Hail Sting: Hail, #5

By Brett Arquette

What do you get when you cross a drone mosquito with Polonium-210?  

Answer: One deadly little prick. 

Hail and his crew take minuturatoin to its limit when Hail attempts to kill the terrorist who killed his family.  Bad news, the terrorist is being held in a CIA underground detention facility.  Good news, Marshall Hail has a talent for making the impossible, possible.  Will his quest to kill the terrorist have repercussions for Kara and Hail's relationship? Damn straight! And the ripple effect of his actions could cost him everything he holds dear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brett Arquette
• Release date: Jun 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393389460

Brett Arquette

Dubbed, "the father of the drone thriller," by his fans, the middle child of five, Brett Duncan Arquette was born in 1960 in Florida.  Brett was anointed with his mother’s pen name “Duncan”, given to him by Mystery Writer's of America Grand Master award winner, author Lois Duncan. During her career, his mother Lois has written over 32 best selling young adult books, some of which have been made into movies, including the movie “I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "Hotel for Dogs".  Brett was raised in New Mexico and moved to Florida on his 30th birthday. Arquette spent most his career working as the Chief Technology Officer for one of the largest Circuit Court Systems in Florida. In 2002, Computerworld Magazine selected Arquette as one of the “Premier 100 IT Leaders” in the world, describing him as a “visionary” in reference to the cutting-edge technology. His books are peppered with technology acquired from his vast experience in advanced computers and audio/video systems. Arquette is also the Editor in Chief of the Court Technology Forum, Contributing Editor for eWeek Magazine, columnist for ComputerWorld and SmartComputing magazines, all of which has helped to create a loyal fan base and lots of traffic on his website. Writing on the weekends, Arquette’s first book, "Deadly Perversions", was published in 2002. His additional titles are "Seeing Red", "Tweaked", "The Pandemic Diary"  and "Soundman for a B-Band".  He is proofing his new adventure into Young Adult writing with a series of "HAIL" books with the first one called "Operation Hail Storm".  Mr. Arquette's primary aspirations are to quit the 9 to 5 grind and become a best-selling author, following in his famous mother’s footsteps. Mr. Arquette currently resides in the Sunshine State with his wife and three children.  

Book preview

Act I

Prologue

Mediterranean Sea, South of Cyprus

The American-made jet was flying low and fast, almost touching the ripples of the calm ocean below. A large plume of water vapor was left in its wake, obscuring the jet from anyone who may be viewing it from the rear. The aircraft was honing in on coordinates provided by the website marinetraffic.com. Once the jet closed within a hundred miles of its target, the ship would appear as a blip on the jet’s radar screen.

The plane was a McDonnell F-101 Voodoo, a supersonic jet fighter that had served the United States Air Force as well as the Royal Canadian Air Force. This particular plane was built in 1957. Over the years, the Voodoo, known as a penetration fighter for the Strategic Air Command, had changed roles. It was reinvented as a nuclear-armed fighter-bomber for the Tactical Air Command, as well as a photo reconnaissance aircraft based on the same airframe. Today, however, the jet fighter was considered a wartime relic, long since retired by every branch of the military in every country which had purchased the aircraft. The last Voodoo in US service was finally retired by the 2nd Fighter Weapons Squadron at Tyndall AFB, Florida in September of 1982.

All that, however, didn’t mean the plane was slow and ineffectual. On the contrary, the plane that was closing in on its intended target was in tip-top shape, maybe as good as the day it was manufactured. The first Voodoo that rolled off the assembly line had a top speed of 641 miles per hour, which had disappointed U.S. Air Force generals. They had been expecting a plane that could outperform its Russian MIG 21 counterparts that had a maximum speed of 1,285 miles per hour. To increase the Voodoo’s top end, McDonnell fitted afterburners to the second prototype. The modification greatly increased both thrust and the jet’s top speed, setting a world speed record of 1,207 miles per hour in 1957.

The pilot flying the Voodoo made a small flight adjustment to align his aircraft with a dot on his navigation screen positioned less than a hundred miles directly ahead. Traveling at twenty miles per minute, this would put the vintage fighter on the X in a little under five minutes.

