The freighter’s whole crew, including the loadmaster, were now sealed inside the cockpit. ‘I can’t tell what they’re doing,’ said one man, watching his CCTV monitor intently. ‘Why the hell didn’t we get this upgraded to HD?’
‘Take over,’ Petrov told his co-pilot, leaving his seat to see for himself. The other man continued to guide the An-124 on its long, slow circle of the airbase; the last update from the control tower maintained that the wreckage would be cleared from the runway within minutes, and troops were working flat out to fill the hole in the concrete with earth. Landing would still be risky, but if the North Koreans packed it firmly enough, there was a good chance that the Antonov – built to operate from battle-damaged runways – would make it over the crater with minimal damage.
Minimal extra damage, at least; the aircraft had already suffered plenty, one landing wheel all but wrenched off and the rear doors and ramp jammed open. His clients would be paying through the nose for all the repairs . . .
He put financial reparations to the back of his mind as he studied the screen. It showed the front of the hold, looking towards the nose. The bald man appeared injured, bloody patches on his chest and thigh, but he had moved to hunch against the remaining wooden crate. The woman, who seemed somehow familiar, had opened up two other cases.
‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered. He didn’t need high definition to identify the warning trefoils on them. ‘She’s messing with the nukes!’
The co-pilot, like all the crew a Russian air force veteran, looked around in alarm. ‘She can’t set one off, can she?’
‘I don’t think so, but . . .’ He watched as the woman lifted out one case’s contents and placed it on the deck. It looked like a ball, but from her strained movements it was much heavier than its small size suggested . . . ‘Fuck me!’ he said, suddenly afraid. ‘It must be uranium, or plutonium – it’s the only thing that could weigh so much.’
‘She won’t blow anything up that way,’ said the crewman, mystified, as she wrapped the sphere in a cargo strap, then tied it to one of the rings in the floor.
‘I still don’t like it. We should try to take them out ourselves before landing.’
‘The bald guy’s still got a gun,’ the loadmaster pointed out. The stowaway was in a good position to cover the ladder, and even wounded seemed fully capable of defending himself.
‘We can’t just sit here and wait for them to do whatever it is they’re doing.’ Petrov regarded the monitor again as the woman moved to the other open case. Rather than take out its sphere, though, she used a second strap to secure it inside, then carefully tipped the container on its side. She then pushed it across the deck until it was lined up with the sphere on the floor and tied another strap to it. ‘Whatever they are doing.’
It became clear that an answer would soon arrive as the woman checked her handiwork, then hurried to an intercom system at the side of the hold. She lifted the handset, and a buzzer sounded in the cockpit.
Petrov was still wearing his headset. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, watching the screen closely as the crewman switched him in. ‘This is the captain,’ he said in English. ‘What do you want?’
‘Hi,’ the woman replied, her accent American. ‘We want a couple of things. First, let us into the cockpit. Second, fly us to South Korea. Sorry for wrecking your plane, by the way.’
‘I will not let you into the cockpit, and I will not fly you to South Korea!’ Petrov told her firmly. ‘We will land at Tonyong in a few minutes. I suggest you jump out the back, it will be quicker and less painful.’ The crew, listening in on their own headphones, smiled at his grim joke.
‘You know what else is painful?’ said the woman. ‘Dying of radiation poisoning.’
‘You can’t set off the bombs. There are safety features.’
‘I’m not going to set off the bombs. But what I am going to do is get down behind that big box full of gold bars,’ she pointed at the crate against which her companion was sheltering, ‘while I pull these two plutonium spheres together. They’re both just below the size at which they’ll reach critical mass so if they touch, or even get too close to each other, they’ll release a big burst of gamma radiation. You know what that is, I assume?’
The pilot had not worked directly with nuclear weapons during his time in the military, but he had become familiar with their basics. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said uncomfortably.
‘And what it’ll do to you?’
‘It ain’t gonna turn you into the Hulk!’ the bald man called out in the background.
