Marion Island, South Africa
November 11, 1:33 P.M., South Africa Standard Time
The population of Marion Island consisted of three South African seamen, thousands of birds, and tens of thousands of mice, all of whom were shocked from sleep by a ground-shaking concussion. Occasionally, there were research teams in residence at the science station at Crawford Bay. But not now.
Officially named Point Dunkel but referred to as “Point Dung Hill,” the large cinderblock bunker rattled for several seconds, cups falling from counters and pictures tilting on walls. Dressed in uniforms with thick thermal linings, the men raced from their windowless, prison-sized rooms to the one door and two north-south–facing windows of the blockhouse.
“Fire to the east!” fifty-nine-year-old Commander Eugène van Tonder alerted the others from the open door.
Shivering, the team’s helicopter pilot, forty-year-old Lieutenant Tito Mabuza, joined him at the frost-coated entrance. The localized flames were at least a mile away but the men felt wisps of heat. The driving wind was so swift and forceful that the heat barely had time to dissipate.
“Volcanic, sir?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” van Tonder answered, sniffing. “I mean, it’s unlikely without any warning, yeah?”
“We had that notification this morning,” said twenty-year-old Ensign Michael Sisula. “The faint glow, likely outgassing.”
“On Prince Edward, not here.” Van Tonder shook his head. “Anyway, that’s jet fuel burning.”
“I’ll contact Simon,” said Sisula.
Simon was Simon’s Town, home of fleet command for the South African Navy.
“Let’s have a look,” van Tonder said to Mabuza, pointing up. “There may be survivors.”
The men rushed back to their rooms, neatly avoiding the half-dozen mousetraps in the corridor. As he pulled on his outer gear, Commander van Tonder was processing what they had seen and heard and felt. Silently, he prayed to God. The crash was likely a passenger flight. Prince Edward and Marion Islands were at the fringes of the commercial airline routes between Southern Africa and Oceania. Research planes typically flew along the Antarctic coast to maximize data gathering, and there was no tactical value for military aircraft to be here. When the South African Air Force tested their Umkhonto short- and medium-range missiles, there was no reason to travel over one thousand miles to the southeast.
Mabuza finished first and ran out to the black Denel AH-2 Rooivalk helicopter. He removed the insulated tarp from the main rotor swash plate and the tail gearbox and stuffed them behind the seats. Then he warmed the aircraft up. The commander followed quickly, pausing to holster his Vektor SP1 semiautomatic with a fifteen-round magazine. He had only used it once on the island, to end the suffering of a sick albatross. Given the nature of their assignment here, Simon’s orders were that both crewmembers should carry firearms during a flight. The pilot’s Milkor BXP submachine gun was in a brace behind his seat along with a shared M1919 Browning machine gun. That powerhouse could also be mounted on the helicopter in the unlikely event of an invasion by pirates or the military. They could destroy a target the better part of a mile away.
Before leaving, van Tonder told Sisula to monitor communications between the chopper and Simon. Depending on where they flew, the mountains could make the direct uplink to Simon spotty. It was strange that, just a score of years before, they would not have been able to communicate at all, not in a straight line. Signals had to go up in space and down so they could talk.
Van Tonder left, buttoning the greatcoat that had been given to him by his sister. A member of the Methodist clergy in Durban, she had been expedition pastor on several South African National Antarctic Expeditions and had said he would need the coat. She was correct. The standard wool-lined flight jacket provided by the military would not have gotten the job done. The winds here were not only constant, they were brutal. Albatrosses were smart birds, and van Tonder could not understand why so many of them chose to live here.
Perhaps it’s their laziness, he had thought, watching them when there was nothing else to do. If you’re a bird with a wingspan of up to twelve feet, you want to live where there’s constant and substantial lift.
The helicopter was parked on a large, naturally flat rock fifty yards behind the bunker. There was room for two small helicopters. During warmer months, scientists were ferried here from the mainland. During the late fall and throughout the winter, educated folk stayed away.
The pad was stained with the oil of six decades of helicopters coming and going at the outpost. Because it was set back from the high, rocky coast, the rock wasn’t stained with bird droppings. Walking anywhere to the front or sides of the outpost, a person had to watch their step.
The rotors were just starting to spin as van Tonder made his way toward the bubble cockpit. He was still praying, still asking the Lord to look out for the souls of the dead; there were sure to be many. Squinting into the wind as he looked to the left, he saw the horizon aglow with what looked like a second cloudy sun in the sky, yellow-orange flame mushroom-capped with roiling black smoke. He could smell not just the fuel but the burning plastics, rubber, and flesh—both human and avian, he suspected.
