Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  “You have more than just one of your ships outfitted like this?” Kara asked.

  Hail replied with a simple yes, but didn’t expand on how many such ships he had.

  “So, what’s the deal with you and nuclear power? Other than the profit, what’s the attraction?”

  Hail liked the question because he liked talking about nuclear power.

  “Power is power,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Power can change everything. Power can make weak countries powerful. Power can solve all of the world’s problems.”

  “How so?” Kara asked cynically, reaching over and tugging loose a piece of bread.

  “Diamonds are expensive, right?” Hail said as more of a statement than a question.

  Kara nodded as she buttered her bread.

  “If you have enough cheap power, you can make diamonds inexpensively. After all, making a diamond only requires two things, pressure and heat. If you put enough pressure and heat on a banana, it will turn into a diamond. However, it takes a massive amount of pressure and heat to make a diamond, and that takes a lot of power. If the power costs more than the diamond, then it’s not practical to make them. But if the scales flip the other way, then a diamond will no longer be expensive, let alone a commodity because they would be inexpensive to make. That’s how power can turn the world on its ear.”

  Kara chewed her bread and thought about Hail’s little speech.

  She swallowed and asked, “Can someone make gold if they have enough power?”

  Hail shook his head no. “That’s very tricky because gold was made in a cataclysmic event known as a short gamma-ray burst, such as the collision of two neutron stars. Gold can be manmade, but none of the processes are economical and most are comical.”

  “How so?” Kara asked.

  “For example, gold can be made in a nuclear reactor, but the gold that would be produced would be highly radioactive. Walking around with an ounce of gold in your pocket that is burning a hole in your leg isn’t a good thing.”

  Kara laughed.

  “It’s also possible to make gold in a supercollider one atom at a time. Even with virtually free energy, it would take a hundred years to create one ounce of gold in a supercollider. Thus, that method is not practical either.”

  “Well, at least gold is one commodity that will stand the test of time, or should I say stand the test of Hail Industries,” Kara said.

  Hail shrugged off the comment and said, “But the real payoff is in solving other problems facing the world. For example, let’s take the global freshwater shortage. That’s not really a water problem; that’s an energy problem. We have an ocean full of saltwater, and all it takes is energy to turn it into fresh drinkable water. So cheap power solves our water problems as well.”

  Kara looked at Hail and commented, “Interesting.” She plucked another piece of bread from the loaf.

  Not sure he had made his point, Hail added, “People only need a few things to live; food, water and air. Antibiotics extend life as do other medications, but the basics are food, water and air. So, what do we do when we run out of oil? What are we going to use as fuel for the tractors to plant and harvest the massive amounts of food our world requires? What fuel are we going to burn in the trucks that bring the harvest to our inner-city stores?”

  “I don’t know,” Kara said honestly. “Batteries?”

  “No, but that is a good guess. Actually, I think that hydrogen will be the new fuel that will replace petroleum-based products. The only problem is that hydrogen takes an enormous amount of energy to produce. Currently, using older energy technology, hydrogen takes more energy to make than it produces. But if you have an abundance of cheap electrical power, then all of a sudden hydrogen becomes economical, and all our cars and trucks and tractors can be switched over to burn hydrogen. And the beauty about hydrogen is the waste product that falls out your tailpipe is pure water. You can drink it.”

  “That is wonderful,” Kara agreed. She picked up her glass and took a sip of wine. Hail did the same.

  “So why wouldn’t all cars run on electricity; you know, batteries?” Kara asked.

  “Well, first of all, batteries are very heavy and don’t hold much power. They also take a lot of energy to manufacture and are made from expensive materials. And batteries don’t last very long before they have to be replaced. And second, the world has an infrastructure problem when it comes to electricity. For example, if tomorrow an electric car magically appeared in the garage of every American, and they all plugged them in at the same time, then the entire power grid in the United States would fail. See, the power companies just don’t have the infrastructure or capacity to facilitate that scenario. But hydrogen could be kept in pretty much the same type of gas stations where gasoline and diesel fuel are currently dispensed.”

  “Interesting,” Kara said.

  “So cheap and clean electrical power completes the circuit,” Hail said, summarizing his thoughts. “We burn our old nuclear waste in a reactor that turns that hideous stuff into low-level waste that can be stored safely. With new cheap electricity, we can create hydrogen to power our machines which only outputs water, so we’re now preserving our air. With cheap and clean power, we can desalinate water from our oceans. Food, water, air—the Hail reactor solves all of our problems.”

  “Almost all of our problems,” Kara reminded Hail.

  “Yep, there is still a people problem that needs to be solved,” Hail said, reading the CIA agent’s mind.

  “More like a people removal problem,” Kara corrected.

  Hail chewed on his bottom lip and nodded his head.

  The door from the kitchen opened, and Sarah appeared toting an armful of dishes. Once she had reached the table, she carefully set down each dish in front of its new owner. Sarah reached across the table and removed the rose from its vase and set it on the table.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you?” Sarah asked.

