Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  ‘You don’t mean you were a hijacker?’ Alice Jennings asked with a laugh.

  ‘I was involved in two kidnappings, nearly twenty years ago now, in Argentina. In England you had protest demonstrations, in Argentina things got a little more serious,’ she added, trying to make light of it. The other women all looked dumbstruck, with the notable exception of Brenda Walker.

  She already knew, Isabel realized. Hence the suspicion. Ms Walker must have some secrets of her own.

  In fact, Brenda Walker had spent the last five minutes wondering whether to come clean about her own role, and deciding that she had no option. As a social worker her advice in this situation would be ignored; as an intelligence agent it would not.

  ‘I also have a confession to make,’ she began.

  ‘My God,’ Alice Jennings gasped. ‘Is no one who they seem to be on this trip?’

  ‘I am,’ Sharon Copley said, with a noise that sounded half laugh, half sob.

  They all laughed, and then there was a moment of silence as they realized what they had done.

  ‘I work for the government,’ Brenda Walker said quietly. ‘My job was, well, it was to make sure Sarah didn’t cause the government any embarrassment while she was abroad.’ She looked across at Sarah. ‘I’ve enjoyed your company,’ she said simply.

  ‘Christ!’ was all Sarah could say.

  ‘She was just doing her job,’ Isabel said. It looked as if imbuing this group with a sense of solidarity was going to be an uphill task.

  But Sarah sighed and gave Brenda a rueful smile. ‘I’ve been enjoying your company too,’ she said.

  Sir Christopher Hanson, the head of MI6, poured himself a small glass of port and sipped at it, allowing the sweetness to smooth away his sense of irritation. Another twelve hours and he would have been on his way to Heathrow to begin a fortnight’s holiday in St Lucia. At any moment now his wife would be receiving the news that he wouldn’t be coming, and he was half expecting her cry of rage to be audible above the ten miles of rush-hour snarl-ups which separated them.

  But one of his men – or woman on loan, to be precise – was apparently in a life-threatening situation, and he would not have felt happy deserting the helm at such a moment. Brenda Walker’s file was supposedly on its way from MI5 Records, though it seemed a long time arriving. He was about to make further enquiries when an apologetic courier appeared in his open doorway.

  Hanson took the discs and went to turn on his computer terminal, feeling, as usual, nostalgic for the bulging file of mostly illegible reports which had once served the same purpose. There was something real about paper and ink, something substantial.

  Still, the new system was ten times as efficient, not to mention a damn sight easier to store. He accessed Brenda Walker’s file and skimmed through it. The computerized portrait told him she had short dark hair and a face, which wasn’t very much. Even in this brave new world there had to be a photograph somewhere, surely.

  Hanson smiled, remembering one subordinate’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they rename MI6 Rent-a-Bond.

  Brenda Walker’s personal details contained no surprises, unless you counted her working-class background and comprehensive education, but these days that was almost par for the course among MI5’s foot-soldiers. She had done a lot of escort work with the royals, had a short stint with the embassy in Australia, and had then taken a specialist training course in immigration law. She had been working in that area for only a few weeks when given the job ‘minding’ the Holcroft girl, apparently because the previous candidate had abruptly fallen ill.

  Was that suspicious? Hanson doubted it.

  He printed out the file and then switched discs. The new one contained not only the ‘paperwork’ from her current assignment, but also the preliminary vetting reports on the tour group concerned and the other members of the party.

  He went through the latter, his mouth opening with surprise when he read the information on Jamie Docherty and his wife Isabel. An SAS veteran and an ex-terrorist! Put them together with Brenda Walker, and that made three of the fourteen tourists who had first-hand experience of dealing, from one side or the other, with such volatile situations. If the party had indeed been hijacked, then that had to be some sort of record.

  Assuming for the moment that they had been, one big question remained: whether or not the hijackers were aware of the fact that they had netted the Foreign Minister’s daughter.

  4

  Isabel lay on the bunk, considering the irony of her situation. She wondered how many people in the world had personally experienced a hijack and kidnapping as both perpetrator and victim. She might well be the first.

  Her thoughts went back to Córdoba in 1974, and the beginning of the war she and her comrades had been crazy enough to launch against the Argentinian military. The first man they had kidnapped had been a local glass manufacturer notorious both for his high living and for the low wages he paid his employees. They had kept him for three days in an apartment not two hundred metres from the city’s central police station, blindfolded but otherwise not ill-treated. His family had paid the requested ransom – $60,000 worth of food and clothing for the city’s poor. They had watched the man’s wife hand out the packages on TV, and then let him go.

  Two weeks later they had done it again. This time the victim was a member of the family which had ruled over the city for most of the century, their wealth amassed through land ownership, banking and several manufacturing businesses. The ransom demanded had been correspondingly higher – $1,000,000 in gift packages for poor schoolchildren, plus the reinstatement of 250 workers who had recently been locked out of the family’s construction business.

  The ransom had been paid, but the experience had not been so pleasurable the second time round. The victim had turned out to be almost likeable, and on several occasions the proximity of police teams scouring the city had made it seem likely that he would have to be killed. In the event this had not happened, but the probability had been enough to sow doubt and dissension through her guerrilla unit. It had made them look more closely at themselves and each other, and in some cases they hadn’t liked what they had seen.

