Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  She thought about it and decided the trait in Marshall Hail that attracted her was his love for his deceased family and his crew who had become his friends. It had been so long since she had witnessed a man who could show unabated love for someone that she doubted if a man like that still existed in the world. She knew her father had loved her, but she had yet to witness that emotion firsthand in another man. Hail loved people. But the dark side of the man also hated people. It was a tarnished spot on a silver soul. Kara knew why that dull spot was ensconced in the man, because she had the exact same tarnished areas that could no longer reflect light. Her dark spots devoured evil. They actually wanted to touch evil before killing it, and she found it ugly. It wasn’t her choice and inescapable. Thus, she could see her reflection each time she peered deeply into Hail’s eyes. She was right there on the surface right next to him. They were so different and still so similar.

  “We’re back, Kara,” Pepper said. Kara brushed her red hair away from her face and put the phone closer to her ear. The ship must have changed direction. The spot between the containers she had chosen to escape the wind was no longer working.

  She said, “I’m here,” as she walked deeper into the maze of containment vessels.

  Pepper said, “After discussing the situation, our question is, do you have any idea how Hail is going to destroy the missiles?”

  “None,” Kara said honestly. “But I guess I will know that answer after the meeting I’m missing right now.”

  “Do you need anything from us?” Pepper asked.

  “Yes, I do. Hail asked me to request satellite photos of the warehouse. We need them quickly. If you can get them at first light and then e-mail them to myself and Hail, we can then use them to determine the LZ for the final approach on the target.”

  “Understood,” Pepper said. “Are you OK?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “All right, text the warehouse coordinates, and we will get busy. Good luck,” Pepper told her.

  Kara clicked off and pulled up a text message that she had already composed which contained the warehouse coordinates.

  She clicked SEND and watched the message hourglass for a moment as it disappeared and flew through the air on its way to Pepper. She returned her phone to her pocket and walked to the ship’s railing.

  The night was beautiful. Kara let out a breath and then breathed in the ocean’s scent. Somewhere in the dark, she heard the distant chatter of porpoises as they played and socialized. At least something was happy on this sultry night. She took in another deep breath and held it like it was her last. She let it out slowly, releasing all her frustrations out into the nothingness that lay before her for hundreds of miles.

  *_*_*

  Hail heard the door to the conference room open, and from the corner of his eye he saw Kara walk into the meeting.

  Renner was talking.

  “So, the only thing we have left to figure out is how to get into the warehouse.”

  Kara walked up to the conference table and nudged in next to Hail. Almost everyone was standing in close and studying still photos of the inside of the warehouse that had apparently been snipped from the video that BEP had taken hours ago.

  “Hi, Kara,” Renner said.

  Hail said nothing. He continued to study the photos, paying no attention to the CIA woman.

  “Hi, Gage. Hi, Marshall,” she said purposely.

  Hail turned to look at her briefly and said, “Oh, hi,” and turned back to the photos.

  Lifting her mouth up toward Hail’s ear, speaking with just enough volume for only Hail to hear, she asked, “Are you still grumpy?”

  Hail continued to ignore her.

  Two white coats were present at the meeting; Eric Rugmon, their drone designer, and Terry Garber, Hail’s lab manager. Pierce Mercier stood quietly and patiently, knowing that his value to the meeting involved weather and nature. Therefore, at this moment he was simply a spectator. Shana Tran was the only person seated. She wasn’t looking at the photos. She was looking at her long red fingernails. Kara was sure that if Shana had a nail file on her, she would have been perfecting her pretty nails in front of everyone.

  “Does anyone have any ideas on how to access the warehouse?” Hail asked his team.

  “I think in order to frame that answer, we need to define some operational parameters,” Renner suggested.

  “I would agree with that,” Hail said. “I think the first parameter is silence; however, if we intend to breach the warehouse, it has to be silent. We can’t alert the guards and have them run in and start blasting away with gunfire.”

  “Agreed,” Renner said.

  Renner asked Kara, “Are we getting those overhead shots of the warehouse from your agency in the morning?”

  “Yes, we are,” Kara said. “They will be e-mailed to Marshall and me as soon as they are acquired.”

  Hail said, “To move forward with our planning, we have to assume there is a spot we can touch down within two hundred yards or else our math won’t work.”

  “I agree,” Renner said. “So, our two mission parameters are two hundred yards out and we must stay silent.”

  “Is that all?” Hail asked.

  Pierce Mercier offered, “Another parameter is WHEN. You need a date and time when you plan to breach the warehouse. I need to know so I can check the weather and visibility and other factors.”

  Shana Tran looked over the top of her extended fingernails and added, “All those weather factors can affect the satellite transmission and communications, so they are important to me as well.”

  Hail summarized the input of the others.

