Operation Hail Storm

Strait of Malacca — on the cargo ship Hail Nucleus

The Hail Nucleus tanker was registered in Panama. It was a Panamax class 80,000 dead-weight-ton bulk cargo ship. The vessel had taken on cargo off the east coast of the United States and was currently heading for its first off-load in Indonesia. Deep inside the belly of the ship was a sophisticated command and control center.

“Holy shit! We’re taking fire,” yelled Alex Knox. He was sitting comfortably at a command station in front of four high-definition monitors. In his left hand, Knox yanked a control yolk to the right and pushed a pedal with his right foot. The image on two of his screens blurred as the video being sent from drone’s cameras pointed skyward. A blast of sunlight burned the monitors white for a brief second and then a moving video of the ground came back into view.

“What do you mean, we’re taking fire?” the ship’s captain, Marshall Hail responded.

Hail was sitting in the center of the mission room in a massive swivel chair that could be mistaken for that on the star ship Enterprise. Two twelve-inch monitors were mounted to the sides of each arm rest.

Using his right hand, Knox pulled the joystick backwards and said in a sarcastic tone, “You know, like bang-bang, someone is shooting a big gun at Eagles.”

Hail looked down at his left monitor and touched an icon on the screen, flooding the room with the audio being streamed by the drone. Most of the sound was that of wind whipping at the microphone on the bird-like drone. And then Boom… Boom… two sharp cracks rattled the speakers over their heads.

“Who is shooting?” Hail asked. His voice was all business.

Of the sixteen flight and control stations that circled the room, only eight of them were being manned by Hail personnel. The current mission did not require sixteen butts in all sixteen chairs. Eagles was being flown by Knox.

“Do we have eyes on the shooter?” asked Hail in a calm but commanding tone.

Knox made a flight adjustment and answered, “I was repositioning Eagles when I heard the first shot. I wasn’t watching the ground feed.”

A second later, “Man-o-man, Eagles has some sort of damage,” Knox yelled. “I can’t turn her to the right. Don’t those idiots know that the Eagle is a protected species?”

Hail let out a sarcastic laugh. “In a country that kills their own people at the drop of a hat, I don’t believe that Eagles or any other living creature is protected in any way. Renner, run diagnostics on the bird and pull up the last minute of video that Eagles recorded.”

Sitting at the control station to the left of Knox, Gage Renner typed in some commands on his keyboard and responded, “Diagnostics are running and I am pulling up the video on large monitor number two.” Renner was a hairy, thin, wiry guy in his forties who was dressed in gym pants and a tee-shirt that stated, “I look better in 8K”. The shirt was supposed to be some sort of joke that only video nerds thought was funny, but Marshall Hail couldn’t care less. Gage Renner was an aeronautics genius and one of the original designers of the bird-drone. He was also one of Hail’s best friends and had been his roommate at MIT.

Alex Knox wasn’t dressed much better than Renner. His tee-shirt had a hand stenciled message on the front that read, “I’m with the stupid guy in the 8K shirt,” and the finger on the hand was pointing at Renner. The antithesis of Renner, Knox was young, nineteen years old and had long clean brown hair. He’d been recruited by Hail because he was the winner of the X-Wing Fantasy Flight Game contest. At nineteen, Knox was one of Hail’s older remote pilots and his skills with remote aircraft were astounding.

Twelve eighty-inch monitors were mounted above the sixteen command stations, creating a perfect circle of displays that looped around the room and touched end to end. The video of the last minutes of Eagles’ flight appeared on big screen number two, directly above both Knox and Renner.

The video was high definition and crystal clear, however the people on the ground were still very small. Even so, Hail could clearly make out a long rifle being delivered into the hands of Kim Yong Chang by one of his servants. It only took about ten seconds for the General to point the gun skyward and to fire two quick shots.

“Damn,” Hail said.

Without looking up from his monitor, Renner reported, “Diagnostics shows that the actuator controlling the right wing is out. Don’t know if is physically gone, wasted or the wiring is damaged.”

“Losing altitude,” Knox reported, talking over Renner. “We need to figure this shit out before Eagles lands in their pool.”

Hail considered his options and none of them were good. The pickup and delivery drone, code name Foghat, was waiting patiently for dust off, four-feet under water in a tributary of the Nam-Gang River. That placed Foghat’s location thirty miles away. Too far away to do them any good right now.