  And now here she was among the victims. She wondered how Nasruddin and his comrades were getting on with each other. Maybe it was a crazy thing to think, but from the little she had witnessed The Trumpet of God didn’t seem to be having much fun. So far, she hadn’t seen a single smile on any of their faces. At the beginning of their war against the Junta, her group, the ERP, had treated it all like a mad adventure.

  Though later, to be sure, there had been nothing to laugh about, only torture and death.

  She had been lucky to survive, her body scarred but intact, her soul missing in action for many years thereafter. She wondered if Nasruddin and his friends believed in what they were doing as strongly as she and her friends had done, and whether they would still be alive in twenty years, and able to look back on what had happened the previous evening.

  She wondered if she would be, or if her luck had finally run out. She thought about Docherty and hoped she hadn’t held him for the last time.

  In the men’s room the light had abruptly gone out shortly after eleven o’clock.

  ‘I guess that means it’s bedtime,’ Copley sighed.

  ‘Aye,’ Docherty said, remembering rooms like this in Highland youth hostels. In his early teens he and his friend Doug had spent many a weekend hitchhiking around from hostel to hostel, partly for the sheer joy of free movement, partly to get out of Glasgow and the parental orbit. After lights out they would talk in whispers and giggles until an older boy managed to shut them up.

  He clambered up on to the bunk above Ogley, wondering if any of them would manage to sleep that night. He felt pretty strung out himself, and guessed that the others, none of whom had his previous experience of life-threatening situations, would spend most of the night listening to their hearts beating wildly inside their ribcages.

  ‘The last time I was in
a place like this,’ Sam Jennings said, his soft drawl floating out of the dark, ‘it was a police station in Mississippi. Back in the Civil Rights days, in the early sixties. We were helping to get black voters registered, which wasn’t very popular with the local authorities. They arrested about twenty of us, though I can’t remember what charges they dreamed up – it was something like walking on the grass with shoes on. Anyway, we were put in a cell a lot like this, except that the police dog pound was right outside, and every so often a dog’s face would appear at the window, growling fit to bust and slavering something awful. We all started singing “We Shall Overcome”, but I tell you, I don’t think any of us felt too confident about it that night. I was scared.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m scared now,’ he added.

  ‘So am I,’ one of the Zahid boys said, eliciting what sounded like a comforting sentence in Urdu from his father.

  ‘What do you think, Jamie?’ Copley asked Docherty. ‘You must have seen some hairy situations in the army.’

  ‘We’re at the mercy of people we know nothing about,’ Docherty said, ‘and that’s always scary. But I don’t think they’re madmen. I don’t think they’ll harm us for fun, or without what they would consider good reason. We mustn’t give them any reason to act in anger – in fact, we should do everything we can to make ourselves human to them. In situations like this people are harder to k…harder to harm if you know them.’

  A silence of several moments was broken by Copley. ‘I wonder how the women are getting on.’

  ‘Probably better than us,’ Docherty said. He knew that women always found it easier to share their feelings, and in adversity that was a useful thing to do. Still, he was worried about Isabel. Though twenty years had passed since her nightmare incarceration in the Naval Mechanical School outside Buenos Aires, being imprisoned once more was bound to give the dreadful memories new life, no matter how different the circumstances might be.

  For the first time since the men with the AK47s had climbed aboard the bus, Docherty felt anger welling inside him. Anger at the bastards who were holding them, anger at a world in which such happenings had become so commonplace, anger at himself for being so helpless to save her.

  He lay on his back looking into the darkness above his head, willing himself back to the state of mind he would need for all their sakes.

  The thought crept in unbidden that he would willingly sacrifice all the others if only she could walk away unscathed.

  It was almost twenty past eleven when Nurhan Ismatulayeva and Marat Rashidov drove down Sholkoviput Street and into the mostly sleeping town of Shakhrisabz. The soaring remnant of Tamerlane’s palace loomed out of the darkness on their right, and Nurhan brought the Volga to a halt opposite the entrance to the car park.

  The chain-link gate was closed, and no lights were visible beyond them.

  ‘Do you know this town?’ she asked Marat.

  ‘Not well.’ He stared past her at the palace complex. ‘There must be a caretaker somewhere around.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed, and reached for the door handle.

  They walked across to the gate, and found it attached by nothing more than a cheap padlock. Marat lifted himself up and over, breathing a bit heavily, and raised a hand to help her down. She ignored it, and then felt a bit churlish for doing so.

  ‘I don’t think much of their security,’ she said, checking anxiously to see if her best nylons had been laddered. Tursanay had brought them back from Paris with the vibrator.

  ‘They probably think thieves would have a hard job sneaking out of the country with this thing,’ Marat said drily, looking up at the ruined entrance.

  ‘There’s always vandalism,’ she said tartly. ‘It’s been getting worse and worse in Samarkand. There’s graffiti everywhere.’

  ‘True,’ Marat agreed. ‘Maybe we do need an Islamic Republic after all. Bring back some discipline, eh?’

