Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  ‘Hanson,’ he announced. ‘Foreign Office,’ he lied blithely. ‘I’m here to fill in any gaps in your knowledge that you think need filling.’

  Brierley and Stoneham took the invitation at face value, and pumped the MI6 chief for details of the hostage situation. He didn’t seem to know much more than Bourne had, but promised that they would be fully briefed the moment they reached Tashkent by a member of the embassy staff. They would of course be liaising directly with the local security forces in Samarkand.

  ‘Who are they?’ Brierley wanted to know. ‘Police or army?’

  ‘A bit of both, really. Strictly speaking it’s the old state KGB with a new name – the National Security Service they call themselves now, the NSS. Their Anti-Terrorist Unit are running the operation. With a woman in charge, I’m told.’ His voice expressed mild disapproval.

  Stoneham, remembering Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love, was inclined to agree.

  ‘I have a list of the hostages,’ Hanson told them, reaching into his briefcase, ‘with whatever information we’ve been able to gather about each of them.’ He passed it over to Brierley. ‘You’ll notice that Sarah Holcroft’s name has been changed to Sheila Hancock…’

  ‘The actress?’ Stoneham asked.

  Hanson looked blank.

  ‘The actress Sheila Hancock,’ Stoneham repeated.

  ‘I was unaware there was anyone famous by that name,’ Hanson admitted. ‘Is she very well known?’

  ‘No, not very.’

  ‘Well, in that case…the name was changed in case this list fell into the wrong hands, of course.’

  ‘Meaning whose?’

  ‘In the final resort, anybody’s.’

  ‘But surely the Uzbek authorities must have a record of visitors in their country?’

  Hanson spreads his hands. ‘Maybe not. I must admit to finding it hard to believe that no one has put two and two together, but…’

  ‘Let’s hope there’s not a branch of the Sheila Hancock Fan Club in Uzbekistan,’ Stoneham murmured.

  ‘Indeed. You’ll also find information on the terrorist leader – at least we assume he’s the leader. That investigation is still ongoing, so you can expect updates while you are in Uzbekistan. Any other questions?’

  Brierley could think of none.

  ‘As far as Her Majesty’s Government is concerned,’ Hanson said carefully, ‘your primary mission is exactly what we have agreed with the Uzbek President – a matter of sharing the expertise your regiment has gathered over the years in dealing with these situations. There is however a secondary mission here, as I’m sure you have already realized. If the hijackers become aware of Miss Holcroft’s identity then they will presumably begin pressing their demands on us rather than the Uzbeks. In that instance the safety of Miss Holcroft will become a matter of national interest, and it may become necessary for you to take a more active part in the proceedings, perhaps even to the extent of acting without the sanction of your hosts.’ He looked at the two SAS men, as if willing them to accept this in silence.

  ‘Are you telling us that we should see the other hostages as second-class citizens?’ Stoneham asked abruptly.

  ‘No. Only that the hijackers will consider Miss Holcroft a first-class bargaining counter.’

  Brierley and Stoneham exchanged glances. Suddenly it had all got a bit complicated.

  It was nearly eight when Barney Davies got home. As usual the darkened house depressed him, and he went around turning on lights before pouring himself a whisky and making the choice between several equally uninviting microwave meals. Once the food was heating he put on a Miles Davis album and sat back to enjoy his drink.

  Miles had hardly broken sweat when the thought occurred to Davies that he should ring Alan Holcroft. He didn’t like the man, but he did know what it was like to worry about one’s kids. And it would be hard to find a more worrying situation than having one taken hostage.

  He dialled the first of the numbers he had been given, announced himself, and was told the Foreign Minister had gone home. He dialled the other number and the phone had hardly started ringing when Holcroft picked it up.

  ‘I just thought I’d let you know that our men are on their way,’ Davies said. ‘They’ll be in Samarkand around two a.m. our time, breakfast time there.’

