Operation Hail Storm

Maryland ― Andrews Naval Air Facility

The Hail Gulfstream was not shot down prior to touching down on the tarmac of Andrews 11,300-foot western runway. Hail was happy about that. He was also happy that the local time in Washington was 10:30AM. With a little luck and a big helicopter, Hail would be on time for his lunch with the President.

Hail had slept wonderfully on the flight across two oceans. After the first hour of trying to sleep in the chair, he had woken, drank some orange juice and crashed on the comfy bed in back. He never even stirred when they had landed and took on fuel in Dakhla. By the time they had arrived in Washington, Hail had cleaned up and put on a black suit that had been hanging in the plane’s closet.

Hail didn’t like wearing suits. Never had. But hell, he was going to lunch with the President of the United States and anything less than a suit would have been disrespectful.

The Gulfstream taxied up to the area where the President’s Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk was located. Of course both Marine One and Marine Two had been modified for comfort rather than military use. Hail deployed the Gulfstream’s stairs and grabbing the handrail, he eased himself out into the dry cool air, careful not to hit his head on the doorway.

In the background, he heard Marine Two start its engines and was pleased that his taxi was waiting. He just hoped that the pilots wouldn’t be too pissed off when he changed the destination while they were already in the air.

Hail made his way over to the big red, white and blue chopper. By habit, Hail saluted the military lieutenant who was dressed in BDUs and waiting at the open door of the helicopter. The soldier looked at Hail funny and then awkwardly returned the salute.

Hail immediately felt foolish. He knew why he had saluted the man. It wasn’t because Hail was in the military or had ever been in the military. It wasn’t because he was intimidated. It wasn’t from an outburst of patriotism. Hail had saluted the man because his father had always made him salute officers since he was a little boy. Instead of a hug, he was instructed to salute his own father every time he came home from the work. Just about any uniform with important insignia got Hail’s hand moving up to his forehead. Old habits were hard to break.

“Step in please, Sir, and sit down and buckle up,” the lieutenant said.

Hail did as the young officer instructed. The chairs were not nearly as comfortable as they were on his plane, but it would be a short flight and he thought he could endure it. The lieutenant followed Hail on to the helicopter and sat in the seat to Hail’s left.

Two pilots could be seen via a video camera and monitor. The lieutenant made a twirly signal with his finger and the rotors increased speed and the door was drawn shut. The Black Hawk rose straight up from the ground, made a hundred and eighty-degree twist and then leaned forward and began to gain speed.

Hail had flown the same model of helicopter in the simulator on the Nucleus and actually had more flight time on the Black Hawk than he had on the AgustaWestland. He considered asking the lieutenant if he could fly it, but then thought he might think Hail was crazy and throw him out the side door. Hail didn’t like the idea of being thrown out, so he kept his mouth shut. It was only a short fifteen miles from Andrews to the Whitehouse, but it was a nice ride. Hail looked down at the old and proud city below and felt absolutely nothing. It didn’t inspire him in the least and that worried him. Hail actually felt sick about visiting the Nation’s capital, but he knew why and he would confront those issues in about five minutes.

Hail leaned over to the lieutenant and yelled, “Put me down there.” Hail pointed at a spot on the ground below that was rapidly approaching.

The soldier looked at him, then looked at where he was pointing and then asked, “What are you talking about? My orders are to take you to the Whitehouse.”

Hail shook his head no.

“I’m going to walk to the Whitehouse. I want you to drop me off there, in that clearing between the Vietnam Memorial and Constitution Gardens.”

The lieutenant shook his head adamantly, no. “No way, my orders were to…”

“I don’t care about your orders,” Hail growled at him. “Either you drop me off right there or turn this tub around and take me back to my plane. I’ll let you explain to the President why I didn’t make my lunch date with her.”

The lieutenant looked confused and worried.

The lieutenant said, “Even if I wanted to, look, there are people down there.”

“They’ll move,” Hail argued. “I mean if you saw a massive helicopter coming down on your head, wouldn’t you move?”

