Before the propeller had stopped spinning, Hail opened the cockpit door and entered the passenger cabin.
“See, not so bad,” he said happily.
“Let me out of here,” Kara said. “Open the door.”
Instead of Hail opening the door, someone on the outside tugged the door open.
Kara clicked open her seat belt, grabbed her purse from the seat next to her and stood.
Balikpapan Bay, Indonesia —Aboard the Hail Nucleus
T
he salt air and sea breeze met her as she stepped off the chopper. Her red hair flew one way and then the other as the wind wound its way around obstacles on the deck of the Hail Nucleus.
“What are all these things?” she asked Hail, pointing toward the white cargo containers.
“Those are the containment vessels that hold the nuclear waste we are currently transporting.”
Kara didn’t like the sound of that.
“Are they all full?” she asked, speaking loudly so she could be heard over the wind.
“Some are full—some are empty,” Hail yelled back.
Hail’s helicopter mechanic asked, “Are you going down?”
Hail nodded his head, yes, and the mechanic pressed a button on a remote control he had on his belt.
The deck of the ship dropped out from under them, and the elevator began to descend to the deck below.
Kara didn’t know what was happening and Hail explained.
“It’s a hydraulic elevator like they have on aircraft carriers. That way we can store our helicopters below and out of the elements.”
Ten feet deep into the hull of the Hail Nucleus, the sound of the wind died away and was replaced with the whine of the hydraulic pump that moaned in the cavernous space. The tenor inside the ship rendered every sound an echo that was sustained for a moment before turning into a lush reverberation.
The massive elevator came to a stop with a bump. Hail gestured in a general direction, and Kara began walking.
“Where are we?” Kara asked.
They were now walking down a long row of helicopters. Each chopper was a different size and a different color.
“We’re aboard the Hail Nucleus. Remember, that was the on-board question you asked about on the plane.”
“And the Hail Nucleus is one of your cargo ships that transports nuclear waste to where?” Kara asked.
“Anywhere it needs to go. Much of it comes here to Balikpapan Bay. I have a refinement plant that takes the waste and bundles it into the fuel cells I was telling you about. I also have a manufacturing plant that makes our nuclear reactors.”
“Makes them?” Kara asked. “I thought that nuclear reactors were built onsite using tons and tons of poured concrete.”
Hail shook his head. “That’s the way the old conventional plants are made, but since the Hail wave reactor is not pressurized, we can get away with pre-casting all the sections of the reactor. And then we simply ship them where they need to go and assemble the pieces onsite.”
“Cool,” Kara said.
They were passing the last helicopter in line and Kara asked, “So you can fly all of these?”
“Yes, I can. And if you are with us long enough, you could fly them, too.”
Kara smiled.
Hail thought she looked much better smiling than freaking out.
The pair stepped through a large metal door.
“I will need you to remove your clothes, if you don’t mind,” Hail told her.
“Excuse me?” Kara replied, both confused and wary.
“You can leave the body stocking you have on, but the skirt, your vest, your shoes, they all have to come off.”
“You’re just like all the other men I meet, Mr. Hail. You can’t wait to get my clothes off.”
The comment caught Hail by surprise. He still didn’t have a grasp of the woman or her sense of humor.
Hail explained, “Every person that enters or leaves this ship has to pass through a contamination checkpoint. What’s in front of you is a very sophisticated Geiger counter. It will measure any radioactivity that you may have been exposed to since you’ve been on this ship.”
“But I barely even—” Kara started to say, but Hail cut her off.
“It’s just one of those safety precautions we take. It will only take a second.”
Kara looked skeptical, but she reluctantly unbuttoned her vest and handed it to Hail. She then unzipped her skirt and handed it to him. Standing in front of Kara were two alloy rails set on their ends. The contraption looked like a metal detector they used at airports. A faint hum emanated from the columns.
“Shoes, please,” Hail requested.
Without reaching down, Kara kicked off her shoes, and Hail bent to pick them up.
“Purse,” Hail requested, and Kara handed her purse over to him.
“Are you going to go through the Geiger counter too?” she asked.
Hail walked over to the wall and opened some sort of metal drawer. He set Kara’s garments and purse into the drawer and closed it.
“Yes, I am,” Hail said.
“Then why aren’t you taking off all of your clothes?”
“Because you have that full body sock on, and I’m not even wearing underwear. But I will if you want me to, OK?”
Hail began to reach for the button on his pants, and Kara said, “That’s OK. No need to make this more awkward than it already is.”
She walked up to the rails and asked, “Is it OK if I walk through now?”
“Yes, you’re good to go,” Hail said.
Kara walked between the metal sticks hoping that they didn’t make that weird scratchy, static sound that Geiger counters make when they encounter a radioactive CIA agent. Thankfully, nothing happened. No static sound, no sirens. Kara heard no sound at all but that constant hum.
A moment later, Hail stepped between the rails, and the Geiger counter didn’t complain about him either.
“OK,” Kara said. “Where’s my stuff?”