The pilot spoke into his microphone, which was routed into the helmet of his passenger sitting behind him in the plane’s only other seat.

Less than five minutes. Are we committed?

In a thick Russian accent, the passenger immediately came back with, Affirmative. Proceed with the attack.

The pilot switched on the jet’s missile guidance system and armed the AGM-65 Maverick missiles tucked under each wing.

The calm, bright blue water fifty feet below the Voodoo gave the pilot and his guest the sense they were zipping across an immense pool table. Now, on the horizon, a white dot appeared. As the plane closed on the ship, the dot began to grow inside the jet’s clear canopy, now becoming more of a white rectangle than a dot. A full minute later, the rough outline of the ship could be seen. A minute after that, the pilot flipped up the safety cover on his flight stick and slid his finger over the button.

In less than a minute, the Voodoo would release its payload and become the first privately-owned attack aircraft to bomb a privately-owned ship. Hopefully, for the sake of both men in the jet, the world would never find out who was behind the attack. A quick surgical strike and an equally fast getaway was the plan. Being killed or crashing into the water, or even being found out, was not part of the plan.

Coming into view, cylindrical shipping containers were stacked on the top deck of the cargo ship like bright, white logs.

The pilot asked, Is that the correct target?

His passenger looked closely at the ship and replied, Yes, that is definitely the Hail Nucleus.

An indication that the guidance radar had locked onto its target sounded, and the pilot began to gain altitude. Shooting the ship with a missile to its starboard side was one way to take it out, but flying his jet into the side of it? Not so much.

Less than ten miles out, the pilot slowed to 600 miles per hour and pressed the little red button on his stick. A single missile left its pylon. Flying at 714 miles per hour, the Maverick would make contact with the ship in a little under forty-five seconds.

It was a done deal. Short of a major technical problem inside the missile’s navigation system, nothing on God’s green earth could stop it.

CIA Detention Facility

South of Richmond, Virginia

The terrorist felt conflicted about her stay in the CIA underground prison. She had been the solitary guest of the U.S.A. for more than three months. During that time, she had been fed well. Each meal had been delivered hot, and it was both tasty and healthy. The temperature in her cell was a constant seventy-seven degrees. The mattress, which sat on a concrete slab that stuck out from the wall, was thick and comfortable. She had her own bathroom, albeit lacking in any type of privacy from anyone standing outside her cell. Both her shower, sink and the toilet had been fused into the back wall of her cell. It was quiet underground, as quiet as the grave. Being the only person incarcerated in the facility meant that other than a steel door being opened or closed at mealtimes, there were no sounds at all. So much for all the good stuff about the place. 

And Halati Tamimi was a good judge of prisons. She had spent all of her twenties in an Israeli jail. Unlike the CIA prison, the Israeli prison was an open-air compound, therefore susceptible to fluctuations in temperature from blazing hot to the bone-chilling cold. Where they slept had been left up to the prisoners. There were a dozen large wooden buildings that had windows, but no glass and offered little more than a roof and four walls to shield the prisoners from rain that fell from October to March. The Israelis didn’t appear to be all that concerned how soft the beds were, because there were none. Each building in the tight cluster had a dirt floor. Most of the prisoners slept on the ground, some supporting their heads with an elbow, arm, and hand. In this manner, they were less susceptible to a bug crawling into their ears. However, this odd way of sleeping was actually an acquired skill, considering that once you fall asleep, your muscles tended to relax, which meant, while learning, you had a good chance of your head hitting the dirt. It took months to master the skill, and for some, it was simply too hard to pull off. For these Palestinian prisoners, they just let the bugs crawl where they may and tried their best to extricate the pests each morning.

The food the Israelis fed their Palestinian prisoners would have been considered a form of torture in first world countries. Each meal consisted of an oatmeal type of goo that sucked the water from one's mouth, creating a dry blob of paste that was difficult to choke down. Bathroom facilities consisted of a long board that had ass-sized holes cut in it with buckets underneath. There was a single shower that dispensed cold water but was frequently shut off just to agitate the prisoners. The only thing Halati would consider a positive was her interaction with the other female prisoners. Halati was considered somewhat of a celebrity, due to hosting her own Palestinian show that was broadcast throughout Jordan and the West Bank. During her pre-prison days in the West Bank, the young militant preached the word of hate, condemning the Israelis for building homes in a land that the Palestinians considered already ocupado.

