Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  Back in October 1947 the 138th Fighter Squadron was formed at Hancock Field as part of the New York Air National Guard 174th Fighter Wing, first flying P-47D Thunderbolts and ending up operating F-16A/B Fighting Falcons beginning in 1988. This era of flying fixed wing fighters ended on 6 March 2010 as the final two F-16s made three low passes over a large crowd of visitors and then departed Hancock Field for the last time. Perhaps strangely, following the departure of the last two jet fighters, the number of full-time Air National Guard personnel at Hancock increased as the 174th Fighter Wing morphed into a very different unit and, many people believed, claimed an important place in the future of air combat.

  And that was why Mahdi Sadir had spent some time researching the area a couple of years earlier. He’d been looking for a location that was close to the runways and the control facilities and had begun his search online rather than in person, getting a feel for the area from mapping applications and satellite photographs on various Internet sites. But there was obviously no substitute for physically visiting the place himself, and so he’d done that as part of his final checks before implementing the operation. And to his surprise he’d found exactly what he was looking for, an unmade road that was little more than a single track off Stewart Drive, to the north-east of the airfield, a track that ran almost due south towards the airfield boundary through a largely wooded area.

  The road was unfenced and unguarded as far as he’d been able to tell, but obviously at some point there would either be a boundary fence or possibly a guard post beyond which unauthorised personnel would not be able to penetrate.

  But that wasn’t a particular concern because of the calculations that had been done on the weapon’s power. He was reasonably certain that even if they had to detonate it anywhere along the unmade road, as long as the orientation was correct the result would be the same.

  There was another difference about this weapon. Because of the places where they had to be deployed, the other six heavier and more powerful devices could only be driven to their chosen locations a matter of an hour or so before detonation. But the Syracuse device was going to be concealed in woodland so it could be positioned several days before the attack began. The only limiting factor was battery life, but the people who had built the weapon had calculated that as long as the detonation sequence was initiated within one month, maybe as long as two months, of positioning, the battery should function perfectly.

  And that was why, early in the morning after collecting the seventh weapon from the house in Damascus, Sadir drove his old Honda through the streets of Washington D.C., merging in with the start of the morning rush hour. He had a fairly long drive ahead of him, about three hundred and fifty miles, to reach Syracuse, where he’d find a room for the night somewhere on the outskirts. He wouldn’t book anything, because that would involve names and credit cards: it would be far easier, and a lot safer, to pick somewhere at random and just pay cash. He was paranoid about not leaving a paper trail. The distance didn’t bother him because he knew the roads were good and fast and there should be few hold-ups.

  His vehicle was entirely street legal and he would take considerable care not to attract the attention of any patrolling police officers by committing a moving traffic violation. His documentation would obviously raise no questions, but he couldn’t afford to let anybody look in the boot of his car because the device he was carrying would be difficult or impossible to explain away.

  The motel he picked early that evening was on the northern side of Syracuse – in fact, it was actually in Cicero, the next town and further north than he needed to go – and was somewhat run-down, but the room was clean and the air conditioning worked most of the time. He picked a name at random when he signed in, handed over some dollars in exchange for the room key and received directions to a nearby diner that served meals all day. But Sadir had no intention of leaving the room that night, to eat or for any other purpose. Quite apart from the fact that he needed to keep his eyes on the Honda, which he had secured against theft with a brace across the steering wheel to prevent it turning and by removing the battery fuse from the fuse box, he was not prepared to eat in any American diner because of the danger of inadvertently eating pork.

  Islamic law absolutely forbids any Muslim to consume pork, the meat being considered haram, meaning both a religious and a cultural taboo. He was aware that Americans enjoyed eating bacon and in his opinion there was too much chance of bacon fat or – a most disgusting thought – even small pieces of that meat being served in other dishes simply because they would be cooked in the same kitchen. Instead, he had prepared a number of cold snacks made with halal meat and vegetables – that Arabic word meaning lawful or permissible, almost the exact opposite of haram both practically and linguistically – which he would eat in his room.

  And the following morning he would position the weapon that would trigger the start of almost the final act in the attack on America.

  Chapter 37

  Washington D.C., United States of America

  ‘There’s something else you need to know. Barbara Simpson’s uncovered something peculiar that’s relevant to this problem. She was checking back through some of the historic data you’d supplied and she noticed an anomaly. Nearly three years ago an Arab male with an Iraqi passport arrived in Baltimore on a flight from the UK. Also on the flight were two Chinese nationals, and the odd thing is that the Arab passenger’s ultimate point of departure was Beijing, and those two Chinese men were also passengers on every flight he took from China all the way to Baltimore.’

  ‘That could just be a coincidence,’ Rogers suggested, not sounding entirely convinced.

  ‘It could be, but Simpson thought it looked odd, so she did a bit more checking through her contacts back in the UK. The people at Six – James Bond-land in London – discovered that the two Chinese passengers were officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and they’d almost certainly been working at Unit 61398 in Shanghai. That’s one of the most persistent and dangerous of all the Chinese hacking outfits. Then she checked some of the details over here in the States and found that the two Chinese men had dropped off the grid almost as soon as they’d arrived.’