And then, boom-boom, another report from the gun on the ground popped through the speakers and both of the video feeds from the bird’s eyeball cameras went black.

“Oh shit,” yelled Knox. “That was a bad one. I think they just shot Eagles head off.”

Realizing that his mission options were being eliminated by the second, Hail asked, “Can we make it to the river?”

Renner responded by saying, “If you want to make the river, Eagles will have to do a burn cycle to gain some altitude.”

“Can we do a burn with the bird’s head gone?” Hail asked. “Isn’t the intake to the rocket on the front of the drone?”

“I don’t know if the burn will work, but really, what’s the downside to it?” Renner asked rhetorically.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Hail agreed. “Knox, do a burn and see if you can get Eagles out of theater. I’d like to save that drone if at all possible. If it flies, then fly it.”

“Will do,” Knox responded.

Pushing an icon on his control monitor labeled ROCKET IGNITION, Knox waited for something or possibly nothing to happen. With the bird’s cameras out of commission and with no visual reference, Knox was completely reliant on the drone’s avionic gauges and dials that were displayed on his forth monitor. He watched the air-speed indicator rise as the rocket propelled the drone forward.

“Fifteen seconds left on the burn,” reported Renner.

“Yeah, yeah, this looks good,” Knox said in an upbeat tone. He pushed his feet into the control pedals and watched the altimeter gauge climb.

Suddenly and without warning, the avionics display went blank and was replaced with two words.

Signal Lost

“Ah shit, we just lost the uplink to Eagles,” Knox yelled. His tone was pleading as if he expected someone to help him.

To the right of Knox sat Shana Tran, who was in charge of communications. Tran said, in a matter-of-fact yet firm tone, “You’re low and flying between two tall hills. Acquiring a signal in that area and at that low altitude is problematic at best.”

Unlike her two co-workers, Renner and Knox, Shana always dressed nice; typically, a dress of some type that showed off her long legs. She was tall for an Asian woman, but she liked being tall. Tall, smart and sexy. Yeah, that all worked for her just fine.

“Well, excuse the hell out of me and my headless bird,” Knox shot back.

“Stay cool,” Tran told him. “You will be out of the hills in what ― twenty seconds. And you’re still gaining altitude from the burn, so you should reacquire anytime now.”

Five seconds clicked by with nothing on the monitors but a handful of frozen words. The eerie sound of wind flapping through the room was gone as well.

Shana Tran looked confident in her assessment of the communications issue and she was far from panicking. Instead of getting all worked up about it, she inspected her long red fingernail polish to make sure there were no chips. She periodically glanced back at her monitors after each finger. Tran’s MIT degree focused on satellite communications and computer science. When it came to mission planning that involved network, Wi-Fi and satellite communications, Hail trusted her completely.

The avionics display in front of Knox flickered twice and then snapped back on.

“Are we good?” Tran asked everyone in the room, but her question was intended for Knox.

“Yeah, we are good.” Knox said, still shaken by the outage. He was pleased to see that the bird had gained almost five hundred feet and was headed in the direction of the Taedong River.

“No, we’re not,” Renner yelled a moment later. “We’re on fire!”

Down on the ground, Kim Yong Chang grunted the Korean words, “Got it,” as he released the trigger of his hunting rifle.

Both of his girlfriends had yelled, “No, no,” in high-pitched unison. “Don’t shoot the bird,” they had pleaded with Chang. But he had ignored them and shot the bird just the same.

Chang lowered the rifle from his cheek and watched the bird jerk to the left, doing its best to maintain flight while dealing with a fresh gunshot injury.

“It’s OK, look it’s OK,” one of the ladies said. “It’s still flying.”

“Not for long,” Chang stated in a confident tone and put the rifle back up to his eye and took aim using the gun’s iron sites.

“Don’t, don’t,” both women began chanting.

“Shut up,” Chang told them as he squeezed off two more quick rounds.

The gun barked and bucked against Chang’s shoulder as two shells ejected out the side of his weapon. Chang lowered the gun and waited for the effect. He thought he saw the eagle’s head pop off, but as the bird flew away, he decided that it must have been a clump of feathers. After all, no bird could fly without its head. Less than ten seconds later, the tall trees at the edge of Chang’s property obstructed his view and then the bird was gone. He handed the gun back to his waiting servant and noticed tears forming in his girlfriend’s eyes.

