The Kompromat Kill

by Michael Jenkins

  Istanbul

  The gentle murmur of the Honda outboard motor was all Sean could hear as he was slowly propelled towards the port of Haydarpaşa, which nestled on the southern approaches to the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul.

  The approach to the port was unusually calm as Sean looked across to the mesmerising splendour of the Bosphorus Bridge, with the reams of night-time traffic gliding across its magnificent spans. He pulled up his hood and adjusted his rucksack, knowing he had another five minutes or so before he would arrive at the disembarkation point, where he could begin his covert insertion into the dockyard. He was the only passenger on the Rigid Raider craft, sitting just behind a highly skilled CIA coxswain who navigated the inlet by feel and stealth to ensure he could deposit his charge into the highly secure area of the port with little fuss.

  Sean marvelled at the late-night dining cruisers, whose customers were being treated to one of the world’s most superb maritime views whilst being lavished with expensive champagne and Michelin-star cuisine.

  The historic port is a central gem of Istanbul and reads like a quick trip through the ages of an Asia Minor adventure. The Phoenicians had their day, as did the Byzantine and later the Roman emperors, followed by crusaders and sultans. The port, Istanbul's largest, moves materials that have been traded for centuries, including cotton, olives and fruit, but also trades electronics, chemicals and automobiles. Sean knew that Istanbul and its trading locations were also a central bazaar for the world’s heaviest trade in illicit materials, from drugs to weapons, furs to jewels and explosives to special nuclear materials. Illegal trade across Asia Minor had many such bargaining markets, where buyers and sellers would come.

  Sean felt the spray of the sea slap against his face in the shallow breeze. His mind drifted back to the last planning meeting he had with Jack the night before the CIA flew him directly into Istanbul’s Samandıra Army Air Base.

  Jack had arranged a final video conference direct with The Court’s operating base in Besiktas, one of the oldest districts of Istanbul on the European side of the city.

  Jack had invited a number of other operators into the conference room for the highly secretive video call, and the conference room had become the centre stage for the detailed planning of Sean’s mission. Had Sean known what the Iranians were planning, he might have asked a few more questions before being inserted into the furore of Istanbul and the kaleidoscope of mayhem that was shortly to begin.

  ‘Hi Samantha, can you hear us?’ Jack had said as the screen tried to focus in on Samantha’s head and shoulders. The video picture was fuzzy as the satellite picture kept zooming in and out, struggling with the bandwidth. Sean leant forward, somewhat eager to see a woman he had not cast his eyes on for nearly three years. He remained tense. Intrigued. And he wondered what emotions Samantha might release after all these years. He watched the streaming images settle and nearly gasped with surprise at how Samantha had changed. She had dyed her hair from brunette and was now a strawberry blonde. Those piercing green eyes shot out of the screen as if to touch Sean right on the chin. They were great friends, but Sean had always felt hunted by her. Chased. Her quarry. He wondered how it would work out being on the ground with her on an active operation after all these years had gone by. The last time they had worked together was as surveillance officers in Northern Ireland, but both had come a long way since then, and there were many skeletons in each of their cupboards. One thing generally remained the same though. She liked to be the boss.

  ‘Hi Jack. And, well, hello Sean,’ Samantha said, making a clear effort to accentuate Sean’s name. She paused, smiling widely to reveal her glistening white teeth neatly circled by plentiful red lipstick. She’d changed. The once make-up-free complexion with hair scrappily gathered together in a bun had gone. In her surveillance days she wouldn’t get a second glance, she had blended in. She looked more like a schoolteacher, or an artist or even a rural vet - no one would have guessed her true profession. On this occasion she had manicured herself meticulously for this moment to rekindle her long-lost friendship with Sean. It was the moment when she would sear her image right into the centre of Sean’s psyche. There was something about her though. Sassy and forthright with a charisma that mesmerised. Sean remained fixed on her eyes, knowing her next line.

