Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

a similar appearance – dark tan complexions, black hair and beards. The man who came out of the restroom was wearing different clothes, which most probably meant he’d just taken off his denim jacket and jeans and put them in a carrier bag that I couldn’t see or didn’t notice, so he was wearing a shirt and khaki trousers or shorts.’

‘But you should still have recognised his face,’ Morgan said.

‘I agree. When I lost sight of him he was wearing a blue face mask: the man who came out of the restroom had a similar complexion but no mask. He was completely clean-shaven. The beard had gone. Before you ask I did check the restroom and there was no sign of him having shaved it off. And in any case he hadn’t been in there long enough to do that.’

‘So how the hell—’

‘Beat the hell out of us too. Our photo technicians solved the problem. I took a picture of him on my mobile when he left the restroom. It wasn’t the best picture in the world but it was clear enough for them to work out what he’d done. He was wearing a mask, but one he’d obviously had custom made, and it was incredibly effective. It exactly matched his skin tone and it was printed with a nose that was slightly more flared than the subject’s nose, different lips and, obviously, no beard. Plus he had on tinted glasses and a beanie cap. It gave him a completely different appearance, and I genuinely never gave him a second glance. He looked just like a guy walking out of the restroom who hadn’t yet put on his paper mask.’

‘Masks are a real problem,’ Rogers pointed out, ‘and I don’t just mean they’re uncomfortable to wear and probably don’t work to stop this fucking virus. But look at it from a law enforcement point of view. Before this pandemic got exported from China, if a couple of guys walked into a bank wearing masks you’d have the tellers pressing the panic button and the guards reaching for their weapons. Today, the only people the guards look at closely are those who aren’t wearing masks when they walk in.

‘And as Bill here knows only too well, live surveillance is a nightmare, because people are expected to have their faces covered. Lose sight of somebody for even a minute and in that time they can take off their jacket, lose their hat and change the colour of their mask and they’ll look completely different. I mean, if we hadn’t already shot him full of holes we could have Osama bin Laden walking around in DC wearing a suit and a mask and nobody would give him a second glance or have any idea who he was.’

Chapter 36

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

On New Year’s Day 1942, just twenty-five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, construction began on a military air base at Syracuse, New York, and by August the same year the first military personnel were operating there. Known as the Syracuse Army Air Base or Mattydale Bomber Base – taking this name from the suburb of Syracuse where the airfield was built – it was used as a training facility and for repairing and updating B-17 and B-24 bombers. At the end of the Second World War the military airfield was redesignated for civilian use and became the Clarence E. Hancock Airport. But the military didn’t stay away for long, exercising their right of return in 1951.

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