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

‘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