Cyberstrike
Page 36
‘Great.’ Morgan grabbed it, dived under the desk, identified the sockets on the system unit that the destroyed control column was plugged into, ripped them out and plugged in the new device.
He sat in the chair again and looked at the screen. At the bottom right-hand side a notification had just popped up: ‘New device found. Driver loading.’
‘It this going to work?’ Rogers asked.
‘Buggered if I know,’ Morgan replied. ‘But if I don’t get this control column to function, and bloody fast, we are comprehensively screwed, and so’s a hefty chunk of the population of DC. The only difference is that we’ll get to walk away.’
The notification cleared from the screen. He rested his feet on the rudder pedals and began easing the control column back. He wasn’t a qualified pilot, but he knew enough about aircraft to know that that would stop the drone’s descent.
But it didn’t.
The view from the camera now showed the unmistakable shape of the city in front of the UAV, the buildings becoming clearer with every passing second, and the altimeter still showed an unaltered rate of descent.
Morgan shifted his gaze to the mapping screen. The Reaper was down to 10,000 feet and on the map had roughly five miles to run. At that rate, he guessed that impact would occur in just over one and a half minutes.
And he was going to have a bird’s eye view when it happened.
Chapter 74
Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
Ben Morgan watched helplessly as the unmistakable skyline of Washington D.C. came into view on the screen in front of him. He could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building and the White House. He was still using the control column, or trying to, but none of the inputs he applied had the slightest effect upon the Reaper’s course.
Maybe the control column was defective. Maybe that was why it had been put away. Then a new dialogue box appeared on the screen: ‘Device installed’. Loading the driver had just taken a lot longer than he’d expected. Or maybe it just felt that way.
He again eased back on the control column. But again what he did had no effect on the flight of the Reaper.
Morgan slumped back in the seat, despair on his face as he tried to work out what was wrong. He again ducked under the desk and checked the control column connections, even though he knew if they were wrong the system wouldn’t have detected it and loaded the device driver.
The image from the drone’s camera showed exactly where the UAV was heading. Filling the screen and getting closer with every second that passed was perhaps the most potent and evocative symbol of the United States of America.
The Reaper, its fuel tanks half full and with a full load of lethal high-explosive ordnance, was less than a mile from the White House and on a definite collision course.
Chapter 75
Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
‘I can’t stop this,’ Morgan said. ‘It’s not responding.’
On the screen, the individual figures of pedestrians were rapidly becoming visible, as were stationary vehicles positioned at odd angles on the streets where they’d presumably ended up when their engines died. Directly in front of the Reaper, the unmistakable shape of the White House was growing bigger by the second, and Morgan unconsciously pushed the chair back to try to distance himself from the inevitable impact.
He kept on pulling the control column, and moving it from side to side, but nothing he did had the slightest effect. The Reaper just continued its inexorable powered descent to oblivion.
‘Ten seconds,’ Morgan said. ‘Maybe less.’
Chapter 76
Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America
One of the SWAT team pushed Morgan to one side and stared at the displays on the two monitors for a moment. Then he reached out a hand to the trackball, span the wheel to move the mouse pointer on the screen showing the flight controls, selected one particular switch and clicked the left mouse button.
Then he reached for the control column and eased it back.
And instantly, as if by magic, the camera view changed. The streets and buildings, which had seemed close enough to touch, were suddenly replaced by the solid blue of the sky above Washington. Morgan could have cried with relief.
‘How did you do that?’ he demanded, recognising the man as the agent who’d been piloting the quad-copter drone around the target house before they made their approach.
‘You had the autopilot locked on,’ the special agent replied, as Morgan reached out for the control column again. ‘Don’t climb it too steeply. If you stall it, we’ll be even deeper in the shit than we were before. Do you want me to do it? I’ve got lots of experience with drones. Not Reapers, but a drone is still a drone.’
‘Oh, God. Yes, please,’ Morgan said, stood up and backed away as the agent took his seat.
He watched the navigation screen that showed the Reaper’s location and the agent steered it north-east, away from the capital, and checked the altimeter display, which confirmed the UAV was climbing steadily.
‘We’ve still got a problem,’ Gordon said, stepping over to him. ‘Well done for gaining control of that UAV, but it can’t stay in the air indefinitely, and you can’t just land it with the controls we have here. I don’t know too much about these devices, but I do know that the take-off and landing have to be handled by a pilot at whatever airfield is being used.’
‘If we can’t land it,’ Morgan said, ‘I suppose we could fly it out over the Atlantic and just ditch it.’
‘We could,’ Gordon replied, ‘but these things come with a multi-million-dollar price tag and it’s bound to be carrying weapons as well, so that has to be our option of last resort. We do know that it took off from Hancock Field, up at Syracuse, so I suggest we turn it round and head it in that direction. Maybe there’s a way of getting a military controller up there to find it on his radar and for another remote pilot to take control of it.’
