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

the rudder pedals and began easing the control column back. He wasn’t a qualified pilot, but he knew enough about aircraft to know that that would stop the drone’s descent.

But it didn’t.

The view from the camera now showed the unmistakable shape of the city in front of the UAV, the buildings becoming clearer with every passing second, and the altimeter still showed an unaltered rate of descent.

Morgan shifted his gaze to the mapping screen. The Reaper was down to 10,000 feet and on the map had roughly five miles to run. At that rate, he guessed that impact would occur in just over one and a half minutes.

And he was going to have a bird’s eye view when it happened.

Chapter 74

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

Ben Morgan watched helplessly as the unmistakable skyline of Washington D.C. came into view on the screen in front of him. He could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building and the White House. He was still using the control column, or trying to, but none of the inputs he applied had the slightest effect upon the Reaper’s course.

Maybe the control column was defective. Maybe that was why it had been put away. Then a new dialogue box appeared on the screen: ‘Device installed’. Loading the driver had just taken a lot longer than he’d expected. Or maybe it just felt that way.

He again eased back on the control column. But again what he did had no effect on the flight of the Reaper.

Morgan slumped back in the seat, despair on his face as he tried to work out what was wrong. He again ducked under the desk and checked the control column connections, even though he knew if they were wrong the system wouldn’t have detected it and loaded the device driver.

The image from the drone’s camera showed exactly where the UAV was heading. Filling the screen and getting closer with every second that passed was perhaps the most potent and evocative symbol of the United States of America.

The Reaper, its fuel tanks half full and with a full load of lethal high-explosive ordnance, was less than a mile from the White House and on a definite collision course.

Chapter 75

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

‘I can’t stop this,’ Morgan said. ‘It’s not responding.’

On the screen, the individual figures of pedestrians were rapidly becoming visible, as were stationary vehicles positioned at odd angles on the streets where they’d presumably ended up when their engines died. Directly in front of the Reaper, the unmistakable shape of the White House was growing bigger by the second, and Morgan unconsciously pushed the chair back to try to distance himself from the inevitable impact.

He kept on pulling the control column, and moving it from side to side, but nothing he did had the slightest effect. The Reaper just continued its inexorable powered descent to oblivion.

‘Ten seconds,’ Morgan said. ‘Maybe less.’

Chapter 76

Fairview, Harford County, Maryland, United States of America

One of the SWAT team pushed Morgan to one side and stared at the displays on the two monitors for a moment. Then he reached out a hand to the trackball, span the wheel to move the mouse pointer on the screen showing the flight controls, selected one particular switch and clicked the left mouse button.

Then he reached for the control column and eased it back.

And instantly, as if by magic, the camera view changed. The streets and buildings, which had seemed close enough to touch, were suddenly replaced by the solid blue of the sky above Washington. Morgan could have cried with relief.

‘How did you do that?’ he demanded, recognising the man as the agent who’d been piloting the quad-copter drone around the target house before they made their approach.

‘You had the autopilot locked on,’ the special agent replied, as Morgan reached out for the control column again. ‘Don’t climb it too steeply. If you stall it, we’ll be even deeper in the shit than we were before. Do you want me to do it? I’ve got lots of experience with drones. Not Reapers, but a drone is still a drone.’

‘Oh, God. Yes, please,’ Morgan said, stood up and backed away as the agent took his seat.

He watched the navigation screen that showed the Reaper’s location and the agent steered it north-east, away from the capital, and checked the altimeter display, which confirmed the UAV was climbing steadily.

‘We’ve still got a problem,’ Gordon said, stepping over to him. ‘Well done for gaining control of that UAV, but it can’t stay in the air indefinitely, and you can’t just land it with the controls we have here. I don’t know too much about these devices, but I do know that the take-off and landing have to be handled by a pilot at whatever airfield is being used.’

‘If we can’t land it,’ Morgan said, ‘I suppose we could fly it out over the Atlantic and just ditch it.’

‘We could,’ Gordon replied, ‘but these things come with a multi-million-dollar price tag and it’s bound to be carrying weapons as well, so that has to be our option of last resort. We do know that it took off from Hancock Field, up at Syracuse, so I suggest we turn it round and head it in that direction. Maybe there’s a way of getting a military controller up there to find it on his radar and for another remote pilot to take control of it.’

The SWAT special agent now controlling the Reaper listened to the exchange and then turned round to look at Gordon.

‘I’ve got it heading north-east right now,’ he said, ‘and I’m climbing it to forty thousand feet or thereabouts to keep it well above any civilian traffic. Hancock Field isn’t the only unit up that way that flies these things. There’s a military base called Fort Drum at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and they operate drones as well. Maybe we should try calling them and find out if they’ve got any bright ideas.