Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  North looked at her and nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It was an anomaly and they decided to take it to the next level. The next level down, I mean. They took a sample to UCL, University College London, and used the scanning electron microscope they have there.’

  ‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ Dame Janet instructed. ‘Presumably this SEM thing identified whatever it was.’

  North nodded.

  ‘It did, yes,’ he replied, ‘but that’s really where our problems start, not where they finish.’ He paused again. ‘Do any of you know what a fullerene is?’ he asked. ‘Or a buckyball?’

  Chapter 5

  River Thames, London

  What had taken most of the time had been working out the delivery mechanism. The target, in the context of the campaign, was both very ambitious and perfectly obvious, and it wasn’t even the first time that somebody had tried to destroy it, though that much earlier attempt had been a complete failure. The problem they had faced was that, precisely because the target was so obvious and so important, it was also extremely well protected. They knew from the very start that getting close enough to it to do any significant damage, at least using the easiest approach and one of their normal, tried and tested methods of attack, would never work.

  There was one approach path to the target that was essentially unguarded but presented an extremely high degree of difficulty and would have required at least one of the volunteer shahids to learn to fly an aircraft, and they really hadn’t got time for that. And in any case, after 9/11 the rules and precautions involving powered flights near cities in the United Kingdom, and especially near London, had been tightened up so much that they knew a successful attack from the air could not be guaranteed. It might not even be possible because of the large number of military bases near London from which a fighter aircraft could be scrambled. So they looked again at the other unguarded avenue of approach and decided that was their best option, but using a slightly different and hopefully unexpected method.

  They knew more or less what they needed to do, and after about a week spent wandering around in the boatyards and marinas that were dotted about the upper reaches of the Thames, they’d found three vessels that would suit their purposes. They covertly watched to see how often the owners of these boats appeared and then settled on the oldest one, which looked as if it had almost been abandoned.

  In the late evening of the day after they had made their choice, Hassan and Tariq, whose combined skill sets included opening locked doors and a certain facility with key-operated systems of all kinds, had entered the small marina after watching it for over an hour to make sure they would be the only people there. That had required picking the padlock securing the pedestrian access gate, which they’d then carefully locked behind them – they would be leaving by a different route – before heading for the office building on which they knew two security cameras were mounted. The most expensive things in the marina were the boats berthed there, not the office buildings, and that was where the cameras had been pointed.

  Tariq had found a sturdy wooden box that would give him the height he needed to reach the camera. He stood on it and, taking care to keep his face well away from the lens, he had sprayed a thick coating of black paint onto it. He’d repeated the treatment with the second camera, checked to make sure there were no other monitoring devices, and then they’d made their way through the marina to the berth where the cabin cruiser was located.

  The lock on the stern door had given them no trouble at all, and nor had the ignition lock. About five minutes after stepping on board the boat, Tariq had released the mooring ropes and begun keeping a sharp lookout in the darkness of the river as Hassan, keeping the engine running at low revolutions, had carefully edged the boat away from its berth.

  It had taken them another hour to travel along the Thames to the almost derelict boathouse that they had discovered during their initial surveillance, and where the cabin cruiser would remain while they prepared it for its short final voyage. That didn’t take too long, because while the search for a suitable boat had been underway, the remaining two members of the gang had been sourcing the other components that they would need, principally ammonium nitrate fertiliser.

  This they couldn’t buy in the quantities they needed because that would attract unwelcome attention to them, but by visiting a number of farms located to the west and north-west of London they had been able to steal bags of the substance, taking just two or three from each farm they visited after dark, reasoning that most farmers wouldn’t notice that the fifty-four bags of fertiliser they had owned on Wednesday had become fifty-one or fifty-two bags by Thursday.

  Ammonium nitrate is a high-nitrogen fertiliser and is comparatively stable in most circumstances – warehouses in Beirut excluded, obviously – and when mixed with diesel oil in the ratio of about 94 per cent ammonium nitrate to 6 per cent diesel fuel it forms a compound known as ANFO, four letters which rather unimaginatively stand for ‘ammonium nitrate fuel oil’, which is more stable than ammonium nitrate by itself and is classed as a tertiary explosive, meaning that it can’t be detonated by shock or something like a blasting cap. To cook off ANFO a secondary explosive known as a booster or a primer has to be used. The explosive yield of the mixture can be improved by as much as 30 per cent by the addition of about 15 per cent powdered aluminium by weight.

  Tariq and his companions had already sourced the aluminium powder and Abū Tadmir, the name adopted by Mahdi Sadir, the leader of their group but a man who was not literally a part of it, had had both the funds and more importantly the contacts to produce a half-kilo block of Semtex and a detonator which together would act as the booster for the ANFO. He had also, at one of their meetings held at random locations outside London, supplied a long canvas bag, the contents of which had clanked mechanically when he handed it over.

  That, Sadir had said in reply to the obvious question from Tariq, was their insurance policy. He’d opened the bag and produced a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle, a box of ammunition and two spare magazines.