  Roger shook his head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. Cyber’s more your thing than mine but I do know that these hackers can run their attacks from anywhere in the world, so why would they travel to America if that was their target? They could have stayed in Shanghai and done everything from there.’

  ‘That,’ Morgan agreed, ‘is the anomaly. What could they be doing here that they couldn’t be doing just as well from the other side of the world? But the fact that according to your records they haven’t used credit cards or driving licences or any other kind of document that could identify them suggests that they’ve gone to ground somewhere and somebody has been providing them with cash for their living expenses.’

  ‘So why do you think they could somehow be involved in this attack?’

  ‘The thing about passports is that the days when you could just wave a reasonable facsimile at an immigration officer and hope that that would do the trick are long gone. These days, at least in the developed world, every passport is scanned electronically and if it doesn’t match what’s in the linked databases it won’t be accepted. So the passports the two Chinese men produced were the real thing, or at least they were genuine People’s Republic of China passports, and the document produced by the Arab was also genuine. Whether or not the names given in those passports match with the actual birth certificates of the three individuals is another question altogether.

  ‘What I’m getting at is that these days even an international terrorist needs to use genuine travel documentation, and it’s difficult to obtain multiple genuine passports. So we do know that for at least the last three years the Arab male who flew out of Beijing with the two Chinese hackers has been travelling on the same passport. And the important thing is the name inside that document.’

  Rogers looked interested.
‘And the name is?’

  ‘Mahdi Sadir. The same name as the man Bill Clark here thinks is the leader of this bunch of four terrorists here in DC. The one calling himself Abū Tadmir.’

  Chapter 38

  Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, United States of America

  The following morning Sadir didn’t get on the road until three hours after he had knelt down to face Mecca and said his dawn prayers, the salat al-fajr, because he wanted to wait until the level of traffic increased, when he would become just another anonymous commuter or shopper. Following the directions on his windscreen-mounted satnav, he headed south along US-11 rather than the interstate because of where he was going. When he reached North Syracuse, he drove down Brewerton Road and turned left onto E Taft Road at the busy intersection to track east. That would take him just to the north of the Syracuse Hancock International Airport, his target.

  Once he drove east of the interstate, the level of traffic diminished considerably, and by the time he reached the right turn he needed to take – William Barry Boulevard – there was only one vehicle on the road in front of him and two cars heading in the opposite direction. He took the turn and drove south on a country road dotted with industrial units. At the T-junction at the end of the road he turned left onto Stewart Drive and about a hundred metres further on he swung right down the unmade road, checking his mirrors and looking in both directions as he did so. But at that moment, Stewart Drive was deserted.

  He reduced his speed on the narrow road, which ran straight as far as he could see. The left-hand side of the road was bordered by trees and undergrowth, with an open field to his right beyond which he could see another industrial unit, this one a distribution company. Ahead of him the road, which bore no name but which he had learnt from one website was called Presque Isle Road, a somewhat exotic name for what amounted to a gravel track, climbed gently and was bordered by more trees, making it almost ideal for his purposes.

  He passed a turning on his left – another unmarked road which he thought was called 2nd Street – and slowed the car as he approached what he thought was a good location, about as close to the airfield boundary as he wanted to risk going. He was surrounded by trees and undergrowth with plenty of places to pull off the road where his car would be out of sight unless somebody actually stopped and looked into the treeline.

  Sadir steered the Honda off the road and stopped it behind a patch of heavy undergrowth that rendered it completely invisible. He got out and walked back towards the tarmac road, checking for tyre marks. But the ground was dry and solid and although he could see a few patches of crushed vegetation there was really nothing to suggest to anyone that a vehicle had driven that way.

  He stood beside the car and for a few moments just listened. The only sound he could hear, apart from the slow ticking noise as the Honda engine cooled, was birdsong and the distant sound of automobile engines from the roads that more or less surrounded him. Satisfied, he opened the boot of the car and lifted out the steel casing of the weapon and placed it on the ground. He’d fashioned a sling which went around his shoulders to help him carry the object and he quickly assembled it and then stood up. With most of the weight now being carried by his shoulders rather than his arms he found it much easier to manoeuvre it.

  He walked deeper into the woods, looking for a suitable location to assemble and prime the weapon. In less than two minutes he found a spot that seemed ideal, away from most of the larger trees but with undergrowth so thick that he doubted if anybody had even tried to walk through there in the past decade. He lowered the casing to the ground, released the sling so that he could use it to carry the stator, and retraced his steps to the car.

