Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  ‘Just up here,’ he told Muran.

  Docherty’s head had begun to drop the moment they started the return journey, but the jerk of the bus as it came to a halt woke him up. His eyes opened to see two men climbing aboard, each with a Kalashnikov AK47 cradled in his arms. A pistol had also appeared in Nasruddin’s hand.

  The three men seemed to get caught up in one another’s movements in the confined space at the front of the bus, but this almost farcical confusion was only momentary, and all three guns were squarely pointed in the passengers’ direction before anyone had time to react.

  A variety of noises emanated from the passengers, ranging from cries of alarm through gasps of surprise to a voice murmuring ‘shit’, which Docherty recognized as his own.

  2

  A stunned silence had settled on the tour party.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Ogley,’ Nasruddin said politely, ‘please move to the empty seats in the back.’

  The academics stared at him for a moment, as if unable to take in the instruction. Nasruddin nodded at them, like a teacher trying to encourage a child, and they responded with alacrity, moving back down the aisle of the bus as if their lives depended on it. Elizabeth sat down next to Brenda Walker, while Charles took the single seat across the aisle from her.

  Docherty was examining the two men holding the assault rifles. Both were in their late twenties or early thirties, and both, to judge by the slight body movements each kept making, were more than a little nervous. One wore a thin, dark-grey jacket over a white collarless shirt, an Uzbek four-sided cap and black trousers. His hair was of medium length and he was clean-shaven. Dark, sunken eyes peered out from either side of a hooked nose. His companion was dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, and wore nothing on his head. His hair was shorter, his Mongoloid face decorated with a neat beard and moustache.

  ‘I don’t suppose I need to tell you all that you have been taken hostage,’ Nasruddin begun. Then, as if realizing that he was still talking to them like a tour guide, the voice hardened. ‘You will probably remain in captivity for several days. Provided you obey our orders quickly and without question, no harm will come to any of you…’

  There was something decidedly unreal about being taken hostage in Central Asia by a Pakistani with a Yorkshire accent, Docherty thought.

  ‘We do not wish to harm anyone,’ Nasruddin said, ‘but we will not hesitate to take any action that is necessary for the success of this operation.’ He looked at his captive audience, conscious of the giant step he had taken but somehow unable to take it in. It felt more like a movie than real life, and for a second he wondered if he was dreaming it all.

  ‘Can I ask a question?’ Mike Copley asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Nasruddin said, unable to think of a good reason for saying no.

  ‘Who are you people, and what do you want?’

  ‘We belong to an organization called The Trumpet of God, and we have certain demands to make of the Uzbekistan government.’

  ‘Which are?’

  Nasruddin smiled. ‘No more questions,’ he said.

  ‘Can we talk to each other?’ Mike Copley asked.

  The bearded hijacker spoke sharply to Nasruddin – in Tajik, Docherty thought, though he wasn’t sure. Their guide smiled and said something reassuring back. Docherty guessed that neither of the new arrivals spoke English.

  ‘You can talk to the people next to you,’ Nasruddin announced, deciding that conversation would do no harm, and that enforcing silence might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. ‘But no meetings,’ he added. He turned to Talib and Akbar, and explained his decision in Uzbek.

  ‘So what shall we talk about?’ Isabel asked Docherty in Spanish. She sounded calm enough, but he could hear the edge of tension beneath the matter-of-fact surface.

  ‘Some ground rules,’ he said in the same language. The two of them were used to conversing in her mother tongue, and at home often found themselves slipping between Spanish and English without thinking about it.

  ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Number one – you don’t try playing the hero. You’re retired.’

  ‘Agreed. Number two – don’t you try arguing politics with them. These don’t strike me as the kind of lads who like being out-pointed by women.’

  ‘That doesn’t make them very unusual,’ she said, putting her eyes to the window. ‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’

  ‘Somewhere remote.’ Docherty was watching Nasruddin out of the corner of his eye, thinking that he would never have suspected the man of pulling a stunt like this. He suddenly remembered something his friend Liam had said the last time he’d seen him, that the more desperate the times, the harder it was to recognize desperation.

