name below.

  Tabitha Hail—one of his twin daughters. She was the one who had always called him at work, the one who had always run to meet him with a hug at the door when he came home. His finger worked through her name as if he were perfecting a cut that was already flawless. “Hi Papa, did you have a good day at work?” he could hear her tiny voice say. Tears spilled forth irrepressibly from Hail’s eyes and dripped from his chin to the black slate below.

  Now his finger was tracing the name of Courtney Hail. She didn’t meet him at the door when he came home or call him on the phone at work to see if he was going to be late. Courtney prided herself on being more grown up than her sister, even though she was only five minutes older. But when the lights went off, Courtney was the one who got scared and came to her parents’ bed to squeeze into the middle and snuggled close. Hail would give her a kiss on her smooth forehead and tell her there was nothing to be scared about. Then they would all fall asleep knowing that the boogeyman had been thwarted for yet another night in the Hail house.

  Hail’s memories jumped back to the last time he had seen them in Istanbul at the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport. It had been a long summer. A long fun summer. The family had hitched a ride on the Hail Proton cargo ship, leaving from the port at Norfolk, Virginia and taking the thirty-day voyage to the massive port in Kandla, India. It took almost a month to make the passage, but the Hail Proton had all the same luxuries as the Hail Nucleus. There was the pool, sports, movies, simulators, games and the great food. It was as much fun as a family could have when surrounded by 12,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. Once docked in India, Hail and his family forgot about business and started having more fun.

  Hail’s wife, Madalyn, had printed from a website, 52 Places to Visit in India Before You Turn 30.

  Their daughters were eight so that excluded them from the extremes of The Frozen River Trek at Chadar and the Backpack Across Northeast, as well as the cycling in Nilgiris and a dozen other crazy-hard outings. But Hail’s family did visit the Living Root Bridges at Cherrapunji, drove through the forests of Bandipur, visited the temples and boulders at Hampi, saw the lighted Dasara in Mysore and visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar, along with about a dozen other adventures. The entire summer that year was spent in India learning about another culture.

  Then the summer ended. It was time for the family to go back to America and time for Marshall to return to work. He would finish up overseeing the installation of three Hail wave reactors in India before taking the Hail Proton back to the United States. But school was going to start that next week, and his wife and the girls had to leave.

  It was United 9257 operated by Lufthansa, flying out of Istanbul to a connecting flight in Düsseldorf at Düsseldorf International. It was a Boeing 737. There were 210 passengers aboard, and Hail didn’t give a damn about 207 of them. He only cared about three of them—the three that were hidden under his hands that were pressed to the black limestone. He was certain that the other people who we
re in pain over their loved ones didn’t give a damn about his special three names either. He found all the love that was left in his empty heart could only be spent on those three names. He didn’t have any love left over for anyone else, including himself.

  “Is this a bad time?” he heard someone say.

  At first, he wasn’t aware the voice was real. It had been so quiet. He had been so absorbed in his grief that the voice didn’t even register.

  Hail looked to his right and removed one arm from the stone and wiped his tears on the sleeve of his suit jacket. He then looked at it, making sure it hadn’t left a stain, realizing he was supposed to have lunch with the president.

  When his blurry eyes cleared, he saw a familiar face.

  “I take it this is a bad time,” Trevor Rodgers said softly.

  “How did you know I was here?” Hail asked his old friend.

  “Well, the Marines were pretty upset, and they ratted you out to the president. I was in the other room and overheard the hubbub. It’s not a long walk from the White House to here.”

  “You’re getting some grey hair there, Trev,” Hail said, taking his other hand off the obelisk and walking over to stand next to Rodgers.

  “Yeah, it’s a family thing. If you remember, my dad was grey as a goose by the time he was forty.”

  “I remember. My dad used to give him grief about it,” Hail said.

  “And you look like you put on a few pounds,” Rodgers scored back at Hail. “You were in better shape the last time I saw you at the—” Rodgers’s voice trailed off into an uncomfortable silence.