The lieutenant hoed and hummed and Hail could tell that the soldier wanted to tell the pushy man to go screw himself, but the thought of being responsible for canceling a lunch with the President had the lieutenant conflicted.

In the end, the lieutenant put on a headset and talked into a microphone to the pilots up front. Via his headset, the lieutenant instructed the main pilot to set them down in the grassy area in front of the memorial.

At first, the main pilot looked confused and Hail thought he was going to have to argue with him as well. But after a moment or two, the pilot simply rotated the craft into a position directly above the grassy area, and began to very slowly lower the machine down to earth. The few people that were lunching or sleeping or drinking below, scattered as the wind turned into a breeze that turned in a squall, which turned into a tornado. By the time the Sikorsky’s skids sunk into the Washington soil, Hail couldn’t see a single person anywhere in sight.

The lieutenant still looked pissed as he yanked open the door.

“Don’t wait for me, I’ll walk,” Hail told the soldier.

Hail jumped out of the chopper and before he could even clear the blade-wash, the rotors began to spin up. It’s just natural that almost everyone ducks in the proximity of a helicopter taking off, which was silly. The machine’s giant blades are well above head-level and when they began to take on lift, they actually bend up toward the sky, moving even further away from head-level. Even so, Hail ducked his head as he walked out from under the big helicopter blades. Paper, sticks, leaves, trash; anything that was not growing into the earth or was too heavy to go airborne, went flying. Hail shielded his face as dirt and dust tried to sneak into the tiny slits that had become his eyes.

As the wind began to die down, Hail was able to open his eyes and see where the hell he was walking. Directly in front of him sat five small monoliths. Each tip of each tower was about thirty feet high. Each tower was a different color, the stone having been mined from each of the countries where the incident had taken place.

That’s the way it was commonly referred to. An incident. But it wasn’t an incident to Marshall Hail. It was the rapture. It was a million nuclear explosions. It was the planet being hit by a meteor the size of the moon. It was too big to even put into words and the word incident was an insult to him.

Then it had been referred to by the date, similar to 9/11. But that wasn’t how it got its name. It got its name by way of introduction. It got its name by reference. It got its name by every person who ever brought up the subject, starting with the words THE FIVE.

THE FIVE commercial jets were shot down in FIVE different countries, by FIVE surface-to-air shoulder-held rockets, by FIVE separate terrorist organizations, within FIVE minutes of one another. When newscasters talked about the incident it always began with THE FIVE airplanes that were… etc… etc… etc…

The horror, the outrage, the crimes against humanity, against families, against children, against the civilized world would become something as simple as THE FIVE.

Hail didn’t really care what it was called. There was no pleasant way to refer to the carnage that had taken place on that day just two years ago. The families of those souls who were lost didn’t give a damn what it was called. They just wanted their loved ones back, and no name, no matter how caring or elegant or compassionate, was going to do that. Hail thought that THE FIVE was just about as good as any other name.

On the highest point of this man-made hill was the only reference to his wife and little girls that he would ever see. He had never had the strength to come visit THE FIVE Memorial before. Hell, he barely had the strength to get out of bed. And Hail could argue the fact that time heals old wounds. Hail knew that time did not heal his old wounds. Each year the scars healed but his heart got heavier. He felt that one day it would just fall out and become as inert as stone. The only way to stop that process was to reverse the process, and that’s why Hail was in Washington. That’s why he had built up his business, his arsenal. That’s why he still got out of bed every day. That’s why he hadn’t stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It sure the hell wasn’t to go on living. He had done enough of that and where had that gotten him?

Hail trudged up the hill. His back hurt, but his heart hurt more. He could already feel the tears beginning to form before he had walked up to look at the first of five stones.

It was made of Colorado Yule Marble, same exact marble used to carve the Lincoln Memorial. The white obelisk sat in a perfectly straight line with the other four. Large slabs of black slate had been laid on the ground, creating a base in which the five pillars had been set. It was a pleasant seventy-five degrees outside, but Hail guessed that any kid who had stepped onto the shale surface in bare feet during a hot summer day had not stayed long.

