Cyber Terror (22 page)

Without a functioning right arm, he couldn’t smash his way through the window or the main door, so he staggered to the back door that Raven had forced open. Trying to ignore the aches in
his knees, he dashed across the lower floor and hauled himself up into the earth mover closest to the window. The key was in the ignition. He turned it on straight away and the giant vehicle burst
noisily to life. He rammed the digger into first gear and the monster leaped forward. Jordan had hardly worked out where the controls were before it crashed through the window. Like icicles falling
from a thawing gutter, shards of glass fell all around him. Jordan protected his head and face with his left arm and the digger lurched to the right.

Clear of the broken glass, Jordan steered the earth mover away from his Jaguar. He shifted the gear stick and the engine spluttered and groaned.

In front of him, Raven was reversing her stolen car crazily back down the narrow lane. Another car was forcing her back towards the car park. It had to be Kate in a white Toyota.

At once, Jordan saw what he had to do. He accelerated towards the lane to block off Raven’s retreat. But the earth mover was nowhere near as nimble as his Jaguar. It seemed to take an age
to turn and gather speed. Shaking Jordan in its rough seat, the digger lumbered across the car park just in time. He brought it to a shuddering halt at the end of the lane.

Raven executed an emergency stop and skidded. The rear of her car smacked into the earth mover.

It was as if a dog had run into an elephant. In the driver’s cab, Jordan did not feel a thing.

Kate turned and braked, stopping the Toyota across the width of the lane. Together, she and Jordan had boxed in Raven.

Laptop in hand, Raven got out and ran for it. She dashed away from the digger and the factory, but Kate was too quick for her. Drawing back her right arm, Kate punched Raven full in the face.
Stunned, she came to a dead halt as if she’d run into an unseen plate of glass. Then her look of surprise changed to one of pain and her legs gave way. The laptop flew from her grasp as she
fell to the ground.

Jordan winced at the power of the punch. Clambering down from the digger, he called out, “Ouch. Remind me not to get on your wrong side.”

Kate smiled. “I’ve done a bit of boxing in my time. Hey, you look rough.”

Jordan pointed to his false arm and then his head. “I’m out of action. Again.”

Kate had brought help in the shape of Eli Kennington. Climbing out of the passenger door, he looked surprised, shocked and a little amused.

On the ground, Raven stirred and moaned.

“End of mission,” Kate declared.

Remembering the two aeroplanes that Raven had sabotaged, Jordan shook his head. “Not really.” He reached down for the laptop and said to Eli, “I need you to save a lot of
lives. We don’t have long.” He began a hurried explanation.

Surprising all three of them, Raven came round from the blow. She jumped up and ran in the direction of the airport.

Taking a breath, Kate said, “You deal with things here. I’ll get her.” She set off in pursuit.

Jordan balanced the computer on the bonnet of Kate’s car. “I’ll make sure you get full access to all my gadgets if you stop some hardware Trojans that are going to bring two
flights down any second now.”

Eli jerked his thumb in Kate’s direction. “She has already promised me that.”

“Must be true, then.”

Eli was about to say something else but he stopped, opened up the laptop and turned it on. Almost immediately, he muttered, “I’m blocked from using it. It is protected by a
password.”

“Hang on. I’ve got an idea.” Jordan called Angel and hurriedly filled him in on events. “What was Raven’s name before she was Madison Flint?” he asked.

“Julie Baker.”

“Okay.” He turned to Eli and said, “Try Baker, Julie or Julie Baker – all one word or with a gap. Something like that. Hurry.”

At the second attempt, the laptop accepted
juliebaker
as a password. “All right,” Eli said, “I am past security.” Seeing an icon for the program
‘UnTrojan’, he cried, “She stole this stuff from me!”

“Good,” Jordan replied. “That means you’ll know how to use it.”

The 09.00 flight from Gatwick to Atlanta had taken off without incident. The Boeing 767 had 304 passengers on board. But the air traffic controller in charge of the departure
was staring at her screen in amazement and horror.

Trying to remain calm, she said into her microphone, “Flight AM5699. You have deviated from your flight path. Please correct at once.”

“Investigating,” the pilot replied.

There was silence for thirty-two seconds. Then the pilot’s voice told her, “The autopilot’s in control of this aeroplane and all my attempts to override it have
failed.”

