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

guard while the rest of them dispersed to try to find out what had gone wrong.

Within minutes, it was clear that virtually all the electrical systems in that section of Hancock Field had suffered catastrophic burnout. Almost nothing was working, not even cars and jeeps, and there was no obvious way of recovering the situation. A team of electrical engineers from the base began examining the circuits and equipment and rapidly came to the conclusion that fixing it was going to require replacement of virtually everything, including many sections of wiring, rather than attempting any kind of repair.

Hancock Field, and more specifically the GCS used to control the Reaper drones, was blind and deaf and dumb, without radios, satellite links, data links or even raw radar.

And that was a problem, because somewhere, probably about thirty thousand feet above their heads and some miles away, was a fully armed MQ-9 Predator drone that nobody was actually controlling.

Not only was nobody controlling it, but none of the people who were now standing around in the dark and windowless GCS, aiming torches pointlessly at the silent banks of equipment, had the slightest idea how to rectify the situation.

‘It’ll keep flying,’ a voice said out of the darkness. ‘So at least we’ve got time to find it.’

‘How?’ another and more senior-sounding voice snapped. ‘With binoculars? And then what do we do?’

‘I don’t think we’ve got any choice. We need to get a fighter airborne out of Andrews or somewhere and shoot it down.’

‘That sounds easy if you say it quickly,’ the base commanding officer replied. ‘But there are a few tiny problems, like we don’t know where it is, we don’t know how high it is, we don’t know which direction it was flying and we don’t know what transponder code it was using, so how the hell is anybody going to identify it? The only two people who knew any of that are lying dead on the floor right here. Even the surveillance systems operator only knew that the camera run at Lake Ontario had been completed and that the drone was on its way towards Fort Drum, because then he decided he needed a leak and left the room. I suppose we’re lucky he did that, because if he hadn’t there might be another corpse lying on the floor over there, and we wouldn’t even know that much.’

‘That was probably deliberate,’ another senior officer suggested.

‘Deliberate? What the hell do you mean? Of course it was deliberate.’

‘The reason for the killing, I mean. That bastard Dawood had to shoot Nagell because he was the pilot. He would have known where the drone was, and the squawk, and we would have been able to get another radar unit to track it. At least, we could have done that, until all the lights went out.’

The CO looked around at the dark figures – they were most of his senior officers – clustered around him in the lightless and silent control room.

‘And there’s something else none of you might have thought of,’ he added, ‘and that’s the professional suicide angle. I, personally, am not entirely happy about the idea of authorising the destruction of a perfectly serviceable fourteen-million-dollar Reaper and having that put on my military record.’

‘I think they’re closer to sixteen million these days.’

‘Whatever. So before we start calling up fighter support we need to do what we can to find it. Whoever said it was still in the air got that right. With no control inputs, it should keep on flying at the same height, at the same speed and in the same direction, but what worries me is that it’s probably not doing that.’

Nobody responded.

‘What I mean,’ the CO clarified, ‘is that we’ve been hit by some kind of EMP weapon, and whoever did that didn’t do it just to fuck up our aircon units and trucks and phones. Building a weapon like that takes knowledge and skills that most people don’t have, so I think we’re looking at terrorist activity here. I think that Reaper’s been hijacked, though I’m damned if I know how, and right now it could be heading straight for New York City or somewhere to try to finish what nine eleven started.’

‘Shit,’ somebody said.

‘You got that right, and we’re neck-deep in it. So we need to get out of here and find somewhere on this base where there’s a working telephone. Then we contact Fort Drum and see if their systems are working, because if they can use their radios or satellite link we might be able to regain control of this thing and bring it down at an airfield somewhere, maybe up at Wheeler-Sack.

‘The other thing we do is let our command structure know what’s happened, because we’re not looking at any kind of an accident here. This was enemy action. So we pass the buck up the line and suggest mounting combat air patrols near high-value targets like New York in case the Reaper is heading that way. Then if it does get shot down it won’t be on my chitty. Short term, I want armed patrols covering the perimeter until further notice. And get a team together to locate the source of the explosion that kicked off this shitstorm. Right, let’s get moving.’

Chapter 52

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

For whatever reason, establishing control of the Reaper drone out of Hancock Field through the satellite data link had taken far longer than Sadir had expected, and for a few minutes he wondered if they would have to abort the attack that day. But the significance of the date and what they were trying to achieve was so important to him that he shoved that idea to the back of his mind. Completing the operation on that most important day of the year for almost every American was essential to drive home the message of radical Islam.

Michael and Joseph had been sitting alongside him ever since he’d arrived that morning and ever since they