Out of Range

by Hank Steinberg

  for anybody who doesn’t do precisely what Karimov tells them to do.”

  Julie was no stranger to this argument. It was the same thing every liberal-minded person who knew anything about Uzbekistan said. But it didn’t exactly give Byko an excuse to blow up thousands of people. And after all of the lying and begging, obfuscating and cajoling she’d done with him, she couldn’t take it anymore. So she finally let it rip . . .

  “You think you’re the only one who’s felt pain? You think this is what Daniella would have wanted you to do? Kill thousands of innocent people? You disgrace her name, you disgrace your son’s name!”

  Byko’s eyes burned. “Listen to me!” he said.

  “No!” she cried. “I don’t want to listen to one more word from you!”

  “Listen.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I told you about my sister being tortured . . . how she came home and killed herself . . . ? What I never told you was that the CIA was at Jaslyk. CIA was leading the interrogation.”

  Julie’s eyes met Byko’s. Guys like Quinn didn’t appear in a vacuum. Guys like Quinn became who they were because the CIA manufactured them. But maybe Byko had just heard some spurious rumor and chose to believe it because it justified his insanity.

  “And MI6,” he continued, “your MI6—well, my dear, it turns out they are the ones who tipped off Karimov about the rally in Andijan six years ago.”

  “Who told you that?” She flashed a hateful look at Quinn. “Him?”

  “You don’t believe it? How do you think Karimov had so many soldiers ready?”

  Her mind was racing. And it had always needled her. How had so many soldiers and choppers and armored personnel carriers converged on Andijan so quickly? Even if they’d been tipped off by Karimov’s secret police, there was only a small military garrison in Andijan. The rest had to have come from someplace miles and miles away. And it wasn’t as if the Uzbek military was the most efficient organization in the world. . . .

  She looked at Byko and knew he could read what was going through her mind. Her own bearings were vulnerable now. But maybe if she could acknowledge his point of view, meet him halfway, it would give her some credibility to penetrate him.

  “Even if it’s true, Alisher, it doesn’t justify what you’re doing.”

  Byko had turned all the way around in his seat, his left arm gripping the headrest as though he wanted to strangle it, his eyes looking through her into his own private horror. “I saw her body,” he whispered. “I saw what they did to my beautiful little sister.”

  “Then think of her,” Julie said. “Think of what she would have wanted. Not this. Not this, Alisher.”

  For a long moment, he held her gaze. Then the tinted window rose with a soft whine and he disappeared.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Hopkins stamped in the cold to keep his feet warm. He was standing outside an abandoned farmhouse overlooking the virtually deserted A377 highway, just over the border in Tajikistan. The sun was beginning to paint the horizon, but it had done nothing yet to cut the chill.

  Two companies of SAS soldiers were now set up to interdict Alisher Byko’s convoy, which had been racing toward the border for the last seven hours. Hopkins had been an infantry officer before joining MI6, but he was making no attempt to give “helpful” tips to the SAS. They were the best in the world at what they did. All he needed to do was tell them to stop the convoy and capture Byko and that’s what they would do.

  “Eighteen minutes,” one of the SAS men said into his microphone.

  The convoy was being tracked by satellite—U.S. and UK—just to make sure no one lost them. A sortie of American F-22s lurked over the horizon in case close air support was required. Hopkins was monitoring the convoy on his laptop.

  At the window, a half-dozen snipers were busy stuffing bits of foliage into the mottled fabric of their ghillie suits while a platoon of paras jogged toward the road. A large tractor-trailer was pulled round on the shoulder of the A377. In another two and a half minutes, it would back out onto the road, mimicking a jacknifed truck and cutting off the highway.

  Byko’s convoy would slow at the sight of it and the SAS lads would pounce.

  Gordon Bryce was monitoring the op from the command center at the Puzzle Palace, adding his two cents by radio when necessary. The last time he had given instructions, though, the SAS commander, a Major Rowbotham, had gotten unnecessarily testy, something to the effect that he ought to “bloody well piss off until the professionals have bloody well done their job.”

  Just as well—he had better things to do than hand-hold some gun-toting prima donna in Uzbekistan. He’d been on the phone almost constantly since two o’clock in the morning, riding point on the dissemination of information to the various parties who were threatened by Byko’s plan. In fact, he’d had a rather long conversation with the PM himself, briefing him again on the specifics of the threat.

  The information that had come from Charlie Davis had yielded some serious results—arrests in Copenhagen, Vienna, Sydney and London (including a raid on a warehouse in the East End where they’d recovered some of the uranium), but all of the captured men seemed to be at the lower levels of their respective terrorist organizations. By all accounts, the bombers were still out there and the intelligence agencies were no closer to finding them. The one piece of intel that gave everyone hope was this: under interrogation, each captured man had insisted the same thing. That everyone in their organizations was still in the dark about the targets and that Byko was intending to wait until the last possible moment to disseminate those targets to the bombers. Which meant that capturing Byko had the utmost importance. If they could get to Byko before the targets were given out, it seemed clear that there was no backup plan, that the cells would be standing by with no instructions and that the bombings would in fact not occur.

