“Look Kim. The Eagle is right there.” The attractive woman across the table from him pointed up into the sky.
Kim Yong Chang finished his grapefruit, took a sip of coffee and checked his phone, making no attempt to look at the bird.
The current bird, with the unimaginative code name of Eagles, had been on station for more than three days. Depending on the weather and thermals, the drone held enough rocket pellets to stay on target for up to one hundred hours. With no way to take flight without human intervention, the rocket propelled glider had to be dropped from a drone at the beginning of its mission or slung off a ship and flown in on its own power. Depending on support logistics, flying the bird to its target from hundreds of miles away on its own power, dramatically reduced it’s time on station. When leaving its target, the drone could either fly out of the region on its own rocket power, or the remaining rocket pellets in its chest cavity could be remotely detonated, turning the half-million-dollar reconnaissance machine into nothing but feathery bits and colorful pieces.
The drone’s outstretched wings made imperceptible corrections, as the eagle’s head turned from the left to the right. The five computers inside the mechanical creature worked in concert to maintain lift and correct for weight shifts as its head moved from side to side. The bird’s head dropped a few millimeters, focusing its onboard camera on new points of interest on the ground. The left wing’s trim feathers lifted twelve millimeters and the tail feathers dropped seven millimeters, counteracting the weight shift of the eagle’s head movement. Two feathers on each wing sensed that a thermal was pushing them up at a measurable vertical velocity. By using avian soaring performance aerodynamics, the computers could make a fuzzy-logic determination if the current thermal was worth riding or if a burn should take place so another thermal could be located.
Hundreds of feet below, Kim Yong Chang’s girlfriends watched the bird gracefully loop in wide circles as it looked for prey.
“Do you see the Eagle?” she asked Kim again. She spoke in English as Kim had instructed her to do.
Kim spoke in English whenever possible, instead of his country’s native Korean language. He was in the process of trying to convince two Russian missile experts to defect to his country, and the only common language between them was English. Kim knew he would be much more effective in his job if he could speak fluent English, so he surrounded himself with girlfriends, prostitutes and staff that understood and spoke some English.
Understanding that if he didn’t look at the Eagle, the women would continue to pester him, Kim glanced up, waiting momentarily for his eyes to adjust to the bright morning sky. He saw the eagle and responded with nothing more than a grunt.
“It’s so beautiful,” his girlfriend said. “It must have a nest close to here. Around and around it goes. I’ve seen it every day for the last few days.”
Since she didn’t ask Kim anything, he didn’t waste the energy responding with another grunt.
“Did you see it?” asked the young Asian woman on a raft. Her bikini was so small that it didn’t make much sense to Kim why she wore anything at all.
She then said loudly enough to be heard over at the table, “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just float on the air like that. No worries. No problems.”
Kim laughed under his breath. Neither of the girls had any problems. They provided him companionship and sex until he tired of them. At that point, they would move out and do the same for one of the other cabinet members. If they had an iota of comprehension of what he went through on a daily basis, then they would comprehend the true meaning of worry and problems.
Kim Yong Chang had promised his leader that he would either steal, buy or build an intercontinental ballistic missile by the time the snows came or… or… he hated to think about the ‘ors’. The ors are what worried him. The ors are why he lost sleep at night. The ors had killed all the previous tenants of this house. The ors were big problems. They had been big problems for his predecessors and look at the way their lives had turned out. Or turned off would be more precise.
For no apparent reason, Kim glanced back up into the sky and watched the dark bird make its elegant loops. The women appeared happy that he had decided to join them in their ornithological pastime. He didn’t have any particular bias for most birds, but he did hate eagles. The eagle represented a country that would be the very first target in which he would aim his new ICBM.
Kim put down his spoon and wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin.
To the shock of his two female companions, Kim turned to his servant who was removing Kim’s grapefruit bowl from the table, and said to him, “Get me my rifle.”
Strait of Malacca — on the cargo ship Hail Nucleus
The Hail Nucleus tanker was registered in Panama. It was a Panamax class 80,000 dead-weight-ton bulk cargo ship. The vessel had taken on cargo off the east coast of the United States and was currently heading for its first off-load in Indonesia. Deep inside the belly of the ship was a sophisticated command and control center.
“Holy shit! We’re taking fire,” yelled Alex Knox. He was sitting comfortably at a command station in front of four high-definition monitors. In his left hand, Knox yanked a control yolk to the right and pushed a pedal with his right foot. The image on two of his screens blurred as the video being sent from drone’s cameras pointed skyward. A blast of sunlight burned the monitors white for a brief second and then a moving video of the ground came back into view.
“What do you mean, we’re taking fire?” the ship’s captain, Marshall Hail responded.
Hail was sitting in the center of the mission room in a massive swivel chair that could be mistaken for that on the star ship Enterprise. Two twelve-inch monitors were mounted to the sides of each arm rest.
Using his right hand, Knox pulled the joystick backwards and said in a sarcastic tone, “You know, like bang-bang, someone is shooting a big gun at Eagles.”
Hail looked down at his left monitor and touched an icon on the screen, flooding the room with the audio being streamed by the drone. Most of the sound was that of wind whipping at the microphone on the bird-like drone. And then Boom… Boom… two sharp cracks rattled the speakers over their heads.
“Who is shooting?” Hail asked. His voice was all business.
Of the sixteen flight and control stations that circled the room, only eight of them were being manned by Hail personnel. The current mission did not require sixteen butts in all sixteen chairs. Eagles was being flown by Knox.
“Do we have eyes on the shooter?” asked Hail in a calm but commanding tone.
Knox made a flight adjustment and answered, “I was repositioning Eagles when I heard the first shot. I wasn’t watching the ground feed.”
A second later, “Man-o-man, Eagles has some sort of damage,” Knox yelled. “I can’t turn her to the right. Don’t those idiots know that the Eagle is a protected species?”
Hail let out a sarcastic laugh. “In a country that kills their own people at the drop of a hat, I don’t believe that Eagles or any other living creature is protected in any way. Renner, run diagnostics on the bird and pull up the last minute of video that Eagles recorded.”
Sitting at the control station to the left of Knox, Gage Renner typed in some commands on his keyboard and responded, “Diagnostics are running and I am pulling up the video on large monitor number two.” Renner was a hairy, thin, wiry guy in his forties who was dressed in gym pants and a tee-shirt that stated, “I look better in 8K”. The shirt was supposed to be some sort of joke that only video nerds thought was funny, but Marshall Hail couldn’t care less. Gage Renner was an aeronautics genius and one of the original designers of the bird-drone. He was also one of Hail’s best friends and had been his roommate at MIT.