‘It will kill you too,’ said Petrov, starting to sweat.
‘Not necessarily. Gold’s just as good as lead at blocking radiation. A lot more expensive, obviously, but we’ve got something like thirty million dollars’ worth of it here. We’ll be safe behind it, but the gamma rays’ll go straight through aluminum like it’s tissue paper. Planes are made of aluminum, right? Including the floor?’ She pointed at the hold’s ceiling above the first sphere, directly beneath the cockpit.
‘If we die, the plane will crash! You will die too!’
‘You won’t die right away. It might take hours, days, even weeks. But from everything I’ve heard about radiation poisoning, you’ll wish you’d died instantly. The North Koreans will have killed us by then . . . but if you take us to South Korea, we can all stay alive.’
The Antonov’s crew exchanged worried looks. ‘You would not do this!’ said Petrov, trying not to let his concern show in his voice, but not succeeding.
‘I would. Because it’s the only way we have to get out of this. So are you going to do what I say?’
‘No!’
‘Your choice.’ The figure on the screen hung up the handset, the captain hearing a loud click in his headphones as she disconnected.
‘She’s bluffing,’ he assured his crew, watching her toss the long strap attached to the case over the gold crate and join the man behind it. ‘She must be!’
‘You know this is the most fucking insane thing you’ve ever done, right?’ said Eddie as Nina crouched beside him.
‘I don’t even know if it’ll work,’ she admitted. ‘As far as I know it should, but I’m not a nuclear physicist.’
‘Shame we haven’t got that arsehole Fenrir Mikkelsson here to test it on. And will this gold really block the radiation?’
‘Again, I think it should, but . . .’ She gave him a resigned look. ‘Hopefully we won’t have to find out.’
She pulled the strap. The case, the plutonium protruding from its open top, slowly scraped along the deck towards the other sphere.
‘She’s doing it!’ cried the loadmaster, staring in horror at the screen. ‘She’s fucking doing it!’
The co-pilot turned in his seat. ‘Will it really kill us?’
‘I don’t know!’ said the pilot. ‘She seems to know what she’s talking about, but . . . I don’t know!’
The sphere in the case inched ever closer to its twin. All eyes were fixed upon it, the Antonov’s crew all too aware that it was less than five metres beneath their feet – and that the woman was right about the aluminium floor. ‘We can’t go to South Korea,’ said the co-pilot. ‘We’re carrying a damn nuclear missile! They’ll lock us up for breaking the arms embargo!’
‘We could dump it out of the rear ramp before we cross the border and say the Koreans never told us what we were transporting,’ the loadmaster suggested.
‘You think they’d believe that?’
‘That doesn’t matter right now!’ Petrov cut in, close to panic. The spheres were now only a hand-span apart, and still edging nearer. He watched them, paralysed by indecision . . . then hurriedly darted to activate the internal speaker system. ‘Okay! Okay! Stop! Don’t do it! We’ll take you to South Korea!’
Nina and Eddie both looked up at the source of the echoing, panicked vo
ice. ‘You think they’ll really do it?’ he asked, dubious.
‘There isn’t much we can do if he’s lying,’ she admitted. ‘But he sounds pretty scared, so . . .’ She stood and rounded the crate, relievedly pushing the case away from the tied sphere, then returned to the intercom. ‘Okay, I’ve moved the plutonium apart. Now would be a good time to show some good faith, because I can always push them right back.’
‘We’re changing course now,’ said the captain. Seconds passed, the An-124 continuing to circle – then it banked, much less steeply than before, and increased power. The lights of the airbase receded into the distance beyond the rear doors as it levelled out again.
Nina allowed herself a tired smile. ‘They’re doing it! We’re actually going to get out of here!’
Eddie grunted as he stood, keeping one hand over his leg wound. ‘This probably isn’t the best time to mention that the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily defended in the world, is it?’
