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

guys back at Cheltenham the job of identifying and tracking the calling mobile, because you figured that was the one being used by the person in charge, and to start a tally of its activity and its location and to monitor the calls and messages. You probably won’t be entirely surprised to hear that most of the time that mobile has been switched off, which suggests to me that you were right: the person using it is the one giving the orders rather than receiving them. He only switches it on when he needs to tell somebody something.

‘As far as locations are concerned, it pops up all over the place and at very different times, usually in and around DC, but we’ve also had hits in Damascus – that’s the one just north of DC, not the city half a world away in Syria, before you ask, a district called Bel Air near Baltimore and one out at a city called Syracuse up in New York State. My man also did historical checking, running back through the records of the service provider to see if it was used before making that call to the mobile. It was, but again the results were the same: only occasional usage in DC, Damascus, Bel Air and Syracuse.’

‘And did your man also—’ Morgan interrupted.

‘I hadn’t finished. Whoever this person is, he doesn’t seem to have many friends, because he’s only ever called six other numbers, and to save you exercising your limited allocation of brain cells, I’ll tell you where they were located. They were all mobiles, three of them in DC, one in Damascus, one in Bel Air and one in Syracuse. To me, that makes it look like we’re dealing with a small number of people located in different places and probably tasked with doing different jobs as part of a single operation. Significantly, none of those mobiles are registered and all of them have been switched on almost all the time, only going off the network between late evening and early in the morning. If you give me a few minutes, I’ll bung the data file over to you now.’

‘Thanks,’ Morgan said. ‘Can you also run a check in real time and find out if those mobiles are switched on right now and where they are? And if your man back in Cheltenham managed to run an active intercept I’d like to hear anything he recorded from any of the target numbers.’

‘I’ll see what he’s got and you’ll have it pretty much immediately.’

‘Now, I’ve also managed to fall out with the hierarchy of the Bureau in a fairly big way, so I’m kind of on my own and this is getting urgent.’

‘Another set of official toes you’ve trodden on, eh?’

‘More like stamped on, really, repeatedly and wearing hobnail boots. I’m definitely not on their Christmas card list any more. Not that I was in the first place.’

‘Typical of you, Ben. Right, you should have the file in the next couple of minutes. Keep me in the loop and try not to piss off any other branches of American law enforcement. If we’re going to wrap this up, we’re going to need help. Lots of help. And it’ll need to be help with badges, body armour and big guns.’

Chapter 46

Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America

A little under ninety minutes after the briefing had ended, the fully prepped General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper was towed by an army 4x4 utility vehicle out of its purpose-built beige-painted hangar, the structure bearing the legend ‘174th ATKW’ painted in black above the white doors. It was accompanied by two airmen walking beside its wings and carrying chocks that could be used to stop the drone if required, and which would be used to keep it stationary on a hardstanding while the pre-start and other checks were carried out before it taxied for take-off.

All the underwing weapons pylons were occupied, carrying the maximum load of four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, two 500-pound GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bombs and one 500-pound GBU-38 JDAM – Joint Direct Attack Munition – precision-guided bomb. The missile’s ‘AGM’ designation simply meant ‘air-to-ground missile’ while ‘GBU’ stood for ‘guided bomb unit’.

That particular Reaper was, as American pilots are so fond of saying, ‘loaded for bear’.

On the hardstanding, with the two main wheels chocked and the brakes engaged, the engine was started and the various systems, like the rotatable camera mounted under the Reaper’s nose, were tested to ensure they were in correct working order. The power lead and telemetry lead were unplugged, the final safety pin, marked by a prominent red flag, was removed, and the drone was ready to taxi.

As the Reaper headed towards the runway, just as on a conventional aircraft a series of pre-take-off checks were carried out to ensure that it was in a flyable condition, the most visually obvious of which was a test of the brakes, the nose of the drone dipping as Nagell applied them. Then the UAV proceeded steadily to the threshold of the active runway. Once the local controller was certain that the runway was clear of turbulence – wide-body passenger jets, in particular, create vortices on landing that are powerful enough to flip a light aircraft onto its back – take-off clearance was granted. The drone accelerated down the runway, lifting off at what was obviously a much slower speed than the passenger jets that had preceded it, and after a much shorter take-off run, thanks to its light weight and straight, glider-like wings.

Until 2019, all Reapers launching from Syracuse Hancock International Airport were required to be escorted by a piloted aircraft to ensure separation from other air traffic, the concern being that the comparatively small UAVs would be difficult for commercial pilots to see and avoid. The rule was that a Civil Air Patrol jet would follow the Reaper from the airfield up to a height of 18,000 feet and act as the