Operation Hail Storm

by Brett Arquette

  “And she has some great dimensions, if you don’t mind my saying,” Dallas proclaimed.

  “No arguments there,” Hail confirmed.

  Hail thought for a moment and said, “Have Alba listen to it to see what she thinks. I have to go work out with her right now. It would be nice if I could ask her about it, but then I would have to start the conversation by saying, ‘So, I was listening to the phone call you had with your boss that we secretly recorded—’”

  “Yeah, that could be a problem,” Dallas agreed.

  “Besides Kara and her language skills, how is the Sea of Japan looking today? All quiet?”

  “So far, so good. All the Asian countries are behaving themselves today.”

  “That’s good news,” Hail said. “I will be in the gym if you need me.”

  “Don’t have a heart attack,” Dallas quipped with a smile.

  “No guarantees,” Hail said as he left the room.

  *_*_*

  The gym was on the other side of the ship, and Hail was winded by the time he got to his workout. He felt that was probably a bad sign.

  Kara was already running on a treadmill, watching a TV monitor mounted to the front of the machine. A wire led from the TV to a pair of earbuds that were stuck into her ears. She didn’t notice Hail when he walked in, but Hail noticed her. Kara was dressed in black yoga pants that hugged her perfect rump like dark skin. At her thin waist, where her yoga pants ended, a patch of porcelain white skin covered up her hard abs until they disappeared under a silver bra made from spandex. At least to Hail it looked like a bra, but it was probably some sort of exercise top. Whatever the hell it was, Hail approved. The woman looked stunning. Her crazy curves bounced and jiggled seductively as she ran. Her red hair flew out behind her, being blown by two fans built into the control panel of the treadmill. Kara was glistening with perspiration, and her face was flushed with a healthy pink hue.

  Hail walked up and stepped onto the treadmill that was next to her. Kara saw him from the corner of her eye and pulled out her ear plugs with a single yank of the wire.

  Hail said hello, and Kara pressed the pause button on her treadmill and it came to a slow stop.

  “So, what did you think?”

  “What did I think of what?”

  Kara looked bemused. She smiled knowingly at Hail and said, “Come on, Marshall. Keep in mind that I’m a CIA agent. So, if I were in your shoes, the very first thing I would have done before I came down here was stop and see your techno-nerds and have them play back the recording of me talking to my boss.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hail said, doing his best to act surprised and somewhat insulted.

  “Really? That’s the trust you want to nurture between us?” Kara said, shaking her head disapprovingly at him.

  Hail thought about it for a moment, gave in and said, “What kind of language is that?”

  Kara smiled like she had won a small battle and said, “I call it Zub-a-dub language.”

  Hail pressed the slow button on his treadmill. His machine came to life, and Hail started walking.

  Kara pressed the slow button and then the up arrow until her belt was moving twice as fast as Hail’s. Kara started walking.

  “What is Zub-a-dub language?” Hail asked, already knowing the answer would be as confusing as the language.

  Kara smiled and increased her treadmill to a slow run. “Now, why would I tell you that? Obviously, it’s a language I can use to talk to my boss when you are secretly recording my conversations.”

  “I thought we were trying to build trust,” Hail said, sounding hurt.

  Kara smiled. She enjoyed this chess game.

  “I’m going to tell you about Zub-a-dub only because it’s nothing that you can research or figure out. It’s not like the Navajo language they used in the Second World War that totally baffled the Germans.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I made it up,” Kara said with pride.

  “You made up a language?” Hail asked skeptically.

  “Yep. When I was a little girl I made up Zub-a-dub.”

  Hail didn’t know how to respond. He was going to ask if that was a common thing for little girls to do, but before he was put on the spot, Kara added, “As you already know, I’ve always had a knack for languages. Even back when I was little, they were fun. I played around with some of the common gibberish languages like Pig Latin and Ubbi dubbi, but they bored me. So, one day, I decided to make up my own language. It was like Ubbi dubbi, but instead of substituting sounds into words, I made up a unique word in Zub-a-dub that matched thousands of English words.”

