Continuing, she said, “But what if it’s not a country that sinks the Nucleus. What if a terrorist organization sinks the Hail Nucleus?”
“What are you implying?” Hail asked, his confusion diffusing his anger.
“You may not know this, but you are doing this mission for both of us ― the CIA and yourself. After all, terrorists love to cause disasters and they don’t care much about the environment. North Korea doesn’t seem to care about much of anything and are more of a terror organization than a country. If North Korea is successful with their missile program, they could just as easily blow your ship out of the water with conventional missiles and cause maybe even more destruction than if they had nukes strapped to them. After all, your cargo is nastier than any nuclear bomb. The Hail Nucleus is a terrorist’s wet dream!”
Hail looked as if he had been slapped in the face.
This woman made him mad. And the flip side was that she also made him kind of happy. It felt like a young marriage.
Hail turned his back on Kara and faced the door of the Security Center. He swiped his badge across the sensor and opened the door. Before entering, he turned back around and said.
“How would you like to swim home?”
He then slammed the door, leaving a steaming Kara Ramey on the other side with the clang of metal ringing in her ears.
The wind felt good on her face. She surfaced on the top deck around mid-ship and began walking toward the bow of the Nucleus. The air was warm and the night was heavy with humidity. A thick iron railing was to her left and then past that there was nothing but ocean. On her right were huge cylindrical containers of nuclear waste. Each container was the size of a truck. Each of them was painted white like innocent looking storage tanks. They were seated and latched into cylindrical slots on the deck, like a beer can being placed into a holder on its side. Kara surmised that the containers and their matching slots on deck were designed before the ship was ever built. The massive slots in the deck were too substantial to have been an afterthought or a retro fit conversion. Part ‘A’ was designed to go into slot ‘B’. The ship designers had then determined how many slots they could pack onto the deck and still leave room for the pool. As she walked along the railing, she was troubled by the natural beauty and calmness of the dark sea to her left, in comparison to the unnatural and hideous toxic slurry that was contained no more than ten feet to her right. She inadvertently rubbed her arm, wiping off any imagined radioactive contaminates that might have leaked out and stuck to her. She knew it was silly, but the feeling that she may be walking through invisible radioactive clouds was hard to shake. Hail was right when he had told her that someone would be crazy to bomb the Hail Nucleus. There were literally mountains of nuclear sludge onboard. And Kara was also right when she had told him that the Nucleus was a terrorist’s wet dream. She suspected that the Nucleus had some defenses against those who would want to sink or board her. She just hoped they wouldn’t be enough if her agency was the one assigned to do that job. Kara shuddered at that thought. This was not the calming walk in fresh air she had thought it would be. But she was there for work, not for pleasure.
As she neared the bow of the boat, she pulled up short and stepped in between some containers and removed her phone from her pocket. She typed in her password and brought up an app that uplinked to a secure communication’s satellite that was floating several miles above her.
The app took a moment to find the elusive satellite. It made a little ding sound when the uplink had been consummated. Kara dialed the number for her boss. She had no numbers stored on her phone. In her line of work, her phone could be liberated from her at any time. The first lesson in Spy School 101 was to keep your phone clean. No numbers. No history. Nothing that could provide an adversary information if her phone was taken from her.
The phone made a peculiar ringing sound, as if it were an echo of a ringing sound. The echo sounded four times before the phone was answered.
“Hi Kara, this is Jarret.”
“Hi Jarret. How are things back at the ranch?”
“Fine, however the president is waiting on an update. I’ve got you on speaker right now and I also have Paul Moore, the Directorate of Operations and Karen Wesley the Directorate of Analysis in the room in case they need to ask you some questions or visa-versa.”
“Understood,” Kara said.
There was a moment of silence while Pepper decided on how to kick off the call.
“First of all, I see you are calling on your own phone. Is that correct?”
“Affirmative,” Kara replied.
“And do you feel that your phone is secure and that you are not being surveilled?”
“I do,” Kara responded confidently. “Hail gave me back my phone and told me that I could use the ships communication channels if I proxy through their gateway or connect to their cell repeater on deck. But right now, I am on the ship’s deck and connected directly to our satellite, so I believe we’re clean.”
“Very good,” Pepper said. “Can you please provide us a mission summary?”
“I am on the Hail Nucleus and somewhere in the Sea of Japan. As you know, the Nucleus is a cargo ship that’s carrying tons of nuclear waste, destination unknown. Pertaining to the mission directly, Hail’s crew was successful in flying in a drone, correction, two drones and dropping them down onto the Huan Yue. The Huan Yue then docked in the city of Wonsan, North Korea. Via the drone’s camera, we then watched the center section of a Russian R-29RMU Sineva unloaded from the Huan Yue and onto a low boy trailer. The trailer was then driven out of the city and exited a few miles off the Wonsan highway. It then drove three miles down a dirt road to a secluded warehouse. I will text you the exact coordinates of the warehouse. At that point, a surveillance drone was positioned inside the warehouse. I watched a live video feed of the missile stage being unloaded from the trailer. Based on nothing but observation, it would appear that almost all the parts have arrived at the warehouse. There still appears to be one missile stage missing.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“Hello,” Kara said.
“We’re here. We were just waiting to see if you had anything else to report,” Pepper said.
Kara said, “I’m expected to be present in a mission meeting that started about ten minutes ago. I’m assuming that Hail’s plan to destroy the missiles will be finalized in this meeting.”
“Are there any complications so far?” Pepper asked.
Kara thought about this for a moment, sifting through information that would matter to the staff in the CIA conference room. Except for Hail’s constant insistence on killing Victor Kornev, there really hadn’t been any complications. But what did that have to do with the CIA. She was pretty sure she could convince Pepper to give the order to kill Kornev, but she didn’t want Kornev dead. She wanted Kornev alive. She wanted information from the man. She wanted to know who had shot down her parent’s plane. Marshall Hail was proving to be short sighted. He really didn’t care who had pulled the trigger. He simply wanted to annihilate all the figure heads that had told their jihadists to pull the triggers. Kara wanted ― no ― Kara needed to look the man in the eyes who had pulled the trigger of the surface to air missile that had wrecked her life. A reasonable Kara Ramey would realize there was a good chance the shooter could already be dead. After all, he was in a very dangerous line of work. The terrorist could have died a number of ways, with disease and starvation right at the top of the list. But for some strange reason she felt that the man was still alive; still out there living while so many of his victim’s families were dying on the inside. And Kara also assumed that the shooter was a man. For no other reason than women in that region were so marginalized that the only reasonable person would be a man.