NAZO
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished without a trace, along with 239 passengers and crew. No distress call. No wreckage. Just silence.
Ten years later, in a quiet corner of the world, a woman catches a fleeting glimpse of her missing husband — in the background of a viral video. Alive. Or someone who looks exactly like him.
Her discovery sets off a chain reaction that pulls a former Marine turned mercenary, a commercial airline pilot, and a shadowy South Korean special forces veteran into a relentless search for the truth. Their journey cuts across continents, through a maze of deception, covert operations, and a conspiracy buried for over two thousand years.
What began as a search for one missing man soon uncovers something far darker — and far more dangerous — than any of them imagined.
The author, a former Boeing 747 captain who flew extensively in the region, draws on years of firsthand experience and conversations with aviation professionals to bring chilling authenticity to this high-stakes thriller. While only the first 1 hour and 41 minutes of the flight are confirmed, the rest remains a puzzle of theories, secrets, and silence.
SAMPLE:
Introduction
The sad loss of MH 370 is true. This is a work of fiction. Included are a few of the hypothesis put forth by others. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with them. The prevailing opinion is murder/suicide. My intention is not to place any blame on the crew, none of whom I knew. The thought of any aviation professional entrusted with the lives of hundreds of people and a more than three hundred million dollar aircraft committing a crime this heinous is too revolting to imagine. My hope is that someday MH 370 will be found and the mystery of the events found to be unintentional. Accidental and not malevolent. With both pilots exonerated from a purposeful criminal act.
Preface
When MH370 disappeared in early March 2014 I was employed as a Boeing 747 captain. The majority of my flights were in the Asia-Pacific region. Naturally all of us in civil aviation initially had our own theories of how, why, and most importantly where the Boeing 777 ended up.
For the next seven years until retirement I heard a lot of speculation about the fate of the tragic flight, and was guilty of voicing my own opinion of the events. All that is known for sure is the flight path for the first one hour and forty one minutes of the flight, Everything else is conjecture and assumption.
NAZO
In the early morning hours of March 8, 2014, at 00:28 (*16:28 Universal Time Coordinated March 7th) the pushback tug guided the Boeing 777 ER with its crew, passengers, belly freight of mangosteens and lithium ion batteries, and 49,100 Kilos of fuel, enough for seven and a half hours flying time, backwards and away from the gate at Kuala Lumpur International Airport for its five hour and thirty-four-minute flight to Beijing China. Thirteen minutes later, 41 minutes after midnight Malaysian local time, the big Boeing was cleared for takeoff on 32 Right and given an initial climb to 6,000 feet. Less than a minute later they were in the air.
The early morning hours are a time when there is little air traffic. Departure control cancelled the Standard Instrument Departure procedure and cleared the flight direct to way point IGARI. By 01:01 local time the airliner had reached its initial cruising altitude of Flight Level 350, 35,000 feet.
The last ACARS (Aircraft Communication, Addressing and Reporting System) transmission the aircraft sent out was at 01:07. This was an automated position report. It included the total fuel remaining, 43,800 Kilo grams, 96,600 pounds. The last voice communication was twelve minutes later when the captain acknowledged the handoff from Lumpur Radar to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh area control on frequency 120.9 MHz. Three minutes later at 01:21 the transponder signal was lost. The flight disappeared from Air Traffic Controls secondary surveillance radar just seconds later. At 01:30 the aircraft made a sharp turn to the west-south-west. Malaysian military primary radar tracked the flight for another hour and two minutes before losing the primary radar return.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and its two pilots, ten flight attendants, and two hundred-twenty-seven passengers disappeared into the early morning darkness over the Andaman Sea. The greatest aviation mystery of all time.