  “That would hurt my brain,” Hail said. “Who did you talk your new language with?”

  “I don’t think that was a sentence in any language,” Kara stated.

  “OK. I will rephrase. Whom did you find to converse with in your new language?”

  Kara laughed, but it was somewhat sad and hollow.

  “I spoke it with my maid,” she said it like it was a confession and something to be ashamed of. “She didn’t speak English very well, and I didn’t speak Spanish very well, so we came together on Zub-a-dub. We would have fun talking about my parents behind their backs, literally. My maid was kind of like my best friend for a while.”

  Kara paused for a second and added, “How sad is that?”

  Hail didn’t want to get sucked in too deep into Kara’s personal life, so he asked, “So you taught Pepper this Zub-a-dub language?”

  “Not hardly,” Kara said. “If you haven’t noticed, Pepper is pretty much a doorknob. It would take him ten years to learn Zub-a-dub, if at all.”

  “So how was he able to reply to you?”

  “I worked with the CIA programmers to create an app for Pepper’s phone that works like SIRI for the iPhone. I say something in Zub-a-dub, and it then translates it for Pepper. He then says something in English, and it speaks his phrases back to me in Zub-a-dub.”

  “That’s what we figured, but we didn’t know you had invented the language,” Hail said.

  “That’s why I’m telling you all this. See, you could keep recording me and put together a team of encryption experts. They would then start to decipher the language by breaking all the words apart. After hundreds of recordings and thousands of man-hours, in about a year you might be able to hash out the language, but why would you waste all that time? I will be gone in a few days.”

  “You will?” Hail asked.

  “Whenever this operation is over, won’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” Hail said honestly. “I’m not even sure what defines ‘the end of the operation’. Would that be when I’m done blowing up missile parts? Or is it when I rid the earth of all the leaders of terrorist organizations?”

  “Good point,” Kara said.

  Hail pressed the up arrow on his treadmill and transitioned into a fast walk.

  Kara pressed the up arrow on her treadmill and began a medium run.

  Hail looked at Kara, and she looked back at him and smiled, as if to say, “You will never catch me.”

  Hail had never met a woman like Kara Ramey. Or was it that he had never met anyone like Kara Ramey that he was interested in. Was he interested in her? Because as far as he was concerned, she wasn’t his type. Hail’s type was a woman in crisis. A dependent female that needed him more than she loved him. Marshall, to the rescue. And for some irrational reason, he found solace in that type of partnership. But even though he sensed that she was damaged goods, her trauma had not undone her. In fact, it appeared that she had become emboldened by her pain, and it had given her a renewed purpose in life. Kara had emerged from her tragedy and had become reincarnated as some sort of CIA badass. And even though it went against all of Hail’s nurturing instincts, he found the independent Ramey invigorating and exciting. Who knows, maybe Hail had also emerged from his own tragedy as a different person? A better person? That was subjective. Only God could make that judgement, but for some
strange reason he cared what Kara thought of him.

  “After we get some good air moving through you, we’re going to start with some sit-ups and see if we can shrink that tire around your waist,” Kara said, letting out phrases between breaths.

  Hail looked hurt.

  Kara saw Hail’s puppy dog expression and said, “I mean it’s not bad. Maybe thirty extra pounds, but you can burn that off in a few weeks, easy.”

  Hail was breathing hard and hadn’t even approached running speed.

  The phone in his pocket went off, and he pressed pause on the treadmill. Once the machine had come to a complete stop, he let go of the handrails and removed his phone. He put it up to his ear.

  “What’s up, Gage?”

  Kara kept her machine running and kept herself running but watched Hail take the call.

  “OK,” was all Hail said, but his body language told Kara that something was up.

  Hail clicked off his phone and reached over to Kara’s treadmill and pressed the STOP button.

  “What’s up?” Kara asked.

  “The truck is pulling into a warehouse off the Pyongyang–Wonsan Highway. We’ve got to go now.”