  ‘I hope you’ve been behaving whilst I’ve been away Sean.’ Sean cringed, watching the glint in her eye, which drew a wry smile from him. He sensed the laughter being held within the assembled staff, a type of heat that drew a twinkle of redness to his cheeks.

  Jack eased the tension. ‘So glad you’re still on good form Samantha,’ he began. ‘It’s important to keep our spirits up as we knuckle down for what could be a pretty bumpy ride ahead for all of us. Now, could you keep this brief and give us the bare bones of what you’ve found out.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, now adopting a fully professional posture. ‘This is hot off the press from my signals intelligence teams. The SIGINT we have collected has revealed a lot of interesting activity across Turkey, and we’re beginning to see similar activity across the region. We’re data mining the signals intelligence we’ve collected through our US systems, and our analytics will soon provide us with some clues. The main assessment is that the Iranian cell we’ve latched onto have now initiated their smuggling routes to move equipment and stores transnationally. We’ll need to track and trace the mules who are moving this stuff across the region and probably into Europe.’

  Sean leapt in, eager to get to the nub of the intelligence. ‘Any idea what they’re moving?’

  ‘Not yet, no. They’ve certainly given the order to mobilise their logistics chain and I’ll brief you when you arrive tomorrow. I have one more snippet though. Our SIGINT has led us to a single location here in Turkey that needs to be looked at. Probably your first task.’

  ‘How did you get this?’

  ‘By observing telemetry signals.’

  ‘Have you seen it anywhere else?’

  ‘Not yet, we’re checking.’

  Sean looked at Jack for his views, but he didn’t flinch. Samantha carried on with her briefing. ‘It looks like they have factories where they’re making different parts for IEDs and some of the telemetry suggests that these are not just normal improvised devices - they seem incredibly high-tech. The first target to be searched is the port at Haydarpaşa.’

  Sean felt the boat reduce its speed to a niggling crawl. The expanse of a huge container ship was the only thing between him and the dockside and he glanced at its bridge wings to check no one was watching the vessel approach the quayside. The craft glided below the ship’s anchor chains, the coxswain skilfully manoeuvring the tiny boat until it sneaked alongside the bow of the vessel. Hugging the vessel’s skin, the coxswain deftly steered the craft to make sure it was well out of sight of anyone who might be perambulating the dockside above. He coaxed the Rigid Raider slowly to the rusting pivots of an old ladder that Sean would use to covertly enter the docks.

  Sean latched onto the sides of the ladder and started to scale the twenty-foot piece of rust to top out on the flat quayside. He stopped just below the top and waited - listening for a good two or three minutes. A huge forklift truck scuttled past the distant warehouses, its pneumatic arm fully propelled in front of the cab and smoke spluttering into the air from a thin chimney at its rear. Sean scanned the distant warehouses in front of him, spotting the small alleyway he needed to enter that provided access to his target.

  The target building was the office of a company called Nadim Zuka - a specialist freight-forwarding company for transits between the EU and Asia. Sean’s homework suggested it was a family-run business masquerading as a legitimate business whilst concealing the nefarious activity of state-sponsored terrorism. It was a major hub for Iranian operations across the EU and Middle East. Istanbul was, after all, perfectly located for access to the EU via the porous Balkans borders, which provided easy entry into Bulgaria and Romania and smuggling routes through Kosovo and Alban
ia. Eastwards, it afforded immediate access to Iran and the wilds of the Caucasus, plus the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait.

  Sean waited until the designated time to break cover before he would move swiftly across the open expanse of the dockyard roads, across a single-track railway, under two container cranes and directly into the Nadim Zuka offices hidden in the alley just off the main concourse of the dock.

  He sat patiently hiding behind a large sea container, biding his time and waiting for the lights to go out. An act that would be initiated from the quiet Suffolk backwaters of RAF Bentwaters by cyber-specialists who would take down the entire infrastructure of the port.

