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

Ronald Reagan International and Dulles in case these terrorists thought disabling power on the ground would cause aircraft to crash, like a sort of nine eleven for DC, but there’s no way it could happen. All the airports have backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies for critical systems, but even if somehow everything was completely shut down all the aircraft in the air could simply divert. So that didn’t make sense as a terror attack, unless their plan is just to mildly inconvenience us.’

Morgan nodded. ‘I hear what you say, but I still don’t like the look of the pattern that seems to be emerging, the hacking attacks on utility companies. There must be a reason for it, but right now I don’t know what it could be. And the “Death from the skies” phrase does worry me. It has echoes of nine eleven and definitely suggests some sort of aerial assault. But the terrorists don’t have any bomber aircraft, unless they’ve cobbled together some kind of IED, an improvised explosive device, that they’re going to try and drop from a hijacked light aircraft on the crowds that will gather here tomorrow for Independence Day. And I guess you have defences here that would take care of something like that really easily.’

‘You got that right,’ Rogers said. ‘This is the capital of the country and we’ve got the air defence side of things screwed down pretty tight. There’s a thing called the Washington D.C. Air Defense Identification Zone, the ADIZ, that surrounds the capital. Inside that is a Special Flight Rules Area that’s got a radius of about thirty miles and a Flight-Restricted Zone that extends out to about fifteen miles. And then there’s a prohibited area around the White House. All that airspace is covered by a whole arsenal of sensors, not just radar but also infrared and electro-optical cameras and various types of passive sensors. And if any unidentified aircraft do approach the area, we won’t just detect them. We can also shoot them down.

‘We’ve got Alert 5 and Alert 15 F16s sitting on the ground at Andrews just waiting for the go command, plus helicopters operated by Homeland Security fitted with fifty cal weapons amongst other stuff, and if anything manages to get through that lot we’ve got a bunch of Norwegian NASAMS waiting to knock them out of the sky.’

‘I presume that’s a kind of surface-to-air missile,’ Morgan suggested.

‘Yup. The acronym stands for National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System. That was developed from the old AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile, which was a really effective weapon. That’s our intermediate range defensive system, which gives cover out to about twenty miles. And if anything somehow manages to get past that we’ve also got the Avenger system using FIM-92 Stinger missiles and fifty cal machine guns for real short range defence. That system’s mounted in turrets on the tops of buildings dotted around the city, one of them covering the White House. The whole system’s fully integrated and even if all the radar systems went down, which they wouldn’t, the Stingers are infrared guided so they would still work.’

‘So if some rogue airliner headed for DC these guys would bring it down? They would pull the trigger?’

‘Definitely. Our view is that if an airliner’s been hijacked, it’s going to end up in a smoking hole in the ground somewhere anyway, and if we can make sure that hole in the ground is well outside Washington or any other urban area we’re going to save a lot of innocent lives. So if we did have a nine eleven or something like that here, I can pretty much guarantee that what we wouldn’t have is thousands of people dead because it crashed into a building. The fighter jocks, who’d probably be the guys doing the intercept, would make sure it came down somewhere in the countryside. And, yes, everybody on board the aircraft would be killed, but they would hopefully be the only casualties. So a few hundred lives would be lost rather than a few thousand. We think that’s a reasonable trade-off.’

‘I can’t argue with any of that,’ Morgan said.

Chapter 41

4 July – Independence Day

Washington D.C., United States of America

The very first thing that happened that morning was that all four of the suspected terrorists – Mahdi Sadir, Karim Ganem, Talat Wasem and Jamal Halabi – only one of whom was under close surveillance by teams of FBI surveillance specialists, all slipped the net at exactly the same time.

Sadir triggered one of the fire alarms in the large hotel where he was staying and slipped away in the ensuing confusion, Wasem left by way of the roof of his apartment building, stepping onto the adjoining structure and making his way out from there, while Ganem and Halabi both left their apartment buildings and climbed onto pedal cycles. The FBI team had been ready to follow Ganem on foot or on to public transport, or by car, but bicycles could go faster than pedestrians and slip through spaces that cars simply could not. Within fifteen minutes of Ganem’s appearance – and then almost immediate disappearance about a quarter of a mile further down the road – none of the watchers had the slightest idea where their quarry might be except, obviously, still somewhere in Washington D.C.

Mahdi Sadir had had no idea whether or not he and the other three men had been under surveillance, but it was obviously prudent to assume that they were, hence his instructions, given at their meeting in Tysons, for them to simultaneously scatter on the morning of the attack. If they had acquired unwelcome followers it was essential for them to leave their properties at exactly the same time, because if they were under surveillance the moment one of them slipped the net the authorities would certainly order the other three men to be picked up immediately.

So he’d precisely timed it for 0838, and by 1100 that morning the three hackers Sadir had