Lethal Sky

by Greg Barron

  ‘This is Jan Sloven.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Our work is done. You’ll get a written report in the next thirty minutes. The LSS-253 is a killing machine. It divides fast. It is vaccine resistant. It is not susceptible to any real extent to any known antibiotics. There is only one possible cure, and that is a monoclonal antibody called ABthrax. I suggest you get onto the company and start stockpiling — we have some here, but not enough to treat more than a few dozen people.’

  Silence, then: ‘Shit.’

  ‘Exactly. I must also issue the caveat that because this strain replicates so fast, it may affect the human body faster than the ABthrax can bind the toxins.’

  ‘That’s not much of a comfort.’

  ‘You can’t let this … thing out into the world. You just can’t allow it to happen.’

  Jan lets the handset slip from his grasp back onto the cradle, then sits on the edge of a lab bench. ‘Mary, and Mary, come here for a minute, please.’

  They come across. He can see how tired they are.

  ‘I have a report to write. But while I do that, I want you to help me do something. We’ll probably all get sacked for this, but …

  ‘What we should be doing right now is preparing a specimen culture of this strain to put,’ he points across at the huge stainless steel cabinet at one end of the room, ‘in the Controlled Specimen Cabinet. But we’re not going to do that.’

  He has their attention. Young Mary’s pretty, long-lashed blue eyes, and old Mary’s wiser green ones are both fixed on his face. ‘You see, I think we’ve been doing this all wrong. You make a weapon, sooner or later someone is going to use it. Maybe it’s time to stop keeping the damn things. If you don’t agree, I’ll let you out now.

  ‘There’s a tide of weapons out there. And we keep making them — the original source of these strains were British and American laboratories. We can’t ever know the end users of the weapons we make. Pathogens don’t think or have a conscience, they’ll follow any master. They kill without empathy.’ He shakes his head sadly. ‘I read about Mikhail Kalashnikov. Just before he died he asked a priest if God would hold him responsible for the deaths of all the millions of people who had been killed at the hands of his invention — the AK47 rifle.’ Jan points at the archive cabinet. ‘This is far more dangerous. If we put LSS-253 in that cabinet it might as well be a nuclear weapon. One day it will be used.’

  Old Mary looks at him questioningly. ‘I agree, but what about research into cures? Don’t we need the cultures for antibiotic testing and the like?’

  ‘Ten, even five years ago you could have made that argument. Now, with the genome mapped, we don’t need them. Everything can be done via modelling. It could even be synthesised if that became necessary.’

  The older woman sums it up for both the lab assistants. ‘I think we’re in.’

  ‘Good, let’s get to work.’

  SIXTY-TWO

  WATTISHAM BASE

  LOCAL TIME: 0400

  ‘OK, we have orders,’ Ronnie shouts, ‘to pick up a tech from the roof at Legoland.’ He uses one of several popular nicknames for the SIS building.

  The chopper is a dedicated CBRN version of the Lynx Wildcat AW159, designated in Special Forces vernacular as the GermCat. Ronnie walks with Kisira towards the side door while the engines start with that high-pitched whine. The lift-off is abrupt and no-nonsense. This is not a VIP flight, but a desperate effort to stave off Armageddon.

  Although just a prototype, the GermCat, Ronnie knows, is the right machine for tracking down the cluster drones. The cockpit is pressurised, the air re-circulated through HEPA filters. It carries protective equipment, a sophisticated sensor suite, but most importantly a variation on the THOR laser ordnance-destroying weapon, a vehicle-mounted high-energy beam that has been in use on the ground since about 2012, adapted for the high-temperature destruction of bioweapons modules.

  The GermCat skims across the city at rooftop height. Ronnie can see smoke from rioting in the north east of the city. The sight makes his blood boil, but the drones are the priority right now.

  They fly over the darkened River Thames, just starting to run in for this record high tide. Vauxhall looms ahead, the helipad clear and lit by floodlights as they settle in.

