Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  One problem was that the ideology of that particular nation was no more in keeping with the aims of radical Islam than it was with the decadent democracies of the West, so an appeal for specialised help on ideological grounds was never going to work. But rather more important than abstract concepts like ideology and philosophy was the appeal of cold hard cash, and that was a weapon Sadir could use to his advantage. And so he had, working through contacts of contacts of contacts until he had finally identified a handful of people with the right qualifications and abilities – they actually had been government trained – and used his financial clout to secure the services of two of them for as long as it took.

  And he had offered a bonus: if the scenario played out as Sadir expected it to, as well as the balance of their promised funds, he had told them that at the completion of the operation they would also receive a technological gift that would be of incalculable value to their home country. That wasn’t actually going to happen, because Sadir had an entirely different endgame in mind, but the offer was too attractive to be ignored. And so he had obtained access to the specialised skills and abilities that he had needed in the form of two very experienced and professional hackers.

  Because what happened at the house in Fairview was the most important part of the plan, he was a fairly frequent visitor, checking on progress and making sure that the two men had everything that they needed. With the implementation date now only a few days away, this visit was the last that he would make to the property before the commencement of the attack.

  The area in front of the house had room to park half a dozen cars. Sadir stopped the Honda behind a dark blue SUV and locked it. By the time he got to the main door of the property, it was already open and the two residents were waiting for him on the full-width porch.

  Inside, they led him directly through the property to a room at the rear overlooking the garden, a view that had been concealed behind heavy curtains, and which had probably originally been a study or a den but which had been transformed into a computer games room. Or, more accurately, what looked like a computer games room.

  Three identical large wood and metal desks had been positioned side by side and touching in the centre of the room. On each was a keyboard, a trackball and a forty-inch flat panel monitor bolted to a kind of frame and being fed by a high specification desktop tower unit. The screens had been arranged in a gentle curve so that a person sitting in any of the black leather chairs behind the desks could easily see everything displayed on all three screens. There were three seats and keyboards primarily to provide redundancy in case one of the computers went down, but also because Sadir intended to be occupying the third seat when the plan came to fruition.

  The central workstation differed from the other two in that it was also equipped with a clearly expensive high-end flight simulator yoke control column, rudder pedals, throttle quadrant assembly and a separate modular instrument panel below the flat panel monitor. In that were a compass, altimeter, VSI – vertical speed indicator – and other standard aircraft instruments, clearly making that position the ‘hot seat’ of the system. The set-up looked like the kind of flight simulator a professional pilot might create in his home to use as both an entertainment console and to help maintain his flying skills.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Sadir asked simply. ‘In all respects, I mean?’

  Both men in front of him nodded, and the taller of the two – Sadir knew him only as ‘Michael’ because real names were never a good idea in the kind of operation he was involved in – replied.

  ‘We are. We have taken control of the last three flights and altered the course by a few degrees.’

  ‘We only deviated them enough that the pilot would assume it was just the action of the wind,’ the other man – Joseph – added. ‘Then we immediately severed our connection. They have no idea we are on the frequency. If they notice anything at all, they’ll probably assume that because they’re using both C-band and Ku-band data links – obviously in the training environment they have to be familiar with both and practise using the two methods of control – there’s a brief mismatch between the two of them.’

  Both men were remarkably similar in appearance, with almost identical facial features, both clean-shaven and with thick black hair, and even tended to dress in much the same way. Their difference in height, a matter of only two or three inches, was all that Sadir had to distinguish between them.

  ‘What about the routes and the payloads?’ Sadir asked.

  Michael nodded. ‘So far, the information supplied by your contact at the base has been completely accurate in terms of the timing and duration of the flights and their configuration. Sometimes they just do surveillance and at other times they operate on various ranges and inside danger areas, exactly as your source predicted. I presume he has access to the training schedule.’

  In fact, the person Michael referred to as Sadir’s ‘contact’ was rather more than just somebody who could glance at a training schedule and then pass on the relevant information. Major Sammy Dawood was an American-born Muslim – his first name was actually spelt ‘Sami,’ the Arabic word meaning exalted or sublime, but because he both looked and sounded American people automatically assumed it was ‘Sammy’ – and identifying and recruiting him to the cause had taken Sadir well over a year. That had been one of the first and most important tasks he’d needed to complete once the plan had been finalised.

  He’d told two of the hackers he’d recruited in America to begin trawling Islamic websites and social media looking for anybody in any branch of the American military who seemed to be expressing an interest in the activities of ISIS and other radical Islamic groups. What had surprised Sadir was how many people this search had produced. Some could be rejected immediately, for one reason or another, but he’d ended up with a hard core of almost a dozen potential recruits scattered across the continental United States which he had begun cultivating.

  From this group, three men had seemed to fit the bill, though one of them was in a branch of the American military machine that Sadir knew almost nothing about – the Air National Guard – and which he had erroneously assumed was some kind of reserve force of ex-military non-combatants using obsolete equipment. When he discovered the reality of the situation, and more importantly about a year earlier had found out that Major Sami Dawood’s next posting was to the 174th Attack Wing of the New York Air National Guard, based at Hancock Field at Syracuse, Sadir had concentrated all his efforts on his recruitment and radicalisation.

