Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  ‘I’m more interested in these attacks or intrusions than I am about what a couple of typically completely clueless politicians think,’ Morgan said. ‘What happened? What was the source?’

  ‘I had a conference call with the security people at both companies. The ostensible source of both attacks was Vietnam, and you know as well as I do that means about the only place they couldn’t have originated was that country. They’d have bounced the origin around the world before using the software.’

  ‘Did they crack a legitimate password or hack into the system using some vulnerability?’

  ‘You’ll need to talk to their security people for chapter and verse, Ben, because this stuff is well outside my comfort zone. But I gather that in both cases the hackers first tried cracking passwords using tools called JTR and Cain. I suppose you know what they are?’

  Morgan nodded.

  ‘John The Ripper and Cain and Abel,’ he replied. ‘They’re both password crackers often used by White Hat hackers doing pen testing.’

  ‘Pen testing?’ Angela Evans asked.

  ‘Sorry, shorthand. Penetration testing, to see if a system is vulnerable. I presume that’s not how they got in?’

  ‘No. Then they looked for system vulnerabilities,’ Dame Janet confirmed.

  ‘They probably used something like Nessus or Metasploit,’ Morgan suggested.

  ‘Yes to both of those, and also something called Sniper.’

  ‘The program’s actually spelt Sn1per, with a number “1” rather than a letter “i”, and it’s often used with Metasploit. And they found a way inside?’

  ‘Oddly enough, no.’

  ‘No?’ Morgan echoed. ‘But I thought you said—’

  ‘As I said, Ben, I’m getting there. The attacks weren’t simultaneous but consecutive and repetitive, and because of the hacking tools that were used, and the way that they were used, it looks as if the same person or group of people were involved. I understand that most hackers have preferred suites of tools they’re familiar with and that do the job, and they tend to use them in much the same way each time.’

  ‘Just like anyone who uses a computer,’ Morgan agreed. ‘Or like any other tradesman, in fact, would use a tool.’

  ‘Right. What I didn’t tell you was that both these attacks failed to breach the firewalls and counter-intrusion systems and get inside the servers. The hackers tried for several days, first on the EDF and then on the Npower servers, and when they got nowhere with Npower they went back to EDF and vice versa. They were quite determined. The security people were pleased with the way legitimate users were able to access the system while the alleged Vietnamese attackers couldn’t get inside.’

  ‘Until,’ Morgan prompted.

  ‘Exactly. Until the people at EDF noticed one apparently legitimate user on their system who was behaving oddly while the attack was still going on. They knew his identity from his log-in details, obviously, but he wasn’t doing what they would have expected, which was accessing the modules that his job required him to use. Instead, he was cruising around the system, looking at completely unrelated material, and at one point it seemed as if he was trying to get access to the encrypted password files and other low-level stuff.’

  ‘Presumably they kicked him off? And checked that he wasn’t a legitimate user just being a bit too curious?’

  ‘Yes, and then they started an internal investigation, which didn’t help. They realised only an idiot would use his own log-in credentials to snoop around the system like that, but they checked anyway and ruled him out, for one unarguable reason.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘He was in hospital. He’d contracted Covid-19 and was in intensive care with barrier nursing and no access even to his mobile phone, far less to a computer, when the intrusion occurred. Whoever it was, it wasn’t him. The EDF security people were cagey about how far the intruder had got, and said no damage was done. No ransomware installed, no data stolen or website pages defaced, nothing like that.’

  Morgan shook his head.

  ‘Hackers don’t normally breach a system just to show that they can,’ he said, ‘and it worries me if this one apparently did nothing apart from take a look around. He might have been trying to install a backdoor so he could access the system in the future, or maybe he was just copying the log-in details of other users. The best place to find a system vulnerability is when you’re inside it, so perhaps that was what he was after. It’s an obvious concern.’

  ‘I agree with you, so get yourself over to see these security bods at EDF and find out exactly what happened and what they’ve done about it.’

  ‘Will do. What I don’t quite follow is why you also talked to a couple of politicians about this.’

