Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  “Three hours and thirty-seven minutes,” Knox corrected.

  “And if we need to move to another location, then how much flight time does that give us?”

  “About six minutes, give or take,” Knox said.

  “What about comms, Shana?” Hail asked Tran, their communications expert.

  “Wi-Fi signal is strong between the drones, but the satellite signal to ELO is degraded because it is semi-indoors. But that’s to be expected.”

  “How much flight time do we have left on ELO?” Hail asked Renner.

  Renner checked and said, “We have about four minutes of flight time. But what concerns me more is that we only have about two hours of power to facilitate the communications between the satellite and BEP. When ELO’s reserves are gone, both drones will go black. We won’t be able to communicate with either of them.”

  Hail told Knox, “Record a video for me. I want a quick 360-degree pan of the entire warehouse and then put BEP to sleep. Copy that recording to my NAS so I can review it later.”

  “Will do,” Knox said.

  Hail told his crew, “Let’s focus on getting ELO out of the warehouse and onto the roof. I want to put that kid to bed to save its power.”

  Renner said, pointing at the big screen, “Looks like the Koreans are done with the lift. They’re removing the chains from the crane. I hope they aren’t going to leave the truck there overnight.”

  “We’ll see in a minute,” Hail said.

  A minute came and went and then another. And another.

  “What are they waiting for?” Kara asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m sure the truck driver can hardly wait to get home to his starving family,” Hail said.

  Kara didn’t look amused, although Renner and Knox did.

  Overall, Hail was happy with his joke.

  The truck driver, a small man with a dirty baseball cap, was standing patiently by his truck door, smoking nervously and looking at the ground.

  A minute later, Trang Won Dong, walked over to hand the man what looked like money. The man bowed several times and then climbed into his truck.

  “Looks like he was waiting to get paid,” Kara said.

  “It’s go time,” Hail said.

  “Knox, are you ready?” he asked his pilot.

  “Yes, sir,” Knox replied. “ELO’s flight systems are online. We’re good to go.”

  The truck shook and the video vibrated as the engine kicked over. A dark puff of smoke came out of the dirty exhaust stack to the right of ELO. With no microphone built into the drone, it was like watching a silent movie.

  “The truck is moving,” Renner said.

  With BEP shut down and its video screen black, the only video in the mission center was sent by ELO. Its camera was pointing toward the back of the truck. The crane had been lowered, stowed and was no longer obscuring the view from the rear. The warehouse doors were wide open, and it looked as if the truck was backing into a murky abyss.

  Hail glanced over at Kara standing next to him. She watched the video like Hail suspected she watched surveillance videos at the CIA office. All of her concentration was focused on it. Somehow, she looked even prettier when she was focused.

  “The truck is out of the warehouse,” Renner reported.

  The drone’s sensitive light detector chip transitioned into night mode. In order to let in as much light as possible, the camera lens opened to its full extent. A night-enhancement software kicked in and sharpened the image further, turning blobs of black and white into lamp poles, security lights and bright lights on top of the truck.

  “If there’s no one around, then let’s get this thing in the air,” Hail instructed.

  Thirty yards from the warehouse, the truck driver placed the truck into first gear, began to make a wide swooping turn through the dirt lot and headed for the front gate.

  “Retracting the magnets,” Knox said. “OK, we’re loose. Taking off in three, two, one and liftoff.”

  Watching the video rise and then sway to the right messed with Kara’s equilibrium. She reached over and balanced herself using Hail’s right shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Hail, but she didn’t remove her hand.

  “No problem,” Hail responded, somewhat surprised that he found her touch comforting.

  Hail understood the drone had only four minutes of power for flight and still had to use its remaining power to facilitate communications with BEP, so he told Knox, “No fancy stuff. There are no trees around so just get it on the roof and stick it somewhere. Flight time is power we can’t afford right now.”

  “You got it,” Knox said, angling for a security light mounted on the corner of the warehouse. Knox pulled the flight controller to the right and throttled up the drone. He made his approach from the warehouse’s east side. ELO swung over a barbed wire fence and darted back in, gaining altitude as it flew.