“Silly women,” was all he had to say to them.

Kim Yong Chang sat back down at the table, put a cloth napkin back in his lap and began to eat some toast.

“Can the bird be seen by Chang?” Hail asked, his tone measured yet urgent.

Knox responded, “No, we’re already a kilometer off the target.”

Comforted with the news, Hail smiled and said, “Well that’s good. Nothing like shooting an eagle and watching it catch on fire. That’s normal, right? I mean that happens every day, doesn’t it,” he said sarcastically.

“About one kilometer to the river,” Knox announced.

Renner,” Hail asked, “How bad is the fire? Can it fly? Are we going to make it to the water?”

Renner checked his diagnostic screen.

Renner hummed concern in the back of his throat before saying, “I really don’t know, Marshall. It’s going to be close. When the bird’s head was shot off, the bullet must have clipped the front end of the rocket tube and angled the exhaust port into Eagles’ tail feathers. Even though those feathers are synthetic and fire resistant, it melted the shit out of a lot of them. I think we are going to have an issue with horizontal control.”

“Check it, Knox,” Hail ordered.

Alex Knox pushed the foot pedals down and then let them back up.

“Very sluggish,” Knox reported. Down is no problem, but up may be an issue.”

“Down is never a problem,” Hail commented. “That’s why God invented gravity.”

Turning his chair thirty degrees toward Tanner Grant, their current mother-drone pilot, Hail asked, “What is the dust-off status of Foghat?”

“Not going to happen in the timeframe we have, Skipper,” Grant responded grimly. He typed on some keys and came back with, “Thirty seconds to blow the ballast and surface and another two minutes to get airborne. At best speed we are ten minutes away, so…”

“So I hate to lose Eagles,” Hail interrupted. His tone was gruff and combative. “A billionteen hours went into that design. If there is any way to save that bird, then…” his words trailed off.

Hail wanted to save the drone, but deep down he knew that it was irretrievable. The bird had to go away. It couldn’t fall into anyone’s hands, no matter whose side they were on.

Finally, giving in to the inevitable, Hail said, “Grant, keep Foghat underwater until nightfall and let’s get these loose ends tied up.”

“Yes, Sir,” the eighteen-year-old responded. Grant was another gaming flight champion, but the boy had also mastered helicopter and car driving skills as well. Hail had hired him by telling him he was going to fly F-35s for the Air Force. It was a lie, but Grant had actually flown the new jet in one of Hail’s simulators, so it wasn’t a complete lie.

If Shana Tran’s opinion meant anything, then Grant was the best looking of the current mission crew. He was clean, blond short trimmed hair, good cheekbones and dressed in nice clothes, khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt that had the Hail company logo stitched into the fabric. Shana thought that Grant could even be considered cute if he ever removed his face from a monitor long enough for someone to notice.

“Twenty seconds until splashdown,” Knox reported.

Except for the sound of the omnipresent wind pouring in from the command center’s speakers, the room was silent. No one spoke. They just waited.

“Ten seconds,” Knox said. He checked his latitude and longitude headings as he eased the drone down toward the river below. He bent the joystick to the left and pressed both pedals down a half-inch.

“You got it, dude,” Grant encouraged his fellow pilot.

“Deploy the antenna float,” Hail ordered.

Shana Tran hesitated for a moment and then touched a red icon on her screen and reported, “Com antenna float has been deployed.”

“Five, four, three, two, one and splashdown,” Renner reported as if they had just returned from space.

A large whooshing sound shot through the room’s speakers and then the command center went deathly quiet. No wind. No water sound. Nothing.

Hail let the room decompress for a few moments. He felt a sickness in his stomach that he got when he let people down; let himself down.

He asked Tran, “Do we still have an uplink with Eagles?”

“Yes, Sir. The float is up and the drone is online.” Tran replied, watching an active data stream on her monitor being exchanged with the sunken drone.

Whereas the mother-drone Foghat, who had dropped Eagles onto station three days ago, was fully submersible, Eagles was not. The bird-drone was designed to contend with heavy rain; where its vital computers, cameras and control motors, would remain in service, but it was not designed to be under water. When Hail had asked for the communications antenna to be deployed, everyone knew why. The mission crew understood that only one signal could be sent to the drone via that communication link.

Hail took some time to think over the situation. He looked around at the eight people in front of their eight consoles who were busy typing and pressing icons, collecting information they anticipated Hail might ask for at any moment.

