4 - Hacked:
When I left Bletchley meeting room the atmosphere in the bullpen, the bunker's open plan office, was different now to the way it had been earlier. The bunker was buzzing. Nervous tension made the air crackle with static electricity.
There was, to use a technical term, a flap on. People were rushing from one cubicle to another like headless chickens and having hushed but animated conversations. All the phones were ringing, and the large video monitors on the walls were showing the same low-def black and white footage over and over again.
Two buses, crosshairs superimposed over the one on the right, white-on-grey information framed the top, bottom and left hand edge of the screen. The video lasted a slack handful of seconds and ended with a bright fuzzy dot moving in on the bus on the right but falling some way short, followed by a bright bloom that momentarily blanks out the video.
And then the video starts all over again from the beginning. A never-ending loop of death and destruction. I mused if it was kill-cam TV, celebrating some jet jockey taking out the bad guys over in the sandbox. Was this the cause of the flap?
I stopped someone as they came past me, a young woman, an ex-RAF electronic warfare specialist, originally from Liverpool. Her name was Emma Black, but a combination of her bright metallic red hair and Scouse accent along with her surname earned her the nickname Cilla after the sixties singer.
"What's happened?" I asked urgently.
"We're not certain like. I mean, we've only just heard, apparently a British UCAV just carried out a drone strike in the States."
"The States Cilla?" I asked, "as in the United States of America?"
"Yep," she nodded.
"What the hell is one of our drones doing IN America in the first place, let alone carrying out a sodding strike?" I asked. "I mean, is it one we've made and the Yanks were testing it or..."
"It's one of ours as in belonging to the RAF, and I'm buggered if I know what it's doing in America," she shrugged, "now everyone's running round like their hair's on fire here. There's a rumour going that the drone was hacked"
"Now why doesn't that surprise me?" I raised an eyebrow. "Not the rumour, but the hack attack."
Drone hacking isn't new. A few years back the Iranian military hacked an American RQ-170 Sentinel UAV. They successfully took over the drone and landed it safe and sound back in Iran. It gave the mad mullahs in Tehran huge kudos in the Middle East.
"Oh, and before I forget, Dirty Harriet sent me to find you and VJ," Cilla informed me, "she wants to see you both, like ten minutes ago, she's in Colossus."
The meeting rooms in the Bunker were named after people, places and things that had been instrumental the development of electronic warfare and cyber-espionage in the UK. So it's a no-brainer that one of the meeting rooms would be named after the code breaking computer designed and built by Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers for code-breaking at Bletchley Park.