  “Put the SO feed on,” Bryce said to Wilson, a doughy-faced comms tech.

  The young tech flipped some buttons, toggling over to one of the dozens of tiny screens on the wall, and the satellite view of Uzbekistan disappeared.

  Now the main screen showed hundreds of uniformed police, tactical officers and plainclothes SO detectives gathered in a warehouse for a briefing. At a lectern stood London’s Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Craille, along with the commander of Special Operations and various other police functionaries. The briefing had begun a few minutes earlier and the police commissioner, a long-faced man with white hair, was in midsentence: “ . . . suffice it to say that we are to be on the highest alert. All leave is canceled and every available officer will be assigned to protect all the usual sensitive targets. Due to the lack of specificity of our intelligence we must prepare for the possibility that the attack could come from anywhere at any time.”

  The head of SO, Assistant Commissioner Cressida Bevis, leaned forward and whispered something in Sir Ian’s ear.

  “Thank you, AC Bevis. As to the issue of the precise nature of the threat—we anticipate dirty bombs packed with high levels of radioactive materials which are capable of inflicting substantial human damage—not to mention untold property damage.”

  Sir Ian surveyed his audience gravely.

  “I must stress that this is more than just a threat. We have hard intelligence that this is going to happen today. It’s only a question now of precisely where and when. I trust that each and every officer in this room understands the need for absolute and utter secrecy. If word gets out, the panic will cause untold damage to this great city. Now I can answer a few brief questions before—”

  Bryce pulled a finger across his throat, signaling the comms officer to cut the feed from the police briefing. He was satisfied to know that wheels were in motion. According to the latest reports, similar briefings were going out to police in each of the targeted cities. He could only imagine how shocked—and frustrated—the police in those cities must feel.

  So now it was
all down to the SAS operation to seize Byko.

  “How much time?” he demanded.

  “They should have a visual in the field within thirty seconds, sir.”

  “Put it on.”

  The satellite image appeared: three vehicles blasting down the A377 at high speed. The tech had set the satellite on infrared so that they were seeing heat, not visual spectrum. He could make out three teams of SAS, white splotches against the green-tinged ground.

  Bryce hunched over the microphone and shouted, “Prepare for R and S. We’ll go on my command.”

  Stupid bloody prat,” one of the SAS men muttered after Bryce’s command came over the radio.

  Hopkins tried unsuccessfully to stifle a smile. There had been a time when units like the SAS were entirely independent of control from headquarters. But with the advent of modern comms, soldiers often had to do their work with London peering over their shoulders, second-guessing their every move. They made no bones about how much they hated it.

  “On my mark,” Major Rowbotham said, ignoring Bryce.

  Hopkins could hear engines in the distance now—Byko’s convoy—and he trained his field glasses on the hill about a half mile away. The location had been carefully chosen so that the convoy would come over the ridge and have very little time to react to the semitrailer “jackknifed” on the road.

  The truck had been backed out about a minute earlier, the hood lifted, and some sort of small incendiary device ignited inside the engine compartment so that it appeared to be suffering from a major engine malfunction.

  Any vehicle Byko traveled in could be presumed to be fully hardened—steel-plated doors and roof, inch-thick polycarbonate-reinforced windows, Kevlar paneling—but depleted uranium rounds would cut through hardened steel plate as though it were cheesecloth and there were three sniper teams running .50-caliber Barrett rifles on the hillside overlooking the road, prepared for the ambush.

  Hopkins shifted focus slightly on his binoculars as the first of the three SUVs crested into view. Almost immediately, all three were braking hard, their tires squealing on the road.

  Rowbotham spoke into the radio. “Go.”

  Three loud gunshots split the air, echoing back and forth in the narrow valley. The simultaneous shots from the sharpshooters were perfectly timed. The .50s slammed into the SUVs’ engines, smashing through the armor plate and into the engine blocks, blasting a shower of wrecked pistons and timing gears out the bottoms of all three vehicles. With that, the vehicles rolled silently to a stop, steam pouring out of their engine compartments.

  Again, the .50s banged, sending another set of rounds downrange—this time through the windshield of each car. The intent was not to kill anyone inside, but to send the clear message that any resistance would result in the massacre of everyone in the cars.

  At the sound of the Barretts, two dozen men rose out of the ground as though spawned from dragon’s teeth. They had been there all along, of course—but so effectively camouflaged that it had been nearly impossible to spot them.

  Less than half a beat later, a second fire team burst out from around the truck.

  Hopkins imagined how terrifying it must have been for the occupants of Byko’s convoy. One second, they were bombing down the road, only a few miles from their destination. The next second, they were stopped dead, holes punched in their “bulletproof” cars, sixty automatic weapons trained directly on them. It was a classic, perfectly executed L-shaped ambush. Hopkins felt a burst of pride in the men. This op had been dumped in their laps at the last second and they’d executed everything perfectly, leaving Byko only two choices.

  Surrender or die.

