Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  * * *

  Despite having been knocked off his feet, Hassan had managed to hang on to the wheel with one hand. And although the cabin cruiser had been comprehensively wrecked and the cockpit was already knee-deep in ice-cold water that was getting deeper by the second, it was still afloat. And, more importantly, so was their improvised explosive charge in what remained of the cabin, at least as far as he could see.

  When Khalid pulled the trigger of the Kalashnikov Hassan immediately knew that something had gone very wrong with the weapon. He glanced sideways just in time to see the terminally damaged assault rifle fall from his companion’s hands at the same moment as Khalid collapsed. He didn’t know what had happened, but the sight of the limp body beside him confirmed that he was on his own. However Khalid had died was irrelevant.

  He looked up the river towards the police launch. At that moment it was virtually stationary in the water, the skipper just starting to manoeuvre it towards him.

  Hassan knew – as long as the detonation circuit still worked after the collision – that he could still do it. And the police launch, the vessel that had interfered with their carefully laid plan at quite literally the eleventh hour, was so close to him that he knew he would take the police officers with him when he detonated the charge. He also knew that he had to initiate the detonation right then, otherwise all would be lost and his and Khalid’s lives would have been forfeited for nothing.

  He released the wheel as the cabin cruiser lurched sideways again and scrambled forwards into the entrance to the saloon to reach the simple trigger they had constructed. It was a cheap electric toggle switch that would do nothing complicated when it was activated, just complete the circuit between the battery they’d fitted and the electric blasting cap embedded in the block of Semtex. They’d waterproofed the switch to avoid the circuit being completed before they were ready in case of spray splashing into the cockpit. That would trigger the plastic explosive and that detonation would provide the booster to ignite the combination of ANFO and powdered aluminium, the mass of improvised explosive that had virtually filled the saloon of the vessel.

  But as he reached for it, his world spun crazily around him as the cabin cruiser disintegrated further. The forward and aft sections of the vessel started to separate and the boat’s engine, wrenched free of its mountings in the collision, began a one-way journey down to the bottom of the river.

  The thing about wooden boats is that they’re made of wood, and wood floats, so although the cabin cruiser had been comprehensively wrecked by the impact, both sections of it were still floating, albeit separated, as was the solid mass of the bags of explosive within their waterproof covering. And Hassan could still see the switch, screwed to what was left of the aft bulkhead of the saloon.

  Stumbling clumsily forwards, half-swimming through the water that had engulfed the cockpit, he hauled himself towards his objective. He grabbed hold of what was left of the saloon door, pulled himself the final couple of feet and rested his finger on the switch.

  For perhaps a second or two he didn’t move, just stared across the few yards of water that separated the wrecked boat from one of the most hated symbols of Western oppression. He glanced back towards the Targa launch, which was again accelerating towards him, closed his eyes and muttered a very short final prayer.

  He tensed every muscle in his body in the knowledge of what was to come. And then he flicked the switch into the ‘on’ position.

  Chapter 14

  Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

  The phone in front of Dame Janet rang again. She answered it immediately and switched it to loudspeaker.

  ‘C-TAC. What’s happened?’

  As everyone in the room had guessed, the caller was again the MPU duty officer out at Wapping.

  ‘Right at this moment we don’t know. We had a radio message from the sergeant who’s skippering the Targa launch. He said he was convinced the cabin cruiser was a floating bomb and that he was going to try to ram it. Since then nothing.’

  ‘If it was stuffed full of explosives,’ Dave North interjected, ‘a massive impact like ramming the boat might be enough to spark the detonation. But if he hit it out in the middle of the Thames that would mean the effects of the blast would be less than if the cabin cruiser was right next to Parliament. So that might have been a good decision.’

  ‘Are your skippers expected to ram vessels that don’t stop?’ Dame Janet asked.

  They could almost see the duty officer shaking his head.

