Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  Dawood stopped beside the control console and nodded. ‘You’ll get them in a couple minutes. Let me know when you’re at cruising altitude.’

  The surveillance operator who been operating the sensors for the runs over the south coast of Lake Ontario stood up, stretched, announced that he needed a comfort break and walked out of the room.

  And at that moment, just when Sami Dawood was convinced that the whole operation had failed for some unknown reason, his mobile phone finally displayed a message on its screen. It read: ‘Log-on problems. Contact now established. Execute.’

  Dawood breathed a sigh of relief that his deduction about the delay had been correct. He could now carry out the actions that he had been mentally rehearsing for weeks. His lips curled in a slight smile as he looked again at the final word on the SMS message Abū Tadmir had sent him. It was more than just appropriate: it was an executive instruction with two separate but intimately linked meanings.

  He walked across to the door of the control room and locked it, then strolled back to where Lieutenant Nagell was concentrating on steering the Reaper towards the Adirondacks air-to-ground range at Fort Drum. As he approached the seated man, Dawood reached into his uniform jacket pocket and took out the weapon that he had purchased perfectly legally, as a senior military officer, almost a year earlier.

  It was a Walther Arms PPQ M2 pistol in 9mm calibre, with a fully loaded fifteen-round magazine inserted and one round already in the chamber, because Dawood hadn’t known how many people would be in the control room when the time came for him to fulfil his destiny. Like the more common Glock handgun range, the PPQ has no external manual safety catch and instead relies upon various internal safeties.

  He stepped across to Nagell, held the pistol about six inches behind the seated man’s head and squeezed the trigger twice, the unsuppressed gunshots explosively loud in the confined space.

  The effect upon the seated man was instant and terminal. Most of his face and forehead were blown forward onto the control panel in front of him and he tumbled forward, collapsing sideways half out of the seat and onto the floor, a spreading pool of crimson blood expanding around his shattered head. It had at least been quick. No Sweat Nagell had been a popular man on the base, and despite his intentions, Dawood had seen no particular reason to make him suffer unduly or even to make him aware that he would be dead in a matter of seconds.

  Dawood stepped back and looked down critically at the corpse of the man he had just killed, alert for any indication that against the odds Nagell was still alive. But there was no movement.

  Dawood replaced the pistol in his pocket, took out his phone and tapped out an instant reply to the SMS message: ‘Execution complete. Allāhu akbar.’ Then he dropped the mobile to the floor, aimed his pistol at it and fired a single round. The bullet blew the phone apart, permanently ending his conversation with Abū Tadmir and eliminating his link with the man.

  He looked around, then knelt on the floor of the control room facing east, the approximate direction of Mecca, and said his brief final prayers.

  Then he walked over to the other side of the room where he had a temporary desk and chair and sat down. He placed the Walther pistol on the table in front of him where it was within easy reach, and then just waited.

  The sounds of the gunshots would have carried a considerable distance even outside the GCS and he knew that the locked door of the control room wouldn’t keep anybody out for very long. Even as he sat there listening, he could already hear the sound of running footsteps from somewhere outside, and an unidentified voice bellowed, ‘Shots fired!’

  Somebody tried the door of the control room, and then hammered on it, shouting something unintelligible, though the meaning was clear.

  They would be inside in minutes, perhaps even in seconds, and although Dawood knew he could take some of them with him with the rounds he had left in the pistol, the outcome was obviously never going to be in any doubt.

  At least it would then all be over. Within a matter of minutes, at the most, he would know the essential truth of Jannah, the Garden of Paradise where, like all true Islamic believers, he would spend the rest of eternity accompanied by seventy-two houris – beautiful, full-breasted and utterly compliant virgins – to attend to his every wish and desire.

  Three minutes later, the door to the control room crashed open and two soldiers dressed in full battle gear, one toting a Colt M4A1 carbine, the standard weapon of the American infantry, and the other a Remington M870 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, kicked their way inside and immediately separated.

  Dawood stood up, picked the target on his left and fired two rounds from his Walther. One missed and the other hit the soldier on his body armour but did no lasting damage to him. The other soldier was the one with the shotgun, and before Dawood could pull the trigger again he had loosed off his first round.

  At that range, the shotgun was by far the most lethal weapon in the room. The three-inch magnum charge of buckshot ploughed into Dawood’s right side, almost tearing his arm from his body, and about a second later the second charge of buckshot tore through his stomach and lower abdomen, virtually ripping his body in half.

  Dawood was clearly well beyond any kind of medical help, but he was still going to take time to die. With the room secured by the two soldiers, several officers from the unit entered to inspect it. Two of them walked over to look down at Dawood, one of whom almost immediately vomited noisily over the fallen man’s legs. They were easily able to reconstruct in their heads what had actually happened in there, though what they couldn’t possibly know was why.

  None of them felt much like interrogating Dawood, who lay twitching and moaning on one side of the control room in his own spreading pool of blood, vomit covering his legs and most of his intestines splattered across the wall behind him.