  “No, this looks great,” Kara said.

  “Thank you, Sarah,” Hail told her.

  Sarah looked pleased and turned and left the room.

  Hail used his fork to cut the corner off his slab of lasagna. As he lifted the pasta to his mouth, his phone rang. Holding it in the air, he used his other hand to take his phone out of his pants pocket. He saw it was Renner calling. He took the call.

  “This is Marshall,” Hail answered.

  “You don’t have me on speaker, do you?” Renner asked.

  “Nope,” Hail said flashing a I’m sorry look at his breakfast companion.

  “Do you want the rundown on the contents of your new buddy’s purse?”

  “Yes, what do you have?”

  “Well, the purse itself is clean. No bugs, no wires, no batteries sewn into it. Everything else is clean as well except for three items. Her phone is sending out a tracking beacon. Even if it is turned off, it is still sending out a beacon. We x-rayed her phone and it has two battery sources; one factory battery and the other is a custom job, straight out of the CIA handbook.”

  “OK,” Hail said.

  Renner continued. “Her compact is a communications device as well. It has a satellite receiver/transmitter and lots of different modes of sending messages. Video, audio, photo and so forth. The deal with her compact is that it has to have clear air to communicate with a satellite. So, if she is inside, then it’s useless unless she hangs the compact out a porthole on the ship.”

  “Understood,” Hail said, giving Kara a little I’ll be done in a second smile.

  “And the weirdest thing is her phone charger. It’s a sophisticated little Linux computer that has the potential of downloading data from any phone that gets plugged into it. It also has Wi-Fi and Ethernet and can even transmit on Bluetooth, if that channel is open.”

  “Good work,” Hail said.

  Renner said, “All her stuff is locked up in the security center in a lead-lined safe. Which means that none of her communication devices are doing any communicating,
as long as they are sealed inside our safe.”

  “OK,” Hail said and clicked off the connection.

  “Sorry about that,” he told Kara.

  Kara shrugged and said, “This is really good food. If I didn’t know better, I would say I was in Italy.”

  “Well, then we did our job.” Hail smiled.

  Kara paused for a moment, one of those gear-shifting silences that indicated she was going to change the subject. “You mentioned that you had minors on the ship. That’s kind of weird.”

  Hail was prepared for a change of subject, but that particular question caught him off guard. Hail said in a defensive tone, “Not really if you understand why.”

  Kara looked at him, smiled innocently and asked, “Why?”

  Hail had to decide how much to share with the CIA. If Kara was on the ship for any amount of time, she would eventually meet most of the people aboard, most of them minors. He could always try to segregate her from the crew as well as his advanced technology. But he realized that he needed the CIA’s intelligence. He needed their help long term. It would be impractical to keep Kara bottled up for that long. She wondered how long ‘that long’ would end up being. Really, what could she tell her bosses that would impact Hail or his operation? Yes, he had drones that delivered drones that delivered drones that killed people. But without designs and specifications and people who knew what they were doing, the United States government would still take a decade to get up to speed if they developed their own program. Realistically, he didn’t want to control Kara while she was on his ship. He wanted to control her communication with anyone who wasn’t on his ship, Jarret Pepper to be precise.

  Hail said, “What you’re going to discover is that the majority of our crew or staff or employees, whatever you want to call them, lost someone in The Five.”

  Kara looked surprised but remained silent.

  Hail let it sink in for a moment, and then he continued.

  “Sarah, for example,” Hail said nodding toward the kitchen. “She lost a brother that she was very close to in The Five. She was a waitress at the time, and the loss crushed her. She didn’t get along well with her mother or father, but she was very close to her brother. She couldn’t function after that and lost her job. When I found her, she was living in a homeless shelter.”

  Kara asked, “What do you mean you found her?”

  Hail responded, “I mean I assembled a team of researchers that did their best to track down all the girls named Sarah in the world. Or more to the point, all the family members who were damaged or orphaned from The Five.”

  “Orphaned?” Kara said, feeling that the conversation was drifting into a strange place.

  “Yes,” Hail said without any reservation. “Most of the minors on the ship I mentioned were orphaned after The Five. I volunteered to take care of them, protect them, make sure they received schooling and even employ them when they get older. In many cases, I’m their official guardian.”

  “Papa Hail,” Kara said with a degree of pessimism. “I don’t see it. Why would a judge give you custody?”

  Hail laughed mockingly. “There weren’t any other billionaires at the time that were making the same offer. Why would I be any worse than anyone else that could take care of them?”

  Kara murmured something to herself that Hail couldn’t make out as she looked out the fake window.

  “I don’t know,” she said in a sad voice, not taking her eyes off the cars that passed by. She noticed that it had started raining outside; outside an Italian restaurant on the other side of the world when this footage had been recorded.

  Hail could tell that she was thinking about her own life and challenges she had faced.