CHAPTER 1
Kyoko Rossi nee Kim, also known by her initials, KK, was in her early forties but still trim and athletic. She easily rose from her knees to stand at her full five-foot-ten-inch height in the garden behind her home in Buenos Aires. By habit she slipped on a pair of sunglasses to cover her scarred right eye lid, a souvenir from a Sinaloa, now deceased, drug lord’s cigar cruelly twisted into it while she lay shot, beaten and unconscious. Brushing the soil away from the almost two-foot-long daikon radish, she glanced to the east. Prevailing easterlies at the cities °34.6-degree south latitude was rolling in dark, lustrous, egg-plant purple storm clouds reflecting the bright mid-morning sunshine. Rain had been forecast for the afternoon. ‘’A good day to stay inside with my tsukemono project!’’ KK said aloud. She had decided this morning that it was time to harvest and preserve the tasty Asian root vegetable in her mother's recipe for spicy rice vinegar pickling solution. Gathering up her gardening trowel and basket of vegetables she heard the muted sound of her cell phone’s Medieval Jaunt ringtone. With her arms full of freshly picked garden produce she decided to ignore it. If it was important they would call back.
Twenty minutes later her phone rang again. Laying down her Ishizuchi Santoku Chef's knife she had been slicing the big radish with she wiped her hands on a dish towel and retrieved her phone from the table. An international call with an 81-country code. Japan followed by the city code 06 for Osaka, the eight digit number after that she couldn’t Identify. ‘’Moshi Moshi’’ she answered. ‘’Kyoko San?’’ A deeper than usual female voice she immediately remembered as a friend from high school in Japan questioned. ‘‘Yumi, it’s good to hear from you. I recognize the sultry voice that drives men wild, I don’t even remember the last time we talked.’’ KK told her. ‘’It’s sad that I’m well into my forties and men never give me a second glance now. But what about you? The last email you sent was from Hawaii, and you had met someone. Are you still there?’’ Yumi questioned.
‘’That didn’t work out. I am afraid that there will never be another man like Georgio, I have resigned myself to widowhood. No, I’m home in Argentina now. How is that Gaijin Paul you married?’’ KK asked. ‘’You’re a foreigner also Kyoko, you were born in South Korea if I remember correctly, with a Korean father.’’ Yumi told her. ‘’That’s true, I’ll never be a true Nihonjin.’’ KK answered. After a longer than normal pause Yumi continued; ‘’I see you don’t know, it’s not your fault, we rarely keep in touch, and it was a painful subject to discuss.’’ ‘’Never told me what?’’ KK queried. ‘’Paul, my husband, is dead. A plane crash more than ten years ago now.’’ Yumi told her quietly. ‘’Oh, I’m so sorry.’’ KK told her high school friend with compassion in her voice. ‘’The thing is he is not dead!’’ Yumi stated. ‘’I don’t understand!’’ KK replied puzzled. ‘’Do you remember more than ten years ago a Malaysian airlines flight took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing and disappeared?’’ Yumi asked. ‘’Yes, I remember a long search that went on for about a year. Was that a decade ago? It doesn’t seem that much time has passed. Are you telling me that they found survivors?’’ KK asked.
‘’No, they found no survivors or bodies, just wreckage they assume was from the Boeing on beaches in the western Indian ocean.’’ Yumi explained. ‘’But where is Paul then? Have you seen him?’’ KK asked more than a little confused now. ‘’I saw him on a video two days ago. About a year and a half after the crash I got an email from someone claiming to be Paul. I never read more than the first couple of sentences, then blocked and deleted it. Paul had a Yahoo account this message came from a Gmail account. Obviously if he was alive, he would have sent it from his own account. I regarded it as a sick joke, there are people like that you know. But now I am sure it was him.’’ She told KK. ‘’Yumi give me a few seconds to process this, you got an email almost, no more than eight years ago from someone claiming to be your husband, then recently saw someone on a video that resembled him?’’ KK asked incredulously. Her old friend simply replied; ‘’Yes.’’