  And none of them felt like ending his agony, either.

  Chapter 51

  Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America

  About five minutes after he’d received the final, triumphant, message from Sami Dawood, Sadir had set the next part of his operational plan in motion, using his mobile phone to dial the first of two numbers he had recorded within the contacts list on his burner. That was the number of the Nokia that he had hidden in the woodland adjoining Hancock Field. That phone emitted no sound, because the ringer was set to silent, but that had no effect upon what happened next.

  Ringing the Nokia completed the circuit between the heavy-duty twelve-volt battery and the device, a specialised kind of bomb known as a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon, or NNEMP, which was designed to do far more than just explode. The weapon had been fabricated by the three electrical engineers in the house at Damascus, the men using the names Rafiq Khayat, Nadeem Ramli and Imran Wardi, following Sadir’s most precise, detailed and specific instructions. Three men who would even then be assuming new identities and putting a safe distance between themselves and Washington D.C.

  Initially in complete silence, a series of actions then took place with extraordinary rapidity under the camouflage-patterned tarpaulin. First, the entire current from the heavy-duty battery was fed down a pair of high-capacity insulated copper cables to the stator winding. This sent an immediate electric current through the stator which, as anyone with a knowledge of basic physics would be aware, generated a magnetic field. Electricity and magnetism are inextricably linked within the force known as electromagnetism: the passage of an electric current generates a magnetic field and the reverse is also true, a moving magnetic field producing an electric current. In this case, the design of the stator, the tight winding of the mass of copper coils from which it had been constructed and the sheer size of the device meant that the magnetic field generated was both intense and enormously powerful.

  After a predetermined interval – an interval so short that it was to all intents instantaneous – a separate electrical circuit triggered a blasting cap within the co
re of C4 – Composition 4 – plastic explosive packed into a steel cylinder, the armature, around which the copper wire forming the stator had been wound, the cylinder and the stator separated by an airgap. Far too fast for any eye to see, the explosion blasted through the armature as a wave, expanding with incredible rapidity, the sound of the detonation crashing through the woods beside the base.

  That sudden expansion forced the metal of the cylinder into contact with the winding of the stator, producing an immediate short-circuit and disrupting the current from the battery. The forward motion of the short circuit, in its turn, compressed the magnetic field, resulting in a massive burst of electromagnetic energy, an electromagnetic pulse or EMP, which travelled across the comparatively short distance between the weapon’s location and the control facilities for the airfield.

  A few fractions of a second after the explosion, the electromagnetic pulse, containing a confusion of powerful electric and magnetic fields, ploughed into its target, wreaking havoc on every electrical system that it reached, causing voltage surges, current spikes, short-circuits and electrical fires, fusing circuit boards and destroying every electronic circuit that it reached. The result was immediate and instantly catastrophic. Cars and lorries stopped moving as their engine control systems were fried. Battery-powered watches stopped working, mobile phones burnt out, and virtually everything else, every electrical device from power points and lighting to control circuits, air-conditioning systems, radios and radars, simply shut down.

  The weapon that Sadir had envisaged as functioning as the second phase of his attack on Washington D.C., albeit indirectly in the case of the device located at Syracuse, had worked perfectly.

  * * *

  Everybody in the control room heard the bang at the same instant as every light went out. The screens, illuminated instruments and controls on the drone pilot’s position instantly turned black and the all-pervading hum of the air-conditioning system, a sound that hardly any of the people there ever really heard because it was a permanent part of the background noise, immediately ceased. In some ways, that was the most alarming thing of all because it meant there’d been a total and complete shutdown of power, not just the simple tripping of a breaker somewhere in the electrical system.

  A couple of the officers pulled out their mobile phones to try to find out from somebody what was going on, but in both cases their handsets were not only warm to the touch, but also completely dead. It wasn’t just a case of the failure of the mobile phone system: their phones had simply become small and slim electronic paperweights, neither useful nor ornamental. The landline phones in the GCS were also completely dead. The most senior officer there, another major, posted one of the armed soldiers outside the door as a guard while the rest of them dispersed to try to find out what had gone wrong.

  Within minutes, it was clear that virtually all the electrical systems in that section of Hancock Field had suffered catastrophic burnout. Almost nothing was working, not even cars and jeeps, and there was no obvious way of recovering the situation. A team of electrical engineers from the base began examining the circuits and equipment and rapidly came to the conclusion that fixing it was going to require replacement of virtually everything, including many sections of wiring, rather than attempting any kind of repair.

  Hancock Field, and more specifically the GCS used to control the Reaper drones, was blind and deaf and dumb, without radios, satellite links, data links or even raw radar.

  And that was a problem, because somewhere, probably about thirty thousand feet above their heads and some miles away, was a fully armed MQ-9 Predator drone that nobody was actually controlling.

  Not only was nobody controlling it, but none of the people who were now standing around in the dark and windowless GCS, aiming torches pointlessly at the silent banks of equipment, had the slightest idea how to rectify the situation.