  “All right, well the date and time will be determined by other factors as well. The first factor is the time it will take to fabricate the drone that will breach the warehouse. As you all know, we currently don’t have anything like that in our inventory. We could always blow a hole in the side of the building, but that’s not quiet. The first thing we need to figure out is how to get into the warehouse.”

  There was a lull in the meeting while everyone considered the problem.

  Renner broke the silence by saying, “I don’t see any way that we can open the doors, so our only other option is to cut a hole in the building.”

  “Is that practical?” Hail asked.

  “Practical or not, I don’t see any other choice. I think we need to fly a drone in next to the building, set it down on the ground and then create a hole large enough in the side of the warehouse for our purposes.”

  “How thick do you think the steel is?” Hail asked Renner.

  “It is 18-gauge, maybe 16-gauge. That would be about a sixteenth of an inch thick. Not very substantial.”

  “We could hook up a cutter grinder to the arm of a drone,” Eric Rugmon suggested. He made a box in the air with his finger while doing calculations in his head. “I estimate the drone could probably have about an eighteen-inch reach both horizontally and vertically.”

  “That would give us a hole in the metal about a foot and a half square,” Renner said, using his hands to demonstrate the size one way and then the other.

  Hail shook his head, shooting down the idea with, “It’s too loud. Can you imagine the reverberation through the sheet metal structure once the cutting wheel started in on it? The guards would have to be dead not to hear it.”

  “That’s another possibility,” Renner said. “If we kill the guards then—”

  “What about a laser?” Kara said. “I mean a laser is quiet and could cut through thin metal, couldn’t it?”

  Everyone turned and looked at Kara.

  Kara looked back at the blank faces that were staring at her.

  “What?” she asked defensively.

  Hail said, “We do science, not science fiction.”

  Kara looked hurt and embarrassed.

  “Well nobody else was coming up with anything,” she shot back.

  “That’s because we haven’t had a chance to think it all out,” Hail said.


  Kara wanted to tell them all to go screw themselves, but she sucked it up and kept her cool.

  “I’m sure if you thought about it for a moment, you would figure out why a laser would not be possible,” Hail told her.

  Nobody spoke.

  Kara already knew it was a stupid idea as soon as the word laser left her mouth. But there were no second chances with this bunch of techno-nerds. If you said something stupid, it appeared that you were going to get called out.

  “Not enough power,” she answered indignantly.

  “Correct,” Hail confirmed.

  Kara looked indifferently at Hail as if she had never met him before. She wished she had a nail file so she could passively work on her nails or stick it into Hail’s arm. Both seemed like a good use of a nail file.

  Hail looked away from Kara and back at the others and asked, “What about a torch?”

  The others thought about it for a moment.

  “It’s pretty quiet,” Renner said, “but two possible issues come to mind. First, it will be bright, especially if we decide to go in at night. Second, high pressure oxy-fuel tanks weigh a lot. Flying them in will take a lot of power.”

  “Not necessarily,” Rugmon said. “If we calculate the exact burn time that is required to cut the hole, we could use lightweight miniature aluminum tanks. Once the cut was done, we could release the leftover fuel and fly the drone back out.”

  “Is that possible?” Hail asked.

  “I need to run the math, but off the top of my head I believe the tanks would be within the lifting range of our mini-drone,” Rugmon said.

  “Sounds good to me,” Hail said. “Gage, are you good with that?”

  “So far it’s the best of our options. It will be awfully bright when we’re cutting, but if we cut on the backside of the building, and no guards are walking the perimeter, then it could work.”

  “I’m good with that,” Hail said. “Eric, how long would it take for your team to modify a mini-drone with that configuration?”

  “We could have it done in twelve hours, give or take,” Rugmon said boastfully.

  Hail looked at the photos on the table and tried to think if there was anything he had missed. Not coming up with any items of consequence, he said, “OK, let’s turn our attention to the explosives.”

  Terry Garber came to life like a robot that had just been activated. A moment ago, she was passive and introverted. She now smiled and waited for input.

  Hail asked her, “What type of explosives do you think we should use to destroy the missile sections?”

  “I think we should use a cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine-based explosive,” Garber said.

  “Oh, here we go,” Renner said, rolling his eyes.

  Hail laughed and said, “Terry, I know you get off on saying those long chemical words, but how about you cut that down for us non-laboratory folks.”

  “OK,” the little woman said snobbishly, “How about we shorten that to nitroamine?”

  “How about you shorten it to RDX?” Renner suggested. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Basically,” Garber said, but it was apparent she wasn’t very happy with just those three letters.

  “So, will RDX do the trick?” Hail asked Garber.

  “Generally speaking, it will do a good job if you stick a wad of it against a large crate of parts,” the woman said. “But it won’t be effective in destroying the thick metal missile stages without some special work.”

  The laboratory woman stopped talking. Everyone waited for her to expand on her thought. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to clarify her last statement without being prompted, Hail decided to drop another quarter into the robot and get her talking again.

  “What type of special work would you need to do?” he asked.

