They walked to the head of the path they intended descending and checked out the ambient light. The new moon had just risen above the mountain in front of them, but the valley below remained deep in shadow. Stoneham didn’t think they needed the Passive Night Goggles, but just to be sure he donned them. The world turned greener but no clearer. He took them off again.
She smiled for no reason apparent to Stoneham, displaying white teeth in a blackened face.
‘Don’t do that too often,’ he warned her.
‘Do what?’
‘Smile. Your teeth can reflect the light,’ he explained.
‘I’ll try not to find anything amusing,’ she said drily. ‘Are you ready?’
He nodded, and she turned to start down the path. It looked no more than two hundred metres in a straight line to the bottom of the valley, but it was more like four by the winding path. By the time they were halfway down it seemed to Stoneham as if the rest of the world had been left behind: there were only the jagged rocks silhouetted against the star-strewn sky and a silence which was eerily complete. He felt his senses shifting into some sort of overdrive, and the familiar, almost glee-like intoxication with pure danger.
And even in the gloom he could see that she had a nicer bum than Rob Brierley.
He smiled to himself, saw Jane in his mind’s eye, and felt a sudden wave of sadness wash over him. It wasn’t a painful sadness though; it felt almost like an acceptance of the fact that she was gone.
They reached the bottom of the valley, where a thin swathe of dry pebbles marked the rainy season stream-bed. They could no longer see the lodge – only the aura of light which shone in the air above it. Nor could they be seen, except in the unlikely event that the terrorists had thermal-imaging equipment. Stoneham was guessing that the trick with the searchlight offered evidence that they did not.
Nurhan led off again, keeping as close to the winding stream-bed as the terrain allowed. The ground under their feet was sometimes bare rock, sometimes sandy soil with clumps of scrub-like vegetation. Visibility was often reduced by the rocks which tumbled down on either side, and which the stream-bed squeezed its twisting way between. Progress of any sort, let alone the silent progress required, was often difficult, and as they slowly climbed the valley each became more conscious of the road above and to their right, and the sentries whom they knew were watching it.
Every now and then they would stop and listen. On the first two occasions they could hear nothing but the faintest of breezes brushing against stone; on the third they heard distant voices floating down from at least fifteen metres above them. They couldn’t make out any of the words, though it seemed to Nurhan that the language was Farsi.
They continued, finding that they needed to exercise ever-greater care not to dislodge loose stones on the steepening slope. The hunting lodge was only about two hundred metres away, but still visible only as a balloon of light beyond the rim of the shelf on which it sat. The last stretch was more of a climb than a walk, but at least they could tackle it in almost total darkness. As they neared the top Nurhan had the sudden memory of stepping out from the wings and on to the lighted stage for a school ballet performance.
She moved her eyes over the edge, and was almost blinded by the light. It took several seconds to make out the front of the lodge, the steep wall of rock behind the building and the shallower slopes on either side – all bathed in the reflected glow. In the foreground the bulbous shape of the transport helicopter stood in stark silhouette.
Nurhan beckoned Stoneham forward to join her, thinking what a brilliant idea it had been to mirror the searchlight. Not perfect though: the Englishman had been right – the ground wasn’t in darkness, but with everything else so brightly lit a distant watcher would have a hard time picking out any movement across it. And there certainly didn’t seem to be any close watchers in attendance.
Stoneham had reached the same conclusions. He raised his eyebrows at Nurhan, who hesitated for only a second before nodding her agreement. He carefully dragged his body over the rim and started moving, ever so slowly on his stomach, across the open ground towards the side of the house. She followed, thinking that someone was bound to spot them, and after ten of the thirty metres wanted to ask Stoneham if he could try speeding things up a little. She couldn’t remember ever feeling more vulnerable; it was, she imagined, rather the way an ant must feel in the middle of a pavement.
But no shouts of alarm, no deadly bursts of gunfire, erupted in their direction. After what seemed hours, but was in fact slightly less than eight minutes, they reached the corner of the lodge and passed into deeper shadow. There they slowly got to their feet.
If they had only brought another four men, Nurhan thought, they could have ended this tonight. But then again, it might have been harder to get six soldiers here undetected than two. And they still didn’t know where the hostages were.
But so far it had been easy, she told herself, just as the sound of footsteps inside the lodge spun both their heads round. The side door was only a few metres away, and the footsteps seemed to be heading their way. Stoneham gestured with his head and ran swiftly towards and past the door, with Nurhan at his heels. As the door opened outwards both of them pulled the silenced automatics from their belt holsters, sucked in breath and held it.
The door closed again to reveal a man walking away, an AK47 held loosely in his right hand. He disappeared around the corner of the house, chewing a hunk of bread.
Stoneham signalled for her to stay put and padded after the man. When he reached the corner of the lodge he stopped and slowly edged an eye around it. A minute later he was back beside her, drawing a diagram in the sandy soil with the end of his knife. A rectangle marked the lodge, a cross superimposed on a circle the transport helicopter, a thumb-mark the man who had just come out. He had taken up position covering the space they had just crossed, and was effectively blocking their way home.
