Hyderabad – June 18, 2025
The deeper they dug, the less it felt like an investigation—and more like peeling back the layers of a rotting truth.
Anushree and Naveen worked out of a small guesthouse near the outskirts of the city, away from media eyes and government ears. The walls were paper-thin, the ceiling fan unreliable, but it had one critical advantage: silence. It was here, amidst scattered files, encrypted laptops, and half-drunk cups of chai, that they began to put it all together.
The first break came from aviation records Naveen pulled from obscure technical bulletins and whistleblower forums. The aircraft model—the Skyrise-800—had a documented engine flaw. An overheating issue in the secondary ignition system. Several near-incidents had occurred globally, but the data had been suppressed. The manufacturer and the Indian Directorate of Civil Aviation had reached a confidential backdoor agreement with airline executives: keep the planes flying, fix issues quietly, avoid public panic.
Then came the second revelation—from a source Anushree accessed through her diplomatic channels.
Three weeks before the crash, Rathnadevi had signed a confidential report urging the grounding of the entire Skyrise-800 fleet. The document had not been made public. But it bore her digital signature.
She had wanted to stop this.
And then—days before her scheduled flight—her calendar was modified by senior ministry staff. Appointments canceled, travel dates shifted. No official explanation. Rathnadevi's personal assistant had been reassigned. Quietly.
The timing wasn't coincidence. It was orchestration.
Then came the message.
An encrypted text to Naveen's burner phone.
"Check Gate 4 logs. 06:45 to 07:15.
Flight AS-279 manifests were altered manually.
Surveillance was looped.
She was never on that plane.
I saw the overwrite protocol.
I'm not the only one. — J."
A junior technician. No name. No traceable IP. But the data they later recovered matched the time window exactly.
The crash wasn't an accident. It was engineered. And it wasn't just about Rathnadevi.
They discovered the final piece buried in customs data. Cargo manifests. Hidden under routine equipment shipments on AS-279 was a sealed diplomatic courier package. Its declared content: "archival files – internal ministry documents."
But Anushree recognized the file code prefix. It was the same code used for whistleblower documentation her department had flagged months ago. Files tied to illegal land acquisitions, military procurement kickbacks, and shadow accounts linked to sitting cabinet members.
Documents Rathnadevi had quietly assembled.
Documents she was planning to leak to an investigative journalist.
A journalist who, according to local police in Delhi, had vanished two days before the crash. Last seen leaving her office late at night. No security footage. No phone activity since.
Everything aligned.
The engine defect. The buried report. The altered schedule. The tampered footage. The missing files. The disappeared journalist.
And most chilling of all: the likelihood that Rathnadevi's death had been planned—but her own personal rift from protocol had saved her. She hadn't boarded AS-279, possibly to attend a private meeting or avoid official scrutiny.
She wasn't the intended survivor.
She was the missed target.
And now—500 innocent lives had been sacrificed to silence one woman.