Operation Hail Storm

Java Sea ― on the cargo ship Hail Nucleus

The conference room on the Nucleus could have been mistaken for any high-tech super-duper fortune five-hundred boardroom, if it wasn’t for the two distinct iron portholes welded into the shiny white wall. Those small openings in the hull had been tinted with a dark film so the outside light didn’t interfere with the room’s complex and sensitive display devices.

Gage Renner, the mission analyst, Shana Tran, the mission communication analyst, Pierce Mercier, their oceanographer and meteorologist and Marshall Hail were putting the final touches on the plan to kill the North Korean, Kim Yong Chang.

“We have a few choices to deliver the death blow,” Hail reminded his staff.

They had been over this a number of times, but Hail wanted to make sure that everyone was in agreement on the most effective way to carry out the mission. After all, none of them were military experts. They were technological wizards that built some very advanced weapon systems. Tactics and mission planning, however, all rested in the lap of Marshall Hail.

He had read all the military books that any person should read if they were interested in getting into this line of work. There was of course the old stuff such as Patton, a study of a master strategist, as well as the U.S. Army U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. And then there was the really old stuff, like Sun Tzu's The Art of War and the History of the Peloponnesian War, written four-hundred years before the birth of Christ. But there were also other methods of attack, which meant that Hail had his nose in the book The Command of the Air, which was perhaps the most often referenced work on air power and air strategy. And he couldn’t forget the sea, and that would dictate that he read the old book The Influence Of Sea Power Upon History 1660–1783 as well as the newer book Modern Sea Power and Tactics. And once on the ground and in the shit, as the Vietnam era military slang went, Hail found the book The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander, a great help. But there were no books, no classes, no instructional references, virtually no help at all when it came to the new type of war tactics Hail and his staff were about to unleash. It was the first assassination of its type and after it was over, the world would never be the same.

“My vote is we bring in the B-52s and drop the payload on the target,” Gage Renner said.

Hail thought it was the most logical decision, but he wanted to make sure that there we no dissenting opinions. He placed equal value on the recommendations of all of his analysts.

“Is there any issue with communications if we call in the B-52s?” he asked Shana Tran. Shana had changed her dress and her hair was up. She looked very fresh, considering they had been hammering away at it for six hours and were only minutes away from the formal launch of the ground mission.

“We have leased time on the Chinese Tianlian data-relay satellite and have tested the uplink and we are good to go. Once Led Zeppelin is in place, it will link up to the Tianlian and then use radio or Wi-Fi to communicate with the hubs. I don’t see any reason why we would have problems unless weather is an issue.”

Hail looked at Pierce Mercier and waited while he flipped, un-pinched and expanded screens on his iPad.

Mercier scratched his head and said, “Things are looking really good, but as you know the weather in North Korea can change in a matter of hours. No fronts are moving in. My projection is light cirrus cloud cover at ten-thousand feet with maybe five knot winds out of the east. At mission time, eight hundred hours, the temperature will be in the low eighties and I would estimate the relative humidity somewhere around eighty-two percent.”

Hail appeared satisfied with all the answers.

“OK, so all of our systems are go,” Hail said to no one in particular.

This was the last chance for Hail’s crew to tell him that he had missed something, but no one spoke up. Hail looked at each of his crew members, waited another moment and then stood and began walking toward the door. The others followed him.

After walking four-hundred feet down the white iron hallway, they all arrived at the door to the mission control center. Hail used his badge to gain access through the bulkhead door and the others followed him inside. Of the sixteen control stations, thirteen of them were occupied. Just enough empty stations left to accommodate those who had been in the meeting.

Renner, Tran and Mercier each took up their own control station and Hail sat in the big chair in the middle of the room. There were a number of fresh faces that Hail didn’t see very often. The missions they had run before had not required this many pilots and analysts, but this one would, hence more pilots on the sticks.

Alex Knox, Hail’s lead mission pilot greeted Hail with a, “Hey Chief, hunting will be good today. I can feel it.”

At that exact moment, today was two in the morning in North Korea. The entire first part of the mission would be done in the dark. No lights, no rocket burns, nothing that could be seen within the backdrop of Kangdong’s hills, trees and indigenous vegetation. The drones they would be flying were equipped with night vision cameras. So that meant that green would be the color of the evening’s viewing.

