Morgan nodded. ‘Are you interested in what I’ve got to say, or do you want to just throw me out into the street right now and have done with it?’
‘Don’t be impertinent.’
‘I’ll be as impertinent as I fucking well please. I don’t answer to you or anybody else out here in the colonies. I was sent over the Pond to try to help you, get that, to help you attempt to stop this attack. It was only thanks to a colleague of mine, who’s also British, by the way, that you even know about these four Arab comedians who might – or who might not – be planning to mount some kind of an attack here.’
Bouchier’s face had flushed dangerously red and Morgan guessed it had been a long time since anybody in the Bureau had actually stood up to his bully boy tactics. Before the SAC could respond, Morgan ploughed on. He, after all, had nothing to lose.
‘Now we can sit here and trade insults for the rest of the day if you want, but I’ve got things I need to do and you’ve probably got a big lunch heading your way, so let me just say this. This isn’t some ragtag bunch of terrorists. This operation, whatever the hell it is, has been planned for years, maybe as long as a decade, and the last thing these guys are going to do is try and mow down a few pedestrians in a stolen truck or plant an IED on Capitol Hill or anything like that. Planning that kind of attack would take about twenty seconds. Based on what we found out from the surviving jihadists who carried out the failed attack in London, this will be much bigger and much more subtle than anything like that.
‘My guess is that it’ll come in stages, and very probably start with attempts to shut down your utility providers, your electricity-generating companies and distributors, based on what Grant has told me about the cyberattacks you’ve had over here. I don’t know what the next stage is likely to be, or what they hope to achieve by creating a temporary blackout in DC, but I do think that will only be the first step. But the attack, the real attack, will come from the air. And it will happen today. So you do whatever the hell you want, but I want on record that I’m here to try and help, not hinder. That’s why the mobile phone in front of me is recording everything said in this room and uploading it to the cloud.’
‘You have absolutely no right—’
‘Oh, give it a rest, Charlie. You’ve said your piece. Now it’s time to let people like Grant here, people who actually give a shit, do what they can to find these guys and stop whatever they’ve got planned.’
Before Bouchier could respond, the lights in the briefing room flickered twice, then went out completely for a couple of seconds before switching on again.
‘I told you so,’ Morgan said with impeccable timing and a straight face. ‘That’s it. It’s started. I’m doing no good sitting here listening to this brain-dead sack of shit, Grant, so I’ll get back out on the streets and see if I can find out what’s going on. I’ll call you.’
Chapter 44
Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America
‘I sure hope you’ve got a nice easy one for us today, Sammy, bearing in mind it’s Independence Day and we’ve all got families to get back to.’
Major Sami Dawood, a stocky, solid-looking man a little under six feet tall with black hair, a tanned complexion and a somewhat bulbous nose centred in his otherwise regular features, looked up from his notes and grinned at the speaker, one of the 138th Attack Squadron’s MQ-9 pilots and part of the 174th Attack Wing based at Hancock Field.
‘All my exercises and evolutions are easy,’ Dawood replied, ‘as you know.’
‘Actually, they’re not,’ the lieutenant responded, ‘so give me a clue.’
‘Okay. Full tanks, full weapons load, half surveillance and half weapons delivery for a bit of variety, and most of the flight in daylight. Does that sound easy enough for you?’
There’s a kind of tradition in the armed forces of all countries that most exercises and activities should begin at a time usually described as something like ‘crikey o’clock’, before even the earliest of the early birds are awake and prepping for the dawn chorus, but many drone sorties were flown during daylight hours, to the relief of those involved.
‘Depends on when and where, I guess,’ Lieutenant Nagell said, ‘but at least I won’t get bored looking through my straw.’
Predator and Reaper pilots have often described controlling their drones as like flying a normal aircraft while looking through a straw.
‘Okay. You ready for the briefing?’
Nagell nodded and sat down in the front row of seats in the aircrew briefing room. A slim and wiry man with closely cropped blond hair and an air of relaxed competence about him, Nagell was a former F-16 jockey who’d transferred to the slightly less frenetic world of remotely piloted aircraft a couple of years earlier. As he would explain to anyone prepared to listen to him, he’d had a successful flying career, basing this statement on the somewhat shaky premise that he’d had the same number of take-offs as landings, meaning that he’d never crashed an aircraft. In fact, he had been regarded not simply as a very competent pilot but also as a man who never got flustered. His nickname, and the name printed on his flying helmet, had been a testament to this: No Sweat.
No Sweat Nagell had entirely embraced the idea of remotely controlled air combat on the grounds that it was just as effective as riding a Fighting Falcon in reheat but a hell of a lot quieter and more comfortable because he could sip a cup of coffee, eat a sandwich or even take a trip to the crapper mid-mission. And he could sleep in his own bed every night instead of sharing a two-berth hut in Kandahar or Baghdad or somewhere surrounded by mosquitoes out for blood and alternately listening out for the whine of incoming mortars or the sound of his hut companion farting. For Nagell, it was no contest.