  “We have burned thirty seconds,” Renner warned.

  A football field of sheet metal appeared under the drone, and Knox tilted the leading edge of the drone into the air to create a stall and shed speed. Once the drone had transitioned into a hover state, Knox eased off the power and lowered the drone atop the warehouse’s roof.

  “We’re down,” Knox said. “Lowering the magnets.”

  “Great job,” Hail told everyone, but most of the praise went to Knox. “Put ELO to sleep to conserve power.”

  Renner asked Kara, “Do you have any idea how much time we have before the North Koreans move all this stuff to another location?”

  Kara removed her hand from Hail’s shoulder and said, “None at all. It could be days. It could be an hour from now. We don’t know where their assembly facility is located.”

  Hail got up and walked toward the door.

  “I would like to meet with the mission planning crew in the conference room in twenty minutes,” he announced.

  Kara followed Hail into the hall and closed the door. Hail began walking, and she matched his strides.

  “Am I invited to the mission planning session?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. The first thing we need you to do is to contact your people and get some aerial shots of the warehouse, so we can get a lay of the land. We need to find the most isolated area to land the drones.”

  “Can’t you do a flyover in one of your drones to get those shots?” Kara asked.

  “We can, but it’s risky for us. In the daylight with slow-moving drones, we might take the risk if we were planning the mission a month from now. However, time isn’t on our side, and we don’t want to do anything that will spook the North Koreans. If they see the drone, they’ll move the missile stash—maybe even underground. That would be a much harder target. Don’t you guys have satellites that can snap a few photos for us?”

  “Yes, we do, and I’ll check with Pepper to see if he can take the photos at first light, weather permitting. Of course, if it’s overcast it would be a no-go.”

  They reached a door that read SHIP SECURITY.

  Hail stopped to look to Kara. “I also want to know how long Kornev will be at the warehouse. Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated.”

  Kara hesitated for a beat.

  “You said us, but you really mean you, don’t you?” Kara asked disapprovingly. “I told you that Kornev is not part of this mission. I have not been given the clearance to remove him. He is currently a valuable conduit of information for the CIA.”

  Hail looked annoyed.

  “Last time I checked, I don’t work for the CIA. Therefore, I don’t need permission to kill this piece of garbage. It’s not like he’s a protected American citizen.”

  “You’re working for the CIA right now,” Kara shot back. “This is a CIA mission that you agreed to execute.”

  “Execute—I like the sound of that. Let’s get down to some executing. Blowing up missile parts is not an execution, but killing Kornev is. You think that he sold the missiles to The Five terrorists, so he’s an asshole that
needs to go.”

  Kara looked like she was ready to spit fire.

  “You need to get over yourself, Mr. Hail. You think you’re untouchable, but you are sitting in the middle of the Sea of Japan on a frickin cargo ship. Don’t you understand that military assets could take you out at any time?”

  “They wouldn’t do that unless they were idiots. We’re currently carrying thousands of tons of nuclear waste. Do you have any idea what a cataclysmic environmental disaster that would cause? Let’s consider that for a moment.”

  Hail stopped talking and thought for a second how best to frame his point.

  Kara primed herself for whatever he was going to say.

  Then Hail surprised her by asking, “Have you ever heard of Sado Island?”

  “No, is there something special about it?” she asked irritably.

  “Not unless you’re visiting one of its beautiful beaches, such as Nyuzaki, Tassha, Sawata, Sobama or Mano-Shinmachi to name a few. It’s a stunning Japanese island in the Sea of Japan. Sink the Hail Nucleus and a thousand years from now everyone will be saying, remember how beautiful Sado Island was before it became a barren moonscape of rock and sand. Sink the Hail Nucleus in the Sea of Japan and the list of countries that no longer have beach access would include Japan, North Korea, South Korea, China and Taiwan. The Russians wouldn’t be that happy either. The positive side is hardly any Russians live in that part of their country. None of them are swimming in the Sea of Okhotsk since its average summer temperature is about 50°F. What do you think those countries will do to the country that causes such a catastrophe?”