The commander climbed into the three-crewmember cockpit, stepping over the food chest, rescue net, and medical footlocker just inside the door, behind the copilot’s seat. With weather conditions and geography as extreme as they were here, a crew did not leave unless they were sure they could sit out a storm or provide first aid.
The third seat was above and behind the first two. Though van Tonder was not a flier, he wanted to sit beside Mabuza. Sometimes—and this was certainly the case with the pilot—a man’s expressions revealed more than his words. Also, from here, the commander could point and be seen.
Van Tonder donned a headset so he could talk to both the pilot and Sisula. The team was airborne less than five minutes after the crash.
Mabuza ascended to two hundred feet and flicked on both the underbelly spotlight and the cockpit camera before nosing toward the flames. The familiar rocks and their permafrost coating flew by. Van Tonder even knew where the small, slimy, caterpillar-like Ceratophysella denticulata lay their eggs.
He was beginning to think the long periods of calm were not as bad as he had imagined.
The three men were career men of the South African Navy Maritime Forces, Ships and Naval Unit Ready Forces. They had been sent to the long-abandoned British outpost three months earlier to investigate reports of illegal drilling on the protected island. In previous eras, invasive species had wreaked incredible ecological damage, in particular the mice and cats that came with whalers. Balance had been restored by both South Africa and nature. The leaders of the parliamentary republic—both from personal conviction, public fanaticism, and international pressure—insisted that order be maintained.
And then, foolishly, an aquatic sciences and fisheries survey in 2019 published a paper that mentioned, by the by, that the islands were likely rich in diamond-bearing kimberlite. The wintertime, evening-hours prospecting began. The navy responded with van Tonder, Mabuza, and Sisula.
The soft-plumaged petrels and Kerguelen cabbage must be preserved, van Tonder had thought when he received his orders.
The response was only partly cynical. Van Tonder believed in the mission. It was just unfortunate that the military invariably had to clean up preventable messes made by their own nationals at the behest of politicians.
Once each month, the fleet replenishment ship SAS Drakensberg arrived with supplies and fuel. In the event of a medical emergency, an aircraft could land on the flat plain between Johnny’s Hill and Arthur’s Hill, just to the northeast. Except for missing his nieces and nephews, and dating—Lord God, he missed women most of all, and the Internet was only a taunting reminder of just how much—van Tonder had no objection to being here. He liked the quiet and the time to pursue his studies of history and languages. Except for twice-a-day helicopter circuits of the two islands, his time was his own. And those trips were short. This island, Marion, was just 112 square miles. Prince Edward was even smaller, at just 17 square miles.
The tall, slender, white-skinned, tawny-haired man was frankly pleased to be anywhere in the military. A Boer, he had survived the 1994 transition from the apartheid government under Frederik W. de Klerk to the Government of National Unity under Nelson Mandela. He achieved that by being invisible. He was still invisible, only now it was by inhabiting a region where most of the observers had feathers, scales, and occasionally fur.
“We’re not hearing Simon,” Mabuza informed both the commander and Sisula. “It’s a little bit the wind, but mostly the metal particulates in that smoke are interfering. I’ll elevate and go out to sea a little—should clear up the dusting issue.”
“I’ll relay anything important,” Sisula replied. “If it were military we would have heard the chatter.”
“But not a word from SACAA?” van Tonder asked.
He was referring to the South African Civil Aviation Authority, which was as tight-lipped as any similar department worldwide. First they checked with the towers, then they checked with the airlines, then they “revealed” what dozens of social media postings had already announced, often with video or images and the disbelieving commentary of observers: that a commercial airliner had gone down.
“I’m not on their channel, but there’s nothing that I’ve been told,” Sisula said.
“Simon knows we’re on our way, though.”
“Of course, Commander,” Sisula told him. “They said they would relay the information to SACAA.”
“Thank you. Civilian authorities can be stupidly jurisdictional and I want a record of the chain of reporting.”
“Understood.”
“Bloody bureaucracy,” Mabuza remarked.
It was lunch hour, granted—well into it, in fact—and those bloody bureaucrats liked their afternoon drinks. But someone from the SACAA should have been in touch with the only personnel who were on site. Though their response could be clogged in military channels. Simon liked to be in charge of its own missions. The military bureaucracy was itself formidable.
Mabuza was not as content to be here as van Tonder. There were two things he longed for. One, he openly and frequently declared, was a yearning for the nightlife of Port Elizabeth. The other was a desire to do something with his skills—test new aircraft, even fight in a war.
“To fly so it matters,” as he put it.
He loved everything that flew. He designed and built model planes and studied avionics. In terms of his overall desires, the post was a wash. The only females he noticed here had wings. But because they had wings he studied them.
