“Please sit down,” the larger man said, gesturing for Nolan to pull up any one of the dozens of office chairs haphazardly strewn about the room. The lieutenant commander corralled the closest chair and rolled it across the iron floor to the table. They didn’t appear to be concerned that the chair was fabric and the pilot was still very wet. If they didn’t care, neither did he. Nolan sat and stared at the strangers before him.
The man in the green polo asked, “What’s your name?”
Nolan responded, “Foster Nolan, Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy, service number 452-29-3692.”
“That’s all good to know,” he said, “but what we really want to know is ‘What in the hell were you thinking when you bombed the North Korean mainland’?”
“Just doing my duty,” Nolan responded.
“Really?” the woman shot back angrily. “We were told that you were a rogue pilot ordered back to your carrier. Rather than following your commander’s orders, you decided to go on an unsanctioned bombing run.”
The lieutenant commander looked shocked and asked, “Who told you that?”
The larger man answered, “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Quentin Ford, told us that.”
The pilot was now one stage past shocked. He looked totally stunned, as if he had been hit by a jolt of electricity and had become paralyzed. A few seconds ticked by, and the lieutenant commander slowly regained a small measure of his composure.
He looked at the three people in front of him and said in a muted and somewhat defeated tone, “Who are you people?”
The trio stared back at him with adjudication, making Nolan feel as if he were a pupil sent to the principal’s office, and now they were deciding his punishment.
“My name is Marshall Hail,” the big guy said.
Nolan recalled the helicopter with the writing on the side, Hail Industries.
Hail continued with the introductions. Gesturing toward the woman, Hail said, “This is Kara Ramey. She works for the CIA.”
Gesturing to the guy wearing the T-shirt, Hail said, “This is Gage Renner. He and I work together.”
“Where — where — what — where are we? What ship is this?” the pilot asked. Nolan appeared confused.
The man introduced as Gage Renner answered the question. “We are on the Hail Nucleus. This is a cargo vessel.”
“Why is there an agent from the CIA on your cargo ship?” Nolan asked, taking in the fact that Renner had told him the ship was the Hail Nucleus. The lieutenant commander directed the question to whom he assumed was the ship’s owner, Marshall Hail.
“No, that’s not the way this is going to work,” Hail told the pilot. “You get to ask a question. Then we get to ask a question. You got your question answered. Now it’s our turn.”
Bluntly, Hail asked, “Why didn’t you call off your airstrike when you were ordered back to your carrier?”
“Can I get out of these wet clothes?” he asked, looking down at the puddle of water forming around his boots.
“Not yet,” the CIA operative told him. “We fished you out of the ocean. But we’re not sure if we’ll keep you or throw you back. Your honest answers to our questions determine whether an hour from now you are in dry clothes or floating around in a brand-new raft in the middle of the ocean. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think the next people who come to your rescue will be as pleasant.”
“Why didn’t you call off your airstrike when you were ordered back to your carrier?” Marshall Hail repeated his question.
Nolan looked down at the puddle again trying his best to wrap his mind around the question. To be honest, he didn’t know why he had turned off his radio and continued into North Korean airspace even after his mission had been scrubbed. It probably had something to do with the death of his brother. Two years prior, his brother had been killed in a terrorist attack that had taken the lives of thousands of people. His brother had been an Air Force jet pilot. They had been very close, and his death had really messed with Foster’s head. He had waited for years to get some payback, and this mission seemed to provide that unique opportunity. He would fly a single jet fighter into North Korea to blow up a warehouse holding ICBM parts that would soon be assembled into missiles. If that wasn’t destiny, Nolan didn’t know what was, and when the voice on the radio ordered him back to his carrier, he was only minutes from the warehouse. He figured a little look-see couldn’t hurt. He had been briefed on the purpose of the mission. A ground team had been sent in to neutralize the warehouse. His mission was to act as backup for the ground team, just in case the boys on the ground couldn’t get the job done. But it never hurt to check.
So, he had done just that. He had done a flyby and verified that the warehouse had been blown to smithereens. But what he hadn’t counted on was the launch of two Chengdu J-20 jet fighters. The damn North Koreans were not supposed to have those advanced planes. The J-20s had just rolled off the floor in a Chinese factory no more than a year ago. No one, except for the Chinese, were supposed to be in possession of those advanced jet fighters. But lo and behold, the North Koreans did have them. And the rumor about those Chinese jets designed to go up against the American F-35 appeared to be true. Once the J-20s were airborne, those fast and nimble jets had run Nolan and his F-35 down. Before the lieutenant commander had cleared the North Korean mainland, he knew he was toast. Even before he had seen the military complex ahead of him.
The large structure had been well-lit and multistoried. Since most of North Korea had little to no electricity, the lieutenant commander had assumed that the building was a special complex, maybe even a military installation. Prior to the target locked alarm, and before ejecting from his 337 million-dollar plane, Nolan had expelled a brand-new, never used in combat LOCO missile into the heart of the building. He still regretted that he barely had any time to enjoy the explosion. As the building disintegrated, Nolan heard a target locked alarm blare in his cockpit. He understood that he had a marginal chance of escaping one J-20, but two, no way José. All his instincts as a pilot told him it was time to leave the party. Once he was over the Sea of Japan, he yanked the ejection handle and that was that. Mission over.
Hail was still waiting for an answer. The lieutenant commander mulled it over a little and ended up saying, “I just went in to verify that the target had been neutralized.”
“And what about the missile that you fired?” Hail questioned.
Without hesitation, and a little defensively, the pilot responded, “I was painted by the Chengdu and saw a target of opportunity, so I decided to take it out before I was shot down.”
“And what type of target did you believe it was?” the beautiful woman asked Nolan.
“A well-lit military target. After all, the North Koreans don’t waste energy powering anything that isn’t important to them.”
Kara responded by asking, “Would it surprise you to know that the military target you mentioned was a hotel?”
He responded with a big long, “Nooooo. It wasn’t.”
But, in the back of his mind, now that she mentioned it, now that he thought about it, it did resemble a hotel. And there had been very few structures to use as a reference. The target had not been surrounded by other buildings. Other than an expanse of bright light, there was very little to see in the dark North Korean city. And to complicate matters, he was flying at full speed on full afterburner, hitting around Mach 1.5. The landscape unfolded like the track of the Monaco Grand Prix. One second nothing was there. And a second later, there was a big building with lights ablaze. Nolan was proud that he could hit any target at that speed, but he was very disappointed to find out it was a hotel.