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A defence analyst from London, Charles Heyman, doubted that the plane had been flying at 21,000 feet. Heyman thought it didn’t make sense because the higher you fly, the more it costs, and the plane would have had to be pressurised. However, after a number of Ukrainian military planes had been targeted and brought down by separatist militias, crews were being advised to fly well above the suspected danger zone.

On the evening of 16 July, Ukraine authorities reported that a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 jet had been shot down near Amvrosiivka, a village about fifteen kilometres from the border with Russia. After rockets hit its tail as the aircraft veered away from the border, the pilot was able to eject from the aircraft, and land safely. Ukraine authorities claimed the jet had been downed by a missile fired from a Russian aircraft. It was the first time that Ukraine openly accused Russia of using airpower in the conflict. Russia denied its involvement in the incident, calling the accusations ‘absurd’.

By now there was a growing body of evidence that Russia had provided tanks, weapons and other support to the separatist rebels, and several separatist leaders had publicly identified themselves as Russian citizens. There was, however, still no proof of any active engagement in Ukraine by the regular Russian military, although the Ukrainian government had complained on several occasions that Russian aircraft had violated Ukraine airspace.

At the end of June 2014, a convoy of Russia’s 53rd AntiAircraft Missile Brigade, a surface-to-air missile brigade of the Russian Ground Forces based near Kursk, travelled to the Ukrainian border, officially as part of a training exercise. Locals spoke to some of the soldiers in the convoy, who said that they were being sent to the border with Ukraine to strengthen border control. On 17 July locals reported seeing a convoy of military vehicles moving eastward towards Snizhne during the early afternoon. The convoy appeared to be transporting a missile launcher that was later reported travelling through Torez. The area was the hub of the fighting and it had been a noisy day in the eastern Ukrainian town, with plenty of military equipment moving through.

On 17 July, Associated Press reporters in the town of Snizhne saw a launcher aboard a flatbed truck with four SA-11 surface-to-air missiles parked on a street. The bulky missile system, also known as a Buk-M1, was a medium-range surface-to-air missile system developed by the Soviet Union and designed to counter cruise missiles, smart bombs, fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Three hours later, people living ten kilometres west of Snizhne heard loud noises. At first there was a weak boom, and then something that resembled explosions or multiple crashes. The blast came with so much force that windows shook and shattered in houses. At 4.20pm local time in the town of Torez, Rostislav Grishin, a 21-year-old prison guard, raised his head to the sounds coming from above and saw a plane falling through the clouds.

Chapter 13

17 July 2014

Aerospace engineer Fatima Dyczynski was returning to Perth at the end of a five-year stint in the Netherlands, where she had been studying for a master’s degree in the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. In the course of her studies she had established her own space and nano-satellite company, Xoterra Space. The company website described her as a ‘thought leader, scientist, creative space enthusiast, motivated entrepreneur, public speaker, all world traveller and absolute futurist’.

Although Fatima liked the Netherlands, her heart belonged to Australia and mainly to the city of Perth. Ten years ago, at the age of fifteen, Fatima had moved from Germany to Perth. It had been her dream to live in Australia and her parents—Jerzy Dyczynski and Angela Rudhart-Dyczynski—decided to share the dream with their only child, moving from their home in Germany to the Perth riverside suburb of Nedlands. In Perth Fatima completed her secondary schooling at John XXIII College in Mount Claremont and after that the world became her oyster as she headed back overseas for further studies.

For the highly intelligent Fatima, however, the world alone wasn’t big enough; her ultimate aim and dream was to become an astronaut. Her bucket list had always reached to the outermost regions of space. For the first twenty-five years of her life she had certainly not been idle: she had travelled through many countries and learned to speak four languages; she’d had a few gigs as a guitarist in a rock band; she liked glider flying and wasn’t bad at kung-fu. She was known as outspoken, ambitious and incredibly motivated; those around her were confident that this young woman was going places.

As she waited to board her flight from Schiphol airport earlier that morning, she talked to her mother and father in Perth via Skype. They were excited at the prospect of having their daughter back soon and had prepared a surprise gift for her homecoming: a blue BMW Z roadster was secretly waiting in the family garage.

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Karlijn Keijzer, twenty-five, was from Amsterdam but had been studying in the United States at Indiana University for her PhD in computational chemistry. She spent long days in the lab preparing a computer simulation for bryostatin, an anti-cancer drug and a promising candidate for treating Alzheimer’s disease.

The blonde student had one great passion, rowing, and she was good at it. At Indiana U in Bloomington she had rowed with the fastest boat crew on the campus. After participating in the European Rowing Junior Championships in 2006 and the World Rowing Junior Championships in 2007, she had quickly developed into a leader on the team and was known for her fine technique. As the best athlete on the 2011 women’s team at Bloomington, Karlijn rowed from the ‘stroke seat’ as the leader of the boat.

The Americans sometimes winced at her Dutch boldness and directness—her words tumbled out, saying everything she wanted to say without inhibition—but friends claimed she remained true to herself and never lost sight of who she really was. She was often the one to pat a back when someone was having a rough day and she could make people smile, like the time she showed up at a team party dressed as a gigantic ear of corn, a tongue-in-cheek dig at Indiana farmland culture.

Karlijn was now travelling to Indonesia with her boyfriend, 32-year-old Laurens van der Graaff. She had fallen head over heels for this sporty guy, and the couple appeared to be a perfect match. Laurens taught Dutch at a high school and they were both active members of the student rowing club, Skoll, where they had first met. But Laurens’s real passion was writing: he wrote for the student magazine at university and he made no secret of the fact that his aim in life was to one day write a book. Meantime his mission was to fire up his teenage pupils with enthusiasm for literature and poetry. Whenever he could, Laurens visited Bloomington, where Karlijn would treat him to basketball games, wineries and restaurants.

Hoping to finish her studies in America in two years’ time, Karlijn intended to return to the Netherlands for good and to move in with Laurens. It was school holidays now and, in between semesters, the couple had decided on a holiday to Indonesia to meet up with two friends: Boudewijn van Opstal, the rowing coach of the national rowing team of Indonesia, and Elizabeth Kleipol, a friend of Karlijn’s from her high school days.

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Gary Slok snapped a smiling selfie of his mum and himself just before the plane was due to take off. The sixteen-year-old did a lot of travelling with his 53-year-old single mother, Petra van Langeveld. On a previous trip they had been to Ecuador together.

When Petra announced their plan to travel to Borneo, Gary’s father, who had remarried, had laughed and joked about it. As it happened, Jan Slok knew his son didn’t much appreciate trees, or bugs for that matter, and the father was wondering how the boy would cope in the life-infested rainforests of Borneo, which were renowned for their wide variety of creepy-crawlies. But Gary and his mum were sure they would be able to overcome such trivial inconveniences and were confident that this trip would turn out to be their dream holiday.