“Shut down?” the Russian general sitting next to Igor Komarov asked into the microphone. “Describe in details what happened.”
There was a pause again.
“I don’t know,” briefly, but with a shiver in his voice the Indian soldier translated, “all systems simply turned off. I hardly landed the machine.”
The captain was silent for a moment, reconstructing the chronology of events in his memory.
“No one was hurt. When we got out of the helicopter, we met an English tourist. He was alone. He saw us falling and came to help. We tried to get the helicopter going again, but we were stopped by…” first the captain and then the interpreter fell silent.
The hall filled with tension. Everyone in the hall could see the captain, torn by some inner dilemma, looking around and not finding a place, either looking at the interpreter or somewhere to the side. He looked at the man next to him in the same uniform and made up his mind:
“We saw the plane crash. It scattered right in the air, and then,” the interpreter paused and shifted his gaze to somewhere behind the camera. “Then it disappeared.”
“Is he talking about the missing Paris-Tokyo flight?” the head of ESA asked his colleagues without using the microphone.
“Yes,” several voices came from the audience.
“It all fits,” said the French general sitting next to Bernard Bajolet.
Captain Shah was silent again.
“Captain,” the Indian general asked him, “clarify what do you mean by the words ‘disappeared’.”
“I mean that the plane just disappeared right in the air. The visibility was good, and we could hear the turbines roaring. It was flying away from us at an altitude of maybe a couple of kilometers. Maybe lower. And then the whole front just disappeared in the air.”
“Maybe it was clouds or fog?” someone in the audience suggested.
“No,” the captain shook his head when the interpreter voiced the Europeans’ hypothesis.
“I saw it with my own eyes, and so did they,” the interpreter continued, and Captain Shah pointed to his subordinates, “and the civilians saw it too.”
“But where are they?” burst out from the Roscosmos head. “What happened to them?”
“We saw part of the plane, the tail part,” the interpreter clarified. “It came off the plane and fell slowly not far from us. We rushed over there.”
“Did part of the plane get out?” again the Indian military general clarified.