  Chapter 13

  Istanbul Port

  The headquarters of Haydarpaşa Port Authority sit beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Istanbul harbour and offers superb views across the bay to the European side of the city and a magnificent view of its famous neighbour, the recently refurbished Haydarpaşa train station terminal located right next to the port.

  A fifty-ton ship’s anchor acts as the gatekeeper to the headquarters where multiple stories of brown-tinted windows look out across the Bosphorus strait where everything from royal yachts to cruise liners passes through the busy sea lanes of Istanbul.

  Below the reception, in the basement, is the port’s command and control centre, its security control room manned by security supervisors with a large bank of CCTV screens and a small data centre acting as the port’s IT hub.

  At exactly 0115, the most silent period in the port’s operation, a startled security manager watched all of the office’s computers and CCTV camera screens go blank and then reappear with messages in blue and black lettering. His primary screen read ‘repairing root file system,’ with a warning not to turn off the computer. The other banks of screens were showing large text. ‘We have encrypted your files and back-ups. Click this link to pay 7 bitcoins to retrieve your files.’ Equivalent to £22,000.

  The entire site had gone dark. The dock’s critical infrastructure had been infiltrated by The Court’s hackers sitting at their dimly lit consoles somewhere in the quiet Suffolk countryside. Sean’s phone began to vibrate; sure enough, right on time. Samantha texted him on TextSecure and the phone came alive with a green screen showing three dots flickering to indicate that she was writing.

  ‘Worm is in. Lights are out. Time to penetrate. Do it well.’

  Sean smirked at her incessant innuendo, stuffed the phone in his inside jacket pocket, pulled his high-visibility vest on and began walking briskly across the dockyard to the alley. He imagined the freaked-out faces of the security officers in the control centre, who would now be making urgent calls to their IT people. He thought of them being awoken and forced to attend the site, where they would be bamboozled by what they saw on the screens.

  The Court’s hackers had inserted a Trojan worm deep into the servers of the port’s data centre, which propagated quickly to laterally burn any server that they wanted it to – from IP phones, to CCTV, to lights operated by computers and even to the cranes and automatic barriers. Across the concourse and down the alley, in a quadrant of the docks well away from the main gate and security control centre, Sean surreptitiously entered his target premises. It was an ornate red-brick building that had previously been used as an historical archive but now adjoined a modern spacious warehouse facility. The magnetic locking mechanism of the main entrance had been disabled by the hackers and Sean simply opened the door and walked in. No one would know of his insertion so long as the IT systems remained cooked and the CCTV dark.

  He walked past the semicircular reception desk, jumped over the key-card gates and made his way to the main offices on the first floor. He navigated by memory, having studied the building plans earlier that day, and started searching for the communications hub of the warehouse. It was a server room where a rack of pizza-box-sized computers were connected by a tangle of wires, all neatly marked with handwritten labels. On a normal day the servers would push out routine freight manifests, shipping timetables, client pricings and consignment data. Sean wanted access to all the data on the stand-alone servers and any digital traffic that moved through them, as well as to locate any network bridges to the data they held offsite in The Cloud.

  The maglocks that normally provided the locking mechanism to the room were now released but a steel console required a code to release a deadlock that provided additional security for the doorset. Luckily it was a cheap push-button lock that Sean knew how to defeat. He took off his rucksack and pulled out a lock-and-pick set, hoping he wouldn’t need it if he could figure out the four-figure code first. He dusted the push-button with a thin coat of talcum powder and, with very little effort, could see the numbers that had been punched the most from latent fingerprints. He tapped the code, feeling a sense of relief when he turned the satin-chrome door-handle and the lock released.

  Inside the room, he heard the gentle whir of air-conditioning units that kept the server racks cool. He’d been asked to enable remote entry into the servers if they were not connected to the Internet. The hackers could conduct brute-force attacks on any Internet-connected devices and servers, but devices that were stand-alone required another means of covert entry into the systems by way of a radio transceiver that would provide the signals needed for a carefully modified drone to hover above the port and hack into the servers.

