Flight Risk Page 3

  The final conversations between pilot and air traffic control are also on the computer. According to my file, the captain is Soraya Notonegro and his first officer is Rizky Dayak; Dayak has the last conversation with Australian traffic control.

  ‘Garuda zero zero five, we are now handing you over to Jakarta radio to continue your journey,’ comes the Australian voice out of my iPad.

  ‘Thank you, Melbourne control,’ replies the Indonesian voice from the cockpit. ‘This is Garuda zero zero five saying goodbye.’

  Prophetic last words?

  In this job, the tendency to overanalyse everything is taken as a given. Sometimes, the smallest details can lead you to your destination. If you don’t pay the fullest attention, you can miss a lot. Of course, the downside to this is that you spend a lot of time looking for stuff that really isn’t there.

  I replay the audio of the Garuda’s last few minutes, listening and re-listening to those last words. But it tells me nothing. No stressed voices, no hidden messages. The little we have managed to cobble together on the background of the pilots doesn’t raise any alarm bells, either.

  The captain, Notonegro, is a long-standing Garuda pilot. He has been with the airline for fifteen years and his conduct has been exemplary in that time. Before working for Garuda, he had flown F-16s for the Indonesian Air Force; again, he was seen as one of the good guys. According to the file, he was regarded as an ultra-professional, never involved in any of the shenanigans as the corrupt Suharto regime fell apart in the late 1990s.

  Information was scarcer on Dayak. He was only 31. Been through various flight schools in the United States and Australia, worked at a couple of smaller Indonesian regional airlines before starting long-haul flights for Garuda six months ago. Dayak was the product of a rich Indonesian family, but no flags were being raised. No dodgy friends, no indication of radical leanings.

  There is no information on the rest of the crew. It’s possible one of them was involved, but if you are looking at who has the capability to crash or lose an aircraft, the pilots are still top of my hit list.

  But it’s still early. No doubt both the Indonesians and the Australians are already digging away to make certain there’s nothing untoward in either pilot’s history buried away somewhere. What would become of any information unearthed was another matter—if the pilots had been responsible for disappearing the plane, it would mean they had slipped through the net of the Indonesian security forces. That may be information our neighbours won’t be keen to share.

  The Indonesians don’t exactly have the greatest of records when it comes to cutting off terrorists at the pass. The Bali bombings, followed by another attack at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, made many of my colleagues wary about how much the Indonesians were really doing to stop these kinds of threats. There was even a belief that the Indonesian security services were quite happy to see a few Australians blown up from time to time: some of those blokes were said to still be holding grudges after we made a nuisance of ourselves over East Timor back in 1999.

  Our high-up spooks, of course, would be pushing people like me to find out as much as possible about what the fuck had actually happened. Whether any information discovered would ever see the light of day is another matter again. That would be a political decision. One taken by people way above my head and for reasons that generally only pissed me off.

  A decision would be taken. It would be either: Do we want to piss Jakarta off today? Or do we need to suck up to Jakarta today? Concepts such as security, justice and vengeance would be in the mix somewhere, but hardly priorities of the first order.

  No doubt plenty of people think the work I do is a bit murky, a bit underhand, maybe even lacking in ethics and morality. But there is a certain honesty in my dishonesty. Those who know me, friends and enemies alike, know what to expect. They understand my motivations, they know my goals. High-up spooks and politicians? Well, who the fuck would know?

  4

  We are 36,000 feet above Australia’s red, dead centre. I can’t tell you how many times I have crisscrossed this desert, but I have still yet to set foot in it. Uluru is down there somewhere, the Olgas, places I have been reading about since school but have never managed to visit.

  I am a fringe dweller in as much as I hug the edges of this great continent. Sydney is my natural home. As such I have the Sydneysider’s distrust of the great interior; all those vast open spaces make us city folk raised on a diet of films such as Wolf Creek and The Cars That Ate Paris a little jumpy. Still, it’s probably better than visiting Melbourne. A grey, wet and miserable joint filled with self-important intellectual misfits. A place where football passes as culture and coffee is a high point of civilisation. Spare me.

