Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  ‘You got that right,’ Rogers said. ‘This is the capital of the country and we’ve got the air defence side of things screwed down pretty tight. There’s a thing called the Washington D.C. Air Defense Identification Zone, the ADIZ, that surrounds the capital. Inside that is a Special Flight Rules Area that’s got a radius of about thirty miles and a Flight-Restricted Zone that extends out to about fifteen miles. And then there’s a prohibited area around the White House. All that airspace is covered by a whole arsenal of sensors, not just radar but also infrared and electro-optical cameras and various types of passive sensors. And if any unidentified aircraft do approach the area, we won’t just detect them. We can also shoot them down.

  ‘We’ve got Alert 5 and Alert 15 F16s sitting on the ground at Andrews just waiting for the go command, plus helicopters operated by Homeland Security fitted with fifty cal weapons amongst other stuff, and if anything manages to get through that lot we’ve got a bunch of Norwegian NASAMS waiting to knock them out of the sky.’

  ‘I presume that’s a kind of surface-to-air missile,’ Morgan suggested.

  ‘Yup. The acronym stands for National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System. That was developed from the old AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile, which was a really effective weapon. That’s our intermediate range defensive system, which gives cover out to about twenty miles. And if anything somehow manages to get past that we’ve also got the Avenger system using FIM-92 Stinger missiles and fifty cal machine guns for real short range defence. That system’s mounted in turrets on the tops of buildings dotted around the city, one of them covering the White House. The whole system’s fully integrated and even if all the radar systems went down, which they wouldn’t, the Stingers are infrared guided so they would still work.’

  ‘So if some rogue airliner headed for DC these guys would bring it down? They would pull the trigger?’

  ‘Definitely. Our view is that if an airliner’s been hijacked, it’s going to end up in a smoking hole in the ground somewhere anyway, and if we can make sure that hole in the ground is well outside Washington or any other urban area we’re going to save a lot of innocent lives. So if we did have a nine eleven or something like that here, I can pretty much guarantee that what we wouldn’t have is thousands of people dead because it crashed into a building. The fighter jocks, who’d probably be the guys doing the intercept, would make sure it came down somewhere in the countryside. And, yes, everybody on board the aircraft would be killed, but they would hopefully be the only casualties. So a few hundred lives would be lost rather than a few thousand. We think that’s a reasonable trade-off.’

  ‘I can’t argue with any of that,’ Morgan said.

  Chapter 41

  4 July – Independence Day

  Washington D.C., United States of America

  The very first thing that happened that morning was that all four of the suspected terrorists – Mahdi Sadir, Karim Ganem, Talat Wasem and Jamal Halabi – only one of whom was under close surveillance by teams of FBI surveillance specialists, all slipped the net at exactly the same time.

  Sadir triggered one of the fire alarms in the large hotel where he was staying and slipped away in the ensuing confusion, Wasem left by way of the roof of his apartment building, stepping onto the adjoining structure and making his way out from there, while Ganem and Halabi both left their apartment buildings and climbed onto pedal cycles. The FBI team had been ready to follow Ganem on foot or on to public transport, or by car, but bicycles could go faster than pedestrians and slip through spaces that cars simply could not. Within fifteen minutes of Ganem’s appearance – and then almost immediate disappearance about a quarter of a mile further down the road – none of the watchers had the slightest idea where their quarry might be except, obviously, still somewhere in Washington D.C.

  * * *

  Mahdi Sadir had had no idea whether or not he and the other three men had been under surveillance, but it was obviously prudent to assume that they were, hence his instructions, given at their meeting in Tysons, for them to simultaneously scatter on the morning of the attack. If they had acquired unwelcome followers it was essential for them to leave their properties at exactly the same time, because if they were under surveillance the moment one of them slipped the net the authorities would certainly order the other three men to be picked up immediately.

  So he’d precisely timed it for 0838, and by 1100 that morning the three hackers Sadir had recruited were established in their alternate locations, places that they had prepared well ahead of the operation but had not visited for the last six months. They were in locations well outside DC, one of them in Woodstock and the other two at opposite ends of Harrisonburg, out to the west of Washington.

  Sadir hadn’t followed the same path as the others because his function in the final part of the operation was very different. Instead, he had headed in virtually the opposite direction, north-east towards Bel Air, and was at that moment sitting in his Honda outside the house in Fairview between Bel Air and Jarrettsville, using his burner phone to contact each of the other three men in turn.

  Once he was satisfied that they were all in place and ready to act, he checked the local weather forecast through the Internet. It probably wasn’t going to be the hottest day of the year but it was certainly going to be very warm, which was exactly what he had hoped and expected.

  Then he glanced at his watch. He was waiting for one very specific piece of information that would determine what he did next, or to be precise when he would do it, because the plan was in every other respect ready to implement. He did nothing for a few seconds, then composed a brief text message that he sent to a mobile phone number that he rarely called.

  The message read: ‘Estimate?’