  ‘Thank you, I appreciate it,’ Holcroft said.

  He sounded terrible, Davies thought. ‘There’s no more news?’

  ‘No. They should be freed sometime tomorrow morning – at around five a.m. GMT.’

  ‘I hope it all goes OK,’ Davies said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Holcroft put down the phone and stood beside it for a moment.

  ‘News?’ his wife asked anxiously from the doorway.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t be going out there?’ she asked.

  ‘It would look strange. Might even jog someone’s memory and get Sarah recognized.’

  She nodded, as much in resignation as agreement. Both of them stood there in silence, unknowingly sharing the same questions.

  How was it possible to care this much about a daughter they had often wished would simply disappear from their lives? And what did such a level of self-deception say about who they were, both as parents and as human beings?

  12

  Uzbekistan Airways’ Wednesday evening flight to Tashkent left Heathrow on time, and was soon travelling east at thirty thousand feet above the north European plain. Brierley and Stoneham had boarded the aircraft before any of the regular passengers, having avoided the usual trek through passport control and the X-ray machines. Their lethally loaded bergens had been stowed separately in the luggage bay.

  The plane had turned out to be only half full. There was one tour group of academic-looking Brits, but most of the other passengers looked like they were on their way home, suitably loaded with duty-free purchases from the no longer forbidden West.

  After dinner each SAS man grabbed a row of four seats and laid himself out horizontally. Rob Brierley tried his usual remedy for sleep, visualizing the waves sweeping in over the pebbles of the Brighton beach he had lived by as a boy. But he was pumping too much adrenalin, and instead of slipping into unconsciousness he found himself thinking about his late father.

  Gerald Brierley had spent his entire adult life commuting to a solicitor’s office in London. Day after day throughout his childhood Rob had watched him leave in the morning and return in the evening, and on three or four occasions he had seen his father’s face reflect a lack of fulfilment in life that could hardly have been sadder. It was to avoid such a fate that Rob, against both his parents’ wishes, had joined the army.

  It was one of the three decisions he had never regretted. The others had been to try for the SAS and to stay single.

  In the seats behind him, Terry Stoneham was also having trouble getting to sleep. It wasn’t the possibility of action ahead which was keeping him awake, but the troubling direction his life seemed to be taking. Lately he had come to realize how happy his life had always been, and how rare such uncomplicated happiness was. He had taken for granted what most people never had – a really happy childhood, good friends, an enjoyable job. Getting married to Jane and starting a family had been more of the same happiness, right up to the moment when she had told him about the boyfriend. The thought of them doing it together had been almost unbearable in itself, and he still didn’t know how he had managed not to hit her, even though she was five months pregnant with his child. But the gradually dawning fear that maybe he had been equally blind in all sorts of other ways was even harder to take. His faith in himself had been shaken. Still was.

  It was good to be getting away from it all for a few days. He tried switching his problems off, and started mulling over the penalties inflicted on his football team. It was all too fucking predictable, the way the game was run. Such a beautiful game, run by such ugly people. He started imagining himself on the pitch at White Hart Lane, the last minutes against Ar
senal in a championship decider, Anderton on the ball, a deep cross, Sheringham nodding it back, and there was Stoneham smashing an unbelievable scissors kick past Seaman into the top corner…

  There was light in the sky when he woke up, and his mouth was dry enough to tame a swamp. His grandad had always produced this phrase when he had a hangover, to the general mystification of all present. Stoneham leaned forward over the seat in front and found Brierley looking up at him. ‘Another twenty minutes,’ the older man said. ‘I won’t ask if you slept well – I could hear you doing it.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ a steward said behind them, almost in a stage whisper. ‘We’ll disembark you immediately we land.’

  He was as good as his word. A few seconds after the rear wheels of the Airbus hit the runway the steward was back, and ushering them past passengers who seemed uncertain whether or not they ought to feel indignant. The moment the plane stopped the door was opened, and a mobile stairway pushed towards it. On the tarmac two uniformed men and a redhead in dark glasses and white dress were waiting for them.