Maybe that was his normal post, Nurhan thought, as Stoneham erased his drawing. In which case they had been extremely lucky to get this far.
But they had, and there was no point in wasting the trip. She started off towards the back of the lodge, turning another corner to find a long, narrow gap, about two metres wide, between the rock-face and the building. About four metres down they came to a window that had been thoroughly boarded up, with adjoining wooden planks nailed into the outside frame. Only the thinnest strips of light could be seen between them.
No noise was coming from the room beyond. They waited for about three minutes, hearing nothing, and were about to give up when a woman’s voice suddenly broke the silence. It was faint, as if heard through more than one room. ‘The water’s almost gone,’ it sounded like to Stoneham.
‘This must be the toilet they’re using,’ he whispered.
‘Should we try to talk to them?’ she whispered back.
He shook his head. For one thing, they would need to almost shout to make themselves heard. For another, there was no way of being certain the hostages didn’t have terrorist company. ‘It’s too risky,’ he murmured.
She nodded, having reached much the same conclusion, and led off again down the back of the lodge, ducking to pass beneath several unbarred windows. At the far end they found another one lit and barred. Here male voices were dimly audible in two accents – American and Glaswegian. Docherty was still alive!
Stoneham gave Nurhan a thumbs up. They had got the info they most needed.
Now they had to get it home.
They slipped gingerly past the end door and approached the front corner of the lodge. Once more Stoneham put his eye round the edge of the building. The bread-eater was sitting about fifteen metres away, in a patch of shadow cast by the tour bus, his attention apparently fixed on the valley beyond. Their way in offered no way out.
They waited five minutes, and another five, hoping for some change in the situation. Taking the terrorist out with their silenced automatics would be easy enough, but the consequences of doing
so were likely to rebound on others. There had to be a better than even chance that the other terrorists would take their revenge on one or more of the hostages.
The minutes ticked by. At this rate, she thought, they would still be here when the sun came up. There was no way up the rock-face behind the lodge, and crossing the slope in front of them would place them in plain view of the watcher. And there was always the chance that one or more terrorists would emerge from the door just behind them, trapping them between guns. Nurhan felt the beads of sweat running down her back.
Suddenly a door banged. The one at the front of the lodge. Two men exchanged a few words in Farsi, and then, just as Stoneham was about to risk another look, a man crossed their line of sight, headed out on to the road, an SMG draped over his shoulder. A minute later he disappeared from sight around the first bend, and Stoneham edged forward to check out the bread-eater.
He was no longer in his original position, and Stoneham searched the shadows for him in vain. Had he heard the front door shut again as the man walked away up the road, or was that just wishful thinking?
‘I think he’s gone,’ he whispered to Nurhan. ‘And we probably won’t get a better chance.’
‘Right,’ she said. Anything was better than more waiting.
He checked the situation once more. ‘We’ll just run, OK?’
‘OK.’
The syllables were hardly out of her mouth and he was gone. She sprung into motion, following his spurt across the open space, swerving past the bus, under the Mi-8’s tail rotor, expecting any moment to feel bullets crashing into her body, or at the very least to hear cries of discovery. The Englishman vaulted over the rim of the steep slope leading down to the valley, and Nurhan followed, leaping into dark nothingness, and landing almost on top of him. They both lay there, breathing heavily, listening for any other sounds.
A door banged quietly, and then nothing. The man had come back out, Stoneham guessed. This had been their lucky night.
She made a downward gesture, and they started working their way laboriously down the slope. An hour later they were back at the main observation point, where Sergeant Abalov had witnessed their race across the front of the lodge. Hot tea was waiting for them.
‘We need some sort of diversion at the front,’ Stoneham said, examining the plan of the lodge with the help of a torch, ‘and two teams ready to knock down those side doors. Unless the guards are in with the hostages – which seems unlikely – we should have no trouble getting them all out alive.’
‘And how do we get the teams there?’ she asked.
‘Down the rock-face at the back.’
Nurhan smiled to herself. She had reached the same conclusions as the man from the famous SAS.
Nasruddin lay on the bed unable to sleep, his mind whirring. Tomorrow they would be famous, he thought. Even if Bakalev managed to censor the Uzbek papers, still the world’s press would carry The Trumpet of God into homes across the planet. There would be pictures on television, recitals of their demands, and people would begin to wonder why it was that men had to do such things for truth to be heard.
He supposed his sister and brother would read the news in their morning papers, his brother on his way to work at the Wakefield business he ran, his sister at the breakfast table after the kids had gone to school. He knew that they would not understand why, but he hoped that somewhere, deep down in their hearts, they would accept that he was following the dictates of his own.
Though sometimes it was hard to share his grief, he knew that they too had lost a mother to the flames, a father to a broken heart.
He shook off the memories, and embraced the future once more. Their demands would set the whole world talking, and Britain in particular. Islam had been abused for so long in his adopted country, but the tide was turning, had perhaps already turned.
‘“But they shall know the Truth,”’ he murmured to himself, ‘“before long they shall know it…the Trumpet shall be sounded.”’
15
The four male hostages were all woken by the rap of the hatch sliding back on the door. ‘You leave in five minutes,’ a voice said, and slid the hatch shut once more.
