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

case any of us had the same buckyballs in our bloodstreams, but thankfully none of us had either intact or broken up fullerenes, so we obviously hadn’t been infected. Autopsies on the other three men – the local paper had included Bob O’Brien in the headline figure – showed that they all had broken and empty fullerenes in their blood and traces of the same chemical compounds as O’Brien, so the cause of their deaths was the same.’

‘I assume your officers did an investigation to try to identify the source?’ Morgan suggested.

‘They did. None of the people who died had any unusual habits or hobbies or anything like that, so it was all a bit inconclusive. Eventually the Head Shed came to the conclusion that the most likely source was a local pub, because that was about the only place where any hostile agents could actually get into close contact with SAS personnel. When the SAS hit a boozer they tend to go as a group, nobody usually bothers to keep count and it can get quite noisy. On a typical evening some third party might be able to drop something into a few of the drinks as they were being ferried from the bar to wherever the members of the Regiment were standing or sitting. In each drinking session the troopers talked about, it was just a typical night out on the town, and none of them thought any more about it.’

‘Until you almost ended up in a smoking hole in the ground somewhere in Wiltshire and three other men dropped dead.’

‘Exactly. And then the Ruperts did the obvious. They checked to see if there was any link between the four men apart from a certain fondness for alcoholic beverages.’

‘And?’

‘And there was one link. Or a sort of link, anyway, but it’s a bit tenuous. Have you ever heard of Task Force Black?’

Morgan shook his head.

‘Okay. It was a Sabre Squadron that operated from 2004 to 2008 on a six-month rotation in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was forced to find a hole to hide in. It was based inside the Green Zone in Baghdad in a building known as “the Station” and it was mainly tasked with hunting down and eliminating senior members of al-Qaeda. As it turned out, two of the four men from the Regiment who died had been members of Task Force Black.’

‘So do you think it was a targeted attack?’

‘Possibly, but I’m not convinced for several reasons. First, people in the Regiment try to remain anonymous as much as possible because of the kind of work they do.’

Morgan nodded and grinned.

‘You’ve told me before that most of the people who claim to have been in the SAS almost certainly have never been within fifty miles of Stirling Lines.’

‘Exactly. Mind you, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out that if you walk into a pub somewhere within staggering distance of Credenhill and see a dozen or so young, fit and healthy men talking and drinking together as a group they might very possibly be members of the Regiment. But none of them is ever going to confirm that, and even if somebody did manage to identify a particular soldier as a member of the SAS, finding out what missions and operations he’d been involved in would be impossible. So the chances of some hostile force identifying Task Force Black personnel are somewhere between nil and nil.’

‘But you’ve just told me that two members of that particular op had been targeted,’ Morgan pointed out.

‘That was the only link the Head Shed found, but it’s a long way from being conclusive. And the third man, and Bob O’Brien for that matter, hadn’t been a part of that op, and they were infected as well. And you have to remember that a Sabre Squadron typically numbers about sixty people, so I think this Task Force Black link is nothing of the sort. It’s just a coincidence. If you randomly picked fifty men from Stirling Lines and checked their operational history you’d find that many of them would have been together on missions in the past, because the SAS is still a small unit. I think what probably happened was a hostile agent identified a group of men in a pub as probably being from the Regiment and somehow managed to spike some of their drinks. And as I said, take any group of men from the SAS and the chances are that some of them would have been involved in one particular operation.’

‘And would that work? Spiking their drinks, I mean?’

‘Not my field,’ North replied, ‘so I don’t know. Nor do the medics, come to that, because nanotechnology is such a new field. But from what Natasha Black was saying, it might be possible to prepare fullerenes that wouldn’t be broken down by stomach acids and would pass into the bloodstream intact and activate later. The bottom line is that nobody knows, but what does seem clear is that those four men all had to have been infected at about the same time. I can’t think of any way that could have happened inside Stirling Lines, so assuming it was down at a local pub or at some other social event does make sense.’

Morgan took another sip of his drink and nodded.

‘So if you’re right and it was nothing to do with Task Force Black, who do you think did it?’

‘It could still have been the Iraqis or other al-Qaeda sympathisers,’ North said. ‘Bearing in mind that the joint operation with the Americans killed hundreds of al-Qaeda personnel and took about three and a half thousand of them off the streets for the loss of just six Regiment soldiers. Maybe al-Qaeda decided to strike back in an unusual way, administering a lethal poison to people they believed to be members of the SAS.’

‘That really doesn’t work for me,’ Morgan said, after a moment, shaking his head. ‘Developing nanotechnology to produce a weapon like that would