The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

10

The icy cold gave way to winter drizzle, and low cloud blended with pollution formed a dome over the Chinese capital Beijing. Air Koryo flights to Pyongyang were never full, but in the aftermath of the missile strike on Japan, the passenger list had been even further depleted. A business delegation from Australia, hoping to finalize long-term mining contracts, had shied away. A European Union Chamber of Commerce visit had been postponed indefinitely. A tour group run by a small travel agency in Britain had pulled the trip at the eleventh hour, leaving its clients kicking their heels in Beijing. Several were irritated journalists travelling under cover in bogus professions.

Only a handful of passengers were taken out by bus to the ageing TU-154 parked at a distant end of the airport tarmac. They included the Hungarian and British ambassadors returning from a few days' break in China; a Swedish couple, young aid workers whose organization had been helping famine victims now for almost twenty years; six North Korean diplomats flying back for consultations after the 'Yokata incident'; a low-ranking delegation of Chinese officials, ostensibly from the Foreign Ministry, but both key intelligence officials reporting to different units; two Russian diplomats, assigned to Russia's overseas intelligence service, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR), and the Pakistani military attache, who also reported to his country's Joint Counter Intelligence Bureau (JCIB), responsible for running intellligence officers as diplomats through embassies.

Iran also sent a delegation, which included a neatly dressed diplomat whose passport described him as Mashhoud Najari, first secretary at the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beijing. Najari was, in fact, Ahmed Memed. One of the men with him was Memed's bodyguard from the Philippines, Hassan Muda. The other was an Iranian special forces captain, attached to the embassy and employed by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security known by its Farsi acronym as SAVAMA.

The aircraft took off in light drizzle and bounced uncomfortably through the cloud on its ascent. Once clear, however, the pilot turned due west for the ninety-minute flight to Pyongyang. When he cleared air traffic control at Dalian, flying at 33,000 feet, he reported nothing wrong. He called in, out of courtesy, to the control tower at Dandong on the border crossing between China and North Korea, although he was technically in North Korean airspace at the time over the Sea of Korea. It was then that he began his descent.

After that, no one outside North Korea was certain about what happened.

The air traffic controller at Dandong only glanced once at his screen after talking to the pilot, and the aircraft was on course. In Dalian, the controller said he had been busy with other aircraft. The North Korean announcement issued later that day from Pyongyang said the flight had crashed, and all those on board had died. It allowed no independent experts in to help with the investigation. There were no television pictures from the crash site.