‘What aircraft does the Air National Guard fly?’ he asked, expecting Baker or somebody to reel off a collection of numbers beginning with the letter ‘F’ for ‘fighter’, but instead the special agent shook his head.
‘They used to fly Fighting Falcons, F-16s,’ he said, ‘but the last one left back in 2010. Since then they’ve only operated MQ-9 Reapers. You know, like a Predator drone but with teeth. Loaded with missiles and bombs and stuff.’
That wasn’t what Morgan had expected him to say, but at that moment several disparate and apparently unconnected facts – the blackout in DC that had forced people out onto the streets, the two Chinese government-trained hackers who had flown to America on the same aircraft as Sadir had done about three years earlier, and perhaps most significantly of all the ‘Contact now established’ SMS that GCHQ had picked up – all started to make sense. And it painted a picture that Morgan really didn’t like the look of.
‘I think Sadir has hijacked a Reaper,’ he said into the silence that followed Baker’s remarks.
Chapter 56
Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
Sadir replaced the pistol in his jacket then turned his attention back to the flight control console and checked the position of the hijacked Reaper. In a few minutes, he would need to alter its course to the south-east to begin the attack run towards Washington D.C. At the moment, it was still at high level to the north-west of his target and would be painting as a faint primary return on any surveillance radar set with coverage of that area, but it should not be attracting any attention because of its non-threatening heading.
He had done most of his research at a very early stage of the planning for this mission, and he knew that the moment he altered course towards the capital city of the United States of America, alarm bells would start ringing and hands would hover over telephone handsets, precisely because the UAV was not wearing a transponder squawk and so would be considered to be potentially or actually hostile.
So first, he had to do something about that. It was time to begin the third act of this particular play.
He picked up his mobile phone, scrolled down his list of contact numbers until he found the one he was looking for, and dialled it. He listened to make sure that the recipient number was ringing, and heard the faint difference in sound as the cascade system Nadeem Ramli had devised shifted to call the second mobile number.
He ended the call when he heard the sixth mobile start to ring.
Chapter 57
Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
Gordon smiled, then laughed out loud.
‘That’s another one of those things that probably sounds easy until you try it. All the communications with those UAVs are encrypted, scrambled like you wouldn’t believe. There’s no way some terrorist could break into that system.’
‘I specialise in cybersecurity and cyber warfare,’ Morgan said quietly, ‘and if I had a hundred pounds for every time some security officer had told me that their intranet or computer system or website or whatever was unbreachable, I’d be a millionaire by now. There’s no system ever devised that can’t be breached if somebody has the time and the talent and the will to do it. Whatever this plan is, what we do know about it is that it’s been a long time in the gestation stage.
‘And there’s something else,’ he went on. ‘Hacking can be done from anywhere on the planet, obviously, but we’ve established that two professional Chinese military hackers travelled all the way from China to America with Sadir about three years ago and then immediately dropped out of sight. Why would they have needed to physically travel to America? Why did they have to be on the spot? To me,’ he concluded, ‘the only answer that makes sense is that there was something they had to do over here that they could not have done from back in Beijing. And I think that something was to design a system and work out a way of hacking into a Reaper’s control systems so they could use it to attack Washington D.C.’
‘That wouldn’t work,’ Gordon insisted. ‘This isn’t my field, but it makes sense that if the guys on the ground at Hancock Field suddenly lost control of a Reaper and couldn’t get it back, about the first thing they’d do would be to whistle up a couple of F-15s or F-16s or something and blow it out of the sky. End of problem.’
Rogers’s mobile rang. As he listened to what the caller was saying, his face seemed to turn pale.
‘That was one of my guys back at the Hoover building,’ he said. ‘We’ve just been notified about an emergency situation up at Syracuse, called in by somebody from outside the airfield. All inbound and outbound flights have been cancelled because the airfield’s radar and radio systems have stopped working and nobody seems to know why. There have also been reports about a bomb blast to the north-east of the airfield but very close to the boundary. What there aren’t, at least so far, are any reports about bomb damage, which again doesn’t really make sense because the two events – the bomb explosion and the radar and communications failure – pretty much have to be linked.’
Nobody in the room responded for a few moments, and then Morgan nodded briskly as another unspoken question that had been on his mind was suddenly answered.
‘That might be the last piece of the puzzle,’ he said. ‘A bomb that doesn’t cause major damage but results in the failure of electrical and electronic systems more or less has to be an EMP device. The bomb wouldn’t have been designed to do much physical damage, just to generate big enough electric charges and magnetic fields to shut down various systems at the airfield, like the radars and radios. And that’s why nobody’s punched a fighter into the air to shoot down the Reaper, because they’ve got no idea where it is now that Sadir’s controlling it. In fact, they probably don’t have any communications out of the base at all at the moment because an EMP blast is really good at frying mobiles and even landlines.’
‘That’s pure speculation,’ Gordon said, but there was little conviction in his voice.
