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

It was one of the three biggest weapons because of the job that it was going to have to do: to send the largest possible pulse of electromagnetic energy surging across Andrews. The other two maximum-size weapons would carry out precisely the same function at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, just south of the centre of DC, and at Dulles Airport out to the west of the city, while the three remaining, very slightly smaller devices, would cripple the central part of Washington.

The full current from the heavy-duty battery began flowing through the tightly wound copper coils of the stator for the briefest of instants before the C4 plastic explosive charge tightly packed inside the steel armature detonated, causing the short circuit that initiated the electromagnetic pulse.

That NNEMP weapon had been the last to be positioned and was also the last of the group to explode, but only by a barely measurable fraction of a second. The epicentre of the detonation was roughly the midpoint of the vehicle, and the device was aimed directly at the rear doors.

No airfield that stays open 24/7, least of all one as big as Joint Base Andrews with its plethora of different military and civil units, is ever silent. Activity of one sort or another goes on around the clock, everything from aircraft taking off and landing to service and maintenance vehicles, and even private cars, moving around the airfield. That afternoon it was comparatively quiet, precisely because of the date, with very little air traffic and just a handful of vehicles driving along the roads and taxiways.

This relative peace was ripped apart by the detonation of the charge of plastic explosive in the centre of the stator of the fabricated weapon, the noise a deafening assault upon the ears. The sound rolled and crashed across the largely open space around the epicentre of the explosion and echoed off the buildings in its path.

The detonation reduced the van to its component parts, flinging the engine and transmission across the road and a couple of dozen yards beyond it. The engine itself smashed into the trunk of the solitary tree that marked the apex of the triangle of grassed land on the other side of the road.

The rest of the van was blown into torn and twisted slivers of steel. One second the van was disabled but intact and a few milliseconds later virtually nothing of it remained, or at least nothing immediately recognisable. The explosion also demolished dozens of yards of the airfield boundary fence, flattened the short length of crash barrier and toppled the pole carrying power cables. They tumbled down to land in an untidy tangle around the wreckage of the van.

The blast reduced the NNEMP weapon to millions of scattered and shattered pieces, just as it was supposed to do to launch the payload.

A huge, devastating and completely invisible charge of electromagnetic energy expanded across the airfield. It destroyed everything electrical that it touched, blowing or fusing circuits, melting wires, frying components and wrecking electric and especially electronic equipment. And these days, virtually everything, almost every machine that performs a useful function, contains at least one electronic circuit.

Moving cars and lorries within range of the blast simply stopped working, their electrical circuits fried. Because it was Independence Day, most of the aircraft were on the ground, and the EMP did a very efficient job of disabling them, the surging currents destroying electronic components, melting wires and creating myriad short-circuits. In the control tower the lights went out, radios fused and fell silent and radar screens instantly shut down.

For probably the first time since the airfield had begun operating as Camp Springs Air Base back in 1942, all activity at Andrews stopped and a total and utterly unnatural silence fell.

Of course, it wasn’t just Andrews that was affected.

At Ronald Reagan, a civilian airliner taxiing to the threshold of the active runway simply stopped when every instrument in the cockpit ceased operating and two small electrical fires broke out behind the instrument panel. When the pilot tried to radio the ground controller, he discovered that all the radios, too, had ceased operating. But even if somehow that particular piece of equipment had been spared, the ground controller was looking at a blank screen in the now entirely unlit, dead and lifeless radar room. And the tow truck that would normally be sent out to recover an aircraft suffering such a catastrophic failure was itself unable to move because its ignition circuit and almost every other piece of wiring on it had been burnt out.

Throughout much of DC itself, those electrical devices that were still operating despite the blackouts ceased functioning, permanently, as the electromagnetic surges from the three NNEMP weapons ravaged their circuitry. The various additional sensors that had been installed to protect the capital city against air attack were fried, meaning that any airborne incursion would not be detected. And, even if such an attack were to be detected, the last line of defence, the Stinger surface-to-air missiles, were also neutralised by that same EMP, their circuits destroyed.

Washington lay defenceless against the assault that was to come, but not silent. Gathering crowds of people thronged the streets, asking questions and looking for explanations for what had happened to their city. Explanations that nobody could give, because nobody there had any idea what was going on. About the only thing most of the population knew was that there had been a truck bomb, or maybe more than one, in the city. There had been casualties, but because the vehicles hadn’t been left in crowded areas, not that many. But that, of course, didn’t explain why nothing, not phones or tablets or computers or cars or buses or ambulances or fire trucks or even some wristwatches, still worked.

The third phase, or the third act, as Sadir was mentally calling it, had been completed exactly as he had planned,