She peered at Charlie adoringly, considering for a moment just how fortunate they were. To have each other, to have this beautiful boy growing inside her, to be able to live the kind of life where they felt they could make an impact on the world.
Julie felt a palpable shift in the energy of the crowd, as if someone very important and famous was arriving. Then she saw Alisher Byko moving through the throng, surrounded by his usual coterie of assistants and bodyguards.
Julie and Byko had attended Cambridge together, where he was renowned as the flamboyant son of one of the richest men in Central Asia. But it wasn’t just Byko’s wealth and confidence that made him such a charismatic figure. He had an innate sense of his own power, a command of his surroundings, and a presence that seemed to suggest he could be a leader of men. At university, Julie had always found there to be more substance to him than others gave him credit for and they’d fallen into an unlikely romance. As an impressionable twenty-year-old she’d often felt sucked into the vortex of his captivating, larger-than-life personality but ultimately she knew their relationship couldn’t last and after eighteen tumultuous months, she’d managed, just before graduation, to gracefully extricate herself from his clutches. Now, after all of these years, she’d come to his country and they’d become erstwhile partners in a growing movement to liberate the Uzbek people from decades of darkness.
Byko’s handsome face was flushed with excitement as he approached Julie and kissed her on the cheek, then pumped Charlie’s hand, brazenly demanding, “See what you started?”
“Me?” Charlie responded implausibly.
“This is all because of your article,” Byko insisted. “I took the liberty of translating it and printing up samizdat copies. They’ve been circulating for days. Very powerful work, Charlie.”
“I’m surprised you’re here, Alisher. This could be risky for you.”
Byko smiled. “Karimov and his cronies don’t give a shit about anything but their Swiss bank accounts. The U.S. and Britain only care about basing troops here to support the war in Afghanistan. I simply had to decide whether I stood with my countrymen or not. At any rate, I want to thank you. Your story has made quite a stir here.”
“So far it hasn’t made much difference in the States, I’m afraid.”
“Just the fact that it was published in a major magazine shows that someone finally cares. Someone other than Julie, that is.” This Byko said with a flirtatious wink and Julie could feel Charlie shift on his heels, a hint of jealousy that ushered Charlie’s hand onto the small of her back. The jealousy didn’t bother her in the least. As a matter of fact, she had to admit she enjoyed it. Especially now that, in her eighth month of pregnancy, she was tipping the scales at 150 pounds, her husband’s proprietary energy was a boon to her hormonally imbalanced ego.
Someone shouted and beckoned toward Byko from a few yards away and he excused himself with a flourish.
“He still has a thing for you,” Charlie noted.
“It was a million years ago,” Julie sighed. “He’s married now, and so am I . . .” She leaned in and kissed him. “Thank God.”
A few minutes later, Charlie was snapping photographs of the crowd. As a seasoned journalist, he normally kept a certain detachment from the events he was covering, but today he was flooded with anticipation. He’d witnessed popular uprisings before, in countries even more repressed than this, but there was something in the spirit of the people here that gave him hope this could be more than just a one-time expression of pent-up fury. Today could be the beginning of something historic. And as Byko himself had said, Charlie was very much a part of what was happening here.
That idea—that he might actually be influencing and not merely reporting on events—filled him with pride and excitement. And there was no one he would rather have at his side in a moment like this than Julie. He was nearly thirty-eight now, and in all of his years of travel, he’d never met anyone quite like her. He lowered his camera and watched her handing out placards to the locals, laughing and bantering in her fluent Uzbek. She might have been raised with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she had the common touch, an ability to immediately connect with people on their own terms.
Just for fun, Charlie turned his camera on her and snapped a few candids. An old Uzbek woman was rubbing her pregnant belly. Julie threw back her head and laughed in that unbridled, carefree way that had slayed him the first time they met. It was as if her joy—her very life force—was contagious. In her presence, he could recognize and approach his best self, and in reaching for that self, he could then be worthy of her. Of course, the flip side of her unmitigated optimism and faith in humanity was a stubborn resolve that could be impenetrable, and the old woman’s hands on Julie’s belly only served to remind him of this.
He and Julie were in the midst of an ongoing argument—she wanted to stay here for the birth, he wanted to go to London where they could be sure they were getting the best medical care. To Julie, it had become almost a moral issue. Leaving here for the safety of London would be, in her words, “a callous repudiation of our solidarity with these people.” For Charlie, it was merely a question of self-preservation. It was one thing to advocate for a third world country, it was another thing to risk having his first child there.
He watched Julie accept a homemade necklace from the woman and recognized it as a traditional token of luck for expectant mothers. Julie smiled gratefully and put her hand to her heart. He noticed a tear glistening in the corner of her eye and it reminded him that her maternal instincts were kicking in. In the end, he thought those instincts might just override any of her moral or political objections and he would win the argument yet. At any rate, he still had a few weeks to convince her and he had a feeling that if today went well it might soften her up.
A growing buzz in the crowd diverted Charlie’s attention and he soon realized what was happening. Byko was getting on the statue. Charlie moved quickly toward Julie. “Is he really doing what I think he’s doing?”