Control gulped. She could hardly believe her ears. “Say again.”

“Override unsuccessful. I have no control over flight. The autopilot is flying the aeroplane. I don’t know where we’re going. Bearing north and descending steadily.”

Further along the row of computers, another controller was having almost exactly the same astonishing conversation with Flight TOM4762 to Larnaca. The only certainty was that
the Boeing 757 carrying 214 passengers was not headed for Cyprus.

“Right,” Angel said into Jordan’s ear. “It’s started. There are two rogue flights out of Gatwick. I’ve scrambled Air Force fighter jets with
missiles primed and ready to fire.”

Jordan didn’t know that his boss wielded such power. Unit Red was a secret organization, but it had authority and contacts in high places.

“Where are they going?”

“At the moment, I’m waiting to see. Find a way to give control back to the pilots or I’ll have to blast them out of the sky.”

Shocked, Jordan replied, “Eli’s working on it.”

“There are 518 people on those two planes, Jordan.”

He swallowed. 518 lives in the hands of an autistic computer geek and a teenager with a broken body. “How long do you need?” he asked Eli.

“I am trying to determine what has been sabotaged. I can see that you...”

Jordan interrupted. “Don’t worry about me. Look for planes.”

“Yes. She has reprogrammed an American flight called AM5699.”

“Well, unprogram it,” Jordan almost shouted.

Eli typed as he replied, “It is possible, but it will take me a few minutes.”

The phone still clamped to his ear, Jordan fell silent, allowing Eli to concentrate.

Before long, though, Angel said, “I think you were right.”

“Oh?”

“They look like they’re heading for Sizewell. If that’s the target, I can’t let them strike.”

An image of a mushroom cloud sprang into Jordan’s mind. He shuddered at the thought of a nuclear explosion in East Anglia. He shuddered at the thought of the devastation it would cause.
“How long have we got?” he asked, his voice suddenly quaking.

“A couple of minutes before I have to give the order to fire and destroy the planes.”

Jordan turned to Eli. “Can you sort it out in two minutes?”

“No,” Eli answered. “But I am making progress in releasing the first aeroplane’s flight and control system.”

“Flight AM5699,” the air traffic controller said. “I’m told someone’s trying to disable your autopilot remotely. Keep trying to override it.
Repeat. Keep trying to regain control and prepare to alter course.”

“We are flying at an altitude of five hundred metres, Control. Five hundred metres! Towards coastal buildings.”

“I’ve got you on screen.”

The pilot said, “I can see another commercial plane. I estimate on a collision course. I don’t know if I’ll hit the ground first or the other Boeing.”

“We’re doing all we can, AM5699. If you get navigation back, fly east. Repeat. Go east over the sea. Flight TOM4762 has instructions to break away to the west, over land. Do you
copy?”

“Copy. I note we have military escorts as well.”

“Confirmed,” Control said.

“What are
their
instructions?”

The air traffic controller hesitated. “The Air Force can’t stand by if you’re going to hit a sensitive target.”

“Like Sizewell B? That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

There was another short period of radio silence before she answered. “Yes, confirmed. I’m sorry, AM5699.”

Giorgos didn’t know it but he was the youngest passenger on Flight TOM4762. In a cheerful mood, he and his family were taking up two rows of seats in the aeroplane. They
were cheerful for two reasons. They’d seen Giorgos’s cousin marry a nice English man in Oxford and now they were going home to Cyprus. Giorgos was smiling because he was remembering the
English rain drenching the wedding party after the ceremony and his mum drinking too much at the reception. She was always funny when she’d had a few drinks.

The plane banked sharply to the right. Instead of continuing its climb into the grey sky, it lurched and began to descend. Giorgos noticed his mum exchanging a glance with the other adults. She
was more surprised than scared.

As the aeroplane turned towards the coast and continued to descend, the grown-ups looked less puzzled and more panicked. With a strange feeling in his stomach, Giorgos gazed out of the window.
The undercarriage almost seemed to be scraping the flat farmlands of the Suffolk countryside. He didn’t know much about flying, but he knew the ground shouldn’t be so close and he could
sense everyone’s nervousness.

Forcing a smile, his mother leaned close and spoke in English. “Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”

Pointing out of the window, he replied, “I see two more planes.”