The SWAT special agent now controlling the Reaper listened to the exchange and then turned round to look at Gordon.
‘I’ve got it heading north-east right now,’ he said, ‘and I’m climbing it to forty thousand feet or thereabouts to keep it well above any civilian traffic. Hancock Field isn’t the only unit up that way that flies these things. There’s a military base called Fort Drum at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and they operate drones as well. Maybe we should try calling them and find out if they’ve got any bright ideas. And there’ll be no problem with the identification. I can just set the Reaper’s transponder to squawk emergency, 7700, and that’ll make it stand out like a dog’s balls on any radar set that can see it.’
‘Do it,’ Gordon said, pulling out his mobile phone. ‘Do it right now.’
Chapter 77
Fort Drum, Jefferson County, New York, United States of America
The so-called ‘rogue’ Reaper touched down entirely without drama on runway 21 at Fort Drum’s Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield a little over three hours later, its weapons payload intact and undamaged.
The emergency squawk had allowed a completely faultless and easy identification of the UAV while it was still as far south as Baltimore. The handover had involved a prolonged telephone conversation between Lewis Gordon and Major Oscar Paulson. It was a most unusual situation, and the worst-case scenario would have seen the handover to the GCS at Fort Drum failing and the Predator continuing, entirely out of control, before crashing somewhere in a ball of flame. Eventually, the best solution they could come up with was to engage the drone’s autopilot again, keep it at 45,000 feet and steer it due east. That way, if Fort Drum couldn’t establish control, the UAV would simply fly out over the Atlantic Ocean and continue heading east until it finally ran out of fuel.
When Morgan shut down the computers in the improvised control suite, an action that would sever their communication with the Reaper, there followed an anxious three or four minutes while Paulson’s men attempted to establish
a link with it.
And when Paulson came back on the line and uttered a simple three-word sentence: ‘We have control,’ the house at Fairview erupted into cheers and clapping.
Chapter 78
United States of America
Ben Morgan acquired something of a souvenir from the house at Fairview. The FBI team had searched the bodies of Mahdi Sadir and the two anonymous Chinese males and had recovered what appeared to be insulin vials and testing and injection equipment from Sadir’s corpse. None of them actually believed the Iraqi had been a diabetic and, even if he had been, he certainly wasn’t going to need insulin now.
‘This could be important,’ Morgan had said to Lewis Gordon, and explained what had happened back in the UK with the deaths of the SAS soldiers and the terrorist while in custody. ‘I think this is probably what Sadir used to poison those men, and I’d like to take some of these vials back with me. Porton Down might find the contents interesting.’
‘Fine with me,’ Gordon had replied. ‘I’ll send a couple to the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, out in Atlanta, and maybe a couple to Fort Detrick right here in Maryland. They’re both in the dangerous bugs business, one way or the other.’
* * *
The damage in Washington was both extensive and expensive to rectify, the high-powered NNEMP devices working with remarkable efficiency. Something like half the cars and other vehicles on the streets had ground to a halt as their electrical systems burnt out, buildings suffered failures of lighting, air conditioning and elevators, and the vast majority of computerised systems and almost anything that incorporated electronic circuits were severely damaged or destroyed. The clean-up would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
But on the plus side, the loss of life had been minimal, less than twenty people having been killed by the explosions of the devices and another thirty-five or so injured, while a further dozen had died in related traffic accidents and the like. All in all, fewer than one hundred citizens of Washington had died or been injured as a result of the NNEMP attack. Of course, that didn’t stop the papers and the media savaging the police, the armed forces, the government and anybody else they could think of to blame for what had happened. But no details of the so nearly successful but ultimately aborted Predator attack were released, or ever would be.
The three hackers whose actions had caused the initial blackouts in DC – Karim Ganem, Jamal Halabi and Talat Wasem – were all arrested by American police officers and charged with numerous offences relating to cybercrime and held in custody pending their trials. All would eventually be found guilty and receive a combined total of 187 years behind bars.
The identities of the people who had fabricated the NNEMP weapons were never established, and no arrests were made.
Ben Morgan, Natasha Black and Barbara Simpson received the grateful thanks of the American government for what they had done, individually and collectively, to help thwart the attack. The only tangible benefits they received were three upgrades to first class for their flights across the Atlantic back to London Heathrow and home.
Chapter 79
Two months later
Southern Iraq
Rashid had weathered the storm caused by the failure of Mahdi Sadir’s ambitious attempt to strike back at America, but only just.
It wasn’t the fact that the attack had failed that had caused such despair in the hierarchy of the Islamic State. It was the fact that they had committed the bulk of their treasury to the purchase of hundreds of thousands of put options, all of which had expired worthless when the stock markets around the world had failed to collapse. Because he had been so certain that the attack would succeed, Rashid was blamed publicly and privately for what had happened, his judgement had been called into question and his position in the hierarchy hotly disputed.
