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

lights and all the way down to kettles and cookers would stop working, depending upon the availability of backup power supplies. There would be road accidents, people would be trapped inside buildings, perhaps inside lifts, and the emergency services would be out in force responding to calls. Office and shop workers, faced with failed lighting inside buildings, would probably end up standing out on the streets as their places of work were forced to shut down without power.

And that was exactly where Mahdi Sadir wanted them.

Chapter 42

Washington D.C., United States of America

Imran Wardi steered the hired van down Old Branch Avenue, the road running parallel to US-5 to the west of Joint Base Andrews, the sound of the traffic on the busy highway audible but the vehicles themselves invisible behind the long line of trees and undergrowth that separated the two roads. Just north of the Shoppers Supermarket, the roads started to diverge, US-5 bearing south-east while Old Branch Avenue continued on a southerly heading.

At the crossroads in Clinton, Wardi turned left onto Woodyard Road, MD-223, crossed over US-5 at the cloverleaf and continued north-east towards Woodyard itself. At the traffic light-controlled crossroads, he turned left, continuing along Woodyard Road as far as the next crossroads, where he again turned left, this time into Dower House Road. It was a pleasant street, bordered by large detached houses and then, as he drove further north, by industrial units. The further he drove the less traffic he saw until, as the road narrowed significantly as it approached the boundary of Joint Base Andrews, he could see nobody ahead of him or behind him. The road didn’t end, simply turned left through about one hundred degrees and became Leapley Road, and that sharp bend was his destination.

Wardi stopped the van right beside the bend, then reversed it off the road onto a patch of scrubby grass and gravel on which was a tall wooden pole carrying electrical cables, two road signs, each displaying an arrow and pointing in opposite directions, and a short length of metal barrier presumably intended to bring to a stop any careless drivers who failed to make it around the bend. The barrier would also prevent them driving through the wooden fence which terminated at the apex of the corner, beyond which lay Pearl Harbor Drive, the name itself a clue: it was one of the roads within Joint Base Andrews itself.

He manoeuvred the vehicle so that the rear of it was pointing in the optimum direction for their purposes. Working quickly, he opened the rear doors, checked the battery, the mobile phone and the wiring of the weapon and everything else, then jumped out carrying a wheel-brace and the van’s jack. He loosened the wheel nuts on the left front wheel, jacked up that side of the van, removed the wheel and placed it, along with the wheel-brace and the nuts, inside the back of the vehicle.

Then he locked the van and, as a final touch, scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and tucked it under one of the windshield wipers. The note read: ‘Gone to garage’ and was obviously self-explanatory. Hopefully, any police patrol or inquisitive local seeing the van would assume it had had a puncture and that the driver was attending to it and no steps would be taken to remove the vehicle because the matter was in hand. He didn’t think anybody would try to remove it because it was clearly not causing any kind of obstruction.

They’d picked that spot because it was the nearest they could get to Andrews, and also because the closest local residents were all dead and lying under the ground in the graveyard of what was marked on the map as St Luke’s Church, though the church building itself was conspicuous by its absence, unless it was lurking somewhere within the treeline. But the only thing Wardi had seen in there was what looked like a yard full of old cars and trucks, presumably waiting to be broken up for spare parts.

Less than five minutes after he’d immobilised the van, a Chevrolet Cavalier nosed its way down the road, Nadeem Ramli behind the wheel. Wardi sat down in the passenger seat and Ramli accelerated away.

‘Any problems?’ he asked, in Arabic.

Wardi shook his head and replied in the same tongue. ‘None. Traffic was light and I made good time. I checked the weapon thoroughly and everything is correct. What about the other vans?’

‘All in position, more or less. DC is busy because of the celebrations but we’d allowed for that and we will have no trouble meeting Abū Tadmir’s deadline. Your journey was the longest, and when Rafiq contacted me about half an hour ago he said he would be able to park the last van within the hour. Obviously one of the problems has been that we had six vans to position and only the three of us to do it, so I’ve been acting as a taxi driver all morning ferrying you and Rafiq around, but it’s worked out as we expected.’

‘And once that last vehicle is in position we can leave,’ Wardi stated. ‘And watch the fireworks from a safe distance.’

‘That’s right,’ Ramli said, grinning wolfishly. ‘It should be quite an interesting afternoon. As long as you’re a long way from Washington, of course.’

Chapter 43

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., United States of America

‘I didn’t want you here in the first place, Morgan,’ Charles Bouchier – you could just tell that he had never been known as ‘Charlie’ in his entire working life – ground out through gritted teeth. ‘The very last thing I want to see in this building is someone like you, an Englishman with a sense of entitlement and an extremely shady past, if what Rogers told me is correct. Let me make myself perfectly clear. I do not want to see you in this building ever again. I forbid you from contacting Rogers or any other member