“It bloody well looks like it,” she replied, eyes widening.
Charlie knew there was lingering affection between them and he’d tried not to let it bother him, but after all, there were many places in the world Julie could have gone to do her “good works” and she’d chosen to come here.
As for Byko, he was something of a conundrum to Charlie. His father had been a Soviet official and a friend of President Karimov. After the split from the Soviet Union, the elder Byko had ruthlessly amassed a fortune in the mining and energy sectors and had become a billionaire by the time he died, leaving the entire empire in his son’s hands. But the younger Byko had been cut from a different cloth. Educated at Cambridge, Westernized in almost every way, Alisher hadn’t fought the regime outwardly, but in his own quiet fashion he’d done much to improve the lot of his countrymen.
The thing was, you didn’t hold on to your billions in Uzbekistan by rocking the boat. Byko had been canny about understanding his limits, where he could press and where he couldn’t. So his mere presence at the rally was a departure from his established approach. Now it seemed as though he was about to take a public stand—an extraordinarily risky, some might say reckless step.
Sure enough, the young man who had been speaking embraced the billionaire, then jumped down into the crowd as Byko took the megaphone. For a moment, everyone went silent.
“My name,” he yelled into the bullhorn, “is Alisher Byko!”
The crowd responded with a roar. Byko was one of the best-known men in Uzbekistan, about as close to a rock star as the country had. If he was publicly putting his stamp on the nascent rebellion, then surely success had to be in the offing.
Charlie aimed his powerful telephoto at the statue of Babur, and snapped off a few photographs of the billionaire.
“Many of you know that my father was one of the richest men in this country. When he died, I inherited everything that was his. I tried to make changes, to bring fairness to my companies, to bring real elections
to the provinces where I have support, to reform the standards in my gold mines, to provide decent working conditions for all my employees. But every step of the way, our government has tried to stop me.
“Time and again, we hear promises for reform but only see more of the same. This is not the country that I want to live in. This is not the country that I want my own son to grow up in.”
The crowd erupted in applause as Byko indicated someone in the crowd. He was pointing to an attractive young woman standing on the curb, a boy of three in her arms. She wore a head scarf but otherwise was dressed in fashionable Western clothes. Charlie recognized her as Daniella, Byko’s wife.
As the applause died down, a throaty, roaring sound cut through the air.
Charlie craned his neck. Byko, too, turned to look.
A row of armored tanks rolled slowly toward the square. Each one carried a machine gun on the turret, manned by a soldier.
Charlie wheeled on Julie, his heart pounding: “You’ve got to get out of here.” Before she could stammer out an argument, he cut her off. “Don’t be stupid, Jules.” He gestured toward the nearby municipal building. “Over there. Go. Now.”
Julie was stubborn but knew enough not to contradict him when he had that tone in his voice. Still, she wasn’t leaving without a word of her own and grabbed him hard, forcing him to look into her eyes. “You don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “Now go!”
Her hand slipped from his shoulder, fingertips brushing against his, as if she wanted to clasp his hand one more time. But Charlie was already turning away, intent on what he had to do.
Julie pushed through the last few feet of the crowd and ducked into the municipal building at the edge of the square. She looked around and found herself in the corner of a dim, high-ceilinged lobby. The big space was entirely empty of people.
In the silence, she couldn’t help but notice the huge murals on the wall—muscular women in head scarves picking cotton and heroic men in overalls driving tractors. The images were a cartoonish homage to the hard work of a robust people. It was a common form of grotesque propaganda and it made Julie sick.
But it wasn’t her moral outrage that accounted for the sudden pain shooting through her abdomen. It was the baby.
She hadn’t wanted to say anything to Charlie earlier, but she’d been feeling twinges all morning, like fishhooks snagging briefly in her flesh.
And this one doubled her over.
Braxton Hicks. Early labor pains. But nothing to be concerned about. There was no way it was happening today. She was sure of that.
When the pain finally eased, she straightened up and looked out the door. Charlie was shimmying up a light pole. She realized, as he wielded his camera, that he’d climbed up there to get a better vantage point. He steadied himself and began snapping photographs of the scene below.
She felt a glow of pride. Most Western reporters in the Middle East had ignored the things that had been going on in Uzbekistan. And the ones who were in Tashkent, they were too chickenshit—an apt American expression she had learned from Charlie—to come out into the hinterlands and report on what was really going on here. Despite the distance that separated her from Charlie now, a deep sense of connection warmed her. They were going to have an extraordinary life together.
Another wave of pain swept through her. This time, she felt something wet on her leg. For a moment she couldn’t figure out what had caused the large stain on her pants. Then she realized . . . her water had just broken.
The baby was coming today. He was coming right now.
She tried moving toward the door, but doubled over in pain.
“Charlie!” she cried, hands on her knees.
And then she collapsed.
A chopper—Charlie recognized it as an Mi-24 Hind—thundered over the roof of a hotel across from the square. A man with a scoped rifle sat in the open bay of the chopper, legs dangling in the air. Charlie squeezed off several more photographs, then returned his attention to Byko. He seemed to be reveling in the tension, pointing at the oncoming troops. “Well, I see we now have the attention of our great leader, President Karimov.”