Halati considered her days spent incarcerated in the Israeli jail as productive. There were thousands of female prisoners that were primed for indoctrination into Hezbollah or Hamas. Each day Halati would make a point of explaining her indignation of the invasion of the Israelis into their land. The angry and violent Tamimi, who had lost her father and only brother to Israeli intelligence operatives, had a gut full of hate and didn’t mind spreading it around. The church of Tamimi had a pastor whose only kind words were for those Palestinian martyrs who had died for the cause. The rest of her words tended to bind all Israelis to the devil himself. She had performed a full ten years of preaching and indoctrinating the incarcerated women, those who were soon to be set free. Halati had been given sixteen life sentences, and even if she were a cat, she wouldn’t have enough lives to outlive her sentence.

Then one day, quite unexpectedly, she was told she was part of a prisoner trade. In an act of unabashed contempt, the Israelis had agreed to trade Tamimi and more than a hundred other Palestinian prisoners for just one Israeli prisoner, inferring that one Israeli was worth a hundred Palestinians. A day later and close to her thirtieth birthday, Halati was set free.

Since her release, she had never spent another day in prison, until now. As she sat in her cell, much of her day was spent reclined on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. During one of these frequent interludes, she determined that she would willingly trade the good food, soft bed, climate controlled air, as well as her clean bathroom, just to have human contact. Contact other than an interrogation.

The CIA had sent a half dozen men to interview her, each trying to make her crack, but this was not Halati’s first rodeo. Every few days, the face changed, but the words that came out of those American-looking faces were all the same. Sometimes her interrogators would act as if they were concerned about her wellbeing, even though the bright lights in her cell always remained on giving Halati no way of telling night from day. No night and day meant there was no way for her to determine how many days she had spent underground. But did that really matter? She knew, short of being traded to the Palestinians in a prisoner exchange, she would spend the rest of her life in an American prison. Therefore, counting days was meaningless unless she was counting the days until she died. At least a prisoner on death row was provided with a date for their execution, but there was no such date for the Jordanian terrorist who, day by day, aged in limbo.

Halati’s interrogators seemed to be preoccupied with the notion that she had taken down a commercial aircraft with a surface-to-air missile. No matter how often she denied the act, they wouldn’t drop it. As far as Halati knew, they had nothing to tie her to the crime and therefore she wasn’t about to admit to it. She had, in fact, shot down the plane they were referring to. She felt a sense of both relief and accomplishment when she saw the plane explode less than a mile from her location on the ground in Dusseldorf, Germany. Not admitting to the terrorist act wasn’t driven by guilt or any other psychobabble the Israelis tried to lay on her. With great pride, Tamimi had talked quite openly about all her other terrorist activities, even on the air during her Jordanian talk show. The reason she was determined not to admit to the Americans that she had shot down the plane was one part stubbornness, damned if she would give her enemy the satisfaction of extracting information from her, and the other part that kept her from spilling the beans was she didn’t want to screw up her chance for a possible prisoner exchange. If all they had on her, concerning the plane incident, were rumors and speculation, then a degree of uncertainty would exist their minds, and that shred of uncertainty meant they might consider letting her go. On the flip side of that coin was, if she admitted to taking down United 9257 and killing 210 passengers and crew, they would certainly throw away the key to her cell and forget about her, letting her rot underground until she began to grow roots and withered into a thin carbon blotch on the floor.

Halati heard a door clang open then closed, and a moment later, the door at the end of the corridor that separated the cellblock from the security center slid open. She didn’t bother getting to her feet to see who had entered. In the past, each time that same door opened another interrogator was there to do his thing, or another meal was being delivered. Since she had just eaten breakfast, she assumed it would be a CIA agent.