  About half a minute later his mobile emitted a double tone to indicate receipt of a message and the equally brief reply he was waiting for.

  The SMS text read: ‘ETD 1330.’

  That was later than he had hoped, and later than he had originally planned, but because he was in overall control of the operation he could still make it work. In fact, there was no reason for there to be any delay in starting the attack. Once the operation was in progress it would be unstoppable, and the longer the first phase lasted the more confusion and chaos would be caused in Washington, and in some ways the longer that went on the better because it would ensure the highest possible death toll.

  Rather than calling the other three men he composed another text message and sent it to each of their phones simultaneously.

  That simple and unambiguous message read: ‘Implement immediately. Acknowledge.’

  He didn’t need to say any more than that, because each of them knew exactly what they had to do. Less than a minute later he’d received confirmation messages from all three of the men.

  The operation, the product of nearly a decade of research, recruitment, planning and scheming, was finally running.

  * * *

  Karim Ganem sent the acknowledgement text on his burner and looked at his watch. Then he opened up the laptop computer that he had brought with him in his backpack, plugged it in, switched it on and logged on to the building’s Wi-Fi network. He opened up his VPN to hide his traces, then opened TOR, The Onion Router, which would provide a further layer of protection against people trying to identify his location. Then, using the backdoor access that he had created, he entered the intranet of the first target company.

  There’s a standard tradition in the world of computer science that the software engineers who build systems, and especially those who design the security protocols, will frequently include a backdoor, a way of getting into the system in the future without having to go through all the tiresome business of being an authorised user and then using verified log-in details to gain access. It’s much simpler, quicker and more efficient to sneak in without anybody noticing and particularly without leaving a trace on the access register. These backdoors are not used for nefarious purposes but simply provide a way for the enginee
r to gain access to the source code of the system to find and fix some problem. But of course, this form of access is also the Holy Grail for a hacker, and Ganem had created several of them.

  As he began his work, he knew that his actions were being mirrored by Talat Wasem and Jamal Halabi in their separate locations, their targets different power companies. Ganem’s first task was to insert a software patch into the master control program in the operations room of the first of his three targeted electricity-generating companies. Its presence would not be detected easily because all it did was to disable one of the alarm circuits, which would ensure that the staff on duty would be unaware of a particular fault.

  Then he accessed one of the utility programs and adjusted settings that would begin disabling certain air-conditioning circuits at the times he specified. He also accessed the circuits controlling various thermostats and coolant pumps and changed the timing and parameters of the cooling equipment. Those actions, Sadir had explained to him, would inevitably cause overheating on certain generators. That, in turn, would cause circuit breakers to trip and generators to shut down, failures that the operators would initially be unaware of from their instrumentation because of the patch he’d created and installed. They’d only realise something was wrong when the calls started coming in, and that would just serve to increase the confusion.

  Load shedding would begin but as his manufactured faults would affect most of the generators, the likely outcome would be a cascade effect as one generator after another failed, either because of the manufactured internal faults or because the demands of load shedding would exceed its capacity.

  And then, as surely and as appositely as night follows day, blackouts would begin spreading across much of Washington D.C.

  Of course, turning out the lights and the air-conditioning units in America’s capital city by day could hardly be classed as a terrorist attack, but it was only intended as a precursor, as an enabler. The blackouts would begin in about half an hour and certainly create chaos. Things that people take for granted on a daily basis, things like escalators, lifts, traffic lights and all the way down to kettles and cookers would stop working, depending upon the availability of backup power supplies. There would be road accidents, people would be trapped inside buildings, perhaps inside lifts, and the emergency services would be out in force responding to calls. Office and shop workers, faced with failed lighting inside buildings, would probably end up standing out on the streets as their places of work were forced to shut down without power.

  And that was exactly where Mahdi Sadir wanted them.

  Chapter 42

  Washington D.C., United States of America

  Imran Wardi steered the hired van down Old Branch Avenue, the road running parallel to US-5 to the west of Joint Base Andrews, the sound of the traffic on the busy highway audible but the vehicles themselves invisible behind the long line of trees and undergrowth that separated the two roads. Just north of the Shoppers Supermarket, the roads started to diverge, US-5 bearing south-east while Old Branch Avenue continued on a southerly heading.

  At the crossroads in Clinton, Wardi turned left onto Woodyard Road, MD-223, crossed over US-5 at the cloverleaf and continued north-east towards Woodyard itself. At the traffic light-controlled crossroads, he turned left, continuing along Woodyard Road as far as the next crossroads, where he again turned left, this time into Dower House Road. It was a pleasant street, bordered by large detached houses and then, as he drove further north, by industrial units. The further he drove the less traffic he saw until, as the road narrowed significantly as it approached the boundary of Joint Base Andrews, he could see nobody ahead of him or behind him. The road didn’t end, simply turned left through about one hundred degrees and became Leapley Road, and that sharp bend was his destination.

