Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  ‘Your turn, Isabel’ Sarah said.

  Isabel hadn’t been sure whether this group was ready for her story, which she sometimes had trouble believing herself. She knew the disclosure of her career as a political kidnapper had shocked the others, and she wasn’t at all sure whether she wanted to re-underline the extraordinariness of her younger life. But then again, it was a good story, and as far as the other women in the room were concerned, she’d at least been on the side of the angels that time round.

  So she had told the story of her meeting with Docherty, of how she, an Argentinian exile in London, had agreed to work for MI6 in Argentina during the Falklands War, and how Docherty, himself leading a British unit behind enemy lines on the Argentinian mainland, had come to the hotel in Rio Gallegos to warn her that her cover might have been blown. Together they had escaped the country, hiking their way across the southern Andes into neutral Chile.

  ‘You have had an exciting life,’ Alice Jennings said, and the looks on the faces of the other women expressed much the same thought.

  ‘The last twelve years it’s just been bringing up the kids,’ Isabel said.

  ‘I thought they were all great stories,’ Sarah Holcroft said, with a brusqueness which seemed to hide more than a trace of wistfulness. ‘Have you ever been married?’ she asked Brenda Walker.

  ‘No,’ was the answer, and there was sadness here too, Isabel thought. Both of these young women had been unlucky with men, she decided. Either with fathers or lovers or both.

  Bakhtar Muratov noticed that the President was staring at the Georgia O’Keeffe print, an enormous red flower which seemed to be reaching out to suck him in. He had bought it in New York several years earlier, and the print had occupied pride of place on his living-room wall ever since. He had fallen in love with the original at first sight, without really knowing why until a fellow gallery visitor had explained the implicit sexuality. This visitor had then taken him back to her Lower East Side apartment for a coffee and twenty-four hours of the explicit version, entangling the print with memories of such pleasure that Muratov felt good whenever he looked at it.

  The President was not impressed. ‘I could have painted this,’ he muttered.

  Muratov scowled at Bakalev’s back and looked at his watch again. It was one minute to eleven. He had the feeling that – Uzbekistan Telephone willing – the call would come on time.

  It did.

  Muratov switched on the tape and picked up the receiver, holding up a finger to indicate the need for Bakalev to remain silent. The President’s presence in the room was the last thing he wanted the hijackers to know. ‘Muratov,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Colonel,’ a voice said. It was not the same man Muratov had spoken to the day before – both the tone and the accent were different. ‘My name is Nasruddin Salih. I am the spokesman for The Trumpet of God.’

  ‘Then speak,’ Muratov said.

  Nasruddin ignored the sarcasm. ‘Have you verified what you were told yesterday?’ he asked.

  ‘The tour party is missing.’

  ‘It is here with us.’

  ‘And where are you?’

  ‘In the Fan Mountains. I am sure you will work out the exact location soon enough.’

  There was amusement in the bastard’s voice, Muratov thought. It was the first time he could remember one of these Islamic zealots having a sense of humour.

  ‘These are our demands,’ Nasruddin told him abruptly. ‘Our organization’s programme is to be printed in full in tomorrow morning’s Voice of the People. And the following men are to be released from your prisons – Muhammad Khotali, Timur Lukmanov, Akhmadzhon Pulatov and Erkin Saliq.’

  Muratov waited several seconds, expecting more.

  At the other end of the line, Nasruddin had been diverted by the sound of an approaching helicopter and the sudden appearance of Talib to tell him about it.

  ‘Visitors,’ the Uzbek said. ‘In an army helicopter. But they’re only looking, I think. It’s only a Ka-26. There can’t be many people up there.’

  But they would have seen the bus, Nasruddin knew. It didn’t matter a great deal – he had never expected that their location would remain undetected for very long.

  ‘Colonel Muratov,’ Nasruddin said. ‘It seems you have discovered where we are…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is an army helicopter in the sky above us. Since we have the means of shooting it down, I suggest you recall it to base immediately. I will call you again in ten minutes.’

  Muratov rubbed his eyes, and dialled a new number. In the Ka-26 Nurhan and Marat were staring down at the lodge nestled at the top of the valley. The bus was sitting outside like a trophy, and three armed men were staring up at them as they hovered some two hundred metres above.

  ‘It’s not marked on the map,’ Marat was saying. But then the approach road had not been marked either.

  The pilot was more interested in the visible guns. ‘Can we go now?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘No,’ Nurhan ordered. She had taken about a dozen photographs so far of the building and the surrounding area, but wanted more close-ups. Through the zoom lens she could see a man emerge from the lodge’s front door with what looked distinctly like a shoulder-held missile launcher.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked Marat calmly, passing him the camera.

  ‘It’s a fucking Stinger,’ he said. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he told the pilot.

  Nurhan carried on taking pictures until the lodge was out of sight. A few seconds later Zhakidov’s voice came through on the radio, advising their immediate withdrawal.

  ‘Happy?’ Muratov asked Nasruddin.

  ‘I have no desire to needlessly take human life,’ Nasruddin retorted.

  ‘I hope not,’ Muratov said. ‘Shall we get back to your demands?’

