Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  “Will do,” Kara said.

  A pause and then Pepper asked, “How are you doing, Kara?”

  His question sounded distant and expressionless, like Pepper figured it was his job to ask such questions, even though he really didn’t care.

  “I’m fine. I will give you a call one way or the other,” Kara said flatly.

  “Sounds good. Keep up the good work. Goodbye,” Pepper said.

  Kara said nothing. In the dark, she watched the icons on her phone change as the transmission was terminated. She left the shelter of the massive radioactive containment vessels, walked out onto the running track and rested her arms on the ship’s railing. The night was bright. A full moon was out shining so brightly that Kara thought it resembled a mini sun. Somewhere in the bright night, Queen was on its way to do bad things. At least bad things to the North Koreans. Good things if you were on the other side of the explosions that would soon follow.

  The sea was still, and except for the air flowing past her from the four-knot forward speed of the ship, there was no wind at all.

  Sea of Japan—Aboard the Hail Nucleus

  T

  he mission control room was full tonight. All sixteen stations had pilots occupying the seats. Three-fourths were young men or boys, depending on who was making the determination, and the other stations were occupied by girls or women, with the same caveat.

  “What’s Queen’s altitude?” Hail asked Knox.

  “Two thousand feet,” Knox reported.

  “Has the glide path been plotted?” Hail asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Knox said. “We’re within gliding range and we are good to release.”

  Hail pressed an icon on his screen and patched in Dallas Stone who was working in the ship’s security center. “Hi, Dallas. Is there any unusual air activity around Wonsan that we need to know about?”

  The voice over the speakers said, “No, nothing on the radar. I’ve also been monitoring the video feeds from our drones stationed at the North Korean airfields, and no combat aircraft has taken off.”

  “Very good,” Hail said. “Please let us know if anything changes.”

  “Will do, Skipper,” Stone said.

  “Bring up the video from Blondie’s main camera,” Hail told Knox.

  The large screen above the controller’s station blinked on but nothing appeared.

  “What’s up with the camera?” Hail asked.

  “The camera is on and streaming, but there is nothing down there to see,” Renner said. “No lights, no nothing. Maybe when we get closer to Wonsan we’ll see something.”

  Hail asked Knox, “Are you ready?”

  “Sure am,” Knox said with a measure of excitement in his voice.

  “Then deploy the wings, recalculate the glide path and release Blondie from Queen.”

  “Deploying the wings,” Alex Knox reported as he pressed the appropriate icon.

  The nineteen-year-old pilot then pressed another icon labeled RELEASE and said, “Blondie’s in free fall.”

  Hail’s next order went to the mission pilot, Tanner Grant, sitting two stations away from Knox.

  “Tanner, get Queen home. Keep it slow and just above the tree line. We don’t want any blips on North Korean radar stations.”

  “Understood,” Tanner Grant replied.

  Hail knew each of his pilots to one degree or another. He had observed each of them in the flight simulator, and he and Renner had both certified these particular pilots for this mission. This was the very first mission for most of his pilots. Hail hoped it would be the first of many missions they would share together.

  Instead of gliding Blondie to its landing zone, Knox had become more of a spectator, relying heavily on Blondie’s computers to make critical flight adjustments. The night was windless, so keeping the drone pointed toward its landing zone was easy. And the rate of descent was a simple mathematical formula; ROD = GRAD x GS, which meant for a three percent glide slope, you multiply your groundspeed in knots by approximately five and you get the rate of descent in feet and minutes. The computers onboard Blondie were recalculating this formula fifteen times per second and making adjustments to Blondie’s flight surfaces and continually correcting for any anomalies. Essentially, the drone was flying itself. Blondie knew its landing coordinates—it knew its height and its rate of descent. Therefore, short of snagging a power cable (of which there were very few in North Korea), this part of the mission was simple. The decision to fly in as a glider meant that the approach and landing would be completely silent. A guard could be a hundred yards away and hear nothing when the drone touched down on the other side of the chain link fence.

  Hail glanced at the monitor connected to the armrest of his chair. A yellow line on a black background sloped from the top of the screen in the left corner to the bottom of the screen in the right corner. At the top of the yellow line was a kite-looking graphic that represented Blondie. At the bottom of the yellow line was a green horizontal line that represented the landing zone. Blondie was slowly sliding down the yellow line while white digital numbers indicated the drone’s speed, altitude, distance and time to its LZ.

  The room was quiet. Each of the pilots had pulled up the same plot that Hail was watching on their own screens. Blondie’s nose camera was turned on and sending back live video, and each of the pilots was watching that as well. But there was still not much to see. The warehouse was on the outskirts of Wonsan, and with only a limited amount of electricity, North Korea wasn’t a cityscape of dazzling lights.

  Knox would typically be announcing distance and altitude, but since everyone was watching the glide slope on their own monitors, he remained silent and kept his eyes on his instruments.

  “Communications status?” Hail asked Shana Tran.

  “Five by five. We have a really good night out there for flying. No clouds. Great signal,” she said.

  The glider was now halfway down the yellow line. The distance showed five miles. The time until landing showed sixteen minutes and five seconds.

