Hail looked at Kara and she looked back at him with a blank expression.
“What issue are you talking about?” Hail demanded.
Pepper paused for a moment and Hail sensed the news was going to be even worse than he had anticipated.
“We may have a rogue pilot on our hands,” Pepper said shamefully.
“Jesus,” Hail groaned.
Kara looked both sickened and ashamed.
“Hold for a second,” Hail told Pepper.
Hail pressed the mute button on his phone and turned to Renner.
“Get us the hell out of here. Let’s head south at best speed.”
“Absolutely,” Renner agreed.
Hail unmuted his phone and let if fall back into his lap, unsure what was left to be said. As far as he was concerned, Pepper had screwed him. For that matter, the entire Washington entourage had screwed him. They could have easily told him about their backup plan, but they chose not to. And to Marshall Hail, that meant they had purposely put him and his crew in danger. Hail chastised himself for not taking Renner’s advice and carrying out the mission from Indonesian waters. They could have launched the drones from the Hail Laser’s catapult and still have run the operation from a thousand miles away. So there was enough blame to go around, but if Pepper and his tribe hadn’t put a crazy pilot into the air, then the mission would have played out exactly as it was planned.
“Are you still there?” Pepper asked.
“Yeah.” Hail said. He said Yeah like it was a cuss word. “But I don’t know what we have to talk about. We are bugging out. This pilot thing is your mess. Not mine.”
Pepper didn’t say anything, so Hail pressed the END button on his phone.
“Let’s finish this,” Hail told Renner.
Renner sat back down at his control station and accessed the drone called Men at Work.
The pilots who had flown the THINGS had left their stations and were standing around the room and watching the video on the big screens being sent by Men at Work and Blondie.
Gage Renner pulled in the throttle trigger and angled the propellers to the right. Still on its side, the drone was dragged a few feet before righting itself and taking flight. The drone gained altitude quickly and for the first time Hail and his crew got a look at the devastation from above. As the drone passed over the missing roof of the warehouse, they could see what was once the floor of the warehouse was now a large pit. Tons of flammable debris had fallen into the shallow and was burning, creating North Korea’s largest campfire.
“Wow,” Kara said. “There is absolutely nothing left.”
The areas inside the warehouse where the large perfect missile sections had once rested, wrapped snuggly in protective plastic, now looked like jagged metal teeth that protruded from dirt and broken concrete.
“We did all of that,” Hail reminded Kara. “We didn’t need your help.”
Kara shot back, “It wasn’t me.”
“Could you have stopped it? Could you have warned me?” Hail asked, but it sounded more like condemnation.
Kara said nothing and Hail added, “I thought so.”
Renner’s drone had finished its pass over the warehouse and had flown back over the fence and was closing in on Blondie’s position in the field.
He asked Knox, “Give me a light, please.”
Knox reached down and flipped on an icon that read ID LIGHT.
And infrared light appeared on Men at Work’s video feed. Renner turned toward it and continued to fly out into the field and toward Blondie’s light.
Dallas Stone’s voice came over the mission room’s speakers.
“The North Koreans have eyes on the F-35. Prince’s radar just detected two military aircraft taking off from Wonsan Air Base.”
“Shit,” Hail said. “Do we have any idea what type of aircraft they scrambled?”
“Checking now,” Stone said.
A moment later, “This doesn’t look good. Their ICAO ping indicates they are Chengdu J-20s.”
Renner and Hail looked at each other, confused about the information.
“Are you sure? The Chengdu J-20 is the new Chinese super jet. How in the world could North Korea get their hands on those?”
Dallas came back with, “You got me. I Googled it and you’re right. They shouldn’t have any.”
Hail looked at Renner and rolled his eyes.
“The Chengdu J-20 is a badass aircraft,” Dallas added. “They were built specifically to go up against the American F-35.”
“I understand. Thanks Dallas.” Hail said.
Then almost as an afterthought, Hail told Stone, “Bring the ship’s railgun online and load a guided projectile.”
“Roger that, Skipper,” Stone responded.
Hail turned to Kara who was still standing nervously next to him.
“Your pilot is in a world of hurt,” he told her.
Kara gave him an angry look and said, “I told you, it was not my call.”
Hail ignored her and looked back to Renner and asked him, “What’s the status of Men at Work?”
“I’m already down,” Renner said.
Hail looked up at the screen and both Blondie and Men at Work’s cameras were showing the exact same image. It was the same long distance shot of the burning warehouse. Renner had landed Men at Work on the back of Blondie.
“Do it,” Hail told Renner.
Without hesitation, Renner typed in four digits and pressed the icon on the screen labeled SELF DESTRUCT. Men at Work blew another deep hole into the North Korean soil, blowing Blondie to tiny pieces along with it.
Over the city of Wonsan, North Korea ― on the F-35C Lightning II Jet Aircraft
As Lieutenant Commander Foster Nolan approached the target site, he drastically reduced speed in order to have a look at the warehouse below. At his previous speed of a thousand miles per hour, the warehouse would have passed under him so fast, that it would have looked like a firefly.
Up ahead, the blaze from the warehouse was clearly visible.
Nolan made a long slow circle above the target until he was convinced that it had been destroyed in its entirety. And just as he was preparing to throttle up and run for the sea, another explosion erupted down on the ground. The Lieutenant Commander estimated the blast was a good hundred yards away from the warehouse. But it didn’t make sense. Any explosive material that had been in the warehouse would have gone up in the initial blast. As he tried to determine what it might be, cockpit alarms began beeping. He checked his heads-up display and was disturbed to see two bogies in the air and headed in his direction.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered.
But the Lieutenant Commander was ready for a fight. He had been for years. He was flying one of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft and armed to the teeth. There was no doubt in his mind that he could certainly take out two shitty North Korean jets. They were probably those outdated Chengdu J-7s or possibly a Russian MIG or two.
But they were not.
“Oh, shit,” he said again. And this “Oh, shit,” he really meant. On his screen the designator J-20 was clearly marked next to each dot that was closing in rapidly on his position. At first he thought it was a mistake, but their speed was no mistake. They were hauling ass and would intercept him in less than one minute.
Nolan pressed the engine throttle forward to its full extent and the jet screamed and pinned him back into the seat. For a moment he considered turning his radio back on and explaining his precarious situation, and then he thought to himself ― why? He was a lone pilot flying over North Korea on a clandestine mission with two J-20s on his ass. No one was going to help him.
Foster Nolan checked his display again and saw that the J-20s were vectoring to cut him off before he could make it out to sea. It was either fight or flight and he was already in the process of flight. But there was another option that appealed to him as well. Actually, not exactly an option. More like an added bonus.