Central Intelligence Headquarters—Langley, Virginia
T
hree people sat around a large mahogany table. Two men and one woman. The man at the end of the table was Jarret Pepper, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was new to the job; appointed by the new president only a month prior to this meeting. Pepper was a tall man in his early fifties with a long stern face and a full head of grey hair that always looked like it needed to be combed. After his divorce, and not possessing the ability to match suits, ties, and shirts, Pepper streamlined to the essentials. He had thrown his old clothes into a donation dumpster and went to a man’s outlet store. He picked out 7 identical grey suits, white shirts and ties. The salesperson said he looked good – now he would look good every day.
The woman at the table was Karen Wesley, Director of Analysis. She had been in the role for the last five years having risen through the ranks at the agency. Wesley was a thin woman in her mid-forties with plain-looking features and black hair cut short for efficient, easy care. Dressed in a suit that implied nothing but business, Wesley looked the part of a consummate bureaucrat. She knew she worked in an agency dominated by men and even though 4% percent of the positions were held by women, those numbers were confined largely to the GS-8 to GS-12 levels. The top senior executive ranks were still predominately filled by men. Wesley continually felt that she had to prove herself.
She could have been one of the CIA’s great spies because she was totally unremarkable. This was a great trait in the spy game because no one noticed you. Potential counterspies would never think, “What a great looking woman,” or “What a hideous creature.” She was positively plain, and she liked it that way. Introspectively, she associated this with her quick rise within the agency. Her short black hair was just long enough to make her look womanly, but short enough where a quick comb was all it took when she got out of the shower. Her face was normal. Not pretty. Not ugly. Simply unremarkable.
The second man at the table was Paul Moore, the Director of Operations. Moore was a short and thick man—thick everywhere. The head that sat on his neck was big and bald. His lips were full, and most of the time they were moving. To Pepper, it seemed that words were always coming out from between Moore’s lips. Today, Moore was dressed in a blue pinstriped suit. Pepper wondered if Moore’s wife bought his suits for him. Moore’s ties perfectly matched the colors in his shirts, and that indicated a female touch.
Pepper felt a tinge of envy for his Director of Operations. He appeared to have it all figured out. Great wife. Great kids. Great job. Low golf handicap. Moore was even able to squeeze in a little fun on the side. Pepper admired Moore’s ability to compartmentalize his tough job. Sure, it was a demanding job, but there should still be a little time to breathe easy and have some fun. Most of the CIA’s executive officers lived and breathed the coveted positions
“OK, I would like to resolve this issue during this meeting so we can move onto other matters,” Pepper told his staff.
Karen Wesley was the first to respond. She cleared her throat so her voice would carry and had made a habit of inflecting a bit of bite into her tone.
“We have completed our evaluations and hammered out the entire list of bounty figures, save one. I believe the only bit of business we need to clear up is the bounty figure for our number one most wanted, Kim Yong Chang.”
“What are your thoughts?” asked Pepper. “Our current reward is already at twenty-five million dollars for Kim Yong Chang.”
Wesley consulted her notebook and flipped through a few pages before responding.
“Research shows that larger bounties entice greater and more sophisticated responses. It’s not just Kim Yong Chang’s butler that would give him up, but entire underground coordinated gangs will make a run at that kind of money. The more money to go around, the more each one gets, and the easier it is to justify the risk. I think we should increase the bounty on Kim Yong Chang up to fifty million.”
Paul Moore chimed in, “Does it really matter if it’s twenty-five million or fifty million? Realistically, how many times have we paid out any of these bounties? How many times has someone killed or turned over anyone on the CIA’s or FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list? Like never. It just doesn’t happen. So why not just make it a gazillion dollars? It’s just chump change anyway. What’s the CIA’s annual budget? Like sixty billion a year? And that’s not including our black ops.”
Being new on the job, Jarret Pepper didn’t really know how to take the brash Paul Moore. In previous meetings, Paul had demonstrated that he had a big mouth. Moore said what was on his mind. Sometimes the stuff was right on the mark, and at other times Pepper got the sense that Moore just wanted to move the meeting along so he could get in a few swings on the back nine before it got dark.
Karen Wesley started to say something, but Moore talked over her.
“All of this—putting prices on terrorists’ heads—seems a little wild-wild-West to me. Does it really work?” Moore asked.
Wesley answered, “It’s more than just a figure. Our evaluation places a monetary value on the target. The size of the reward doesn’t only indicate who is important to us; but it indicates who is more important to us. It’s a method of ranking these dangerous individuals in a fashion that the public can understand. The more we want them, the higher the reward.”
Pepper remained silent, absorbing the back-and-forth exchange between Wesley and Moore.
Moore said, “I don’t think this is worth meeting about. We know who we want to capture or kill and we know the order, so why go through this exercise? Why not just add five million a pop, like the reward for the tenth guy on the list is ten million, number nine is fifteen million, number eight is twenty million, and so on?”
There was a long silence, and it appeared that Wesley was waiting on Pepper to add his two-cents to the conversation.
