The Reluctant Hero

by Michael Dobbs

  And waited.

  Eventually, Harry clenched his hand until it made a fist. ‘Bollocks. Something’s wrong.’

  The plan had called for a power cut at 12.20 a.m. that would knock out the lights and drown the courtyard in darkness, courtesy of another friend of Bektour’s group who worked at the local power station. Easiest thing in the world, to trip the supply, happened all the time, most evenings, in fact, even with teams of engineers toiling to stop it happening. But not, it seemed, tonight.

  Three minutes passed, five, then eight.

  Nothing.

  Most of Ashkek slept.

  In the hotel, Sid Proffit was pouring the last of the vodka into the glasses of the guards, who were in the state of relaxation that comes only when a man knows his duty is done and there is free booze for the asking. They sat in the corridor with their backs propped up against the wall. One was almost asleep, his eyes glazed, his chin drooping towards the plastic flower that still protruded from his breast pocket.

  Yet as one cog in the system ground to a halt, another was stirred into action. In the square outside the prison, a guard, considerably more alert than Sid Proffit’s companions, at last emerged from the gatehouse to inspect the problem with Aibeck’s truck.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know?’ Aibeck replied. ‘My boss pays me to drive, not piece back together this load of Japanese junk.’ He spat in the snow, professing anger, trying to stop his fingers from shaking with fear as he scraped at a spark plug with a strip of emery paper.

  ‘Bosses? Tell me about them,’ the guard muttered goodnaturedly. ‘You want to try working in this shit hole.’

  ‘No thanks. Too reliable. It means I’d have to go home every night to the wife. I’d rather stand here and freeze.’

  The guard laughed, while Aibeck’s trembling hands dropped the spark plug in the snow. ‘So bloody cold I can’t feel my fingers any more.’

  ‘You want tea?’

  Aibeck glanced at his watch. 12.32 a.m. The others were due out at 1.20. He had to keep this going, and tea would give him cover, fill the time. And he was fucking freezing, ice collecting on his moustache. ‘Thanks. Can I have it here, though? Need to get this bathtub back on the road.’

  ‘What, you think I’d let you into the prison? I’d have to shoot you first! No, you wait here,’ the guard instructed over his shoulder as he walked back to the guardhouse.

  Aibeck thrust his hands deep into his pockets to stop them shaking. It was several minutes before he dared even try to pick up the spark plug from the snow.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the prison walls, Harry had come to a decision. ‘We’ll have to risk it.’

  ‘What, beneath the lights?’ Bektour protested. ‘They’ll see us for sure.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ve been watching. None of them have looked this way in five minutes. If they’re not scratching their balls or making tea they’re looking at what Aibeck’s up to in the square.’

  ‘I guess we’re going to have to take this game up a level,’ Mourat muttered, flexing his shoulders, trying to spit, pretend indifference, but nothing came, his mouth was dry.

  Suddenly Harry knew he was taking advantage of these young men. Perhaps he’d known it from the start and simply hadn’t bothered about it. He was leading them on, allowing their inexperience and youthful enthusiasm to take them further, step after step, disguising the danger behind a web of adventure. But it was the same with all military service, wasn’t it? It was a young man’s game, had to be, not simply because of factors like speed, and strength, and resilience, but because old men didn’t appreciate the joke, knew when to duck and run. Harry was old enough to know better than to wade through a tunnel of shit in order to break into a prison, but he knew he’d come too far to turn back. What had Martha said – a shark that had to swim? That hurt, too close for comfort, but he’d worry about that later. For now, he had a job to do. He picked up a broom and thrust it at Mourat, then grabbed a bucket and mop for himself.

  ‘Look, we don’t run, we walk,’ he instructed. ‘Slowly, as if we own the place. If they spot us, they’ll assume we have reason to be here.’

  ‘And if not?’ Bektour asked.

  ‘Then I guess it’s a race for the sewers. Which we will win.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Because we’ve got so much more to lose than they have.’