“Alright,” Hail began, adjusting the monitors on each side of his chair. “Let’s do this.”

Hail swiveled his chair toward Tanner Grant, his mission drone pilot who was flying Foghat.

“Where are we, Mr. Grant?” Hail asked.

Grant looked at a monitor that showed the real-time digital coordinates of Foghat. The numbers were changing quickly like a Vegas slot machine.

“Foghat is about three miles south-east of the target and currently circling some crop fields. We are waiting for further instructions.”

Hail checked his right monitor to verify the drone was in the correct position.

“Is Led Zeppelin operational and ready to be released?” Hail asked.

“Yes, Sir,” Grant said. He pulled up a screen that monitored the vitals of the drone called Led Zeppelin which was connected to the underbelly of the drone Foghat.

Grant continued, “Zeppelin was attached fifteen miles off the coast of North Korea in the Yellow Sea by the crew of the Hail Laser. Foghat was launched at twenty-two hundred hours and has been in flight for approximately four hours and is on station. As far as I can tell, we have not attracted any unfriendlies. Weather is good and all systems are nominal.”

The Hail Laser was a mechanical ship that supported the Hail cargo ships. But it was also the perfect ship to slip in and out of discreet areas; not large enough to attract attention. Therefore, during the mission planning, it had been decided that the Hail Laser would position itself in international waters, situated on the latitude line that separated North and South Korea. There were so many Hail support vessels in the fleet, and they operated in so many of the world’s waters, that it would hopefully not draw much attention. When the mission was over, Foghat would recover Zeppelin and return to the Laser. At least it would all work out that way if Hail and his crew lived in a perfect world. The recent loss of Eagles proved that the world was indeed, imperfect.

“OK, bring Foghat in for its drop approach.” Hail ordered.

Hail looked at each member of the mission crew and wondered if they would do what they needed to do when they needed to do it. After all, most of these kids were kids. The closest they had come to killing someone was mowing down a gangster while driving Adder in Grand Theft Auto. But then on the other hand, this type of killing was not much different than the simulated version. They flew a remote aircraft and delivered deadly payloads. They were not in danger and his young pilots were physically thousands of miles away from the action. Still, they all understood that this was not a game. It was the real thing. But making their country a safer place had been done by young people for hundreds of years.

“One mile,” Grant reported.

Anticipating Hail’s next question, Shana Tran added, “Communications are good and the uplink is hot.”

Hail swiveled his chair toward Dallas Stone.

“What’s the status of Led Zeppelin?” he asked the pilot.

“We’re good, Marshall,” Dallas responded. He flipped through a few technical screens until he located a page splattered with data that was labeled DRONE DASHBOARD. “We are fully charged and communications are online. Data streams are good. No dropped packets. No collisions.”

“Excellent,” Hail said. So far everything was going like clockwork.

“Dropping Zeppelin in five, four, three, two, one, and Zeppelin is away,” Tanner Grant announced.

Hail pressed some icons on his left monitor. A moment later, the video being streamed from the nose camera of Led Zeppelin appeared on his right monitor. There was nothing much to look at. A green blur was dancing across the screen as the drone descended and accelerated to a hundred and twenty-two miles per hour, or roughly one-hundred and seventy-eight feet per second. Led Zeppelin’s thousand-foot free fall would be over in less than eight seconds.

“X and Y look good,” Dallas said. “Drifting a little north maybe, but not too bad. The parafoil is going to pop in three, two, one…”

Hail watched the green blur stop for a brief second. The shock of the 4G deceleration scrambled the communications and whited-out the screen as the parafoil yanked up on the drone. Then a beat later an image returned. Hail could make out a distant tree line on a hill maybe a half a mile away. Everything was still green, many shades of green, similar to an old fashion black and white TV with shades of grey differentiating the colors.

Hail pressed an icon on his screen labeled BELLYCAM. Led Zeppelin had a total of five video cameras mounted to its black carbon fiber frame. The aircraft was round and thin and if it had flashing lights and was seen from the ground, it would be recognized as a flying saucer. But the drone was black and had no lights and would never be seen from the ground. Since it was round, there was no real front and back to the machine, but for practical purposes the designers had assigned front, back, left side and right side cameras.