  “Let me ask you this,” Kara responded austerely. “You used the word country, as in, what do you think those countries will do to the country that causes such a catastrophe?” Kara punched the word country in her sentence.

  Continuing, she asked, “But what if it’s not a country that sinks the Hail Nucleus? What if it is a terrorist organization sinks the Hail Nucleus?”

  “What are you implying?” Hail asked, his confusion diffusing his anger.

  “You may not know this, but you are doing this mission for both the CIA and yourself. After all, terrorists love to cause disasters, and they don’t care much about the environment. North Korea doesn’t seem to care about much and are more of a terror organization than a country. If North Korea is successful with their missile program, they could easily blow your ship out of the water with conventional missiles and cause maybe even more destruction than if they had nukes strapped to them. After all, your cargo is nastier than any nuclear bomb. The Hail Nucleus is a terrorist’s wet dream!”

  Hail looked as if he had been slapped in the face.

  This woman made him irate. And the flip side was that she also made him kind of happy. It felt like a young marriage.

  Hail turned his back on Kara and faced the door of the security center. He swiped his badge across the sensor and opened the door. Before entering, he turned back around and asked, “How would you like to swim home?”

  He then slammed the door. He left a fuming Kara Ramey with the clang of metal ringing in her ears.

  *_*_*

  The wind felt good on her face. She surfaced on the top deck around midship and began walking toward the bow of the Hail Nucleus. The air was warm and the night was heavy with humidity. A thick iron railing was to her left and past that there was nothing but the ocean. On her right were huge cylindrical containers of nuclear waste, each the size of a truck and painted white like innocent-looking storage tanks. They were seated and latched into cylindrical slots on the deck, like a beer can being placed into a holder on its side. Kara surmised that the containers and the matching slots on deck were designed before the ship was ever built. The massive slots in the deck were too substantial to have been an afterthought or a retrofit conversion. Part ‘A’ was designed to go into slot ‘B’. The ship designers had then determined how many slots they could pack onto the deck and still leave room for the pool.

  As she walked along the railing, she was troubled by the natural beauty and calmness of the dark sea to her left, in comparison to the unnatural and hideous toxic slurry contained no more than ten feet to her right. She inadvertently rubbed her arm, wiping off any imaginary radioactive contaminates that might have leaked out and stuck to her. She knew it was silly, but the feeling that she may be walking through invisible radioactive clouds was hard to shake. Hail was right when he had told her that someone would be crazy to bomb the Hail Nucleus. There were literally mountains of nuclear sludge onboard. And Kara was also right when she had told him that his ship was a terrorist’s wet dream. She suspected the Hail Nucleus had some defenses against those who would want to sink or board her. She just hoped they wouldn’t be enough if her agency was the one assigned to do that job. Kara shuddered at that thought. This wasn’t the calming walk in fresh air she had thought it would be. But she was there for work, not for pleasure.

  As she neared the bow of the boat, she pulled up short and stepped in between some containers to remove her phone from her pocket. She typed in her password and brought up an app that uplinked to a secure communications satellite that was floating several miles above her.

  The app took a moment to find the elusive satellite. It made a little ding sound when the uplink had connected. Kara dialed the number for her boss. She had no numbers stored on her phone. In her line of work, her phone could be liberated from her at any time. The first lesson in Spy School 101 was to keep your phone clean. No numbers. No history. Nothing that could provide an adversary information if the phone were confiscated.

  The phone made a peculiar ringing sound, as if it were an echo of a ringing sound. The echo sounded four times before the phone was answered.

  “Hi, Kara, this is Jarret.”

  “Hi, Jarret. How are things back at the ranch?”

  “Fine, but the president is waiting on an update. I’ve got you on speaker right now, and I also have Paul Moore, the Director of Operations, and Karen Wesley, the Director of Analysis, in the room in case they need to ask you some questions or vice versa.”

