Beam Rider

A ground receiving station of the COSPAS/SARSAT international search and rescue organisation logs a distress message transmitted automatically by an aircraft emergency transmitter. The message records the aircraft registration, its position and the time of the event that triggered the transmission. The presumed crash-site is in a mountainous and densely forested part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), hundreds of kilometres from the nearest, charted human settlement. COSPAS/SARSAT alerts the aircraft owner, a company based in Uzbekistan. By prearrangement they also inform Tetrahedron: an organisation working closely with the UN to eliminate the trade in rare minerals, including diamonds, used to fund well armed gangs terrorising the settled populations of Eastern Congo. A UN sponsored team sent to investigate the crash make some unexpected finds and its members are drawn into a fiercely fought armed clash between local interests. This threatens to reignite the under-reported local conflict known regionally as the Great War of Africa, which morphed out of the Rwanda Genocide and caused the deaths of over five million people.