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

that the various verbal statements attributed to him were actually spoken by an Iraqi actor. A terrorist captured by the coalition forces also claimed that Abū Omar was a fiction and had been created simply so that a man of Iraqi origin could be perceived as the leader of an insurgent group run by foreigners, meaning al-Qaeda. This story was reinforced in March 2008 by another terrorist group – Hamas-Iraq – which claimed the same thing, that the Abū Omar character had been created by al-Qaeda as the Iraqi face of the insurgent organisation.

There was further confusion when the Iraqi Interior Minister stated that Abū Omar – or al-Baghdadi as he was commonly known – had been captured in Baghdad in March 2007. That was apparently somebody else who looked a bit like him. Then the same source claimed al-Baghdadi had been killed during a joint American–Iraqi operation north of the capital. That was followed by another report that the man had been arrested by the Iraqi military in April 2009, with photographs released to prove it. ISI denied this claim as well as all the others in a statement made by al-Baghdadi himself, and he continued to release audio statements and recordings throughout 2009 and 2010.

He was finally and definitively identified as one of the people killed in the raid on the safe house near Tikrit in April 2010.

Vektor, Gosudarstvennyy Nauchnyy Tsentr Virusologii I Biotekhnologii (Vector, Russian State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology)

Koltsovo Naukograd, Novosibirsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia

Koltsovo – Кольцо́во in the Cyrillic alphabet – was created in 1974around Vektor, the Russian State Centre for Research on Virology andBiotechnology, an institute that studies particularly dangerous viruses.Named after Nikolai Koltsov, a respected Russian biologist, thesettlement was granted naukograd or science town status on 17 January2003 and is part of the group of Russian laboratories known as theBiopreparat.

Vektor itself is located a short distance to the east of the main town of Koltsovo as part of a scattered cluster of buildings encircled by a boundary road. The location is relatively secluded and has a permanent garrison of Russian Army soldiers because of what’s held in the building. The six-storey structure contains samples of some of the most lethal bugs on the planet, including the Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, dengue and yellow fever viruses, and secure biosafety level 4 – BSL4 – laboratories where work on these deadly pathogens can be carried out in safety. Safety in this case is something of a relative term: in 2004 a female researcher at Vektor died after pricking herself with a needle contaminated with Ebola. The establishment is one of only two locations in the world, the other one being the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, that are official repositories for samples of the smallpox virus.

During the Cold War Vektor was heavily involved in the development of biological weapons, but today it’s an important research centre concentrating on creating antiviral vaccines and drugs, and on developing diagnostic tools and protocols for the treatment of infectious diseases.

Officially, that is. In fact, the unit’s remit is far wider than that and includes a number of other, largely unrelated disciplines linked only by the two facts that the materials involved in the research are both extremely small and are dangerous or lethal to human beings. But lethal viruses and bacteria are not the only sub-microscopic entities that require specialised handling and storage.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Vektor management found that although its diminished client base still included the Russian government and various organs of the state, many of the approaches it received were from outside, often from well outside, the boundaries of the new Commonwealth of Independent States. But a research project was a research project no matter where the principals were located, and Vektor had no particular difficulty in accommodating requests, as long as those requests were backed by a sufficiently attractive offer of remuneration. And one of the defining characteristics of many of its new customers was that they had very substantial, in some cases effectively unlimited, sources of funding.

Theory of flight

The most commonly accepted explanation of why aircraft fly is based on a theorem worked out by a Swiss mathematician named Daniel Bernoulli in 1738, when the only things in the air were birds, bats and insects, none of which bore much resemblance to an aircraft. Bernoulli calculated that if the upper surface of an aerofoil section is curved, like a modern aircraft’s wing, air will have to travel faster over it compared to the speed of the air along the underside. That means the air over the upper surface will be at a lower pressure than the lower, so the wing will be ‘sucked’ or lifted upwards. This is known as lift.

But there’s a problem. If the theory is right, then an aircraft should not be able to fly if it is upside-down, because then the effect of lift would be to force the aircraft down towards the ground. But display aircraft at air shows and the like routinely fly upside-down for prolonged distances, so Bernoulli can’t be entirely correct.

It also doesn’t explain why aircraft with flat, non-aerofoil wings, like some modern fighters, still manage to get into the air.

The other main contender is the Newtonian principle, based on his Third Law, which suggests that an aircraft’s wing is forced upwards by the pressure of the air on its lower surface as the speed increases. The argument is that air has mass, and so the downward pressure of the lower surface of a wing should result in an equal and opposite force from the air to push the wing upwards.

This theory is more comprehensive because it can be applied to wings of any shape and is equally valid when an aircraft is flying inverted. However, the theory does not explain why there is a measurable area of low pressure above an aerofoil wing when an aircraft is in flight.

Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing (JSFAW)

One