Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  Or . . .

  Charlie suddenly had a horrible thought.

  “Charlie? Charlie, you still there?”

  “Back up a sec. Byko’s takedown—you said the Uzbeks screwed it up. What exactly happened there?”

  “The story I heard was that Byko was at the Café Odillion near the Kukcha Mosque—”

  “I know the place. It’s been around since the Soviet era.”

  “Right. So anyway, he’s sitting there in broad daylight, apparently with Julie. Next thing you know, two or three companies from the Twenty-seventh are converging on the place. As you can imagine, it’s total chaos. They’re landing choppers in the street, throwing up checkpoints, sticking guns in everybody’s faces, stopping traffic. Everybody’s freaking out thinking they’re about to get scooped up and tossed in jail. Next thing you know there’s a ring of two hundred guys with AKs pointed at the Odillion. They smash the door down, rough up the maître d’, chuck everybody on the floor . . . And Byko’s gone.”

  “But that café is at the end of a little cul-de-sac just off the Mannon Uygur. There’s a street in front and an alley in the back. Two ways in, two ways out. They could have surrounded that place with twenty secret policemen and a couple of German shepherds. Why would they send two hundred paratroopers in helicopters?”

  “Typical totalitarian overkill.”

  But Charlie had more information than Garman. And he saw the whole picture with crystalline clarity. It was all a show. Karimov wanted Byko to get away. It sounded absurd at first—Byko might be the one guy in the entire country Karimov was afraid of—but Karimov was and always had been a master chess player. Over the years, the West’s willingness to overlook Uzbek intransigence, inefficiency and graft had worn thin, and as the war on terror wound down, Karimov’s usefulness was inevitably waning. But if Byko could pull off his attack (and Karimov could claim that he’d done everything he could to try to stop it), then suddenly Uzbekistan would be catapulted to the front lines of the war on terror redux. Imagine the billions of dollars Karimov could squeeze out of the West in order to “clean up” the extremists within his borders. What a gorgeous piece of geopolitical jujitsu. Not only would Byko be completely marginalized as a player on the Uzbek stage, not only would Karimov practically get buried in Western money and military assistance, but he’d have the perfect excuse to clean house and wipe out any stray enemies whom he hadn’t squashed in the past few years.

  If all of that was true, and Charlie felt quite certain it was, then Karimov would come up with some way to cock-block the entire MI6 operation.

  “They’re never going to make it,” Charlie said, half to himself.

  “What’s that?”

  “Julie. She’s got maybe another couple of hours before she’s outlived her usefulness to Byko. SAS is never going to get there in time. If at all.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. Anyway, there’s not much you can do about it.”

  “I’m going to have to go back there and bust her out.”

  “All due respect, Charlie—”

  “Give me some guys who can handle themselves. I’ve got eight grand and change as a down payment. Plus, Julie’s family’s got money—”

  “Hold on a second. Okay? Just hold on.”

  Charlie could feel the rationalizations coming.

  “This isn’t about money, Charlie. There are practical issues here. I’m a professional. You can’t just grab a couple of yahoos with guns and charge into fortified locations full of armed men. These things take meticulous preparation. Floor plans, maps, transpo, special weapons, explosives, guys with very particular skills . . .”

  “It isn’t just Julie!” Charlie blurted out. He’d been trying to heed Hopkins’s warnings about disclosure, but now he had to appeal to Garman’s morality. And to hope that he still had some whiff of humanity left in him. “The reason MI6 wants Byko isn’t to stop a coup. It’s because Byko is the mastermind of a plot to kill hundreds of thousands of people. And not here. I’m talking New York, London, Paris . . .”

  This last part Charlie was making up, but given what Hopkins had told him, he thought those cities were a pretty safe bet.

  “I don’t know all the details,” Charlie said. “But it’s happening tomorrow, and trust me, it’ll make 9/11 look like a walk in the park.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Garman muttered.

  “Julie was working for MI6. They recruited her to draw Byko out. She went into it eyes open, knowing what was at risk. Because she had to do something to try to stop it.”

  This was Charlie’s last, best hope. Hooking into Garman’s sense of chivalry and shame. After all, how could a man like Garman stand on the sidelines and do nothing when untrained Julie Davis had thrown her pound of flesh into the game? And as Charlie recounted what Julie had done, said it aloud for the first time since uncovering all of her lies, he began to understand her choice. To feel for her. To admire her.

  Charlie thought for certain he had gotten through to the mercenary because when he’d finished, Garman was silent. So he pressed on. “Byko and Julie are at the same place. We go in there to get her, we get him, too. You put the screws on him, we save the world.”

  “Listen, Charlie.” Garman sounded anguished. “My wife’s Uzbek. My kids are Uzbek. This is my home now. You’re asking me to put my family on the chopping block for what sounds like a serious no-win proposition. Truly, I wish I could help you. But it’s just too little too late at this point . . . I gotta go, Charlie. I’m sorry.”

  And the line went dead.

  Charlie set the phone down slowly. Just ten minutes ago, it had seemed like the cavalry was cresting the hill and everything was going to be okay.

