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

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