Hail Warning Read online

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  Hail Warning

  Written by Brett Arquette

  Edited by Andrea Kerr and Jim Gabler

  Special thanks to my devoted beta readers:

  Michael Picco

  Don Cline

  Marilyn Bourdeau

  Leslie Bryant

  Copyright © 2017 by Brett Arquette

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2017

  ISBN: 9781973219262

  Imprint: Independently published

  Brett Arquette

  51 E. Jefferson Street

  1686

  Orlando, Florida 32802

  http://brett.arquette.us

  Dedicated to my father

  Donald W. Arquette

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THREE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD READ HAIL STORM FIRST

  1) The Hail series is a technothriller series, with a big emphasis on TECH. For this story to believable, I thoroughly vetted the technology behind the workings of the complicated command application and how the drones were flown using remote pilots. I went into thorough detail because I wanted everyone to understand the technology behind Hail Industries. While most readers loved this attention to detail, some readers experienced tech overload; therefore, in the books following Hail Storm, I’m not going to regurgitate the technical aspects of the drones or the nuclear aspects of his traveling wave reactors. If you would like more information on how the drones are flown remotely, what makes them go BOOM, please read the first book of the series, Operation: Hail Storm. If you need a refresher, see What You Missed here: on my website: http:/brett.arquette.us or specifically on this page: http://brett873.wixsite.com/brettarquette/what-you-missed

  2) In the same vein of the technology, I fleshed out the backstories of the leading characters on the Hail Nucleus and the players within the Washington, D.C. area. Although it may appear I enjoy writing lots of descriptions of technology and backstories of characters, (because I did so much of it in the first book), what really makes my fingers fly is moving the plot forward. My passion and goals are to keep the book’s momentum speeding along, (like an F-35), until it culminates in a novel that readers will have difficulty putting down. In this book, I do provide readers the truncated backstory of the lead characters. Like the drones, if you want to know what makes the characters tick, fly, but (hopefully) NOT go boom, I refer you to read Hail Storm.

  3) With the rise of e-books, the challenges of becoming a bestselling author is not about writing a bestselling book. Tucked away in the corners of Amazon’s Kindle Store, I assume, are thousands of unknown and potentially bestselling novels. Countless books are submitted to Amazon Digital Services but without a literary agent getting the book read by tens of thousands of wonderful readers like you is challenging. This is one the reason authors beg you to leave reviews. It expands our audience base. We write to entertain. That is our mission. But we also enjoy it when writing can sustain us – instead of being an expensive hobby.

  I hope you enjoy reading Hail Warning as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please leave a review and be sure to check back for the third book in the series, Hail Strike, due in 2018. In addition, you might want to also check out some of the books I wrote while I was first learning my craft. Most are not edited well and are quite strange, but then, so is life! I think my favorite of these first novels is Tweaked.

  Best,

  Brett Arquette

  PROLOGUE

  TEN YEARS AGO

  SAMBISA FOREST, NIGERIA

  T he captives’ screams were nothing new to Mohammed Mboso. More than 200 girls—really, women—were releasing guttural screams of terror. Explosions and automatic weapons fire was coming from every direction in their secluded camp. Previously, it had been a peaceful evening in the forest—then all hell broke loose.

  Mohammed Mboso grabbed his AK-47 from its spot next to his tent’s flap. His woman, one of the girls they had kidnapped long ago from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, showed less emotions than the others. Over the many years in captivity the small malnourished girl had become emotionally withdrawn. Her eyes looked dead. Mohammed thought she might not be quite right in her head. He had seen this same condition develop in several of the others. They had withdrawn from reality and now resembled zombies rather than living, breathing people.

  As he raced out of camp, Mohammed thumbed off his weapon’s safety. This was not the first time that some do-gooder group had tried to rescue the women. Most of the previous skirmishes had either not been sufficiently funded or planned. Thus, any attempt to save the women did not last long because the Boko Haram had built well-fortified camps.

  Mohammed ran to the outskirts of the camp where two of his men were hunkered down behind a pile of strategically placed sandbags. Mohammed Mboso hit the ground next to them, calling out, “How many?”

  One of the young black jihadis fired three quick rounds resulting in muzzle flashes that winked on and off in the forest like nuclear fireflies.

  “Many,” was his succinct answer. “More than any other time before.”

  The locations of the large Boko Haram’s camps were well known. In fact, the camps could even be seen on Google Earth if anyone cared to look. However, there were few who desired to engage a highly motivated and lethal band of religious zealots. What made them especially deadly was the value they placed on the women they had captured. To most of the world, the plight of the women, the Boko Haram and Nigeria were of little concern. It was a case of out of sight, out of mind.

  Mboso rested the barrel of his rifle on a sandbag and began returning fire. He went through two full 30-round magazines of 7.62 x 39 ammo in less than a minute, but the flashes in the dense forest were only getting closer and brighter.

  “You need to move the women,” the young man reminded Mboso.