One was flying low, just like their own. The other was much smaller and higher. A jet like the ones in war films.

There was a hurried announcement in English that Giorgos didn’t quite catch, but the look of horror on his mum’s face told him they were in trouble.

“Right,” she said to him, struggling to hold back tears. “We’ve got to get into the brace position.”

“What’s that?”

“Like this,” she said, bending over so her forehead rested against the seat in front. She also cradled her head in her arms.

“Why?”

“Because...the stewardess said so. Because we’re too near the ground.”

“But you said it’d be all right.”

“Let’s get you into the right position, love, then it will be.”

Eli tapped at the keypad and then looked up. “That’s it! I have freed the first system.”

On the Suffolk coast, unseen by Jordan and Eli, the aeroplane bound for Atlanta peeled away from the coast under the control of its pilot and zoomed out over the North Sea. It almost skimmed the
waves. But it was safe and it climbed back into the sky.

“One more,” Angel said to Jordan urgently. “Flight TOM4762.”

“TOM4762 as well,” he roared at Eli.

“I know.”

Chilling Jordan, Angel said, “You’ve got thirty seconds before I give the order to fire.”

“Thirty seconds,” Jordan told Eli. “Any hope?”

“None at all.”

“There’s got to be something...”

Eli shook his head. “With hurrying come mistakes.”

“We need more time,” Jordan said into the phone.

“There isn’t any,” Angel replied abruptly.

Eli was working as quickly as he could: typing, shutting down systems, entering codes. But he was only human. He didn’t stand a chance.

In a broken voice, Jordan said to his chief, “Sorry. We’re too...”

Angel had broken off. He was giving orders to someone else.

On Flight TOM4762, Giorgos could not sit still in the brace position. Silently, he uncurled himself and sneaked a look outside. He saw the other big Boeing veer away over the
sea. His aeroplane was keeping to its course, over fields, towards some buildings on the edge of the land. To Giorgos, it didn’t look like an airport.

After a few more seconds, movement caught his eye. The fighter jet had fired a missile. Again, it was just like he’d seen in films. This time, though, the weapon wasn’t hurtling
towards some fictional enemy. It was coming directly at him. It was coming directly at a real plane full of innocent passengers.

They weren’t in the brace position in case of an accident. It was in case of an attack.

Giorgos let out a gasp and he shouted at his mum. “Look!”

“Keep your head down,” she muttered.

“No! Look!”

Their startled faces at the window saw the incoming rocket, horribly close. Elsewhere on the plane, some people were screaming. In an instant, Flight TOM4762 was no longer recognizable as an
aeroplane. In a giant explosion, it became a flying fireball. Breaking into flaming fragments, it plummeted towards the coast, one hundred metres short of Sizewell nuclear power station.

Kate was panting when she returned. On her own. “She gave me the slip. Sorry.”

“Oh, no!” Jordan had just lost 214 passengers. Now he’d lost Short Circuit as well. Talking to Eli Kennington, he said, “UnTrojan me now. Quickly. I’m not letting
her get away. Not after what she’s done.”

“What has she done?” Kate asked. “You look...shaken.”

Shaken was hardly the word. He felt terrible. He felt like a failure. And he felt angry.

“A plane’s just been shot down, all because of her. More than two hundred people.”

Kate gazed for a while at the ground. Then, unable to make eye contact with Jordan, she looked out across the field where Raven had made her getaway. “I wish I’d hit her harder. She
wouldn’t have got up again.”

Taking him by surprise, Jordan’s fine sense of smell returned. At once, he detected aviation fuel again. “That’s better,” he said to Eli. Talking to Kate, he added,
“Maybe she’s nicked another car by now.”

Kate shook her head. “She’ll have worked out Angel’s monitoring reports of stolen cars. More likely, she’ll jump on a train.”

“And go where?” Jordan asked. “She won’t go home. She’ll know agents will be waiting for her.”

Kate sighed. “I don’t know.”

“I hope she hasn’t got a plane ticket.”

“She won’t leave the country. She wants to ruin this one first.”

“We’ve got her computer. My guess is she’ll go where she can get another one.” Jordan’s robotic arm jerked stiffly into life. It came up level with his shoulder as
if he were making some strange salute.