The video from the bellycam was much better than the forward camera. The forward camera was having difficulties maintaining focus while the parafoil’s cords untwisted. The bellycam, however, was mounted directly in the center of the drone. This allowed the camera gimbal to rotate on a fine set of German ball bearings, keeping its lens pointed forward no matter how the aircraft twisted and turned.

“We have a visual on the landing zone,” Dallas said. He twisted his right joystick to correct for wind driftage. A small motor on the drone wound in five inches of thin clear line that was tied to the airfoil twenty feet above. The line pulled down the left corner of the plastic material, changing the aerodynamics of the winged shaped parafoil. Led Zeppelin responded accordingly and turned ten degrees to the north. Once the direction had been corrected, Dallas released the joy stick and the same motor unwound exactly five inches of line and the aircraft flew straight and true.

“Where is the landing point?” Hail asked. “I don’t see it.”

Dallas touched an icon labeled MARKER and then touched his finger to his video screen and circled a dark green area. A red circle appeared on Hail’s monitor.

“Right there, that’s the spot you indicated during the briefing,” Dallas said.

“Great,” Hail said.

The parafoil had slowed the drone from a descending speed of 190 miles per hour to 17 miles per hour.

“Systems check,” Hail ordered.

One of the junior mission pilots that Hail knew, but didn’t see often, fielded the request.

“Checking…” said Oliver Fox. The other pilots called the young man Oli, if Hail remembered correctly.

Hail was proud of the job his programmers had done designing the ship’s command and control network. All the communications with the drones was done through the application. Since there was no direct access to a drone except through the ship’s software, that meant that any drone, or even any part of a drone, could be handed off to another pilot. Weapons, flight control, system checks, damage reporting, if one pilot was busy, then another could access the drone’s flight system and help out.

Hail had all sixteen seats filled with pilots and analysts for just that reason. A few of the pilots would not be flying drones on this mission, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t help out with the hundreds of parameters that had to be monitored and adjusted. Currently, no less than six pilots were monitoring Led Zeppelin’s vitals and watching for any indication that the machine was having problems.

“Approaching two-hundred feet,” Dallas announced. “Preparing to cut the chute. Spinning up the propellers.”

Dallas reached over and pushed forward a thick lever that had a small stencil on it that read THRUST.

A gauge on his control panel began to change. Inside the small rectangle were two sections. There was a red section at the bottom and a green section at the top. Each of these sections was overlaid by ruler marks. As Dallas pushed the thrust lever forward, the red section began to move up, and the green section began to retreat. When the red section and the green section were exactly equal, Dallas said, “We are at equilibrium. Cutting the chute.”

He pressed an icon that looked like miniature scissors cutting a kite string.

“Chute is away in we are in free flight,” Dallas announced.

Dallas turned Led Zeppelin to the right, until he could verify the airfoil was loose and drifting off to the east.

“It would be nice if it made it to water,” Hail said, but he knew it really didn’t matter.

It was only the difference between minutes and hours. The parafoil was made from a hydro-degradable plastic that was up to three times stronger than polythene. Once exposed to the atmosphere, the parafoil, its control lines and every part of the chute had already begun to dissolve. If directly exposed to a body of water, such as a lake or a river, the parafoil would be completely dissolved in a matter of minutes. But even if it landed in the middle of a farmer’s field, considering the humidity level in Kangdong, in a matter of hours the chute would look like a heard of snails and left a thin patch of clear slime on the ground. Hours after that, even the slime would have evaporated. Hail was confident the parafoil would leave no tell-tale sign that it ever existed.

“Status report?” Hail requested.

Shana Tran was the first to respond. “Communications are five by five with both Zeppelin and Foghat.”

The term five by five was a radio communication expression that meant ‘loud and clear’. Tran at one time had explained to Hail that one five represented the S units of reception strength. The other five was a rating of signal clarity, so five by five meant there was a good and clear signal.

Oliver Fox was the next to report that all systems were nominal.

Hail suspected that Oli didn’t know the difference between the term normal and nominal. He guessed that Fox had heard it used in a movie and had adopted the expression. The use of the phrase "all systems nominal" was a term used by NASA and indicated that the telemetry was reading as expected from historical data trends. Over the years, it had become a response that covered all parameters of flight systems and controls. Normal and nominal meant two different things. Normal would report the condition of the flight parameters when the machine was at rest. Nominal meant that the parameters were within flight specifications for the current mission with the drone under load.

