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

the room. The three-inch magnum charge of buckshot ploughed into Dawood’s right side, almost tearing his arm from his body, and about a second later the second charge of buckshot tore through his stomach and lower abdomen, virtually ripping his body in half.

Dawood was clearly well beyond any kind of medical help, but he was still going to take time to die. With the room secured by the two soldiers, several officers from the unit entered to inspect it. Two of them walked over to look down at Dawood, one of whom almost immediately vomited noisily over the fallen man’s legs. They were easily able to reconstruct in their heads what had actually happened in there, though what they couldn’t possibly know was why.

None of them felt much like interrogating Dawood, who lay twitching and moaning on one side of the control room in his own spreading pool of blood, vomit covering his legs and most of his intestines splattered across the wall behind him.

And none of them felt like ending his agony, either.

Chapter 51

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

About five minutes after he’d received the final, triumphant, message from Sami Dawood, Sadir had set the next part of his operational plan in motion, using his mobile phone to dial the first of two numbers he had recorded within the contacts list on his burner. That was the number of the Nokia that he had hidden in the woodland adjoining Hancock Field. That phone emitted no sound, because the ringer was set to silent, but that had no effect upon what happened next.

Ringing the Nokia completed the circuit between the heavy-duty twelve-volt battery and the device, a specialised kind of bomb known as a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon, or NNEMP, which was designed to do far more than just explode. The weapon had been fabricated by the three electrical engineers in the house at Damascus, the men using the names Rafiq Khayat, Nadeem Ramli and Imran Wardi, following Sadir’s most precise, detailed and specific instructions. Three men who would even then be assuming new identities and putting a safe distance between themselves and Washington D.C.

Initially in complete silence, a series of actions then took place with extraordinary rapidity under the camouflage-patterned tarpaulin. First, the entire current from the heavy-duty battery was fed down a pair of high-capacity insulated copper cables to the stator winding. This sent an immediate electric current through the stator which, as anyone with a knowledge of basic physics would be aware, generated a magnetic field. Electricity and magnetism are inextricably linked within the force known as electromagnetism: the passage of an electric current generates a magnetic field and the reverse is also true, a moving magnetic field producing an electric current. In this case, the design of the stator, the tight winding of the mass of copper coils from which it had been constructed and the sheer size of the device meant that the magnetic field generated was both intense and enormously powerful.

After a predetermined interval – an interval so short that it was to all intents instantaneous – a separate electrical circuit triggered a blasting cap within the core of C4 – Composition 4 – plastic explosive packed into a steel cylinder, the armature, around which the copper wire forming the stator had been wound, the cylinder and the stator separated by an airgap. Far too fast for any eye to see, the explosion blasted through the armature as a wave, expanding with incredible rapidity, the sound of the detonation crashing through the woods beside the base.

That sudden expansion forced the metal of the cylinder into contact with the winding of the stator, producing an immediate short-circuit and disrupting the current from the battery. The forward motion of the short circuit, in its turn, compressed the magnetic field, resulting in a massive burst of electromagnetic energy, an electromagnetic pulse or EMP, which travelled across the comparatively short distance between the weapon’s location and the control facilities for the airfield.

A few fractions of a second after the explosion, the electromagnetic pulse, containing a confusion of powerful electric and magnetic fields, ploughed into its target, wreaking havoc on every electrical system that it reached, causing voltage surges, current spikes, short-circuits and electrical fires, fusing circuit boards and destroying every electronic circuit that it reached. The result was immediate and instantly catastrophic. Cars and lorries stopped moving as their engine control systems were fried. Battery-powered watches stopped working, mobile phones burnt out, and virtually everything else, every electrical device from power points and lighting to control circuits, air-conditioning systems, radios and radars, simply shut down.

The weapon that Sadir had envisaged as functioning as the second phase of his attack on Washington D.C., albeit indirectly in the case of the device located at Syracuse, had worked perfectly.

Everybody in the control room heard the bang at the same instant as every light went out. The screens, illuminated instruments and controls on the drone pilot’s position instantly turned black and the all-pervading hum of the air-conditioning system, a sound that hardly any of the people there ever really heard because it was a permanent part of the background noise, immediately ceased. In some ways, that was the most alarming thing of all because it meant there’d been a total and complete shutdown of power, not just the simple tripping of a breaker somewhere in the electrical system.

A couple of the officers pulled out their mobile phones to try to find out from somebody what was going on, but in both cases their handsets were not only warm to the touch, but also completely dead. It wasn’t just a case of the failure of the mobile phone system: their phones had simply become small and slim electronic paperweights, neither useful nor ornamental. The landline phones in the GCS were also completely dead. The most senior officer there, another major, posted one of the armed soldiers outside the door as a