  ‘This,’ he’d said, ‘will ensure that the boat will not be stopped on the river by anybody.’

  Ten days after they’d stolen the cabin cruiser, it was ready. The very first thing they’d done was to change the name painted on the stern to try to disguise the fact that it had been stolen. That was easy because the original name was made up of six letters and was a palindrome, and by painting over the first and last they’d produced a name that was still a palindrome but quite different to the original.

  Then they’d stripped out virtually everything from the interior of the saloon and dumped it. There wasn’t much finesse involved in the removal, though they took great care to make sure that the hull wasn’t damaged by their actions. Acting on Sadir’s specific instructions, they’d then packed all the ANFO into watertight bags and stacked them on the floor of the saloon in a single thick layer wrapped in heavy-duty waterproof plastic sheeting and sealed with copious amounts of tape. Both ammonium nitrate and ANFO were highly hygroscopic and it was essential to keep the mixture as dry as possible to maximise its explosive power.

  More or less in the centre of the improvised explosive was the chunk of Semtex into which the electrically powered detonator had been inserted, attached to a simple circuit that included a battery. That would form the booster that would initiate the explosion.

  They had known from the start that the mission would require sacrifice because Sadir had made it very clear that the only way it was going to work was if they were directly involved in the delivery of the improvised weapon. And by that he meant one of them would have to stand in the cabin cruiser beside the explosive, steer the vessel to its destination and then trigger the booster charge when the boat was in precisely the optimum position.

  That was the reality of the situation. They did not have the technology to even attempt to control the boat remotely, and the strong currents and powerful tidal flow along the Thames
meant that any remote-control system would be cumbersome and probably unworkable.

  The second relevant factor was timing, and the same argument applied. This was not something that could be initiated remotely. Only a man actually on board the vessel would know when both the time and the position were right, and at that point he would initiate the detonation.

  So martyrdom was a given, but that was not a problem. All the members of the group were utterly committed and perfectly prepared to die for their beliefs. They knew beyond any doubt that dying as a martyr was an absolute guarantee that they would enjoy an eternity of paradise in the afterlife.

  But that wasn’t all. Because of the importance of the operation to Sadir and, more significantly, to his comrades and the elders back in Iraq who were funding it, he had decided that there needed to be two men on the boat. One would have to steer it, to get it into the correct position, and the second one would act as a guard and protect the vessel in the event that it was detected and an attempt made to stop it or board it.

  And, though Sadir did not labour the point and none of them would ever say it out loud, having a second man on board, a man just as committed to the mission as the first, would ensure that there would be no hesitation at the crucial moment. Not all martyrs were always prepared to go all the way, as evidenced by the number of truck bombers whose ultimate commitment and sacrifice were known to have been guaranteed by a set of handcuffs linking them securely to the steering wheel of their vehicle and a detonation system that could be triggered remotely.

  It was important that the explosion should take place during the day, to ensure the maximum number of casualties and the greatest possible disruption to the centre of London. Accordingly, the two men who had volunteered to accept martyrdom for the cause – Hassan and Khalid – had set off from their requisitioned boathouse in mid-morning when they expected the volume of river traffic to be high. Their intention was to reach the target early that afternoon when most of the occupants of the building should be back from lunch.

  Chapter 6

  Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

  ‘A what?’ Angela Evans demanded.

  Natasha Black held up her hand, but North shook his head.

  ‘I know you know, Natasha,’ he said, ‘because you seem to know quite a lot about almost everything. Okay, for the benefit of everybody else in the room, we’re talking about nanotechnology, another subject I’d never even heard of before this thing happened. This past week has been a bloody steep learning curve for me, let me tell you.

  ‘Nanotechnology is basically the manipulation of atoms and molecules, and what I also didn’t know is that it’s not a new technique. It’s been going on for centuries, and to see a really good example of it all you have to do is visit a medieval church and take a look at the stained-glass windows. The artists in that period mixed gold and silver particles to create the different colours in the glass, and that process actually changed the composition of the materials. That was a form of nanotechnology, though obviously nobody realised what it was until modern times.’

  ‘But you’re not talking about some accidental process, I assume,’ Morgan said. ‘It wasn’t something he could have picked up out walking his dog or mowing his lawn. From what you’ve described the grey substance found in O’Brien’s blood is presumably artificial.’

  ‘Yes, and definitely a form of enemy action. Anyway, the background is that the element carbon has the ability to catenate, to form long chains or rings of atoms and to have other elements attached to it, and the entire science of organic chemistry is the study of carbon and its compounds. A fullerene is another form of carbon molecule called an allotrope, and it’s different because it forms a closed mesh. It comes in a wide variety of shapes, including balls and tubes and flat sheets. The balls are known as buckyballs and all the various kinds of meshes are called fullerenes.