  Hail heard the thick door to the mission center hinge open and saw Kara enter the room. She was holding her cellphone in one hand leaving her other hand free.

  She walked up and stood next to Hail. This time, Hail couldn’t offer her a chair if he wanted to because they were all taken. She had told him before that she liked standing, so he thought nothing of it.

  “I see you removed your underwear,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, I didn’t want to give these young people the wrong idea,” Hail replied.

  “That was some solid thinking,” Kara said. “So, what’s going on with Hail Storm?” she asked.

  Hail chuckled. For some reason, every time she said Hail Storm he thought it was amusing. It wasn’t that the name was funny. It was the fact that the CIA had to name everything they did. He assumed this was the case because they had so many operations going on at one time that they had to name them in order to refer to them. But he also assumed that each operation had a budget line associated with it, and all the financials were bundled under that name. It also had a little more flair when discussing the mission with Congress after it had become declassified. He was certain that they would rather discuss Hail Storm with Congress instead of Operation 19,304.

  “We’re about to land Blondie next to the warehouse in the LZ we selected on the photographs,” Hail told Kara.

  Hail pointed down toward his monitor so Kara could see the progress of the descent.

  The legend was pretty easy to follow. Kara saw that the kite-looking graphic was three-fourths down the yellow sloping line and nearing the green bar at the bottom.

  Hail then pointed up at the big screen above the controllers’ stations.

  “That’s the live feed from Blondie’s nose camera.”

  Kara had to take a second look at the screen to be sure she was looking at the correct monitor. It appeared to be turned off. The entire screen was black. And then, just when she was going to ask Hail about it, she sa
w a light below. A second later, she saw another light on the ground, far away. It was actually two lights close together. Kara thought it must be a vehicle of some type.

  “Not exactly Times Square down there, is it?” she said.

  “Nope,” Hail said. “Good thing we’re navigating by GPS, or there would be no way to land this thing.”

  Kara thought about taking this last moment before the drone landed to tell Hail about Washington’s back-up plan. If his operation was called Hail Storm, then Hail Mary would be a good name for the back-up mission. Kara knew that North Korea had been steadily building up its anti-aircraft missile installations. They had purchased much of their equipment from Victor Kornev. And, in just the past few years, North Korea had also purchased and installed the new Chinese radar that could detect a stealth aircraft, but not clearly enough to give an accurate location to an interception missile. Still, this meant that the North Koreans could scramble their fighters to intercept such an incursion into their country. Kara felt sorry for the poor sucker that had volunteered to fly that mission. She hoped it would be unnecessary.

  “Getting close to touchdown,” Knox reported.

  Kara watched the live video being sent from the drone, and she thought it was useless. A flash of light here, a streak of moonlight there, and that was the best the video had to offer. The pilot they called Knox wasn’t even looking at the video feed. He was watching a bank of virtual gauges and holding onto the controls, but he didn’t appear to be actually flying the machine.

  “Hundred feet and flaring to fifty knots,” Knox said, but he made no significant action Kara could detect.

  Hail saw Kara watching Knox and said, “The drone is flying in autopilot. Remember when we were on my jet and I told you that the plane could take off and land itself?”

  Kara nodded.

  “Well, that’s what Blondie is doing now. The only unknown is how far it will slide when it hits the landing zone. The grass and weeds in the field are wet and slick.”

  “Fifty feet,” Knox announced.

  “Release the skids,” Hail ordered.

  Knox touched the screen and confirmed, “Skids released.”

  “What are the skids?” Kara asked.

  Hail took a moment before answering.

  “They resemble skis and are tucked up inside the drone to prevent drag when it’s flying. When we’re getting ready to land, we deploy the skis, or skids as they are called, instead of landing wheels. The skids weigh less than wheels and don’t require the extra weight of brakes. They stop the aircraft by using friction. The skids have short spikes on the back of them. After the drone touches the ground, if we lift the nose of the drone, the skids roll back onto their spikes which dig into the ground and quickly slow down the aircraft.”

  “Neat idea,” Kara said.

  “Old Rugmon came up with that one,” Hail told her.

  “Good old Rugmon,” Kara said dryly.

  Now closer to the earth, shapes and forms began to show up on the video as the bright moon illuminated the ground and the landing zone dead ahead. To the right, the warehouse was clearly visible. A bright sodium vapor lamp was mounted to each corner of the building, casting out a wide cone of light that glittered off the newly installed barbed wire fence.

  The video swayed from side-to-side a little, but Kara thought it was surprisingly stable considering that no one was flying the drone. Or maybe the opposite was the case. The reason it was so stable was because a computer was flying Blondie and not some nineteen-year-old pilot. In either case, everyone in the room stopped breathing for a moment. The ground, which had looked brown only a second ago, now looked somewhat greenish as the nose of the aircraft skimmed just a foot above it. The video chattered and blinked and jerked as the drone’s skids dug into the soft earth.

  Knox stepped on his control pedals, instinctively activating brakes that were not in fact brakes at all, but it made him feel better to do something. Once the aircraft had touched down, it took only a matter of four seconds before it came to a complete stop.