  Of course, that still makes it an improvement on Brisbane. A shiny place full of shallow souls. Perth is too far away for anyone on the east coast to care about. Strangely, I quite like Adelaide. Good wine. Decent food. Never even bothered going to Hobart.

  The iPad beeps. It’s a message from Bob.

  ‘This may be something or nothing. We’ve been checking the cargo manifest of GIA005 and something doesn’t add up. According to the official papers, that aircraft was only carrying around 500 kilograms of cargo, which is ridiculous. That flight averages around 15,000 kilograms of cargo each day. Something doesn’t add up.’

  I ping back a quick acknowledgment of the message. Two scenarios come immediately to mind. The first: that the Indonesians were carrying something lethal, or at least dangerous, in that ‘empty’ hold (a big no-no on an aircraft that was carrying that many passengers) and it exploded. It could be anything from lithium-ion batteries to undeclared ammunition or some sort of radioactive material. Or, of course, a bomb. This would suggest we were now looking at an official cover-up. A mid-air explosion would explain the sudden disappearance of GIA005 from all known radars. But if that is the case, we will soon spot quite a bit of wreckage in the vicinity of the aircraft’s last known position. Sure, the ocean is a big place, but an exploding A330 would make a mess difficult to miss with half the Australian Air Force and most of the world’s satellites now looking for the thing.

  The second option is scarier. It still involves a lot of weird shit being down in that hold, but of even more concern is the idea that some fairly bad dudes have discovered what GIA005 was carrying and decided to take it for themselves.

  But to do that they would also need someone so familiar with the Airbus A330 that they knew exactly which buttons to push to make it disappear from the most sophisticated radar systems known to mankind—and to do so in a way that aroused no suspicion from anyone until it was far too late.

  It’s with these thoughts banging around in my head that I finally nod off. But it’s a brief and unsatisfactory nap. One where I feel suspended between sleep and wakefulness, and I jolt awake because in my dream I kick a kerb and stumble, almost falling, leaving me with a strange sensation in my left big toe and no sense of balance.

  * * *

  There is something relentlessly barren about the far reaches of Western Australia. The dirt is red, the vegetation sparse and the sky seems to stretch to infinity. I struggle to believe this place and the Sydney I left a few hours ago are part of the same country. Each living thing, animal or plant is a testament to fortitude and persistence.

  The air force base is just a few windswept huts. No doubt one day the earth will reclaim what is rightfully its own and the mark of man will be blown away. If you ever think humanity has dominion over the earth, pop out to the desert some time—that should help convince you that we’re really only a temporary stain on the face of the planet.

  The long grey landing strip was built in World War II when the whole country was paranoid about those deadly Japs sweeping down over the horizon and invading our lucky country. Today, the enemy is far more ill-defined, probably deadlier, and coming at you from all directions.

  After the cool interior of the aircraft, it’s a rough return to the land of the living. Th
ere is a piercing quality to the midday sun, penetrating my sunglasses to launch itself into the back of my eyeballs, making me blink, raise my arm and take an involuntary half a step backwards as if warding off an unprovoked aggressor. At the bottom of the stairs waiting to greet me is a severe-looking gentleman in an air force uniform. He’s also wearing a cap with the RAAF logo and those black mirrored sunglasses that make me think of a redneck cop.

  No salute is offered by either of us. Any rank I once had has long been swept away. Technically, I am now a civilian, so he thrusts out a hand and introduces himself as Colonel James Summers, the commanding officer guiding the search.

  ‘What’s the latest, Colonel?’ I enquire. ‘Any sign of the A330?’

  ‘Not a skerrick, I’m afraid. We’ve had four P-3s up since dawn. The navy are out there as well and the coast guard has been flying its planes and drones too. I would estimate we’ve looked at 5000-square kilometres of ocean. Not a thing. I know it’s early days, but if I had to bet on it I would say it’s not out there. Or, if it is, it’s not where we’re looking. We’ll keep expanding the range. It has to be somewhere.’

