“I don’t think that was a sentence in any language,” Kara stated.
“OK. I will rephrase. Whom did you find to converse with in your new language?”
Kara laughed, but it was somewhat sad and hollow.
“I spoke it with my maid.” She said it like it was a confession and something to be ashamed about. “She didn’t speak English very well and I didn’t speak Spanish very well, so we came together on Zub-a-dub. We would have fun talking about my parents behind their backs, literally. My maid was kind of like my best friend for a while.”
Kara paused for a second and added, “How sad it that?”
Hail didn’t want to get sucked in too deep into Kara’s personal life, so he asked, “So you taught Pepper this Zub-a-dub language?”
“Not hardly,” Kara said. “If you haven’t noticed, Pepper is pretty much a doorknob. It would take him ten years to learn Zub-a-dub, if at all.”
“So how was he able to reply to you?”
“I worked with the CIA programmers to create an app for Pepper’s phone that works like SIRI for the iPhone. I say something in Zub-a-dub and it then translates it for Pepper. He then says something in English and it speaks his phrases back to me in Zub-a-dub.”
“That’s what we figured, but we didn’t know you had invented the language,” Hail said.
“That’s why I’m telling you all this. See, you could keep recording me and put together a team of encryption experts. They would then start to decipher the language by breaking all the words apart. After hundreds of recordings and thousands of man-hours, in about a year you might be able to hash out the language, but why would you waste all that time? I will be gone in a few days.”
“You will?” Hail asked.
“Well, whenever this operation is over. Won’t I?”
“I don’t know,” Hail said honestly. “I’m not even sure what defines the end of the operation. Would that be when I am done blowing up missile parts or when I rid the earth of all the terrorist leaders?”
“Good point,” Kara said.
Hail pressed the up arrow on his treadmill and transitioned into a fast walk.
Kara then pressed the up arrow on her treadmill and began a medium run.
Hail looked at Kara and she looked back at him and she smiled, as if to say, you will never catch me.
Hail had never met a woman like Kara Ramey. Or was it that he had never met anyone like Kara Ramey that he was interested in. Was he interested in her? Because as far as he was concerned, she was not his type. Hail’s type was a woman in crisis. A dependent female that needed him more than she loved him. Marshall to the rescue. And for some irrational reason, he found solace in that type of partnership. But even though he sensed that Kara was damaged goods, her trauma had not undone her. In fact, it appeared that she had become emboldened by her pain and it had given her a renewed purpose in life. Kara had emerged from her tragedy and had become reincarnated as some sort of CIA bad-ass. And even though it went against all of Hail’s nurturing instincts, he found the independent Ramey invigorating and exciting. Who knows, maybe Hail had also emerged from his own tragedy as a different person. A better person? That was subjective. Only God could make that judgement, but for some strange reason he cared what Kara thought of him.
“After we get some good air moving through you, we are going to start with some sit ups and see if we can shrink that tire around your waist,” Kara said, letting out phrases between breaths.
Hail looked hurt.
Kara saw Hail’s puppy dog expression and said, “I mean it’s not bad. Maybe thirty extra pounds, but you can burn that off in a few weeks, easy.”
Hail was breathing hard and hadn’t even approached running speed.
The phone in his pocket went off and he pressed pause on the treadmill. Once the machine had come to a complete stop, he let go of the handrails and removed his phone and put it up to his ear.
“What’s up, Gage?”
Kara kept her machine running and kept herself running, but watched Hail take the call.
“OK,” was all Hail said, but his body language told Kara that something was up.
Hail clicked off his phone and reached over to Kara’s treadmill and pressed the stop button.
“What’s up?” Kara asked.
“The truck is pulling into a warehouse off the Wonsan highway. We’ve got to go now.”
Kara grabbed her phone and a towel and some water. Hail draped a towel over his shoulder. They left the gym and quickly made their way through the ship’s corridors, all the way back to the mission control center.
“Nice outfit,” Gage Renner told Hail sarcastically as he entered the room.
Then he looked at Kara Ramey in her workout clothes and said, “Nice outfit,” and he meant it.
Gage relinquished the captain’s chair to Hail and moved over to his own control station on the front line.
Hail sat down and asked Kara if she would like a chair.
“No, I like standing.”
“Oh, that’s right. It was something about your flat ass, wasn’t it?” Hail recalled.
Kara flipped him the bird.
Only the principles in the room were in attendance.
Gage Renner, Alex Knox, Shana Tran and Pierce Mercier. Hail figured that Alba Zorn, their language specialist, was currently pulling her hair out trying to make sense of Kara’s Zub-a-dub recording.
Hail looked up at the large screen above the control stations. The view from inside the warehouse was clear and bright. The drone sitting on the roof of the truck provided an elevated vantage point.
“Can you please do a slow 180 with the camera so I can get a sense of the place?” Hail asked Knox.
“Sure thing,” Knox replied and began panning the camera clockwise very slowly.
The front of the truck was pointing toward the back of the warehouse. Hail estimated the building was about twenty yards deep. Crates upon crates were stacked thirty feet in the air. The ceiling above the crates was probably another ten feet higher. An aisle between the crates, wide enough to accommodate a small fork lift, had been left in order to move stuff around.
“Hold there for a moment,” Hail asked. “Good, now point the camera up in the rafters so we can find a place to park the drone.”
Knox adjusted the camera so it was pointing toward the ceiling of the warehouse.
“Looks like it’s a galvanized roof, eighteen gauge maybe, laid across the top of steel beams,” Renner commented. “It’s not insulated, so we should be able to find some good magnetic spots to land the drone.”
“Is galvanized a ferrous metal.” Hail asked.
“Galvanized isn’t a metal at all,” Pierce Mercier said. “That roof is a thin sheet of steel that has been galvanized in zinc. Zinc is nonferrous, but it’s such a thin coat that the magnets on the drone should still be able to stick to the steel beneath the zinc.”
Hail and his crew continued to watch the video, realizing that every minute they watched, they were draining the drone’s battery power.
“Man, this place is packed,” Hail said, as the camera zoomed back and continued to make a 360-degree pan.
Kara said, “This has to be one of the last pieces to arrive. They don’t have any more space left.”
“Unless they have more than one warehouse,” Hail suggested.
“How many missiles are they buying?” Renner asked.
“Three,” Kara said.
“I’m no missile expert, but right there,” Hail said, pointing his finger at some large cylindrical pieces to the left, “are six separate stages. Keep going with the camera and let’s see what’s on the other side of the truck.”
As Knox rotated the camera around, their view was temporarily blocked by the backside of the crane’s boom that was already being positioned to lift the huge missile part off the truck.
“Keep going,” Hail instructed.