  ‘Only because I couldn’t get in to see the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary. They were tied up in meetings, so I had to make do with a couple of their minions. And they’re both involved, along with the PM, because of the foreign ownership of these two companies and the possible impact a hacking attack could have on the parts of the UK served by EDF and Npower. I asked the idiot MP who’d been telling me about zombie servers how comfortable his home would be if the mains electricity and gas went offline for a couple of weeks with no backup power supplies available and he actually went white. Best part of my day, that was.

  ‘Anyway, C-TAC is in the loop now, so off you go and check it out, just in case there’s more to this than meets the eye.’

  Chapter 11

  North of Lambeth Bridge, London

  As Carter steered the launch on an intercept course with the cabin cruiser and continued to close the distance between the two vessels he saw a second man appear in the stern of the boat. He couldn’t tell if he’d just stepped out of the saloon or if he’d been sitting down at the stern of the boat and out of sight.

  ‘There are at least two of them on board, Bob,’ he said, ‘so don’t forget to take a spare pair of cuffs.’

  The attention of all three men in the Targa patrol boat was focused on the cabin cruiser, but it was Crichton who saw the threat first.

  ‘Is that a boat hook?’ he murmured, almost to himself. Then he recognised the object for what it was and immediately shouted out a warning. ‘Rifle! He’s got a rifle.’

  Carter slammed the throttles forward and at the same moment turned the wheel hard to port, trying to drive the patrol boat clear of the sudden and completely unexpected danger.

  In fact, Mark Crichton was wrong. Or at least not entirely right.

  The word ‘rifle’ in the minds of most people, certainly members of the almost entirely unarmed population of the United Kingdom, conjures up an image of a bolt action weapon, probably in .22 or another fairly small calibre, the kind of thing a farmer would have to hand to take care of rats and rabbits and other small animals. But place the word ‘assault’ before the word ‘rifle’ and the image instantly changes.

  What Crichton had seen was the long barrel of a weapon in the hands of the second man on the boat they were pursuing, but at a distance and from a bouncing and unstable platform. If they’d been a little closer, he might have seen the distinctive gas cylinder mounted above the barrel which, along with the forward-curved magazine, are the two most obvious identification features of the Kalashnikov AK-47 and its variants.

  But even though Crichton hadn’t immediately realised the exact type of weapon they were facing, it became blindingly obvious in the next few seconds as Carter took evasive action.

  As the Targa heeled over, the three police officers heard the yammering sound as the unidentified man on the cabin cruiser fired the assault rifle towards them, the slamming noise echoing off the buildings and river walls on both sides of them.

  Carter reckoned they were about a hundred yards away from the gunman, well within the lethal range of the assault rifle, which he guessed was a Kalashnikov because it was the obvious weapon of choice for terrorists around the world. He didn’t know exactly how many shots had been fired in that first
burst, but he thought he had felt the impacts of at least two rounds hitting the starboard side of his boat.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he yelled as he steered the launch back the way they’d come, swinging it from side to side so as not to present a static target and keeping the speed up to produce a curtain of spray behind the boat to further confuse the gunman’s aim. ‘Anybody hurt?’

  A pair of answering shouts told him that his men were uninjured, and as far as he could tell the bullets hadn’t done anything terminal or even serious to his vessel.

  MPU boats do not normally carry weapons, and when they do they are usually in the experienced hands of members of SCO19, the Metropolitan Police’s armed division, which includes roaming ARVs – Armed Response Vehicles – and groups such as the Specialist Rifle Officers, or SROs, all highly trained marksmen, and the Tactical Support Teams that provide armed backup for police raids when the suspects are known or believed to be in possession of weapons. But in that boat on that day, the three officers hadn’t even got a pistol between them.

  Bob Fisher was already on the radio, calling in the incident, but unlike a situation on dry land, when the driver of a police car can request the help of other units to apprehend a vehicle that has failed to stop, out on the river there were no other units. Or at least none close enough to lend a hand. And for obvious reasons roadblocks and spike strips or stingers were never going to work. Ultimately, the boat could be stopped by the Thames Barrier out at the London City Airport, but Carter had no intention of letting it get that far east.

