Chapter 42
Novy Urengoy Airport
Western Siberia
The same could be said of her captain. The weathered Belarusian stood askance in the forward cargo hold, keeping a wary eye on the proceedings.
A big forklift belched black smoke as it struggled up the aft ramp with the final load.
The airplane settled lower on its oleo struts from the added weight.
Like the pilot in command of any cargo aircraft, the captain was intimately familiar with transporting hazardous materials.
He knew the rules chapter and verse for handling corrosives, explosives, infectious substances, and flammable gases.
The load he was carrying today, however, was none of those things.
He looked down at his clipboard and saw a manifest with only basic information.
They were hauling twenty-nine shipping casks, each weighing slightly over five hundred kilograms. Sixteen metric tons.
This information was vital, dictating where the casks would be placed and how they would be secured.
Yet the greater question—and the one that was adding new filaments of gray to his crewcut dark hair—was the issue of what was inside them.
For the first time in his long and checkered career, he would be flying a jet with no direct knowledge of what he was carrying.
The story he had been given, that they were hauling empty casks to be donated to the provisional government in eastern Libya, was pure bullshit.
He’d flown a number of missions to the same airfield in recent months, flights that had carried more typical cargo.
Machinery, stores, crates of food, fuel bladders.
On one occasion, a consignment of drones from Iran.
Never had there been anything like this—a complete void of information.
He guessed they were hauling some manner of radiological agent, even though none of the casks were marked with the standard trefoil symbol—the internationally recognized emblem for ionizing radiation.
Admittedly, he had drawn this conclusion on purely circumstantial evidence.
The way the forklift strained under the weight of the casks.
And far more damningly, the way the man overseeing the loading process had checked each container with a Geiger counter.
The question of what to do about it loomed menacingly.
The captain worked for TransAvia, a Belarusian cargo airline based in Minsk.
For thirty years he had hauled all manner of suspect loads to airfields across the world.
Smuggled oil drilling hardware to Russia’s Far East, crates of guns to Africa, banned electrical transformers to Cuba. He thought he’d done it all.
But this was in another league.
The shipping party listed on the manifest was laughable.
He’d seen his share of sham companies, but whoever had contracted this shipment hadn’t even bothered to list a contact address.
TransAvia had given him a flight plan with an indirect route that avoided the airspace of certain countries.
If he had to divert for an emergency, he’d been told to land only at military bases in Russia or a handful of other countries: Azerbaijan, Cyprus, or Syria.
And in an unprecedented preflight briefing, his chief pilot had instructed that if none of those places were reachable in a crisis, he was to ditch his aircraft at sea.
The forklift backed out of the cargo bay, and as the last cask was being tied down by the loadmaster, his copilot appeared at the entry door. He’d been preforming a preflight inspection in preparation for departure.
“Captain, something you should see.”
The skipper, already in a sulfurous mood, glared at his copilot. The young man was competent, but his penchant for going by the book was grossly overdeveloped.
“Don’t tell me you have found another minor dent on the fuselage.” That had been the issue last week, a ding in the hull similar to what a car door would suffer in a parking lot. A jet this old had hundreds of them.
“No, it is more important,” the kid said.
The captain followed his second down the stairs and onto the tarmac. The pressure to stay on schedule was intense, and the nature of their cargo only added to the tension. He was in no mood for delays.
The copilot led around to the far side of the big jet.
There was no need to point out the problem.
The captain stopped in his tracks. The main landing gear consisted of twin sets of eight wheels, one on either side of the broad fuselage.
One of the four tires on the forward starboard truck was completely flat, and an adjacent tire appeared to be damaged.
“Shit!” the captain muttered.
He went closer and studied the mess. They had arrived three hours ago, a rushed crossing from Minsk, and on the inbound taxi there had been no irregularities.
No steering issues, no thumping of damaged tires.
Then he saw the culprit. Wedged between tires two and three was the twisted remains of a pickax.
Like everything in Siberia, the airport at Novy Urengoy was in a perpetual state of repair.
He imagined the tool had fallen off a truck driven by a drunken work crew.
“We have to call a mechanic,” the copilot said.
The captain gave him a withering look. Instead of slapping the kid, satisfying as that would have been, he pulled out his phone and placed a call to TransAvia. While the call was routed to the maintenance section, he said, “Call the tower, tell them to keep our flight plan open.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then go find some gloves and get back here.”
“Gloves?” the copilot inquired.
“Unless you want to get your lily-white hands dirty. When the mechanic shows up, he’s going to need some help.”