  Bektour looked pale in the light of the torch. He stared at Harry for a while, uncertain, then he sighed. ‘You’d better put on one of those kitchen coats, Harry,’ he suggested. ‘You smell like shit.’

  Amir Beg lay back on his pillow, sleepless. The report had come in from the hotel that Jones was safely abed, but that hadn’t been enough to satisfy him. He was a man with a restless nature and mistrustful mind, and this business seemed to him to be just too neat, overly simple. Neat and simple didn’t fit comfortably with Amir Beg’s view of life, which stated that the shortest route to hell was in the company of someone you trust. Anyway, it wasn’t the hotel, it was the prison he had to worry about, that’s where all their unpleasant little secrets were buried. He lit a rare cigarette, and as the smoke drifted away, it took with it any temptation he might have had to complacency. He rolled over on his side and stretched for the phone, dialling his duty officer.

  It rang, several times, then some more before it was answered, while Beg ground out his cigarette in impatience.

  ‘You know who this is?’ he demanded, when at last a voice appeared.

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘Have you been sleeping?’

  ‘N-no, sir!’

  ‘Then you have been idle.’

  Beg didn’t raise his voice, didn’t need to. There was a damning hesitation at the other end. He could almost sense the mug of coffee being put aside, the magazine being closed, the mouth turning suddenly dry.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  Ah, at least the man hadn’t lied and invented some ridiculous excuse. An honest malingerer. The service was full of malingerers, but so few of them were honest. This one was a rare bird. It meant he might survive.

  ‘Stop filling your pants,’ Beg instructed, ‘and get Governor Akmatov out of bed for me.’

  Every step felt as if they were dragging dead horses behind them. They needed to cross thirty yards of the courtyard before they would be out of sight of the guard room. They hadn’t covered twenty when a voice rang out.

  ‘Hey! What’s going on?’

  Harry brought up his hand and waved, very slowly, but kept walking.

  ‘Come here a minute!’ the guard demanded, his tone a little sharper.

  ‘We’ve got blocked drains to clear,’ Bektour shouted back. ‘Make us some tea, we’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  The bluff wasn’t working. The guard took a pace towards them. ‘I wasn’t told about any night work.’

  ‘Now, may God help us,’ whispered Mourat.

  That’s when the lights went out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It had been agreed, during the previous frenetic day of planning, that one of Bektour’s young friends in his Internet group would take care of the lights. Anna was only twenty, and was the in-house web designer who also wrote, with a decidedly radical edge, about women’s issues. Wife-beating was still commonplace in Ta’argistan, and wife-kidnapping far from exceptional, so she would never suffer from a shortage of copy. Anna was a woman of both opinions and interests, and one of her many interests was Volkov, an engineer at the municipal power station where the tall chimneys soared above the eastern suburbs of Ashkek and belched dense clouds of steam and smut into the mountain skies. Volkov was the passionate type, and Anna had little difficulty in persuading him to tamper with the control systems at the station. She spun him a story about using a power cut as cover for a raid on the server at the Ministry of Justice, where she wanted to wipe out a backlog of traffic convictions. Cutting the electricity supply would be a simple task in such a rickety syst
em, the work of a moment, with the responsibility entirely undetectable by Volkov’s bosses.

  But Volkov was not only passionate, he was also intensely jealous, and during the afternoon he had changed his mind. He was twelve years older than Anna and had difficulty in keeping pace with her uncompromising lifestyle. They had rowed on the phone, and he had reneged on his promise. So the lights had stayed on.

  She had called him, he had sulked. She had threatened. She would inform his wife, she said, as well as posting compromising pictures of him on all sorts of websites – a task, she reminded him, which wouldn’t require foreshortening any of the images in order to leave him squirming in humiliation and forever after being known around Ashkek as Needle Dick. She even emailed one to him as illustration. Only then did he relent.

  By which time it was 12.37. Seventeen minutes late.

