Hail reached down and touched his wife’s face. She was so beautiful and she always told him how handsome he was. Maybe he had been handsome years ago. But the man that was looking back at him in the mirror looked fatigued and worn-out, as if he spent much of his time snorting crank or shooting some other destructive drug. Hail felt he had aged ten years in only a matter of two. His hair at one time, had been an attractive shade of light brown, but now it was turning prematurely grey. The lines in his long and strong face, character lines as his wife had referred to them, now appeared as deep furrows that carved a sorrowful and cross expression into his face.
The man in the mirror looked down again and touched each of his twin girls’ faces on the photograph. Blond and eight-years old forever, frozen in the photograph taken moments before their flight from Istanbul to their connecting flight to America. It had been so long since he had last seen them. He missed them so much that it made his heart hurt.
Hail removed his shirt and looked himself over again, taking in the big picture. Once in great shape, now his six-foot-one, two-hundred and twenty-pound frame was wilting. Just like that. A big-ol tree that was beginning to shrivel up and lean. He knew he needed to stay in shape and told himself that he would work out tonight. But as one side of his brain was already confirming the appointment, the other side of his brain knew that it wasn’t going to happen. He was going to spend the evening scanning and documenting all seventy-two hours of video that was shot by the dead drone Eagles. If the mission was on for the next day, then the intelligence that could be disseminated from the video would be vital. No actionable intelligence meant no mission. Simple as that. The workout would have to wait, but the shower was important. It would revive him. It would allow him to refocus.
Taking one more quick glance at the photograph, Hail reluctantly left the image and entered the bathroom. He was met by yet another mirror above the bathroom sink. He saw something new in that mirror that he hadn’t seen in the other. He saw a killer. As of yet, as of today, he was not a killer. But tomorrow he would be an official killer. A killer of his fellow man. A murderer? No. In his mind there was big difference between a killer and murderer. Murder implied that a crime had taken place. The person he would kill tomorrow and those that would follow, were all murderers. Hail was the yang to the murders ying. He was the force that would offset the glob of human sewage that had slipped all the way down the purulent hill and just needed that little extra nudge to allow it to fall over the rim and tumble into the pit of hell.
Hail got into the shower and started counting to one-hundred and twenty. He didn’t realize he was counting inside his head. Since he was a small child, his father, Tucker M. Hail, had made him take military showers. His father was big-time military. The regulation two-minute shower got sent down the family ranks until it landed on him. He had taken a two-minute shower for so long that if he was forced to stay under the water for three full minutes, he would just have to stand there and do nothing for an extra sixty-seconds. And doing nothing was not part of Marshall Hail’s DNA. Nothing meant no movement. No movement meant no advancement. If you were not moving forward, then you were technically moving backwards, because everyone else around you was moving forward. If you didn’t move forward, you were going to be left behind, and if that was the case, then why even exist? He didn’t know if that was yet another piece of military training his father had instilled in him, or maybe it was just his own philosophy. A suit he had grown into.
The timer in Hail’s head reached two minutes and he stepped out of the shower and dried off. He only allowed himself ten seconds for that task. The rest of the bathroom activities were allocated a scant sixty-seconds and then he exited the bathroom. Hail was thankful that his Dad had not set a time limit on taking a shit. Rules like that could screw up a kid.
Hail’s wife and his children thought that his lickity-split showers were funny, but he didn’t agree. Hail didn’t appreciate feeling like an odd-ball. He enjoyed fitting in. Unlike the other techno-nerds at MIT, Hail felt he was one of the few who could invent as well as sit in the boardroom and sell. Most of the time, those two traits didn’t exist in the same person. And if they did, they came at a price. Some other important social skillset would have typically been omitted. But anyone who knew Marshall Hail would be hard-pressed to find a flaw in his character.
Hail stopped long enough in the bedroom to pull on some underwear and a pair of grey sweatpants. He had stopped wearing button up pants. One day, an extra inch of fat had appeared around his waist and from that point on, button up pants had become uncomfortable. Stretchy pants felt much better.
In a room adjacent to his bedroom was a mini-control room, his office. It was outfitted with four large monitors and one giant monitor the size of a big screen TV. A fast computer interconnected all the gear. Hail considered lying down in bed to view Eagles’ video footage, but he felt he might drift off and waste a good amount of the afternoon. There was still the possibility of falling asleep even if he was sitting in his comfortable high-back chair in his small office. But upright and attentive was more practical than recumbent.
Shirtless, wearing only his grey sweatpants, Hail walked into his little office. He tried to recall the last time he had slept. It had to have been sometime within the last twenty-four hours, but nailing the exact time really didn’t matter, so he abandoned the query and sat down in front of his wall of monitors.
Hail logged in and clicked on an icon labelled Hail NAS. Inside that folder were about thirty other folders. He clicked on the folder called EaglesVideo. Inside that folder were scores of folders that contained dozens of video files that Eagles had recorded from its time flying above the North Korean compound. Hail opened a text editor and then opened the first video file of Eagles on station at Kangdong. As the video streamed across his large screen, Hail began to type out dates, times and related notes.
Langley, Virginia ― Central Intelligence Headquarters
Three people sat around a large mahogany table. Two men and one woman.
The man at the end of the table was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Jarret Pepper. He was new to the job; appointed by the new President only a month prior to this meeting. Pepper was a tall man in his early fifties. He had a long stern face and full head of grey hair that always looked like it needed to be combed. Newly divorced, Pepper had streamlined the essentials. Every suit he owned was identical. Never possessing the talent of being able to match a tie to a shirt to a suit, after his wife had signed the papers, he had thrown his entire closet in the Goodwill dumpster and started over. Immediately after leaving the dumpster, he had gone directly to an outlet men’s store and bought fourteen new identical grey suits, fourteen new identical white shirts and fourteen identical ties. The men at the store told him he looked great. So if he looked great in the store, then he would look great at work — everyday. Pepper didn’t even have to waste time thinking about getting dressed in the morning. And that was good, because he had more important items on which to focus. His co-workers would just have to deal with the same suit every day.