The silence continued. Moore looked at Wesley and then at Pepper.
Wesley looked at Moore, and when Moore’s eyes shifted to Pepper, she looked at Pepper as well.
Pepper was in no hurry to provide his two cents. He considered the fact, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It was his job to predict the reaction.
Pepper finally said, “I need to brief our new president in two days. The people attending that meeting will be the Director of National Intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the FBI. I would like to have a solid reason for spending more of the taxpayers’ money on the outside chance that we have to pay one of these bounties. Placing arbitrary amounts on highly sought terrorists really doesn’t do it for me, and I don’t think it will do it for the people in that meeting either.”
Pepper looked at Moore, expecting him to say something, but Moore remained silent.
Pepper continued, “So, I would like a written justification as to why some of the detestable people on our Top Ten Terrorist list are worth only five million, and why we feel that others are worth fifty million. I’m not expecting a one-inch-thick slab of paper on my desk, but we should have some research and corresponding data that backs up how we arrived at our bounty numbers. Are we good with that?”
“Sounds good to me,” Wesley said.
Moore looked like he could see a light at the end of what was supposed to be a long meeting and said, “Absolutely, Jarret. Makes perfect sense.”
Pepper didn’t detect a tone of placation in Moore’s response, but he didn’t know the man all that well.
“So, are we all good with fifty million dollars for Kim’s head?” Wesley asked.
“Sure, but make sure you justify how much we’ll pay for the rest of him,” Pepper joked.
No one laughed.
Tough crowd, Pepper thought.
Java Sea—Aboard the Hail Nucleus
H
ail had reviewed a few hours of Eagles’ video when an instant message popped up on his screen. The message was from Dallas Stone in the ship’s security center.
It read: Hey Marshall, we have a security situation that may require your attention.
Hail checked the time on the corner of the monitor. It was about two in the afternoon. Hail’s stomach grumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten in the last twelve hours.
Hail typed a reply to the instant message: On my way. He hit send and logged off his computer.
Hail left his little office, walked back to his bedroom. After getting dressed, he left his stateroom. It took him about three minutes to walk the 700 feet to the security center. He knew this because he was kind of a math guy and knew that the average person walked about four feet per second, and the security center was on the other end of the ship. Simple math yielded the solution—175 seconds for a one-way pedestrian trip.
Seven hundred feet later, Hail held his proximity card to the scanner, and the lock inside the bulkhead door to the security center clanged open.
Unlike the last time he had walked in and hardly anyone had paid attention, this time six happy faces were all looking at him and smiling.
Hail looked confused. “What the heck is up? And what’s so funny?” Hail asked.
Six laughs accompanied six devious grins. Other than Pierce Mercier, who was sitting at one of the analyst’s stations, no one in the room was older than 22 years of age.
“Pirates,” Dallas Stone told Hail.
“What?” Hail heard himself say, but he already knew what Dallas was telling him. He simply didn’t believe him.
“That’s right,” Dallas said, laughing. “Some dumb-ass pirates are approaching us in a twenty-foot wooden fishing vessel. What are they thinking?” Dallas slapped himself on the side of his head.
The expressions didn’t change on his crew’s faces. His pilots and analysts just stared at Hail with big grins plastered across their animated faces. Working in the security center was a pretty boring job. Up until now, the Hail Nucleus had never been attacked, so this minor low-risk diversion from the monotony had his young crew excited.
“This should be interesting,” Hail laughed, clapping his hands together.
Taylor informed Hail, “Oh, they also have a mother boat sitting about a mile off our port side, but it looks like they only have a single .50 caliber machine gun mounted on its bow.”
Dallas turned to look at his monitors and said, “Check it out.”
Hail squeezed in between Dallas’ and Taylor’s stations. Dallas pointed at a set of screens that had a video playing on them. One screen showed a view from a camera on Prince shooting directly down on the small wooden boat. The small craft appeared to be powered by an outboard motor. A driver was muscling the tiller through four-foot waves. Hail saw five men on the boat—some with shirts, some without—but all of them had a rifle of some type slung over their shoulders. Stone’s other monitor displayed a video being shot from one of the Hail Nucleus’ gun ports. The camera mounted in that particular port was sitting at an angle of forty-five degrees to the sea below. A crisp and clean image of the approaching vessel was being electronically streamed from the port camera to the security center. Hail estimated that the pirates’ wooden boat was about a thousand yards off the Hail Nucleus’ port side.
“Is our deck clear? No one is up top, are they?”
Dallas answered, “The deck has been cleared, and we are locked down.”
“Queen has a close-up of the mother boat, and I have that video on this monitor,” Taylor told Hail, pointing at the screen closest to her boss.
Hail turned his attention to Taylor’s monitor. Her screen showed a white boat that was much larger than the wooden boat. It was newer in design and age. The mother boat appeared to be made of fiberglass. It was white and shiny and sat low in the water. Only three men could be seen on its deck.
