A young man in his late twenties sitting next to the mother and son smiled cheekily at his phone, as he posted a message or maybe a photo into cyberspace; Renuka thought it was probably something silly he had sent to his friends at the last minute. As she stood behind her counter watching the passengers while they waited to board the plane, Renuka had no idea that she would never forget the faces of the people on this particular flight. She also had no idea that the choices she and her colleague would make in regard to who could board the plane and who could not, would later that day turn out to be the choice between life and death.
Not the young boy and his mother, she decided. He appeared nervous and apprehensive enough as it was. He had stopped talking to his mother now and looked to be observing the plane that was almost ready for the passengers. As he turned his head from the window, she glimpsed his face. His expression was one of fear, but also resignation. It wasn’t hard for Renuka to guess what he might be thinking; she could almost hear the words in his mind: ‘They’ve already lost one plane, so why can’t they lose another?’
Just four and a half months before, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a scheduled international passenger flight, had disappeared. It was 8 March 2014 and the plane vanished while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia, to its destination, Beijing Capital International Airport in China. The Boeing 777 operated by Malaysia Airlines had last made voice contact with air traffic control on 8 March as it was making its way over the South China Sea, just under an hour after takeoff. The aircraft disappeared from air traffic controllers’ radar screens but was still tracked by military radar as it swerved westwards from its planned flight path crossing the Malay Peninsula. The radar lost track of the plane as it hovered over the Andaman Sea near north-western Malaysia. It was carrying twelve Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from fifteen different nations.
A few days later Malaysia, working alongside foreign aviation authorities and experts, launched a joint investigation team to investigate the incident. Australia took charge of the search when there were indications that the plane may have gone down into the southern Indian Ocean. Different theories about the cause of the disappearance arose, even one that suggested that the plane had been hijacked and was standing somewhere in the desert in ISIS territory with all its passengers still on board. That was in fact the most comforting theory: it meant that people’s loved ones were possibly alive and waiting somewhere to be found and released. It was also the most far-fetched of all the theories. Some researchers believed that it was a pilot’s private suicide mission that had caused the plane to vanish, a difficult idea for Malaysia to accept with suicide a taboo.
Now, more than four months later, there was still no trace of the aircraft. Its disappearance remained a mystery. With no bodies to bury for the bereaved, all they had left were memories to cling to. There would be no closure for the families of MH370 for a long time to come, and everyone working for Malaysia Airlines had been devastated. Renuka realised that some of the passengers were inevitably asking themselves if their plane could go missing too. She also knew the odds were next to none. The disappearance was a freak incident, and the chances of something similar happening were likely to be one in a million. As she tried to obliterate the horrible memory of all those missing people, she turned to her work.
Rather reluctantly, her colleague reminded her it was time to choose eight passengers to be transferred onto a later flight. Via the intercom they asked for volunteers. To their surprise, a man, his wife and three children rose from their seats and made their way to the desk. The flight with three children to Malaysia was very expensive and the man wanted to know how much compensation he would get and when the next flight was scheduled. When they told him, he smiled. The compensation was a very nice cut in costs and the family did not appear too worried about having to wait for the next flight.
They picked a young man travelling alone and a couple and called them all to the desk to inform them of the bad news. The couple weren’t happy and tried to persuade Renuka to let them board anyway, but when she explained that the transfer to another flight was inevitable but that they would be compensated, they resigned to their fate. They weren’t happy, but they didn’t want to start this trip, a trip they had been looking forward to for so long, with an argument.
When Renuka checked the young man’s papers she realised that his Dutch passport had almost expired—in fact, the expiry date was the next day. The fellow, in his late teens, became very upset when she told him that boarding was out of the question because his passport would expire before he landed in Malaysia. And before they could check him onto another flight, his passport would need to be renewed at the airport passport office. Irritated, the young man started directing his anger at Renuka, but after a while they managed to calm him and one of the Schiphol aides was called in to take him to the passport office. Around 11.30am peace returned to Gate 3 and they started the final check-in to board the passengers.
An elderly woman who had trouble walking was helped to board first by a crew member. A few people Renuka had helped at the baggage counter recognised her as they passed by her for the second time; there were smiles and a quick word.
Renuka noticed another familiar face in the boarding line, her colleague from the Malaysia Airlines ticket counter on his way home for a holiday with his wife and son. When she bade him a final good flight, he produced his boarding pass and said, ‘See you soon,’ as he disappeared into the passenger airbridge tunnel. When the last of the passengers had gone down the bridge and were seated, she heard the final clunk of plane doors closing, the sound hollow and dry as it echoed down the corridor. They were almost ready to remove the bridge.
Renuka was home by one. Tired from lack of sleep and the busy morning, she fell asleep almost at once only to be awoken a few hours later by her phone. It kept ringing incessantly and, when she peeked at it, the callers were colleagues. She turned it off; they probably wanted her to return to the airport, but she was tired and all she wanted now was to sleep. In a couple of hours she’d phone them back, she thought, as she blissfully slumbered back into that oblivious state of mind where bad things do happen, but only in dreams.
Chapter 2
Ukraine, November 2013
It was a cold Saturday morning and Viktor Yanukovych’s breath was short and urgent, turning into small puffs of icy fog as he hurried down the steps to the presidential limousine waiting to take him to the airport. Weighing 110 kilos and over six feet tall, he had to squeeze himself through the limousine door, held open by one of his staff. His mission today was an important one: the president of Ukraine was on his way to meet the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. To talk business.
The 63-year-old Yanukovych had been elected Ukrainian president three years prior on 25 February 2010. For the past decade he had loomed large on Ukraine’s political scene. Holding a prominent position in the Ukrainian government wasn’t new to him: from 2002 to 2005 he had been prime minister and from 2006 till 2007 he had served another term as PM.
Ukraine had been a Cossack republic that emerged and prospered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but its territory was eventually split between Poland and the Russian Empire, and finally merged fully into the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in the late 1940s as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It wasn’t until 1991 and the end of the Cold War that Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union.