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

Morgan fished his notebook out of his pocket and found the correct page. He ringed a pair of geographical coordinates with his pen, the latest triangulation update Natasha Black had sent him, and handed the book to Special Agent Crawford. The FBI man sat down at a computer terminal, pulled up a mapping application and fed in the information. Then he leaned back in the chair and pointed at the screen.

‘The mobile’s position was at the Syracuse Airport,’ he said, ‘so I don’t think that piece of data gets us any further forward.’ Then he paused for a moment and looked more closely at the mapping display.

‘What is it, David?’ Gordon asked.

‘Well, that position is on the airfield, but not where I would have expected to see it on the airfield. The passenger terminals and customs and all that stuff are on the north side of the runway, but the location Mr Morgan has given me is to the south of the runway, so maybe our mystery man wasn’t waiting for a flight to depart.’

‘What buildings are near that location?’ Rogers asked.

‘It’s pretty close to the southern edge of the airfield so there are a bunch of utility companies there, offering stuff like hydraulic and pneumatic repair, batteries, a distribution hub and even a medical centre. I guess they’re all outside the airfield boundary fence and the location I’ve been given is pretty much in the middle of that lot.’

‘The accuracy of the triangulation depends on a bunch of different factors,’ Morgan said, ‘but mainly the number of masts in communication with the cell phone. Don’t just focus on the coordinates I gave you. Is there anything else in the area that’s more interesting than a battery shop?’

Crawford studied the map again, then shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘The only thing marked inside the airfield boundary near there is the Hancock Field ANGB, and I don’t know what that is.’

‘I do,’ John Baker said, ‘but I don’t think it helps us any. Syracuse Airport is a joint civil and military airfield, and on the southern side of the runway is the Air National Guard Base. They call that bit Hancock Field.’

That simple statement and the transcription of the penultimate call that the GCHQ intercept had picked up struck a chord in Morgan’s brain. The expression ‘Contact now established’ could mean that Sadir had been talking to a military pilot. Maybe he had suborned a fighter jockey and intended to have the pilot run strafing runs over Washington D.C. That would certainly count as ‘death from the skies’. In his head, it was all beginning to make a bit more sense.

‘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