Operation Hail Storm Read online

  Operation Hail Storm

  Written by Brett Arquette

  Editor: Andrea Kerr

  First Pass Editing: Jim Gabler and Michael Picco

  Special thanks to my devoted beta readers:

  Jeff Donohoe

  Karen Colvin

  Jim

  Uma

  Paul

  Ann

  Copyright © 2016 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, 2016 (Rev 3)

  ISBN 978-1-365-12072-5

  Brett Arquette

  51 E. Jefferson Street #1686

  Orlando, Florida 32802

  http://brett.arquette.us

  Front Cover (base artwork) credit to MDBA Missile Systems and was used in a press release on 13-09-2011.

  Table of Contents

  ACT I North Korea—Hills of Kangdong ……………………………………..5

  ACT II Central Intelligence Headquarters: Langley, Virginia ……….110

  ACT III Sea of Japan—Aboard the Fishing Trawler, Huan Yue ………….217

  Dedicated to my mother:

  Lois Duncan

  All my skills as a writer are ensconced in her DNA

  ACT I

  North Korea—Hills of Kangdong

  F

  orty miles north and east of Pyongyang, nestled high in the bushy hills and just one mile from the esteemed leader’s residence is a plush and opulent estate. It was thirty-nine hundred square feet, had five bedrooms, three baths, and an open patio that overlooked a generous-sized pool. Not exactly the definition of a mansion by Western standards, but in a country where 2.5 million of its impoverished citizens had starved to death, it was considered pretty damn nice.

  The previous owner of the white single-level modern dwelling had been General Hyon Yong-chun. At one point, he was a senior North Korean military officer who had served the Workers' Party of Korea and had formerly served as defense minister. Retirement, as it pertains to many North Korean politicians, is iffy at best. The general’s retirement from his prestigious appointment wasn’t all that rewarding, considering the fact that he had been removed from his post and executed in 2015. No gold watch. No party.

  The next resident of the Castle on the Hill, as the locals called it, lasted eight more years until he was forced into early retirement by a bullet to his brain.

  The total length of the newest landlord’s current political term was yet to be determined, as was the duration of his breathing privileges. Lots of people wanted to kill the current Minister of People’s Armed Forces, Kim Yong Chang. There were people in his country who would like to slit his throat because they were jealous over his quick and unjust rise to power. High-ranking thugs in other communist countries, who felt cheated during Kim’s bargaining for nuclear refinement tools and machines, would like to see him under a thick layer of dirt. And still, further away, dots across the globe, several military specialists wanted Kim Yong Chang dead just because the world would be a safer place. And, who in their right mind wouldn’t want that?

  “Look at the pretty bird,” one of Kim Yong Chang’s girlfriends called out from a recumbent position on her raft in the pool. She pointed up at the perfectly clear blue sky at the large bird circling overhead.

  Kim Yong Chang was a major player in the race for North Korea to become a nuclear power. More to the point, a nuclear threat. For years, Kim had managed the extraction of uranium from the mine at Pyongsan. He had been instrumental in creating the concentrate pilot plant located in the northern part of the country at Pakchon. It was at this installation that the raw uranium was converted to yellowcake, a milled uranium oxide that could be enriched for use in nuclear bombs. Surprisingly, those foreigners who wanted him dead didn’t care about any of that. North Korea already had a nuclear bomb, so that cat was out of the bag and nothing less than

  turning North Korea into an open vast smoking pit would put the cat back into the aforementioned bag. What scared countries located on the other side of the globe was the possibility of North Korea placing their nuclear bomb on the end of a long-range missile. Up to this point, North Korea had medium range, but not long range missiles. It would seem in this day and age anyone could create a nuclear bomb, but missile technology was complicated—damn near rocket science. Kim Yong Chang was in charge of North Korea’s program to entice talented rocket scientists to build his country enough long range missiles to become a major power, threat, and pain in the ass for anyone who didn’t live in North Korea.

  “Oh, I see it,” a girlfriend said. “Is it an eagle? I think it’s an eagle!”

  There are approximately twenty-one species of birds of prey that make their homes in North Korea. On this clear summer morning, a Golden eagle floated on the updrafts high above the Castle on the Hill. With a wingspan of seven feet, the majestic bird was the size of a small drone aircraft, which it actually happened to be. Ten feet away, it would be difficult for any casual observer to recognize that the feathery contraption was not a real bird. Every surface of the machine had been meticulously covered with synthetic feathers, each one mimicked the correct coarseness, color and weight of an actual Golden eagle’s feathers. The frame on which the feathers were attached was made from thin carbon fiber, just rigid enough to contain and support the weight of the electric motors and actuators that moved the bird’s wings and control surfaces. The drone’s wings were a marvel of engineering. The onboard computers reticulated and bent the wings at the necessary angle to catch a thermal and remain aloft. The bird’s head looked just like a real eagle’s head, with the exception that each of the drone’s eyes held an individual high-definition camera. One eye was just the plain old run-of-the-mill fifty-thousand-dollar camera, but the other eye—the other camera—contained night vision features and a plethora of ground-tracking optics.