Charlie watched the approaching tanks. Several armored personnel carriers followed, filled with soldiers. A tall young officer with an enormous hat leaped from the lead vehicle to the ground and began pointing his arms, ordering men from the vehicles. The troops poured out, but they weren’t carrying riot shields or batons, as Charlie expected. They were carrying submachine guns.
Charlie felt a twinge of fear. Surely they weren’t planning—
Before he could even finish the thought, the officer shouted a command and the soldiers loaded and cocked their weapons. Charlie zoomed in tighter on one young soldier, his face grim with determination as he racked a live round into the chamber of his weapon and pointed it at the crowd.
Time seemed to slow. Could this really be happening? Without so much as a warning, they were going to fire on unarmed civilians?
The hubbub of the crowd died down as they seemed to sense what was about to happen. For a moment, there was no sound at all but the idling of the tanks.
Then the cry of the officer rang out. “Fire!”
Framed in the powerful lens of Charlie’s camera, the young soldier squinted down the sight of his weapon and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The young man’s eyes widened as though the sound of the gun had surprised him.
Charlie tried to keep his focus on this soldier, to capture in the intimacy of this poignant vignette the entirety of what was about to happen. But the cacophony of the onslaught was too much to bear and Charlie lowered his camera to take in the full scene, clinging to a brief hope that maybe the soldiers were firing rubber bullets or some other nonlethal form of crowd control.
The screams of fear and agony batted away that hope and confirmed the sickening truth.
All of the soldiers opened fire at once until the shooting became a deafening rattle of death. From Charlie’s vantage point on the lamp post, he saw pure chaos. The crowd, unsure which way to flee, facing gunfire from snipers on every side of the square, swirled and surged frantically in all directions.
Charlie knew he had maybe ten more seconds before he’d have to run for his own life. He also knew that he was the only Western journalist here and therefore had to grab as many photos as he could—something to document today’s tragic events for the rest of the world. He popped off a few shots of the frantic crowd, then zoomed in, framing a close-up of a bloody woman dragging a lifeless man, her face crazed with disbelief and horror. Next, it was a child—knocked down, disappearing in the melee. Next, an old man in a turban, blasted in the chest, falling like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.
And then he picked up Byko, pushing his way through the crush of the masses. Even through the lens, Charlie could feel Byko’s furious intensity and force of will as he desperately tried to get to his wife and son.
Charlie panned, trying to find them as well. Somehow, his eye caught a glimpse of Daniella’s steel blue scarf and he was able to lock on to her. She was huddling her son into her chest, her face twisted in fear, screaming, “Alisher! Alisher!”
Suddenly, she dropped out of Charlie’s frame.
He quickly adjusted and found her again. She was on the ground and seemed to have been folded, her torso oddly twisted, like a paper doll that had been bent at some anatomically impossible angle. Charlie detected no sign of a bullet wound, but there was no sign of life either. She simply lay motionless, drained of all animation.
Then Charlie saw the boy. Byko’s son lay underneath his mother, eyes open, mouth wide, staring at the sky.
Charlie stopped shooting, looking through the lens merely as a way to understand what was happening.
When Byko’s agonized face came into the frame, it was clear. He grabbed his wife and his son, scooping them into his arms. Now, Charlie could see blood, all over Byko’s white shirt. It was the b
lood of his family. Clutching them to his chest, Byko’s mouth opened as he roared, “Nooo!”
It was too intimate, too grotesque, too haunting for Charlie to bear. He lowered the camera in a daze, thinking of his own wife. Of his own unborn son.
He had to get out of there. Now.
He slid down the pole as the soldiers marched across the square, firing relentlessly at the crowd. They were approaching fast.
Charlie turned and saw the doorway of the municipal building where Julie had disappeared. It was fifty yards to that door, if he could navigate his way through the panicked crowd, which was now trampling each other in a frenzy to find shelter.
He shouldered his camera and bulled into the blurry mass of humanity, trying to create a path for himself. Suddenly, there was a huge push from his right, a survivors’ stampede that knocked him to the ground. Someone’s knee smacked him in the chin. A stray elbow stabbed his temple. Charlie fell to all fours, his camera dangling from his neck.
It wasn’t the soldiers who were going to get him. It was the terrified crowd, moments earlier united in their hatred of the regime now reduced by that regime to its lowest form of humanity, an every-man-for-himself battle for survival. As Charlie tried to gather himself and find a way out, he noticed a girl lying on the ground, trapped as he was.
Somehow, amid all of the chaos, their eyes locked.
“Help me!” hers seemed to say.
On his hands and knees, bumped and jostled and kicked by those fleeing past him, Charlie found his way to her.
When he lifted her into his arms, she screamed and clawed at him, her large brown eyes wide with bewilderment. She was a beautiful child of eight or nine, old enough to wear a head scarf. But the bright blue scarf—now stained with a discordant splotch of red—had slipped from her head, her long black hair spilling out. It was only then that Charlie realized she’d been shot in the chest. The child’s mouth opened and closed as though she wanted to say something, but no sound came out.
Out of Range: A Novel Page 2
