Only Docherty and Sharon Copley recognized the succeeding ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’.
‘Midnight,’ the Scot said softly, excitement in his voice. The other nine faces all looked his way, as if they were waiting for his instructions. In the yellow light each face seemed to reflect a different blend of fears, hopes and anxieties.
The saxophonist now seemed to be improvising, and for a few moments Docherty wondered if it was only an enormous coincidence. But then the player reprised the opening line of ‘Midnight Hour’, before striking out on his own once more.
‘Gonna wait till the midnight hour…’ It was no coincidence. There was a bunch of lunatics from Hereford out there.
Upstairs, all the doors in the octagonal chamber were closed, and the music was only slightly more audible. Nasruddin, sitting in one of the cushions they had brought in from the adjoining chambers of the madrasah, thought at first it might be a signal of some sort, and got to his feet to listen more closely.
Minutes went by and nothing happened, except that the musician seemed increasingly uncertain of what he was playing. It had to be a music student who lived in one of the houses behind the Gur Emir, Nasruddin decided, busy practising vaguely familiar Western tunes on his Western instrument. He probably wanted a job in one of the hotel bands, and dreamed of appearing on one of the new pop music TV shows.
He had liked such music once himself, Nasruddin thought. The Jam, the Clash, Talking Heads. He remembered getting his mother to listen to the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’. She had been outraged.
He leaned up against the enormous jade slab which marked the spot above Tamerlane’s grave in the crypt below, and looked up at the ceiling, which seemed to sparkle like faint silver stars in the dim light. This is paradise, he thought, as seen from death’s entrance door.
The other five men were also in the chamber – Shukrat and Akbar standing sentry by the north and south doors respectively, while Sabir and Farkhot slept on beds of cushions by the wall between the north and east doors. Across the chamber from them, Talib was squatting beside the top of the steps which led down to the crypt, AK47 in one hand, grenade in the other, an open Koran between his knees. Nasruddin didn’t see how Talib could read in such light, but then his cousin seemed to know most of the suras by heart in any case.
In the mobile incident room, once the plan of assault had been agreed, the evening seemed to crawl by. It had been argued by Brierley, and somewhat reluctantly conceded by Nurhan, that using the entire Anti-Terrorist Unit would be counter-productive. There were only a limited number of entrances to the mausoleum, and it would be easier to reach them in silence with five men than twenty. For much the same reason, it had been decided that, with the exception of the sector including their point of ingress, the cordon of regular troops deployed around the mausoleum complex would be given no advance information of the rescue bid. The Unit’s two sniper posts would be in constant touch with the assault party in case the need for covering fire arose, but most of those in the vicinity would only know something was happening when the first shots rang out.
The figure of five had originally been suggested by Nurhan, mainly on the grounds that the members of her unit should at least outnumber Englishmen when it came to operations in Samarkand. She got her ways as regards the number, but Marat’s insistence on being one of the five – ‘I’m head of the Tourist Protection Unit, and if this isn’t tourist protection then I don’t know what is’ – meant that only Sergeant Abalov could be included from the Unit.
The composition of the team once settled, the one woman and four men had gone over the plan twice. Once certain they knew what was expected of themselves and each other, they had driven the incident room around the other side of the complex and settled down to wait, mostly in silence, for the appointed hour to arrive. Brierley’s thoughts were only of the operation to come, but Stoneham couldn’t keep images of Jane and his unnamed son from occupying his mind. Nurhan occasionally caught Marat looking at her, and wondered whether she would risk going out with him. He was finding that daydreaming about making love to her was one of the better ways of coping without a drink.
At eleven-fifteen they started on their final preparations, and at exactly eleven-thirty they filed out of the mobile incident room and into the street. It was a clear night, with the stars dazzling in the sky above, and a yellow crescent moon only recently emerged from behind the mountains. The two SAS men were carrying Heckler & Koch MP5SD sub-machine-guns, the three Uzbeks Kalashnikov AK74s, the upgraded version of the AK47. The two MP5s had aiming point projectors fixed above the barrels, the three Soviet weapons a more primitive but equally effective torch.
The two SAS men were carrying spare magazines for the MP5s in pouches on their left hips, and one spare magazine for the holstered High Powers on their right wrists. Brierley also carried the Remington 870 shotgun, Abalov the rope ladder. All five of them were wearing body armour and communications helmets, and carrying stun grenades, CS gas grenades and gas respirators.
At eleven-forty they reached the low stone wall which had been declared inviolate by the terrorists, and halted for something like five minutes, scanning the moonlit ground in front of them with both the naked eye and nightscopes. Nothing was moving. The terrorists, as expected, were all inside the complex walls.
Brierley led the way across the wall, closely followed by Nurhan, and the five of them walked swiftly across the short, yellowed grass towards the four-metre wall which surrounded the courtyard. Stoneham got down on his haunches for Brierley to climb aboard his shoulders, then straightened himself out to lift the senior man up the wall. With his eyes only an inch or so beneath the top, Brierley took a deep breath and heaved himself up on to the top of the wall. A few bits of stonework fell down the far face and landed with a pattering sound on the stonework below.