He loved this place, this room. It had taken over two years to complete, but it was everything he had hoped for. It was his future. It was his new beginning.

Behind the sixteen command stations were two more stations that sat a foot higher on an upper tier. And behind those analyst stations, up one more tier was Hail’s captain’s chair. The stations behind the pilots were reserved for the mission analysts.

Pierce Mercier was sitting in one of them. The other analyst station to his right was empty. Pierce Mercier’s main area of expertise was wet craft. He was their ocean, river, reservoir, pool and basically anything wet expert. He was also an expert in anything plant, animal or insect. Mercier had a funny French accent and the Hail crew constantly made fun of him. He was tall, quiet, refined and polished in a manner that most of Hail’s young crew was not. Marshall had hired Pierce directly from the École Polytechnique (ParisTech) after reading a few of his published papers on Oceanography. Mercier was in his forties and a contemporary that could talk directly to Hail. As a bonus to the mission crew, Mercier acted as a father figure to the young pilots.

“What are the chances of recovering Eagles from the river?” Hail asked Mercier.

Mercier had anticipated the question and instantly responded, “Not good. We are talking about twenty feet down, heavy silt, fast current and the bird will weigh at least twice its flight weight considering how much water it’s taking on.”

Hail didn’t respond.

Mercier felt he should say something more, something positive and added, “I don’t think we can save it remotely. But if we put divers into the water, we could get it back. But that is not going to happen. Is it? That’s not what we do.”

Hail let out a big long breath, an action as close to defeat as Marshall Hail would ever exhibit in front of his crew. He then composed himself, rubbed his chin with a long contemplative stroke and said in a poised tone, “No my friend. That is not going to happen.”

Hail swiveled his massive chair toward Renner.

“How much video did we record?”

Renner glanced at a screen and responded, “About seventy-two hours.”

“That should be enough,” Hail said to himself.

The captain of the Nucleus bunched his lips together and shook his head slightly, recalling how proud his avionic engineers were on the day they had completed the build of the astounding bird-drone. As the tech guys ran Eagles through its paces, everyone involved felt as if they were all little kids with the coolest toy on the block. The drone wasn’t perfect out of the gate, but then most ground-breaking technology is rarely good-to-go on the first go-around. After a few months of tweaking, the half a million-dollar bird was ready to go on its first mission. None of them would have guessed that the demise of the aircraft would come at the hands of a crazy North Korean politician who shot it out of the sky with a hunting rifle.

Hail took in another long breath and let it out slowly. It was his method of dealing with anxiety.

“Blow it up,” he told Knox.

“Are you sure, Skipper?”

Hail didn’t say anything; he just nodded once and tensed his jaw muscles.

Knox typed in a password and pressed an icon on the screen labeled SELF DESTRUCT. He held his finger on the icon as a timer began to count down. If he removed his finger, the countdown would be discontinued. As each digit was displayed, a bright red light pulsed under Knox’s finger. A loud mechanical female voice came through the room’s speakers and read off the numbers.

Ten, nine, eight…

No one in the room spoke. They all just waited for the end.

At zero, the drone known as Eagles, the first and only one of its species, dematerialized at the bottom of the Taedong River in an explosion that was heard by no one.

“Eagles is gone,” Knox said softly.

“Yeah, but it did its job and collected the data and video we needed,” Hail commiserated.

Hail checked the time on his right monitor. 10:30 in the morning and the Nucleus was running on time and was nearing the South China Sea. Hail suddenly felt very tired.

He turned toward Renner. “Can you copy all the video that Eagles shot to my NAS so I can review it tonight?”

“Sure thing, Marshall,” Renner said.

The rest of the crew was looking at Hail and waiting for any further instructions.

“Do you need me here tonight when you clear Foghat out of the theater?” Hail asked his crew.

On behalf of the crew, Pierce Mercier responded, “No, we have it Marshall. Take whatever time you need to plan what you want to do next.”

“OK,” Hail said and slid out of his Captain Kirk’s chair and on to his feet. He stretched for a moment, noticing how stiff his forty-year old body had become from just sitting in the chair for… for… How long had he been sitting in the chair? It must have been at least five hours. He needed to pee.

“Let’s meet tomorrow and go over what we’ve been planning. If all the pieces fit, then I don’t see any reason why we can’t start the operation tomorrow night,” Hail told his crew.