  Kara grabbed her phone, a towel and some water. Hail draped a towel over his shoulder. They left the gym and quickly made their way through the ship’s corridors back to the mission control center.

  *_*_*

  “Nice outfit,” Gage Renner told Hail sarcastically as he entered the room.

  Then he looked at Kara Ramey in her workout clothes and said, “Nice outfit,” and he meant it.

  Gage relinquished the captain’s chair to Hail and moved over to his own control station.

  Hail sat down and asked Kara if she would like a chair.

  “No, I like standing.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It was something about your flat ass, wasn’t it?” Hail recalled.

  Kara flipped him the bird.

  Only the principals in the room were in attendance: Gage Renner, Alex Knox, Shana Tran and Pierce Mercier. Hail figured that Alba Zorn, their language specialist, was currently pulling her hair out trying to make sense of Kara’s Zub-a-dub recording.

  Hail looked up at the large screen. The view from inside the warehouse was clear and bright. The drone sitting on the roof of the truck provided an elevated vantage point.

  “Can you please do a slow 180-degree pan with the camera, so I can get a sense of the place?” Hail asked Knox.

  “Sure thing,” Knox replied and began panning the camera clockwise very slowly.

  The front of the truck was pointing toward the back of the warehouse. Hail estimated the building was about twenty yards deep. Crates upon crates were stacked thirty feet in the air. The ceiling above the crates was probably another ten feet higher. An aisle between the crates, wide enough to accommodate a small forklift, had been left in order to move stuff around.

  “Hold there for a moment,” Hail asked. “Good. Now point the camera up in the rafters, so we can find a place to park the drone.”

  Knox adjusted the camera so it was pointing toward the ceiling of the warehouse.

  “Looks like it’s a galvanized roof, 18-gauge maybe, laid across the top of steel beams,” Renner commented. “It’s not insulated, so we should be able to find some good magnetic spots to land the drone.”

  “Is galvanized a ferrous metal?” Hail asked.

  “Galvanized isn’t a metal at all,” Pierce Mercier said. “That roof is a thin sheet of steel that has been galvanized in zinc. Zinc is nonferrous, but it’s such a thin coat that the magnets on the drone should still be able to stick to the steel beneath the zinc.”

  Hail and his crew continued to watch the video, realizing every minute they watched, the drone’s battery power was draining.

  “Man, this place is packed,” Hail said, as the camera zoomed back and continued to make a 360-degree pan.

  Kara said, “This has to be one of the last pieces to arrive. They don’t have any more space left.”

  “Unless they have more than one warehouse,” Hail suggested.

  “How many missiles are they buying?” Renner asked.

  “Three,” Kara said.

  “I’m no missile expert, but right there,” Hail said, pointing his finger at some large cylindrical pieces to the left, “are six separate stages. Keep going with the camera, and let’s see what’s on the other side of the truck.”

  As Knox rotated the camera around, their view was temporarily blocked by the backside of the crane’s boom already being positioned to lift the huge missile part off the truck.

  “Keep going,” Hail instructed.

  Three men in North Korean uniforms came into view. Each soldier held a thick piece of chain and were busily connecting the links to the missile section on the trailer.

  “Right there—stop,” Hail said. “I see one more missile stage on the ground, right there at the bottom left of the frame.”

  The group looked at where Hail was pointing.

  “So that means that one more stage has yet to arrive,” Kara said.

  “Would that last piece do them any good if all these stages were already blown up?” Hail asked.

  “No,” Kara said, “Unless they want to make it into a big hot tub or something.”

  The truck’s suspension groaned and rocked to one side as the crane hefted the metallic cylinder off the trailer and slung it out to the left. The camera tilted slightly as the load was being lowered to the ground.

  “Now’s the time to get flying,” Gage reminded Hail. “Everyone’s eyes are on the cargo.”

  Hail sat a little straighter in his chair.

  “Unlock Black Eyed Peas (BEP) and fly it up to the rafters,” Hail told Knox.