Hail watched as the dark green patch on the ground drew in closer. The dark green began to break up and pixelate into lighter splotches of green as the drone’s camera began to differentiate between bushes, plants and grass.

“Twenty-five feet until touchdown,” Dallas reported, pushing pedals under his feet to change the angle of attack of the propellers.

“Do we have any company?” Hail asked Tanner Grant.

Tanner Grant was still on station flying Foghat in tight circles over the house below. He looked at his screen that showed Foghat’s Star SAFIRE HD FLIR system. He adjusted the multi-spectral SWIR system until it focused on the landing zone and the surrounding area. Anything that was hotter than the ambient earth below would show up as a white light on his monitor.

“There is nothing in the immediate area except some wild dogs about a mile away. I am going to reposition so I can scan the residence.”

Grant pinched and swiped and rotated his screen until he was happy with his view of Kim Yong Chang’s house, back yard, front yard and additional property on the sides of his home.

“Putting it up on big screen number three,” Grant told Hail.

Hail glanced up above the control stations to see the new forward looking infrared radiometer image that had appeared on the big screen.

Hail saw large rectangle-shaped objects on the ground in front of the house that were undoubtedly cars. The engines glowed warm under their hoods. On the side of the house was a smaller box that glowed white as well. Hail decided that this was an air conditioner unit. The well heated pool glowed brighter than the bricks surrounding the pool, which had cooled in the night air. In the backyard, some smaller objects, some round, others square were glowing, but not with the same intensity as the cars or the air conditioner. Hail came to the conclusion that it was probably pool equipment, the pump, the motor, maybe even a water heater.

“Does anyone think it’s weird that Chang doesn’t have any guards at his house?” Hail asked his crew.

Gage Renner, the mission aeronautics analyst and Hail’s close friend offered his two cents.

“I don’t really see the need. I mean the entire country is guarded. No one gets in and most of its citizens want to get out.”

Pierce Mercier, offered, “And the entire complex is surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence. Look at the glow on that thing,” Mercier nodded up toward the big screen. “I don’t think a fence like that glows with heat unless it’s electrified.”

Hail remained silent.

“And the fence has razor wire on top of it,” Renner added.

“And we have already seen that Chang is good with weapons,” Mercier said.

Hail agreed, “I guess so. I don’t think I’ll ever understand this country. It’s like a throwback to the sixteenth century with a bunch a nukes thrown in to make things even more complicated.”

Dallas got everyone’s attention with the words, “Three, two, one and touchdown.”

Hail checked the FLIR screen again and didn’t see any glowing moving objects, no people, no dogs.

“So far, so good,” Hail said, relieved that the first part of the mission was successful.

As the crew looked at the FLIR screen, they noticed that another object now glowed in the darkness. It was Led Zeppelin. A few days before, the dead drone Eagles had scouted out the perfect landing zone for Led Zeppelin. Outside the wire of Kim Yong Chang’s property was a tangle of thorny bushes Mercier had called Poncirus trifoliata, also known as the Flying Dragon. A circle of these thick green bushes had naturally formed around a rocky area in its center. The stems of the Flying Dragon created a contorted and twisted thicket that no person or animal would readily venture in to. The landing site was perfect. One-hundred meters outside the electrified fence and completely hidden from view.

“Do you want me to fly Foghat back to the Laser?” Tanner Grant asked Hail.

“What’s your fuel looking like?” Hail asked.

Grant double checked his gauges.

“I have about six hours,” Grant said.

Hail did some math in his head and determined that Foghat could stay on station for about one more hour and still have plenty of fuel to make it back to their support ship.

“I’d like you to stick around until the hubs are deployed,” Hail told Grant.

“No problem, Skipper,” Grant said. He took his finger and drew a red circle around the top of the complex. He then set the auto-pilot on Foghat to lock onto that hand-drawn path and to maintain its current altitude and speed.

“Alright, Alex. You’re on,” Hail said. “Let’s make this clean and silent.”

Alex turned to two of his junior pilots, Oliver Fox on his right and Paige Grayson to his left.

“Let’s do this like we planned,” Alex instructed. “I’ll go first, then Oli, then Paige. Are we good?”

