Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

keyboard, a trackball and a forty-inch flat panel monitor bolted to a kind of frame and being fed by a high specification desktop tower unit. The screens had been arranged in a gentle curve so that a person sitting in any of the black leather chairs behind the desks could easily see everything displayed on all three screens. There were three seats and keyboards primarily to provide redundancy in case one of the computers went down, but also because Sadir intended to be occupying the third seat when the plan came to fruition.

The central workstation differed from the other two in that it was also equipped with a clearly expensive high-end flight simulator yoke control column, rudder pedals, throttle quadrant assembly and a separate modular instrument panel below the flat panel monitor. In that were a compass, altimeter, VSI – vertical speed indicator – and other standard aircraft instruments, clearly making that position the ‘hot seat’ of the system. The set-up looked like the kind of flight simulator a professional pilot might create in his home to use as both an entertainment console and to help maintain his flying skills.

‘Are you ready?’ Sadir asked simply. ‘In all respects, I mean?’

Both men in front of him nodded, and the taller of the two – Sadir knew him only as ‘Michael’ because real names were never a good idea in the kind of operation he was involved in – replied.

‘We are. We have taken control of the last three flights and altered the course by a few degrees.’

‘We only deviated them enough that the pilot would assume it was just the action of the wind,’ the other man – Joseph – added. ‘Then we immediately severed our connection. They have no idea we are on the frequency. If they notice anything at all, they’ll probably assume that because they’re using both C-band and Ku-band data links – obviously in the training environment they have to be familiar with both and practise using the two methods of control – there’s a brief mismatch between the two of them.’

Both men were remarkably similar in appearance, with almost identical facial features, both clean-shaven and with thick black hair, and even tended to dress in much the same way. Their difference in height, a matter of only two or three inches, was all that Sadir had to distinguish between them.

‘What about the routes and the payloads?’ Sadir asked.

Michael nodded. ‘So far, the information supplied by your contact at the base has been completely accurate in terms of the timing and duration of the flights and their configuration. Sometimes they just do surveillance and at other times they operate on various ranges and inside danger areas, exactly as your source predicted. I presume he has access to the training schedule.’

In fact, the person Michael referred to as Sadir’s ‘contact’ was rather more than just somebody who could glance at a training schedule and then pass on the relevant information. Major Sammy Dawood was an American-born Muslim – his first name was actually spelt ‘Sami,’ the Arabic word meaning exalted or sublime, but because he both looked and sounded American people automatically assumed it was ‘Sammy’ – and identifying and recruiting him to the cause had taken Sadir well over a year. That had been one of the first and most important tasks he’d needed to complete once the plan had been finalised.

He’d told two of the hackers he’d recruited in America to begin trawling Islamic websites and social media looking for anybody in any branch of the American military who seemed to be expressing an interest in the activities of ISIS and other radical Islamic groups. What had surprised Sadir was how many people this search had produced. Some could be rejected immediately, for one reason or another, but he’d ended up with a hard core of almost a dozen potential recruits scattered across the continental United States which he had begun cultivating.

From this group, three men had seemed to fit the bill, though one of them was in a branch of the American military machine that Sadir knew almost nothing about – the Air National Guard – and which he had erroneously assumed was some kind of reserve force of ex-military non-combatants using obsolete equipment. When he discovered the reality of the situation, and more importantly about a year earlier had found out that Major Sami Dawood’s next posting was to the 174th Attack Wing of the New York Air National Guard, based at Hancock Field at Syracuse, Sadir had concentrated all his efforts on his recruitment and radicalisation.

The process had been lengthy and subtle, beginning with just the occasional exchanged comment about the dislike of Muslims shown by some Americans, and had then escalated through discussions about racist and anti-Islamic treatment being meted out to Muslims in various parts of the Middle East, and had ended with apparently authoritative statements made by an imam about the duty of all Muslims to attack their common enemy, and most specifically about the jihad, the holy war against the Great Satan.

Once Dawood had clearly and enthusiastically accepted this premise, the next step was to directly recruit him as an essential part of Sadir’s religiously sanctioned operation to visit death and destruction upon Americans in their homeland, in exactly the same way that American soldiers and airmen had rained down mortars and bombs and missiles upon the people of Iraq and Iran, and on the fearless freedom fighters of the Islamic State and ISIS.

In fact, Dawood was the lynchpin of this, the most important single part of the operation, because he was a senior training officer in the team responsible for planning the flight schedule out of Hancock and, crucially, one of his duties was to specify the payload for each mission, which was why Sadir knew exactly what was going to be carried aloft a few hours before he would launch the attack on DC.

A little over two hours later, having thoroughly inspected the equipment, gone over the