KK really hadn’t seen Yumi face to face since shortly after graduation. Pretty Yumi had married at nineteen, very young for a Japanese woman. Her first husband, Kenji, was the grandson of the founder of one of Osaka's largest taxicab companies. He had died less than two years into the marriage, climbing the treacherous 4,180-meter Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps. Kenji was an adventurous, thrill-seeking young man with lots of money. A dangerous combination. At least he had left Yumi financially more than comfortable. Five years later she had married Paul, a man KK had never met. Four-or five- no, at least six or more years older than Yumi she remembered. Paul Jovanovski was some sort of non-credentialed archaeologist who had made a name for himself with alternative, and somewhat fanciful, theories about the ancient world. Yumi had been fascinated by his books and videos. She had written him with an offer to be his guide and translator if he ever came to Japan. As luck would have it, he did have a trip planned to the Ryukyu Islands to investigate the submerged rock formation off Yonaguni Island. Yumi had flown to Okinawa to meet him. One thing led to another.
‘’Yumi San, an email you received years ago and a video of a man who resembles your husband as he was a decade ago is not very convincing.’’ KK told her. ‘’There is one other thing Kyoko.’’ ‘’What’s that?’’ ‘’Six months ago, I received a post card in the mail from the Balkans, Montenegro. It said simply ‘I am alive my yummy Yumi.’ That was what he called me when we were...intimate. I thought it was from a hacker that somehow had gotten into my emails from years ago, fishing for information to take advantage of the tragedy. An elaborate ruse to have me send money. Then two days ago I saw the video, it was just a street scene I stumbled on.’’
KK didn’t know what to say almost a quarter century before they had been close but drifted apart, she had never even met Yumi’s first husband let alone her second. ‘’Yumi, I don’t see how I can help you.’’ ‘’I heard you were Naicho at one time. I thought maybe you could find out something, you know there have been rumors about the missing plane, governments involved, that sort of thing.’’ ‘’Yumi, I went back to Korea shortly after high school graduation and was in the South Korean military for a while, ten years with a couple of months extension. I don’t know where you got the idea, I was with the Naicho, that is not true.’’ ‘’That was a rumor going around years ago.’’ Yumi told her.
KK had been selected for the ROK 707th. The South Korean Special Forces unit incorporated a select group of women warriors who would appear to be translators, hostage negotiators, flight attendants or uniformed airline personnel during hijackings, robberies or terrorist kidnappings. Schooled in martial arts and expert pistol markswomen, they were trained to take out bad actors from the least suspected quarter. Their US and allied Special Forces dubbed them ‘Killer Barbies.’ After she left the 707th at age 29 she had been recruited into Nippon's Tokubetsu Kai. For eleven years she and her husband had worked for the Kai. Covert soldiers of fortune the Japanese government had utilized from the early 1980’s until late in the year of 2021 to solve problems by other than diplomatic means. The Naicho, or Naikaku Joho Chosashitsu the intelligence agency of Japan never fully trusted the foreign mercenaries of the Special Group. At times it appeared that the Kai and Naicho had contradictory objectives.
‘’Yumi, believe me I was never with the Naicho. The only thing I know about that terrible event was what was in the papers, more than half of which has already been forgotten by me.’’ ‘’Kyoko, do you think somehow, he got off the airplane before it disappeared?’’ ‘’How would that be possible Yumi, if he is still alive it would be because he never got on the aircraft.’’ There was silence on the other end. Finally, Yumi spoke; ‘’I went with him to the airport to see him off. The plane disappeared, but Paul has reappeared. Nazo desu ne!’’ “Yes, it’s an enigma, a mystery I don’t understand, but were you able to go to the gate and see him actually board the aircraft?’’ KK insisted. ‘’No.’ ‘’Then if he is alive, it must mean he never got on the airplane! Airliners don’t crash and have someone just walk, or swim away and not mention it to anyone.’’ KK told her. ‘’I wonder if there was any way he could have parachuted from the flight?’’ Yumi asked. She can’t be serious. How can I answer that without insulting her KK wondered. ‘’Yumi, I assume when he left for the airport, he wasn’t wearing a parachute. Also, I do not think it would be possible to leave a pressurized airplane going hundreds of miles an hour five or six miles above the earth.’’ KK replied.
After an uncomfortable silence KK asked her; “Yumi can you send me the video I really don’t know your husband but I’m curious about the clarity? I’ll tell you what, I know a pilot that might be able to answer your questions. I’ll send you his contact information.’’ ...