  ‘You have heard them. You will find a copy of our programme in the Hotel Samarkand safe, where I deposited it under my own name yesterday. Once it has been printed in the newspaper – and we shall know if it has or has not – the four released prisoners are to be brought here by helicopter – an Mi-8. They, ourselves and the hostages will then fly across the border to Tajikistan. You will announce that the prisoners have been granted exile, and we shall release the hostages. By then the deal with the Western governments will have been signed, and no one will be very interested in such a benign act of terrorism. I am sure you will come up with a half-convincing explanation for it all – an anti-terrorist exercise which went wrong, perhaps.’

  Muratov raised an eyebrow. ‘That will be easier if the hostages are all alive and in good health,’ he said.

  ‘They are.’

  ‘You understand that I cannot say yes or no to you myself?’

  ‘Yes, but I am sure you will have no difficulty in reaching the President.’

  Muratov smiled to himself, looking across at Bakalev’s angry face. ‘How can I reach you with a reply?’

  ‘I will ring you at three p.m. In the meantime the hostages’ well-being depends on your behaviour. We do not wish to see anyone within a mile of here, either on the ground or in the air. Is that clear?’

  ‘Perfectly. I…’ Muratov began, but the call had been disconnected. He stared at the phone for several seconds, before replacing the receiver. It was the first time he had ever talked to a hijacker, but even so he had the distinct impression that Nasruddin was not typical of the species.

  ‘Well?’ Bakalev asked him.

  Muratov told him the hijackers’ demands, and how they were supposed to be met, adding that he was surprised they hadn’t asked for more.

  The President looked at him. ‘These are not insignificant demands,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Khotali has been a thorn in our side for years, and I like him where he is. And how do we explain our sudden decision to print these lunatics’ programme?’

  Muratov thought for a moment. ‘The second wouldn’t be too much of a problem. We could print it as the first of a series – every mad group’
s manifesto that we can find. Though of course we won’t say that it’s part of a series until the second one is printed, by which time the hostages will have been released.’ He smiled. ‘And you’ll get extra credit from the West for your determination to support democracy.’

  Bakalev grunted. ‘Are they that stupid? Maybe they are.’ He exhaled noisily. ‘But…you now what Khomeini did from exile…’

  ‘Khotali’s not in the same class.’ And if that many people in Uzbekistan supported the clerical zealot, Muratov thought, then he and Bakalev were both wasting their time anyway.

  ‘So you think we should just give them what they’re asking for?’ Bakalev said. He had begun to pace up and down.

  ‘It looks better than the alternative. We need the Western deal and we need tourism. If The Trumpet of God’ – Muratov curled the words derisively on his tongue – ‘starts killing these tourists then we can say goodbye to about a quarter of our foreign-currency earnings for the next few years.’

  ‘The deal would probably still go though,’ Bakalev replied. ‘After all, the English and Americans are not in it for charity – they want it as much as we do.’

  ‘They want it, we need it.’

  ‘Yes, yes…wait a minute,’ Bakalev said, stopping in his tracks. ‘Once the hostages are released, what’s to stop them telling the newspapers? Our tourism income will be affected anyway.’

  ‘It will be damaged much more if people are seen to die. If everyone is rescued then we can use it as proof of how efficient our police are, how safe this country is.’ Muratov paused, wondering whether he really believed what he had just said. ‘The only alternative,’ he added sardonically, ‘would be to kill the tourists ourselves after their release by the terrorists.’

  Bakalev stopped once more. ‘Or we could kill them all now,’ he said softly. ‘We know where they are, don’t we?’

  ‘They’re in the new hunting lodge.’

  The President looked surprised, and then almost indignant. ‘The bastards,’ he said, and then shrugged resignedly. ‘Well, there was no way we were ever going to be able to use it again. And it’s certainly a long way from anywhere. What’s to stop us launching an air strike? Who will know? We can say their bus went over a cliff and exploded.’

  7

  After putting the phone down Nasruddin sat there for several seconds, feeling his heart thumping like a steam hammer. He had never imagined that it would feel like that – the exhilaration of talking on equal terms to someone who was probably the second most powerful figure in the country. He had told the man to get his helicopter away and he had done so, just like that.

  And yet, having experienced the feeling, he knew where it came from. Any sociologist could write reams on the sense of powerlessness endemic in oppressed minority cultures, and his personal history had accentuated that sense.

  My mother is dead, went the forgotten voice inside his mind, and I can’t bring her back.

  ‘Well?’ Akbar asked explosively.

  ‘You heard what I told him. He will put our demands to the President.’

  ‘The son of Satan was probably sitting there beside him,’ Talib said. ‘I wonder how they found us so quickly.’

  Nasruddin shrugged. ‘Guesswork, perhaps. Once they worked out we were in the mountains then the choices were limited.’ He still seemed to be shaking inside from the experience.

  ‘How did he sound?’ Akbar asked.

  ‘The way you would expect – clever, condescending, sarcastic.’

  ‘You got no sense of what they will do?’

  ‘None. They will not know themselves yet. They must weigh the costs of acceptance against those of rejection. And we must wait four hours.’

