Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  “Clearing the hatch in three, two, one. The hatch is cleared,” reported Taylor.

  “What do you want to do, Skipper?” Dallas Stone asked.

  Hail looked at the monitor that showed the pirates’ boat slowing as they approached the port side of the Hail Nucleus.

  “Take the drones over the starboard side. Stay low, circle around the back of the ship and come up behind the pirates. I think a surprise meeting would be best.”

  “Roger that,” Dallas said.

  In a tight group, the three weapons traversed the width of the ship, flying just feet above the white cargo containers. Hail watched the videos streaming until the drones disappeared over the starboard railing.

  Hail looked at Mercier sitting in front of his station, doing nothing except waiting for the popcorn, and asked him, “Mercier, please get a camera on these pirates and let’s see if we can ID their country by what they are wearing.”

  “Sure, Marshall,” Mercier said, “But you don’t need an analyst to tell you that it doesn’t matter where they are from. They are here for the money. If they can take control of the ship, they will hold it until they receive a ransom.”

  Hail huffed and said, “Well, we know that isn’t going to happen. Please humor me.”

  Mercier touched his screen and opened another gun port on the port side of the Hail Nucleus. The angle from this camera was much better than the previous view. Mercier zoomed in so close that instead of five nondescript pirates, five ugly men with stained and rotten teeth appeared on Mercier’s monitor.

  “Transfer it to big screen number two, please,” Hail requested.

  Mercier touched a few icons, and the video from his small screen appeared on one of the big screens mounted on the wall above the crew.

  “Maybe I won’t have that popcorn,” said Alba cynically. “Can you zoom out a little,” she asked Mercier. “Sometimes close is just too close.”

  “I just want to see their clothes, or whatever clothes they have on,” Mercier said. He zoomed out about four feet.

  Mercier studied the pirates for a moment and said, “I can’t tell anything by the dirty rags they’re wearing. Indonesian or Malaysian maybe. It is so damn hard to tell. They are all carrying AK-47s if that helps at all?”

  “Yeah, right,” Hail laughed. “Every man, woman and child in this hemisphere carries an AK-47.”

  “Just coming around the stern of the ship,” Dallas reported.

  “Stay low; stay low,” Hail told him. “I want you guys almost touching the water. What’s the status on the mother boat?”

  Taylor moved her joystick and refocused Queen’s camera on the boat.

  “They are still a long way away,” she said. “I don’t think they’ll be able to see Ratt, Scorpion and Poison from that distance. And even if they do, they won’t have a clue what they’re seeing.”

  The pirates’ boat touched the hull of the Hail Nucleus. At twenty knots, a light touch from the massive cargo ship was amplified into a violent jarring of the small pirates’ craft. The pirates all fell down in the middle of their boat and then scrambled back up to their feet.

  “What are they doing?” Hail asked.

  “Not much,” Mercier replied. “If they have done this before, they are expecting our ship to start making sharp turns. The other thing they would anticipate is getting hit in the face by a firehose shot from a panicked crew on deck. None of that is happening and they’re wondering why.”

  “OK, so what are they going to do next?” Hail asked Mercier.

  “If they follow “International Pirate Protocol” or IPP,” Mercier joked, “then they’re going to swing hooks up to the railing and climb aboard.”

  “Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Hail said emphatically.

  “Where is the popcorn?” Alba asked.

  “We’re almost up to them,” Dallas informed everyone. “Thirty meters.”

  “Pull back on the camera about five feet,” Hail told Mercier.

  Mercier zoomed out until it showed the wooden boat next to the Hail Nucleus with a perimeter of five feet of water surrounding it. The waves were hammering on the little boat and Hail wondered how long the pirates could hold out under those current conditions.

  “Are you guys ready?” Hail asked his pilots.

  “Ready,” they said.

  “All right, bring up the drones and meet our pirate friends.”