The monolith he was standing in front of, on the far left of the others, represented the Virgin Atlantic flight 1082. Hail looked at the surface of the gleaming marble, but none of the letters carved into the stone indicated the flight number. Matter of fact, it didn’t have any indication of the flight or country or any other information. Just a list of names. Lots of names. Each name representing someone who had perished on that flight. But Hail knew that it was flight 1082 originating from Orlando, Florida and on its way to Gatwick airport in London. It had been a huge airplane, a Boeing 777 that was flying at full capacity with 660 passengers on board. Embedded in the bright marble were six hundred and sixty names, chiseled in long endless columns. The first name started down low. And when the last name had been etched in high enough where it was difficult to touch or see, then the engravers had started in on another column of names. When there was no more room for more columns, the chisel moved to another side of the pillar. Hail reached out and touched one of the names. Sarah Gartner. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know any of the people on this flight, but in a way, he knew them all. He knew how their relatives felt about their passing. Every name on all five shafts of stone was intertwined at some level, a specific frequency of consciousness that those who had not been affected by the horror would never understand.

Hail worked his big index finger inside the channel that formed the S in Sarah. Some sort of gold material, either gold-leaf or maybe just golden paint, made each of the names stand out against the white marble background. He snaked the tip of his finger from the top of the S to the bottom of the S.

Sarah Gartner.

She was someone’s child, maybe someone’s wife, maybe a mother, maybe a grandmother. But she sure the hell didn’t deserve to end up on this slab with all the other meaningless deaths that this monument represented.

Hail removed his hand and took a few side steps to his right, centering himself in front of the next stone.

He had watched the news when the memorial was being built. Hail knew what airline, what flight, what country and what group of human beings were being memorialized just by the color of the stone. The obelisk he was standing in front of was cut from a beautiful piece of red granite. The reddish feldspars gave the granite its color, but it was broken up with quartz crystals that were semi-clear greyish and purplish in color. This stone represented the Paris to New York flight AirFrance 1082. Its destination had been John F Kennedy International, leaving out of Charles De Gaulle, but it never made it. None of the flights represented by these stones had ever made it. Like the Orlando flight, the Paris aircraft was a huge Boeing 777 with 451 passengers on board. Without counting them, Hail was certain that there were 451 names chiseled into the surface of the red granite in front of him. 451 names that had been colored in golden paint. 451 people who never thought for a single second that this piece of hand-worked stone would represent their final resting place.

Hail looked around and didn’t see any other people around him. He guessed that the helicopter might have scared off some, but he didn’t sense that was the case. He looked to his left, down the hill toward the Vietnam Memorial. There were maybe a hundred visitors at that site. And it made perfect sense when he thought about it. There were roughly 60,000 names inscribed into the walls of that memorial. And only a fraction of that number was on these five columns in front of him. Sixty thousand families lost someone in the Vietnam War. If ten family members loved each of those soldiers then that yielded a potential of 600,000 visitors from just those loved ones; not to mention all the other friends, soldiers, tourists and the general public that wished to pay their respects. In contrast, there were only 1716 names on these stones. Just 2 % of the names compared to the adjacent memorial, but each of those names were just as important as the names on these stones. Every death mattered to someone, except for those terrorists who had caused them.

Next to the pretty red stone was a grey monolith. Simon Bolivar International of Maiquetia to George Bush Intercontinental. Caracas Venezuela to Houston in Texas. United 1045. Boeing 737. 205 dead. Golden names burrowed into grey sparkling granite. This had been a smaller plane so there were fewer names on the stone, but the monolith was the same exact size as all the others. Its smooth warm sides reached skywards, narrowing as it rose until it came to a sharp merciless point that seemed to want to go higher if not clipped by a chisel and a budget.