  ‘Both those names come from a man named Buckminster Fuller who, strangely enough, had nothing to do with nanotechnology. His connection is that he made the geodesic dome structure popular in his lifetime – he died in 1983 – and that’s pretty much an identical structure to one particular buckyball, C60, which somebody named buckminsterfullerene. The geodesic dome is just a hell of a lot bigger. The scientists needed names to call these things, and fullerene and bucky just kind of stuck. And there are bucky onions and bucky tubes and similar names for other structures.

  ‘Anyway, the point is that what the electron microscope showed was that the grey smear recovered from O’Brien’s blood sample consisted entirely of buckyballs, and that’s what I meant when I said it was enemy action. That’s the commonest fullerene that occurs naturally. It’s in things like soot and it’s even been detected in deep space, the space between the stars, but there’s no way O’Brien could have ingested it in its natural form. It had to have been administered to him, somehow.’

  ‘Empty or full?’ Natasha Black asked. ‘The buckyballs, I mean.’

  ‘Sorry, I should have explained that better. What the technicians working the electron microscope saw weren’t buckyballs as such, but the remains of buckyballs.’

  ‘There you go, then. That’s your smoking gun.’

  North noticed the slightly blank expressions on the faces of everybody else in the room and decided to clarify what he’d been told.

  ‘One of the ways scientists expect to be able to use nanotechnology is to deliver precise dosages of drugs to specific locations in the body. The shape of the buckyball means that a drug can be carried inside it, or chemicals can be attached on the outside and then released. What Natasha means is that because all the buckyballs that the technicians could see with the electron microscope had broken apart, the payload, whatever was inside the balls, must have been released.’

  ‘And you think that was what killed him?’ Morgan suggested.

  North nodded.

  ‘That’s what the medics think. By a process of elimination they ruled out everything except the foreign bodies, the buckyballs, so the only conclusion they could come to is that whatever they carried was the cause. So then they did another check for drugs. Initially, they’d been looking for so-called recreational drugs – heroin, cocaine, crack, that kind of thing – but then they did a broad-spectrum analysis, and that produced something really unexpected.’ He paused and looked at Natasha Black before he continued. ‘His blood contained traces of sodium thiopental and potassium chloride.’

  ‘That’s two-thirds of a lethal injection,’ she said immediately. ‘Sodium thiopental is a barbiturate normally used as a first step in general anaesthesia for patients undergoing operations and it’s really fast acting at very low doses. Potassium chloride shuts down the heart by cocking up the electrical conductivity of the muscles. The other drug usually included in a lethal injection is pancuronium bromide, which works like curare. It’s a muscle relaxant that blocks the action of acetylcholine and paralyses the respiratory system.’

  ‘So we’re looking at a murder,’ Dave North said flatly.

  Chapter 7

  River Thames, London

  Neither Hassan nor Khalid knew much about boat handling or had had much experience on the water, and the heavily laden cabin cruiser, the mass of improvised explosives causing it to ride much lower in the water than it should have done, was something of a handful on the fairly choppy waters of the Thames. Hassan worked the throttle to keep the speed high enough to more or less match that of the other traffic on the river, but slow enough that he remained in control of the vessel.

  Khalid sat beside him in the stern cockpit, the fully loaded Kalashnikov AK-47, the weapon intended to ensure their mission was neither interfered with nor compromised, resting on the seat beside him and covered by a blanket.

  In the event, they seemed to have attracted no unwelcome attention at all, and at just after two o’clock in the afternoon the cabin cruiser passed under Battersea Bridge. As it did so, Hassan picked up the mobile phone from the dashboard in f
ront of him and dialled a mobile number from memory. Just like the phone he was using, the number he called belonged to a burner, an unregistered mobile.

  His call was answered almost immediately.

  ‘As-salamu alaykum, Hassan,’ Mahdi Sadir said, the Arabic greeting meaning ‘peace be upon you.’ He knew exactly who was calling him because only Hassan knew that number. The other two cell members had a different number to contact him on.

  ‘Ma’a salama, Abū Tadmir,’ Hassan replied: ‘go in peace,’ a standard response. ‘We are on track and on time. We have just passed Battersea Bridge. River traffic is light, and we do not expect any delays.’

  ‘You have done well, my brother,’ Sadir said. ‘I do not expect to hear from you again. Allāhu akbar.’

  ‘Allāhu akbar,’ Hassan echoed, his voice rising in fervour as he said the words and ended the call.

  ‘We now have,’ he said to Khalid, putting down the mobile and again looking at the chart of the river he had mounted in front of him, ‘just over one mile to go. We have three more bridges to pass underneath before the river straightens up to take us direct to our target. Then there is the last bridge, Lambeth Bridge, and we must make our preparations and say our final prayers before we reach it. When we pass under that bridge we will be able to see our target coming into view ahead of us, and by then we must be ready. Completely prepared in all respects.’

  ‘Nothing can stop us now,’ Khalid said confidently. ‘Our action will bring London to its knees and send an unmistakable message of defiance to the Great Satan.’

  ‘We will prevail,’ Hassan concurred. ‘But we are not in position yet and there is still some distance to go. Keep alert and be prepared to react at a moment’s notice.’