  “Roger that,” Knox said, reaching over and bringing up a screen that read INTERLOCK ON.

  Knox moved the graphic slider to the OFF position and said, “Black Eyed Peas is loose and we are spinning up in three, two, one.”

  The view from the drone’s camera rose as the matte black drone lifted off from the center of the yellow ring, leaving the outer ring with the outer drone still stuck to the top of the truck.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Kara said. “I thought the drone was called ELO?”

  Hail shook his head.

  Without taking his eyes off the big screen, he explained, “We actually landed two drones on the Huan Yue. The outer drone—the drone that looks like a round yellow reflector light—is called ELO. It’s a communications drone. It has a camera for navigation, but it doesn’t support audio. That would be too much combined weight. Inside the ring called ELO is another drone called Black Eyed Peas. The inner drone is the surveillance drone. It supports both video and audio, and it is used exclusively for observation. The outer drone functions as the satellite uplink drone.”

  “I don’t get it,” Kara said. “Why do we need two drones?”

  “Look at the video,” Hail said, pointing to the big screen. “Right now, those big warehouse doors are open, and we can communicate pretty well with the drones via satellite. But when those doors close, we need to switch Black Eyed Peas’ communications from satellite to Wi-Fi communications. Even inside the warehouse with the doors closed, Black Eyed Peas will be able to pick-up the Wi-Fi signal being sent from ELO. So, when the truck leaves the warehouse, we’ll fly ELO off the top of the truck and land it on top of the warehouse. Once it’s up there, it will receive a strong satellite signal. It will then convert those signals to Wi-Fi and network in with BEP.”

  “BEEP?” Kara asked.

  “Black Eyed Peas,” Hail told her.

  “Of course. What was I thinking?”

  Hail watched the ceiling of the warehouse get closer and closer. He could make out a bird’s nest about three feet away that was resting on the steel girder they had selected.

  “You guys really have all this stuff figured out,” Kara said, without a trace of sarcasm in her tone.

  “I’d like to think so,” Hail s
aid. “We put a lot of time and money into these designs.”

  Knox hovered BEP over the beam and turned the drone on its axis 180 degrees so it was pointing toward the front of the warehouse. Shooting down at a forty-five-degree angle, the video provided a clear view of the front of the truck. Lying on each side of the truck were the stored missile sections. Behind the truck, the warehouse doors were open and beyond that was pitch darkness. The crew in the mission center could all clearly see the yellow light ring called ELO that was still sitting in on the truck’s roof, lost in an array of other yellow lights and red reflectors that peppered the vehicle.

  “What do you think about setting BEP down here?” Knox asked Hail.

  “That bird’s nest is pretty close, and there appears to be a bird in it. What do you think, Pierce? Is that thing a woodpecker or something? Is it going to mess with us?”

  Knox brought the camera around and zoomed it in on the bird. The medium sized bird had a narrow black head with white stripes running down its side. It had a black, sharp beak, and Hail guessed it could probably do some damage to the drone if it hammered its little feathery face on it.

  Pierce Mercier looked closely at the bird and said, “It’s a Korean magpie or Oriental magpie (Pica pica serica), known as kkachi in Korean. It is a smaller bird with a—”

  “We don’t need an ornithology lesson right now, Pierce. Is it going to peck on us, or isn’t it?”

  “No,” Mercier said, sounding disappointed that he couldn’t provide a full report.

  “Set BEP down,” Hail said, “and be sure to touch down on the edge of the beam so we can point the camera down and see the floor.”

  The camera swayed from side to side for a moment. A second later, the video stream became fixed and focused as if the camera had been set on a tripod.

  “We’re down,” Knox reported.

  “What’s our power reserve?” Hail asked.

  Knox looked up the information.

  “We have about forty percent battery left on BEP.”

  “So, taking into account the energy used to communicate with the Wi-Fi, that would give us about four hours of video streaming,” Hail estimated.

  Knox flipped to another screen.