“Fire!” Hail ordered.
Dallas pressed the button.
There was a deafening sound like a redwood tree being broken over God’s knee. A bolt of lightning shot from the container, followed by a depleted uranium projectile, followed by a ring of purple fire. The concussion and transfer of energy rolled the Hail Nucleus twenty-degrees to its starboard side. At five-thousand miles per hour, the projectile took less than a tenth of a second to impact the Whaler. The kinetic energy was so immense that it looked like a magic act had been performed. One second the Whaler was there, and then a tenth of a second later it was gone. The boat had been turned into a fiberglass dust cloud that hovered for a moment before breaking up and dissipating as the ocean breeze returned.
Inside the Security Center, Hail grabbed onto the back of Dallas and Tayler’s high-back chairs, riding it out as the ship rolled back and forth, trying to find its equilibrium.
“Holy smokes!” Alba yelled. She set the popcorn on the floor next to her and got to her feet and started clapping. “Damn, that was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.”
Hail looked up at the monitor above him. There wasn’t much to see. The small wooden pirate boat had stopped and was picking up the privates who had abandoned their vaporized craft. They all looked shaken. The Indonesians looked like they could hardly wait to put some distance between them and the cargo ship from outer space. Hail thought they might even consider retiring from this line of work.
Hail smiled and instructed Dallas to secure the railgun.
“Let’s get the drones back on board,” he told his pilots.
Hail took a moment and mulled over the events, thinking that he may have missed something.
“Does anyone need me for anything else?” Hail asked his crew.
“No, we’re good, Skipper” Dallas responded. “We’ll let you know if there is more fun to be had. Don’t worry.”
“I’m sure you will,” Hail said.
Smiling, Hail turned and walked to the door.
Once outside in the hallway, the walk to his stateroom seemed longer than it had been thirty minutes ago. His stomach growled, his eyes were tired, his back hurt and it had been years since he was in this good of a mood.
Nizhny Novgorod, Russia ― Volna Hotel
Whereas Karen Wesley, the Directorate of Analysis for the CIA, attributed her climb in the agency to her ordinary looks, Kara Ramey knew the exact opposite.
Kara was supposed to be noticed.
Shoulders back, chest out, sitting up perfectly straight, she posed on her bar stool while sitting at the bar of the Volna Hotel.
Men who saw Kara were supposed to think, “Wow, what a great looking woman!” They were supposed to be attracted to her. They were supposed to tell her secrets.
Ramey’s primary role in the CIA was to draw attention. Her secondary role was to use that attention to extract data. She was just like all the other CIA special agents, with the exception of her undeniable beauty. Ramey had trained at Camp Peary, also known as the Farm, just like all the other CIA agents. Kara graduated at the top of her class in physical conditioning, vehicle handling, firearms, surveillance, and interviewing. In hand-to-hand combat, Ramey could dispatch her male counterparts and then outshoot and outdrive them, but none of that mattered. All that talent was useful as a CIA agent, but in reality, it was seldom used. Maybe in the movies, but if it ever got down the hand-to-hand stuff, there was a greater chance of some other actor taking out a gun and blowing her head off while she was grappling. The CIA found intrinsic value in Ramey’s inherent good looks, and that’s what had brought her to the bar of the Volna Hotel.
The city of Nizhny Novgorod was the fourth largest city in Russia. Located about four-hundred kilometers east of Moscow, it was the administrative center of the Nizhny Novgorod region. The hotel Volna was a continental four-star affair with modern accoutrements and fixings.
It was summertime in Russia. The temperature outside at cocktail hour was in the seventies. If it had been wintertime, then Ramey would have had to rethink her outfit. Kara was dressed in a tight pink one-piece dress that hugged her generous curves; the way that all men who looked at her would love to hug them. But Kara was not alone at the bar. Her curves were currently being admired by her new date. The man had recently excused himself to take a phone call out of her earshot. That was disappointing.
Her CIA intelligence team had been looking for her new admirer for quite some time; a man known as the Russian Liquidator.
Victor Kornev was a hard man to find. Always on the move. Always changing identities. Always making arms deals. And after more than a year of looking, the CIA analysts had finally found him. Kara had been immediately activated and sent in as a deep cover agent to see what she could dig up.
Beauty was not all it took to burrow into the hearts and minds of bad men who were suspicious by nature. It also took a great deal of acting. Dumb and beautiful were disarming traits that went together like ice cream and chocolate. Beauty was the attraction and dumb implied no agenda. Just a pretty girl out having fun looking for a rich guy that liked to have fun as well. Kara had done her best to ditz it up to the point where the Russian would let his guard down. But so far, no luck. Maybe she had overdone it, but she sensed that was not the case. After all, Victor Kornev had not become the world’s largest arms dealer by blabbing critical business snippets to a spoiled rich international floozy he had just met.
Kara took out a compact from her purse and put it in front of her face and took a snapshot of a queer little smile she flashed in the mirror. The picture had been sent to her controllers who understood the code. If they received the queer little smile; the smirk where one side of Kara’s mouth turned up while the other side remained normal, then Kara was OK. If she didn’t check in each hour, or she sent them a full smile, no smile, or any photo other than that strange smile, then she was in trouble and they needed to call in the cavalry.
Kara took a moment to touch up her makeup, which didn’t require much. Adjusting beauty was like trying to determine how shiny the Ferrari had to be. It was subjective. Some men liked makeup, even on a fashion model, and others found it more attractive for the beautiful to just be themselves. Kara still didn’t have a read on what the Russian liked, so she didn’t overdo it. Just some clear gloss on her thick lips and that was it. Her red hair was natural and had a slight curl. It puffed out around her shoulders and framed her elegant face. Her cheekbones were prominent and Kara wasn’t all that happy about it. Her mother had the same cheekbones and beautiful ivory thin skin. It was a great look when you were young, but it didn’t last. Kara had noticed a startling change in her mother’s face when she had reached her forties. As the natural elasticity in her Mom’s skin decreased, those prominent cheekbones looked more like a skeleton holding up pasty chicken skin. Not attractive in the least. Thin loose skin on sharp bones; it just didn’t work. But she never told her Mom that. What was the point? Her Mom was a beautiful person on the inside, so who cared about the outside. Kara was in her late twenties so she had some mileage left before they stuck her behind a desk and her life got boring. But she would be long gone from the agency before that ever happened.
The Volna Hotel bar was a tight little place. Situated just off the lobby, it was dark, wooden and had only a handful of tables that had been pressed into all the accessible crevasses of the room. Kara was sitting at the bar, more or less on display, perched on a bar stool, using her best posture. And the good posture thing wasn’t feeling all that good. She wanted to rest her elbows on the bar and slouch. But what refined woman would do such a thing? She wanted to get the six-inch pink stiletto pumps off her feet and grab a bag of popcorn and a beer and lay in bed for a few days. She would argue the point with anyone that told her this pretty girl stuff was an easy job.