  But he saw now that it was nothing but a mirage.

  Everything was on him. As it had been from the start.

  PART III

  DESTINY

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  As Byko’s Escalade sped through the dark tunnel twenty feet below the surface of the ground, his young communications specialist quickly connected his gear to the onboard cameras and monitors that could be viewed from the rear of the vehicle.

  Within a matter of minutes, the display was live.

  Lipstick cameras had been hung at the various target locations—covertly taped onto telephone poles, set into holes drilled out of mortar joints or wedged beneath flowerpots. The young tech wordlessly handed the remote control to Byko then seated himself on a small fold-out chair built into one of the car doors.

  Byko clicked from view to view to view. There was Hanover. There was London. There was Minneapolis. There was New York.

  He smiled as the people on each screen scuttled around, full of the importance of their days, rushing from here to there on some little errand or other—pushing a mail cart, delivering flowers, walking to a deposition, chastising subordinates for some minor oversight—unaware that if they were in this same place tomorrow, their lives would be ended.

  And Byko saw no sign of surveillance teams posted anywhere, no collections of heavily armed men with German shepherds, no unusual blast barricades or traffic barriers. Everything was still looking good.

  “Are you ready, sir?”

  Byko glanced at the young tech. “Not quite.” He wanted to take in the city scenes a bit more.

  The tiny cameras transmitted amazingly clear and vivid pictures. Here was a lovely young woman, her breasts straining at her thin blouse; there a self-important-looking man with a briefcase and a tailored suit; here a woman limping along on a bad leg, stopping to massage her swollen ankle; there a young man who looked as though he might be rushing to make his first day of work.

  One might be tempted to pity them . . . if one didn’t understand that their destruction would, in the end, lead to a world that was not so full of pain and ugliness and degradation.

  “All right then,” Byko said, nodding to the technician.

  The young man clicked away feverishly on his laptop, arranging for the transmissions.
>
  The connection between Byko and the people he was about to speak to was known as a discontinuous link—a high-tech version of the trick used in old kidnapper movies where two telephones were duct-taped together in a safe house so that the phone company couldn’t trace the call. Only, in this case, instead of duct tape, they’d used a specially designed computer in a safe house somewhere in Bangladesh. Or maybe it was in Karachi. Or perhaps Lithuania. There were twenty-three safe houses around the world, each used only once, randomly chosen by computer, each wired to be destroyed as soon as the phone call was completed.

  “Start with London?” the techs asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Byko replied.

  The tech typed a few commands into his laptop. Then Rasul, the leader of the London cell, appeared on the screen attached to the driver’s seat back.

  Byko greeted him calmly then asked, “Is everything arranged?”

  “It is.” Rasul swallowed nervously. “But what about Samarkand? I heard you were almost captured just four days ago. I am very concerned.”

  Byko laughed pleasantly and waved away Rasul’s worries. “Everything isn’t what it appears to be. I was never in danger. Not for a minute.”

  Rasul frowned. “Are you saying—”

  “Let’s not get distracted. Nothing has changed. The operation is still entirely on track.”

  “But what about the targets? If they know where you are, they might know where we are.”

  “You are ahead of yourself, my friend. Do you even know the targets yet?”

  “I assume someone on the ground does, sir. And it—”

  Byko smiled condescendingly. “Only I know the targets. In just a few hours, you will know them, too. But not until the time is right.”

  “But we won’t have enough time to prepare if you still want to do this tomorrow.”

  Byko gave Rasul a long, hard look, then leaned forward and softened his voice. “We are on the verge of something magnificent. You are on the verge of something magnificent. Your courage and resolve have never failed you. They will not fail you now. Have faith, my brother. Tomorrow we shall prevail.”

  Byko thumbed the remote. The face of Idris, his man in New York, appeared. Byko took one look at him and knew he’d be facing the same withering of will.

  It took Byko nearly the entire drive through the tunnel to talk his men down from their various psychological ledges. By the time he was finished, his stomach was churning and he felt fidgety, as if bugs were crawling under his skin—the sensation signaling that he was on the verge of losing control over himself.

  Why was it so hard to find decent men?

  He did a line of coke off the back of his hand. Better now.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  This was where it had all started—the village of Radgovir. It was here that Charlie had seen the mutilated body of Palonchi Ursalov’s boy, it was here that Charlie had written the story which catapulted the destiny of the Uzbek people toward Andijan.

  Charlie’s initial instinct had been to try to recruit fighters from one of the villages where Julie had worked six years ago. But those villages were all too far from the Fergana Valley to do him any good in the short span of time that he had. So he’d surveyed his map, looking for a village where the people might remember him. As it turned out, Ragdovir was only eleven kilometers from that dumpy café. And it was a place where they would surely never forget him.

  Crowded into the mayor’s living room was a knot of three dozen men. Hollow cheeked, traditionally dressed in the long shirt dresses of the region, beards down to the middle of their chests, they stared soberly at Charlie, faces blank, bodies unmoving. The room was dark, lit only by kerosene lamps and the light from one tiny window. It smelled of unwashed bodies, cumin and smoke.