The man who appeared at her cell door was familiar to her. He had been one of the men who had clasped handcuffs to her wrists when she had been initially arrested in Lomé, Togo. As he was applying the steel bracelets to her arms, he had introduced himself as Jarret Pepper, adding that he was the director of the CIA. The introduction had not impressed her. He was simply another infidel who would burn in hell for defying God’s rules. The man in the gray suit, Pepper, had then accompanied her onto a plane that was flown to the United States. He had taken time out of his busy day to escort her to her current location. She recalled spitting in the CIA Director’s face on the car trip to this facility. She smiled, replaying the incident in her mind, registering how shocked the man had looked when her loogie hit him on his cheek and began to drip down his face. Halati had a lot of experience spitting. It had been her main method of attack when attending demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. Any soldier who got within spitting distance received a heaping wad of saliva.

Pepper said, Get up. We need to talk.

He made no attempt to enter her cell. Instead, he corraled a chair from the near wall and set it in front of her barred door.

The woman made no attempt to get to her feet. She defiantly remained on her back, still staring at the dull ceiling.

The CIA man then said, Do you know what’s worse than constant light?

Tamimi said nothing, so Pepper answered his own question with, Constant darkness. We are talking pitch black where you can’t see your hand in front of your face.

Tamimi considered the threat and decided that he was right. It was bad enough not having any human contact, but spending her days and nights in total darkness sent a chill up her spine. Slowly, Halati got to her feet and walked to the end of her bunk, where she sat, facing the man.

Pepper said, I have sent six men here to talk to you, and so far you haven’t said anything that interests me.

Halati remained stoically quiet since the man’s words were not in the form of a question.

Pepper said, We know that you were the person responsible for shooting down United flight 9257.

Halati responded, And how would you know that?

Pepper looked as if he had the woman in his crosshairs and told her, Does the name Victor Kornev sound familiar to you?

Pepper detected the woman flinch ever so slightly at the mention of the Russian arms dealer.

Halati said nothing, so Pepper continued with, You see, Kornev works for us. He told us that he trained you in Dusseldorf on how to fire the weapon and even showed you the best location, as well as potential escape routes.

Halati said nothing, but internally, her stomach began to churn. There was no better way to get a story other than from the horse’s mouth, and her horse happened to be named Victor Kornev. Everything the CIA man had told her was true, but that didn’t mean she would admit to it. There was no upside to it. After all, the man Pepper was referring to was not the most trusted person in the world. Actually, taking the word of an infamous illegal arms dealer who was on the run from more countries then she had fingers, was paramount to trusting a Catholic priest.

Pepper looked irritated that the woman had not said a single word.

He changed up the pitch and went back to the hard fastball.

Remember when I asked you which you liked better, light or dark. If I get up from this chair and have not received some type of admission from you, then your lighting privileges will be terminated.  You understand that no one knows where you are and that we could potentially let you die down here?

The color seemed to drain from Tamimi’s face, and Pepper could tell he was getting somewhere. The big man himself would be the person to break the Palestinian terrorist, not one of his agents.

For the second time since Pepper had sat down, his prisoner spoke, I think you are a piece of human sewage.

Her English was good and her diction even better.

Sensing that she was just getting started, Pepper allowed Tamimi to continue.

I will not permit one of your male agents to question me. I’d rather spend the rest of my days in darkness. However, I will talk to your female agent, the woman who took part in my kidnapping in Jordan.

Pepper oscillated from stern to surprise.

Why is that particular person important to you? Pepper asked.

Let’s just say I get along better with females than I do with males. It was males that took away my brother and father. It was males who guarded the Israeli jail I was held in for ten years. And males run both Hezbollah and Hamas. Let’s just say that I’ve had my fill of male companionship.

Pepper looked conflicted and took a moment to think over the request. The biggest downside to Tamimi’s offer was that he would not be the person responsible for extracting intelligence from the terrorist. Add to that, the woman Tamimi was referring to was on winning streak, and Pepper sensed that at some point, Ramey might go for his job. The president loved his agent Kara Ramey. The president’s advisors liked her as well, but that meant nothing considering what head those men had used to consider her worth.