Both of the other pilots acknowledged Knox and each of them began to prepare their aircrafts.

Three grossly misshapen objects sat on top of Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin was the size of a mini trampoline and in comparison to its smooth and conical black surface; the hubs that were connected to its top were bizarre in appearance.

One hub was not even a shape. It was more like a blob of clay the size of softball that had been overworked by an angry mental patient wearing oven mitts. It was brown and lopsided. A rough texture had been applied to its surface. A flat black area the size of a golf ball had been infused into one of its unnatural sides.

“OK,” Knox said in a predatory tone, “Undocking now.”

Knox checked his gauges, checked his cameras and verified that his flight controls were working and said, “And liftoff.”

The brown blob hummed, its three small propellers spinning furiously as the machine rose from the back of Led Zeppelin.

“Put Aerosmith’s camera on big screen number two,” Hail requested.

Oli fulfilled the request and the video appeared in time for Hail to see the small drone, code named Aerosmith, clear the top of the Flying Dragon bushes. The bushes were green, the big berries on the bushes were green, but then everything shot by the night vision camera was green. The crew that was not actively flying a drone, watched the main monitor as the bushes became smaller and smaller.

“I’m at a hundred feet and Aerosmith feels good and is responding nicely.” Alex Knox commented. “Well, as nicely as this hunk of wood and can respond,” he added.

“Take it slow,” Hail told Knox.

“With the weird shape of this thing, I don’t think I have much choice,” Knox replied. “It’s amazing that this drone can even fly.”

Knox worked the flight controls as the electric fence came into view. A moment later, the fence disappeared underneath the camera as the drone passed over it.

“OK, approaching the LZ.” Knox said, looking worried.

“Oh, damn, this is going to be harder than I thought; especially at night with nothing but this stupid green screen. Too bad I can’t light it up.”

“It is what it is,” Hail told his pilot. “You’re doing a great job. Just take it slow.”

Knox shook his head in disagreement.

“I can’t take it too slow, Skipper. Not if you want to get this drone back to Zeppelin tomorrow. I’ve already burned through twenty-five percent of my battery.”

Hail said nothing.

Aerosmith was quickly approaching a tall tree. Specifically, Mercier had told them during the planning meeting that the tree was a Pinus densiflora, also known as the Japanese Red Pine. In the winter it became yellowish, but in the summer it just happened to be the exact same shade of brown as Aerosmith.

“Alright, here goes nothing,” Knox said, tensing slightly on the controls as he made his final approach.

Not a single aspect of this mission had been left to chance. Eagles had scouted the landing zone and the exact spot where Aerosmith would land had been predetermined.

Knox maneuvered Aerosmith between two limbs of the enormous red pine. Similar to the other hub drones, the propellers on Aerosmith were internal to the machine. Hollow on the inside, the propellers twirled internally in a chamber that resembled a cylindrical chimney, creating lift by blowing air down and sucking air in from the top of the drone. All of the electronics were built into a ring that circled around the interior chimney. The lithium-ion battery was circular as well. There was not a centimeter of wasted space on Aerosmith. A microchip crammed in here, a servo motor stuffed in there; beautiful it was not. An amazing piece of flying technology, it was.

The camera rocked to one side, taking a hard, jarring hit from one of the branches.

“Damn,” Knox cursed. “Man, it’s tight between these tree limbs.”

No one said anything. Knox knew what he needed to do. He had performed this landing flawlessly in the simulator a number of times, but doing it in real life was different. Unlike the simulator, he was experiencing lighting issues. In the live setting, the different shades of green were more defused and indiscernible than they had been in the simulator. As he guided the drone between the branches, some of the smaller twigs were almost invisible on his monitor. And compounding his problems, there was a light breeze and small pine branches were fluttering in and out of his flight path. Right now, the design of the drone was saving him. Since the propellers were located on the inside of the aircraft, the small drone could be bumped around a little because there was no chance of the propellers coming into contact with the obstructions. Too much bumping, however, would scramble the internal computer. The chip made thousands of tiny flight adjustments per second, keeping Aerosmith at the proper height and angle of attack. Too many unanticipated disruptions would overwhelm the computer managing the drone’s flight characteristics. At that point the computer would reset. If that happened, then Aerosmith would drop to the ground like a log.