  “I think it is an eagle,” the woman floating in the pool agreed.

  As the drone glided at an altitude of a thousand feet in the air. The distinction from a real eagle was negligible, and no one on the ground would notice. By design, the birdlike drone’s mouth had to remain open for air intake. It took in air to cool the solid rocket booster that ran down the core of the machine. The engineers studied eagles in flight to ensure their drone would remain undetected.

  They found most birds are wizards at sensing thermals and updrafts that are caused by the uneven heating of the ground below. Eagles fly into thermals to conserve energy while migrating or looking for prey. Once inside, they stop flapping, keeping their wings extended. An eagle will slowly descend, but while inside the thermal, their rate of descent is slower as the lighter and hotter air pushes up vertically. Simultaneously, the tail feathers open like fans and the tapered feathers on the wing’s edges spread apart; both actions enhance airflow. Staying aloft requires forward motion, even when riding thermals. In order to remain inside a thermal column, the eagle will navigate in circular paths, steering with its tail and wings, thus creating lazy circles in the sky. Eventually, the bird must have some means of propulsion to regain altitude before repeating the process.

  Both women on the ground watched the elegant bird fly circles. The women would have been surprised to learn the “bird” circling over the home of Kim Yong Chang was actually a drone which had to, every so often, burn a solid rocket pellet. Anatomically, around where an eagle’s heart was located, a mechanism loaded a rocket pellet into a burn chamber. This operated in a similar manner as a
bullet loaded into a chambered gun. To fire the rocket, a tiny glow plug started the chemical ignition, and after a thirty-second burn, a new pellet would be cocked into the rocket. Then, maybe hours later, another burn cycle would take place. The unique and tiny rocket engine wasted some of its propulsion energy by dissipating its noise through baffles. At the operating height in which the drone maneuvered, onlookers from the ground heard nothing and the propellant burned clean, leaving no telltale visual signature.

  “Do you see the eagle, Mr. Kim?”

  Kim Yong Chang was seated at an outside patio table in his backyard, eating a grapefruit sectioned for him by one of his two personal servants. A girlfriend was sitting across from him, a young pretty Asian, a fraction of his age, picking at a fluffy croissant. He was a thin man with black hair that was considered long in his country. He wore a casual black button-up shirt and matching black pants. At thirty-five years of age, he was young for his position in the North Korean cabinet, which made him even less popular with the older officers and politicians who wanted his job.

  “Look, Mr. Kim. The eagle is right there.” The attractive woman across the table from him pointed up into the sky. Kim Yong Chang’s companions were not permitted to call him by his first name, Chang. No one, except his mother, was allowed to call him Chang.

  Kim Yong Chang finished his grapefruit, took a sip of coffee and checked his phone, making no attempt to look at the bird.

  The current bird, with the unimaginative code name of Eagles, had been on station for more than three days. Depending on the weather and thermals, the drone held enough rocket pellets to stay on target for up to one hundred hours. With no way to take flight without human intervention, the rocket-propelled glider had to be dropped from a drone at the beginning of its mission or slung off a ship and flown in on its own power. Depending on support logistics, flying the bird to its target from hundreds of miles away on its own power, dramatically reduced its time on station. When leaving its target, the drone could either fly out of the region under its own rocket power or the remaining rocket pellets in its chest cavity could be remotely detonated, turning the half-million-dollar reconnaissance machine into nothing but feathery bits and colorful pieces.

  The drone’s outstretched wings made imperceptible corrections, as the eagle’s head turned from the left to the right. The five computers inside the mechanical creature worked in concert to maintain lift and correct for weight shifts as its head moved from side to side. The bird’s head dropped a few millimeters, focusing its onboard camera on new points of interest on the ground. The left wing’s trim feathers lifted twelve millimeters and the tail feathers dropped seven millimeters, counteracting the weight shift of the eagle’s head movements. Two feathers on each wing sensed that a thermal was pushing them up at a measurable vertical velocity. By using avian soaring performance aerodynamics, the computers could make a fuzzy logic determination if the current thermal was worth riding or if a burn should take place so another thermal could be located.

  Hundreds of feet below, Kim Yong Chang’s girlfriends watched the bird gracefully loop in wide circles as it looked for prey.

  “Do you see the eagle?” she asked Kim again. She spoke in English as Kim had instructed her.

  Kim spoke in English whenever possible, instead of his country’s native Korean language. He was in the process of trying to convince two Russian missile experts to defect to his country, and the only common language between them was English. Kim knew he would be much more effective in his job if he could speak fluent English, so he surrounded himself with girlfriends, prostitutes and staff that understood and spoke some English.

  Understanding if he didn’t look at the eagle, the women would continue to pester him, Kim glanced up, waiting momentarily for his eyes to adjust to the bright morning sky. He saw the eagle and responded with nothing more than a grunt.

  “It’s so beautiful,” his girlfriend said. “It must have a nest close to here. Around and around it goes. I’ve seen it every day for the last few days.”

