Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best english books to read .txt) 📗

Radlix Road, between Leyton Jubilee Park and Leyton County Cricket Ground, is fairly typical of the area. Quiet and prosperous looking, with newish cars parked on the street in the ‘permit holder only’ bays, it looks like the kind of area likely to be occupied by people in decent jobs who need fast and reliable access to London, and certainly not the kind of area most people would expect to find a terrorist cell.

Which, of course, was exactly why Mahdi Sadir, the Iraqi man who was calling himself Abū Tadmir, had chosen that location.

To protect his own security he had never visited the property, which was occupied by the four volunteers he had recruited soon after he had arrived in London, and he only ever met them in neutral locations at least two miles away from the house and never used the same place twice. Most of the recruitment had been done in advance by other people who were involved in some capacity with the large number of mosques in the vicinity of Stratford.

It was the usual routine. People sympathetic to the cause of radical Islam were asked to keep their eyes and ears open and be on the lookout for young men, and possibly young women as well, who might be aggrieved enough with the way that Muslims were being treated in the Middle East by the various occupying forces and who were sufficiently dissatisfied with their lives in the West that they could be persuaded to exchange their earthly existence for a guaranteed afterlife in paradise through the medium of an explosion or other act of terminal and murderous defiance. By becoming, in other words, a shahid, or a shahida if female, and taking an active part in the jihad, radical Islam’s war against the West. Once a suitable ‘volunteer’ had been identified, he or she would be singled out for special treatment, for their general dissatisfaction to be discussed and escalated and honed and eventually for their hate and resentment to be pointed in whatever very specific direction had been selected by the people who’d recruited them.

And for all that, for that ability to develop and nurture a home-grown terrorist presence, Sadir knew that the organisation he had to thank was – bizarrely enough – the British government, and two factors that had enabled domestic terrorism to take root and flourish: freedom of movement and political correctness.

Freedom of movement allowed students from around the world to enrol in courses at schools and universities in the United Kingdom. This was not in itself a bad thing, obviously, but what had worried British intelligence from the start were the students who vanished below the radar at some point after their arrival. The concern was that some of these now invisible students might be following their own agendas and could become either radicalised or function as sleepers. And political correctness and the even more insidious Woke movement made it difficult or impossible to get people in authority to listen to questions or allegations about individuals in case they were perceived as being racist or sexist or some other kind of politically unacceptable -ist.

The result was probably inevitable and entirely predictable. It has been reliably estimated by the British intelligence services that by 2020 there were at least two hundred sleepers in the United Kingdom and in the United States the situation was even worse. There, it was estimated some four thousand sleepers had taken positions in the core industries driving the American economy, places like MIT and Silicon Valley, and in the organisations supposedly working to keep the country safe, the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the police and the NSA.

Many of the sleepers were involved in one way or another with the computer industry because what they and their distant masters directing their operations had realised was that although conventional warfare was still going on in the perennially troubled Middle East and other hotspots around the world, the new battlefield involved mice, keyboards and screens rather than aircraft, armies and naval task forces. It was much easier to destroy an enemy’s capability to wage war by simply denying essential services like electricity or fuel rather than physically planting explosives to try to do the same job.

And for exactly the same reason, the vast majority of the sleepers had not the slightest intention of becoming shahids themselves – that was reserved for the cannon fodder, the lowest of the low in the struggle against the West – but many of the sleepers were extremely adroit at persuading other people that blowing themselves up or performing some other kind of violent action was the best way forward in their short and bitter lives.

When Sadir had arrived in the United Kingdom after following a complicated and erratic route from Iraq, a route that had included almost a year on the other side of the Atlantic carrying out the necessary preparations for the principal part of his planned operations, the Islamic recruiter working in the Stratford area already had six potential martyrs largely primed and ready to go. Sadir had sat behind the recruiter as each man’s commitment and motives were discussed and had selected the four men he believed were the most committed for the operation he had come to Britain to implement, the first strike, before continuing his journey to his ultimate destination.

Sadir had arrived with a fully developed plan to cause massive loss of life and catastrophic destruction to the centre of London, as well as the contacts and sources they needed and effectively unlimited funds to ensure that it would all work. He’d rented the property in Leyton Grange Estate to provide a secure base for his four volunteers. Then he’d briefed them collectively in a secure location and explained exactly what he needed each of them to do and when and how they were to do it.

He had kept his orders simple, easy to understand, and unambiguous. He had begun by