  The process had been lengthy and subtle, beginning with just the occasional exchanged comment about the dislike of Muslims shown by some Americans, and had then escalated through discussions about racist and anti-Islamic treatment being meted out to Muslims in various parts of the Middle East, and had ended with apparently authoritative statements made by an imam about the duty of all Muslims to attack their common enemy, and most specifically about the jihad, the holy war against the Great Satan.

  Once Dawood had clearly and enthusiastically accepted this premise, the next step was to directly recruit him as an essential part of Sadir’s religiously sanctioned operation to visit death and destruction upon Americans in their homeland, in exactly the same way that American soldiers and airmen had rained down mortars and bombs and missiles upon the people of Iraq and Iran, and on the fearless freedom fighters of the Islamic State and ISIS.

  In fact, Dawood was the lynchpin of this, the most important single part of the operation, because he was a senior training officer in the team responsible for planning the flight schedule out of Hancock and, crucially, one of his duties was to specify the payload for each mission, which was why Sadir knew exactly what was going to be carried aloft a few hours before he would launch the attack on DC.

  A little over two hours later, having thoroughly inspected the equipment, gone over the plan one more time and obtained from both Michael and Joseph the answers he had expected to the questions he had asked, Sadir got back into his Honda
for the return drive to Washington.

  This, the final component, was in place and ready to be activated on his command. But there were still two other pieces of the overall plan he would need to check. All three different aspects of the attack were separate but complementary, and for the matter to reach the ideal conclusion, all needed to function faultlessly. His next job was to confirm that the weapons they would position within DC itself were also fully prepared, checked and ready to deploy.

  Chapter 27

  Washington D.C., United States of America

  ‘You don’t know me,’ the female and clearly English voice in the speaker of Ben Morgan’s mobile phone said, ‘but we have a mutual friend. Or possibly a mutual friend of a mutual friend.’

  ‘We have?’ Morgan replied, his voice sounding somewhat groggy even to his own ears. He’d overslept that morning and had had trouble getting to sleep the night before because he was getting into a different bed in a different city in a different country, and more importantly in a different time zone, to the one that his body clock assumed he was still occupying.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ the woman demanded. ‘It’s not even ten in the morning.’

  ‘No,’ Morgan replied, waking up rapidly. ‘I flew in last night. I’ve had about four hours’ sleep and I deliberately didn’t set an alarm. Your phone call woke me up.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ the voice said, with no particular evidence of sincerity.

  ‘So who are you, and what do you want?’

  ‘First, let me just make sure I’m talking to the right person. I’ve been given your mobile number, but can you just tell me your name?’

  ‘Ben Morgan. So who gave you my number?’

  ‘Good. I got it from Assistant Chief Constable Richard Boston. You may not know him, but you do know Ian Mitchell. My name’s Barbara Simpson. I’m over here in the Wild West as part of a low-level surveillance operation and I need to talk to somebody outside the investigation who knows about cyber and all that crap. Your name popped up at the top of the list. So where and when do you want to meet?’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Morgan replied. ‘I’m not even awake yet. I need to shower and get dressed and then pour some coffee down my throat before I’m even halfway back to being human.’

  Morgan was even more confused. What he had assumed was a covert operation involving only him and Natasha Black apparently also involved other people from the eastern side of the Pond. Maybe there was a full UK team on site and all sorts of cogs turning that somebody had decided he had no need to know about.

  ‘I’ll make a deal with you. Stop fannying about. Get up, wash the important bits and get dressed and I’ll buy you breakfast. Where are you staying?’

  A couple of minutes later, Morgan dropped the phone on the bed and pulled himself out of it, still slightly shell-shocked and feeling steamrollered. Barbara Simpson sounded less like a human being and more like an unstoppable force of nature. She’d known exactly where his hotel was located and had told Morgan to meet her in a coffee shop about a block away. He needed to get moving, and quickly, if he was going to make the rendezvous at the time she’d specified.

  He headed for the door of the en-suite bathroom then stopped and walked back to the bed. He glanced at his watch then picked up his mobile phone and dialled Ian Mitchell’s number back in the UK. Ten thirty Eastern Standard Time meant it was three thirty in the afternoon in London, so Mitchell would certainly be awake and working.

  ‘Do you know a woman called Barbara Simpson?’ Morgan asked when his call was connected and they’d exchanged the usual pleasantries.

  ‘I don’t know her so much as know of her,’ Mitchell replied, ‘and I met her exactly once. Why? And where are you?’

  ‘Washington, as in DC rather than Tyne and Wear. She’s just called me to arrange a meeting and I know the square root of sod all about who she is or why she wants to talk to me. Is she legit?’