  But thus far no doors had opened, no return shots fired, no one had appeared at all. Rowbotham nodded to Hopkins and they began hiking down the hillside toward the three motionless vehicles. Hopkins would have been well within his brief to have waited at the top of the hill and let the SAS handle all the risky bits. After all, there was still a possibility of gunplay.

  But he wanted to be there to see Byko’s face.

  Thirty feet from the lead car, Hopkins stopped, crossed his arms and shouted into a bullhorn, “Right then, Byko. Out you come!”

  For a moment nothing happened. Then the rear door of the second SUV opened slowly.

  Sixty rifles swiveled toward the door.

  A young woman stepped tentatively out of the car. With her brown hair, blue jeans and white shirt, she looked vaguely like Julie Davis. But this girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

  Another door opened and a tall, dark-haired man in a white linen suit stepped out of the car, hands extended, palms out to show he wasn’t armed. He stood slowly, buttoned his beautiful suit, smoothed the front of his coat, took off his sunglasses and smiled.

  “You’ve got me,” he said in Russian.

  “Christ,” muttered Hopkins.

  The SAS commander looked at him curiously, brow furrowed.

  “That’s not Byko,” Hopkins said. “It’s a double.”

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Charlie felt an odd mix of anxiety, sadness and anticipation as he and Salim drove through the outskirts of Andijan. It was the capital city of the province, but it was a drab, ugly town. The streets were poorly paved, the storefronts were barren, and at this early hour, the sidewalks were nearly deserted. But when they neared the city center, he saw many more people, and by the time they got within half a mile of the Square, the streets were packed and vehicular traffic could no longer move.

  Charlie spotted a vacant lot on his right and pulled into it. They’d have to walk from here. He grabbed his Sig Sauer, made sure he had a dozen extra cartridges in his pocket and got out of the car. His cohort did the same, but the instant Salim shut his door and started limping toward the town, Charlie saw how injured he really was.

  “What’s going on with your leg?” Charlie asked.

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with—”

  “Salim.”

  Charlie bent down and Salim reluctantly allowed him to roll up his pants. The edges of the gaping wound were angry and red, with a rim of white showing along the margins of the cut. A clear liquid weeped out the bottom, crusting along the top of his sock.

  “This is infected,” Charlie told him. “You need to get to a hospital.”

  “Not when you still need my help.”

  Charlie looked at the kid—his bravery, his nobility, his largesse.

  “You’re not going to be any help to me if you can barely walk,” Charlie told him. “There used to be a clinic just up the road. I’m going to leave you there.”

  Salim tried to fight him, but the instant he put any pressure on the leg he nearly collapsed.

  Charlie put his arm around him, absorbing the kid’s weight, and helped him trudge through the growing crowd. They walked a half-dozen blocks in silence, each of them taking in the scene around them. The mood today was far different than it had been the last time Charlie was here. The placards themselves told the story. Six years ago they were adorned with hopeful slogans. Today, many had photos of friends and family members who’d been killed in the Square.

  When they arrived at the clinic, Charlie was grateful to see that it was still there and that it was open today.

  “You don’t need to take me inside,” Salim said. “I am slowing you down as it is.”

  Charlie took out some money and offered it to Salim.

  “I don’t want that,” Salim snapped, looking insulted.

  “It’s for the doctor,” Charlie said. “Make sure they give you the proper medicine. An antibiotic.”

  Salim reluctantly took the cash and crumpled it into his pocket, then looked at Charlie incredulously. “How are you going to find your wife?”

  “I don’t know,” Charli
e said. “But I know Byko will be here.”

  “I wish you luck.”

  Charlie nodded. “I can’t even begin to thank you.”

  “I am the one who should be thanking you,” Salim said. “For making us believe that we must fight. That change was possible.”

  “I’m not sure I was right,” Charlie said.

  “You were,” Salim assured him. “Even if it hasn’t happened yet.”

  Charlie felt himself well up with tears. This kid—this naive, yet worldly kid—reminded him so much of himself at that age.

  “You better go,” Salim said.

  Charlie touched his heart with his palm. “Assalaam aleikum.”

  “Aleikum salaam.”

  And with that, Salim smiled, limped toward the clinic and disappeared inside.

  Charlie watched the closing door for an extra moment, then turned back toward the Square. Now that he was finally here, in Andijan, he felt in his bones that Hopkins was wrong, that Byko and Julie would be here, too. Somewhere.

  Julie was trussed up in the rear of Byko’s vast presidential suite. The hotel was a holdover from the final days of the Soviet Union—a Stalinist fun house mirror version of a Western luxury hotel. Fancy woodwork, a grand piano, oil paintings on the walls, Belgian chocolates on the pillows. And yet when you homed in on the details, there was something weird and cheap about it all—Bakelite handles on the furniture, worn patches in the silk carpet, hideous pink and green reimaginings of 1970s-era Pop Art.

  She glanced surreptitiously at Quinn, who was watching her like a hawk. Then her eyes fell on Byko, who was standing on the balcony overlooking the gathering crowd in Babur Square. Two more bodyguards stood at the doorway outside the room.