  Mohammed knew he was right, but he hated to leave the fight. He had been killing nonbelievers for so long he had grown to enjoy it. Fighting and killing was the best part of being a jihadi. The recruitment, scavenging for food and weapons, kidnappings, and negotiating and bargaining for human lives Mboso found excruciatingly boring. Fighting for his beliefs and ridding the world of infidels was exciting; however, Mboso knew his comrade-in-arms was correct. Their leader, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, had made the women Mohammed’s responsibility. It was a great honor and a noble obligation, because the women elevated Boko Haram, providing them prestige, power, control and influence. The kidnapped women’s lives were more important to Boko Haram than food or weapons because the women were worth their weight in gold. Many foreign agencies and sympathetic governments would pay a great deal to have them released, and then the Nigerian jihadis would have nothing left of value.

  Mboso found a pile of preloaded magazines resting on a sandbag. He slapped a magazine into his gun and racked in a fresh shell. He turned to look back to make sure the camp’s perimeter was still intact. Mohammed stood and ran in a zigzag pattern to the center of camp.

  Most of the panicked women had run from their tents and congregated in the middle of the camp around the fire. A hundred women huddled en masse, screaming and crying. Mboso walked over to the women, insisting they quiet down and follow him. He pointed his weapon into the night sky releasing a burst of gunfire from the muzzle of his gun to punctuate his order with a degree of intimidation. Several other Boko Haram fighters surrounded the women, corralling them into a ragged line. Mboso assumed the lead and quickly ushered them deeper into the jungl
e. He occasionally looked back to make sure they were still following.

  On the outskirts of the camp, Mboso found the tunnel’s hidden entrance by removing a thin camouflaged tarp. Followed by the women, he began walking down a muddy earthen ramp in pitch darkness. They were traversing a wide ditch that was dug using a small excavator. Sticks, branches and piles of dead jungle foliage had been placed above them serving as the tunnel’s roof. It effectively camouflaged the passageway. This method of construction was faster than digging a true underground tunnel. And the Boko Haram demanded expediency. Their entire existence relied on mobility. Taking time to build fixed and hardened structures was counterproductive.

  Once he reached the bottom of the ramp, Mohammad Mboso removed a flashlight from his dirty vest, pointing it into the darkness. Mud, water and dead things squished beneath his boots. The stench inside the tunnel was ghastly, but no one noticed. The gunfire back at camp seemed to be getting louder. Mboso considered this time the Special Forces had been sent to free the women. There was the possibility they had penetrated the perimeter’s defenses. Mboso was not worried because the tunnel ran for more than 200 meters through the dense jungle. It emerged a half-kilometer from the river, and in less than five minutes—after Mboso made a call on his Sat phone—a powered river barge would arrive to take Mboso, his fighters, and their captives to another camp downriver. That is unless the Nigerian Special Forces had men stationed at the river.

  After getting settled, the process of bargaining for the women with the new Nigerian president would resume. But this time, the prices would be much higher because their government would pay dearly for the lives of every jihadi killed in battle. Mboso had no idea if his leader was still alive, but he would soon find out. Mboso’s one and only job was to get the women safely out of camp and transported to another camp.

  But now it was time for the younger jihadis to do the hard-core fighting. Mboso had already earned his badge of courage. Ever since he was a teenager, he could not recall a time when an assault rifle wasn’t within arm’s reach. He had fought in so many battles he could not remember them. Now, ten years later, he was high enough on the Boko Haram food chain to avoid being the last man out. These days, he found his ass seated in a chair more often than diving into a foxhole. He was as close to management as one could get in an organization focused on raining death and terror on the infidels. Only their current leader, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, had served more time as the “Islamic caliphate” of Nigeria.

  Ahead, Mboso’s flashlight found the earth slanting upward toward the forest. Now that there was a considerable amount of distance between the attacking forces and his group, the women were beginning to quiet down. Mboso held up his hand, stopped, signaling the line behind him to follow suit. One of the Boko Haram fighters pushed his way to the front of the line and met up with Mboso.

  Mboso told the young man, “Keep everyone here and keep them quiet. I will go to make sure the coast is clear.”

  The younger man nodded in understanding, and Mboso continued walking up the incline.

  As he neared the top of the muddy ramp, the jihadi stuck his head out of the tunnel to take a quick look around. Off in the distance the sounds of gunfire had died down. The forest around him was very still. It seemed every living creature had been scared into silence. Except for the sound of the rushing river in the distance, the forest swallowed the usual nocturnal noises of insects, birds, breaking of deadfall, and animals walking along paths through thick underbrush to forage. The immensity of the silence was unnerving and eerily unnatural.

  Cautiously, Mboso emerged from the tunnel into a clearing. The area had been trampled by a modern machine that had excavated dirt from the trench. He was hesitant to use his flashlight. Instead, he stood quietly in the darkness, listening and looking for others that meant him harm.

  Nothing. No light. No sounds. Even the racket from the gun battle had now died down to an occasional muted pop.

  Mboso heard a voice behind him. It was that of his leader, Abu Musab al-Barnawi. Behind him dozens of the Boko Haram fighters had caught up with his group. The men exited the tunnel and quickly drew up beside Mboso forming a tight defensive line with their guns pointed at unseen threats.