  Terry smiled and said, “The cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine needs to be molded into a shaped charge.” She gave Renner a look.

  “Is that a problem?” Renner asked.

  Before the woman could answer, Kara asked, “What’s a shaped charge?”

  The little woman beamed with vitality, as if she had been waiting all her life for that particular question.

  Before Hail or Renner could stop her, she began with, “A shaped charge is known as the Munroe effect, named after Charles E. Munroe, who discovered it in 1888. It’s the science of focusing the blast energy by cutting a hollow or void cut on the surface of an explosive.”

  Terry stopped and looked at Hail.

  “Go on,” Hail told her, knowing how much enjoyment she was getting out of this.

  “The most common of the linear-shaped charge is conical, with an internal apex angle of 40 to 90 degrees. Different apex angles yield different distributions of jet mass and velocity. Small apex angles can result in jet bifurcation, or even in the failure of the jet to form at all, if you can believe that,” she laughed knowingly, “and this is attributed to the collapse velocity being above a certain threshold, normally slightly higher than—”

  “OK,” Hail interrupted. “That’s enough.”

  The woman stopped talking and looked as if something very valuable was yanked from her grasp.

  “I’m sorry,” Hail said, softening his tone. “But we’re short on time. Terry, I hope you understand.”

  The woman said nothing.

  Hail explained to Kara, “In a nutshell, if you cut a V-shaped notch into a block of RDX, and then place the RDX on a thick slab of metal, when it blows up it will cut the metal in half.”

  “Oh,” Kara said, content with Hail’s explanation.

  Renner told the group, “So it’s important to keep track of the shaped charges and the non-shaped charges, because the shaped charges need to be used only on the missile sections.”

  “Correct,” Garber said.

  “Am I correct in assuming outfitting this mission with both types of charges will not be an issue in a twelve-hour time frame?” Hail asked Garber.

  “It will not be an issue,” Garber said, making sure she kept her responses short and succinct.

  Hail looked back down at the photos, not because they were of any interest to him any longer, but the tranquil bland images helped him to clear his mind. He appeared to study the photos with such intensity that his crew began to look at them again believing they had missed something.

  A minute later, Hail looked up and said, “I can’t think of anything else. We need to have a quick meeting in the morning when we get the aerial photos of the warehouse. Those images will enable us to determine the final landing zone coordinates. But other than that, I think we’re ready to go.”

  “I must have missed something,” Kara said. “How are you going to get the explosives into the warehouse?”

  “We already discussed that,” Rugmon told her. “Remember, you were late to the meeting.”

  Kara thought that Rugmon might send her to the principal’s office for being late to class.

  “That’s OK,” Hail said, defusing the situation. “I’ll update you later on that. But right now, we need to agree on a time of the attack.”

  Hail let the question float around the room for a moment before suggesting, “What about 3:00AM tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll check the weather,” Mercier said.

  “I’ll check on the availability of the satellite,” Tran said.

  “We should have all the drones flight-ready by that time,” Rugmon confirmed.

  “Explosives will be ready before that time,” Garber said, one-upping Rugmon.

  Renner smiled, “I think we are a go.”

  “I think so too,” Hail agreed.

  “Let’s do this thing,” Hail said. “Gage, please meet with the pilots. Each needs to be assigned a specific task. If we have time, we should run this solution in the simulator and see if the weight, power and flight time make sense.”

  “I agree,” Renner said.

  “OK, let’s get to work,” Hail said.

  The meeting broke up, and the cre
w began heading for the door.

  “Gage, can I speak to you for a minute?” Hail asked.

  Kara was not heading out, remaining quietly next to Hail.

  “Privately,” he added, giving Kara the not so subtle hint to leave.

  “Sorry,” Kara said, and she turned to leave the room.

  Hail walked across the room and closed the conference room door behind her.

  “What’s up?” Renner asked.

  “You tell me. What did Kara talk about with her CIA buddies when she was up on deck?”

  “It was pretty straightforward,” Renner said. “She gave them a rundown on all of our mission activities since we left Indonesia.”

  “If you understood her, am I correct in assuming she wasn’t talking in her Zap-e-dee language or whatever she calls it?”

  “No, but then it didn’t sound like she was telling them anything she wouldn’t want us to know about. Like I said, it was just the facts.”

  Hail rubbed his chin. He stood in the middle of the room shaking his head slightly from side to side.

  “Why is it that I just don’t trust her? Is that a me thing, or do you feel it as well?”

  Renner laughed, “That’s one of my faults, Marshall. You should know that I always trust beautiful women, no matter who they work for. I don’t think I’m the right guy to ask.”

  “Big help you are,” Hail told his friend.

  “I think you have some feelings for the woman. That’s what I think,” Renner said, patting Hail lightly on his back.

  “No way,” Hail said, but somewhere hidden inside his brain were a few rogue cells that didn’t believe his own words.