But he had survived. And he knew there would be other attacks, and other shahids, and other opportunities to bloody the arrogant face of the Great Satan. It was just a matter of picking a suitable target and devising a method – a simple one, with few opportunities for it to fail – and a date to carry it out. Recruiting the shahids would probably be the easiest part of the entire operation.
In the meantime, Rashid decided that he would maintain a low profile, and not get involved too deeply with any other operations being considered by the Islamic State, at least until the organisation had started to replenish its coffers and people had begun to forget what had happened.
He had a small farm on the outskirts of Karbala, not far from the Holy Shrine of Al-Abbas, some fifty miles to the south of Baghdad, where he would be close enough to the action to know what was going on and for people to remember him when decisions needed to be taken, but far enough away that people wouldn’t see him on a daily basis and be reminded of what had happened. But he was determined to remain in touch with the organisation that he had served for so many years.
He fairly quickly settled into the routine, tending his sheep and goats, but always keeping a wary eye for danger. As far as he knew, the Americans had no idea who he was, far less what involvement he might have had in what had happened – or rather hadn’t happened – in America’s capital city.
* * *
In this belief, he was sadly mistaken.
With the situation in Washington under control, the NSA and their partner the GCHQ began picking apart the actions and particularly the communications that Mahdi Sadir had employed, not only while he was in America but also in the years leading up to that, when he was visiting places in Europe and China and even further afield. It is amazing what information can be collected by a careful examination of anybody’s mobile phone usage, and although Sadir had been careful, he had still left behind near-invisible traces that could be detected by dedicated analysts.
Piece by piece, a picture began to emerge of who Sadir had been and who his contacts were. And from this amorphous data map the number-crunchers at GCHQ utilised Venn diagrams, 3-D graphs and other analytical tools to make sense of the connections. As they had expected, certain names and certain numbers began to surface, some repeatedly, as the entire picture started to emerge.
One of these was a man named Rashid who, along with certain other senior Islamic State officials, was clearly identified as being behind the linked plots in London and Washington. It was soon confirmed that Rashid, as the most senior member of this group, had apparently been the driving force behind the attacks.
And that meant his life was forfeit.
* * *
The Americans decided that retribution would come from the skies, but not as a random bombing or anything as imprecise as that. Instead, they obtained pictures of Rashid’s face and the location of his smallholding and bided their time.
As a kind of poetic twist, they also decided that their weapon of choice would be a Reaper, and the man controlling it would be operating from the GCS at Hancock Field, the seat – or to be exact an identical replacement seat – that No Sweat Nagell had been sitting in when Major Sami Dawood had executed him.
* * *
Late on a Saturday afternoon, Rashid was walking along a country road, returning to his smallholding, when he heard an unusual sound in the sky. He stopped and looked up, shading his eyes against the harsh sun over Iraq, and watched as an unusual-looking aircraft with a long nose and straight wings overflew him at an unusually low altitude. When it had passed, the aircraft began climbing away and was quickly lost to sight.
* * *
‘That’s a match,’ the sensor operator said, comparing the frozen image the Reaper’s camera had recorded with a colour photograph of the man they were seeking. The low pass had allowed them to obtain excellent quality pictures.
‘That’s good enough for me,’ the pilot replied, already arming one of the UAV’s Hellfire missiles. ‘We’ll attack from the west, out of the sun.’
‘Just a shame he won’t hear it coming.’
* * *
The AGM-114 Hellfire missile was originally designed as a Mac
h 1.3 supersonic tank-buster but has proved to be equally adept at the elimination of selected high-value targets. People like Rashid, in fact.
This particular Reaper was carrying a Hellfire variant, the AGM-114R9X. Commonly known as the Ninja Bomb or the Flying Ginsu, the high explosive has been replaced by a kinetic warhead comprising a one-hundred-pound lump of material and six high-speed blades to slice and dice the target. It is specifically intended as an anti-personnel weapon and designed to reduce collateral damage and has been successfully deployed in the trouble spots of the world since 2017.
The man who masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, Jamal Ahmad Mohammad Al Badawi, was eliminated by a R9X, as was Abu Khayr al-Masri, one of the most senior members of al-Qaeda. It has also been used against al-Qaeda members in Syria and senior Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. It’s a precision assassination weapon against which there is almost no defence.
* * *
Rashid resumed his walk along the dusty track, wondering briefly about the aircraft he had seen. And then, perhaps gripped by some kind of subconscious premonition, he stopped and looked back, towards the west and the slowly sinking sun. At a greyish dot, very high and moving slowly.
And then he saw something else, below the grey dot, something that seemed to glint, high in the sky. Something small and fast moving. Very fast moving. Something that seemed to be heading towards him.
And in that instant he knew they’d made the connection. His last conscious thought was that he’d heard that the Americans didn’t either forgive or forget.