Hail told her, “It’s being scanned in the room on the other side of this wall. It takes a while with objects that have metal in them, so we’ll pick them up later.”
Kara didn’t look happy with that answer, but then there really wasn’t much that she needed right now. If she was going to meet people, she would have preferred not looking like the cat woman, dressed in a black body suit. But Kara was confident in her appearance, and it was preferable to meeting people while she was totally naked.
They stepped into an elevator that was made out of metal and metal and more metal. Hail pressed a button labeled DECK 4. The elevator door closed, and the metal box began to go down.
“Are you hungry?” Hail asked.
“Sure, I could eat something.”
“What type of food?”
“What do you mean what type?”
“I mean Mexican, Italian, French or American?”
“I wasn’t aware that American was a type of food,” Kara said.
“Sure, it is. Hamburgers, fried chicken, hot dogs and apple pie. I don’t know any food more American than that.”
“All right,” Kara said, wanting to put an end to the debate. “How about Italian?”
“Italian it is,” Hail agreed, and the elevator came to a stop.
Hail took out his phone and made a quick call.
With the sound the elevator was making, Kara couldn’t discern what was said.
The door slid open, and Hail walked out and turned left, expecting his guest to follow him.
Kara looked around, observing, documenting and cataloging in her mind anything that could help with her mission. They were walking down a long white hallway. Kara knew one thing for sure. Hail could afford a lot of white paint. So far, everything she had seen had been painted white; containment vessels, hallways, bulkheads, ceilings, all shiny and bright white.
The pair reached some sort of junction where the hallway forked in two directions. One direction made a big arc to the right,
and the other made an equally big arc to the left.
Hail seemed to take a moment to get his bearings before choosing the left hallway. Side by side, they began walking down the curving hallway. The first door they passed on their left was stenciled AMERICAN. Fifty feet further down the hallway they passed a door stenciled ASIAN. Another fifty feet and they arrived at a door that read ITALIAN.
Hail stopped and said, “Here we are.”
He unwound the wheel that was the door handle and opened the bulkhead door.
“After you,” Hail said.
Kara stepped into the room and was instantly blown away.
“Oh my God,” she stammered.
“Do you like it?” Hail asked.
“What’s not to like,” Kara said in a dreamlike voice.
In front of her was a real Italian restaurant, like the ones she had visited when she had been on vacation in Italy. Aged brick walls and hand-laid brick arches were lit by soft amber light that came from fiery iron lamps that burned in wall sconces. On the ceiling, green and yellow vines clung to the rustic stone surface, giving the appearance of not just years, but hundreds of years. Thick, dark wooden beams appeared to support the ceiling, but they also supported many types of flowering hanging plants. Garlic bunches hung from the red brick wall, and on the opposite wall was a pale wooden arch lattice that was stuffed with wine bottles.
The restaurant had about twenty tables, seating groups of twos and fours. Each table was draped with a blue checkered tablecloth and then laid over that was a smaller white tablecloth. A fine white porcelain plate sat in front of each chair, and a linen napkin sat neatly folded on each plate. Every table in the cozy room had been set. Each place setting had one knife, two forks, two spoons and one large spoon that could be used to twirl a mass of spaghetti and the other to stir a drink. There was a tall, clear bottle of oil, a bottle of vinegar, an ornate shaker of parmesan cheese and checkered bottles of salt and pepper that matched the table cloth.
Hail stopped at a table in the center of the empty restaurant and pulled out a chair for Kara.
Kara looked around and sat down.
“There’s no one here,” she noticed.
“It’s about 9:00 a.m., Indonesian time. Not a popular time for an Italian restaurant.”
Kara kept looking around.
“But through the windows it’s dark. Oh my God, this place has windows,” Kara exclaimed, noticing them for the first time.
“They are fake windows, of course,” Hail explained. “All three of the windows are the new 3D 82-inch flat screens. We recorded a full day’s and night’s footage from an actual restaurant in Italy. Each monitor has its own video player, and all the players are synchronized. We typically set the video to coincide with our local time, so it’s day on the screens when it is day on the ship. But, I called ahead and had them play the nighttime video instead. It seems cozier in here with the flame-burning lamps. Nice ambience as they say in the elite circles.”
Kara stared at one of the windows and watched Italian cars drive by. She wondered if Hail made cozy requests for all the guests he had on board, or if this—if she—was somehow different. An older lady strolled by walking a fluffy white dog. As she passed the first window, she disappeared behind a broad wooden beam that separated the windows. Then the next window (the next video screen as Hail explained it) picked her up. As she passed by that window, she vanished behind the window separation; just as she would have done in real life and then appeared in the third window. There was a street corner at the end of the third window. The woman began to go around the corner and then was lost from sight.
“This is just amazing,” Kara said both excited and confused. “What’s an Italian restaurant doing in a cargo ship?”
Hail smiled warmly. “The same thing the Asian, Mexican, French and American restaurants are doing on this same ship. They make people happy.”