Hail realized that a fiberglass boat wasn’t the best attack vessel, but then these dirt-poor Indonesian people didn’t have the luxury of being picky. They had probably liberated it from pleasure seekers or fishermen who had entered an area of the Java Sea that they now regretted. Hail thought about how desperate these pirates must be to think they could pull up next to a massive cargo ship in a dinky wooden boat and try to take over. He actually admired them in a way. What balls.
“What do you want to do, Skipper?” Dallas asked.
Indecisiveness wasn’t part of Hail’s character. He was raised by a decisive man in a decisive manner. Indecision had been interpreted as a weakness by his father. But Hail had to think this situation over for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said to buy some time. “It doesn’t even seem fair—” and he let his sentence trail off.
He started again, “I mean; I really don’t want to vaporize these poor fools unless we have to. Does anyone have any thoughts?”
Lex Vaughn, one of the two weapon controllers, suggested, “We could get close and personal to scare them away.” Vaughn had just graduated from high school and
had recently joined Hail’s crew on the Hail Nucleus. He had tested very high on the online flight simulator exercise that his team had developed, and so far, Hail thought that Vaughn was fitting in nicely.
Titus Penn, the other weapon controller, suggested, “Or we could just open up with one of our ship’s fifties in front of them. That would scare the hell out of me if I was a pirate in a crappy wooden boat.”
Penn’s addition to the crew had been much different than that of Vaughn’s. Titus Penn had been orphaned years ago in an atrocity that had taken his parents’ lives. With no other living relatives, Hail had become Penn’s guardian, as he had for many of the young people on board. Penn was only fourteen when his parents had left his life. For the last two years, he had been schooled, fed, housed and nurtured aboard the Hail Nucleus. The ship had become his home.
Marshall considered both options for a moment. He watched the small pirates’ boat bounce across the waves under full power. Water was shooting up from the sides of the boat as the pirates closed within 500 yards of the Hail Nucleus.
His next question was directed toward both of his weapon controllers.
“What do we have in our medium-class drone that is charged, armed and ready to fly?”
Penn and Vaughn began to flip through screens on their monitors.
Penn was the first to report, “I have Ratt and Scorpion ready for launch.”
Vaughn said a moment later, “And I have Poison ready to go.”
“That sounds good,” Hail said, his tone balanced and assertive. “Handoff Ratt to Stone so each of you is flying a single drone. Open the hatch on the deck and get them airborne.”
“Yes, sir,” Penn said, transferring the Ratt’s flight control to Dallas Stone.
The assignment made sense, because Taylor was still controlling the in-flight attack drone, code-named Queen. And Dallas’ drone, Prince, was static and clipped to the underside of a blimp thousands of feet above the Hail Nucleus.
Vaughn pressed an icon on a screen and reported, “The deck hatch is open, and we are good to spin up.”
The three pilots, who had each been assigned a weapon, pulled in a bar from the sides of their stations that swiveled into place in front of them. The bar had a combination of joysticks and flight controls mounted to its stainless-steel surface. Each of the young men placed their feet on control pedals under their stations.
Hail asked Taylor, “Can you please bring up the video on the hatch camera and track the group until they go over the rail?”
“Will do,” Taylor said, transferring the video from the hatch camera to the monitor closest to Hail.
His stomach growled loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
“I think we should get some popcorn,” Hail told his crew.
“Yeah!” squealed Alba, clapping her hands together. “Popcorn and an action movie.”
Alba was occupying the second analyst’s station next to Pierce Mercier. Both the analyst’s stations were built behind the pilots’ stations and were elevated on the second tier. Behind the analysts’
stations was a third tier that held Hail’s big captain’s chair. Alba was the oldest of the young crew in the room. She was twenty-two, but Hail thought she acted more like sixteen. She had graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Foreign Language Study. His analyst had short dark hair, and Hail couldn’t recall ever seeing the vivacious woman without a smile on her face. Alba Zorn was a security analyst. Specifically, she was the ship’s language specialist.
“Of course, you guys are flying,” he told the pilots.
“And your hands are full too,” he said to Taylor. “So that leaves me, Mercier and Alba to share the popcorn.”
For the first time since Hail arrived in the security center, the two data analysts looked pleased to be sitting one row back from the action.
“Can you do the honors?” Hail asked Pierce Mercier.
Mercier picked up the phone, dialed a six-digit number and requested a bowl of popcorn.
Hail watched Dallas’ and Taylor’s monitors. He considered climbing up the two tiers behind them to sit in his chair, but he had done a lot of sitting today and felt like standing. Standing burned more calories, and this might be the only exercise he would get today.
The cameras from Poison, Ratt and Scorpion were transmitting videos to each of the pilot’s stations. Each of the weapon systems lifted off from deck two and began flying toward the light above.
“Don’t forget the lemonade,” Hail told Mercier before he hung up the phone.
“Yay!” Alba yelled, clapping her hands together again. “Popcorn and lemonade and an action movie. Dang, most people would have to be on a cargo ship in the middle of the frickin’ Java Sea to get an afternoon of fun like that.”
Operation Hail Storm Page 4