  ‘Janice Wood,’ she said, shaking each man by the hand. ‘I’m the embassy secretary. ‘These are the local NSS,’ she explained. ‘They don’t speak English,’ she added, as more hands were shaken. ‘They’re just here to make sure you don’t do anything naughty between getting off one plane and getting on the other. It’s OK to ignore them.’

  The two SAS men’s bergens were trundling down the mobile luggage chute. Once they had been reclaimed the three Britons were put in the back of a jeep-like vehicle, with one of the NSS officers chauffeuring them several hundred metres across the tarmac to where a small propeller plane was already warming up.

  Janice told the NSS men ‘two minutes’ in Russian, and turned to the SAS men. ‘There are no new developments,’ she informed them. ‘The released prisoners are supposed to reach the hijackers at eleven, and then the whole ensemble will fly on into Tajikistan, where the hostages are supposed to be released. Simon Kennedy will meet your plane in Samarkand, and he’ll probably have the NSS operational commander with him. Her name is Nurhan Ismatulayeva, and she’s the head of the Anti-Terrorist Unit. According to Kennedy she’s a bit full of herself, but that probably just means she rejected him. OK?’

  Stoneham smiled. Brierley didn’t. ‘What about the hostage situation?’ he asked. ‘What exactly has been done?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have they established that the leader can deliver what he says he can? Has the situation on the ground been contained? Have all the means of access been controlled? That sort of thing.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘No one’s told me any of that. Simon will know.’

  The NSS man was beckoning. The SAS men manoeuvred themselves and the bergens aboard the six-seater and strapped themselves in. The pilot, who looked about eighteen, took one look round at them, grinned inanely, and set the plane in motion. Within minutes Tashkent was spread out beneath them in the early-morning light. It looked more modern than either had expected.

  ‘Where are you off to so early in the morning?’ Diq Sayriddin’s wife asked, as she watched him pull up his trousers and button his shirt. ‘Business,’ he said curtly, noticing how her nipples peeked over the rim of the sheet.

  ‘What business?’ she asked suspiciously, sitting up so abruptly that her large breasts wobbled violently.

  ‘My own,’ he said, turning away. Maybe he should insist she wore something in bed, he thought, or at least remember to put something on after he had satisfied his carnal desires.

  Sayriddin made his way out through the house, past a disdainful stare from his father’s wife, and into the street, where he turned left in the direction of the Bibi Khanum mosque. In the old market-place in front of the ruined mosque he found the kiosk already open, and several men sitting on the nearby seats reading their newspapers.

  There was no excited discussion going on, and Sayriddin’s heart sank – the government must have refused to print the manifesto. He bought a copy of Voice of the People nevertheless, found a place to sit that was as far from his fellow-readers as possible, and started thumbing through the thin pages.

  And suddenly there it was – a full page of small type. Looking up to make sure no one was watching him, he extracted his own copy of the manifesto from his jacket pocket and started comparing the two.

  They were the same. Exactly the same. He looked up to see if there were any signs of surprise among the other readers, and noticed two of them talking excitedly about something. It had to be the manifesto. This was the beginning, Sayriddin thought, and he was here to witness it. And he was a part of what was making it all possible.

  He walked back past the kiosk and up Tashkent Street towards the public phone which Nasruddin had stipulated he use for both calls. This time he intended to obey – there was every chance they were tapping the line, and he didn’t want this call traced back to the carpet shop.

  At the phone he stopped and looked around before putting the money in. There were a few people on their way to work, but little traffic as yet, and no one seemed to be watching him. He inserted the coins, dialled the number and waited.

  ‘Yes?’ the familiar voice said.

  ‘It’s me,’ Sayriddin said. ‘It’s in the newspaper. All of it. Word for word. A whole page.’

