Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  As usual, the Copleys were the last to arrive. Sharon had changed into a green backless dress, but Mike was still wearing the long shorts and baseball hat which made him look like an American in search of a barbecue. With his designer stubble head, goatee beard, stud earrings and permanently attached camera, he had not immediately endeared himself to Docherty, but here too first impressions had proved a worthless guide. The builder might seem like an English yobbo who had strayed abroad by accident, but he had a smile and a kind word for everyone, and of all the party he was the most at ease when it came to talking with the locals, be they wizened women or street urchins. He had a wide-eyed approach to the world which was not that common among men in their late thirties. And he was funny too.

  For most of the time his wife seemed content to exist in his shadow. Isabel had talked with her about their respective children, and thought her nice enough, but Sharon Copley, unlike her husband, had rarely volunteered any opinions in Docherty’s hearing. The only thing he knew for certain about her was that she had brought three suitcases on the trip, which seemed more than a trifle excessive.

  After announcing an hour’s break for lunch, Nasruddin Salih had slipped back out of the hotel, turned left outside the doors and walked swiftly up the narrow street towards the roundabout which marked the northern end of Maxim Gorky Boulevard. A couple of hundred metres down the wide avenue, in the twenty-metre-wide strip of park which ran between its two lanes, he reached the bank of four public telephones.

  The two at either end were in use, one by a blonde Russian woman in jeans and T-shirt, the other by an Uzbek man in a white shirt and a tyubeteyka embroidered skullcap. In the adjoining children’s play area two Tajik children were contesting possession of a ball with their volume controls set on maximum.

  Nasruddin walked a few more metres past the telephones and sat down on a convenient bench to wait. He was sweating profusely, he realized, and maybe not just from the heat. Still, it was hot, and more than once that morning he had envied Mike Copley his ridiculous shorts.

  The Uzbek had finished his call. Nasruddin got up and walked swiftly across to the available phone. The Russian woman was telling someone about an experience the night before, alternating breathless revelations with peals of laughter. These people had no sense of shame, Nasruddin thought.

  He dialled the first number.

  Talib answered almost instantly. ‘Yes?’ the Uzbek asked.

  ‘There are no problems,’ Nasruddin told him.

  ‘God be praised,’ Talib said, and hung up.

  Nasruddin heard footsteps behind him, and turned, slower than his nerves wished. It was only the Tajik boy’s father, come to collect their ball, which had rolled to within a few feet of the telephones. Nasruddin smiled at him, waited until the man had retrieved the ball, and then turned back to dial the other number. The Russian woman was now facing in his direction, nipples pressing against the tight T-shirt, still absorbed in her conversation.

  He dialled and turned away from her. This time the phone rang several times before it was picked up, each ring heightening Nasruddin’s nervousness.

  ‘Sayriddin?’ he asked, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice.

  ‘Assalamu alaikam, Nasruddin…’

  ‘Yes, yes. You are ready? You know what to do?’ Though if he didn’t by this time, then God would surely abandon them…

  ‘Of course. I deliver the message this evening, one hour after I hear from Talib. On Thursday morning I check Voice of the People. If there is nothing there I try again the next day. When I see it, then I call you at the number you gave me.’

  ‘Good. God be with you.’

  ‘And you, brother.’

  Nasruddin hung up, and noticed that the Russian woman had gone. In her place was a young Uzbek, no more than seventeen by the look of him. He was wearing a sharp suit with three pens prominent in the top pocket. It sounded as if he was trying to sell someone a second-hand tractor.

  Nasruddin looked at his watch. It was still only ten to one – time to get back to the hotel and have some lunch. But he didn’t feel hungry. Nor did he fancy small talk with the members of the party.

  He sat down again on the bench, and watched the world go by. The uneasy blend of Asian and European which was Samarkand still felt nothing like home to him, even though one side of his family had roots in the town which went back almost a century. A great-great-grandfather had originally come as a trader, encouraged by the bloody peace the English had imposed on Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century. Nasruddin’s side of the family had come to England instead, much later, in the mid 1950s. He himself had been born in Bradford in 1966, heard about his relatives in far-off Samarkand as a young adolescent, and had determined even then to visit them if ever the chance arose.