  He turned the boat through a half-circle as quickly as possible so that the bow of his vessel was aiming back towards the cabin cruiser, now about two hundred yards distant. That put most of the Targa between the three officers and the man with the assault rifle, which would hopefully provide at least some measure of protection, but they were still well within range of the Kalashnikov and they all knew it. But at that distance, using the notoriously inaccurate assault rifle from a moving platform – the cabin cruiser – to hit another moving target would be difficult at best.

  ‘There’s another Targa heading our way,’ Fisher reported, ‘but he’s down by the Isle of Dogs and he’ll be stopping to pick up a couple of SROs from Wapping so it’s going to be a while getting here. There are a couple of ARVs heading for the river to get in position to try to take out these two comedians. And they’ve scrambled India 99 but they estimate it’ll be at least fifteen minutes before he’s on task.’

  That was the callsign of one of three Eurocopter EC 145 helicopters of the ASU, the Air Support Unit, that provide airborne surveillance and other assistance to the Metropolitan Police. They’re based at North Weald Airfield, about twenty miles from the centre of London, a distance the EC 145 could cover in a little under eight minutes at its maximum speed of 153 miles per hour. If it was already airborne over the airfield. The extra time quoted was the inevitable delay caused by the crew getting from their ready room, out to the aircraft, doing pre-flight checks, pre-start, post-start and pre-take-off checks, and actually launching the helicopter into the air. Obviously most of these were pre-done to allow as fast a take-off as possible, but no sensible pilot would ever even think about getting into the air without running through these checks. As the old adage has it, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.

  ‘It’d be a big help to us,’ Carter said, staring towards the cabin cruiser, which was still heading north along the eastern, the right-hand, side of the river, ‘if that chopper was fitted with a fucking great machine gun as well as cameras and lights. Then we could just back away and watch chummy being blown out of the water.’

  The man with the assault rifle had only fired that one initial burst of maybe six or eight rounds, but all four officers knew that the standard magazine for a Kalashnikov AK-47 held thirty cartridges, and most terrorists – because that was very obviously what they were dealing with – who managed to obtain an assault rifle also managed to obtain more than one magazine for it. The expression ‘outgunned’ covered the situation perfectly.

  ‘So what the hell’s this guy up to?’ Crichton asked. ‘It’s not much of a terrorist attack if all he does is shoot up a police launch.’

  Carter didn’t respond for a few seconds, mentally trying to put the pieces together. Then he shook his head.

  ‘They’d only be carrying an assault rifle and be prepared to use it if they’re planning an attack right now,’ he said. ‘Think about it. We had truck bombs over here when the IRA was playing around, and at Oklahoma in the States as well, and the Americans have had aircraft bombs when planes were used as weapons on 9/11. I think we could be looking at the first boat bomb in Britain.’

  Bob Fisher didn’t look entirely convinced.

  ‘So what’s their target, down here on the river?’ he asked, then glanced up towards the western bank of the Thames at one of the most recognisable buildings not just in Britain but in the entire world: the Palace of Westminster, home of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. ‘Oh, shit. Not Parliament?’

  ‘Think about it,’ Carter said again. ‘If what we’re looking at is part of an active branch of some radical Islamic organisation they’ll be aiming for either the maximum possible loss of civilian lives or the maximum possible embarrassment to the British government. Or both. There’s not a big enough civilian presence anywhere on the river to form a target. If all they wanted to do was mow down a few civilians they could have used that assault rifle to shoot up a London bus, no problem. But this is different. I think their target is almost certainly either Parliament or the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, but that’s a hardened facility, not to mention the fact that they’ve already gone past it. Unless you can think of something else, that means they must be heading for Parliament.’

  As Carter spoke, the three police officers watched as the cabin cruiser started angling over to port, heading for the wrong side of the river – traffic on the Thames, as on almost every waterway, always keeps right – and Westminster. That was a clear and unmistakable confirmation of what he had suspected.