Brierley didn’t move for a full minute, his ears straining for any sound in the courtyard below. There was none, and he slowly moved himself into a position from which he could verify with his eyes what his ears had already told him, that nothing was moving in the courtyard beneath him but the branches of the trees away to his right. Slightly to his left, some twenty metres away, the south door to the mausoleum chamber was closed.
So far so good.
He beckoned for Nurhan to join him. Stoneham did the honours once more, and Brierley helped her up on to the wall beside him. Abalov then sent one end of the ten-metre rope ladder spinning up towards them, rather like a fisherman casting his tackle. Brierley lowered half the ladder down the inner face of the wall, checked that Abalov and Stoneham were ready to take his weight, and swiftly descended to the ground. Nurhan followed him. The two of them held the ladder for Stoneham to climb up the other side, and then Marat and Abalov took the strain as he climbed down into the courtyard.
Brierley looked at his watch, and raised four fingers to show the others it was four minutes to midnight. While Marat and Abalov worked their way around to the entrances which opened off the corridors from the north and east doors, the other three squatted down in the shadows beneath the wall and put on their respirators. They looked, Stoneham thought, like Dr Who’s Cybermen.
At exactly one minute to midnight they rose together, Brierley and Nurhan heading for the east door, while Stoneham, still wishing he had a more active role, made for the side door which constituted the terrorists’ last possible escape hatch. As they walked stealthily across the courtyard the sound of loud talking, even shouting, could be heard from inside the mausoleum chamber.
Nasruddin heard it too. He had only left the octagonal chamber a few minutes before, having passed through the north door and into the adjoining administrative office in search of a pencil to copy down a particularly beautiful line from the Koran’s ‘Night Journey’ sura. He walked back through, and found everything as normal.
‘They wanted more water,’ Talib explained from his position at the top of the steps. ‘Akbar has gone down.’
Nasruddin nod
ded and checked his watch. It was midnight. He looked up suddenly, his mind racing with the words ‘Gonna wait till the midnight hour…’ That was the song.
It had been a signal.
Ten metres away, on the other side of the south door, Nurhan stood to one side, wondering what the Ancient Monuments people would say if they could see what Brierley was aiming the Remington at.
The gun boomed once, twice, and the hingeless door tottered for a second before Brierley shoved it aside. He and Nurhan flattened themselves against the edges of the frame, hurling stun and CS gas grenades through the opening as they did so. A dazzling light flashed out across the courtyard as the thunder sounded.
In the crypt the first blast of the shotgun jerked Akbar’s head around, and Docherty launched himself across the three-metre space between them, hitting the Tajik with the concentrated force of an American linebacker in full motion. The AK47 went off, scattering bullets across the ceiling, and then flew out of the terrorist’s hand as he hit the floor. Docherty landed on Akbar’s chest with a force which probably broke several ribs, and a horrible wheezing noise erupted from the man’s throat.
Nurhan and Brierley had stepped through the doorway, the siting-lights on their SMGs searching for targets. A man came into view directly across the chamber, coughing and spluttering. Two concentrated bursts slammed him against the far door.
On the wall to the right one man was halfway to his feet, another trying to bury himself in his hands. Both died instantly, their blood splattered across the onyx marble panels which lined the wall behind them.
Nurhan’s torch beam moved right, just in time to catch a door closing behind someone. Brierley’s moved left, and the lighted red dot from his aiming point projector alighted on a man’s face. He pulled the trigger just as the face dropped from sight down the steps leading to the crypt.
Docherty looked up to see Talib bumping his way down the first few steps, took in the grenade in the terrorist’s hand, the eyes that still seemed to burn in the bloody shattered face, and lunged for Akbar’s AK47. As the Scot turned, his fingers reaching for the unfamiliar trigger, Talib, his broken face a study in demented concentration, drew the pin from the grenade, and stared around in triumph. Docherty fired, ripping the man’s chest apart, and with a last loud sigh Talib crumpled forward on the steps, the hand that still held the grenade crushed beneath him.
A few seconds later it exploded, showering the crypt with a martyr’s flesh.
Nasruddin had instinctively pulled the door shut behind him as he stepped back into the passageway. It was over, he thought, and that was cause for sadness, but somehow he felt a sense of relief.
He stood in the corridor for only a second, and then calmly opened the door of the chamber opposite the administrative office. He walked across it, and waited for a moment by the door leading out into the courtyard. The only sounds he could hear were coming from the corridor he had left behind.
Nasruddin pulled back the bolts and opened the door on to the night.
A man in a helmet was silhouetted against the stars, as he had been all those years before.
Nasruddin had no weapon, but it would have made no difference if he had. His limbs were frozen in the shock of recognition, and his finger on a trigger would have needed a thousand times the time it took for Stoneham’s MP5 to blow his life away.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES
Behind Iraqi Lines
Mission to Argentina
Sniper Fire in Belfast
Desert Raiders
Embassy Siege
Guerrillas in the Jungle
Secret War in Arabia
Colombian Cocaine War
Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
Heroes of the South Atlantic
Counter-insurgency in Aden
Gambian Bluff
Bosnian Inferno
Night Fighters in France
Death on Gibraltar
Into Vietnam
For King and Country
Kashmir Rescue
Guatemala – Journey into Evil
Headhunters of Borneo
Kidnap the Emperor!
War on the Streets
Bandit Country
Days of the Dead
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Samarkand Hijack Page 24
