Hail Warning

by Brett Arquette

  Kara shrugged, understanding that was the extent of the explanation. Kornev looked disappointed because she didn’t appear more enthusiastic about their impending trip. His tone changed when he said, “You understand we can’t possibly stay here. Those flying machines could arrive at that very window at any time,” he said, pointing at the sliding glass doors.

  He continued, “We need to go, and we need to go now. And I have some business I need to attend to as well, so—”

  “This is just all too crazy,” Tonya said, doing her best to portray a party girl who had found herself in a situation way over her head.

  Victor looked compassionate and said, “I understand how you feel, but I guarantee by tomorrow, you will have long forgotten all about this. Just you and me and some drinks and other fun stuff.”

  Kara was not enthused about the fun stuff the Russian was referring to, but keeping in character, she responded with a sigh and said, “OK, but so far, this is not what I expected. Can I have my cellphone back?” she whined. She thought it was a natural thing for someone in Tonya’s shoes to request.

  Kornev looked apologetic and explained, “I’m sorry, but that’s not a good idea. We don’t know if our phones are being tracked. I have them both shut off, and I also have them in a lead-lined pouch, so there is no way they can send a signal. These modern cellphones have all sorts of signals they send out, even when they’re shut off.”

  Kara gave Victor a disappointed look, as if he had again let her down, but she thought that was about all she could do for right now. Tonya Merkalov would probably be happy to be headed to a resort, even without access to her cellphone. Kara simply shrugged, gave a little smile of contrition and joyfully said, “OK, let’s go.”

  TWO YEARS AGO

  CARIBBEAN SEA—PORLAMAR, VENEZUELA

  I t was another beautiful day in the Caribbean, in the low 80s with lots of humidity but there was a pleasant breeze coming from the north. Isaac Obano could see thunderheads off in the distance, but they were of little concern to him. Afternoon thunderstorms were common, and the yacht’s Doppler radar screen showed no substantial severe weather within hundreds of miles of their current location.

  It had taken the Obanos two full days to navigate the yacht from Trinidad back to Porlamar. Isaac could have gotten there faster, but he wasn’t going to kill himself or lose sleep picking up the jihadi. As it was, he had already lost enough sleep due to the man’s actions. Picking up the terrorist still was akin to a flip toss. One side of the coin represented a substantial pay off in business, money and lifestyle upgrades. The other side of the coin was death. Not really a 50/50 outcome, if one placed a higher value on their life than their lifestyle. But Obano also ran the risk of losing his life if he didn’t return to Nigeria with Diambu. He didn’t know how upset the Boko Haram leaders would be, or what actions they would take, if he arrived without Diambu. Would they blame Isaac? There was no way to tell. The men of the Boko Haram were far from reasonable people. Everything they did, and every action they took, was done to either impress, intimidate or to enslave someone. Still, leaving the beauty and solitude of Trinidad to return to the dog-eat-dog country of Nigeria was depressing. In the back of Obano’s mind, he was formulating a plan to make a great deal of money in a very short amount of time. After that, he and his wife would leave Nigeria and go back to Trinidad, but this time, they would make it their new home. Nigerians didn’t know the meaning of the words voluntary retirement, and it was time for the Obanos to leave the country.

  Obano had called Afua informing him of their time of arrival. Like clockwork, Afua was waiting at the predetermined dock for the yacht to arrive. The tall jihadi struggled to stand as the Nigerian Princess moored next to him. Once on his feet, Afua placed a pair of wooden crutches under his armpits. He allowed his leg to dangle a few inches above the ground, swinging his body between the crutches, swoop by swoop, making his way towards the yacht.

  Giving a little wave to Afua, Obano swung the gangway into place. Working the controls of the winch, he lowered the stairs to the level of the dock. With both hands busy working his crutches, Afua did not return the wave. He looked like

  he couldn’t wait to get back aboard the Nigerian Princess. The tall Nigerian made a beeline toward the stairs and step-by-step, he climbed onto the yacht.

  “How are you doing, my friend?” Obano greeted Afua.