49
The Antonov picked its way through the crumpled labyrinth of valleys of North Korea’s south-eastern region. The cockpit lights had been all but extinguished to let the pilots adjust their eyesight to the darkness, but despite their tension as they guided the hulking aircraft between the hills and mountains, staying as low as they dared to avoid radar, it was one of the flight crew behind them who was under the most pressure. Using a paper chart, he was trying to plan a route to the border that would both stave off detection for as long as possible – and keep the plane from rounding a peak to find nothing but a wall of rock directly ahead.
With no time to plot a course in advance, he was forced to relay directions to the pilots on the fly. ‘In forty seconds turn, uh . . . twenty degrees starboard,’ he said, having to approximate the speed-to-distance calculations in his head. ‘Next turn after that will be to port.’
Not taking his eyes off the moonlit landscape beyond the windscreen, Petrov spoke to Eddie, who was in the crew seat immediately behind him – both to make sure the pilots were taking them south, and to keep them covered with his gun. ‘Please, we have to go higher. The mountains are getting bigger. If we take the wrong route, we will not be able to climb fast enough to get over them.’
‘Then don’t take the wrong route,’ Eddie replied sardonically, trying to mask his nervousness. He could make out enough of the rushing terrain to tell that it would only take a moment of lost concentration to end up embedded in it. Warning lights flashed continuously on the control panels; the pilots had already been forced to switch off the aircraft’s verbal alarms because the endless droning of ‘Terrain. Pull up. Terrain. Pull up . . .’ had driven them to distraction. ‘They’ll already be looking for us. If they get a radar fix, they’ll be on us in no time.’
‘Even this low, they may already have one! They have radar everywhere along the border.’
‘How far to the DMZ?’ Nina asked. She was at the cockpit’s rear with the other gun, the rest of the Antonov’s crew coralled between her and her husband.
‘Dee-em-zed,’ Eddie corrected.
‘Dee-em-zee, and you think now’s a good time for a transatlantic pronunciation debate?’
The man with the map, who was slowly moving his fingertip over it to mark their current position, glanced at a line below his nail. ‘Four, five kilometres.’
‘Can you go any faster?’ Eddie asked Petrov.
The Russian snorted incredulously. ‘You want to die?’ He saw the valley promised by the navigator and turned as quickly as he dared to follow it. With its landing gear jammed down and the battered rear doors still open, the An-124’s aerodynamics – and manoeuvrability – were compromised.
‘We made it this far,’ said Nina. ‘If we keep doing what we’re doing, we might—’
Those crew with headphones simultaneously twitched in alarm. Eddie heard a strident voice in Petrov’s earpiece. ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded.
‘They’ve found us!’ the pilot cried. ‘They’re ordering us to turn back to Tonyong!’
‘It might be a bluff. Keep going.’
‘No, they have our position and course!’
A gasp of alarm from the navigator drew everyone’s attention. He spoke urgently – and fearfully – to the pilots. ‘This valley splits ahead – and they are both dead ends!’ Petrov warned. ‘We have to climb.’
‘But then they’ll be able to shoot at us,’ Nina protested.
‘Yup,’ said Eddie. ‘You might want to hold on really tight . . .’
The navigator began what sounded to the two Westerners like a countdown as the North Korean kept barking commands over the radio. Petrov kept the Antonov in the valley for as long as he could, then snapped: ‘Climbing now!’
He pulled back the controls. The An-124 laboured upwards, a tree-covered wall of rock briefly looming beyond the windows before falling out of sight. Eddie glanced at the map. They could only be a couple of kilometres from the DMZ—
The radio voice cut out. Petrov blanched. ‘They have gone!’
‘What do you mean, gone?’ said Nina.
‘They have stopped talking! They would only do that if—’
‘If they’ve given up trying to talk us around,’ Eddie finished for him. That meant . . .
The co-pilot yelled a Russian obscenity, staring in horror out of his window.
In the distance to the west, an orange pillar of fire and smoke rose from the ground. It headed quickly into the black sky . . . then seemed to slow.