  ‘Definitely. She’s a police superintendent who specialises in undercover work. I ran into her at a briefing here in London about five or six months ago. I gathered she was about to be sent off on some secret squirrel activity, probably in America, but that part of the briefing didn’t involve me so I don’t know for sure. But if she’s in Washington and so are you, it’s a fair guess that the faeces are about to impact the air-conditioning system, to coin a phrase. She said – several times, in fact – that she knew nothing at all about cyber, so if she wants to talk to you she’s probably run up against something computery that she doesn’t understand. But she is kosher.’

  ‘Anything else I need to know about her?’

  Morgan heard Mitchell’s chuckle from three and a half thousand miles away.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Don’t call her a person of colour or try any of that PC crap on her or she’ll bite your head off: she told me she’s black and proud of it. Her nickname in the Met is “The Nutcracker” because that’s slightly more polite than “ball breaker”, and that should give you some idea about her personality. And don’t for God’s sake mention drugs to her. She’ll bore the arse off you for the next hour if you do. She hates drugs and she hates drug dealers and she’s spent a good part of her working life down in Colombia trying to disrupt the drug trade. But she also thinks we should legalise the lot. To say she’s conflicted doesn’t really cover it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Morgan said, ended the call and resumed his journey to the bathroom.

  * * *

  He stepped into the coffee shop only three minutes late and stood for a moment just inside the doorway looking round. He could see three black women, one by herself in a booth at the back and the other two sitting at tables, all of them alone. But the question of which one was Barbara Simpson was quickly resolved when the woman in the booth stopped looking at her watch, pointed at him, crooked her finger and then gestured at the seat opposite her.

  ‘You’d better be Ben Morgan,’ she said as he sat down, ‘otherwise you’re going to feel a massive spike of pain in your groin, which will be the heel of my shoe crushing your testicles, after which I’ll scream rape and run out.’

  ‘I am Ben Morgan, and I’d really appreciate it if you left my wedding tackle alone. Are you going to do me serious bodily harm if I order a coffee?’

  Simpson grinned at him and slid a plastic covered menu across the table towards him.

  ‘Good morning, Ben. A deal’s a deal. I said I’d buy you breakfast, so why don’t you whistle up a waitress, order what you want and get some coffee down your throat. Then we need to talk.’

  One of the waitresses cruised by at that moment, poured coffee into the cup that was already on the table and wrote down what Morgan wanted to eat, which was basically an Americanised version of a full English – bacon, sausage, eggs over easy, whatever that meant, and hash browns – then disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ Morgan asked, adding milk to his cup and taking a sip.

  ‘I guessed. No new customers had walked in here for the last ten minutes, which is when I arrived, and then you pitched up, a single white male, bit geeky, looking lost and three minutes late. It wasn’t particularly difficult to identify you.’

  Morgan’s breakfast arrived much sooner than he had expected, but America was, after all, the home of fast food, which didn’t necessarily just mean burgers and fries. It was hot, tasty and well cooked, and certainly filled the gap left by him not eating dinner the previous evening.

  ‘Finish that,’ Simpson ordered, pointing at his plate. ‘Then we can talk.’

  ‘So how can I help you?’ Morgan asked about five minutes later, cutting the last piece of spicy sausage in half and popping a piece of it into his mouth.

  ‘Do you know why I’m here? In America, I mean, not in this particular coffee shop?’

  ‘I talked to Ian Mitchell,’ Morgan replied, glancing around, ‘and I gather you’re a senior British police officer and you’re probably doing something undercover over here. But that’s the limit of
my knowledge.’

  Simpson nodded. ‘That’s it in a nutshell, yes,’ she replied. ‘My services, such as they are, were requested by the Americans, specifically by the Feds, because I’m a complete outsider and all the alphabet soup three-digit agencies over here are worried about penetration by people who might have been radicalised. And, more significantly, about the threat of some possible unspecified terrorist attack possibly being planned by a group of possible radical Islamists. There have been whispers in the ether, all kinds of mutterings picked up by low-level informers, but not much in the way of solid information. All possibles but no probables or certainties. My job has been to try to put some flesh on the bones. Either that, or to somehow prove that there is no such threat. I have a knack for spotting bad people hiding in plain sight.

  ‘Now let me answer your obvious first question before you ask it. The Bureau gave me all the relevant information they had, all the whispers, so I knew who they suspected of being involved. That gave me somewhere to start. The reason they thought I might be a useful asset was because they guessed that if there was some terrorist plot being hatched, the people involved would be making sure they weren’t observed or followed. And they believed that a black female street person, which is the way I usually dress when I do my surveillance, would be less likely to be spotted than a bunch of white guys in suits with lapel mics and bulges under their left armpits standing about on street corners. Or even the same white guys in casual clothes trying to blend in. My speciality, or specialism as the Americans persist in calling it, is becoming effectively invisible. Just another wino or dropout dressed in rags, wandering the streets or sitting in a doorway. The kind of person that everybody sees but nobody notices.’

  Morgan stared across the table at the slim and smartly dressed woman looking at him. He found it difficult to imagine her wandering the streets in rags and begging for coins or drinks or other scraps – what the Americans called panhandling. But that, he supposed, was really the point.