  “Understood,” Kara said.

  There was a moment of silence while Pepper decided on how to kick off the call.

  “First of all, I see you are calling on your own phone. Is that correct?”

  “Affirmative,” Kara replied.

  “And do you feel that your phone is secure and that you are not being surveilled?”

  “I do,” Kara responded confidently. “Hail gave me back my phone and told me that I could use the ship’s communication channels if I proxy through their gateway or connect to their cell repeater on deck. But right now, I’m on the ship’s deck and connected directly to our satellite, so I believe we’re clean.”

  “Very good,” Pepper said. “Can you please provide us a mission summary?”

  “I’m on the Hail Nucleus somewhere in the Sea of Japan. As you know, it is a cargo ship that’s carrying tons of nuclear waste, destination unknown. Pertaining to the mission directly, Hail’s crew was successful in flying in a drone, correction, two drones, and dropping them onto the Huan Yue. The Huan Yue then docked in the city of Wonsan, North Korea. Via the drone’s camera, we then watched the center section of a Russian R-29RMU Sineva unloaded from the Huan Yue and onto a lowboy trailer. The trailer was then driven out of the city and exited a few miles off the Pyongyang–Wonsan Highway. It drove three miles down a dirt road to a secluded warehouse. I will text you the exact coordinates of the warehouse. At that point, a surveillance drone was positioned inside the warehouse. I watched a live video feed of the missile stage being unloaded from the trailer. Based on observation, it would appear that almost all parts have arrived at the warehouse. There still appears to be one missile stage missing.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Hello?” Kara said.

  “We’re here. We were just waiting to see if you had more to report,” Pepper said.

  Kara said, “I’m expecte
d to be present in a mission meeting that started about ten minutes ago. I’m assuming that Hail’s plan to destroy the missiles will be finalized in this meeting.”

  “Are there any complications thus far?” Pepper asked.

  Kara thought about this for a moment, sifting through information relevant to the staff within the CIA conference room. Except for Hail’s constant insistence on killing Victor Kornev, there really hadn’t been any complications. But what did that have to do with the CIA? She was pretty sure she could convince Pepper to give the order to kill Kornev, but she didn’t want him dead. She wanted Kornev alive. She wanted information from the man. She wanted to know who had shot down her parents’ plane. Marshall Hail was proving to be short sighted. He really didn’t care who had pulled the trigger. He simply wanted to annihilate all the figureheads that had told their jihadis to pull the triggers.

  Kara wanted—no—Kara needed to look the man in the eyes who had pulled the trigger of the surface-to-air missile that had wrecked her life. A reasonable Kara Ramey would realize there was a good chance the shooter could already be dead. After all, he was in a very dangerous line of work. The terrorist could have died a number of ways with disease and starvation at the top of the list. But for some strange reason, she felt that the man was still alive—still out there living while so many of his victims’ families were dying inside. And Kara also assumed that the shooter was a man. For no other reason than women in that region were so marginalized that the only reasonable person would be a man.

  “Are you there, Kara?” Pepper asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here, she said.

  “The only thing I have to report is that Hail is a pompous, power-hungry ass,” but she didn’t say that. She simply said, “Nothing else to report.”

  Pepper asked, “Can you hold for a minute?”

  Before Kara could say, “Sure,” she was already listening to elevator music.

  Her confrontation with Marshall Hail had upset her more than she had anticipated. And that was a strange emotion because she was the amazing Kara Ramey, master manipulator of all things created male. But there was something about Marshall Hail that was different than the other men she had mastered, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. He was rich, but most of her assignments had been wealthy. Poor men didn’t have much power. Therefore, they were inconsequential when it came to big world stuff. Most rich men were powerful. Either that or they had inherited their wealth which made them rich, powerful and lazy. Hail wasn’t bad looking, but he was no twenty-nine-year-old male model, so that wasn’t it. Hail was indeed powerful. In order to build his business, he had achieved a great many dominant and influential actions to get where he had ended up. But that in itself didn’t carry any weight with Kara.