Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

GCS was probably the easiest and safest thing to do, just in case he wasn’t being spun a yarn. ‘I’ll get on that now, sir,’ he replied. ‘Can I call you on this mobile number once we’re up and running?’

‘Yes, yes. Just get on with it.’

Before Paulson did anything else, he dialled the number for the Air National Guard base at Syracuse. It came back as number unobtainable, and that single result was more convincing to him than anything that the man calling himself Colonel Moore had said.

Ten minutes later, Paulson led his team into the ground control station and explained briefly what little he knew. He didn’t mention terrorists or hijacking because that idea was stretching his own credulity, and instead described the incident as involving a ‘rogue’ drone caused by a massive equipment malfunction at Hancock Field.

‘We need to find this Reaper,’ he said, ‘and that won’t be easy, because we have no idea where it is. In fact, when they lost contact with it, the UAV was on its way to the air-to-ground range here at Fort Drum, but where it is now nobody has any idea. It probably isn’t squawking so we need to start looking out for primary contacts. Check with all the local radar units and try all our usual contact frequencies, including the Ku-band links through the satellite. I’ll try and get some more information from Syracuse.

‘Right, let’s get to it.’

Chapter 65

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

But before they could formulate a plan, far less move, Morgan’s phone rang and the screen told him the caller was Natasha Black.

‘Yes, Natasha,’ he said.

‘Chummy’s been on the horn again,’ she told him. ‘He made a call to another mobile number that hasn’t been flagged up before. The peculiar thing is that he just rang it, but there was no conversation, and that mobile is now off the air.’

‘We think he’s triggered several EMP weapons in DC to knock out the radars and radios,’ Morgan said, ‘and that call could have been the activation signal. Our best guess is that he’s steering an armed Reaper drone towards the city. We’re just about to try to take him down. Just to confirm, you haven’t got a more accurate set of coordinates for the location of his phone than you supplied before?’

‘No,’ she replied, ‘but maybe I can help you identify the property.’

‘How?’

‘His mobile is still switched on. I don’t know if that means he’s expecting another call from somebody or if he just forgot to turn it off, but when you get outside the house or wherever he is, text me and I’ll call him up. I can be a phone company executive with an offer that he simply can’t afford not to take. You should be able to hear the phone ringing from inside the building.’

‘Good idea. We’ll do that. Now we’ve got to move.’

The target house was located on a large corner plot, and the area was sufficiently rural that the SWAT team members were able to get to within about twenty yards of the front door without any possibility of being seen by the occupants. But that was as far as they could go, because as soon as the special agent in charge – the fabric nametag on his black combat clothing read ‘Wayne’ – scanned the front of the property with his binoculars he spotted two small cameras covering the road and the short driveway.

‘If we get any nearer,’ he said, ‘we might as well walk over there and ring on the doorbell. Let’s try round the back. There might be cameras there as well, but because of the trees and shrubs we should be able to get a whole lot closer to the building without being spotted.’

They left two of the team members to cover the front of the house with their sniper rifles and the rest of them retraced their path until they were able to step into the open ground behind the property.

Wayne had been right: there was a camera aimed at the lawned area to the rear of the house, but the sides of the property appeared to have no surveillance devices in place, and that omission allowed them to get close without being detected.

‘We need to lose that single camera,’ he said, and moments later two of his men flattened themselves against the back wall of the property and walked sideways until the camera was directly above them. One of the men crouched down, braced himself and used his linked hands and shoulders as stepping stones for his partner to climb up high enough to reach not the camera, but the cable that fed it. He took a pair of insulated wire cutters, in case the camera was fed by mains power, and briskly snipped the cable in two.

Chapter 66

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

Inside the improvised control suite they’d constructed at the back of the house, Mahdi Sadir was suddenly aware of a change in the room, or more specifically of a change in the ambient lighting, but for a few moments he wasn’t aware of what had caused it.

He checked the screens and controls in front of him, but they all appeared to be normal. Then he looked up towards the ceiling, at the three small flatscreens which displayed images from the CCTV cameras on the property. Strangely, only two of them still showed the feeds from the area around the house. The rear camera, the one that covered the yard, was no longer working. Sadir stood up in order to see better and carefully checked the pictures being produced by the two front cameras. Everything in front of the house appeared to be perfectly normal, exactly as it had been all day. No pedestrians and no new vehicles were visible.

It was probably, he rationalised, a defective camera, or possibly a problem with the wiring, and of no consequence to him – not when he was so close to the