A few more damns came out of Knox as he closed in on the landing point.

“You are down to fifty-five percent battery life,” Gage Renner informed Knox.

“Almost there, just another foot,” Knox replied. “Almost there…”

The misshapen drone slowly lowered onto a thick limb of the red pine, centering itself over the widest part of the branch before gently touching down.

No one said anything.

Aerosmith joined the branch of the Japanese red pine ― literally.

Everyone held their breath until the green video being sent by Aerosmith froze in place. It reminded Hail of when he had watched the old video of the first lunar landing on the moon from 1969 with his dad. Seconds before touchdown, a whirl of activity could be seen on the footage; movement, dust and shapes coming into view before being cast aside for new shapes. And then, like someone had switched off a light, nothing but stillness. Tranquility Base. The Eagle had landed.

Hail let out a breath he wasn’t aware he had been holding.

Knox let go of his control handles, changed screens and pressed an icon labeled DOCK.

A second later, four brown fish hooks dropped down from the sides of the Aerosmith, hooked into the tree and then tightened, attaching the drone to the tree.

Aerosmith had been designed to look like a bump on a log. The drone was an illusion. Notched into its side was a shallow cavity that looked like a place where a small limb had broken off. That circular dark section was a camera port that could be shuttered open or closed, depending on when the drone was actively streaming video. Aerosmith’s surface was so meticulously modeled with bark, that from any angle on the ground, it was invisible sitting silently on its limb.

“Are we locked?” Hail asked.

“Yes, Sir,” Knox said, leaning back in his chair and taking in a deep breath and then letting it out slowly.

“OK,” Hail said, turning his chair toward Oliver Fox. “Let’s bring in the next mico-hub.”

The term mico-hub didn’t have much to do with the size of the drones. It was nomenclature Hail’s crew used to refer to a drone’s heritage. The main drone was Foghat, which dropped off the hub called Led Zeppelin or its mini-drone. The next group of hubs that were released by Led Zeppelin was referred to as mico-hubs. If those hubs parented more hubs, then those would be called nano-hubs and so on until pico had been used. Hail’s drone laboratories had never nested drones deeper than pico, so there was no need for any further extended classification. The inventors of the metric system in 18th century France, had little need for any terminology smaller than micro, because they didn’t have instruments fine enough to measure more minute increments. But in later years, pico, femto, atto, zepto and yocto metric increments had been established in case Hail’s team ever needed them.

Oliver Fox situated himself in his chair and placed his hands on his controllers and his feet on the pedals under his station.

Knox touched an icon that mirrored the green video being sent from Styx onto the big screen mounted directly over Fox’s control station. That way, the entire crew could see the video being sent by his drone.

“Liftoff,” Fox announced.

From the top of Led Zeppelin, an object that could only be described as a bird’s nest began to rise into the humid night. This micro-drone was a mass of plastic sticks woven haphazardly together to form a bird’s nest. The nest didn’t have an affiliation to any particular bird in the area. So unless one of Chang’s servants or girlfriends happened to be an expert in ornithology, then it should go unnoticed.

Hail thought that Styx appeared to handle a little better than Aerosmith. It certainly climbed much faster.

“I’m at a hundred feet and moving toward my LZ,” Fox told the crew.

The video looked just the same as when Aerosmith had passed over the electric fence; green, murky, and not much on the horizon to look at other than distant trees.

Having Fox fly a patch of sticks into a tree would have been a disaster. The sides of the drone would have certainly snagged on something. So the landing point that had been chosen for Styx was much easier to manage.

Fox smiled. “Alright,” he said. “I am over my touchdown point and the surface looks clear.”

Hail nodded and remained silent.

“Coming down, down, down…” Fox said as he nudged his foot pedals deeper into the floor.

The video streaming from Styx was not as shaky as it had been with Aerosmith; therefore the touchdown was not as dramatic. Inch by inch, Styx dropped down until it came to rest on top of a power pole that fed one-inch thick electrical cables into Chang’s property. The pole was about twenty meters behind the pool in the backyard. The landing zone for Styx was in a perfect line of sight to the pool and the patio area.

“We’re down,” Fox announced with little fanfare. “Docking Styx now.”

Three thin brown fishing lines lowered three tiny brown tri-barbed fish hooks about an inch down the pole. A second later, the hooks were reeled back in. Each of the hooks dug into the weathered pole and secured Styx to the top.