  In less than ten minutes, all the components were laid out on the ground in front of him. He listened again for any noise that could indicate a human presence nearby, then quickly began the assembly, which was simply a matter of bolting the stator into the steel casing and making sure it was pointing in the correct direction. Then he connected the wiring to the heavy-duty twelve-volt battery that would supply the current for the detonation when he rang the mobile phone that formed part of the circuit Ramli had constructed. It was an old Nokia from the days when a mobile phone only needed charging about once a month and he had no doubt that the battery would hold more than enough charge to ensure that the explosion would take place exactly when he wanted it.

  He checked the wiring and all the other components to ensure that he had missed nothing and had made no mistakes in the assembly, then took the camouflaged tarpaulin and laid it over the top of the device, pulling it tight so that it wouldn’t flap if the wind started blowing because that noise might attract attention. Finally, he forced the steel pegs into the ground to hold the tarpaulin securely in place, the strength of his legs being enough to drive them all the way home so he didn’t have to use the wooden mallet.

  Then he stood back and looked at what he’d done. Not only was the device completely invisible, but because of the shrubs and undergrowth and leaf litter the camouflaged tarpaulin was an almost exact match for the ground around it. Sadir turned away for a few seconds, then looked back and chuckled. Even knowing the shape of the shrouded device, and knowing exactly where it was, he still couldn’t see it. And that meant the chances of somebody else finding it were effectively nil.

  Twenty minutes later, he was again sitting in the driving seat of the Honda, steering the car back north along Presque Isle Road on his way back to Washington. He wouldn’t get there until late in the evening, but that didn’t matter.

  In the glade in the woods behind him, the device was absolutely silent. For now, the only part of it that functioned was the mobile phone. That was on standby waiting to receive the single call that would allow the circuit to be completed and the detonation to take place.

  Chapter 39

  Washington D.C., United States of America

  For the forty-eight hours after his meeting with Grant Rogers, Ben Morgan stayed in contact with Barbara Simpson, meeting her in various cafes when she wasn’t dressed in rags and panhandling her way around DC, and remained in the FBI loop as well, attending some briefings and updates in the Hoover building – as in John Edgar, rather than a vacuum cleaner factory – as a specialist observer.

  He also had a longish telephone conversation with Natasha Black, who was still wearing her GCHQ hat in the monolithic black slab of a building that was the home of the NSA out at Fort George G. Meade in Anne Arundel County in Maryland. It was basically a catch-up and ‘how are you doing out there?’ call, but Morgan did have one idea, and a fairly obvious related question, that he wanted to run by her.

  ‘The Fibbies have eyes on four Arab suspects here in DC,’ he began, ‘and there’s a strong possibility that one of them might be this Abū Tadmir character. The problem is that they have four names for these guys based on photographic ID but they only have an address for one of them. They tried following the other three suspects after a meeting but lost them in the crowds.’

  Morgan could hear what sounded like a snort of disgust from the other end of the call.

  ‘Typical Bureau incompetence,’ Black said. ‘Most of the FBI agents I’ve met couldn’t follow a cow across an empty field in broad daylight without stepping in a pile of shit and managing to lose sight of the animal. Look, if these really are bad guys, the chances of them using a registered mobile are about the same as my chance of becoming the next American President. That’s nil, by the way. They’ll have burners, obviously, and they’ll have given false names and paid in cash at whatever hotel or apartment building they’re living in. They’ll be way under the radar.’

  ‘I had kind of worked that out for myself, Natasha,’ Morgan replied. ‘But I was wondering if there was a way we could at least use their mobiles to try and track them through the resources you’re sitting on out at Fort Meade.’

  He outlined what he had in mind, but as usual Natasha Black saw exactly where he was go
ing well before he’d finished.

  ‘The answer to that’s fairly obvious,’ she said. ‘It’s yes and no. Yes, we have the resources and ability to do what you’ve suggested and no, the NSA can’t legally do that. There are laws and rules in place, even when you’re turning over stones trying to find a bunch of scabby terrorists hiding under them while they plan to blow up the White House or whatever, and what the NSA can’t legally do is spy on American citizens or anyone living in the country.’

  ‘So that’s that, then?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t, Ben. Do try and keep up. We just do it through the back door. The NSA can’t spy on American citizens, just as GCHQ can’t spy on British citizens. So what we do is tell the NSA which people in Britain we’d like them to watch and let them get on with it, and they tell us which American citizens we need to keep an eye on. And then we just swap the data. That way, both the NSA and GCHQ are obeying the letter of our respective laws rather than their spirit, and that keeps the lawyers happy. Or at least quiet. We’ve been doing that for years. I’ll set it up through Cheltenham, but I will need whatever data you’ve got because we’ll have to have somewhere to start.’

  ‘I’ve got a date and a time and a confirmed location in DC for the receiving mobile.’

  ‘That’ll do nicely. Lay it on me.’

  For the remainder of those two days nothing appeared to happen. The Bureau had teams of agents out on the streets monitoring the movements of Karim Ganem, the only suspected terrorist whose address they knew, but he never left the building except for domestic purposes such as food shopping, on each occasion trailing a full team of FBI watchers behind him like the straggly tail of an unlikely comet.