  The confusion caused within the prison by the power cut didn’t create chaos, it was too common an occurrence for that. But it distracted the guard, made other demands on him, and in the sudden darkness Harry and his team got to the door. It was just as he had been told, secured on the outside with nothing more than a simple heavy-duty barrel bolt. He drew it back, had to hit it hard to persuade it to move, but the noise was more than covered by the agitation of the guards. Before he ducked inside, Harry looked over his shoulder at what they were leaving behind, a landscape of silhouettes and shadows, and eyeless prison windows, and bars, a claustrophobic world lit only by a pale, half-hearted moon. From where he was standing, whatever else lay beyond the prison walls had ceased to exist.

  They had prepared for what they found at this point. Once inside, Bektour placed wooden wedges beneath the door to make sure that although it appeared closed, it couldn’t be locked on them. This was not only the way in, but also their way out. Ahead of them the passageway stretched beyond the reach of their torches, and even a single pace inside the air was stale and dank. The paintwork bore the signs of endless neglect; great chunks were flaking off, and what was left was badly scratched. Harry imagined this as the marks of desperate hands and feet. It couldn’t have been like that, of course. Corpses don’t kick.

  The passage was littered with ancient, dangling cobwebs and patrolled by cumbersome woodlice. Two red eyes peered out at them from the distance before scurrying off into the darkness, claws scratching along the rough concrete floor. They followed, every step taking them deeper inside, every sense on alert, fighting their instinct to turn and retreat. Near the end of the passage they discovered an old gurney, a stretcher on wheels that blocked their way. Bektour sighed sadly, from somewhere deep within, brushed it with his hand, as though his father was still lying on it. The others let him stand for a moment, lost in remembrance, before they squeezed past to the door that lay beyond. Another simple barrel bolt, this time much stiffer; it gave way with the sound of a hammer on an anvil, or perhaps a falling trapdoor. The echo shot back from the walls like alarm bells, but no one came. The door opened slowly on tired hinges.

  The Hanging Room, was, Harry thought, probably the most pitiless place he had ever seen. He was no stranger to death or judicial executions, and even executions that hadn’t bothered with a judge, but nothing he had seen was more immediately offensive than this. Everything in it stank of death. It was a square room, twenty feet across and almost as high. Their torches picked out the dull glint of scaffolding poles that formed a structure nine feet high, a construction so haphazard it seemed as though two men might tip it over with their bare hands. By contrast, the steps that climbed to the top were solid, wide, with substantial handrails on either side in case anything needed to be hauled up them. They led to a platform of wooden planks, and in the middle of it, square and a little warped, was a trapdoor. Harry’s eyes were dragged upwards with an irresistible force. Almost at ceiling height was a discoloured steel joist stretching from wall to wall. From this, staring at them in the torchlight like a one-eyed goddess of vengeance, hung the noose with its huge hemp knot.

  Bektour stood, gazing, his lips moving silently, holding out his hands in prayer. As he finished, his entire frame gave a terrible shudder.

  There was worse. Harry saw old, evil stains beneath the scaffold, signs not just of death but of botched executions, too long a drop, too much twisting, too great a force for fragile necks and skin and tissue to withstand. Damn these people, they couldn’t even kill properly. But perhaps that was the point of this crude machinery. Its message was that those who built it simply didn’t care. Life was of no significance, scarcely worth the bother it took to finish it, so if they butchered you like a chicken it was of no consequence. If they didn’t get it right first time they’d simply try again until the job was done. There was no dignity in this place, death was little more than a crude game, played out for the passing gratification of others. Little wonder some struggled as they were dragged up these steps.

  Harry turned away in disgust, but the horror wasn’t over. His light fell upon the wall by the far door, the first thing that would catch the eye as you entered. Photographs. Crudely stuck to the wall with pins and tape like shopping lists. Some were new, some much older, stained, or curling at the edges. Dozens of them. Of executions. Of men standing, of men falling, of corpses dangling. Of heads being held up by the hair where the execution had gone so gruesomely wrong. Of empty faces with their torn, twisted necks. Of faces being forced back in their proper places by boots for the benefit of the photographer. In one, a man was kneeling between two corpses, their lifeless heads propped up in his hands. A man and a woman, stripped to the waist. The man clearly had a death erection. Husband and wife? Harry wondered. But it was a redundant question. Here they were nothing but trophies. No better than pigs’ heads on a plate.