  And here he was.

  Two Uzbek women were walking towards him, both clothed head to foot in the Muslim paranca, eyes glinting behind the horsehair mesh which covered their faces. There was something so graceful about them, something so beautiful. Nasruddin turned his eyes away, and found himself remembering the pictures in Playboy which he and the others had studied so intently in the toilets at school. He watched the two women walking away, their bodies swaying in the loose black garments. When English friends had argued with him about such things he had never felt certain in his heart of the rightness of his views. But at this moment he did.

  Not that it mattered. He had always been certain that the other way, the Western way, the obsession with sex, could never work. It had brought only grief in its wake – broken families, prostitution, rape, sexual abuse, AIDS…the list was endless. Whatever God expected of humanity, it was not that. In the words of one of his favourite songs as a teenager, that was the road to nowhere.

  And whatever befell him and the others over the next few days, he had no doubt that they were on the right road.

  He made his way slowly back to the hotel, arriving in time to supervise the boarding of the tour bus for the two-hour ride to Shakhrisabz. He watched with amusement as they all claimed the same places they had occupied that morning and the previous afternoon, and idly wondered what would happen to anyone daring enough to claim someone else’s.

  Now that the dice were cast he felt, somewhat to his surprise and much to his relief, rather less nervous than he had.

  Docherty also registered the guide’s change of mood, but let it slip from his mind as the views unfolding through the bus window claimed more and more of his attention. They were soon out of Samarkand, driving down a straight, metalled road between cherry orchards. Groups of men were gathered in the shade, often seated on the bed-like platforms called kravats.

  ‘Do you think they’re waiting for the cherries to ripen?’ Docherty asked Isabel.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘The women probably do all the picking.’

  ‘Aye, but someone has to supervise them,’ Docherty argued.

  She pinched the back of his neck.

  The orchards soon disappeared, giving way to parched fields of grain. As the road slowly rose towards the mountains they could see the valley of the Zerafshan behind them, a receding strip of vegetation running from east to west in a yellow-brown sea, the domes of Samarkand like blue map pins in the green swathe.

  ‘What do you know about Shakhrisabz?’ Isabel asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Docherty said. ‘It was Tamerlane’s home town – that’s about all.’

  ‘There’s the ruins of his palace,’ Mike Copley volunteered, open guide book in his lap. ‘It says the only thing left is part of the entrance arch, but that that’s awesome enough.’

  ‘The son of a bitch didn’t do anything by halves,’ Sam Jennings commented. ‘I was reading in this’ – he held up the paperback biography – ‘about his war with the Ottoman Turks. Do you want to hear the story?’ he asked, with the boyish enthusiasm which seemed to make light of his years.

  ‘Go on, educate us,’ Copley told him.

  ‘Well, the Ottoman Turks’ le
ader Bayazid was just about to take Constantinople when a messenger from Tamerlane arrives on horseback. The message, basically, says that Tamerlane is the ruler of the world, and he wants Bayazid to recognize the fact. Bayazid has heard of Tamerlane, but thinks he’s just another upstart warlord. His guys, on the other hand, are the military flavour of the month. The whole of Europe’s wetting itself in anticipation, so he can hardly believe some desert bandit’s going to give him any trouble. He sends back a message telling Tamerlane to go procreate himself.

  ‘A few weeks later the news arrives that Tamerlane’s army is halfway across Turkey. Bayazid’s cheesed, but realizes he has to take time out to deal with the upstart, and he leads his two hundred thousand crack troops across Anatolia to meet Tamerlane. When the armies are a few miles apart the Turks get themselves in formation and wait. At which point Tamerlane’s army hits them from every conceivable side. A few hours later Bayazid is on his way to Samarkand in a cage. And the Turkish conquest of Constantinople gets put back fifty years, which probably saves the rest of Europe from Islam.’

  The American smiled in pleasure at his story.

