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 voice. ‘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.