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

However, those same Islamic laws are very specific with respect to how any such conflict is to be conducted. In particular, it is forbidden for women, children and non-combatants to be targeted, and residential areas and property are not to be attacked: the struggle is supposed to only be between the members of the Muslim community and those troops or forces that are seen to be actively oppressing or otherwise threatening them. Radical Islam has thoroughly embraced the concept of jihad but has clearly decided to ignore the other Islamic laws and rules of the struggle, preferring to direct most of their operations against the softest possible targets, the civilian populations of the countries with which they are in dispute or which they see as their oppressors.

The ISI leadership knew that finding people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in support of their cause would not be particularly difficult. Recent history has clearly shown that disaffected young men in many Western nations were prepared to concoct their own plans and strike at the heart of their adopted country, which in some cases was also the country of their birth. So providing the appropriate guidance, finance and equipment would ensure that devastating attacks could be launched comparatively easily. It would just be a matter of identifying suitable ‘volunteers’ and then executing the operation. And the elders planning and directing the ISI had every intention of doing exactly that.

Such terrorist attacks were easy enough to plan and, given the proper degree of commitment by the selected shahids, would always be successful. Attacks like these, mounted with no warning given and always aiming for the highest possible level of casualties, would be devastating. Every British and American death would be a cause for celebration and they would relish the chaos and carnage the attacks inflicted.

But the other thing the ISI leadership needed was a very different attack strategy. They wanted something as utterly devastating as possible and a lot more inventive than a shahid detonating a suicide vest on a crowded street or driving a truck into a mass of pedestrians.

At a hastily convened meeting held in the remaining ground-floor room of a ruined building – a building ruined by American bombing – the ruling council debated the options open to them. The air was dense with harsh and angry exchanges in Arabic, and made visibly thicker by what looked like cigarette smoke, though it was actually dust raised from the floor and the scattered tables by thumping fists and stamping feet. Although many Iraqis enjoy cigarettes, smoking had always been seen by the ISI leadership as un-Islamic and had been banned, with severe penalties meted out to transgressors. Many of the council members still smoked, but always in private locations where they knew they could not be observed. Most of them also preferred American cigarettes to any of the local brands like Sumer, Eridu or Baghdad, making their secret vice doubly anti-Islamic, and the avoidance of detection therefore doubly important.

They needed an entirely new direction and, after spending much of the day in heated discussions, they finally thought they had one. In fact, they had two. Two very different targets and attack methods in their two principal target countries.

It was the youngest member of the council, a thick-set and heavily built man whose intimidating physical appearance belied his keen brain, who came up with the idea for the bigger attack, based upon an article he had read in an American magazine. Mahdi Sadir was no poet, but he was very well aware of the meaning of the expression ‘poetic justice’. It seemed to him to be entirely appropriate that the Americans would experience death raining down upon them in a very similar fashion to the carnage inflicted upon ISI soldiers at the hands of the Americans in Iraq with their armed drones and ground attack aircraft. A war waged by technology had given the infidels the upper hand, and ISI had been slow to respond.

He also knew that the elders would wish to see a game-changing attack on London as well as the much more complex and devastating assault on the second and more significant target, and accordingly he came up with ideas for two very different attack strategies. The first was easy for him to explain because it was simply an enhanced version of the kind of retribution attacks that had been launched against the West over the last few years, and he knew that the elders would grasp its inherent simplicity and potential effects almost immediately.

The second phase of the operation he was proposing was a more difficult sell for a variety of reasons, but mainly because Sadir frankly understood very little of the science behind the method of attack, and the elders he was talking to understood even less.

The concept was simple enough, though it would be anything but simple to implement because there were massive technical challenges and obstacles that would have to be overcome. But the idea was so apposite that everybody on the council agreed it was well worth pursuing, even though Sadir explained to them, several times over, that it might take years before the plan could be implemented. There would be several separate components to the final strategy, and to make it work they would have to enlist or recruit specialist helpers in at least two very different disciplines: electrical engineering and computer science. They would also need to find somebody who was employed in an organisation that represented everything they were fighting against. They would need to consort with their deadliest enemy.

But he was both enthusiastic and persuasive and after a further three hours of talking – a comparatively short time for any decision involving a group of Arabs, who liked to explore every possible angle of every possible subject in every possible way, repeatedly – he was given permission to investigate the second proposed attack and, if it appeared to