Hail Warning

Gulf of Guinea — Aboard the Hail Proton

Over 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.