‘I’m a simple soul,’ Morgan said, ‘I follow William of Occam so I always choose the simplest explanation for any sequence of events. If you’ve got a better idea, now would be the time to explain it to us. If you haven’t – if nobody has – then we need to get over to Fairview right now. And if we find Sadir sitting in a lawn chair, reading a magazine, drinking a cup of coffee, looking at the view on this lovely afternoon or doing something else completely innocent then I’ll apologise to him and I’ll apologise to you because that would mean I’ve got it completely wrong. But I don’t think I’ll be saying sorry any time soon.’
‘Fair enough,’ Gordon said. ‘We’ll take your chopper and I can brief the SWAT team en route.’
Chapter 58
Washington D.C., United States of America
A couple of locals in a flatbed Ford had driven past the van parked on the corner of Dower House Road W and Leapley Road about twenty minutes after Imran Wardi had stepped away from it and climbed into the passenger seat of the Chevrolet Cavalier Nadeem Ramli had been driving.
The Ford’s driver had pointed ahead through the windscreen as they’d approached the van and given a brief laugh.
‘Hell of a place to get a flat,’ he said. ‘Funny he didn’t have a spare with him.’
‘Maybe he had,’ his passenger suggested, ‘but maybe that was flat as well. Whatever, he’ll have had a real long walk to find a garage. I think the closest is probably back in Woodyard, and that’s maybe three miles away. Let’s hope somebody gave him a ride.’
Two other local drivers passed the vehicle over the next couple of hours, and their reactions mirrored those of the first two men. None of them saw the van as anything other than a bit of bad news for its driver.
An hour or so later a Washington D.C. police patrol car drove along the same road. Colloquially referred to in America as ‘black-and-whites’, the DC cars are anything but. This cruiser was a Dodge Charger, and its bodywork was almost entirely white, with the word ‘POLICE’ in large
light blue letters signwritten on each side and embellished with short horizontal red stripes overlaid by a thin, sinuous, curving horizontal blue stripe. Apart from the word written on both sides of the vehicle, and the inevitable lightbar on the roof, it could almost have been an upmarket company car wearing a corporate logo.
Inside it was much the same in terms of equipment as any other police patrol car in America, as were the two men sitting in the front seats. They were trained to look out for anything unusual, and an abandoned van missing one wheel and left on a quiet country road certainly fitted that description. So unlike the locals, the two cops in the Charger didn’t simply drive past but stopped on the apex of the bend where the driver switched on his roof bar lights.
‘You run the plates, Dick,’ he said, pushing open his door, ‘and I’ll take a quick look around.’
What he found was exactly what he had expected to find when he’d first seen the abandoned vehicle: it was fairly new, the driving compartment appeared clean and tidy and all the doors were locked. He pulled the note out from under the wiper, read what was written on it, shrugged and replaced it.
‘Anything?’ he asked as he sat down again in the driving seat.
‘Nope,’ his partner replied. ‘It’s a rental from a DC company and the insurance and everything else checks out. And at least the guy driving it managed to get it off the road so it’s not causing an obstruction. I’ll just log it and get the late shift guys to check if it’s still here tonight.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ the driver said, switching off his roof bar lights as he accelerated away.
Nobody else went anywhere near it on the public roads for the next ninety minutes, though a handful of vehicles passed it on the other side of the fence, on the roads within Joint Base Andrews.
And then, seconds after Sadir had dialled the number of the first mobile, the screen of the Nokia burner phone clipped to the board in the back of the van illuminated when it received what would be its last ever call.
Chapter 59
Forest Hill, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
‘You got coordinates for where this Sadir guy’s at?’ Gordon asked, his voice clear enough through the headset Morgan was wearing in the back of the Bell helicopter.
‘Yes,’ he replied, and tore another sheet from his notebook after checking that he’d copied the numbers correctly from Angela Black’s message on his mobile phone.
‘Thanks.’
Gordon had a handheld two-way radio, pre-set to the same frequency that the SWAT team was using. He lifted one half of the headset from his right ear so that he could use the radio, and he quickly passed the coordinates to whoever he was talking to at the other end. He listened to the reply, then ended the transmission and replaced his headset.
‘The team leader’s already scouted the area and he thinks he knows which property those coordinates refer to, but he’ll check it out on his map to make sure. Then he’s going to put a drone up – not a Predator or Reaper, obviously, just a small camera-equipped quad-copter – to do a surveillance run around the property, keeping it high enough to be invisible and inaudible. When we know what we’re facing, we can go in and sort this.’
‘Got a question for you,’ the Bell’s pilot asked.
‘Go ahead, Rich.’
‘This is all covert, right? Landing a chopper ain’t what you might call discreet, especially if I’m putting it down in some guy’s back garden. So how about we do what aircraft are supposed to do and land at an airport?’
‘There’s an airport here?’ Morgan demanded, staring through the windscreen at the patchwork of woods and fields and occasional houses that lay directly ahead of and below the helicopter.
‘It’s not quite like LaGuardia or JFK,’ Richard Muldoon confirmed, ‘but there is an airport, right here in Forest Hill.’ He briefly pointed ahead of the aircraft towards a thin strip of tarmac lying to the south of the road they were just approaching and which was bracketed on both sides by what looked like rows of industrial units.