“Well I can see why,” Kara said, returning the smile.
“Many of my crew members never leave this ship,” Hail explained. “Some, because they have nowhere to go and nobody to go home to. Others, because they feel safe on the ship, or they are minors and don’t have much of a choice. But that’s still kind of the same thing as nowhere to go and nobody to go home to.”
Kara nodded her head but still didn’t fully understand.
Hail reached down and picked up a fake rose off the table and inserted it into an empty vase in the middle of the table. Back in the kitchen, a light went on and a bell rang.
“A server only comes out here if the flower is put in the vase,” Hail explained. “It makes things much more efficient than the servers continually checking all the restaurants.”
“One server works in all the restaurants?” Kara asked.
“Well, a couple during the busy time. But it’s functional. You see, there’s only one kitchen for all the restaurants. Each restaurant is set up in a circular pattern on this deck. Like each restaurant is a piece of pie and the kitchen is located directly in the center of the pie. You might have noticed the curved hallway outside. It forms a large circle. As you walk around it, you would eventually see the entrance to all the restaurants.”
“That’s amazing,” Kara said. “But why again would you go to all this trouble?”
“Like I said, most of my crew rarely leaves the ship. Therefore, I wanted to build the ship with all the comforts of home, so they feel like they are still part of the world. We also have all sorts of sports facilities set up around the ship. We have a real movie theater with a lobby and candy and popcorn. Everything you would expect to see at the theater. Every once in a while, we will have a live Broadway play video streamed into the theater.”
“I can’t believe all the time and expense that must have gone into all of this,” Kara said.
“It’s not really all that expensive if you consider how much the ship itself costs. And it’s a really small price to pay if I can get talented crew members who are happy and like their jobs. Turnover is something that I try to avoid. This concept is nothing new. Check out the Google campus.”
A young black woman entered from a door at the back of the restaurant and walked up to the table. Her hair had been straightened and tied in back, creating a long ponytail. Kara thought she was pretty, but not the type of pretty that got you in trouble. The woman was dressed in black pants and a button-up starched white shirt. Around her neck was a colorful bandana that was knotted, making it look like a fluffy tie. The server was holding a small electronic notepad of some sort.
“Good morning, Marshall and—a new person I have never seen before,” the server said, taking a moment to look over the new arrival.
“Good morning to you, Sarah,” Hail replied. “This is Kara Ramey. She will be with us for a while.”
Sarah said, “It is very nice to meet you, Kara,” but the server didn’t offer Kara her hand. Instead she handed each of them a leather menu and placed a stylus pen on her tablet, ready to write.
“So, what will it be for you this morning?”
Hail and Kara opened their menus and looked them over.
Sensing that Kara needed more time, Hail said, “I would like the lasagna, a house salad and a glass of whatever wine you recommend. As you know, I don’t know much about wine.”
“That you don’t,” Sarah said smartly as she jotted down Hail’s order.
“And for you, Kara?” Sarah asked.
“I would like the pasta e fagioli, please. And if possible, can you put some extra ditalini in it?”
“Sure,” Sarah said, writing down the order. “To drink?” she asked.
“I’ll have of glass of what he’s having,” Kara said.
“So, you don’t know anything about wine either?” Sarah joked.
“I do, but I don’t want Mr. Hail to feel insecure,” Kara smiled devilishly.
The server winked at Kara and left.
Then a moment later, she came back and placed some bread and butter on the table before disappearing
again.
Both Hail and Kara were quiet, neither knowing what to talk about. Kara looked out the window at the Italian cars driving by and the people taking their evening strolls. A group of six young professionals walked by gesturing and laughing.
Hail considered talking about the upcoming mission and then discarded the idea. There would be plenty of time to talk about that after breakfast, or whatever meal they were eating now.
The kitchen door swung open, and Sarah brought out two glasses of dark wine. She set them down carefully in front of Hail and his guest and said, “Bon Appetit.” The woman went back into the kitchen, and the room was silent again.
Hail took a sip of wine and didn’t know if it was good or not. He figured there should be some sort of scientific test that should yield such a result, but he figured that wine connoisseurs would sneer at such technology.
Kara broke the silence and asked, “So all of this—the ship, the restaurants, the movie theater; is it here because of Hail Industries or is it here because of your new line of work? You know, the retribution thing?”
Hail thought for a moment and said, “It started out as strictly Hail Industries. I really loved the idea of solving the world’s power problems, but then after The Five a lot changed.”
Hail took another sip of wine and continued, “My first ships were mainstream cargo ships. At that time, we hauled a massive amount of nuclear material. But once the majority of the nuclear waste had been removed from the United States, I didn’t need the entire ship to be devoted to that task. That’s when I built my new ships, like the one we’re on now. These new ships were designed from the ground up to serve two tasks. We still haul nuclear waste and deliver precast nuclear reactors. But we also serve a second purpose, which you will soon see. That’s why I needed to hire a specialized crew. That’s why I needed a Google type of atmosphere.”
Operation Hail Storm Page 23