  ‘No. That’s much too dangerous and usually unnecessary. But in the circumstances the sergeant might have felt he had no other choice. He was suspicious about the appearance of the vessel, and when one of the two men in it opened fire at him with an assault rifle it was obvious that they were terrorists of some kind. And then when they started steering the boat straight towards Parliament, he probably thought his suspicions were justified. And in the absence of any other way of bringing the vessel to a halt, ramming was about the only option he had left.’

  ‘But you’ve had no reports about an explosion near Parliament?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘Not yet, but the radio network has almost gone into meltdown and the mobile network’s crashed. As soon I have anything definite I’ll give you a call. Look, I have to go now. I’ve got three different phones ringing.’

  Chapter 15

  North of Lambeth Bridge, London

  As Hassan’s fingers flicked the bulkhead-mounted switch, he heard a sudden sharp crack audible even over the roaring of the engines of the patrol boat and a flash of light right in front of him. But what he didn’t feel was any sense of being instantly transported to paradise, only the numbing cold as the dark waters of the Thames soaked more of his clothing.

  All around him floated scattered timbers that had, just a matter of a minute or two earlier, formed part of the hull of the cabin cruiser. In front of him the plastic-wrapped mass of improvised explosive charges was very clearly still in one piece, presumably being kept on the surface by the air trapped within it.

  And as he looked around him in shocked desperation, he realised what must have happened. The crack he had heard could only have been the sound of the blasting cap firing. But because the ANFO hadn’t exploded, that meant the detonator must have been pulled out of the lump of Semtex plastic explosive when the cabin cruiser was torn apart. They had only had a single blasting cap, so there was no possible way that he could still initiate the explosion.

  That in turn meant that their mission had failed. They – he and Khalid – had failed. And that was the bitterest pill of them all.

  Even as this realisation dawned on him, the battered bow of the Targa smashed into what was left of the cockpit, flinging him bodily to one side as the police launch completed the job of demolition that it had started.

  Hassan’s body was driven underwater by the impact and for a few seconds he could see nothing, visibility underwater in the Thames being very poor even at the best of times. Then he saw light, or rather a lightening of the darkness, and his survival instinct took over as he struggled towards the surface of the river.

  * * *

  Carter hauled the Targa around in a tight port turn and throttled back to survey the wreckage. In the midst of the shattered timbers he could see one figure face down, clearly either dead or unconscious, and if he was just unconscious he would be dead within a couple of minutes from drowning. As he looked, the second man broke the surface just a few yards away and began swimming desperately away from the wreckage.

  Carter moved the wheel slightly and applied a little throttle to close with the two figures in the water.

  ‘Call Wapping and tell them we’ve neutralised the threat,’ he ordered, ‘and we’ll be picking up two suspects. Or maybe one suspect and a body. We’ll need some other boats out here as well sharpish to recover all this wreckage.’

  ‘Or we could just run both of them down,’ Fisher suggested. ‘Save the cost of the tr
ial, all that kind of thing. Help the struggling British economy.’

  ‘I assume you’re joking,’ Carter said. ‘And in any case, this doesn’t look to me like it was an amateur effort, and that means Five will want to sit down with the survivor at Millbank or somewhere and find out what they can about whatever terrorist network they belong to. Right, stand by to grab the live one. Handcuff his wrists behind his back and see if you can get a second pair of cuffs around his ankles as well. But before you haul him on board make sure he’s not wearing a suicide vest. If he is, I might just decide to opt for the Bob Fisher solution for dealing with swimming terrorists.’

  Two minutes later, the man trying to swim away from the wrecked cabin cruiser had been dragged on board the police launch, none too gently, and slammed face first onto the decking while he was secured. Once he’d been immobilised, Carter told his men to leave him right where he was, and that if he tried to get up they could use whatever force they thought was appropriate to make him lie down again, up to and including clubbing him senseless.