Hail looked around the room. “Does that sound good to everyone?”

There was a mumbling of “Yes, Sirs”, “Yeahs”, “OKs” and even a “That’s cool” that drifted through the sullen room.

Marshall Hail exited the mission center and began the walk down the seemingly endless hallway of deck number six. He was both tired and exhilarated from the events that had transpired over the last three days. His lower back was bothering him and he knew it would feel better if he did a work out. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

After walking about five-hundred feet, Hail stopped at a door that looked like all the other metal doors on the ship and reached for his badge. Thick black letters had been stenciled onto the door’s shiny white paint that spelled the words SHIP SECURITY. Hail used his proximity card to swipe himself in. The room behind the heavy metal door resembled a smaller version of the command and control center he had just left. There were four men and two women sitting behind control stations that also looked just like the control stations in the mission room.

Two of the six people were in charge of flying the drone and drone-blimp combinations. Two others analyzed the radar, images and video that was streamed back from the airborne drones. And the other two were the killers. They operated the attack drone’s weapon systems, which consisted of two AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, two 70mm rockets and a 30mm automatic cannon with up to 1,200 high-explosive, dual-purpose ammunition rounds.

The weapon controllers also operated the ship’s own weapons systems. The top deck of the Nucleus had a perimeter of two-thousand one-hundred and twelve feet. Spaced every hundred feet along the hull of the Nucleus was a porthole. Behind the water-tight automated porthole hatches sat two guns at the ready. Each set of guns was mounted to a reticulating platform. The Browning M2 .50-caliber Heavy Machine Gun, better known as the “Ma Deuce”, was mounted next to the XM307 ACSW Advanced Heavy Machine Gun. The M2 could spit out 850 rounds per minute of armor-piercing incendiary rounds that could perforate an inch of hardened steel armor plate at a distance of a hundred yards. The XM307 was denoted as a heavy machine gun, but in fact it was a twenty-five millimeter belt-fed grenade machine gun with smart shell capability. The XM307 could kill or suppress enemy combatants out to two-thousand meters and destroy lightly armored vehicles, watercraft and helicopters at one-thousand meters. The company who built the XM307 cancelled the project for the gun in 2007. Hail acquired the rights and had the gun redesigned and built exclusively for his ships and to protect his land-based nuclear reactor installations. All the way around the Nucleus, twenty sets of the guns sat at the ready, fully loaded, each gun outfitted with thousands of rounds of ammunition, just waiting to be remotely pointed and fired at a target.

But the real glitz, the newest big toy that the weapon controllers liked to play with was the ship’s new railgun. The railgun used electromagnetic energy known as the Lerentz force to hurl a twenty-three-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 or five-thousand miles per hour. The weapon could fire guided high-speed projectiles more than 100 miles, which made it suitable for cruise missile defense, ballistic missile defense and various kinds of surface warfare applications. The downside to the new railgun was that it took a tremendous amount of energy to fire. The upside was the Hail Nucleus had a five-hundred megawatt traveling wave reactor. This power plant supplied the ship with more than twice the energy potential than an old Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. So the electricity to fire the beast was not an issue. The railgun was hidden on deck inside two nuclear waste shipping containers that were connected end-to-end near the bow of the Nucleus. The containers and railgun were mounted to a hydraulic lift that could swivel on an immense ball-bearing base in a full three-hundred and sixty-degree radius. Even though there was no warhead on the projectile, the kinetic energy of a wad of depleted uranium impacting a solid object was devastating. It typically left more dust than pieces. Either that or the shell cut a perfect hole through its target. The result from the impact of the projectile depended on the material itself. Solid objects that resisted the force were pulverized. Lighter objects with thin skins were typically bisected. A supplementary advantage to the kinetic round was that it left no trace of explosives, so that left investigators scratching their heads as to the cause of their airplane mysteriously falling from the sky.

Only one of the six people in the ship’s security center looked up at Hail as he entered the room. Dallas Stone met Hail’s gaze and greeted him with, “Hey, Marshall. How are you doing?”

The rest of the crew then looked up and greeted their boss, their Captain, their leader.

Similar to the attire in the mission center, everyone in the security center was dressed casually. Hail had not instituted a dress code for his crew. It was bad enough that they worked full-time and lived on a ship that was rarely docked. So as long as they did their job and were happy, then he couldn’t care less what they wore.