“That’s the way to do it,” Hail told Fox. “Two in place and one more to go.”

Paige Grayson was up to bat.

Without hesitation, Grayson pushed her feet into the flight pedals and twisted both of her flight controllers to the right. The micro-hub knows as Stones rose into the air and hovered over Led Zeppelin. Grayson oriented the craft so that its main camera was pointed in the direction of Chang’s compound. She then increased the speed of the propellers and ascended quickly to a hundred feet.

Knox patched Stone’s camera into the big monitor above Grayson, providing Hail and the rest of the crew a view of her drone’s streamed video.

Grayson navigated Stones along the same vector that Aerosmith and Styx had taken. First out of the bushes, then up higher and over the fence, and now down lower as Grayson brought the drone within twenty meters of its landing zone.

Above Hail, the image on two of the large monitors being sent from Styx and Aerosmith was standing still and only Stone’s video stream was on the move. The dark green pool came into view. It was surrounded by lighter green bricks. A spillway adorned with cement and rocks was cut into the side of the pool. The opening released water into a small brook that ran down hill. Rocks had been methodically placed in a specific pattern to create a babbling brook that meandered through the backyard. The brook terminated fifty meters downhill, where a hidden pump sent the water back into the pool via a buried pipe.

“Almost there,” Grayson said. She kept glancing down at the bottom of her screen at her altitude. The other micro-hubs had never descended lower than twenty feet. Grayson’s drone, however, was now only two feet off the ground.

Grayson glanced at her navigation screen.

“My X and Y show this is my LZ, but it looks pretty wet to me,” Grayson said. “What do you guys think?”

Hail shook his head. “How can you tell it’s wet?” he asked. “It’s all green.”

Grayson shrugged without taking her hands off the controls.

She said, “It looks like there is some luminescence coming off the rocks, like they are reflecting the moon light.”

Gage Renner, who had designed the drone, spoke up. “The hub can take some water, but it would be best if we set it down somewhere dry. It looks like there may be some water splashing from the stream right there, so why don’t we land to the right a few feet?”

Hail said, “We want to keep Stones surrounded by rocks so it doesn’t look out of place. If we want to set it down on the periphery of the brook, then that would be OK, but it needs to be surround by rocks.”

Renner said, “It’s not like anyone except for the gardener walks this far down the brook and we are only talking about twenty-four hours. I think we have to depend on stealth here and take a chance,” Renner suggested.

“OK,” Hail conceded. “Set it down, Paige.”

“Rodger that,” Grayson said, and tilted one of her flight controllers to the left. “There’s a patch of rocks further down the stream that look dry. I’m going for that.”

Grayson maneuvered Stones to the left a few yards and said, “This area looks good and dry. I’m coming down.”

A foot above the edge of the stream, a drone that looked like a river worn stone, lowered into place, nuzzling itself between four other river stones. The doors on its cylindrical propeller shaft irised closed and the micro-hub turned into a rock.

Unlike the other two drones that had touched down and were still streaming a video, the instant that Stones touched down, its stream went dark. Hail knew that the camera was still sending an image, but the camera was looking directly into a rock sitting next to it. That was no big deal. Stones had a specific purpose and sending back surveillance video was not part of its mission.

Hail stood up and began clapping his hands. The sound was loud in the quiet room.

“That was a fantastic job, everyone,” he told his crew. “Everything worked out the way we planned it. I couldn’t have asked for a better phase of this mission.”

The rest of the crew pushed back from their stations and relaxed.

“Let’s put all the hubs into sleep mode to save power and I’d like all of you to put yourselves into sleep mode as well.”

There was a smattering of laughter. A few of pilots got up and stretched and began with idle mission chatter, burning nervous energy.

Hail yelled out over the noise, “I need everyone to be back on station in five hours, that’s zero seven-hundred hours.”

On his way out of the mission room, Hail shook Renner and Mercier’s hands.

“So far so good,” he said to them.

“Let’s just hope the big show tomorrow morning goes as well,” Mercier said.

“Yep,” Hail agreed.

Hail opened the massive iron door, left the mission center and headed back toward his stateroom for a few hours of sleep.

Sleep, he thought to himself. Yeah right.