  There was a lot of commotion down on the sea below. The pirates’ little boat was tipping from side to side and bouncing around from the five-foot wakes that rolled off the Hail Nucleus. The pirates didn’t seem to notice the three remote flying machines that had just appeared above the dirty lip of their boat. The flying saucer-like aircraft, roughly the size of a big hula hoop, hovered above the water, keeping perfect pace with their boat. Ratt was flying in front of the bow of the pirates’ boat, and Scorpion and Poison maintained a measured three-foot distance on each side of the pirates’ wooden craft.

  For what seemed like a minute to the security crew, but was closer to fifteen seconds, the pirates remained oblivious to the strange objects that hovered and surrounded them. The pirate who was in the far back of the boat wrestling with the powerful outboard engine was the first man to notice Ratt hovering directly in front the boat. An instant later, his expression turned from confusion to fear when he noticed the other two air machines on either side of his boat. The pirate working the tiller yelled something to his men who scanned their surroundings and took in the strange sight as well. Initially, the grimy and water-soaked pirates looked at the objects as if they were alien invaders that had come to earth from outer-space, which wasn’t far off the mark from their perspective. Then the pirates all seemed to recognize the outline of a weapon hanging underneath each of the flying saucers that they were very familiar with. Each pirate in the boat had one hanging over their own shoulder. The only difference was the .45 caliber, fully automatic mini-gun mounted under the remote-controlled drones could fire at double the rate of the pirates’ AK-47s. The flying guns also held a hundred and twenty rounds of barrel-fed ammunition. The pirates’ AK-47s had a single magazine of thirty rounds.

  One of the pirates was so startled by the sight of the strange contraptions that he inadvertently squeezed off a burst of fire. Two of his six rounds hit the top of Poison’s Kevlar cover, the part the pirates would describe as the top of the flying saucer. Those two 7.62 rounds harmlessly skidded off Poison’s domed surface and bounced off the side of the Hail Nucleus, making movie ricochet sounds. Two more rounds hit the mini-gun mounted under Poison and went pinging off into the ocean. The last two rounds missed everything entirely and harmlessly disappeared into the distance.

  The blast of gunfire drew the attention of the rest of the pirates, and they raised their guns up to their shoulders and took aim at the closest alien.

  Each of the cameras mounted to each of the flying weapons streamed the video back to the security center on the Hail Nucleus. The video that arrived showed five pirates that looked both scared and angry.

  “What do you want to do, Marshall?” Dallas asked. “We have them at gunpoint.”

  Hail looked at the pirates. They stared back at him through the eyes of his avionic soldiers.

  “God, what would it be like to be one of these guys?” Hail thought. Born into abject poverty; having to scrape by for the very basics of life. And the kicker was that their lives would never change. No retirement. No relief. Day after day, doing whatever they had to do to eat and keep a cardboard roof over their heads. Death might even be welcomed after a lifetime of that. Hell, maybe even after a decade of that type of existence. Today, however, the Hail crew would not be the answer to those prayers or any of their problems.

  “Alba, do you know Indonesian?” Hail asked.

  Alba put down the bowl of popcorn that had just arrived and said, “I know a little of the Bahasa Indonesia form of the language. It is the official modified form of Malay.”

  Hail responded, “I
don’t know what any of that means, but it has to be better than nothing. Open a microphone and speaker channel on Ratt.”

  “Give me a minute,” Alba said.

  On the water, the pirates appeared both confused and paralyzed. They stared at their flying captors, apparently trying to make up their minds about what to do next. Their choice was to either continue on with what had become a very odd abduction scenario or cut their losses and return to the mother boat.

  Hail looked over the Indonesians closely, trying to determine which one was the leader. Their body language was being continually interrupted by the bumps and dips in the ocean. The man sitting at the back of the boat and operating the outboard engine had it easy. The others were trying to remain standing while keeping their guns trained on the targets surrounding them.

  Hail decided that it really didn’t matter who was in charge. There were no decisions to be made by the pirates. Hail was making all the decisions on their behalf. Live or die. It was all a matter of one command that exited his mouth and entered the ears of his pilots.

  “I have comms open, Marshall,” Alba reported.

  “Tell them this: ‘This is the captain of Hail Nucleus. Turn your boat around and go home. If you do, no harm will come to you or your men,’” Hail said.