  He turned his attention back to his wife’s question. They seemed to be travelling mostly uphill, and the road was nowhere near as smooth as they were used to. He tried to remember the map of Central Asia he had examined before the trip, but the details had slipped from his mind. There were mountains to the east of the desert, and Chinese desert to the east of the mountains. Which wasn’t very helpful.

  He thought about leaning across the aisle and asking to borrow Mike Copley’s guide book, but decided that would only draw attention to its existence and his own curiosity. Better to wait until they reached their destination, wherever that might be.

  He turned round to look at Isabel, and found her angrily wiping away a tear. ‘I was just thinking about the children,’ she said defiantly.

  He took her hand and grasped it tightly. ‘It’s going to work out OK,’ he said. ‘We’re going to grow old together.’

  She smiled in spite of herself. ‘I hope so.’

  Diq Sayriddin plucked a group of sour cherries from the branch above the kravat, and shared them out between the juice-stained hands of his friends. ‘I have to go inside for a while,’ he told them.

  It was fifty-five minutes since he had received the call from Shakhrisabz at the public telephone in Registan Street. Nasruddin had expected him to make his own call from there, but somehow the place seemed too exposed. He had decided to use his initiative instead.

  Sayriddin passed through the family house and out the back, climbed over the wall and walked swiftly down the alley which led to Tashkent Street. His father, as always, was sitting outside the shop in the shade, more interested in talking with the other shopkeepers than worrying about prospective customers. Sayriddin slipped round the side of the building and let himself in through the back door.

  The whole building was empty – no one stayed indoors at this hour of the day – and the office was more or less soundproof, but just to be on the safe side he wedged the door shut with a heavy roll of carpet. Exactly an hour had now gone by since the call from Talib – it was time to make his own.

  He pulled the piece of paper with the number, name and message typed on it from his back pocket, smoothed it out and placed it on the desk beside the telephone. He felt more excited than nervous, but perhaps they were the same thing.

  After listening for several seconds to make sure he was alone, he picked up the receiver and dialled the Tashkent number. It rang once, twice, three times…

  ‘Hello,’ an irritable voice said.

  ‘I must speak with Colonel Muratov,’ Sayriddin said. His voice didn’t sound as nervous as he had expected it would.

  ‘This is Muratov. Who are you?’

  ‘I have a message for you…’ Sayriddin began.

  ‘Who are you?’ Muratov repeated.

  ‘I cannot say. I have a message, that is all. It is important,’ he added, fearful that the National Security Service chief would hang up.

  There was a moment’s silence at the other end, followed by what sounded like a woman speaking angrily.

  ‘What is this message?’ Muratov asked, almost sarcastically.

  ‘The Trumpet of God group…’ Sayriddin began reading.

  ‘The what?!’

  ‘The Trumpet of God group has seized a party of Western tourists in Sama
rkand,’ Sayriddin said, the words tumbling out in a single breath. ‘They were with the “Blue Domes” tour, staying at the Hotel Samarkand. There are twelve English and two Americans among the hostages…’

  Muratov listened, wondering whether this was a hoax, or simply one of his own men winding him up. Or maybe even one of the Russians who had been jettisoned when the KGB became the NSS. It didn’t sound like a Russian though, or a hoax.

  ‘Who the fuck are The Trumpet of God?’ he asked belligerently.

  ‘I cannot answer questions,’ Sayriddin said. ‘There is only the message.’

  ‘OK, give me the message,’ Muratov said. Who did the bastard think he was – Muhammad?