Sisula, the unit’s communications and tech expert, was the most content of the three. He loved anything digital and didn’t care where he was. Van Tonder was grateful for him. If Sisula were any less able, the outfit would lose Internet access on an hourly basis. The dish on the roof rattled in the near-constant wind, but the brilliant ensign had written a program to compensate for the vacillation. He was always creating uplinks and hacks that provided rich global access to one of the most desolate spots on the planet. Just before bed tonight, Mabuza had delighted to the view from the security cameras inside Boogie Heights, a popular nightclub in Hong Kong.
Van Tonder looked out through the glass-bubble nose of the helicopter as they closed in on the crash site. It looked to him as if the fire was burning across roughly a quarter mile of flat scrub.
Mabuza’s maneuver had worked. The next message was from Simon.
“Dunkel, we have SACAA’s reply that a South African Airbus went off-radar at zero one hundred hours, eleven minutes, and five seconds local,” the Simon radio operator said. “It left Johannesburg at eleven forty-five—it was one hundred miles northwest of you at the time. What is approximate location of presumed wreckage?”
“Location forty-six degrees, fifty-four minutes, forty-five seconds south, thirty-seven degrees, forty-four minutes, thirty-seven degrees east,” Sisula replied. “Helicopter en route.”
“Is it patched in?” Simon inquired.
“This is Commander Eugène van Tonder. Lieutenant Tito Mabuza and I are approximately a half mile from the site.” He pulled off a glove and pushed a pulsing circle on the digital display. “Video should be coming through now. Expect interference proximate to the crash site.”
“Un … stood … ank you, Com…”
“Sorry,” Mabuza said to his companion. “That’ll break up the images as well.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that,” Sisula said. “Simon is talking to SACAA now—reporting to us that there was no mayday. They’re looking into any other communication from the cockpit. They want to know what we saw or heard—I’ll tell them and get back to you.”
“Thanks.” Van Tonder turned to his pilot. “So they fell off radar. A sudden descent from thirty-five thousand feet.”
“More than sudden, I think,” Mabuza said. He pointed ahead at the wreckage, its jagged angles and hidden recesses illuminated by its own fires. “The way the fuselage is separated from the nose section—you see the cockpit there?”
Van Tonder saw the conical structure—what was left of it—angled upward from the ground, the cabin broken off behind it around the galley.
“That came down in a power dive,” Mabuza said.
“Powered? Full throttle?”
“Yes, as if someone leaned or fell against the controls,” Mabuza said. “That suggests either willful destruction or complete and sudden incapacitation.”
Sisula cut in. “Sirs, Simon says Johannesburg tower received no communication from the Airbus whatsoever.”
“Then that would seem to rule out pilot suicide or a struggle in the cockpit,” van Tonder said. “Someone would have heard something, the shouts of the flight crew.”
“It also rules out sudden depressurization,” Mabuza said. “The tower would have heard the alarms, even during the descent.” The pilot pointed toward the crash site. “Look—four equal, separate fires.”
“What’s the significance?” van Tonder asked.
“It tells the story of the nose dive,” he said. “The flight deck hit at nearly a ninety-degree angle, and the rest of the plane, still carrying the momentum, crumpled behind it—you see the front of the first-class section? Where the outside looks like an accordion?”
“Yes—”
“The structure was compromised there, snapped, and the rest of the plane just crashed down flat. Each of the fuel tanks ruptured at the same time.”
Van Tonder heard another communication from Simon.
“I am sending … flight path, Dunkel,” the voice said. “See if … seems unusual to you.”
“Thank you, Simon,” Sisula said. “Sir, Simon—”
“We got most of it,” van Tonder said. “Ask them if they’re looking for some kind of sea-based event, like a rocket-propelled grenade.”
Sisula forwarded the message.
“They have requested satellite images from Europe and America to look for just that, yes,” Sisula said. “But I had a thought. Commander, do you remember that call we received this morning?”
“The fisherman?”
“Yes,” Sisula said.
“I included it in the daily briefing. Presumed thermal activity off Ship Rock on Edward.”
“I’m looking at the flight path that just came in from Simon,” Sisula said. “The point where the Airbus disappeared from radar is a latitudinal match with Ship Rock.”
“How many miles away?”
“Let’s see—two hundred and twelve.”
“That’s a slim and pretty distant connection,” van Tonder said.
“True, sir,” Sisula said. “But when you factor in—just a second, removing height differential so the event and the plane are at the same height—when you factor in the speed of the Antarctic easterlies and the westerlies north of it, something happens.”
“What?” van Tonder asked.
“Whatever was above Ship Rock ran smack into the path of the jetliner.”