  Nasruddin hung up, leaving Sayriddin with more than a slight sense of anticlimax, and turned to tell Talib and Akbar the good news.

  Talib allowed himself one of his rare smiles. ‘If all else fails then at least we have told the people,’ he said.

  ‘It will not fail,’ Akbar said excitedly. ‘We have won. Why would they print our words if they mean to renege on the deal? They have simply surrendered, that is all. They are weaker than we thought. We should have asked for more.’

  The flight south, mostly across grey-brown desert, took little more than an hour, and it was not quite eight when the two SAS men had their first view of Samarkand’s blue domes. Once more there was a reception committee of three, and it wasn’t hard to pick out which of the men was English. Simon Kennedy, to both Brierley and Stoneham, looked like an identikit public school product, from the wave of hair dropping over one eyebrow to the boyish grin.

  The woman, Stoneham thought, looked like she had just sat down on something pointed. The other man had the slightest of ironic smiles, but otherwise looked vaguely bored.

  Which was not far from the truth. Marat’s interest in the art of dealing with hostage situations was a purely practical one, and since the only such situation available would soon be history, he would rather have been getting on with tracking down the identities of all the hostage-takers. But Nurhan had asked him to accompany her, mostly, he suspected, to avoid having to cope alone with her breast-fixated Englishman. She had told him about Kennedy’s staring, and Marat had been curious to observe the phenomenon in action. But so far Kennedy seemed to be ignoring her, lost in some reverie of his own.

  Nurhan watched the new arrivals step down from the plane with a mixture of apprehension, irritation and curiosity. They certainly didn’t look like their fellow-countryman, though exactly where the difference lay was hard to pinpoint. Maybe it was just that they had other things on their mind than sex.

  ‘Tell them we are going first to my office,’ she instructed Kennedy.

  ‘We both speak Russian,’ Brierley interjected. ‘Though not perfectly,’ he added.

  She smiled at them, and Stoneham instantly changed his mind about her. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘But it is a foreign language for me, also. So we are even.’

  She introduced herself and Marat, and led them across to a large black car. The bergens fitted into the roomy boot, and the three Englishmen shared the back seat. Nurhan drove.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ she asked as they swung on to a four-lane highway.

  ‘No,’ both replied at once.

  ‘Well, once the situation is cleared up you must see the sights. And I would like to talk with you abou
t the business we are both in, if there is time.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brierley said. It all sounded thoroughly wrapped up, he thought. Which, no doubt, he should find a cause for rejoicing. But that was like expecting firemen to wish there were never any fires – fine in theory, but anyone with expertise could hardly help wanting the chance to demonstrate it in practice.

  Through the window he noticed what looked like a field full of levelled ruins, and beyond that a sloping line of buildings, some with blue domes.

  ‘That’s the Shah-i-Zinda,’ Marat explained. ‘They are mausoleums from the time of Tamerlane.’

  Once more the male hostages were led out through the lodge to the improvised exercise yard. This was the third time they had been brought out, and the fourth would hopefully be the last. The scenery was stunning, but then the view from Colditz had probably been impressive too.

  Docherty had to admit that, as jails went, this had been a pretty luxurious one. The beds were comfortable, the food, though restricted to soup, bread and tea, had been both tasty and nutritious. A new set of clothes would have been great, but the guards always seemed prepared to bring more water. It was how an Englishman would do a hijacking, Docherty decided – politely, courteously, as if it wasn’t really happening. But then of course Nasruddin was an Englishman, and he seemed to be in charge.

  The other male hostages seemed to be bearing up well. Though the general upbeat cheerfulness couldn’t quite conceal the underlying anxiety, everyone was trying, even Ogley. The previous evening had been a long one, despite the draughts tournament. Imran Zahid had won with ease.

  This morning there had been a general reluctance to talk, as if each man was busy gathering the strength to cope with potential disappointment. Even now, all eight of them were shuffling around the space in front of the lodge in silence.