The ship had several amenities that a typical sailor would not find on a typical cargo ship. For example, there was a large pool on the top deck that could be covered by a massive sliding hunk of steel with a flip of a button. Each crew member had a cabin the size of an efficiency apartment. There was a gaming area, a state of the art flight and driving simulator, a wood shop, metal shop, sewing shop, electronic shop and an area to experiment with new creations, as well as a movie theater with popcorn and candy. The Hail Nucleus employed four excellent chefs that rotated their schedule so at any time during the day or night, a crew member could order a five-star meal. On the top deck, a running track outlined the perimeter of the ship. There was also a workout area with weights and treadmills, as well as an exercise room below deck in the air conditioning. On deck number seven, deep inside the ship, was a basketball court, a tennis court and a relatively small soccer field with artificial turf.

Hail understood that amenities were cheap, especially if it meant attracting talented minds. An attack drone could cost millions. If the difference between hiring a really smart designer who built a brilliant attack drone or a kind-of-smart guy whose drone crashed was the cost of a basketball court, then that issue was a no-brainer. All one had to do was take a look at the Google campus and the business sense was evident.

“Is there anything going on?” Hail asked Dallas Stone, the head of his ship’s security center.

Dallas rubbed his three-day beard. He was either starting to grow something new or he was simply too lazy to shave it off. Dallas glanced at his monitors for a moment.

“No, all quiet on the sea today,” Dallas confirmed. “Prince is secured to the blimp above us, floating at two-thousand feet. Her radar and video screens are clear. No potential threats in the immediate area.”

Dallas was in his early twenties, medium in every way; height, weight, looks and dress. The only thing that was above medium was his brain and his ability to analyze and react quickly to threats on the Nucleus. Hail’s father had known Dallas Stone’s father, Mark Stone. Mark Stone had been a young officer on several of the ships Hail’s dad had commanded. Dallas had been through the ROTC and wanted to fly jets. Mark Stone had heard about the little circus Hail was running and asked Hail for a favor. Instead of his son joining the Air Force, Mark Stone asked Hail if his son could join his menagerie. No father wants to see their son in danger. And Mark Stone knew that flying Hail’s drones was a lot safer than running midnight sorties in an F-35 over Libya.

Hail looked over Dallas Stone sitting there, concentrating on his screens and he realized that this young man might be the only person on the Nucleus with any type of military training, however minor that training happened to be.

Without turning to look at her, Hail asked the woman sitting next to Stone, “Tayler, what does Queen see?”

The nineteen-year-old attractive blond, sitting at the station to the left of Dallas, zoomed out on her main monitor and reported, “Queen has been doing a three-hundred and sixty-degree flight pattern at a fifty-kilometer distance from the Nucleus. She is currently flying at an altitude of fifty-two hundred feet. Radar shows three tankers, two cargo ships, four fishing boats and two pleasure craft in our vicinity. The video feed that is being streamed from Queen shows no unusual activity taking place on the decks of any of those vessels. The vessels’ registrations are all clean and all check out.”

Tayler was a refugee of sorts. Hail had discovered her living near the docks in the Port of Charleston. Tayler had tried to steal some food that was waiting to be loaded onto the Nucleus. The girl had been busted and then delivered to Hail by the port authority officers. Hail was asked if he wanted to press charges. Instead, Hail had brought Shana Tran into the room. She had a friendly demeanor that women liked. He then asked the officers to leave them alone so Hail and Shana could have a talk with Tayler. After about an hour, it was apparent to both Hail and Tran that all Tayler needed to turn her life around was a purpose. At that time, Tayler had only been seventeen years old. And in the last two years, since the young woman had decided to stay on the ship, Tayler had never told Hail her last name. But Hail knew it. Before they had even left Charleston that day, he had Tayler’s background investigated. Hail knew what had happened to her parents ― well, parent. Her father was unknown and her mother was deceased. Tayler was their only kid. But she was not a unique personality on the ship. Most of the crew on the Nucleus had a gloomy history and had some issues to work out.

“So much for what’s on the water,” Hail responded, “but what about the air?”

A soldier-looking young man to Hail’s right answered, “We have two commercial aircraft within a two-hundred-mile radius and five smaller aircraft on the scope. None of their paths are vectored in our direction, but of course we will watch them closely.”

