Ten, nine, eight…
No one in the room spoke. They all just waited for the end.
At zero, the drone known as Eagles, the first and only one of its species, dematerialized at the bottom of the Taedong River in an explosion that was heard by no one.
“Eagles is gone,” Knox said softly.
“Yeah, but it did its job and collected the data and video we needed,” Hail commiserated.
Hail checked the time on his right monitor. 10:30 in the morning and the Nucleus was running on time and was nearing the South China Sea. Hail suddenly felt very tired.
He turned toward Renner. “Can you copy all the video that Eagles shot to my NAS so I can review it tonight?”
“Sure thing, Marshall,” Renner said.
The rest of the crew was looking at Hail and waiting for any further instructions.
“Do you need me here tonight when you clear Foghat out of the theater?” Hail asked his crew.
On behalf of the crew, Pierce Mercier responded, “No, we have it Marshall. Take whatever time you need to plan what you want to do next.”
“OK,” Hail said and slid out of his Captain Kirk’s chair and on to his feet. He stretched for a moment, noticing how stiff his forty-year old body had become from just sitting in the chair for… for… How long had he been sitting in the chair? It must have been at least five hours. He needed to pee.
“Let’s meet tomorrow and go over what we’ve been planning. If all the pieces fit, then I don’t see any reason why we can’t start the operation tomorrow night,” Hail told his crew.
Hail looked around the room. “Does that sound good to everyone?”
There was a mumbling of “Yes, Sirs”, “Yeahs”, “OKs” and even a “That’s cool” that drifted through the sullen room.
Marshall Hail exited the mission center and began the walk down the seemingly endless hallway of deck number six. He was both tired and exhilarated from the events that had transpired over the last three days. His lower back was bothering him and he knew it would feel better if he did a work out. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen.
After walking about five-hundred feet, Hail stopped at a door that looked like all the other metal doors on the ship and reached for his badge. Thick black letters had been stenciled onto the door’s shiny white paint that spelled the words SHIP SECURITY. Hail used his proximity card to swipe himself in. The room behind the heavy metal door resembled a smaller version of the command and control center he had just left. There were four men and two women sitting behind control stations that also looked just like the control stations in the mission room.
Two of the six people were in charge of flying the drone and drone-blimp combinations. Two others analyzed the radar, images and video that was streamed back from the airborne drones. And the other two were the killers. They operated the attack drone’s weapon systems, which consisted of two AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, two 70mm rockets and a 30mm automatic cannon with up to 1,200 high-explosive, dual-purpose ammunition rounds.
The weapon controllers also operated the ship’s own weapons systems. The top deck of the Nucleus had a perimeter of two-thousand one-hundred and twelve feet. Spaced every hundred feet along the hull of the Nucleus was a porthole. Behind the water-tight automated porthole hatches sat two guns at the ready. Each set of guns was mounted to a reticulating platform. The Browning M2 .50-caliber Heavy Machine Gun, better known as the “Ma Deuce”, was mounted next to the XM307 ACSW Advanced Heavy Machine Gun. The M2 could spit out 850 rounds per minute of armor-piercing incendiary rounds that could perforate an inch of hardened steel armor plate at a distance of a hundred yards. The XM307 was denoted as a heavy machine gun, but in fact it was a twenty-five millimeter belt-fed grenade machine gun with smart shell capability. The XM307 could kill or suppress enemy combatants out to two-thousand meters and destroy lightly armored vehicles, watercraft and helicopters at one-thousand meters. The company who built the XM307 cancelled the project for the gun in 2007. Hail acquired the rights and had the gun redesigned and built exclusively for his ships and to protect his land-based nuclear reactor installations. All the way around the Nucleus, twenty sets of the guns sat at the ready, fully loaded, each gun outfitted with thousands of rounds of ammunition, just waiting to be remotely pointed and fired at a target.
But the real glitz, the newest big toy that the weapon controllers liked to play with was the ship’s new railgun. The railgun used electromagnetic energy known as the Lerentz force to hurl a twenty-three-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 or five-thousand miles per hour. The weapon could fire guided high-speed projectiles more than 100 miles, which made it suitable for cruise missile defense, ballistic missile defense and various kinds of surface warfare applications. The downside to the new railgun was that it took a tremendous amount of energy to fire. The upside was the Hail Nucleus had a five-hundred megawatt traveling wave reactor. This power plant supplied the ship with more than twice the energy potential than an old Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. So the electricity to fire the beast was not an issue. The railgun was hidden on deck inside two nuclear waste shipping containers that were connected end-to-end near the bow of the Nucleus. The containers and railgun were mounted to a hydraulic lift that could swivel on an immense ball-bearing base in a full three-hundred and sixty-degree radius. Even though there was no warhead on the projectile, the kinetic energy of a wad of depleted uranium impacting a solid object was devastating. It typically left more dust than pieces. Either that or the shell cut a perfect hole through its target. The result from the impact of the projectile depended on the material itself. Solid objects that resisted the force were pulverized. Lighter objects with thin skins were typically bisected. A supplementary advantage to the kinetic round was that it left no trace of explosives, so that left investigators scratching their heads as to the cause of their airplane mysteriously falling from the sky.
Only one of the six people in the ship’s security center looked up at Hail as he entered the room. Dallas Stone met Hail’s gaze and greeted him with, “Hey, Marshall. How are you doing?”
The rest of the crew then looked up and greeted their boss, their Captain, their leader.
Similar to the attire in the mission center, everyone in the security center was dressed casually. Hail had not instituted a dress code for his crew. It was bad enough that they worked full-time and lived on a ship that was rarely docked. So as long as they did their job and were happy, then he couldn’t care less what they wore.
The ship had several amenities that a typical sailor would not find on a typical cargo ship. For example, there was a large pool on the top deck that could be covered by a massive sliding hunk of steel with a flip of a button. Each crew member had a cabin the size of an efficiency apartment. There was a gaming area, a state of the art flight and driving simulator, a wood shop, metal shop, sewing shop, electronic shop and an area to experiment with new creations, as well as a movie theater with popcorn and candy. The Hail Nucleus employed four excellent chefs that rotated their schedule so at any time during the day or night, a crew member could order a five-star meal. On the top deck, a running track outlined the perimeter of the ship. There was also a workout area with weights and treadmills, as well as an exercise room below deck in the air conditioning. On deck number seven, deep inside the ship, was a basketball court, a tennis court and a relatively small soccer field with artificial turf.
Hail understood that amenities were cheap, especially if it meant attracting talented minds. An attack drone could cost millions. If the difference between hiring a really smart designer who built a brilliant attack drone or a kind-of-smart guy whose drone crashed was the cost of a basketball court, then that issue was a no-brainer. All one had to do was take a look at the Google campus and the business sense was evident.