  Afua responded gruffly, “Let’s get going.”

  Obano immediately sensed that something was different. Before, Afua seemed to be somewhat easygoing. Well, as easygoing as a terrorist can be. As Afua immediately descended to the lower decks of the yacht, Obano sensed the man was troubled. Maybe his life-threatening leg injury had brought the fear of God into focus. But Obano knew that Afua didn’t fear God, any God. He also didn’t think Afua feared any man. So that just left the fear of death, which was more substantial than the fear of either God or man.

  “We are leaving,” Obano yelled down at the dock worker, who was still in the process of tying up the Nigerian Princess to the large dock cleats. The man below looked confused, but he understood. He immediately began undoing all the things he had done. Pressing the UP button on the gangway winch, the stairs began to rise and retracted into the yacht.

  Obano was troubled by Afua’s change in character. He hoped the man wasn’t wrestling with a moral issue like killing Isaac and his wife. He wasn’t going to be sleeping very well on their return trip.

  CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE HEADQUARTERS—LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  P epper understood he would be unable to contact his agent, Kara Ramey, while she was in the presence of Kornev. Instead he phoned Marshall Hail for an update on her activities.

  Hail answered on the second ring with the single word, “Yeah?”

  “This is Pepper,” responded the director of the CIA.

  “Yeah, I know. I have caller ID,” Hail said sarcastically.

  Both men understood that neither was their cup of tea. Something intended as an attempt at a light-hearted joke was not taken that way.

  In a blunt manner, Pepper asked, “Where is my agent?”

  Hail let Pepper eat digital static before responding, “She is currently in the air.”

  “What do you mean in the air?”

  “Exactly that,” Hail said. “She and Kornev are in the air flying in a southwesterly direction. Their current position is directly above the Red Sea.”

  “How do you know that?” Pepper asked.

  “Because we are following them in my Gulfstream,” Hail said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Pepper took a moment to absorb the information. He asked, “And I don’t suppose you know where they’re headed?”

  “I have no clue, but they will have to fuel up if they intend to fly off the continent of Africa. Kornev’s old cargo planes don’t have the fuel capacity to go any farther than that.”

  “Do you have any flight information so we can track them from here?” Pepper inquired.

  “No,” Hail replied curtly. “Kornev is purposely flying low, under radar; therefore, my educated guess is he didn’t file a flight plan. I don’t think that Kornev is a flight plan kind of guy.”

  When he gave Hail and Kara the task to turn Victor Kornev, an arms dealer into a CIA asset, Pepper understood there would be many mission elements outside his control. Hell, he was now even dependent on Marshall Hail to inform

  him of the whereabouts of his agent. If, for some reason Hail lost Ramey’s trail, she would be completely alone with no means up backup support. There was the possibility that Kara may still be in possession of her cellphone, but she had not texted her fake friend, a CIA number she was supposed to text every three hours. Pepper had to assume either she could not get a signal or her phone had been confiscated. This was not a deal killer. However, whenever an agent was out of contact for a prolonged period, it added an extra level of angst for Pepper and his CIA team. Kara’s phone was also rigged to send out a tracking signal. However, two hours ago the phone h
ad stopped sending out a signal. Pepper concluded her phone had not only been taken from her, but also had either been destroyed or quarantined in a compartment preventing signal transmission. Neither scenario gave him warm and fuzzy feelings.

  Hail waited patiently for Pepper to say something. After a moment of silence, Hail said, “I will contact you when they land.”

  “OK,” Pepper concluded the call.

  Just as Hail disconnected his phone call with Jarret Pepper, Dallas Stone appeared on a monitor mounted on the wall inside Hail’s Gulfstream. The monitors on the plane were interconnected in a round-robin fashion, so if one screen currently had a video call in progress, the next person calling in would appear on the next screen once the former call ended. Since there were a dozen screens mounted in different areas of Hail’s jet, he had adequate room for plenty of simultaneous video conferences. Currently, Dallas Stone was the only face appearing on a screen. Stone was physically located in the security center on the Hail Nucleus.