  ‘I think it’s a shame the way someone like Tamerlane gets glorified,’ his wife said. ‘In Samarkand he’s becoming the new Lenin – there are statues everywhere. The man turned cities into mountains of skulls, for God’s sake. He can’t be the only hero the Uzbeks have in their past.’

  ‘He wasn’t an Uzbek,’ Charles Ogley said, his irritable voice floating back from the front seat. ‘None of the Uzbeks’ heroes are. Nawaii, Naqshband, Avicenna. The Uzbeks didn’t get here until the end of the fifteenth century.’

  Docherty, Mike Copley and Sam Jennings exchanged glances.

  ‘So who was here before them, Professor?’ Copley asked.

  ‘Mostly other Turkic peoples, some Mongols, probably a few Arabs, even some Chinese. A mixture.’

  ‘Maybe countries should learn to do without heroes,’ Sarah Holcroft said, almost defiantly.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Alice Jennings said.

  Ogley’s grunt didn’t sound like agreement.

  There were few signs of vegetation now, and fewer signs of farming. A lone donkey tied to a roadside fence brayed at them as they went past. The mountains rose like a wall in front of the bus.

  The next hour offered a ride to remember, as the bus clambered up one side of the mountain range to the six-thousand-foot Tashtakaracha Pass, and then gingerly wound its way down the other. On their left were tantalizing glimpses of higher snow-capped ranges.

  ‘China’s on the other side of that lot,’ Copley observed.

  They arrived at Shakhrisabz soon after three-thirty. ‘The name means “green city”,’ Nasruddin told them, and it did seem beautifully luxuriant after the desert and bare mountains. The bus deposited them in a car park, which turned out to occupy only a small part of the site of Tamerlane’s intended home away from home, the Ak Saray Palace. It would have been bigger than Hampden Park, Docherty decided.

  As Copley’s book had said, all that remained of the edifice was a section of wall and archway. The latter, covered in blue, white and gold mosaics, loomed forty metres into the blue sky. Awesome was the word.

  The other sights – another blue-domed mosque, a couple of mausoleums, a covered market – all paled in comparison. At around five-thirty, with the light beginning to take on a golden tinge, they stopped for a drink at the Ak Saray café. ‘We’ll leave for Samarkand in twenty minutes,’ Nasruddin said, before disappearing back outside.

  The tourists sipped their mint tea and watched the sun sliding down over the western desert horizon. As the jagged-edged tower of Tamerlane’s gateway darkened against the yellow sky Docherty felt at peace with the world.

  He smiled across the table at Isabel. Twelve years now, he thought, twelve years of the sort of happiness he hadn’t expected to find anywhere, let alone behind enemy lines in Argentina during the Falklands War.

  It was an incredible story. At the beginning of the war Isabel, an exiled opponent of the Junta living in London, had agreed to return home as a spy, her love of country outweighed by hatred of its political masters. Docherty had been the leader of one of the two SAS patrols dropped on the mainland to monitor take-offs from the Argentinian airfields, and the two of them had ended up escaping together across the Andes into Chile, already lovers and more than halfway to being in love. Since then they’d married and had two children, Ricardo and Marie, who were spending these ten days with Docherty’s elder sister in Glasgow.

  Isabel had made and mostly abandoned a career in compiling and writing travel guides, while Docherty had stayed on in the SAS until the early winter of 1992. Pulled out of retirement for the Bosnian mission a month later, his second goodbye to the Regiment in January 1993 had been final. Now, eighteen months later, the couple were preparing to move to Chile, where she had the offer of a job.

  Chile, of course, was a long way from anywhere, and they had decided to undertake this Central Asian trip while they still could. It hadn’t been cheap, but it wasn’t that expensive either, considering the distances involved. The collapse of the Soviet Union had presumably opened the way for young entrepreneurs to compete in this market. Men like Nasruddin, Docherty thought, and idly wondered where their tour operator and guide had got to.