One pillar to the right was a rich thick green granite stone. Swirls of light and dark green meandered through the stone with thin rivulets of black and grey separating one swirl from another. To Hail, it looked like a mint milkshake that had been locked in time after only a few seconds of mixing. Green had nothing to do with the doomed Mexico City International to Miami International flight, except the Mexican flag did have some green in it. The Boeing 737 had 190 passengers that were obliterated only two thousand feet off the ground. The American Airlines flight 264 had lasted less than thirty seconds before the 9K333 Verba Russia man-portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile had taken it down.

Hail spent more time at the big green rock then he had at the others. Not because the names or the stone or the flight or the deaths interested him more than any of the others. He stayed there because he didn’t want to move to the next stone, the last stone in the line. He sensed that his heart-rate was increasing. He felt his heart push and strain to pump his thick lifeless blood through veins he now cared little about. A rush of anxiety coursed through him as he left the green stone and approached the black obelisk to his right.

It was called Taurus Black, a limestone from Turkey; black as Hail’s mood with lightning bolts of white that danced on the surface and then tunneled deep into the hard stone. He looked up at the top of the rock, afraid to look at the 210 names that were forever associated with this one stone. He looked up higher, past the top of the stone, past the haze that held in the city and on upward toward somewhere beyond, somewhere where life made sense and death never existed. He longed to go there. He wanted to hear his wife’s laugh. He wanted to hear the word Papa being said from thin lips suspended on tiny dainty voices. He wanted to smell strawberry shampoo in clean blond hair and sing stupid songs and read silly books and do all that stuff he had taken for granted.

Then he lowered his eyes and right in front of him were those special names.

Madalyn Hail, his wife’s name came first. Without giving it a conscious thought, Hail reached out and began running his finger through her name, tracing her lines, feeling the sharp edges of the stone press against his trembling hand. His wife’s name was on the rock and his wife had been a rock. All the moves, all the crazy business ideas, all the locations and customers and distance and months of separation, but she had kept it all together. She had kept everything running. She was a rock who had determined that the family came first, even if it meant that the girls would be tutored wherever they happened to be and that their education and happiness always came first. She was a great woman and Hail knew she was irreplaceable. There was no other woman on the planet for him and he would we be alone until one day he found her again; high above the five stones, somewhere in paradise.

His finger now fell to the name below.

Tabitha Hail, one of his twin daughters. She was the one who had always called him at work, the one who had always run to meet him with a hug at the door when he came home. His finger worked through her name as if he were perfecting a cut that was already flawless. “Hi Papa, did you have a good day at work?” he could hear her tiny voice say.

Tears leaked irrepressibly from Hail’s eyes and dripped from his chin to the black slate below.

Now his finger was tracing the name of Courtney Hail. She did not meet him at the door when he came home or call him on the phone at work to see if he was going to be late. Courtney prided herself on being more grown up than her sister, even though she was only five minutes older. But when the lights went off, Courtney was the one who got scared and came to her parent’s bed and squeezed into the middle and snuggled up close. Hail would give her a kiss on her smooth forehead and tell her there was nothing to be scared about. Then they would all fall asleep knowing that the boogeymen had been thwarted for yet another night in the Hail house.

Hail’s memories jumped back to the last time he had seen them in Istanbul at the Sabiha Gokcen International airport. It had been a long summer. A long fun summer. The family had hitched a ride on the Hail Proton cargo ship, leaving out of the port at Norfolk Virginia and taking the thirty-day voyage to the massive port in Kandla, India. It took almost a month to make the passage, but the Proton had all the same luxuries as the Nucleus. There was the pool, the sports, the movies, the simulators, the games and the great food. It was as much fun as a family could have when surrounded by 12,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. Once docked in India, Hail and his family forgot about the business and started having more fun.

Hail’s wife, Madalyn, had printed off a website called 52 Places to Visit in India Before You Turn 30.

