Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

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.

‘Now start tracking south-west towards the airfield,’ Sadir ordered, ‘and keep the speed down so it doesn’t trigger alarms anywhere.’

He glanced at the two young Chinese men sitting in the seats on either side of him and smiled.

‘We’ve done well,’ he said. ‘I hope your country will be appreciative of the work you’ve done here and with the prize that you’ll be able to ship to Beijing or Shanghai, in the diplomatic bag, of course. In fact,’ he added, ‘I think you probably deserve a drink to keep you going, because it’s still a long flight to where we’ll land the drone. Stay here, and keep the Reaper heading in the same direction.’

‘There are Cokes in the fridge,’ Joseph said, as Sadir stood up to leave the room.

In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took out two cans of Coke, half filled a couple of glasses and then, with a surreptitious glance back towards the door of the room, he took two small vials of colourless liquid out of his pocket, snapped off the tops and poured the contents into each of the glasses, and used a teaspoon to mix the contents, being careful not to rattle the steel spoon against the glass.

He walked back into the room they were calling the control suite, handed over the glasses and then returned to the kitchen to pour his own drink, which he would consume neat, without any extras.

Sadir had only been able to obtain the services of the two professional, Chinese government-trained, hackers – their range of techniques and abilities went way beyond the level that Ganem and the other two men had reached – by agreeing with their employer that his plan would deliver not simply a current and state-of-the-art Reaper drone, but also a full weapons fit, intact and undamaged. He had agreed to fund the entire process of stealing the drone on the understanding that on delivery he would receive substantial remuneration for conducting the operation. That was his stated motive, though his real agenda was of course entirely different, and he had managed to convince the senior officers running Unit 61398 of that.

As the two Chinese men sipped the drinks and imbibed the nanobot cocktail that would kill them both in under half an hour, Sadir began to quietly celebrate in his mind. His two companions had had no idea what had happened at Hancock Field, except that Sadir had somehow managed to disable the ground control station. They believed that all they then had to do was land the drone at the small private airfield they had identified as a suitable location, and where a small delegation of Chinese diplomats was probably already waiting to see the drone descend from the sky. He wondered how long they would stay there before it dawned on them that something had gone wrong and that the Reaper, the enticing high-tech prize that Sadir had dangled in front of them, wasn’t going to appear.

He had calculated that Joseph and Michael would collapse at least twenty minutes before he would need to swing the Reaper onto a southerly heading to track directly towards Washington D.C., where he would unleash the entirety of the weapons load carried by the drone into the soft underbelly of the people of the capital, the crowds that he was certain would already be out in the streets in response to the series of blackouts Ganem and the other two hackers had engineered. The kind of crowds that a typically cynical American military pilot would probably describe as ‘a target-rich environment’ if the Reaper was overhead somewhere like Baghdad. Well, they were about to find out that the same mentality could also exist over Washington D.C.

Sadir’s final act would be to plunge the Reaper directly into the portico of the White House, where the substantial quantity of fuel remaining in the tanks – it should still be carrying almost half of its initial fuel load – would create an impressive, and hopefully fatal, fireball. He wouldn’t be able to kill the President because the bulletproof glass and thick reinforced walls of the building would prevent that happening, but he should certainly be able to take out several of the Secret Service bodyguards and anybody else within range. And the sight of the front of the White House apparently bursting into flames, an image