Credit: Illustration by Dan Blomberg
Sentinels of Islam in a suburb of Paris. Around the firefly buzz hung a weekday midnight silence.
"Merde du jour," he muttered. The Islamic Front could afford the butterflies. They fed on endless money from the Saudis, part of the campaign to restore Islam to Europe after the "regrettable" Christian Era.
Not restored by the sword, of course - they were hopeless on a battlefield. But now, in softened consumerist Europe, their shopworn push-pull strategies of terror and political demand still worked. Islamic Front had plenty of followers in the immigrant masses. Their code of strict secrecy - talk and you die, unpleasantly - made them potent. Against them the French government deployed lawyers. Thinking of them, he spat on the floor of the apartment he had rented.
"Ready, Ajax?" He got a coded blip in answer - OK.
Time to move. Nobody knew where the Front would strike next with bombs, kidnappings, violent protests. Plus the usual rhetoric about being repressed. Very effective.
They had made such claims back in Lyon, after a street brawl on Montclair Boulevard. That was years ago, just as the Front started to use advanced technologies. All cameras, videos, and other recording systems near Montclair Boulevard had been blank, so the Front could claim that the fighting and the car bomb that followed were the work of others. So it had gone now for years, an arms race of technologies.
Unless, of course, the plans of the Islamic Front could be tapped. But that meant getting in fast, silent, deadly. Tonight.
Inside the shadowy compound ahead, the Head was at work. Under the shield of the looming mosque, he sent agents forth. He hid behind some holy title, but French Intelligence had pinpointed the Head's movements, and now was the time to strike. Remembering Montclair Boulevard.
Jean said softly, "Take out the microwaves."
Silently, the side teams did.
The details registered in his left eye, fed from his wearable computer. The Front was using the minarets at the square's corners to mount their detectors. Jean could see their snouts peeking out of the corbelled designs that wrapped around each artfully curved dome atop the minarets. The surveillance cameras were the usual IR motion-sensing type. But they were all connected to a central security centre - the usual control-freak arrangement. They could be defeated by intersecting their microwave links, saturating them, blowing the electronics down the line.
The security 'bots zoomed around the looming mosque like supersonic fireflies it the cold air. Jean watched them with his infrared eyes as their tiny plumes darted over the bare zone, blazing high-tech fireflies. They patrolled silently over the wide plaza, watching for movement up and down the spectral bands.
Jean ordered the teams to open up. Soundless beams lanced instantly into the broad square of the compound. They were aimed at receivers, jamming the link back to the security centre that squatted down on the mosque's roof.
Simple, really - flood them with a high-power noise-spectrum signal. Their cameras looked in all directions, their sensors wide open in the winter dark - so they could be attacked from any direction, jammed from any angle. Thank God - whichever version you liked, Jean thought - the Front hadn't thought to use laser links: easier to find, but far harder to block or saturate.
"Their links are cut," came a whispered comm message from a nearby apartment, diagonally across the square.
"Now the security 'bots."