Hail nodded his head at Lex Vaughn, comforted that the Nucleus and its contents were safe for the time being. Lex Vaughn acted military, but Hail figured he had picked all that up from movies he had watched. Some of his crew used military terms such as ‘Roger, that’ and ‘Affirmative’ as well as sometimes referring to distance in miles and at other times in kilometers. With no military training, Hail was always surprised how much movie-talk his crew brought to the job.

“Thanks people,” he said, already turning to exit the door.

“Thank you, Sir,” his staff responded.

His security staff was wound a little tighter than his mission crew and he liked it that way.

“If we don’t see you, have a good night,” Hail heard Stone say just before the door clanked shut.

Hail turned to his right and began walking down the hall toward his stateroom.

Have a good night; he had heard Dallas tell him. I haven’t had a good night in two years, he thought, and a wave of depression passed through him that was so intense that it almost took him down to his knees. It happened that way sometimes. Depression jumped on him fast. Like a wild animal. He could go for days pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened; that the world had not really changed all that much, but it had. To Marshall Hail, his entire world had been altered. All the people in it were different. Every one of them appeared more animalistic in some way. He understood that he had changed as well. He was different all the way down to his core. At one point in time, Hail would have considered himself a passive person. But now, he recognized that he had become more barbaric in the last two years. He had developed a savage side that he didn’t have before. He also possessed a new ability to be cruel. He fully realized that he had turned away from the light and was walking slowly into darkness. And making it all that much more detestable was that it had been a conscious decision on his part. Before, he had been put on the earth to help people. Now, two years later, he had been reborn as a predator and had been left on the earth to kill people. But in a strange way, he felt that the people he killed; that their deaths would still help people in some way. He could reconcile his actions in a number of ways. But when it came down to it, a prominent group of individuals were putting up large sums of money to make sure that nasty people were removed from the planet. Hail didn’t feel it was up to him to judge. Other people had already taken on that task. He was simply there as the executioner; an exterminator of vermin that fed off the fear of others.

Hail arrived at his stateroom and held up his prox-card and entered his oasis. This was home. Well, this was one of his homes, but they were all identical. He had an identical stateroom on the Hail Atom, the Hail Electron, the Hail Proton and the rest of his full size cargo ships. Each of his cargo vessels were exactly the same. Same mission center, same security center, same armaments, same everything. If one of his ships was upgraded in some manner, then all of his ships would receive the same upgrade. The design of his ships was perfection and even Hail, with his many flaws, knew not to mess with perfection. If one was perfect, then they all needed to be perfect.

The living room he entered was stark and minimalist. There was a leather couch and end table, a matching reclining chair and a coffee table placed on a hardwood floor. He crossed through the living room and entered his bedroom. His bedroom could have been mistaken for that of a hotel. There was almost nothing in the room that personalized the space. No photos or curios or knickknacks or paintings.

On his way to the shower, Hail caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He stopped and looked more closely, but he wasn’t looking at himself. Stuck in the corner of the mirror was a photo of his wife and two girls. Maybe the only item that personalized the space. He allowed his hand to reach out and touch the small piece of colorful parchment. He then glanced back up at the mirror in time to see a single tear form in his left eye and then streak down his cheek, leaving a thin glimmering trail of sorrow down his tired face. Hail rubbed the tear away and then squashed his face together between both of his large hands. There was a pressure forming in his head and massaging his face provided a little relief. He was under a great deal of stress. Tomorrow would be an important day, maybe the most important day of his life, and that was saying a lot. The billions that he had made during his lifetime were earned with a number of lifetime achievements; many great accomplishments to be proud of, but all of those didn’t mean anything to him now.

Hail reached down and touched his wife’s face. She was so beautiful and she always told him how handsome he was. Maybe he had been handsome years ago. But the man that was looking back at him in the mirror looked fatigued and worn-out, as if he spent much of his time snorting crank or shooting some other destructive drug. Hail felt he had aged ten years in only a matter of two. His hair at one time, had been an attractive shade of light brown, but now it was turning prematurely grey. The lines in his long and strong face, character lines as his wife had referred to them, now appeared as deep furrows that carved a sorrowful and cross expression into his face.

The man in the mirror looked down again and touched each of his twin girls’ faces on the photograph. Blond and eight-years old forever, frozen in the photograph taken moments before their flight from Istanbul to their connecting flight to America. It had been so long since he had last seen them. He missed them so much that it made his heart hurt.