It was five forty-five and still dark outside. The men scrambled into sitting positions and stared at each other. Where were they going? The room they had occupied for the past sixty hours suddenly seemed more like home than it had before.
‘Better get ready,’ Docherty said, thinking it was almost amusing that they had been given five minutes’ notice. The phrase ‘gentlemen terrorists’ came to mind, like an echo of the ‘gentlemen crooks’ who had peopled the thirties thrillers he had read and loved as a boy.
The four men had time to dress, have a piss and gather together their few belongings before the door swung open to reveal the familiar armed figure gesturing them out. Docherty smiled at him and led the way along the corridor which led to the outside world. Another terrorist was momentarily silhouetted in the front doorway, but stepped aside to usher them through. The large transport helicopter they had heard the day before was perched on the flat shelf in front of the building, its rotor blades reaching out across the void beyond, a bright light directly beneath its belly. The side doors were open.
As they walked towards them a man in uniform was brought out and led off on a diagonal path towards the ill-fated tour bus. He glanced across at the hostages but said nothing.
Approaching the helicopter, Docherty noticed a definite lightening of the sky above the mountain crest. The sun would soon be up. For the moment though it was still decidedly cool, and the dark interior of the chopper at least offered shelter from the wind.
The door slammed shut behind them, and the four men sat down on the floor, backs against the inside walls, and waited fearfully for the sound of rotors starting up.
Silence continued to reign, and as the minutes went by their hopes began to rise. Then the doors swung open again, and the face of Alice Jennings appeared in the space.
‘Well, give me a hand,’ she said.
Copley and Docherty helped her aboard, their eyes hungrily seeking out their own wives as they did so. Sharon Copley collapsed into her husband’s arms with almost a sob of relief, and Isabel buried her head in Docherty’s shoulder, murmuring ‘A Dios gracias.’
‘How are you doing?’ he asked, lifting her chin with a finger and looking into her eyes.
‘OK, I guess.’
He shook his head. ‘Some tour, this.’
Stoneham and Brierley were woken by one of Nurhan’s men with a message to join her immediately at the observation point. They scrambled out of the lorry into the pre-dawn air and fumbled with the laces on their rubber-soled boots. ‘It’s probably just me she wants,’ Stoneham mused. ‘It was the recon. She spent the night trying to forget me, and found she couldn’t.’
‘No one could,’ Brierley agreed.
They made their way swiftly up the winding path, down the gully to the OP, and squeezed in alongside Sergeant Abalov and Nurhan. The first thing they noticed was the sound of the helicopter rotors turning; the second was the glow of the dawn above the mountain behind the lodge.
‘The hostages are on board,’ Nurhan told them. ‘The women were brought out about ten minutes ago; the men five minutes before that.’
‘What about the terrorists?’ Brierley began to ask her, but at that moment two things happened. First, the whirr of the rotors abruptly went up a gear, and the Mi-8 lifted itself ponderously into the air. Second, Nurhan had to take an incoming radio call from Muratov.
‘They’re on their way to Samarkand,’ she told the two SAS men as the helicopter glided past them on its way down the valley. ‘They called Muratov to demand that the sky over the city be cleared of traffic.’
‘Where in Samarkand?’ Brierley asked.
‘They didn’t say.’
In the crisis room on the second floor of the NSS HQ, Bakhtar Muratov and James Pearson-Jones were both slumped in their seats, as if KO’d by the latest mess
age from the hijackers. Marat got up, left the room and walked down the corridor to his own office. Samarkand, he murmured to himself, as if it were a word he’d never heard before. They would be here in half an hour, or even less. But where?
Think, he ordered himself. There had to be a reason for leaving their mountain fortress. Had cutting their phone contact with the outside world forced them to make the move? Was it publicity they wanted? Were they headed for one of the tourist spots?
His mind flicked through the possibilities. Being an atheist, he wasn’t too sure how Muslims felt about using holy ground for political purposes, but he couldn’t imagine them risking the destruction of mosques and madrasahs. In any case, the Registan didn’t seem a promising place to sustain a siege. Nor did the Bibi Khanum mosque. There were no suitable spaces for a landing anywhere near the Shah-i-Zinda. Which left the Ulug Bek observatory and the Gur Emir, Tamerlane’s mausoleum…
Marat recalled something Nasruddin’s cousin had said during one of their interrogation sessions, about how much Nasruddin had loved the story of the inauspicious tomb-opening in 1941. And then he remembered suggesting Tamerlane’s mausoleum himself, during the dawn conversation with Nurhan in Shakhrisabz.
He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had already gone by. There would be no time for concealing troops or anything like that, so what…?
He spun on one heel and raced out of the office, taking the wide stairway down to the ground floor three steps at a time. Still running, he headed down a corridor which led to the operations room where the surveillance equipment was stored.
‘Bugs,’ he told the officer in charge breathlessly.
‘How many do you want?’
‘Just a few. But quickly.’
The man gave him a strange look and disappeared into a maze of cabinets. The seconds ticked by.
Samarkand Hijack Page 21