  ‘There are eight men and six women,’ Sayriddin continued. ‘All will be released unharmed if our demands are met. These will be relayed to you, on this number, at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Finally, The Trumpet of God does not wish this matter publicized. Nor, it believes, will the government. News of a tourist hijacking will do damage to the country’s tourist industry, and probably result in the cancellation of the Anglo-American development deal’ – Sayriddin stumbled over this phrase and repeated it – ‘the Anglo-American development deal…which is due to be signed by the various Foreign Ministers this coming Saturday…’

  Whoever the bastards were, Muratov thought, they were certainly well informed. And the man at the other end of the line was probably exactly what he claimed to be, just a messenger.

  ‘Is that all clear?’ Sayriddin asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Muratov agreed. ‘How did you get my private number?’ he asked innocently. His answer was the click of disconnection.

  In the office of the carpet shop Sayriddin was also wondering how Nasruddin had got hold of such a number. But his second cousin was a resourceful man.

  He placed the roll of carpet back up against the wall, and let himself out through the back door.

  In the apartment on what had, until recently, been Leningrad Street, Bakhtar Muratov sat for a moment on the side of the bed, replaying in his mind what he had just heard. He was a tall man for an Uzbek, broadly built with dark eyes under greying hair, and a mat of darker hair across his chest and abdomen. He was naked.

  His latest girlfriend had also been undressed when the phone first rang, but now she emerged from the adjoining bathroom wearing tights and high-heeled shoes.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said, as if expecting him to demand that she stay.

  ‘Good,’ he said, not even bothering to look round. ‘I have business to deal with.’

  ‘When will I see you again?’ she asked.

  He turned his head to look at her. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. Why did he always lust after women whose tits were bigger than their brains? he asked himself. ‘Now get dressed,’ he told her, and reached for his discarded clothes.

  Once she had left he walked downstairs, and out along the temporarily nameless street to the NSS building a hundred metres further down. The socialist slogan above the door was still in place, either because no one dared take it down or because it was so much a part of the façade that no one else noticed it any more.

  Muratov walked quickly up the stairs to his office on the first floor and closed the door behind him. He looked up the number of the Samarkand bureau chief and dialled it, then sat back, his eyes on the picture of Yakov Peters which hung on the wall he was facing.

  ‘Samarkand NSS,’ a voice answered.

  ‘This is Muratov in Tashkent. I want to speak to Colonel Zhakidov.’

  ‘He has gone home, sir.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About ten minutes ago,’ the Samarkand man said tentatively.

  The bastard took the afternoon off, Muratov guessed. ‘I want him to call me at this number’ – he read it out slowly – ‘within the next half hour.’

  He hung up the phone and locked eyes with the portrait on the wall once more. Yakov Peters had been Dzerzhinsky’s number two in Leningrad during the revolution, just as idealistic, and just as ruthless. Lenin had sent him to Tashkent in 1921 to solidify the Bolsheviks’ control of Central Asia, and he had done so, from this very office.

  If Peters had been alive today, Muratov thought, he too would have found himself a big fish in a suddenly shrunken pond. And an even less friendly one than Muratov’s own. Peters had been a Lett, and from all the reports it seemed as if the KGB in Latvia had actually been dissolved and had not simply acquired a new mask, as was the case in Uzbekistan.

  Muratov opened one of the drawers of his desk and reached in for the bottle of canyak brandy which he kept for such moments. After pouring a generous portion into the glass and taking his first medicinal gulp the NSS chief gave some serious thought to the hijack message for the first time. If it was genuine – and for some reason he felt that it was – then it also represented a new phenomenon – hijackers who didn’t want publicity. Their name obviously suggested some strain of Islamic fundamentalism, but could just as easily be a cover for men who wanted money and lots of it. Which it was would no doubt become clear when the demands arrived on the following morning.

  Muratov walked across to the open window, glass in hand. The dim yellow lights on the unnamed street below were hardly cheerful.

  The telephone rang, and he took three quick strides to pick it up. ‘Hamza?’ he asked. The two men had known each other a long time. Four years earlier they had been indicted together on corruption charges for their part in the Great Cotton Production Scam, which had seen Moscow paying Uzbekistan for a lot of non-existent cotton. The break-up of the Soviet Union had almost made them Uzbek national heroes.