Their daughters were eight, so that excluded them from the extremes of The Frozen River Trek at Chadar and the Backpack Across Northeast, as well as the Cycling in Nilgiris and a dozen other crazy-hard outings. But Hail’s family did visit the Living Root Bridges at Cherrapunji, drove through the forest of Bandipur, visited the temples and boulders at Hampi, saw the lighted Dasara in Mysore and visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar, along with about a dozen other adventures. The entire summer that year was spent in India learning about another culture.

Then the summer had ended. It was time for the family to go back to America and time for Marshall to go back to work. He would finish up overseeing the installation of three Hail wave reactors in India, before taking the Proton back to the United States.

But school was starting next week and his wife and the girls had to leave.

It was United 9257 operated by Lufthansa, flying out of Instanbul to a connecting flight in Duesseldorf at Duesseldorf International. It was a Boeing 737. There were 210 passengers aboard and Hail didn’t give a damn about two-hundred and seven of them. He only cared about three of them; the three that were hidden under both of his hands that were pressed to the black limestone. He was certain that the other people who were in pain over their loved ones didn’t give a damn about his special three names either. He found that all the love that was left in his empty heart could only be spent on those three names. He didn’t have any love left over for anyone else, including himself.

“Is this a bad time?” he heard someone say.

At first he wasn’t aware that the voice was real. It had been so quiet and he had been so absorbed in his grief that the voice didn’t even register.

Hail looked to his right and removed one arm from the stone and wiped his tears on the sleeve of his suit coat. He then looked at it, making sure it didn’t leave a stain, realizing he was supposed to wear this suit to have lunch with the President.

His blurry eyes cleared and he saw a familiar face ten feet from him.

“I take it, this is a bad time,” Trevor Rogers said softly.

“How did you know I was here?” Hail asked his old friend.

“Well, the Marine guys were pretty upset and they ratted you out to the President. I was in the other room and overheard the hubbub. It’s not a long walk from the Whitehouse to here.”

“You’re getting some grey hair, there, Trev,” Hail said, taking his other hand off the obelisk and walking over to stand next to Rogers.

“Yeah, it’s a family thing. If you remember, my Dad was grey as a goose by the time he was forty.”

“I remember. My Dad use to give him shit about it,” Hail said.

“And you look like you put on a few pounds,” Rogers scored back at Hail. “You were in better shape the last time I saw you at the…” Rogers’s voice trailed off into an uncomfortable silence.

“You can say it,” Hail told him. “It’s OK… the last time you saw me at the funeral. That was more than two years ago, but it wasn’t much of a funeral. There were no bodies.”

“Is that why you came here?” Rogers asked.

“Short answer is yes; the long answer is yes because I paid for this memorial. I wanted to make sure they did it right.”

Rogers knew Hail was lying. Not about paying for the memorial, but he was lying about the reason he was there.

“And did they do it right?” Rogers asked. “I mean to me it’s strange that the there are no flight numbers or countries or really nothing is on the stones but names. Shouldn’t there be more information?”

“None of that matters,” Hail said, turning to look back at the monument as if he were seeing it for the first time.

“Only the names matter,” he added. “No one cares about the dates or planes or countries, and at times like this, when there is nobody here, I don’t think they even care about the names anymore.”

Rogers didn’t say anything.

“With no bodies, this is the only place for me to go. You know… to see them,” Hail said, struggling to keep it together.

Hail looked back one last time.

“But I will never come here again. It hurts just too damn much,” he added in a tone as sorrowful as it was resolute.

More silence.

“Do you want to walk?” his friend asked, “Or should Marine Two come back and give you a ride?”

Hail laughed and then coughed. He wiped away moisture from the corners of his eyes with a flick of his finger.

“I think walking would be good for me. Don’t you?” he asked Trevor.

“That’s what they tell me,” Rogers said. He turned and faced Constitution Avenue and took a few steps. Hail fell in next to him.

“Remember in second grade when you tied Barbara Belcher’s hair to the back of her chair and then screamed fire?”

“Yeah, that was funny,” Hail chuckled.