The Warmaster and his team were hidden among the rocks of the shoreline around the north of the island of Langt Arr off the coast of Norway.
They had come in just after midnight, brought there by the Zodiac inflatable rubber boats that were operating in stealth mode, even the wildlife hadn’t heard them coming, and there were two more teams lying up to the West and to the South.
The Warmaster was a grizzled military veteran, a former Colonel, of the elite 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment of the French Foreign Legion. He had fought, led men and killed his enemies from Bosnia to Somalia, Afghanistan to Gabon. He was as tough as nails and ruthless when he had to be.
The three Warmaster teams had been in place now for nearly five hours on standby. But within the last few moments the message from the Intelligence Officer, the Fisherman, had come through.
The operation was a go.
The Warmaster’s 2 i/c sent the signal and the teams moved off into position. All were heavily armed and tactically presented. They were loyal soldiers to their commander and would hit hard and fast and ask no questions.
The team in the West would break off into sub-units of three men each and carry out a perfectly timed attack on the weapons, stealth and hypersonic research buildings. A combination of RPG rounds and high explosives would flatten the buildings and whatever was inside.
The team to the South would take care of the hypersonic test track and destroy it with carefully placed explosive charges. The team in the North, led by the Warmaster and his commanders, would contain the scientists and security personnel in their quarters.
From start to finish, the whole operation took no more than fifteen minutes. By the end of that time the place was a wasteland of debris, fire and destruction. When the Warmaster teams had all reported in that their mission tasks were complete, the Warmaster made his way to the sports hall where his soldiers had corralled the Trillium personnel. He knew exactly who he was looking for.
He ripped off his Tactical headgear, his face severe; grey hair topped a tanned face that hinted at a Corsican background. “Who is the Assistant Technology Development Manager for Pandora?” he said, in French-accented English.
The Warmaster looked over the bowed heads and watched as they all turned almost in unison to a young man somewhere near the back of the crowd. The Warmaster raised a finger and one of his soldiers brought the young scientist to stand before him.
“You were the assistant for this project?” asked the Warmaster, looking down at the slightly built scientist.
“Yes… yes I am, sir.”
The Warmaster nodded. “And you were included in the progress of the Pandora project? You knew the science behind it?”
“Yes… yes I do, sir. Please… I’m just a scientist, I…”
The Warmaster drew his heavy Desert Eagle and fired a single shot into the head of the young scientist. The man’s legs folded beneath him and his own blood covered his body as he dropped to the floor. The Warmaster’s orders were clear. If any of the Pandora team had access to the same level of information that the agent Sailfish had, then they were classed as a clear threat to the containment of the future technology. The Assistant had been named by the spy Sailfish as someone who was likely to have that information.
Within minutes, the Warmaster teams were leaving the island by the very Zodiacs that they had arrived on, ready to RV with the transport vessel that had brought them here.
Phase one of the strike operation was completed.
She was an assassin, a binary assassin, but an assassin none the less.
The Codex sat at her desk at the secure office complex in Luxembourg that was the base for her team of hackers and cyber-experts. In the darkness around their Ops Room, her team of five were patiently waiting to start the next phase of the operation. She was the Conductor, they were her Black Orchestra.
She had worked hard over the years to develop her version of the assassin code and had perfected it against targets all over the world, firstly as a freelance operator, criminal and cyber-terrorist and then, after a life-altering set of circumstances from her personal life, eventually for the Prism.
In her youth, the Codex had been courted to become a model for the fashion industry. She was young, blonde, slim and tanned, with features that the magazines would kill for. But none of that had interested her. Instead, she had been drawn to the world of computers, codes and the methodologies of hacking. Over time, she had combined the two elements; her beauty and her knowledge of cyber-crime. Social engineering to elicit the information from the target and hacking to break through their Firewalls.
She heard one of her protégés, Anton, run his fingers over his keyboard. There was a pause and then he said, “We have the message.”
She spun in her chair, turned towards him, her ice blue eyes studying him. “Is it the confirmation code? Please read it out for the rest of us, Anton.”
“Sailfish is safe; Operation is a go!” replied Anton.
“Shall we proceed?” asked Yevlena, the Russian and the best Phishing expert on her team.
The Codex nodded. “Absolutely. Kill order is confirmed. Do what you do best, guys.”
She watched them at play; they were her orchestra, her online assassins. The Codex knew that within seconds, the activation sequence would be sent, via email, to trigger the virus that the agent known as Sailfish had inserted many weeks ago into the IT systems of Trillium Industries. If the virus was the bullet, then the activation sequence was the trigger. The victim was anything related to the Pandora project inside Trillium.
The virus ran through ethernet cables, wires, Wifi and into the servers of all main and regional Trillium offices, destroying, wiping or corrupting anything relating to the Project Pandora, Pavel Zeman, or Hypersonic technology projects. It was like a virtual eraser.
By the morning, the virus had spread so far and so wide within the Trillium networks that weeks later, computer security experts from around the world would judge the cyber-hack to be one of the most lethal attacks ever recorded.
For the Prism, the final phase was completed. Pandora was dead.