  Carter had never been the most politically correct officer employed by the Maritime Policing Unit, and he was irritated by the damage caused to his boat.

  Recovery of what Carter knew by then to be a dead man took a little longer, but finally Crichton managed to pull the body to the side of the police launch with a boathook and then he and Fisher hauled the limp corpse onto the deck.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Crichton said as he saw the extensive damage to the man’s head for the first time.

  ‘No point in trying mouth-to-mouth on that,’ Fisher said, ‘because he hasn’t actually got one any more.’

  ‘I’ll get a body bag.’

  The recovery of corpses from the River Thames was another one of the duties of the MPU, and not one that any officer looked forward to carrying out, ‘floaters’ being almost always badly disfigured thanks to the action of marine life and decomposition, and usually extremely smelly.

  They’d just got the corpse zipped up when a small civilian vessel, somewhat like a half-size version of the Targa, hove to alongside them and the man at the wheel asked if they needed help.

  ‘We’ve got to head back to Wapping,’ Carter said, ‘but if you could give us a hand to haul whatever’s wrapped in that plastic sheeting onto our vessel we’d appreciate it.’ He pointed at the object he was describing.

  ‘If that’s a bloody great IED,’ Fisher said, ‘do you think it’s a good idea letting a couple of Thames boatmen fiddle about with it?’

  ‘If it was going to explode,’ Carter retorted, ‘it would have done when contestant number one pressed that switch. I watched him do it, and nothing happened, so whatever’s wrapped up in that sheeting must be pretty much inert. Go and give them a hand.’

  Chapter 16

  Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

  ‘Panic over.’ The relief in the MPU duty officer’s voice was quite obvious through the loudspeaker. ‘The suspect boat has now been converted into firewood. Our patrol boat is a bit battered but it’s still afloat and our officers picked up one suspect and one dead body, both of Middle Eastern appearance but neither carrying any form of identification.’

  ‘Was it full of explosives?’ Dame Janet asked.

  ‘We’ll have to wait for forensics, but that’s the way it looks. Part of the aft section of the cabin cruiser is intact and afloat and according to the Targa’s skipper he can see a battery and a switch and some lengths of wire inside it. There’s also a semi-submerged plastic-wrapped object that could be an IED, which they’re trying to recover. But as I say, we need the forensic people to tell us one way or the other.’

  ‘Where are you taking the suspect?’ Dave North asked.

  ‘Initially they’ll bring him here to Wapping so we can process him, but I’ve already had Five on the line so I guess he’ll be transferred to Millbank or maybe to Paddington Green for questioning. But that decision is above my pay grade.’

  Dame Janet ended the call and glanced around the table. ‘Assuming this isn’t a case of hopelessly mistaken identity and some waterborne rozzer seeing something that quite literally wasn’t there, I think we can say that we’ve been lucky. More importantly, Parliament has been lucky, and that doesn’t happen very often. Dave, this is more your department than anybody else’s, so get yourself out to Wapping, take a look at this character and whatever evidence the MPU manages to drag out of the Thames and then let me have your assessment.’

  North nodded. ‘There may not be all that much to find,’ he said, ‘because if that was an IED that these two managed to cobble together, the most likely explosive for them to have used would be ammonium nitrate and that’s highly hygroscopic, meaning it attracts water. If you put it in enough water, and I promise you there’s definitely enough in the Thames, it can turn to liquid. Can you call back the guy at Wapping and tell him to make sure that the people on the scene recover at least a sample of whatever was inside that plastic if they can’t get the whole thing out of the water?’

  ‘No problem,’ Dame Janet replied. ‘Now get on your way. I want to know what’s going on as soon as possible. And why are you still here, Ben?’ she asked, swivelling her attention to Morgan. ‘Cyber stuff and cyberattacks are potentially a much bigger problem than a couple of terrorists in a stolen cabin cruiser, so get moving.’