  She ignored him. The nylons seemed to have survived intact.

  ‘We could cut off the artists’ hands,’ he went on, warming to his theme.

  ‘Are you finished?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, thinking how sexy she looked, standing there in a darkened car park with a short party dress on, hands on hips and eyes flashing. ‘The museum building seems the best bet,’ he added helpfully. ‘It’s that one over there.’

  ‘What are we standing here for then?’ she asked, turning on her heel and starting off across the pock-marked asphalt surface.

  After knocking at two doors they found the caretaker, a man somewhere between middle and old age, asleep on a kravat in the trees behind the building. His eyes opened slowly from slumber, widened quickly at the sight of Nurhan standing over him, and then narrowed once more at the sight of her NSS identification.

  ‘They were just small pieces,’ he said. ‘No bigger than this,’ he added, bending his forefinger inside his thumb to indicate just how small.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Nurhan asked him sternly.

  He blinked up at her, opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  ‘Pieces of pottery or tile,’ Marat said wearily. ‘Our friend here has been selling them to the tourists.’ He shook his head.

  ‘That’s not why we’re here,’ he said, ‘though I may come back to find out if you’re still doing it. We’re looking for the tour party who were here this afternoon.’

  The man blinked again. ‘There were three here this afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘This one came in a small green and white bus.’

  ‘Ah, the last one. Is there a reward for this information?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘There’s a heavy penalty for selling state property,’ Marat reminded him.

  ‘Yes, yes. What do you want to know? I see them go into the museum, and I see them go out. The last time I see them they are sitting outside the café across the street.’

  ‘When was that?’ Nurhan asked.

  The man shrugged. ‘It was growing dark. Maybe six o’clock.’

  ‘You didn’t see the bus leave?’

  ‘No.’

  Nurhan looked at Marat. ‘The café?’

  He nodded, and turned to the caretaker. ‘Cut out the sideline,’ he told him, ‘or you’ll be out of a job.’

  They walked back round the building and across the vast space towards the gate, with Nurhan wishing they had brought along the caretaker and his key. She doubted whether her nylons would survive another climb.

  Still, there was a simple answer to that. She turned away from Marat, lifted the dress, unhooked the French suspenders and pulled down the nylons. ‘They cost a fortune,’ she muttered in explanation.

  He said nothing, but this time failed to offer her a helping hand.

  Human beings are ridiculous, she thought, climbing down to the road.

  ‘That’s the café,’ Marat said, indicating a dark shape some fifty metres up the road. They left the car where it was and walked up. It was a one-storey building set back from the road, with a yard full of metal tables and chairs strewn beneath the large plum tree in its front yard.

  The proprietor finally appeared in answer to their knocking, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. ‘I was working out the back,’ he said, ‘but my wife will answer your questions.’ He disappeared to fetch her.

  ‘Working out the back,’ Nurhan repeated to herself sarcastically. The man had probably been sitting around talking to his friends while his wife ran the place for him.

  She appeared at the door, a diminutive woman with quick eyes and an aura of efficiency about her. She remembered serving the group in question, but had not actually seen them leave. For that they would need to talk to her son, who was responsible for selling the tickets at the gate. She disappeared in search of him.

  ‘I think I’ll go back and break a pot over that caretaker’s head,’ Marat muttered, as they waited once more on the café veranda.

  This time, though, it was worth it. The son had seen the bus drive out of the park, and seen it turn
right on to the Samarkand road. ‘And the car left right behind it,’ he added.

  ‘Which car?’ Nurhan asked.

  The boy described the black Volga, and the rusty black Fiat which had spent most of the afternoon alongside it. He had assumed they must be waiting for something. The Fiat had left just before the bus. He thought that each car had contained two or three men, but he couldn’t be more precise than that. During the afternoon the men had sat down together under the trees behind the two cars, but it was over a hundred metres from the gate, so he had not been able to see them very clearly. Most were wearing Western dress, but at least one man was wearing a traditional robe.

  ‘You didn’t catch the number of either car?’

  No, he had not.

  They thanked him and started back towards their own vehicle.

  ‘We’ve got a hijack on our hands,’ Marat said. It felt strange saying it – hijackings were things that happened somewhere else. Still, this one should keep him busy for the next few days.

  ‘We should talk to Zhakidov,’ Nurhan said, opening the door and reaching for the radio receiver. Despite the intervening mountains the signal was loud and clear. She waited while the duty operator went to fetch Zhakidov, then told him what they had discovered. ‘There’s no indication of where they went,’ she said. In fact, as she suddenly realized, the hijackers could have left Shakhrisabz at six and got back to Samarkand before she and Marat had left. She suggested as much to Zhakidov.

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ he said doubtfully. ‘You two had better stay in Shakhrisabz tonight, and start trying to pick up the trail at first light.’

  ‘At the hotel?’ Nurhan asked hopefully.

  ‘At tourist prices? You must be joking,’ Zhakidov said. ‘It’s only about five hours till dawn. Just pretend you’re on a stake-out.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Nurhan said under her breath.

  ‘And keep me up to date,’ Zhakidov was saying.