  The tech who waits with an armload of gear looks familiar, but the light is uneven, and Ronnie thinks little of it as the man settles into the seat next to Kisira. Other men come with him, assisting with setting up an array of equipment that includes a laptop, various black boxes including a signal booster, and a directional antenna.

  ‘How much range has this chopper got?’ the tech asks into the onboard comms when they have him connected.

  ‘We just topped up, and we’ve got long-range tanks. At least eight-hundred clicks.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Welcome aboard, anyway.’

  ‘My name’s Julian.’

  Ronnie turns and looks at him. ‘Julian, aren’t you the geek who …?’

  ‘Yes, that was me.’

  ‘Aren’t you in Thailand or something?’

  ‘Myanmar, but they brought me back to help with this.’

  ‘You’re lucky you didn’t get a bullet in the head and a shallow grave. I’m watching you closely. Try and sell us out this time and you’ll have to learn how to fly pretty damn quickly. Understood?’

  Julian nods his head, surprised at how much the words hurt. ‘Of course. I want this to work, I really do.’

  There is an uneasy silence as the GermCat rises into the London night. Two other aircraft appear from out to the west, looming up so there is one on each wing.

  ‘Apaches, our escort,’ the pilot explains. ‘They’ll be with us in relays.’

  ‘We’ve been ordered to chase the French drones first, because they’re supposed to deploy before the English ones,’ Ronnie says.

  ‘OK. That’ll give us practice, anyway. We’ve got about five hours. Let’s pray to whoever the hell you pray to that it’s enough.’

  The fuselage groans with the strain of increased speed as they fly east over the channel. Julian watches out the window at a moonlit arctic wasteland of cloud-tops, white and blue-grey on their shadowed sides. Wispy, spirit-like clumps drift over the whole like herdsmen. The coast of France appears through gaps in the cloud as a line of lights in the distance.

  ‘Anything yet?’ Ronnie asks.

  ‘Not yet. How close are we to Boulogne?’

  ‘Twenty kilometres.’

  Ronnie leans closer, ‘Now walk me through what you’re doing here.’

  Julian sniffs, eyes focused on the screen. ‘We’ll track down those drones, one by one. We need to be within about thirty kilometres to do it, but the closer the better. I’m going to find them — you’re going to destroy them. The rest is rather technical.’

  ‘OK, sure. Give me the dead-heads version.’

  ‘Basically, the cluster drones all communicate through a wireless network, protected by an almost unbreakable level of encryption. We have to break that encryption to become part of the network. Once we have, then we use the controller software to first switch on their ‘friendly’ radar signals, so we can see them, then stop them from going into autonomous defence mode. We could try to order them to land, but that’s been vetoed, apparently. You’re going to take them out.’

  ‘OK, I got it.’

  The conversation in the chopper starts to slow as they realise the enormity of the task at hand. Five drones in the air over England and France. Their only chance of stopping them is a bank of electrical equipment run by a known traitor.

  ‘We’ve got clearance for French airspace,’ says the pilot, ‘and we’ve got a new escort now.’

  Julian glances out the window to see two French Dassault Rafale fighter jets scream up and around, one lighting its afterburners as it breaks right and climbs, looking like a fiery comet in the darkness. He turns back to his equipment.

  Hastily assembled, he nonetheless has replicated the
MGCS — Mobile Ground Control Station — that Ross Craven had originally designed to control the units. As they fly on towards Amiens he picks up the first signal from the network.

  The screen flashes in front of him. ‘OK, at least one of the drones is talking to us. The strength is good, we must be close.’

  The pilot: ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Just stay on this course. Our computers back home will try every possible combination until they break the encryption. It’s called brute force, and it takes time. We’re talking hundreds of digits.’

  ‘So the computers back at DRFS are powerful, are they?’ Ronnie grunts.

  ‘Yeah, you could say that. How does five ProLiant 96 core Opteron servers, each running two terabytes of RAM sound?’

  ‘Like complete fucking gibberish.’ Ronnie is quiet for a moment, then: ‘So, brute force, right. How long would it take to guess my ATM pin?’