Hail removed his shirt and looked himself over again, taking in the big picture. Once in great shape, now his six-foot-one, two-hundred and twenty-pound frame was wilting. Just like that. A big-ol tree that was beginning to shrivel up and lean. He knew he needed to stay in shape and told himself that he would work out tonight. But as one side of his brain was already confirming the appointment, the other side of his brain knew that it wasn’t going to happen. He was going to spend the evening scanning and documenting all seventy-two hours of video that was shot by the dead drone Eagles. If the mission was on for the next day, then the intelligence that could be disseminated from the video would be vital. No actionable intelligence meant no mission. Simple as that. The workout would have to wait, but the shower was important. It would revive him. It would allow him to refocus.

Taking one more quick glance at the photograph, Hail reluctantly left the image and entered the bathroom. He was met by yet another mirror above the bathroom sink. He saw something new in that mirror that he hadn’t seen in the other. He saw a killer. As of yet, as of today, he was not a killer. But tomorrow he would be an official killer. A killer of his fellow man. A murderer? No. In his mind there was big difference between a killer and murderer. Murder implied that a crime had taken place. The person he would kill tomorrow and those that would follow, were all murderers. Hail was the yang to the murders ying. He was the force that would offset the glob of human sewage that had slipped all the way down the purulent hill and just needed that little extra nudge to allow it to fall over the rim and tumble into the pit of hell.

Hail got into the shower and started counting to one-hundred and twenty. He didn’t realize he was counting inside his head. Since he was a small child, his father, Tucker M. Hail, had made him take military showers. His father was big-time military. The regulation two-minute shower got sent down the family ranks until it landed on him. He had taken a two-minute shower for so long that if he was forced to stay under the water for three full minutes, he would just have to stand there and do nothing for an extra sixty-seconds. And doing nothing was not part of Marshall Hail’s DNA. Nothing meant no movement. No movement meant no advancement. If you were not moving forward, then you were technically moving backwards, because everyone else around you was moving forward. If you didn’t move forward, you were going to be left behind, and if that was the case, then why even exist? He didn’t know if that was yet another piece of military training his father had instilled in him, or maybe it was just his own philosophy. A suit he had grown into.

The timer in Hail’s head reached two minutes and he stepped out of the shower and dried off. He only allowed himself ten seconds for that task. The rest of the bathroom activities were allocated a scant sixty-seconds and then he exited the bathroom. Hail was thankful that his Dad had not set a time limit on taking a shit. Rules like that could screw up a kid.

Hail’s wife and his children thought that his lickity-split showers were funny, but he didn’t agree. Hail didn’t appreciate feeling like an odd-ball. He enjoyed fitting in. Unlike the other techno-nerds at MIT, Hail felt he was one of the few who could invent as well as sit in the boardroom and sell. Most of the time, those two traits didn’t exist in the same person. And if they did, they came at a price. Some other important social skillset would have typically been omitted. But anyone who knew Marshall Hail would be hard-pressed to find a flaw in his character.

Hail stopped long enough in the bedroom to pull on some underwear and a pair of grey sweatpants. He had stopped wearing button up pants. One day, an extra inch of fat had appeared around his waist and from that point on, button up pants had become uncomfortable. Stretchy pants felt much better.

In a room adjacent to his bedroom was a mini-control room, his office. It was outfitted with four large monitors and one giant monitor the size of a big screen TV. A fast computer interconnected all the gear. Hail considered lying down in bed to view Eagles’ video footage, but he felt he might drift off and waste a good amount of the afternoon. There was still the possibility of falling asleep even if he was sitting in his comfortable high-back chair in his small office. But upright and attentive was more practical than recumbent.

Shirtless, wearing only his grey sweatpants, Hail walked into his little office. He tried to recall the last time he had slept. It had to have been sometime within the last twenty-four hours, but nailing the exact time really didn’t matter, so he abandoned the query and sat down in front of his wall of monitors.

Hail logged in and clicked on an icon labelled Hail NAS. Inside that folder were about thirty other folders. He clicked on the folder called EaglesVideo. Inside that folder were scores of folders that contained dozens of video files that Eagles had recorded from its time flying above the North Korean compound. Hail opened a text editor and then opened the first video file of Eagles on station at Kangdong. As the video streamed across his large screen, Hail began to type out dates, times and related notes.