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

there’d be,’ Baker said in partial explanation as he steered the Suburban down the street, ‘or if you’d have a bunch of equipment with you.’

Inside the resident agency a heavily built black man wearing an impeccable light grey suit, white shirt, silver tie and an almost palpable air of authority was waiting when Special Agent Crawford led the way through the door.

‘Rogers?’ he asked, staring at the new arrivals.

Grant Rogers nodded and stepped towards him.

‘Follow me. Now.’ And with that the man turned away and strode down a short corridor to an open door, Rogers trailing a few feet behind him. Inside, the man sat down in a large leather swivel chair behind a mahogany desk and stared across it towards Rogers.

‘I’m the Baltimore SAC, Lewis Gordon,’ he said, ‘and I’m here at this resident agency because I want to know what the hell’s going on. I’ve just spent a very unpleasant five minutes on the phone listening to your SAC, Charles Bouchier, tell me exactly why he wants you to be suspended and some guy called Ben Morgan, who I presume you brought with you, to be arrested immediately. The last thing I want or need is some guy from the Hoover building I’ve never heard of telling me to prep my SWAT team, to clear a space for a helicopter to land right here in Bel Air, and to make plans for carrying out an assault without authorisation or justification or even giving me the faintest fucking clue who’s going to be assaulted, where they are or why they’ve suddenly become a target.

‘So if you don’t want an awesome shower of shit to descend upon your head from a hell of a height, Rogers, then I suggest you start talking and give me one good reason why I shouldn’t do what Bouchier wants, right now.’

Chapter 50

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

Sami Dawood’s attention was divided between three different things: the Reaper’s training flight, which he had devised and was personally supervising; his wristwatch, where the minute hand seemed to be rotating around the dial at ever-increasing speed; and his mobile phone, which was remaining ominously silent.

Of those three things, it was the seemingly far more rapid than usual passage of time allied to the absence of any contact from the person he was expecting to hear from that was causing him the most mental distress and anguish. At this, almost literally the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, after months and years of planning, surely they could not fail. Surely Allah would not permit it.

What should he do if the call didn’t come? If there was no contact? If that nightmare became a reality? He had come so far in his personal and spiritual development, thanks to the imam who had recognised and acknowledged his anguish and inner turmoil as a senior member of the selfsame military machine that had been slaughtering hundreds and thousands of his brother Muslims in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, delivering death by remote control using their fighter and bomber aircraft and their infernal, devilish drones, invisible, inaudible and impersonal killing machines.

When he had first contacted the imam, he had been seeking guidance, an explanation, not absolution or anything of that sort. His dilemma was as obvious as it was apparently irreconcilable: how could he remain a devout and practising Muslim if the job he was doing involved training people in the safest, easiest and most efficient and cost-effective methods of going out there and killing Muslims on behalf of the United States of America?

Praying hadn’t helped, and nor had the conflicting voices in his head. He was trying to do the impossible, to balance the exhortations of Allah, the acknowledged reality that all Muslims on every continent were brothers and brothers didn’t kill brothers because family, whether local or global, was sacrosanct, with the comradeship and professionalism of the American military, the organisation that he had pledged allegiance to, just as he had pledged allegiance to America itself. How could he reconcile that, and how could he accept and cope with the knowledge that his country of birth was now at war with radical Islam and, at least by implication, with the whole of the Muslim world?

Until he had talked with the imam, he had almost felt as if his very soul was being torn apart. But eventually his prayers and the imam’s guidance had shown him where his true destiny lay: he was first, last and always, a Muslim, and the conduct of the West, and particularly of the Americans in the Middle East, had shown beyond all doubt that they were godless polluters of the planet, a radicalised Christian nation that would not rest until every other religion had been crushed beneath their steel-shod feet. And the imam had shown him that he was in a unique position, a Muslim able to help redress the balance, to even the scores, and able to do it from the inside, from the very bowels of the American war machine.

When he had grasped that essential – and in retrospect, entirely obvious – truth Dawood had managed to quiet his inner demons and was able to worship Allah with a clear conscience, while at the same time carrying out his military duties with his usual quiet professionalism while he waited for further guidance. And that guidance had been provided sooner than he had expected.

He had been contacted by a man who had understood his inner conflict, sympathised with his dilemma, and had finally been able to show him the way forward, to specify the precise route that he would have to take to retain his Islamic purity and at the same time help to strike a blow for Muslims everywhere. A route that would also, as a shahid, ensure his eternal life in the beatific presence of Allah himself.

That man had called himself Abū Tadmir, and Dawood neither knew nor cared what his real