  ‘It’s wallowing,’ Fisher said. ‘It could be stuffed full of Semtex or C4 and you can get a hell of a lot of explosive inside a boat that size.’

  ‘I doubt if they’d have access to that much plastic,’ Carter said, ‘but a fertiliser bomb would be bloody nearly as dangerous.’

  ‘So what are we going to do? They’re heading for Parliament right now.’

  ‘We’re going to stop them. Buggered if I know how, but that’s what we’re going to do.’

  Chapter 12

  Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

  Ben Morgan was standing up ready to leave when the phone beside Dame Janet rang. There were standing orders in place to ensure that that particular number was only known to certain high-level officials and government ministers, the intelligence services, the military and the police, along with very specific instructions about who could call it and under what circumstances. So when it rang it meant that one of two things had happened. Either a confirmed terrorist attack, or an incident that was most likely the work of a group of terrorists, had taken place or was then in progress.

  Morgan sat down again as Dame Janet picked up the phone and announced herself crisply just as ‘C-TAC’ and then listened. About ten seconds into the conversation she told the caller to wait.

  ‘It’s the duty officer at the Marine Policing Unit – the river police – out at Wapping,’ she said, and switched on the loudspeaker. ‘Tell me that again.’

  ‘We have a developing situation on the Thames near Lambeth Bridge,’ a male voice said, speaking urgently. ‘There’s a cabin cruiser out there that failed to stop. It was approached by one of our patrol boats because it looked as if it was overloaded, and a registry check showed that it was possibly stolen. But when our launch started to close with it, one of the two men visible on board opened fire with an assault rifle.’


  ‘Bloody hell,’ Dave North muttered.

  ‘Any injuries?’ Dame Janet asked.

  ‘None reported.’

  ‘Which side of Lambeth Bridge?’ Ben Morgan interjected, and Dame Janet repeated his question to the duty officer.

  ‘North, near the—’

  ‘Houses of Parliament,’ Morgan finished for him, walking up to Dame Janet so that the duty officer would hear his voice. ‘Put it together: an overloaded boat, a man with an assault weapon and the Houses of Parliament. It has to be a bomb attack. Are the officers on the police launch armed?’

  ‘Negative. We have armed officers preparing to board a second patrol boat but it will be at least half an hour before they can reach that location. You’re on my list of people to call.’

  ‘There’s not much we can do from here,’ Morgan said, ‘apart from shut down the cell phone network in central London in case the weapon is intended to be remotely triggered by a mobile.’

  ‘I’ll do that right now,’ Angela Evans said, reaching for her own phone.

  Dame Janet nodded her approval.

  ‘Keep us in the loop,’ she told the police officer, and ended the call.

  ‘I really hope,’ Natasha Black said, glancing in the general direction of the River Thames, ‘that we don’t hear a sodding great bang in the next five minutes.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  Chapter 13

  North of Lambeth Bridge, London

  The obviously laden cabin cruiser was wallowing its way across the river, now aiming directly towards the centre of the Palace of Westminster, the vast and elegant building glowing golden in the afternoon sun, the roofline marked by spires and scaffolding in equal measure, a necessary part of the refurbishment work that had been going on for some time on the fabric of the structure.

  ‘We need to keep him in the middle of the river,’ Carter said urgently, ‘where the effects of the blast will be minimised.’ He pushed the throttles forward and started to accelerate. The target vessel was still about two hundred yards in front of them. ‘Get on to Wapping and make sure they’ve warned the PaDP at the House. They’ll need to evacuate Parliament and get everyone into the Old Palace Yard or at least outside and somewhere on the west side of the building. And then they need to send as many armed officers as they can to the wall by the river. Make sure they know that we’ve been fired on, and what we think the people in that cabin cruiser are planning. It’d be a really good idea if they forgot about their stupid bloody rules of engagement and loosed off a few rounds to persuade the people in that boat to back off, or at least to show them that we’ve got teeth.’