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

there, the one who looks like an Arab. The other two, the two Chinese here, were already dead. The Arab fired three times and so we returned the favour.’

‘But none of you are hurt?’

‘No, because he didn’t fire at us. He fired at that.’ He pointed at the control suite, where Morgan was just sitting down.

‘I think Unit 61398 of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is now permanently down by two of its most experienced hackers,’ Morgan said, glancing at the two bodies on the floor behind him. ‘Which is no bad thing, in my opinion. But that doesn’t help us right here and right now.’

‘What you mean?’ Gordon asked.

‘Sadir knew that once the SWAT team guys were in the house, he was only going to leave here in a body bag. So he didn’t fire at them: he fired at the control panel to try and disable it. The reason he did that must be because he’s already got the Reaper inbound to DC on quite literally a crash course, and by disabling these controls he knew there would be nothing we could do to stop it.’

‘Knew, or hoped?’ Rogers asked.

‘I don’t know yet.’

Chapter 73

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

Sadir’s bullets had smashed the flatscreen monitor directly in front of the central seat on the console, ripped through the control column mounted on the desk and ploughed through a black plastic box containing several circuit boards. On what was left of the front of the box Morgan could see various analogue-type, but obviously digitally powered, flight instruments. He presumed that was a device running in tandem with the Reaper’s instrumentation circuits that he expected to see displayed on the flat-panel monitors. A throttle quadrant was clamped on the right-hand side of the desk and below it he could see a set of rudder pedals. A standard computer keyboard and a trackball completed the set-up. It looked very like some of the other much-modified home flight simulators he’d seen.

He knew time was running out, and he also knew that he was the only person in that room and in that house with anything like sufficient knowledge of computer systems to recover the situation. And that depended upon him getting the control console up and running again, soonest.

The control column was way beyond repair, just a shattered collection of plastic and wires, but Morgan knew the way that computer programmers thought and worked, and he was absolutely convinced that somewhere in the room, in one of the cupboards or drawers or somewhere, there would be spare components. No serious computer user ever just has one machine or one screen or one mouse or one keyboard because people like that are always looking for faster or more responsive equipment, and so inevitably they accumulate bits and pieces that are perfectly functional and usable but not quite the newest or highest-spec.

All they had to do was find them.

‘Grant,’ he said, ‘can you see if you can find a spare control column somewhere, as fast as you can, please.’

‘Got it.’

Morgan stepped around to the back of the control console, unplugged the ruined screen and connected the undamaged one on the right-hand side, then walked back to the seat. Behind him, one of the SWAT team members was photographing the room and the three bodies lying on the floor, hopefully to allow the corpses to be moved somewhere else.

As he sat down the screen came to life and displayed the view from the Reaper’s main forward-facing camera in the upper portion – the view was simply sky and clouds with nothing at all to indicate the drone’s location – and below that, in a separate window, the flight instruments of the UAV.

He looked to his left, at the other undamaged flat-panel monitor, and realised it was showing the location of what could only be the Reaper, a tiny blue triangular symbol following a red vector and overlaid on a map of the local area. What immediately worried him was how close it was to Washington D.C. He checked the scale displayed at the bottom right of the screen and mentally applied that to the distance the UAV still had to run.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘That’s fifteen miles, eighteen at the most.’

He switched his gaze to the other screen and to the flight instruments displayed there. The ASI, the air speed indicator, was showing 175 and he knew that the speed of an aircraft was normally given in knots, so that meant 200 miles an hour. Or just under twenty seconds to travel one mile.

The altimeter was unwinding at a frightening rate, and as he looked it passed 20,000 feet in the descent. He did some very rough and ready calculations in his head and estimated that the drone would reach ground level at about the same time as it would be over the centre of Washington.

Which was obviously the point.

Sadir must’ve heard something or guessed that he wasn’t going to get the chance to drop whatever weapons the Reaper was carrying and instead had set it up to crash into the city centre, relying on the explosive power of the fuel still in the drone’s tanks to cause as much mayhem as possible.

‘I found this,’ Rogers said, handing Morgan a complex-looking control column studded with buttons and switches.

‘Great.’ Morgan grabbed it, dived under the desk, identified the sockets on the system unit that the destroyed control column was plugged into, ripped them out and plugged in the new device.

He sat in the chair again and looked at the screen. At the bottom right-hand side a notification had just popped up: ‘New device found. Driver loading.’

‘It this going to work?’ Rogers asked.

‘Buggered if I know,’ Morgan replied. ‘But if I don’t get this control column to function, and bloody fast, we are comprehensively screwed, and so’s a hefty chunk of the population of DC. The only difference is that we’ll get to walk away.’

The notification cleared from the screen. He rested his feet on