  ‘It’ll keep flying,’ a voice said out of the darkness. ‘So at least we’ve got time to find it.’

  ‘How?’ another and more senior-sounding voice snapped. ‘With binoculars? And then what do we do?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got any choice. We need to get a fighter airborne out of Andrews or somewhere and shoot it down.’

  ‘That sounds easy if you say it quickly,’ the base commanding officer replied. ‘But there are a few tiny problems, like we don’t know where it is, we don’t know how high it is, we don’t know which direction it was flying and we don’t know what transponder code it was using, so how the hell is anybody going to identify it? The only two people who knew any of that are lying dead on the floor right here. Even the surveillance systems operator only knew that the camera run at Lake Ontario had been completed and that the drone was on its way towards Fort Drum, because then he decided he needed a leak and left the room. I suppose we’re lucky he did that, because if he hadn’t there might be another corpse lying on the floor over there, and we wouldn’t even know that much.’

  ‘That was probably deliberate,’ another senior officer suggested.

  ‘Deliberate? What the hell do you mean? Of course it was deliberate.’

  ‘The reason for the killing, I mean. That bastard Dawood had to shoot Nagell because he was the pilot. He would have known where the drone was, and the squawk, and we would have been able to get another radar unit to track it. At least, we could have done that, until all the lights went out.’

  The CO looked around at the dark figures – they were most of his senior officers – clustered around him in the lightless and silent control room.

  ‘And there’s something else none of you might have thought of,’ he added, ‘and that’s the professional suicide angle. I, personally, am not entirely happy about the idea of authorising the destruction of a perfectly serviceable fourteen-million-dollar Reaper and having that put on my military record.’

  ‘I think they’re closer to sixteen million these days.’

  ‘Whatever. So before we start calling up fighter support we need to do what we can to find it. Whoever said it was still in the air got that right. With no control inputs, it should keep on flying at the same height, at the same speed and in the same direction, but what worries me is that it’s probably not doing that.’

  Nobody responded.

  ‘What I mean,’ the CO clarified, ‘is that we’ve been hit by some kind of EMP weapon, and whoever did that didn’t do it just to fuck up our aircon units and trucks and phones. Building a weapon like that takes knowledge and skills that most people don’t have, so I think we’re looking at terrorist activity here. I think that Reaper’s been hijacked, though I’m damned if I know how, and right now it could be heading straight for New York City or somewhere to try to finish what nine eleven started.’

  ‘Shit,’ somebody said.

  ‘You got that right, and we’re neck-deep in it. So we need to get out of here and find somewhere on this base where there’s a working telephone. Then we contact Fort Drum and see if their systems are working, because if they can use their radios or satellite link we might be able to regain control of this thing and bring it down at an airfield somewhere, maybe up at Wheeler-Sack.

  ‘The other thing we do is let our command structure know what’s happened, because we’re not looking at any kind of an accident here. This was enemy action. So we pass the buck up the line and suggest mounting combat air patrols near high-value targets like New York in case the Reaper is heading that way. Then if it does get shot down it won’t be on my chitty. Short term, I want armed patrols covering the perimeter until further notice. And get a team together to locate the source of the explosion that kicked off this shitstorm. Right, let’s get moving.’

  Chapter 52

  Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

  For whatever reason, establishing control of the Reaper drone out of Hancock Field through the satellite data link had taken far longer than Sadir had expected, and for a few minutes he wondered if they would have to abort the attack that day. But th
e significance of the date and what they were trying to achieve was so important to him that he shoved that idea to the back of his mind. Completing the operation on that most important day of the year for almost every American was essential to drive home the message of radical Islam.

  Michael and Joseph had been sitting alongside him ever since he’d arrived that morning and ever since they had identified the data feeds to and from the drone they’d been doing their best to intercept and monitor it. That had caused the delays, because for some reason they had been unable to establish a secure link to the drone as quickly as they had hoped and had previously managed.

  But finally they had done so, and the moment they had both confirmed that they were happy with it Sadir had made the call to Sami Dawood to set the operation in motion, and he’d followed that a few minutes later with the mobile call to trigger the detonation of the NNEMP he’d hidden in the woods alongside Hancock Field.

  As a precaution, Sadir had waited about half a minute more and then called the same mobile number again. That had come back with a number unobtainable message, which he knew meant that the mobile phone must have been destroyed in the explosion and that the Reaper GCS at the airfield had been rendered permanently incommunicado, which was the object of the exercise.

  Acting on Sadir’s instructions, Michael climbed the drone to almost fifty thousand feet to get it well above all civilian traffic and at the same time switched off the Reaper’s transponder. That wouldn’t make the drone invisible, as it would still generate a small primary radar return, but it would almost guarantee that civilian controllers would simply ignore it and military controllers might see it but wouldn’t do anything about it because they would probably assume it was a small, low-flying aircraft below controlled airspace or even an angel, an atmospheric phenomenon, a bit of anomalous propagation that generates intermittent returns on radar displays.