  ‘Four digits? Way less than a second. Wouldn’t even get the processors cranked up.’

  ‘What about my online banking password? Five letters and three numbers.’

  ‘Twenty seconds maybe. What we’re dealing with out there is maybe ninety characters. It’ll take ten minutes to an hour if we’re lucky. Half a day if we’re not. Depends on a lot of factors … every additional character will make it that much harder.’

  Ronnie has stopped listening, talking into the mouthpiece of his headset. ‘I’m going to move into the gunner’s chair now.’

  The pilot: ‘Go for it.’

  Moving gingerly in the tight confines of the cabin, Ronnie slides his legs and body down into the gunner’s seat. Settled, he lowers the helmet over his head.

  The screen inside is an integrated part of the weapons system, automatically connecting to the GU unit via Bluetooth and thus to the SITPOL screen back over the Channel at Vauxhall Cross. Tiny icons across the top also show other assets on the local network. Pilot and co-pilot both appear as avatars as if in realistic game play.

  The main view is a fusion screen, combining a FLIR display, with a visible spectrum image, the former being fed from a Thales pod mounted on the starboard wing. The FLIR display shows any and all objects within a roughly forty nautical mile range that throw up any kind of heat signature — aircraft, even people. The unit is capable of seeing through smoke and darkness.

  Below the FLIR screen is the laser rangefinder/designator, and after a few moments of familiarising himself with the display, Ronnie begins to look for the drone in the airspace up ahead.

  ‘I’m worried we might go past them,’ the pilot warns. ‘Slowing down now.’

  ‘Any progress?’ Ronnie asks.

  ‘No.’

  Time passes. Long minutes where the tension builds. Twenty minutes. Thirty. The banter stops. Sweat drips down Julian’s face as he studies the laptop screen, muttering under his breath.

  Each potential character of the p value needed to crack the protocol, forms its own line on the screen, then scrolls endlessly through every possibility from A to Z, followed by digits from 0 to 9.

  The critical point is the number of possibilities. Fifty, sixty, then seventy as the PERL script starts to explore the algorithm.

  Please. Not more than ninety, Julian urges under his breath. Even the powerful DRFS computers will not be able to cope with much more than that.

  Eighty, ninety …

  ‘This isn’t looking good,’ he calls out.

  Even Ronnie looks stressed. He doesn’t say a word.

  One hundred, one hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty …

  ‘I can’t get in,’ Julian calls, ‘Faizan must have made the p value bigger.’

  ‘That’s a definite?’

  One hundred and fifty …

  ‘I just don’t know for sure … it’ll take a while. It may be unbreakable. I’ll keep trying but …’

  Tom Mossel responds using voice comms in the SITPOL room. ‘If it can’t be done it can’t be done.’ He sits down on his chair in the Blair Room and pictures the uninhabited, windswept wastelands of Vozrozhdeniye Island again. London without her people would be a tragedy beyond imagination.

  A moment later there is the sound of running footsteps, and Will Grace appears at the door. His eyes are wild with excitement. Mossel has never seen him in such a state.

  ‘We’ve just had a call from the CIA. They say they have a way to locate the drones.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Phantom Eye, a drone way up in the stratosphere.’

  Tom Mossel sits up. ‘Tell the GermCat to stand by. We’ll see if the Yanks can find them a target.’

  SIXTY-THREE

  LONDON

  LOCAL TIME: 0430

  Across London, thousands of men and women wake to the sound of shrilling telephones. They open closet doors, lace up boots and check webbing. Within half an hour the first uniformed soldiers pour onto the streets.

  Their brief is to stand in front of shopfronts, and guard local business districts. Most wear a uniform familiar to the British people — battle dress in olive drab that has served the British army for more than a century. This time-worn garb has far more gravitas than the ubiquitous combat fatigues in use around the world.

  Officers in peaked caps open armouries across London and pass out SA80 rifles. Boxes of GMT PVC-tipped riot ammunition are broken open and pushed into magazines. One after the other, squads head out onto the streets.

