Zero Hour Read Free Page B

Jets? Ground troops? A combination? There’d be nothing for them to latch onto just yet, but Ra’am couldn’t hug the desert for ever. They were going to have to gain height in excess of 8,000 feet in order to assume their attack profiles. That was where I came in: if I didn’t fuck up the Russian-made Tor-M1 and Pechora-A2 surface-to-air missiles that were protecting al-Kibar, they were going to fuck up Ra’am, and it really would be Armageddon.
    Everything fell silent. Cody, me, Ehud Olmert - we were all holding our breath. Even the noise outside was blocked as I kept my eyes glued to the screen and the bars fluctuated between 73 and 75.
    I checked the timer. Fourteen minutes fifteen seconds to go. I turned back to the screen. My laptop was linked by satellite to America’s Suter airborne-attack system. This package could feed enemy radar emitters with false targets, and even directly manipulate the Tor-M1 and Pechora-A2 sensors so they closed down completely. And that was what was happening now - or, at least, I hoped it was. I was directly attacking the microprocessors within the Syrian missile systems. It was easy enough. The chips had had kill switches programmed into them. When I hit the go button, I’d be sending a pre-programmed code to those chips, enabling Suter to override and tell the system what to do.
    Syria’s missile systems might have been built in Russia, but the chips inside them hadn’t. Russia had been in shit state for years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Bizarre as it seemed, they plugged the gap by buying microchips off-the-shelf from Taiwan and the West. Washington and London weren’t slow to catch on. As soon as they found out what was happening, they mobilized their Tefalheads. Microchips bound for Moscow and other unfriendly states were either reprogrammed or built from scratch with back doors or kill switches installed. Until they twigged, the West would be at liberty to disable whole weapons systems at will.
    It wasn’t the first time the Russians and their various mates had been at the sharp end of this particular conjuring trick. In 2004, the CIA inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment bought from Canadian suppliers to control a trans-Siberian gas pipeline. A three-kiloton explosion tore the pipeline apart; the detonation was so large it was visible from outer space.
    The radar systems on the border were old Soviet-era kit and didn’t have the kill switches, so they had to be hammered the old-fashioned way. The Syrians also had the newer, state-of-the-art Russian Pantsyr-S1E missile systems, but luckily for us they wouldn’t be operational for a month. I guessed that was a reason we were pushing ahead with the attack.
    There was a distant rumble in the sky. It could only mean one thing. The F-15s’ engines were on full thrust to push them up from the sand. At 8,000 feet they’d acquire the target and scream down towards it at forty-five degrees. That was when they were at their most vulnerable. If I fucked up, they could be illuminated.
    I didn’t even bother looking out of the window. They were miles away in the darkness.
    I looked at the timer. Fifty-eight seconds until the first attack.
    There was a loud thump.
    Then another.
    I glanced at my watch as the door took another pounding. There was nowhere to run. I had to stay and make sure this shit worked.
    ‘Nick … ?’
    I gave a low groan. ‘I’m sleeping.’
    Cody sparked up in my earpieces. ‘First attack - ordnance deployed.’
    ‘Shorry … Nick …’ Her voice was slurred. It sounded like she had her face pressed against the door. ‘I was wondering … if you fancied a drink. Maybe I could bring a bottle up?’
    ‘Contact, contact, contact.’
    There was a distant flash of sheet lighting, then another, from the strip of darkness between the city and the stars. A few seconds later, the pressure waves from the first series of explosions rumbled over the rooftops.
    Cody continued his