  Despite the colonel’s confidence, the uneasy feeling in my gut is starting to gnaw a little harder. The feeling that this is not a tragic accident; that it’s not something exploding by mistake in the cargo hold, or some faulty ten-cent door seal blowing out and bringing down a plane. A conclusion is building. Somehow, someone has taken control of this aircraft and disappeared it, as well as the 245 people on board. And anyone who can make an A330 disappear without a trace is going to be terrifyingly smart and utterly ruthless. Not a good combination.

  I walk into one of the bigger buildings on the base to find it’s only the top deck of a far larger complex, most of which has been dug deep into the desert floor. I have to say I’m impressed—even I didn’t know this stuff was out here.

  The colonel and I take a steel-doored elevator trip down one level. When the doors open I am confronted with a square-shaped room, perhaps 50 metres by 50 metres. There are four people in here, but there is the most fantastical array of computer technology I have ever seen. One wall is taken up with an enormous video screen that shows the positions of all the aircraft currently searching for the Garuda. Off to the sides are separate screens showing live feeds of what those aircraft are seeing—which so far reveals the same large, empty grey sea.

  Summers points the way to a door at the other end of the room.

  ‘In here. There’s a phone call for you.’

  It’s Bob. And not only can I hear him, I can see him sitting behind his desk in Sydney. He appears not to have moved in the last six hours.

  ‘What’s happening over there, Ted? Anything new to report?’

  ‘I’ve just landed, but it doesn’t look too promising. I’m sure you’ve seen the latest. Lots of planes looking at lots of ocean and seeing nothing that resembles a broken Garuda. What have you heard?’

  ‘Only that it gets more mysterious. We’ve been digging deeper into the radar signals. They reveal that the Garuda goes off the chart. The radar responder just drops out. You have seen it yourself. This could be because the thing has suffered a catastrophic failure, or because someone has switched it off.’

  Transponders, I remember from my flying days, are easy to turn off and often are for all sorts of reasons, many not nefarious. If a pilot is sitting at the gate at Sydney Airport, there is no need to have your transponder turned on. You can safely assume everyone knows where you are. It’s switched on again when taxiing out to take off and switched off again when you dock again at the other end. So, if someone has done it at 38,000 feet, that is worrying.

  ‘It’s too early to be definitive,’ Bob continued, ‘but Global-sat, one of the private operators, had some of its hardware pretty close overhead at the relevant time. Its reading shows just the one ping about nine minutes after the Garuda fell off the radar 100 kilometres due north of its last reported position. Now, there is no certainty this is our plane. The technology isn’t that specific. We can’t even be sure it’s an aircraft. It just tells us an object of some sort was in that area, flying anywhere between 20,000 and 55,000 feet. But there was no other traffic we could pinpoint in that area at the time.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  I sigh. ‘It’s not much to go on. And what does it really tell us? That maybe it turned due north the moment after it vanished from the screens? Then what? Maybe it turned due south after that. Maybe west, maybe east. Maybe anywhere.’

  The pained look on Bob’s face 4000 kilometres away tells its own story. He leans back into his big leather chair, pushes both his hands through his hair and groans.

  ‘What else are we doing?’ I ask.

  ‘Every piece of satellite information we can get our hands on is being scrutinised and scrutinised again. The Indonesians are sending down their hardware. We have offers of help from the Americans, the Japanese.’

  I feel my frustration and anger growing, but I do my best not to let Bob see that I think he is playing this all wrong.

  ‘Bob, it’s not out there,’ I say in a calm voice. ‘It’s gone elsewhere and far away. We are wasting time looking for something that’s not there. I know that radar hit is the plane we are looking for. So we need to be looking at the pilots, crew, the passengers, the airline, even the baggage handlers at bloody Sydney.’

  ‘Ted, all that stuff is beginning. It just takes time. So while we’re waiting, and while the odds still tell us the most likely explanation is the simplest—that it crashed—our efforts need to be directed to finding it.’

