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

name was, only that his wisdom and certainty of purpose served to further quell his doubts and reinforce the path that he knew in his heart was the correct one to follow.

And now, when the retaliatory strike against America’s capital city was about to begin, the contact, the instruction, that he had been waiting for simply hadn’t arrived. He could only assume, and hope, that Abū Tadmir had encountered some kind of technical difficulty that was hampering the changeover. At least, that was what he was silently praying was the reason.

‘Surveillance run complete,’ Nagell reported. ‘The Reaper’s in the climb for the transit to Fort Drum. We’ll need briefing on targets and weapons pretty soon, Sammy.’

Dawood stopped beside the control console and nodded. ‘You’ll get them in a couple minutes. Let me know when you’re at cruising altitude.’

The surveillance operator who been operating the sensors for the runs over the south coast of Lake Ontario stood up, stretched, announced that he needed a comfort break and walked out of the room.

And at that moment, just when Sami Dawood was convinced that the whole operation had failed for some unknown reason, his mobile phone finally displayed a message on its screen. It read: ‘Log-on problems. Contact now established. Execute.’

Dawood breathed a sigh of relief that his deduction about the delay had been correct. He could now carry out the actions that he had been mentally rehearsing for weeks. His lips curled in a slight smile as he looked again at the final word on the SMS message Abū Tadmir had sent him. It was more than just appropriate: it was an executive instruction with two separate but intimately linked meanings.

He walked across to the door of the control room and locked it, then strolled back to where Lieutenant Nagell was concentrating on steering the Reaper towards the Adirondacks air-to-ground range at Fort Drum. As he approached the seated man, Dawood reached into his uniform jacket pocket and took out the weapon that he had purchased perfectly legally, as a senior military officer, almost a year earlier.

It was a Walther Arms PPQ M2 pistol in 9mm calibre, with a fully loaded fifteen-round magazine inserted and one round already in the chamber, because Dawood hadn’t known how many people would be in the control room when the time came for him to fulfil his destiny. Like the more common Glock handgun range, the PPQ has no external manual safety catch and instead relies upon various internal safeties.

He stepped across to Nagell, held the pistol about six inches behind the seated man’s head and squeezed the trigger twice, the unsuppressed gunshots explosively loud in the confined space.

The effect upon the seated man was instant and terminal. Most of his face and forehead were blown forward onto the control panel in front of him and he tumbled forward, collapsing sideways half out of the seat and onto the floor, a spreading pool of crimson blood expanding around his shattered head. It had at least been quick. No Sweat Nagell had been a popular man on the base, and despite his intentions, Dawood had seen no particular reason to make him suffer unduly or even to make him aware that he would be dead in a matter of seconds.

Dawood stepped back and looked down critically at the corpse of the man he had just killed, alert for any indication that against the odds Nagell was still alive. But there was no movement.

Dawood replaced the pistol in his pocket, took out his phone and tapped out an instant reply to the SMS message: ‘Execution complete. Allāhu akbar.’ Then he dropped the mobile to the floor, aimed his pistol at it and fired a single round. The bullet blew the phone apart, permanently ending his conversation with Abū Tadmir and eliminating his link with the man.

He looked around, then knelt on the floor of the control room facing east, the approximate direction of Mecca, and said his brief final prayers.

Then he walked over to the other side of the room where he had a temporary desk and chair and sat down. He placed the Walther pistol on the table in front of him where it was within easy reach, and then just waited.

The sounds of the gunshots would have carried a considerable distance even outside the GCS and he knew that the locked door of the control room wouldn’t keep anybody out for very long. Even as he sat there listening, he could already hear the sound of running footsteps from somewhere outside, and an unidentified voice bellowed, ‘Shots fired!’

Somebody tried the door of the control room, and then hammered on it, shouting something unintelligible, though the meaning was clear.

They would be inside in minutes, perhaps even in seconds, and although Dawood knew he could take some of them with him with the rounds he had left in the pistol, the outcome was obviously never going to be in any doubt.

At least it would then all be over. Within a matter of minutes, at the most, he would know the essential truth of Jannah, the Garden of Paradise where, like all true Islamic believers, he would spend the rest of eternity accompanied by seventy-two houris – beautiful, full-breasted and utterly compliant virgins – to attend to his every wish and desire.

Three minutes later, the door to the control room crashed open and two soldiers dressed in full battle gear, one toting a Colt M4A1 carbine, the standard weapon of the American infantry, and the other a Remington M870 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, kicked their way inside and immediately separated.

Dawood stood up, picked the target on his left and fired two rounds from his Walther. One missed and the other hit the soldier on his body armour but did no lasting damage to him. The other soldier was the one with the shotgun, and before Dawood could pull the trigger again he had loosed off his first round.

At that range, the shotgun was by far the most lethal weapon in