  “Hey, Marshall,” Dallas said. “We were recording video of Kornev’s plane on the tarmac of the Termez International Airport when we notified you they were getting ready to takeoff. We had Milky Way sitting atop the airport’s roof shooting the video. Initially, we didn’t see anything of significance. However, one of our analysts aboard the Hail Proton reviewed the recorded video. He saw something that you should be aware of. It may be of concern.”

  Hail said, “Show me.”

  Stone said, “I’m bringing up the video on screen number two.”

  Hail looked at the screen mounted to the wall. A clear video showed Kornev’s black Hummer pulling into the AIR CRESS area of the airport on the tarmac. An older Antonov An-26 cargo plane was awaiting his arrival. It was the same plane currently flying a few miles in front of Hail’s Gulfstream. On the recording, the cargo doors of the plane were opened. A single engineer dressed in a bright orange vest and coveralls greeted Kornev with a wave. Hail watched Kara get out of the Hummer and look around. Kornev went to the back of his Hummer, popped the hatch, dropped the tailgate and pulled out two small carry-on suitcases. He set them on the ground, but the cargo engineer made no attempt to pick them up. Then Kornev removed from his vehicle a very large black case. Kornev grimaced. Hail thought it looked like Kornev was in a mild amount of pain when he took out a second identical-appearing case. Kornev handed a case approximately 5-feet long by 1-foot wide by 1-foot deep to the cargo engineer, who quickly hustled it up into the plane. A moment later, the Air Cress employee returned to receive the second case from Kornev. The worker ran it up into the cargo plane, but this time he didn’t return. Kara and Kornev dragged their personal carry-on luggage up the ramp and into the plane.

  Dallas said, “That is a very strange shape for luggage, if you know what I mean?”

  Hail said, “I understand why you wanted me to see this. Those cases do not appear like any standard luggage of which I am familiar.”

  Renner had been watching the video as well. Nolan was flying the Gulfstream. Typically, Hail had his jet flown remotely by one of his pilots aboard the Hail Nucleus, but Nolan was excited about getting behind the stick. Hail had told him to knock himself out.

  Renner said, “There is absolutely nothing I can think of, other than a shoulder-fired missile that is that size. A gun would be in a smaller case and any standard-sized missile would not be in a case. Most likely it would have been in a crate of some sort.”

  Hail added, “And if it wasn’t for the fact that Kornev is an arms dealer, we probably wouldn’t even give the cases a second thought. But really, what else can they be?”

  Dallas asked, “What do you want to do?”

  Marshall said to Stone and Renner, “I warned Kornev the next time I caught him selling this wicked stuff to his clients he would pay for it. It’s time to make him pay. If he thought that little gunshot in his hand hurt, then he doesn’t know the meaning of the word pain.”

  Renner nodded his head in agreement.

  Hail told Stone, “Dallas, I want you to contact Captain Mitch Nichols on the Hail Proton.”

  Then Hail stopped and said, “Wait, just one second.” Hail put his finger in the air like he was freezing time. Hail took out a notepad and scribbled some math, keeping his “I’ve got a thought” finger in the air which he lowered when he began explaining the thought that had appeared out of thin air.

  “We will maintain our current heading and speed. Tell Mitch to intersect Kornev’s plane using Foreigner at these coordinates.” Hail read off a series of numbers. Offscreen, Stone jotted down the coordinates.

  “I want Foreigner armed with LOCO missiles—big and bad and prominent—so Kornev can see them. Have Mitch’s pilot fly right down in front of Kornev’s plane to the point of almost touching his plane’s windshield. I want that bastard to see Foreigner has plenty of armaments and can blow his ass out of the sky. Hopefully, once Kornev sees that we aren’t messing around, he will follow our instructions.”

  “Do you want the Hail Nucleus team to fly Foreigner?” Stone asked.

  “No, let Hail Proton’s pilots fly the drone. We’ve been stealing a lot of their thunder, and we need to let them have some fun.”

  “What are you going to do once Foreigner catches up with them?” Stone asked.