He wasn’t the only man to take a seat as three other officers, two of them responsible for the drone’s sensors and the third the second pilot for the day’s flight, strolled in moments later and also sat down. The controlling team for each Reaper comprised a pilot and a sensor operator, backed up by a Mission Intelligence Coordinator for operational sorties, and it was normal operating procedure to brief the relief team at the same time as those who’d be controlling the Reaper for the first part of the mission.
‘Met, please,’ Dawood ordered, and a slim, bespectacled man stepped forward and used a handheld remote to display a single schematic map of the local area on the projection screen.
‘I’ll give you the real short version: it’s a beautiful day for flying. Winds light and variable, unlimited visibility and sod all in the way of clouds. Eight eighths blue, in a nutshell. No change expected before tomorrow, roughly mid-morning.’
Cloud cover is reported by meteorological officers and air traffic controllers to aircrew in octas, meaning one eighth, so four octas means that half the sky is obscured by cloud. ‘Eight eighths blue’ is a common military shorthand term to indicate a sky devoid of all cloud cover.
There were no questions about that, predictably enough, and Sami Dawood cracked on with the operational part of the briefing. The Reaper was to get airborne and climb to its assigned cruising altitude of 30,500 feet, flight level 305, well below its operational ceiling of 50,000 feet. Flight levels are a kind of verbal shorthand, the altitude of an aircraft in thousands of feet with the last two zeros knocked off, and above about 25,000 feet are based on whole thousands. So, strictly speaking, flight level 305 didn’t exist, which was why it had been chosen.
The allocation of flight levels worldwide is based on a very simple rule. If the aircraft’s track is between 0° and 179° the flight level must be an odd number – 190 or 230, for example – and if it’s between 180° and 359° an even flight level must be chosen, like 180 or 220. This provides the most basic possible separation so that aircraft flying in opposite directions will always be vertically separated by at least one thousand feet. Selecting an intermediate flight level, in this case between flight level 300 and flight level 310, meant that no civilian aircraft would be at tha
t altitude, so that no matter what happened the drone would always be at least five hundred feet clear of all air traffic. Of course, the Reaper would be under control from the ground control station, the GCS, and its on-board radar would alert the remote pilot to any conflicting traffic, but it provided an additional margin of safety because of the drone’s relatively slow speed: even at its maximum velocity it would be travelling less than half as quickly as most civilian airliners.
It was to maintain a cruising speed of 150 knots to conserve fuel – flat-out, the Reaper could reach 240 knots – and proceed north-west to Lake Ontario, where it would descend to 15,500 feet and carry out a series of surveillance runs aimed at identifying ground-based and waterborne targets along the southern shore. That phase completed, the pilot was to turn the Reaper east, climb to high level again and transit the short distance to the Adirondacks air-to-ground range at Fort Drum, near Watertown in Jefferson County at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. The attack headings, altitudes, targets and the weapons to be used there would be specified on arrival overhead to increase operational flexibility.
It was the kind of briefing that Nagell and the other men had sat through on countless previous occasions, and the mission profile was in no way unusual. It wouldn’t be especially challenging for a pilot of his experience, and the first part of the mission, over Lake Ontario, was going to be far more of a test for the sensor operator than for him. He would just be the taxi driver, following whatever route he was told to take while the cameras in the drone were used to record the surveillance data and allow the images to be analysed.
‘No sweat,’ Nagell muttered as the briefing ended, living up to his nickname.
Chapter 45
Washington D.C., United States of America
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building occupies an entire trapezoid-shaped city block between the wide eight-lane dual carriageway that is Pennsylvania Avenue to the south, E Street NW to the north and 9th and 10th Streets NW to the east and west respectively. The southern entrance of the vast structure lies on the wide and imposing Pennsylvania Avenue which leads directly to the White House a few hundred metres further west, or to the Capitol to the east, but Morgan stepped out of the northern end of the building onto E Street, somewhat in the manner of a person leaving by the tradesman’s entrance.
A sudden cacophony of blaring horns drew his attention to the E Street and 10th Street traffic light-controlled intersection. Only the traffic lights weren’t controlling the junction, because power to them had obviously failed, resulting in a snarl-up of angry drivers trying to make their way across the intersection, none willing to give way and most of them, by the sound of it, venting their obvious fury through the audible medium of their car horns. He looked the other way, to the 9th Street junction, and saw a similar, but not quite so noisy, exchange of views taking place.
He already knew that that area of Washington D.C. was usually busy with cars and tour coaches rather than pedestrians, most Americans being reluctant to walk more than a few hundred yards if there was some form of motorised vehicle they could use instead, but there were far more people on the sidewalks than he had previously seen in that vicinity. They might reasonably have been described as pedestrians, but most of them weren’t walking anywhere, just standing around in small groups, talking and gesticulating. He guessed that they probably worked in some of the nearby buildings and had moved outside because whatever electric or electronic equipment they were using had ceased functioning. As he watched, the E Street and 10th Street traffic lights flickered back into life and then almost immediately shut down again, presumably as another generator came online and then almost as quickly some breaker somewhere tripped because of an overload and the feed was shut down.