  Abu Musab al-Barnawi asked Mohammad, “Is it safe to leave from here?” His leader was breathing hard. Sweat on his dark skin gleamed in the moonlight, and it looked like he was made from finely polished onyx.

  Mboso had only begun to assess the security of the current location, but remaining standing out in the open was clearly not an option. As if he sensed the same predicament, even before Mboso could answer, al-Barnawi ordered, “Let’s move out.”

  Several of the younger jihadis went out on point, followed by al-Barnawi and then Mboso with the women trailing along behind him. They had walked almost the full half-kilometer toward the river when Mboso suddenly stopped. Since leaving the tunnel and entering the strangely quiet forest, he had heard the first sounds the forest had to offer. Yet the sound was neither insect nor animal. This noise was manmade. It started out as a whisper, as if someone was delicately tearing paper. The noise became increasingly louder, finally cutting through the thick night air with an unholy screech. Once Mohammad identified what was making the sound, he panicked. He turned toward the women yelling, “Go back. Go back!”

  The women did not have to be told twice. They began running to the safety the tunnels provided. The low-flying jet may have no intention other than innocently flying over them, but Mboso was taking no chances tonight.

  Far back in the woods, Mboso watched as the trees lit up—it looked like Allah was throwing streams of hellfire down to earth. Long lines of red, blue and orange death dropped from the heavens. A million suns had descended upon him

  The skin on the back of his neck, arms and hands began forming blisters. His greasy black hair rolled into tiny curls, burned off and then fluttered away in singed clumps. Prior to passing out, Mohammed realized in disbelief what the dropped substance was—it was napalm.

  SEA OF JAPAN

  L t. Commander Foster Nolan was crazy. As he floated on his tiny life raft in the middle of the dark ocean, he realized anyone in his line of work had to be crazy. No sane person would volunteer to climb into a lightning-fast jet venturing into foreign lands with very little chance of coming out unscathed—either physically or emotionally. Yet he volunteered to jump into a jet and had flown a single sortie over the mainland of North Korea. That pegged the frickin’ needle on the crazy meter, and he understood how lucky he was to be alive. If he had pulled the ejection handle on his F-35 just one second later, he would be floating in the Sea of Japan in the form of shark chum.

  Moments after his aircraft had been blown from the sky by one of the North Korean pilots flying the Chengdu J-20 jet fighters, the lieutenant commander initially was surprised to be alive. There were so many things that could have gone wrong when he yanked the ejection handle going 1200 miles per hour.

  In flight school, Nolan had learned that deploying the ejection seat in a modern jet operates in a two-stage system. First, the canopy is blown away, then the seat is launched. When the ejection handle under the seat is pulled, the ejection process is activated. Once the clear canopy was blown away, the pilot’s seat was ejected from the fuselage. Nolan had escaped the first deadly problem that could have occurred. The canopy might not have released properly and shot him directly through the tough acrylic dome which would have broken his neck, instantly. Thankfully, all had gone well, and Foster Nolan had found himself clear of the aircraft. Under his seat a series of little white tubes with nozzle ends ignited. The solid rocket fuel burned in one quick, ferocious burst, lasting less than a second, propelling both himself and his chair an additional 100 feet away from the aircraft. After the burn sequence had taken place, a tiny drogue parachute popped out from the top of Nolan’s pilot seat.

  Initially, the chute stabilized his seat and prevented it from tumbling out of control. Since the lieutenant commander had eject
ed under 10,000 feet, the drogue chute had yanked out his larger main parachute. The instant the main chute deployed, Nolan felt his pilot chair release from beneath his butt. He looked down to watch the chair tumble toward the black water below. Nolan found himself hanging under his main chute as he slowly descended toward the unknown. He looked down to verify his survival kit—or ditch bag—as referred to by pilot was

  hanging ten feet below him. He was glad to see it had had not been severed from its tether and lost at sea. When a pilot ejects over a body of water, the versatile ditch bag is the pilot’s lifeline. It contains essential items to sustain life until rescued: a small life raft, water, food rations, medical supplies, in addition to signal and communication devices.

  Lt. Commander Nolan understood the statistics of survival rates when a pilot ejected from a jet. Only eight percent of ejections were fatal, and most of those occurred when the pilot waited too long to pull the handle. But that didn’t mean that a pilot could expect to walk away scot-free. About one in three pilots who ejected at full speed could expect to have some type of spinal fracture, typically caused by the force of the ejection. When Nolan had pulled the handle, he had experienced a gravitational force of fourteen to sixteen times normal gravity at 20G/second. During primary training with the Training Air Wing FIVE at NAS Whiting Field in Florida, he had watched videos of the very first ejection seats while they were being tested. The extreme blast of air could whip one’s arms behind the seat and snap bones like twigs. The same thing could also occur to a pilot’s legs. The new ejection seats were more sophisticated, and most of the injuries now centered around the neck and spinal areas.