  Quickly Hail ordered, “Microphone on, please. I want to determine if we can hear anything.”

  “Like boots running toward Blondie?” Kara asked.

  “Yeah, just like that,” Hail said.

  The microphone was opened, and the room was flooded with the sound of a million popcorn kernels being shaken in a metal trash can.

  “Turn it down,” Hail said. “What the hell is that?”

  Pierce Mercier, who had been sitting very quietly at his station, fielded the question.

  “Cicadas, or the more common term is summer crickets, known as “Maemi” in Korean. En masse, their call for a mate can reach in the neighborhood of 90 decibels or above.”

  “Well, we’re not going to hear anything with that racket going on. Shut off the microphone and take the camera up and do a three sixty, and let’s see what there is to see,” Hail told Knox.

  Near the front of the drone, a small round hatch on Blondie’s back popped open. A telescoping monopod slowly grew from the hole. On the tip of the pole was affixed a motorized 360-degree pan head. Mounted on the pan head was a small high-definition camera. The black drone sat on its long belly in the deep weeds and grass with only two feet of its profile exposed. The camera’s monopod extended Blondie’s horizontal elevation another three feet—high enough to clear even the tallest grass in the field.

  Knox slowly rotated the camera as Hail had instructed.

  The crew watched nothing but blackness for three-fourths of the camera’s rotation. In the last quarter turn, Knox stopped the camera when the warehouse centered into frame.

  Hail took some time to look over the building.

  The warehouse was galvanized grey in color. Hail estimated it was about 40 feet high, and the side they were looking at was about 300 feet long. The aerial photos they had received from the CIA had already provided the team with overall dimensions of the warehouse, everything but its height. Even with all that information they had collected from outer space, there was nothing like looking at the warehouse from ground level to get an idea of the layout.

  Hail detected some sort of movement in the right corner of the frame. A dark figure was crossing under one of the bright lights.

  “Zoom in on that guy,” Hail told Knox.

  Knox adjusted the camera to the right and tightened up the shot.

  A soldier in a drab grey North Korean uniform was walking slowly down the side of the warehouse. He had a shiny black AK-47 slung over his shoulder. His strides were short and indifferent. He walked with his head down, looking at the ground.

  “Is that guy awake?” Renner asked.

  “Let’s hope not,” Hail said.

  The camera tracked the soldier as he walked halfway down the side of the building and then stopped. The soldier then stood still, raising his head and looking off into the night. In fact, he was looking right at Blondie’s camera.

  “Say cheese,” Knox quipped.

  Of course, the crew understood that there was no possible way the man could make out the black drone in the dark field a hundred yards away. He was simply killing time, waiting there instead of finishing his rounds. The guard’s body language said, “I’m tired and need a good night’s sleep.” Hail could only guess how long the guy had been trudging around or the last time he had slept.

  They continued to watch the man stand on the side of the warehouse. Eventually he backed up and began leaning on the building.

  “What are you waiting for?” Kara asked Hail.

  We need to see what this guy does,” Hail told her. “Either he’s going to walk all the way to the back of the building and check it out, or he is going to kill time on the side before walking back to the front. Either way, we need to know if there is some sort of guard schedule and if so, where do they go.”

  “This guy looks like the only thing he is patrolling is the inside of his eyelids,” Kara responded.

  “That works for me,” Hail said. />
  The soldier now looked as if he had literally fallen asleep. He continued to stand, leaning on the side of the warehouse, shoulders sloped, head down pointed toward the ground.

  “Knox, wake up Black Eyed Peas and Electric Light Orchestra. Run a full system check on them. I need to know how much video time and communications time each drone has left.”

  Knox began flipping through screens and pressing icons. It took him a few moments to collect the information.

  “ELO has about two hours of power left to facilitate the communications between BEP and the satellite.”

  He paused for a second and flipped to another screen.

  “And BEP has a little over three hours of power left to stream video.”

  Hail checked the time; it was 3:15 a.m.

  Kara checked the time on her phone as well—3:15 a.m. She knew that Hail would be cutting things close and wrestled with telling him her little secret. Best outcome would be that Hail would quickly complete the mission, and the airstrike would be called off. Worst outcome would be that he would run long and the jet would polish off the warehouse. She decided to wait a little longer and see how things progressed.

  Hail’s phone went off and he answered it.

  “Hello,” was all he said.

  “Hey, Marshall. This is Dallas. We played back the last phone call Ramey made to Pepper. The time set for the airstrike is still set for 4:00 a.m. Pyongyang Time.

  Hail wanted to say damn or some other expletive, but with Kara standing next to him, all he said was, “I understand,” and he pressed the END icon on his phone.

  He looked at Kara inquisitively for a moment, as if his gaze alone might prompt her to spill the beans.

  Kara looked back at him innocently.

  If he confronted her with the information, then she would know that they were still monitoring all of her communications. That was an advantage Hail was unwilling to give up at this time. And this would not be the best time to get into a pissing match with the CIA operative. He needed to get the operation moving quickly considering that there was less than forty-five minutes left.

  He looked away from Kara.