  “We need to force Kornev’s plane to land before they reach their destination,” Hail said. “Check your topographical maps using the coordinates I just gave you. After we fly over the Red Sea, are there any abandoned or unused airfields in Egypt?”

  Stone mumbled to himself that the entire Egyptian desert was one abandoned and unused airfield. A few minutes ticked by while Dallas searched for a location that would be suitable.

  “There is an old airfield on the outer edges of Eba National Park, although I don’t know why they call it a park. Looks like nothing but sand to me. I can’t even make out a single tree.”

  “That will work,” Hail said. “Send Nolan the coordinates so he can pour on the afterburners before Kornev gets there. With any luck, we can get this Gulfstream on the ground and get everything set up before Kornev sets down.”

  Hail took a moment to think over the situation.

  He then asked Dallas, “We had medium-class drones with us for this mission. Milky Way was left on the roof of the Termez International Airport. U2 was loaded on this plane with us. Does U2 have type 1 ammunition on board, as well as the gun to fire it?”

  “Yeah, it should,” Stone said. “The ammo and the other gun should be stowed in your cargo hold next to the drone. I think we have type 3 as well.”

  Hail asked Renner, “Gage, how long would it take for you to change out the gun and ammo on the drone?”

  Renner puffed out his lips, exhaled, letting his lips flap together.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  “Good, then we’ve got a plan,” Hail told everyone. “Dallas, make sure you notify me when Foreigner is in place and in front of Kornev’s plane.”

  “Will do,” Stone replied.

  “Good deal,” Hail said. “If those are indeed surface-to-air, shoulder-fired missiles Kornev loaded on his plane, he is going to be in a great deal of pain and will have some decisions to make.”

  “Works for me,” Renner said.

  Dallas clicked off the connection, and Hail went to the cockpit to fill Nolan in on their new plan.

  GULF OF GUINEA—ABOARD THE HAIL PROTON

  O ver the last two days, Mitch Nichols had spent more time launching drones from the hangar of the Hail Proton than ever in the past. He had received the call from Marshall just as Foghat had splashed down next to the cargo ship. Using the ship’s deck crane, his crew had plucked the attack drone from the water. While Foghat was being transported back to the drone’s service center, Foreigner was sitting on its back on the ship’s catapult, fueled up, with some new lethal munitions mounted to its underwing pylons. The drone’s communications had been tested, and it was exchanging bidirectional communications with the leased Russian
satellite.

  Installing the weapon pylons that held the LOCO missiles in place was a new process for Hail Proton’s crew. Hail had used drones with small winglet weapon pylons for years on his drones that had flown security surveillance over his shipments of nuclear material. But their crew had never had a need for the massive destructive power of the LOCO missile. Still their weapon specialists knew how to attach the pylons under the wings of Foreigner. They were also well-versed in the method of attaching the missiles to those same pylons. They had just never done it previously. The missiles were not big as far as missiles go. They were smaller than the older Hellfire missiles which were the mainstay weapon many branches of the military had used in the past.

  But as time marches on, the methods of miniaturization had created smaller packages yielding bigger bangs. One just had to look at the sizes of Fat Man and Little Boy—the nuclear bombs that had been dropped on the Japanese cities. As early as the 1950s, the field-fired Davy Crockett nuclear warhead had a projectile the size of a kid’s balloon, yet it had the same destructive yield as Fat Man and Little Boy. And the world’s military machines had 80+ years to make those types of WMDs even smaller. The LOCO was still a conventional warhead with a threefold-enhanced yield of destructive power. The small missile pulverized anything it hit, including multilevel-reinforced bunkers.

  Foreigner needed to get into the air quickly. Marshall had given Hail Proton’s crew a time and place for the rendezvous, and Nichols did not want to let his friend down. Hail had given Mitch and his crew more responsibilities than he had in the past. And, up to this point, his crew had delivered on each of them.

  “Faster, please,” Captain Nichols told his weapons specialists, calculating in his mind the distance the drone had yet to fly and the timetable Hail had given them.

  TWO YEARS AGO

  LAGOS, NIGERIA