  Nasruddin had crossed the road to the car park, and walked across to where two cars, a Volga and a rusting Soviet-made Fiat, were parked side by side under a large mulberry tree. There was no one in the cars, but behind them, in the circle of shade offered by the tree, six men were sitting cross-legged in a rough circle. Four of them were dressed modern Uzbek-style in cotton shirts, cotton trousers and embroidered skullcaps, but the other two were wearing the more traditional ankle-length robes and turbans.

  As Nasruddin appeared the men’s faces jerked guiltily towards him, as if they were a bunch of schoolboys caught playing cards behind the bicycle sheds. Recognition eased the faces somewhat, but the tension in the group was still palpable.

  ‘Everything is going as expected,’ Nasruddin told them, squatting down and looking across the circle at Talib Khamidov. His cousin gave him a tight smile in return, which did little to soften the lines of his hawkish face.

  ‘They all came?’ Akbar Makhamov asked anxiously, ‘the Americans too?’ Despite Nasruddin’s assurances the others had feared that the two septuagenarians would sit out the side-trip to Shakhrisabz.

  ‘Yes. I told you they would come.’

  ‘God is with us,’ Makhamov muttered. The bearded Tajik was the other third of the group’s unofficial ruling triumvirate. He came from a rich Samarkand family, and like many such youths in the Muslim world, had not been disowned by his father for demonstrating a youthful excess of religious zeal. His family had not objected to his studying in Iran for several years, and on his return in 1992 Akbar had been given the prodigal son treatment. Over the last year, however, his father’s patience had begun wearing a little thin, though nothing like as thin as it would have done had he known the family money was being spent on second-hand AK47s and walkie-talkies for a mass kidnapping.

  ‘Everyone knows their duties?’ Nasruddin asked, looking round the circle.

  They all did.

  ‘God be with us,’ Nasruddin murmured, getting to his feet. He caught Talib’s eyes once more, and took strength from the determination that he saw there.

  He walked back to the tour bus, and found the driver behind his wheel, smoking a cigarette and reading one of the newly popular ‘romantic’ graphic novels. Nasruddin was angered by both activities, but managed to restrain himself from sounding it.

  ‘I told you not to smoke in the bus,’ he said mildly.

  Muran gave him one contemptuous glance, and tossed the cigarette out through his window.

  ‘We’ll be picking up two more passengers on the way back,’ he told the driver. ‘A couple of cousins of mine. Just on the other side of Kitab. I’ll tell you when we get there.’

  Muran shrug
ged his agreement.

  Nasruddin started back for the café, looking at his watch. It was almost six o’clock. As he approached the tables the Fiat drove out of the car park and turned up the road towards Samarkand, leaving a cloud of dust hanging above the crossroads.

  The group was ready to go, and he shepherded them back across the car park and into the bus, wondering as he did so which of them might make trouble when the time came. The ex-soldier and the builder looked tough enough, but neither seemed the sort to panic and do something stupid. Ogley was too fond of himself to take a risk, and the American was too old. Though neither he nor his wife, Nasruddin both thought and hoped, seemed the type to drop dead with shock.

  Muran started up the bus, and Nasruddin sat down in the front folding seat. Once out on the road he sat staring ahead, half listening to the murmur of conversation behind him, trying to keep calm. He could feel a palpitation in his upper arm, and his heart seemed to be beating loud enough for everyone in the bus to hear.

  He glanced sideways at the driver. There was a good chance the man would take the hundred American dollars and make himself scarce. But even if Muran went to the authorities, it wouldn’t matter much.

  Nasruddin took a deep breath. Only ten minutes more, he told himself. It was almost dark now, and the fields to left and right were black against the sky’s vestigial light. Ahead of them the bus’s headlamps laid a moving carpet of light on the asphalt road. In the wing mirror he had occasional glimpses of the lights of the following car.

  They entered the small town of Kitab, and passed families sitting outside their houses enjoying the evening breeze. In the centre a bustling café spilled its light across the road, and the smell of pilaff floated through the bus.

  Nasruddin concentrated on the road ahead as they drove out through the northern edge of the town. A hundred metres past the last house he saw the figures waiting by the side of the road.