So turning over the interrogation to Ramey might cost him some dignity, but in the end, he was still running the show. If his agent was successful in coercing information from the woman, then he could still take the credit for making the assignment.

Pepper’s upper lip curled upward as if he was trying to dislodge a nose hair, and then said, I can do that for you, as long as you understand that if she gets nowhere with you, then your future will be very uncertain.

Tamimi wanted to spit on the man again, but her mouth was dry, and Pepper was sitting well back from her cage.

When it was apparent that the woman had gone mute again, Pepper stood, slid the plastic chair back against the far wall and left the pod.

Lethpora, Pulwama district

Jammu and Kashmir, India

Sixteen Jaish-e-Mohammed militants waited in ambush of the convoy. They had selected this particular strip of the Jammu Srinagar National Highway because it was hemmed in by hills that jutted straight up from the roadway. Before the construction of the highway, this had been a single large hill. Huge machines and explosives had bifurcated the hill to lay down the four-lane highway that now went right through it.

Naveed Shallah, the leader of the Pakistan-based sect, had directed half of his men to set up on the top of the opposing hill, while Shallah, gun for gun, claimed the hill closest to the traffic lanes through which the convoy would pass.

Shallah spoke into his radio.

How far?

A voice that belonged to his lieutenant dug in five miles up the highway, running yet a third team of men said, The convoy has not passed us yet.

The information meant that Shallah didn’t have to start the stopwatch in his head. The moment the convoy was spotted traveling the speed limit, around 104 kilometers per hour, simple math would place the convoy in front of him eight minutes later, or 480 seconds.

Naveed Shallah was not as good with numbers as his recently departed brother, Zain, had been. For some reason, Zain had innately understood numbers and excelled in math, whereas Naveed couldn’t make sense of it. It was no surprise to Naveed that Zain had become a successful banker and had used his position as a bank president to launder their jihadist funds through his business.

Naveed Shallah held down the button on his radio and directed his next question at his men across the void.

Are you ready?

The voice that came back sounded out of breath.

Yes, we just finished setting up the machine gun, and we’re currently deploying the LAWS.

His lieutenant was referring to their portable single shot, 66-mm, unguided, anti-tank weapon, the M72 LAW or LAWS.  LAWS stood for Light Anti-Armor Weapons System. The very first batch of this disposable weapon rolled off an American assembly line in 1963 and was adopted by the U. S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps. Shoulder-fired rockets are no different from last year’s cell phone. Once a new model comes out, the prices begin to fall for the older model. When the M72 was replaced by the M126 AT4, a glut of M72s was snatched up by various governments all over the world, to either use them or resell them. The Shallah family arms dealer, Victor Kornev, had sold four LAWS to Naveed.

Naveed’s radio squawked, and he heard from his man stationed five miles northeast from his location.

The convoy is passing us right now. 

The voice didn’t sound excited or jacked up in any way. It could have been the tone of someone ordering a pizza.

Naveed replied, I understand, and began counting in his head to 400.

At the count of one hundred, Naveed confirmed that the two men he had assigned to fire the rockets, had the weapons sitting on their shoulders and ready to fire. A third man was standing in front of a Russian DShK 1938 heavy machine gun that sat atop an equally heavy tripod. This gun was first manufactured in 1933 and was still in use today. The two machine guns, one on Naveed’s side and the other gun across the void, had also been purchased from the family’s arms dealer. Naveed didn’t know how many of these guns the man had; he only knew that he wouldn’t run out of them anytime soon. Once the Russian designers added a belt-fed mechanism, this weapon became the standard Soviet heavy machine gun and was used extensively in World War II.

The fourth man on Naveed’s squad had just fed the beginning round of the ammo belt into the gun and had closed the cover. He then picked up the lead section of the bullet belt and prepared to guide the belt efficiently into the gun.

At the count of three hundred, Shallah looked through a pair of binoculars, trying to detect the unique outline of the Indian manufactured VFJ Stallion, a medium-duty defense vehicle. Sixty thousand of the boxy vehicles were in service with the Indian Armed Forces. At the count of 350, Shallah could make out four of the vehicles headed in their direction.