  The orders are simple. ‘March through the city. Restore order. Arrest the leaders and the others will go home.’

  The news of the terror plot is now impossible to contain. Media outlets descend on ‘sources’ offering bribes and using relentless pressure to obtain everything but the absolute truth. They gather enough stray supposition and sound bites for screaming headlines.

  Calais and Boulogne, after being tipped off by British Intelligence that they are likely targets, are in mayhem. One popular radio station is exhorting citizens to evacuate: ‘Citoyens, n’hésitez pas à quitter la ville.’

  The highways and streets are jammed with vehicles, and some drivers flee their cars, abandoning them in the traffic stream to run off on foot.

  France is an important psychological target. Despite her strong opposition to the Iraq war, led by outspoken Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, in more recent times they have been involved in several conflicts. Their jets flew thousands of sorties into Libya, enforcing the UN no-fly zone. In fact it was a French jet that fired the first shot in the intervention.

  Later still, France poured troops into Mali at the request of the government, and her four thousand troops there were instrumental in holding back the combined advance of AQIM, Mojwa and Ansar Dine. France also actively promoted NATO attacks on Syria, and provided weapons including MANPADS and small arms to rebel groups.

  In Moscow, long a friend and ally to the deposed regime in Syria, tensions are high nevertheless. Hundreds, if not thousands of operatives are assigned to a suspicious parcel at Domodedovo airport, a missing chartered plane in Kazan, and a Chechen informer in custody in a ‘special’ facility in Kizlyar who, under the influence of SP-117 truth serum, has told of a site just outside the capital, hot air balloons and a tank of helium. Agents are swarming, trying to locate the site before forecast breezes arrive.

  New York is on its highest alert since 9/11, and Los Angeles police have made no progress in uncovering a plot, despite one of the largest law enforcement mobilisations in history. Drones crisscross the sky, F22 and F16 jets from Edwards Air Force Base leave vapour trails hanging off the Californian skies.

  Not all the world, of course, is preoccupied with the coming terror. Many people, even in the target cities, don’t believe it will happen, and for the majority of the world’s population, London, Paris, Sydney, New York and Los Angeles are far away. In other countries, other cities, students worry about their coming exams, accountants add their figures, and lovers stroll through parks.

  BOOK FOUR

  ‘About one-third
of our work was on weapons, like anthrax, plague and other bacteria,’ he recalls, ‘and two-thirds on matters like testing vaccines or clothing or how long micro-organisms would survive in the soil.’

  I show Lepyoshkin photographs of the lab complex. He flips through them gloomily. He stops at a shot of a long three-story building. ‘That’s where I worked,’ he says. ‘That’s the hot zone, where we kept the pathogens, where the animals were brought after the tests and where they died and were autopsied. It was cleared out so no one could even guess what went on there.’

  Does he ever have any qualms about being part of a program that was making enough germs to kill the earth’s population several times over?

  ‘No,’ he says and shakes his head vigorously. ‘Absolutely not. Because I knew the weapons would never be used. When nuclear weapons were made, no one thought they would be used. You’d have to be mad to use them.’

  Gennadi Lepyoshkin interviewed by Christopher Pala, in the New York Times

  0430(Z) English Channel / Alt 18600m — Vis range 27594m / Wind S 0 knots — Visibility 20000m — Temp (ground) 10°C /

  Phantom Eye can see the English Channel far below. At close to twenty thousand metres altitude it views a five hundred kilometre terrestrial circle, from Wales to Paris.

  HUMINT has failed, standard ELINT has failed.

  Phantom Eye activates the HyperSpectral sensors, mounted under the starboard wing. HyperSpectral uses a combination of optics and spectrometers to collect a three-dimensional image called a datacube, updated in real time, and assessed by software designed to look for predesignated targets in the clutter.

  No stealth technology can escape. HyperSpectral sees into the very molecules themselves, discerns the nature of matter. Clouds will not hide the cluster drones, their only advantage is their small size, only a couple of pixels in the datacube. Phantom Eye starts to search on the edge of French territory.