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

It was the kind of briefing that Nagell and the other men had sat through on countless previous occasions, and the mission profile was in no way unusual. It wouldn’t be especially challenging for a pilot of his experience, and the first part of the mission, over Lake Ontario, was going to be far more of a test for the sensor operator than for him. He would just be the taxi driver, following whatever route he was told to take while the cameras in the drone were used to record the surveillance data and allow the images to be analysed.

‘No sweat,’ Nagell muttered as the briefing ended, living up to his nickname.

Chapter 45

Washington D.C., United States of America

The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building occupies an entire trapezoid-shaped city block between the wide eight-lane dual carriageway that is Pennsylvania Avenue to the south, E Street NW to the north and 9th and 10th Streets NW to the east and west respectively. The southern entrance of the vast structure lies on the wide and imposing Pennsylvania Avenue which leads directly to the White House a few hundred metres further west, or to the Capitol to the east, but Morgan stepped out of the northern end of the building onto E Street, somewhat in the manner of a person leaving by the tradesman’s entrance.

A sudden cacophony of blaring horns drew his attention to the E Street and 10th Street traffic light-controlled intersection. Only the traffic lights weren’t controlling the junction, because power to them had obviously failed, resulting in a snarl-up of angry drivers trying to make their way across the intersection, none willing to give way and most of them, by the sound of it, venting their obvious fury through the audible medium of their car horns. He looked the other way, to the 9th Street junction, and saw a similar, but not quite so noisy, exchange of views taking place.

He already knew that that area of Washington D.C. was usually busy with cars and tour coaches rather than pedestrians, most Americans being reluctant to walk more than a few hundred yards if there was some form of motorised vehicle they could use instead, but there were far more people on the sidewalks than he had previously seen in that vicinity. They might reasonably have been described as pedestrians, but most of them weren’t walking anywhere, just standing around in small groups, talking and gesticulating. He guessed that they probably worked in some of the nearby buildings and had moved outside because whatever electric or electronic equipment they were using had ceased functioning. As he watched, the E Street and 10th Street traffic lights flickered back into life and then almost immediately shut down again, presumably as another generator came online and then almost as quickly some breaker somewhere tripped because of an overload and the feed was shut down.

In 2003, what became known as the North-east Blackout, which began because of a software bug in a computerised alarm system in a power company in Akron, Ohio, progressed to surges and outages and then cascaded into a loss of power in parts of eight American states. The blackout directly affected some 45 million Americans and about a further 10 million people in Ontario. The lack of power contributed to roughly one hundred fatalities and affected everything from mains water systems when the pumping system power supplies were cut, to rail services, oil refineries, gas station forecourts where petrol and diesel pumps stopped working and led to long queues of vehicles, television systems and general communications, as well as domestic heating, lighting, air conditioning and other utilities, all of which either shut down or suffered outages. Even industries and businesses which had backup generators suffered, because although the blackout only lasted about eight hours some of those generators ran out of fuel within that time.

Morgan guessed that what DC was experiencing was far more localised than that event, with a much smaller affected area and population. But it was, he was sure, only the start of the threat. Looking at the gathering crowds, he also wondered if whatever attack was planned involved something like napalm or some other chemical that would have a bigger effect on an exposed population rather than people still inside buildings. Maybe that was the reason for the blackouts.

He shivered slightly at that thought and almost unconsciously looked up to stare at the sky, or what he could see of it from the bottom of the concrete canyon in which he was standing, searching for danger or anything that shouldn’t be there. Then he pulled out his mobile phone, checked the screen to confirm that the network was up – during the North-east Blackout mobile providers had suffered outages – then dialled a number that he knew almost as well as his own.

‘I’m just about to pour my second cup of coffee of the morning, Ben, so you’ve caught me at a good time. What’s on your mind?’

‘Good morning, Natasha. Everything okay at your end?’

‘My end is fine, if you’re talking about where I’m working, rather than something more personal. Why are you asking?’

‘DC is getting hit with power outages,’ Morgan replied. ‘How about Maryland?’

‘As far as I know, the No Such Agency hasn’t had a problem, so maybe our supplier is unaffected. On the other hand, this place has massive backup generators and if there was a power cut it’s quite possible we wouldn’t even notice. Are you thinking this is enemy action?’

‘I’d be amazed if it wasn’t. But obviously there must be more to it than just a few lights going out. Any joy with the tracking idea we talked about?’

‘Oddly enough, yes, because we both know how rare it is for one of your ideas to actually pan out. You gave me a specific location where an unregistered mobile was located and the date and time when another unregistered mobile called it. So I gave one of my