Shallah spoke into his radio, I can see the convoy. They will pass us in thirty seconds.

Even though the Stallion could be used to haul equipment and ordinance, these four trucks were primarily hauling troops. Lots of troops. Twenty to each of the four vehicles.

His men on the other side of the gorge would begin firing as soon as Naveed’s men fired their first round.

Naveed let the binoculars fall onto its strap around his neck. He then raised his hand as if he was getting ready to start a drag race.

By this time, the convoy of four green trucks was nearing the optimum angle of attack. Shallah’s men, who had the LAWS on their shoulders, were assigned to take out the first two trucks, while the men across the void would take out the last two.

Then seconds later, Shallah let his arm fall and each man holding a LAW fired his weapon.

The concussive sound of identical rockets leaving their tubes in unison created a vacuum sensation as if the projectiles had sucked all the air around them down into the valley below. Traveling at 170 meters per second, it took the rockets a single heartbeat to reach the vehicles. The explosion of just one of the armor-piercing rounds was astonishing, let alone a pair of them going off in harmony. A second later, the other two rockets struck their assigned targets with equally catastrophic consequences. Fire and debris shot up from the center of the vehicles like tiny volcanos. The heavy trucks left the ground as the explosions expanded beneath them, blowing the rims and tires off their heavy military axles. The lightly armored vehicles were no match for the tank-killing rockets that could penetrate up to eleven inches of steel plate. The explosions tattered the trucks’ thick green canopies, exposing the stunned men inside. The trucks went airborne, and the men in the back flew even higher. As the initial blast began to subside, gravity began doing its thing, pulling everything and everyone back down to the earth. As each man landed haphazardly around the blast zone, terrified drivers directly behind the convoy, slammed on their brakes as the attack unfolded. Dozens of drivers jumped out of their cars and began running down the highway in the opposite direction, waving their arms at approaching traffic.

Once all the Stallion vehicles had landed back on their burnt and mangled frames, the machine guns lit up. The majority of the men on the ground were not moving, but for the ones that were, they were quickly made still by the incoming fire. Once all the moving men had been killed, the gunners began firing at the unmoving men, just to make sure they were all dead.

Shallah held up his hand and spoke into his radio, Stop firing, stop firing. 

Across the valley, the guns on the other hill fell quiet.

Shallah looked down at the grisly scene with great pride. Would this bold act make a difference in the disputed territory of Kashmir?  Probably not. To this point, more than 70,000 people had been killed in the ongoing dispute between Pakistan and India. Shallah estimated that it would take another 70,000 sacrifices before their rightful land would be once again in the hands of Pakistan.

Down below, two men emerged from what was left of the last truck inline. Both men looked dazed and were unsteady on their feet. Shallah walked over to the smoking machine gun, pushed his man out of the way and took hold of the weapon. He lined up the men and pulled the trigger. Their deaths were quick and painless.  Not really the satisfaction that Naveed Shallah had come to enjoy, but the trade-off was distance. The attack had been carried out from afar. Now, they could even take their time loading up the machine guns and discarding their rocket tubes into the back of their Jeeps. Taking into account how remote this stretch of highway happened to be, Shallah and his men would be back in Pakistan before any of the first responders had arrived.

Let’s get loaded up and get out of here, Shallah ordered, and his men began to pack up.

Newport News Marine Terminal, Virginia

The cargo ship, Hail Nucleus, was docked in the massive port of Newport News. The ship had recently offloaded hundreds of empty containers that had previously been filled with radioactive material. Essentially, the containers were considered empty, but in reality, they still contained a deadly payload. If someone were to climb inside one of the large steel, ceramic-lined cylinders, they would find it to be empty. However, while they were observing the emptiness of their surroundings, their skin would start to fall off in thick chunks, landing on the radioactive floor beneath them. Even though the containment vessels held no nuclear waste, their interior was still highly radioactive, having been immersed repeatedly in some of the nastiest radioactive material on the face of the planet.

The deal that Hail Industries had made with the United States had been ongoing for several years. There were three sets of containment vessels in play, with hundreds in each set. One set were the vessels