The wheels of the 747 hit the runway hard. The jolt made Suryei jump. Joe woke with a start. ‘Jesus!’ he said, eyes wide, expecting the worst.

Sydney, 0800 Zulu, Monday, 18 May

ABC Radio 702: ‘A spokesman for Boeing Corporation revealed today preliminary findings into the crash of Qantas Flight 1 that killed a total of four hundred and ten passengers and crew, ruling out terrorism as a possible cause. It is believed that the section of the fuselage called the Electronics and Equipment Bay, which houses vital junctions for the aircraft’s hydraulic systems, was struck by a small meteorite.

‘A Boeing investigator says such a missile could have been travelling at close to 60 000 kilometres per hour, vaporising the section of the plane it struck. The investigator says the wreckage of the plane recovered from Sulawesi is consistent with this theory.

‘A spokesman for Boeing says the chances of an aircraft being hit by a meteorite are around a hundred million to one but that, given the number of jets flying and the many millions of air miles flown each year, a strike by a meteorite was just a matter of time.’

Author’s note

Time is a difficult beast to tame when writing a book like this, where events are happening in different time zones simultaneously. For example, something can take place in the morning in Sydney, Australia, and affect events in Hawaii the morning of the day before.

To help overcome the confusion, I’ve adopted the standard twenty-four hour Greenwich ‘clock’. This was previously known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and is now officially called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In military parlance, however, the letter designator for this clock is Z, or Zulu.

If I were to adhere strictly to form, 10 am on April 28 in Sydney (Eastern Standard Time) should be written 28041200Z (Sydney is +10 hours UTC).

Once you get used to reading time in this fashion, it’s actually less confusing than it might at first seem. But it becomes less so when juggling several time zones at once. In order to cut down on the mental arithmetic, I’ve omitted the local times in the section headings. But for the sake of general interest, the local times of the major places in this story are:

Sulawesi — UTC plus 8 hrs

Bali — UTC plus 8 hrs

Hawaii — UTC minus 10 hrs

Maryland — UTC minus 5 hrs

East Timor — UTC plus 9 hrs

Jakarta — UTC plus 7 hrs

Canberra — UTC plus 10 hrs