  I don’t know what to do here. I finished the call with Bob and return to the square-shaped control room. The official part of the operation is swirling around me, the search-and-rescue phase, but as I told Bob I’ll be stunned if that finds anything. This is not an accident, which means my job isn’t here. My job exists in the cracks between the official world and the criminal one. And that’s where the plane now lives.

  My problem now is the lack of intel. A quick stocktake tells me: we don’t know where the aircraft is; we don’t know why it’s disappeared; despite my gut feeling, we don’t know whether it’s been stolen or crashed; and if it has been stolen, we don’t know by who or why.

  That’s a lot of stuff not to know when you’re trying to figure out whether 245 people are still alive.

  If one thing is clear, however, it’s that the best place to start looking is in Indonesia. But that’s tricky as well. The Indonesians aren’t going to want me pitching up on their doorstep. Australia and Indonesia are nominally friends these days, but it doesn’t mean they appreciate someone like me showing up for an unescorted and unannounced look around. The idea doesn’t thrill me, either. I will have to travel with no gun, no backup, and will probably be abandoned by my own people if things go horribly wrong. But them’s the rules. I prefer working alone, but it does carry the odd risk.

  It’s the pilot’s wife I really want to start with. The airline industry isn’t keen on talking about pilot suicide, but it happens and it is one of the live options to me. The bigger question is: if he has topped himself, has he done it because of his own demons or has someone else inspired him to do it? Possibly by promising a glorious afterlife romping around with 72 virgins … So, I need to know a lot more about Notonegro. After all, the easiest way to get to an aircraft is to get to its pilot.

  Bob will be cautious about it, especially as he is clinging on to a belief that it’s all one big accident. I contemplate not telling him, but I need that nice private plane to get me down to Perth, then on to a commercial flight to Jakarta. This is not a trip for the company jet. I’ll need to stay off the Indonesian radar as much as possible and there’s nothing that says ‘Hello, I’m here’ quite like turning up in the Gulfstream.

  Bob takes a little convincing when I call him back. He wants me to hang around a bit longer until the wreckage starts to surface. But I start with the premise t
hat there is nothing for me to do here in the wastelands of Western Australia and I slowly turn him around. I tell him at this point we have to play the odds. If this really is some vast conspiracy then the chances are that the pilot or the co-pilot had some say in it. If I’m wrong, and the plane has buried itself somewhere in the Indian Ocean, well, what’s the loss?

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ Bob asks. ‘Turn up at the grieving widow’s house? Knock on the front door and ask if her husband is in cahoots with international terrorists?’

  ‘That will be my starting point, but I hope to develop my theory from there. I know, it’s a long shot, but what do you call sitting here in the fucking desert waiting for rain?’

  With that, he gives his assent and I am back on the Gulfstream heading south to Perth. Bob has promised to find me a seat on the next available flight out of Perth to Jakarta. It looks like there is one at 7 p.m. Perth time, which means I should just be able to get there in time. Then it’s off to the teeming, chaotic city of Jakarta. A place where I had never had very much luck.

  5

  Jakarta is not the place to go if you want a bit of peace and quiet. More than ten million people live here and it feels as if at any given moment around half of them are trying to share the same road space as you. The nearly five-hour flight from Perth, though, is pleasantly quiet. It’s a half-empty plane and I have managed to secure three seats in economy to myself. A rare luxury.

  I try not to take too much notice that I’m travelling on a Garuda plane. I try not to think of words such as ‘omen’ or phrases such as ‘lightning striking twice’. But I had no choice. The Garuda was the first scheduled flight to Jakarta after I made it to Perth and the only one to fly direct to Jakarta. I try to sleep, but my brain is buzzing. It’s the adrenalin rush of the step into the unknown. It’s like jumping out of a plane, but with the added thrill of knowing there is a larger than usual chance that someone has been hacking away at your parachute with a Stanley knife before you launch yourself into the void.