‘That’s Forest Hill Airport,’ Gordon confirmed. ‘Not so much an airport as a right-of-way in a field, according to a pilot friend of mine, but it does have a tarmac runway and a helicopter landing there isn’t going to attract very much attention, so that’s a good call. Put us down, Rich, and I’ll tell the SWAT team to pick us up from there.’
Muldoon tried to raise the airfield on VHF 122.7, the only frequency published in his aeronautical information guide, but got no response.
‘That’s only a UNICOM frequency,’ he said on the intercom, ‘and that’s like a small handheld VHF set, so I don’t think there’s anyone home. It’s a private airport and you need permission to land so I’ll just park this bird on the grass by the undershoot to runway one three. There’s plenty of room there and your SWAT guys can drive straight in off the Jarrettsville Road to pick you up. If anyone turns up to complain I’ll just tell them we’re on FBI business and to send the bill for landing fees to the Hoover building.’
Something had been niggling away at Morgan’s subconscious, something that didn’t quite fit with the attack scenario that he was almost certain Sadir had planned, and as Rich Muldoon settled the Bell down smoothly a few yards north of the western end of the thin and short tarmac runway – it was only a little under 3,300 feet long – at the Forest Hill Airport, it suddenly came to him.
‘Oh, shit,’ he muttered.
Chapter 60
Washington D.C., United States of America
In complete silence, the screen of the last linked mobile illuminated, completing the automated cascade system that Ramli had devised. That action initiated the small program on the tablet computer, which then in its turn triggered the first step of the firing sequence, at virtually the same moment as the other five tablets in their dispersed locations did precisely the same thing.
The NNEMP weapon bolted to the floor of the rented van parked beside the boundary fence on the eastern side of Joint Base Andrews was several orders of magnitude larger – in all respects – than the device that Sadir had manhandled into the woods adjoining Hancock Field. It was so heavy that its total weight was very close to the maximum permitted load in the back of the van, and the three engineers working at the house in Damascus had had to use the engine hoist to manoeuvre its component parts into the vehicle, and then manhandle a collapsible steel frame and a chain hoist into the van as well as use long levers and pry bars to assemble it.
It was one of the three biggest weapons because of the job that it was going to have to do: to send the largest possible pulse of electromagnetic energy surging across Andrews. The other two maximum-size weapons would carry out precisely the same function at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, just south of the centre of DC, and at Dulles Airport out to the west of the city, while the three remaining, very slightly smaller devices, would cripple the central part of Washington.
The full current from the heavy-duty battery began flowing through the tightly wound copper coils of the stator for the briefest of instants before the C4 plastic explosive charge tightly packed inside the steel armature detonated, causing the short circuit that initiated the electromagnetic pulse.
That NNEMP weapon had been the last to be positioned and was also the last of the group to explode, but only by a barely measurable fraction of a second. The epicentre of the detonation was roughly the midpoint of the vehicle, and the device was aimed directly at the rear doors.
No airfield that stays open 24/7, least of all one as big as Joint Base Andrews with its plethora of different military and civil units, is ever silent. Activity of one sort or another goes on around the clock, everything from aircraft taking off and landing to service and maintenance vehicles, and even private cars, moving around the airfield. That afternoon it was comparatively quiet, precisely because of the date, with very little air traffic and just a handful of vehicles driving along the roads and taxiways.
This relative peace was ripped apart
by the detonation of the charge of plastic explosive in the centre of the stator of the fabricated weapon, the noise a deafening assault upon the ears. The sound rolled and crashed across the largely open space around the epicentre of the explosion and echoed off the buildings in its path.
The detonation reduced the van to its component parts, flinging the engine and transmission across the road and a couple of dozen yards beyond it. The engine itself smashed into the trunk of the solitary tree that marked the apex of the triangle of grassed land on the other side of the road.
The rest of the van was blown into torn and twisted slivers of steel. One second the van was disabled but intact and a few milliseconds later virtually nothing of it remained, or at least nothing immediately recognisable. The explosion also demolished dozens of yards of the airfield boundary fence, flattened the short length of crash barrier and toppled the pole carrying power cables. They tumbled down to land in an untidy tangle around the wreckage of the van.
The blast reduced the NNEMP weapon to millions of scattered and shattered pieces, just as it was supposed to do to launch the payload.
A huge, devastating and completely invisible charge of electromagnetic energy expanded across the airfield. It destroyed everything electrical that it touched, blowing or fusing circuits, melting wires, frying components and wrecking electric and especially electronic equipment. And these days, virtually everything, almost every machine that performs a useful function, contains at least one electronic circuit.
Moving cars and lorries within range of the blast simply stopped working, their electrical circuits fried. Because it was Independence Day, most of the aircraft were on the ground, and the EMP did a very efficient job of disabling them, the surging currents destroying electronic components, melting wires and creating myriad short-circuits. In the control tower the lights went out, radios fused and fell silent and radar screens instantly shut down.
Cyberstrike Page 33