  On the drive, winding up the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains, Charlie had rehearsed what he would say over and over again. But now, standing before them, seeing some of their eyes, filled as they were with judgment and suspicion, Charlie realized there were fences to mend before he could even contemplate asking for their assistance.

  He would have preferred to speak to them in their native Uzbek

  but for something as delicate as this he had to go with his superior Russian.

  “Many of you remember, I came here six years ago because I wanted to help you. And I made promises that we could do something together to change your country.” He scanned the room and cleared his throat. “I’m sure some of you feel I left before completing the job, that I didn’t finish what I came here to do. Some of you may not know that I was shot that day in Andijan and I felt I had no choice but to return to my own country. But there has not been a single day that has passed in the last six years when I haven’t thought about you people and ached for your suffering.” Charlie paused and surveyed the room.

  Just then, a young man slipped into the back. At first, Charlie didn’t recognize him in the gloomy half darkness, but then he saw his milky left eye: it was Salim. He was nineteen or twenty now, the same age his older brother had been when he was murdered.

  Charlie nodded to him, then continued. “My wife never wanted to leave here. If it had been up to her, she would have stayed. Some of you have heard of the work she did in villages much like this one. Because she loves this country and wanted it to become a better place. Last week, she came back here and risked her life to stop a man who will only make things harder for everyone in this country.”

  He tried to make eye contact with the men in the room. “I need your help now to save her. But I’m not coming here with my hand out. I will pay. I will pay five hundred dollars to any man who comes with me.”

  A soft rustle spread across the room. Heads turned. Voices murmured. To most of these men, five hundred dollars was more than a year’s income.

  “And what do you need then?” asked one of the elders.

  “My wife was being held at a compound just south of here. If she’s still there, she’ll be guarded by professionals. But if—”

  “What is this compound? Whose compound is it?” This was a toughed-eyed clan chief named Khalil.

  “It belongs to Alisher Byko,” Charlie said.

  At the mention of Byko’s name several men got up and headed for the door.

  Charlie plowed on. “I understand that Byko is a powerful man, but we will have the advantage of surprise. And he’ll have no way to track any of you back to this town.”

  The murmurs became derisive and the men filtered out of the room en masse.

  “Wait a minute!” Charlie barked at them. “Just wait.” There was an urgency in his voice that stopped them. “There’s something else,” he said. “There is more at stake here than just my wife. Far more at stake.” He surveyed the men’s faces. “I am not supposed to tell you this, to tell anyone this . . .” He could feel everyone in the room tense. “Alisher Byko is planning a large-scale terrorist attack against the United States and Europe. If he succeeds, not only will hundreds of thousands of people be killed, but you and the rest of your people will pay the price for it. You can only imagine what President Karimov will do once he has an excuse like that to clamp down on ‘extremists’ in this region. That is why Byko remains at large. Because Karimov wants him to get away with it. Karimov can’t wait to have another reason to take away more of your freedoms . . .”

  Charlie felt sure this time that he had them. “So I’m asking you now, come with me. Together we will find Byko and bring him to justice. And we will prove to the world that the people of this region are a proud people, a worthy people, a noble people. This is what I was hoping to do when I was here six years ago, but now there is really a chance. To do something for the world and something for yourselves. Please. Come with me.”

  For a long moment, no one spoke. Charlie could see that many of the men were moved. But then Khalil spoke.

  “We have no reason to believe this man. And even if what he says is true, Alisher Byko has his own private army. The women of this village
will all end up widows, the children orphans. What he wants . . . is simply not possible. Not for any amount of money.” He looked at the men and issued what might as well have been a command. “Now we go.”

  Charlie’s heart sank as one by one the men headed out and disappeared into the village square. Khalil waited by the door, apparently making sure that no one was fool enough to disobey him. Only when the exodus was nearly complete did Khalil notice that the one-eyed teenager was still here.

  “Salim!” Khalil called out sternly. He didn’t have to say anything more. The kid rose reluctantly and dragged himself toward the exit. But there were four others who did remain.

  “They’re grown men,” Charlie insisted. “They can do as they please.”

  Khalil looked them over for a long moment, as if deciding which tack he would take, then spit on the ground and warned Charlie, “If these four never come back, we will all be better off.” And with that, Khalil took his leave.

  Charlie turned to face the men who’d stayed. They were thin, wiry and disreputable looking with scraggly beards and torn clothes. Clearly the dregs of the town. But they were armed with battered AK-47s and at this point Charlie knew beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “All right then,” he said and started counting out the money.

  “Not five hundred,” one of them said in Russian. “Five thousand.”

  Charlie looked up. The man, apparently the de facto leader, smiled without mirth, revealing all three of the teeth that were left in his mouth. “Apiece.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Not possible.”

  “Is possible,” said the man. “You want your wife, you want stop these killings . . . is very possible.”

  A long session of bargaining commenced. Tempers flared, threats were issued, automatic weapons were waved, and once the four men even made a feint toward the door. But Charlie had spent enough time in Uzbekistan to understand that the men had to go through this exercise, to make sure Charlie had left no money on the table.