Eddie knew it was an optical illusion. The source of the flames was most likely a telegraph-pole-sized SA-2 surface-to-air missile, like much of North Korea’s arsenal an old Soviet weapon, but its age made it barely less deadly. It was still a threat even to fighter aircraft, so the lumbering freighter would be an easy target.
Petrov issued rapid instructions to his crew. Seat belts were hurriedly tightened, those men without chairs racing aft to find secure places in the passenger compartment. ‘What’s the plan?’ Eddie demanded as Nina hurried to join him.
‘There is no plan!’ Petrov replied, barely controlling his panic. ‘This plane is civilian, it has no defences – all we can do is run and hope we do not get blown up!’ He turned due south and shoved the throttles further forward.
Eddie looked back through the starboard window. The missile was now a small halo of light around a tiny dark dot, drifting lazily across the sky towards them. ‘How far to the DMZ?’ The strip of neutral territory bisecting the Korean peninsula was four kilometres wide, and would take just over a minute to traverse at the Antonov’s current speed – but the SAM was approaching at more than three times the speed of sound. It would easily reach them before they crossed it.
‘We will be there in seconds,’ said the Russian. ‘Now shut up!’
‘All right, keep your hair on! Wish I could . . .’
The co-pilot shouted a warning to Petrov, who forced the plane into a hard descending turn. The approaching missile took on terrifying dimensionality as it rolled out of sight beyond the window. Eddie clutched Nina to him—
A bright flash from outside – and the Antonov was thrown sideways as if kicked by an angry god, its hull echoing to the clamour of a thousand burning hailstones. The SA-2 had detonated as it streaked past, its warhead almost two hundred kilograms of high explosive surrounded by a jacket of frangible steel that turned instantly into a cloud of supersonic shrapnel. The explosion was followed a split second later by a deafening bang of disintegrating metal as a chunk of the starboard fuselage tore away, taking a huge bite out of the aircraft’s side.
Alarms screamed as the cockpit’s occupants regained their senses. Petrov battled with the controls, dragging the enormous plane out of its roll towards earth. A bank of warning lights lit up in a terrifying grid of red. ‘We’ve lost both starboard engines!’ he cried, still struggli
ng with the yoke as the co-pilot triggered the crippled engines’ fire extinguishers. ‘The rudder is damaged, we can’t turn well!’
Another horrified warning in Russian from the co-pilot. Another two blazing lines were being etched into the sky—
More fiery flashes from the ground – but these came from ahead, lancing from a flattened hilltop a few miles away. ‘Oh my God!’ Nina yelled. ‘They’re everywhere!’
‘We’re over the DMZ!’ said the pilot, pushing the Antonov into another desperate evasive turn. ‘Those are coming from South Korea!’
‘Great, now everyone’s shooting at us!’ Eddie held Nina more tightly, watching as another pair of missiles rushed at them —
And shot past.
All heads whipped around in surprise to track them. A second later, two more brilliant flashes lit the sky, followed by thunderous detonations. ‘They . . . they shot down the other rockets,’ said the co-pilot, stunned.
‘Must have been Patriots,’ Eddie realised. Both Koreas relied on armaments from their most powerful allies to defend their sides of the border; the difference was that the south had the latest technology from the United States rather than decades-old Soviet weapons. The Antonov had either had the good fortune to cross the DMZ within range of a battery of Patriot interceptors, or – equally likely – South Korea had more of the missiles deployed along the 160-mile dividing line than it let on.
‘Okay, so they just saved us,’ said Nina. ‘Now what?’
The answer came as a new voice crackled through the pilot’s headphones. Eddie hurriedly re-donned his own set to listen. The language was English, and the accent American. ‘Unknown aircraft, unknown aircraft. You have illegally entered South Korean airspace. Identify yourself, or turn back across the DMZ. You will not be allowed to proceed any further unless you identify yourself. If you do not, we will shoot you down.’
Petrov exchanged worried looks with his crew before answering. ‘We are a civilian freight aircraft – I repeat, we have civilians aboard. Do not shoot, do not shoot.’