Andy McDermott - The Midas Legacy

‘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 struggling 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.’