  It sounded like eternity. Nasruddin was conscious of the dizzy sense of power slipping away, and in its place a growing awareness of the hard choices that might yet be forced upon them.

  ‘Do you think it was one of ours?’ Copley asked.

  ‘If it didn’t land I think we can assume it was,’ Docherty said. Whoever ‘ours’ might be in this context. He hadn’t said anything to the others, but the old Soviet Union had not been slow to take on terrorists in situations like this, often with scant regard for the hostages concerned. Sometimes it had worked: one group of Lebanese Shiites who had kidnapped four Soviet diplomats had been sent a finger from one of their relatives, and had hastily released their captives. Sometimes it had not, and a hostage’s chances of survival had come down to how adept or lucky they were when it came to dodging the bullets of both terrorists and authorities.

  Of course, there was always the hope that the new Uzbekistan had not inherited such KGB propensities, but somehow Docherty didn’t feel optimistic. He still felt their best chance rested on Sarah Holcroft’s involvement drawing in help from home.

  ‘It didn’t seem to be moving,’ Sam Jennings was saying.

  ‘No,’ Docherty agreed. The helicopter had been hovering. And presumably watching.

  ‘Well, it’s gone now,’ Copley said.

  ‘At least they know we’re here,’ added Ogley, as if a weight had been lifted from his mind.

  ‘They always knew we were somewhere,’ the American said unhelpfully.

  This is just the beginning, Docherty thought. Despite his own pep talk he felt almost consumed by powerlessness. They didn’t know what the hijackers wanted, or whether it could be granted, or what the authorities were planning. They were the ones at risk, and they were the ones who knew the least.

  When the sound of the helicopter had faded into the distance, the women had drawn much the same conclusions as the men.

  ‘They know where we are,’ Elizabeth Ogley said, unaware that her husband was saying much the thing thirty metres away.

  ‘But what does that mean?’ Sharon wanted to know. ‘Isabel?’

  Isabel pulled herself out of her reverie. During the flying visit her mind had gone back twenty years, to the room in Córdoba where they had held the industrialist whose name she had long since forgotten. There had been no helicopter whirring above them, but she remembered the sound of sirens on the streets outside, and the strange blend of thrill and fear which they had evoked in her and her comrades. She wondered if Nasruddin and the others had watched the helicopter with the same intense emotions, and found herself feeling almost sorry for them.

  ‘Isabel?’ Sharon repeated.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Isabel replied. ‘But it can’t be bad news.’ Docherty would know, she thought, and felt the fear of loss wash through her mind once more.

  Simon Kennedy wiped his brow and stared across the car park at the Ak Saray Museum. Maybe there would be someone over there he could question about the missing tourists.

  It had taken only one and a half hours to reach Shakhrisabz on the mountain road, but it had still been cool when he started out, and the wind blowing behind the moving car all the way had not prepared him for the heat of the day. And he had forgotten his hat. As he approached the museum, the patch of shade under the overhanging acacia looked positively paradisal.

  The kravat which occupied this space was home to an ageing Uzbek. Throwing English reticence to the winds, Kennedy took a seat without being asked and wiped his brow again. ‘Do you speak Russian?’ he asked, without much hope.

  ‘Da,’ the man said.

  Kennedy explained about the missing tourist party. The Uzbek said he had information, and unselfconsciously extended his palm. The MI6 man gave him a five-thousand-rouble note, thinking that he would claim it back on expenses under the heading ‘greedy peasant’. The old man told him about his visit from the police the night before, and then pulled several pieces of mosaic tile from somewhere within the robe he was wearing. ‘Only a dollar each,’ he said in Russian. ‘Genuine fifteenth-century.’

  Kennedy walked back across the car park, wondering how long it would be before someone noticed that the tiles on the gateway were growing fewer day by day. It was probably his imagination, but the boy on the gate seemed to smile knowingly
at him.

  The café across the street was just opening, and he went in search of coffee and an interpreter. The former was available, if almost undrinkable, and he had to wait over half an hour before a customer arrived who spoke both Russian and Uzbek. The man initially looked at Kennedy as if he was mad, but was persuaded to humour him by the sight of a five-thousand-rouble note. They walked across the street to interview the boy on the gate, who told Kennedy, through the bewildered interpreter, the same story he had told the NSS man and woman the night before, and generously added that he had seen the two of them head off in the same direction as the bus soon after first light that morning.

  All of which seemed pretty decisive, Kennedy thought, once more ensconced behind the wheel of his car. He suddenly remembered the black Volga he had seen parked on the side of the road on the other side of the mountains. A rather striking-looking woman in a short red dress had been talking to two men, one of whom had been dressed in Western clothes, the other not. They must have been the police in question, he realized, though there had been no reason to think so at the time. The KGB had never been noted for its fashion sense.

  Like the two of them, he could see no reason for lingering in Shakhrisabz once he had reported in. ‘The Mystery of the Disappearing Bus,’ he murmured to himself. What would Poirot make of it? he wondered, and wished he hadn’t. His staff college instructor’s remark – that he would make the perfect Hastings – had not yet ceased to rankle.