  These images were the last things a prisoner would see, the images they would die with, knowing that in death they, too, would be nothing more than pieces of pornography stuck to a peeling wall.

  It’s what they planned for Zac.

  Harry had to get him out. There were no more doubts. Silently, he yelled Zac’s name. Fuck it, Harry, get on with it, came the reply.

  He scolded himself for his distraction and headed for the far door.

  Governor Akmatov arrived at the main entrance to the prison shortly after the power supply had failed. The confusion he found did nothing to improve his mood. He was a man who slept heavily and resented disturbance, but he was also an adept player of the game necessary for survival. It was inevitable that fortunes amongst the elite in Ashkek would ebb and flow, but one of the constants was that you did not cross Amir Beg. Now Beg had sneezed, so Akmatov had sprung, and the governor was not in a mood to tolerate any underling who stumbled in his way.

  He arrived looking as though he had put on a few pounds, still in his pyjamas that were tucked away beneath his suit. Comfort clothing. He felt in need of it.

  ‘What the hell’s happening?’ he snapped at the duty captain who had rushed to meet him at the gate. Akmatov hadn’t been told that anything was happening, not for sure, but his staff had a multifaceted talent for screwing things up. Give them an egg and they’d end up with an outbreak of dysentery.

  ‘Why, nothing, Governor,’ the captain answered, hesitantly. ‘All’s quiet.’

  ‘No alarms?’

  ‘Well, no, sir, I mean . . . the power’s gone. The alarms aren’t working.’

  ‘What? You moron. Why the hell wasn’t I told?’

  This last exchange was a well-practised dance, a formal two-step conducted for the benefit of the record. They both knew the alarm system wasn’t worth a damn, with or without the power. They also knew whose responsibility it was, but the captain didn’t dare rub the point home. The system within the Castle was basic to the point of obsolescence – magnetic contacts on some of the main doors and exits, rudimentary CCTV, and motion detectors in a few of the important locations, all of which were designed to be fed into a computerized monitoring operation that wouldn’t have been out of place in a backstreet grocery shop. It h
ad been installed under the auspices of the European Union’s humanitarian-aid programme with the stated objective of preventing the abuse of some prisoners by others, and of making sure the prison officers, too, followed the rules. Yet the elementary nature of the system had scarcely been reflected in its expense; the installation had been budgeted for around €800,000 but had ballooned beyond the two million mark, the contractor arguing that cost inflation was inevitable because of the ancient nature of the structure and the extraordinarily damp conditions in some of its areas. It was those conditions, too, he said, which caused the notorious lack of reliability.

  There were some obvious flaws in the contractor’s argument. After all, the Castle hadn’t changed much in fifty years; it might be argued that he should have foreseen these difficulties. There was also the point that the contractor was Governor Akmatov’s brother-in-law so there were no grounds for surprise. Yet the EU paymasters in Brussels were a long way away, and foreign-aid programmes come with their inevitable clutter. However, no one was willing to let such an unsatisfactory situation stagnate. A further submission had recently been made to the EU for a full refurbishment and upgrade programme. The governor had given it his full support. Everything would get fixed. Tomorrow.

  But, tonight, it failed. Part of the basic CCTV system operated in the Extreme Punishment Wing, where conditions were too taxing for guards to remain on full-time duty, and where the cameras were supposed to fill the gaps. Yet, for now, the Castle was bathed in pale moonlight, the gloom pierced by nothing more than the occasional flash of a torch. It wasn’t the first time Akmatov had found his prison in this state, the condition was almost normal, nothing to worry about, except for the fact that Amir Beg was on the phone. That was one hell of a coincidence, and the governor hated coincidences. He hurried on his way.