  Chapter 17

  London

  Like almost all the great cities of the world London is built on a river but, unlike most other cities, it is also to some extent divided by the tidal waterway that runs through its heart. With few exceptions, the ‘best’ districts in the capital city, areas with names like Belgravia, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Mayfair and of course Westminster, the seat of the government of the United Kingdom, are all located on the northern side of the river. In this half of London, property prices are higher, the buildings are more elegant and the streets always seem to be wider and cleaner and prowled by more expensive cars.

  To the south, the names resonate less well: districts like Brixton, Clapham, Croydon and Peckham, the last achieving enduring fame as the location of a perennially popular television comedy series that seemed to encapsulate the hand to mouth, cash-based, quasi-legal economy of one of the poorer sectors of the capital’s population. And many of these areas enjoy less than savoury reputations. In the past cab drivers were known to demand a higher fare if they had to venture ‘south of the river’ and especially if it was a late evening or night-time journey.

  Those organisations and businesses that did, for whatever reason, establish themselves on the southern side of the Thames seemed almost unwilling to venture too far away from the river, clustering as close as they could to the waterway. The headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, popularly and incorrectly known as MI6, the building commonly referred to throughout the intelligence community as ‘Legoland’ and by certain other less polite epithets, demonstrates this perfectly. It’s located at the south-eastern end of Vauxhall Bridge and if it was any closer to the river it would actually be in the water.

  But not everywhere north of the river enjoys the wealth and kudos of a district like Mayfair, and a good example is the north-east London suburb of Stratford, part of the old parish of West Ham. It’s been inhabited for the better part of a thousand years; the name Strætforda, a compound place name deriving from the Old English stræt or ‘street’ and ‘ford’ and referring to a river crossing, its exact location unknown but somewhere north of the present Stratford High Street, being recorded as early as 1067. The area began the twentieth century in a state of economic decline that continued to worsen with every passing decade. De-industrialisation had ended the district’s importance as a manufacturing centre, as a major railway hub and as London’s principal commercial dock area.

  Then, on 6 July 2005, London was announced as the venue for the 2012 Summer Olympics, and what happened after that changed Stratford permanently. Because of the need to not only create world-class sporting f
acilities in the area but also to improve and update roads and transport links, and in some cases to create brand new ones, Stratford received an astonishing level of expenditure, totalling almost £10 billion, making the London Olympics the third most expensive games ever held after Beijing 2008 and Sochi 2014.

  Leyton Grange Estate isn’t a part of Stratford but of the much larger borough of Waltham Forest. It lies north-west of the A12 that forms the northern boundary of Stratford, and north-east of Hackney Marshes, and is a primarily residential London suburb. The modernisation and gentrification of Stratford inevitably had an effect upon the surrounding areas, and despite the sometimes unfortunate connotations of the word ‘estate’ when applied to urban housing, the Leyton Grange Estate is a popular area to live for both owners and renters. Most of the older properties are solidly built mainly Victorian terraced houses, originally intended for single family occupation but in some cases now divided up into two or three flats to maximise their rental potential and overall property value, or converted into HMOs, houses in multiple occupation, where people rent single rooms, often with shared facilities.

  Radlix Road, between Leyton Jubilee Park and Leyton County Cricket Ground, is fairly typical of the area. Quiet and prosperous looking, with newish cars parked on the street in the ‘permit holder only’ bays, it looks like the kind of area likely to be occupied by people in decent jobs who need fast and reliable access to London, and certainly not the kind of area most people would expect to find a terrorist cell.

  Which, of course, was exactly why Mahdi Sadir, the Iraqi man who was calling himself Abū Tadmir, had chosen that location.

  To protect his own security he had never visited the property, which was occupied by the four volunteers he had recruited soon after he had arrived in London, and he only ever met them in neutral locations at least two miles away from the house and never used the same place twice. Most of the recruitment had been done in advance by other people who were involved in some capacity with the large number of mosques in the vicinity of Stratford.