  Sean looked at the back of the servers for the telephone jack fittings that would provide cabled access to the Internet. All but two servers were connected to it. Both of these could well be connected locally to a building network and would provide hardened security for the terrorist cell if they were operating here. Sean crouched next to the two servers, opened a small side pocket on his rucksack and grabbed a blue Tupperware box stuffed with small radio-frequency transmitters. He plugged two of these into the Ethernet sockets of the servers, closed the mesh door and grabbed his phone. He sent a codeword back to Samantha indicating that the receivers were in place and could now be exploited by Billy Phish, his cyber-sleuth, using a small drone. Sean smiled at the chance of catching up with Billy Phish, who was now ensconced in Samantha’s operations room on the other side of the Bosphorus.

  Once the drone was in place, Billy Phish would enable a digital bridge back to The Court’s operators in the UK, who would be able to dump records, logs and data from the servers to analyse terabytes of information, looking for any useful intelligence on the Iranian operation.

  The port’s IT employees were now on-site and yelling to their colleagues to turn off computers or disconnect them from the port’s network before the malicious software could infect every office and every business on the site, as well as its power, cooling and operations systems. They needed to deal with this before the port woke for its business of the day at 0500. It dawned on them that every minute lost would mean dozens or hundreds more corrupted PCs, which had now been paralysed by the still-mysterious malware.

  Sean headed downstairs to the workshops that intelligence had suggested formed the core area of operation for the warehouse. He knew he had to act fast, but he also needed to search precisely to gather as much intelligence as he could in the short time he had on-site. His most important task was to find any bomb-making equipment or to verify the complex was being used by an Iranian terrorist cell, which would give him some skin in the game.

  He walked down the stairs and turned left into the warehouse, sweating a little by now. The small warehouse had a number of wooden crates stacked across the open space, with a few corridors to walk in-between them. There were boxes of all sizes, some cardboard, some wrapped in cellophane and some on pallets stacked ready for shipment with cargo netting strapped tightly around them. To the left-hand side were two large offices that looked like post rooms. The lights were on in both of them. He approached the first door, carrying a clipboard under his arm. He tried the door-handle. Locked. He couldn’t see through the door’s glazing because of the frosted privacy glass. The high-level windows were also frosted
and too high to peer through. He decided to check the other room, hoping its door might be open. By turning his head, the headtorch provided him with the light he needed to grasp the handle but, just as he reached for it, he heard a loud shout from behind. ‘Durda! Durda! Ellerini Durdur.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he murmured, taking a moment to process the language. Should he turn? Or play stupid and put his hands up? He didn’t recognise the language, so he couldn’t talk his way out of this one. Security guard, he hoped. He froze rigid and put his hands up, turning slowly to face his aggressor.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said, turning slowly. ‘No need to be alarmed.’

  It wasn’t what he wanted. He looked straight into the eyes of a bearded man with a handgun, who was pointing it right at his chest.

  ‘Mate, I’m doing some checks,’ Sean said, waving his clipboard in the air, blagging it to buy the seconds he needed. ‘Don’t you know there’s been a massive cyber-attack on the whole port?’

  The man, broad-shouldered with a slightly bent nose, scowled angrily. He smelt bad. His eyes were flickering as he tried to process what he was hearing and seeing. His answer was immediate. ‘Fuck off with the bullshit and keep your hands where I can see them.’

  Sean noticed that the man had his trouser zip undone and looked like a gruesome wrestler. ‘Go and have a look at your computers – you’ll see for yourself. We’ve been the victim of a massive cyber-attack and absolutely nothing is working. It’s in meltdown. I’m an IT engineer checking the network nodes.’

  The man looked perplexed, his brow furrowed. ‘Turn around, white man, open the door and keep your hands in the air.’

  Sean paused, then turned slightly, wondering if the scam might have put a seed of doubt in the man’s mind. He rejected that thought immediately. Like a cornered snake, he tensed his muscles, bent his knees and, with all the force he could muster, swung his arm back and launched his clipboard like a frisbee straight at the man’s head.