  Since she didn’t ask Kim anything, he didn’t waste the energy responding with another grunt.

  “Did you see it?” asked the young Asian woman on the raft. Her bikini was so small that it didn’t make much sense to Kim why she wore anything at all.

  She then said loudly enough to be heard over at the table, “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just float on the air like that? No worries. No problems.”

  Kim laughed under his breath. Neither of the girls had any problems. They provided him companionship and sex until he tired of them. At that point, they would move out and do the same for one of the other cabinet members. If they had an iota of comprehension of what he went through on a daily basis, then they would comprehend the true meaning of worry and problems.

  Kim Yong Chang had promised his leader that he would either steal, buy or build an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States by the time the snows came or—or—he hated to think about the ‘ors’. The ors are what worried him. The ors are why he lost sleep at night. The ors had killed all the previous tenants of this house. The ors had been big

  problems for his predecessors, and look at the way their lives had turned out. Or turned off would be more precise.

  For no apparent reason, Kim glanced back up into the sky and watched the dark bird make its elegant loops. The women appeared happy that he had decided to join them in their ornithological pastime. He didn’t have any particular bias for most birds, but he did hate eagles. The eagle represented a country that would be the very first target for testing his new ICBM.

  Kim put down his spoon and wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin.

  To the shock of his two female companions, Kim turned to his servant who was removing Kim’s grapefruit bowl from the table, and said, “Get me my rifle.”

  Strait of Malacca—Aboard the Hail Nucleus

  T

  he Hail Nucleus tanker was registered in Panama. It was a Panamax Class 80,000 deadweight ton bulk cargo ship. The vessel had taken on cargo off the east coast of the United States and was currently heading for its first offload in Indonesia. Deep inside the belly of the ship was a sophisticated command and control center.

  “I can’t believe it! We’re taking fire,” yelled Alex Knox. He was sitting comfortably at a command station in front of four high-definition monitors. In his left hand, Knox yanked a control yoke to the right and pushed a pedal with his right foot. The image on two of his screens blurred as the video being sent from the drone’s cameras pointed skyward. A blast of sunlight burned the monitors white for a brief second and then a moving video of the ground came back into view.

  “What do you mean, we’re taking fire?” the ship’s owner, Marshall Hail, responded.

  Hail was sitting in the center of the mission room in a massive swivel chair that could be mistaken for that on the Starship Enterprise. Two twelve-inch monitors were mounted to the sides of each arm rest.

  Using his right hand, Knox pulled the joystick backward and said in a sarcastic tone, “You know, like bang-bang! Someone is shooting a big gun at Eagles.”

  Hail looked down at his left monitor and touched an icon on the screen, flooding the room with the audio being streamed by the drone. Most of the sound was that of wind whipping at the microphone on the birdlike drone. And then BOOM…BOOM …two sharp cracks rattled the speakers over their heads.

  “Who is shooting?” Hail asked. His voice was all business.

  Of the sixteen flight and control stations that circled the room, only eight of them were being manned by Hail personnel. The current mission didn’t require sixteen butts in all sixteen chairs. Eagles was being flown by Knox.

  “Do we have eyes on the shooter?” asked Hail in a calm but commanding tone.

  Knox made a flight adjustment and answered, “I was repositioning Eagles when I heard the first shot. I wasn’t watching the ground feed.”

  A second later Knox said, “Man-o-man, Eagl
es has suffered some sort of damage,” Knox yelled. “I can’t turn her to the right. Don’t those idiots know that the eagle is a protected species?”

  Hail let out a sarcastic laugh. “In a country that kills their own people at the drop of a hat, I don’t believe that eagles, or any other living creature, is protected in any way. Renner, run diagnostics on the bird, and pull up the last minute of video that Eagles recorded.”

  Sitting at the control station to the left of Knox, Gage Renner typed in some commands on his keyboard and responded, “Diagnostics are running, and I’m pulling up the video on large monitor number two.” Renner was a hairy, thin and a wiry guy in his forties who was dressed in gym pants and a T-shirt that stated, “I look better in 8K”. The shirt was supposed to be some sort of joke that only video nerds thought was funny, but Marshall Hail could care less. Gage Renner was an aeronautics genius and one of the original designers of the birdlike drone. He was also one of Hail’s best friends and they had been roommates at MIT.

  Alex Knox wasn’t dressed much better than Renner. His T-shirt had a hand stenciled message on the front that read, “I’m with the stupid guy in the 8K shirt,” and the finger on the hand was pointing at Renner. The antithesis of Renner, Knox was young, nineteen years old and had long, clean brown hair. He’d been recruited by Hail because he was the winner of the X-Wing Fantasy Flight Game contest. At nineteen, Knox was one of Hail’s older remote pilots, and his skills with remote aircraft were astounding.

  Twelve eighty-inch monitors were mounted above the sixteen command stations, creating a perfect circle of displays that looped around the room and touched end to end. The video of the last minutes of Eagles’ flight appeared on big screen number two, directly above both Knox and Renner.