  “It’s really nice for the kids here,” Hail told her in a kind voice, almost fatherly. “They are in school Monday through Friday, and we have our own teachers. For the kids over eighteen, they are taking college via distance learning. These days almost every college course is offered via video. One teacher and a hundred students watching the lesson via remote video connections all around the globe. It makes so much sense that I wonder how long brick and mortar colleges will actually last.”

  “As long as colleges have kegger parties, then they will be around,” Kara mused. “It’s hard to do that over the Internet.”

  Hail paused to see if Kara had anything else she wanted to say. She was still watching the rain shine the streets of Italy, miles away from the conversation.

  “You need rain sound effects,” she said softly, like she wasn’t even aware that she was talking.

  Hail chuckled. “Yeah, sure, we’ll get right on that.”

  “I’m sure that everything you do for the kids is all well and good, but it’s not like having a mother and father. It’s not like having a family,” Kara said, returning from wherever her thoughts had been.

  “I agree with you. It’s not like having a mother and father, but it’s like having a family. The kids on board have other kids to do things with. They are growing very close relationships with one another. We are their family. We are each other’s family. In a way, the kids are mine but, in another way, they belong to everyone on this ship. We all belong to each other. We all lost something in The Five, but I will be damned if we all didn’t gain something from it as well. And what we gained is the ability to love again. The ability to feel something again other than sorrow. Having all the kids and adults that were damaged from The Five on board is like a mass therapeutic session. You don’t have to go home to a foster mother and father that don’t have a clue how you feel and don’t understand what you’re going through, because each of us on this ship is going through the exact same thing. We don’t have to go to a grocery store and have the cashier ask how our day is going. And we don’t have to tell them it’s going like hell and not getting any better. We don’t have to listen to people telling us to have a nice day. We have nice days when we feel like it. We don’t even have to talk about how we feel on the Hail Nucleus. We just know. When someone is feeling down ― we just know. We know how they feel, and we know how to respond to it.”

  Hail stopped talking, realizing that he was rambling. But he didn’t feel guilty about it. If Kara didn’t get it, then she didn’t get it.

  There were a lot of emotions going through Kara, and Hail could almost see each play out on her expressive features. The prevailing emotion she revealed was sorrow. But as Hail was talking, that emotion began to change into one that resembled hope. It was like sensing that beyond that one mountain was a greener pasture. War and death on one side, and peace and solace on the other side. Hail knew she got it. He just didn’t know if she knew that she got it.

  “What?” Kara began to say and then stopped.

  “This is all just—” and she shut down again.

  “This is overwhelming,” she finally said. “Does anyone on the outside know that most of your crew consists of family sufferers of The Five?”

  “I don’t know,” Hail said. “I don’t know if anyone on the outside really cares. All of these wonderful people are here for one of three reasons. One, they want to be part of the solution. Two, everyone they loved is dead. Three, there is no one left who cares about them. Well, I care about all of them. I don’t want The Five to dictate the way their lives will turn out. I want them to all go on and have a good life. If they want to learn a skill and work for me, then I’ll train them.”

  Kara pushed away her soup and set her elbows on the table. She looked directly into Hail’s blue eyes. He returned the stare.

  Hail could tell that she had a thousand more questions. She had questions about the crew, numbers, the ship, technology, and, of course, CIA questions. And all of those questions were swimming around in her head, each one competing in her brain to be asked.

  Before she had a chance to ask any of them, Hail said, “If you are done eating, we really need to get over to our mission planning room and get the ball rolling. I’m not sure what we have in the form of interdiction equipment, an
d we don’t have much time to build it.”

  Kara took all of her questions and quickly filed them away; making a note to ask them when there was more time.

  “I need to get cleaned up,” she said.

  “No, you don’t,” Hail said firmly. “You smell just fine.”

  Kara was shocked and laughed.

  Then Hail added, “And you look really good in that cat woman body stocking thing as well. I think this should be your new look.”

  Kara smiled demurely and replied, “I know I look good in it, but the reason you really like me in this skintight getup is because you can tell I don’t have any hidden wires, recorders, cameras or communication devices on my body.”

  “Damn,” Hail thought, “She read my mind.”

  Hail said nothing. Instead, he stood and walked around the table and pulled Kara’s chair out for her.

  “No dessert?” Kara asked, facetiously.

  “Later,” Hail said. “First work and then the cat gets a treat.”

  “Where to?” Kara asked.

  “One deck up. I’ve got everyone waiting for us in the conference room.”

  “Lead the way,” Kara said, looking for her purse and then realizing she had absolutely nothing. It struck her for the first time that she was literally at the mercy of Marshall Hail. She didn’t like that feeling one bit. But in her line of work, she was constantly putting herself and her safety on the line. At least Hail and his clan were supposed to be the good guys. But that so-called fact had yet to be verified.

  The conference room was situated one deck up and almost directly above the grouping of restaurants so they didn’t have to walk any great distance.