  Alba made an adjustment to the TC Helicon Voice Modulator and set the dial for BARITONE MALE. She slipped on a headset and adjusted the microphone in front of her mouth.

  She then translated Hail’s words.

  Hail and the crew waited for a reaction.

  The pirate closest to Ratt was so startled when the weird thing started talking, he fell back into the boat and opened fire. His volley of lead wasn’t aimed well, and the rounds uselessly shot skyward.

  Hail shook his head and said to Alba, “Tell them this: ‘Turn your boat around right now. Go home or we will open fire.’”

  Alba repeated the phrase in her best Indonesian.

  The mechanical Indonesia voice that came out of Ratt was low, loud and clear. Hail could tell the men in the boat had understood Alba’s instructions. They just didn’t like the message. They began arguing with one another. There was a rapid fire of curt exchanges that didn’t appear to resolve the situation. The pirate who had fallen down in the boat got back to his feet and purposely pointed his weapon at Ratt and appeared to be ready to fire.

  “Screw this,” Hail said. “Vaughn, what kind of angle do you have on their bow gunwale?”

  “I’m good,” Vaughn said, “But Dallas needs to move Ratt out of the way.”

  “I’m on it,” Dallas said, tilting his joystick to the right. “I should be clear now.”

  The pirates looked happy when the flying gun-alien-thing that had hovered over their bow began to move away from the front of their boat. To Hail, he sensed they thought that their recent gunfire had scared the thing away.

  “Fire,” Hail ordered.

  Vaughn lifted the safety latch and slid his finger onto the trigger of his left joystick. On his screen, he centered a red laser on the top rail of the pirate boat. Confident with the fix on his target, Vaughn fired the machine gun. The speakers in the security center crackled with loud static as the barrage of brass and lead peaked and distorted the drone’s microphones.

  The pirates jumped and launched themselves toward the back of their boat as Poison spat out bullets. Chunks of wood and flying splinters chattered off the vessel’s bow. The pirate driving their boat cranked the motor hard to the right. As the roar of gunfire subsided, it veered away from the Hail Nucleus. The barrel on Poison smoked, leaving a dull grey cloud behind it as the flying weapons maintained their original speed and position next to the Hail Nucleus.

  “Should we pursue them?” Dallas asked.

  Before Hail could respond, Taylor, who was still flying the attack drone Queen high above, said, “The mother boat is on the move and closing rapidly on our position. There is one guy manning the .50 caliber and they are vectored to reach us in about forty-seven seconds.”

  “Get one of the port cameras on them,” Hail requested.

  Being one of the few crew members with free hands, Mercier pulled up the console and took control of the camera that had been tracking the pirates below. He pointed it up and out toward the sea. It took him a few second of scanning, but he finally acquired the inbound boat, drew a crude box around the vessel with his finger and set the camera to AUTO TRACK.

  Hail studied the fiberglass boat that was approaching the Hail Nucleus. From the front, it looked like a twenty-six-foot Boston Whaler; year unknown. The only modification from the stock craft was the addition of a large .50 caliber Browning machine gun that pivoted on a stand mounted on the front deck. As Hail scanned the pirate boat for other weapons, puffs of smoke began appearing from the barrel of the machine gun. A second later, the sound of gunfire was heard over the drone’s microphones which was piped up to the security center.

  “We are taking fire from the mother boat,” Dallas reported.

  “Range?” Hail asked.

  “Two thousand yards,” Dallas answered.

  “We’re still out of their range. Those .50 calibers won’t hurt us.” Hail said.

  Hail told Dallas, “Pop a few grenades in front of them to see if that slows them down.”

  “You got it, Skipper,” Dallas said. “I’m putting Ratt on auto-suspend.”

  In avionic terms, auto-suspend for a drone was similar to autopilot on a plane. By suspending the drone, the aircraft continued at its current direction and speed, unless it encountered an obstacle, in which case its programming would run an avoidance sub-routine.

