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

being considered by the Islamic State, at least until the organisation had started to replenish its coffers and people had begun to forget what had happened.

He had a small farm on the outskirts of Karbala, not far from the Holy Shrine of Al-Abbas, some fifty miles to the south of Baghdad, where he would be close enough to the action to know what was going on and for people to remember him when decisions needed to be taken, but far enough away that people wouldn’t see him on a daily basis and be reminded of what had happened. But he was determined to remain in touch with the organisation that he had served for so many years.

He fairly quickly settled into the routine, tending his sheep and goats, but always keeping a wary eye for danger. As far as he knew, the Americans had no idea who he was, far less what involvement he might have had in what had happened – or rather hadn’t happened – in America’s capital city.

In this belief, he was sadly mistaken.

With the situation in Washington under control, the NSA and their partner the GCHQ began picking apart the actions and particularly the communications that Mahdi Sadir had employed, not only while he was in America but also in the years leading up to that, when he was visiting places in Europe and China and even further afield. It is amazing what information can be collected by a careful examination of anybody’s mobile phone usage, and although Sadir had been careful, he had still left behind near-invisible traces that could be detected by dedicated analysts.

Piece by piece, a picture began to emerge of who Sadir had been and who his contacts were. And from this amorphous data map the number-crunchers at GCHQ utilised Venn diagrams, 3-D graphs and other analytical tools to make sense of the connections. As they had expected, certain names and certain numbers began to surface, some repeatedly, as the entire picture started to emerge.

One of these was a man named Rashid who, along with certain other senior Islamic State officials, was clearly identified as being behind the linked plots in London and Washington. It was soon confirmed that Rashid, as the most senior member of this group, had apparently been the driving force behind the attacks.

And that meant his life was forfeit.

The Americans decided that retribution would come from the skies, but not as a random bombing or anything as imprecise as that. Instead, they obtained pictures of Rashid’s face and the location of his smallholding and bided their time.

As a kind of poetic twist, they also decided that their weapon of choice would be a Reaper, and the man controlling it would be operating from the GCS at Hancock Field, the seat – or to be exact an identical replacement seat – that No Sweat Nagell had been sitting in when Major Sami Dawood had executed him.

Late on a Saturday afternoon, Rashid was walking along a country road, returning to his smallholding, when he heard an unusual sound in the sky. He stopped and looked up, shading his eyes against the harsh sun over Iraq, and watched as an unusual-looking aircraft with a long nose and straight wings overflew him at an unusually low altitude. When it had passed, the aircraft began climbing away and was quickly lost to sight.

‘That’s a match,’ the sensor operator said, comparing the frozen image the Reaper’s camera had recorded with a colour photograph of the man they were seeking. The low pass had allowed them to obtain excellent quality pictures.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ the pilot replied, already arming one of the UAV’s Hellfire missiles. ‘We’ll attack from the west, out of the sun.’

‘Just a shame he won’t hear it coming.’

The AGM-114 Hellfire missile was originally designed as a Mach 1.3 supersonic tank-buster but has proved to be equally adept at the elimination of selected high-value targets. People like Rashid, in fact.

This particular Reaper was carrying a Hellfire variant, the AGM-114R9X. Commonly known as the Ninja Bomb or the Flying Ginsu, the high explosive has been replaced by a kinetic warhead comprising a one-hundred-pound lump of material and six high-speed blades to slice and dice the target. It is specifically intended as an anti-personnel weapon and designed to reduce collateral damage and has been successfully deployed in the trouble spots of the world since 2017.

The man who masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, Jamal Ahmad Mohammad Al Badawi, was eliminated by a R9X, as was Abu Khayr al-Masri, one of the most senior members of al-Qaeda. It has also been used against al-Qaeda members in Syria and senior Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. It’s a precision assassination weapon against which there is almost no defence.

Rashid resumed his walk along the dusty track, wondering briefly about the aircraft he had seen. And then, perhaps gripped by some kind of subconscious premonition, he stopped and looked back, towards the west and the slowly sinking sun. At a greyish dot, very high and moving slowly.

And then he saw something else, below the grey dot, something that seemed to glint, high in the sky. Something small and fast moving. Very fast moving. Something that seemed to be heading towards him.

And in that instant he knew they’d made the connection. His last conscious thought was that he’d heard that the Americans didn’t either forgive or forget.

Author’s Note

SINCGARS

SINCGARS stands for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System. It’s a piece of standard military equipment and comes in various flavours, including the AN/PRC-119 manpack radio, which permits communication with airborne units. Typically, each patrol would include a soldier carrying one of these units.

Another is the AN/PRC-148 MBITR handheld unit. The designation MBITR stands for Multiband Inter/Intra Team Radio and is a personal combat radio system developed to address the requirement for individual communications on the battlefield. This is reflected in the designation AN/PRC, which stands for Army/Navy Portable Radio used for two-way