Hail Warning

Philippine Sea — Aboard the Hail Nucleus

After ending the video conference with the Hail Proton, Hail and his staff turned to the other topic of the meeting. Hail said in a begrudging tone, “In return for the intelligence on locating Afua Diambu, the CIA has asked us to undertake a mission that I think is next to impossible, but that is pretty much what we do.”

Hail turned toward Kara and said, “Kara, you have the floor.”

Kara had been organizing information on her laptop for the last few minutes, poking her finger at keys and moving the mouse around the screen. She looked up from her laptop and pointed at the big screen on the wall.

“We have determined the location of the world’s largest arms dealer, Victor Kornev. He is staying in this house right here,” she said, pointing the laptop’s cursor to the sizable white house.

“Where is this house?” Nolan asked, recalling Kara’s boss mentioning the country was Uzbekistan — wherever the hell that was. But he couldn’t recall the town.

“Termez,” she said, zooming out on her laptop until the town turned into a country. “As you can see, it’s located in the southernmost tip of Uzbekistan.”

The group looked at the country and all the strange countries surrounding it, places that never came up in general conversations. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan were the countries that bordered Uzbekistan. The celebrity country of those four was certainly Afghanistan, having been in the headlines for years. But the others most people could barely pronounce.

“Why is he there?” Hail asked.

“Convalescing is what our advanced team has told me. He is on the mend from a gunshot to his hand, as well as several other injuries caused from being in the proximity of an exploding hotel in North Korea,” Kara said, shooting both Hail and Nolan a look.

Nolan looked as if he wanted to crawl under the table, but Hail shrugged it off and simply said, “I wish I would have killed him that day.”

“OK, enough of that talk,” Kara said in a scolding tone. “We know the plan is to turn him, and the only way we are going to do that is by first letting him know he has no other choice. And then, when he blows off our first warning, we’ll come back a second time, and then we’ll show him that we mean business.”

“And how do you want to warn him?” Hail asked.

“Face-to-face,” Kara said. “Your face-to-face meeting. Like I told you before, Kornev does not fear weapons. He fears the men behind the weapons. Thus, you need to have a face-to-face meeting to earn his respect.”

“What do you want me to do? Knock on his front door and when he answers, I punch him in the face?”

“That would probably not be a good idea, because he would just kick your sorry ass, and we would be back to square one,” Kara told Hail with a satisfied smirk.

Hail looked hurt, and she continued.

Kara zoomed in, and the country blurred before refocusing on Kornev’s compound.

“We need to get him out of his home, or compound, or whatever you want to call this fortress he is holed up in. We need to lure him out into the open, where there is no place to hide, and nowhere to run, and no chance of him having any backup support.”

Hail looked over the compound.

“Can you zoom out a little so we can get a layout of the town?” Renner asked.

Kara zoomed out and displayed five miles of the town surrounding Kornev’s home.

“Looks like a lot of farmland,” Nolan remarked.

Hail said, “Yeah, but look at the area north of the airport. It looks like nothing but desert. Not a lick of green anywhere for hundreds of miles. If we can get him out there, we can do anything we want to him.”

Kara looked at the area that Hail was referring to. He was right. On the map, it was labeled as the Surkhandarya Province.

Kara suggested, “The airport is very close to no-mans-land, the area you are talking about,” Kara said, resting the mouse pointer on the single runway. “If I e-mailed Kornev and let him know I was flying into the Termez airport, after one wrong turn, we would be headed into the desert.”

Renner asked Kara, “So, you just pull a gun on Kornev and insist he drive you to the desert?”

“I don’t want to give up my cover unless I have to,” Kara informed the group. “I don’t know what type of leverage we will need against Kornev, but being turned

by a female CIA agent might be more of a slap in the face than Kornev’s ego can handle.”

Everyone was quiet, each of them pondering the situation.

“If no one has any suggestions then I think I know a way,” Kara said.

“Is it going to blow your cover?” Hail asked Kara

“Nope, I would just be along for the ride. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

“I can handle that,” Hail said.

“OK, this is what we’re going to do,” Kara stated.