  Dallas took control of the ship’s porthole that was already open and shooting video. He touched his screen and activated the gun cluster control. Dallas switched aiming control to his right-hand joystick, and the servomotors on the gun turret jumped to life. A thick red laser beam shot out across the sea.

  “Bringing the XM on target,” Dallas announced. He then focused the tip of the beam about fifty yards in front of the oncoming Whaler.

  “Let me know when Marshall,” he told Hail.

  “Fire a burst,” Hail told him.

  Dallas pulled the trigger, and the XM307 grenade launcher chugged out four metal bombs that spiraled through the air like tiny footballs. Two seconds later, the tight group of grenades exploded with such force that the drones hovering next to the Hail Nucleus juddered.

  In front of the Whaler, water hurtled into the air, and thunder rolled across the ocean. The grenades had all exploded underwater. The shock and awe were a firework show. All the shrapnel from the grenades sank safely to the bottom of the Java Sea. The mother boat remained intact.

  The Hail crew expected a reduction in speed or possibly a change in direction. But to everyone’s surprise, none of that stuff happened. The Whaler kept pouring on the juice, and the gunner opened up again with the big fifty-caliber machine gun.

  “Distance?” Hail asked.

  “Fifteen hundred yards,” Taylor responded.

  “Where is the little boat?” Hail asked.

  “Heading back toward the mother boat,” Dallas answered.

  “Screw these guys,” Hail said. “Bring up the railgun.”

  “Yeaaaaaah, the railgun!” Alba yelled, grabbing the bowl of popcorn again. “This movie just keeps getting better.”

  For the second time, Dallas switched weapon devices and assigned himself the railgun control set.

  Dallas pressed some icons on his monitor, and somewhere far away from the security center they heard a loud metallic KA-THUNK that reverberated throughout the ship.

  “The containers are unlocked, and we’re elevating the gun,” Dallas said.

  The pirate manning the machine gun on the Whaler was the first man to see a new and disturbing sight. A door on the end of a large cylindrical cargo container flapped open. And then, seemingly defying gravity, two huge containers, connected end-to-end, began to rise from the deck of the huge ship.

  The pi
rate gunner on the Whaler turned and yelled something at his fellow pirates who all rushed up to the bow. The cargo containers began turning in the Whaler’s direction, slowly, like the head of a lethargic snake. When the barrel finally came to rest, its dark mouth was pointed directly at them. Now the pirates on the Whaler could clearly see that the containers were not floating in midair. In fact, some sort of massive lift had moved the containers into this threatening position.

  More urgent words were exchanged on the Whaler.

  More bullets sprayed out of their machine gun at the big ship in front of them.

  More distance was reduced as the pirate ship continued to close on the Hail Nucleus.

  “Charge the capacitors,” Hail ordered.

  Dallas looked for the correct icon and replied, “Bringing up the grid.”

  A deep 60-hertz hum began vibrating the hull of the Hail Nucleus. The heavy harmonic tone came from the transformers as they sent thousands of volts into the huge capacitor farm. During all the test firings of the railgun, the exact same sound of corona discharge had been experienced. The weird sounds of fluid being ionized around a conductor had been anticipated inside the security center. Everything was as it should be.

  The pirates watched as a glow appeared from inside the dark cargo container that pointed its enigmatic opening toward them. At first, a blurry blue hue could be seen inside the black hole. As the gun began to take on a charge, the hue mutated into a red and yellow type of fuzzy static that jittered around inside the tube.

  The pirate who was at the wheel of the Whaler pulled back on the throttles, and the bow of their craft dipped and dug into the waves. The pirates were now clustered up front on the bow of the Whaler, staring so intently at the Hail Nucleus that the pirates on the small wooden boat came to a stop as well. The men in the little attack boat turned to look over their shoulders at the strange sight, apparently wondering what the hubbub was all about.

  The sound coming out of the weird metal tube was terrifying only because it was like nothing the pirates had ever heard. In nature, the only thing comparable would have been a beehive strapped to a pirate’s head. But there was more to it than just that. Each of the pirates could physically feel the sound. Their skin prickled. Their teeth vibrated. The insane buzz was accompanied by a low hum that seemed to move the air around them.