In 2003, what became known as the North-east Blackout, which began because of a software bug in a computerised alarm system in a power company in Akron, Ohio, progressed to surges and outages and then cascaded into a loss of power in parts of eight American states. The blackout directly affected some 45 million Americans and about a further 10 million people in Ontario. The lack of power contributed to roughly one hundred fatalities and affected everything from mains water systems when the pumping system power supplies were cut, to rail services, oil refineries, gas station forecourts where petrol and diesel pumps stopped working and led to long queues of vehicles, television systems and general communications, as well as domestic heating, lighting, air conditioning and other utilities, all of which either shut down or suffered outages. Even industries and businesses which had backup generators suffered, because although the blackout only lasted about eight hours some of those generators ran out of fuel within that time.
Morgan guessed that what DC was experiencing was far more localised than that event, with a much smaller affected area and population. But it was, he was sure, only the start of the threat. Looking at the gathering crowds, he also wondered if whatever attack was planned involved something like napalm or some other chemical that would have a bigger effect on an exposed population rather than people still inside buildings. Maybe that was the reason for the blackouts.
He shivered slightly at that thought and almost unconsciously looked up to stare at the sky, or what he could see of it from the bottom of the concrete canyon in which he was standing, searching for danger or anything that shouldn’t be there. Then he pulled out his mobile phone, checked the screen to confirm that the network was up – during the North-east Blackout mobile providers had suffered outages – then dialled a number that he knew almost as well as his own.
‘I’m just about to pour my second cup of coffee of the morning, Ben, so you’ve caught me at a good time. What’s on your mind?’
‘Good morning, Natasha. Everything okay at your end?’
‘My end is fine, if you’re talking about where I’m working, rather than something more personal. Why are you asking?’
‘DC is getting hit with power outages,’ Morgan replied. ‘How about Maryland?’
‘As far as I know, the No Such Agency hasn’t had a problem, so maybe our supplier is unaffected. On the other hand, this place has massive backup generators and if there was a power cut it’s quite possible we wouldn’t even notice. Are you thinking this is enemy action?’
‘I’d be amazed if it wasn’t. But obviously there must be more to it than just a few lights going out. Any joy with the tracking idea we talked about?’
‘Oddly enough, yes, because we both know how rare it is for one of your ideas to actually pan out. You gave me a specific location where an unregistered mobile was located and the date and time when another unregistered mobile called it. So I gave one of my guys back at Cheltenham the job of identifying and tracking the calling mobile, because you figured that was the one being used by the person in charge, and to start a tally of its activity and its location and to monitor the calls and messages. You probably won’t be entirely surprised to hear that most of the time that mobile has been switched off, which suggests to me that you were right: the person using it is the one giving the orders rather than receiving them. He only switches it on when he needs to tell somebody something.
‘As far as locations are concerned, it pops up all over the place and at very different times, usually in and around DC, but we’ve also had hits in Damascus – that’s the one just north of DC, not the city half a world away in Syria, before you ask, a district called Bel Air near Baltimore and one out at a city called Syracuse up in New York State. My man also did historical checking, running back through the records of the service provider to see if it was used before making that call to the mobile. It was, but again the results were the same: only occasional usage in DC, Damascus, Bel Air and Syracuse.’
‘And did your man also—’ Morgan interrupted.
‘I hadn’t finished. Whoever this person is, he doesn’t seem to have many friends, because he’s only ever called six other numbers, and to save you exercising your limited allocation of brain cells, I’ll tell you where they were located. They
were all mobiles, three of them in DC, one in Damascus, one in Bel Air and one in Syracuse. To me, that makes it look like we’re dealing with a small number of people located in different places and probably tasked with doing different jobs as part of a single operation. Significantly, none of those mobiles are registered and all of them have been switched on almost all the time, only going off the network between late evening and early in the morning. If you give me a few minutes, I’ll bung the data file over to you now.’
‘Thanks,’ Morgan said. ‘Can you also run a check in real time and find out if those mobiles are switched on right now and where they are? And if your man back in Cheltenham managed to run an active intercept I’d like to hear anything he recorded from any of the target numbers.’
‘I’ll see what he’s got and you’ll have it pretty much immediately.’
‘Now, I’ve also managed to fall out with the hierarchy of the Bureau in a fairly big way, so I’m kind of on my own and this is getting urgent.’
‘Another set of official toes you’ve trodden on, eh?’
‘More like stamped on, really, repeatedly and wearing hobnail boots. I’m definitely not on their Christmas card list any more. Not that I was in the first place.’
‘Typical of you, Ben. Right, you should have the file in the next couple of minutes. Keep me in the loop and try not to piss off any other branches of American law enforcement. If we’re going to wrap this up, we’re going to need help. Lots of help. And it’ll need to be help with badges, body armour and big guns.’
Chapter 46
Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America
A little under ninety minutes after the briefing had ended, the fully prepped General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper was towed by an army 4x4 utility vehicle out of its purpose-built beige-painted hangar, the structure bearing the legend ‘174th ATKW’ painted in black above the white doors. It was accompanied by two airmen walking beside its wings and carrying chocks that could be used to stop the drone if required, and which would be used to keep it stationary on a hardstanding while the pre-start and other checks were carried out before it taxied for take-off.
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