  Wardi stopped the van right beside the bend, then reversed it off the road onto a patch of scrubby grass and gravel on which was a tall wooden pole carrying electrical cables, two road signs, each displaying an arrow and pointing in opposite directions, and a short length of metal barrier presumably intended to bring to a stop any careless drivers who failed to make it around the bend. The barrier would also prevent them driving through the wooden fence which terminated at the apex of the corner, beyond which lay Pearl Harbor Drive, the name itself a clue: it was one of the roads within Joint Base Andrews itself.

  He manoeuvred the vehicle so that the rear of it was pointing in the optimum direction for their purposes. Working quickly, he opened the rear doors, checked the battery, the mobile phone and the wiring of the weapon and everything else, then jumped out carrying a wheel-brace and the van’s jack. He loosened the wheel nuts on the left front wheel, jacked up that side of the van, removed the wheel and placed it, along with the wheel-brace and the nuts, inside the back of the vehicle.

  Then he locked the van and, as a final touch, scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and tucked it under one of the windshield wipers. The note read: ‘Gone to garage’ and was obviously self-explanatory. Hopefully, any police patrol or inquisitive local seeing the van would assume it had had a puncture and that the driver was attending to it and no steps would be taken to remove the vehicle because the matter was in hand. He didn’t think anybody would try to remove it because it was clearly not causing any kind of obstruction.

  They’d picked that spot because it was the nearest they could get to Andrews, and also because the closest local residents were all dead and lying under the ground in the graveyard of what was marked on the map as St Luke’s Church, though the church building itself was conspicuous by its absence, unless it was lurking somewhere within the treeline. But the only thing Wardi had seen in there was what looked like a yard full of old cars and trucks, presumably waiting to be broken up for spare parts.

  Less than five minutes after he’d immobilised the van, a Chevrolet Cavalier nosed its way down the road, Nadeem Ramli behind the wheel. Wardi sat down in the passenger seat and Ramli accelerated away.

  ‘Any problems?’ he asked, in Arabic.

  Wardi shook his head and replied in the same tongue. ‘None. Traffic was light and I made good time. I checked the weapon thoroughly and everything is correct. What about the other vans?’

  ‘All in position, more or less. DC is busy because of the celebrations but we’d allowed for that and we will have no trouble meeting Abū Tadmir’s deadline. Your journey was the longest, and when Rafiq contacted me about half an hour ago he said he would be able to park the last van within the hour. Obviously one of the problems has been that we had six vans to position and only the three of us to do it, so I’ve been acting as a taxi driver all morning ferrying you and Rafiq around, but it’s worked out as we expected.’

  ‘And once that last vehicle is in position we can leave,’ Wardi stated. ‘And watch the fireworks from a safe distance.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ramli said, grinning wolfishly. ‘It should be quite an interesting afternoon. As long as you’re a long way from Washington, of course.’

  Chapter 43

  J. Edgar Hoover Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., United States of America

  ‘I didn’t want you here in the first place, Morgan,’ Charles Bouchier – you could just tell that he had never been known as ‘Charlie’ in his entire working life – ground out through gritted teeth. ‘The very last thing I want to see in this building is someone like you, an Englishman with a sense of entitlement and an extremely shady past, if what Rogers told me is correct. Let me make myself perfectly clear. I do not want to see you in this building ever again. I forbid you from contacting Rogers or any other member of the Bureau, and the moment this meeting is over I will have you escorted out into the street.’

  Morgan didn’t respond immediately, just glanced slightly sideways at Grant Rogers, who replied with the faintest possible shrug of his shoulders and a facial expression that somehow seemed to convey irritation, an apology and a sense of resignation all at the same time. Charles Bouchier, a black haired, so
mewhat jowly and thick-set man, particularly around the waist, an indication that he was more of a seat-shiner than a front-line agent, a man who probably spent most of his time attending committee meetings and consuming large working lunches rather than chasing down bad guys on the streets, was Rogers’s immediate boss. He was the SAC, the special agent in charge, of the operation designed to provide continuing surveillance of Ganem and to locate the other three suspects. He had been incandescent with rage when Rogers had admitted that Ganem had slipped the leash and was on the loose somewhere in DC or maybe even further afield, and the man he apparently blamed for this situation was, bizarrely enough, Ben Morgan, who at no time had had anything to do with the surveillance operation.

  And Bouchier was really just getting started, his loud and hectoring voice filling the briefing room where the three men were standing, Morgan on one side of the table and the two FBI officers on the other.

  ‘And what evidence have you brought us to support this preposterous claim that a disorganised ragtag band of Arab terrorists are intending to launch an attack on Washington D.C. today? Hmm? An attack that you can’t even describe because you have no idea what form it might take. We’re well aware that the streets of the city will be full of people today, all celebrating the day this country finally achieved independence from the likes of you. We have ample police and security forces out on the streets with them to ensure that the chances of anybody being able to plant a bomb or drive a truck into a crowd of pedestrians or do anything else are nil.’