  ‘Yes, Bakhtar, what can I do for you?’

  The Samarkand man sounded in a good mood, Muratov thought. Not to mention sleepy. He had probably gone home for an afternoon tumble with his new wife, whom rumour claimed was half her husband’s age and gorgeous to boot.

  ‘I’ve just had a call,’ Muratov told him, and recited the alleged hijackers’ message word for word.

  ‘You want me to check it out?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  ‘Of course. Will you be in your office?’

  ‘Either here or at the apartment.’ He gave Zhakidov the latter’s number. ‘And make sure whoever you assign can keep their mouth shut. If this is genuine we don’t want any news getting out, at least not until we know who we’re dealing with and why.’

  Nurhan Ismatulayeva studied herself in the mirror. She had tried her hair in three different ways now, but all of them seemed wrong in one way or another. She let the luxuriant black mane simply drop around her face, and stared at herself in exasperation.

  The red dress seemed wrong too, now that she thought about it. It was short by Uzbek standards, far too short. If she had been going out with an Uzbek this would have been fine – he would have seen it as the statement of independence from male Islamic culture which it was intended to be. But she was going out with a Russian, and he was likely to see the dress as nothing more than a come-on. His fingers would be slithering up her thigh before the first course arrived.

  She buried her nose in her hands, and stared into her own dark eyes. Why was she even going out with the creep? Because, she answered herself, she scared Islamic men to death. And since the pool of available Russians was shrinking with the exodus from Central Asia her choice was growing more and more limited.

  There was always the vibrator her friend Tursanay had brought home from France.

  She stared sternly at herself. Was that what her grandmother had fought for in the 1920s? Was that why she’d pursued the career she had?

  She was getting things out of proportion, she told herself. This was a dinner date, not a life crisis. If he didn’t like her hair down, tough luck. If he put his hand up her dress, then she’d break a bottle over his head. Always assuming she wasn’t too drunk to care.

  That decided, she picked up her bag and decided to ring for a taxi – most men seemed to find her official car intimidating.

  The pho
ne rang before she could reach it.

  ‘Nurhan?’ the familiar voice asked.

  ‘Yes, comrade,’ she said instinctively, and heard the suppressed amusement in his voice as he told her to report in at once. ‘Hell,’ she said after hanging up, but without much conviction. She hadn’t really wanted to go out with the creep anyway, and after-hours summonses from Zhakidov weren’t exactly commonplace.

  She called her prospective date at his home, but the line was engaged. Too bad, she thought, and walked out to the balcony and down to the street. Her car was parked in the alley beside the house, and seemed to be covered in children. As she approached they leapt off and scurried into the darkness with melodramatic shrieks of alarm. Nurhan smiled and climbed into the driver’s seat. Of the two Samarkands which sat side by side – the labyrinthine old Uzbek city and the neat colonial-style Russian one – she had always loved the former and loathed the latter. One was alive, the other dead. And the fact that she had more in common with the people who lived in the Russian city couldn’t change that basic truth.

  As she started up the car she suddenly realized that her dress was hardly the appropriate uniform for an NSS major in command of an Anti-Terrorist Unit. What the hell – Zhakidov had said ‘now’. She pressed a black-stockinged leg down on the accelerator.

  It took no more than ten minutes to reach the old KGB building in Uzbekistan Street. There was a light burning in Zhakidov’s second-floor office, but the rest of the building seemed to be in darkness.

  She parked outside the front door and climbed out of the car. As she crossed the pavement a taxi pulled up and disgorged Major Marat Rashidov, commander of the largely theoretical Foreign Business and Tourist Protection Unit. Rashidov had been a friend of Zhakidov’s for a long time, and those in the know said he had been given this unit for old times’ sake. The bottle was supposed to be his real vocation.

  ‘My God, is it an office party?’ he asked, looking at her dress.