‘Will do,’ she started to say, but he had already cut the connection.
‘I take it we’re not sleeping between clean white sheets tonight,’ Marat said.
‘You got that right,’ she told him, reaching over into the back seat for the rug. ‘You’re in your bed right now. At dawn we’re supposed to find the hijackers.’
‘And rescue the tourists?’
‘If we’re in the mood.’ She let her seat back with rather more suddenness than she intended, and almost knocked the breath out of herself.
He looked down at her with a grin. ‘I don’t suppose I get to share the rug,’ he said.
She smiled sweetly up at him. ‘You got that right too.’
Nasruddin Salih was sitting in the large living-room, his foot resting on the bear’s head, a bottle of lemonade in his hand. Talib Khamidov was slumped in another chair, his AK47 within easy reach, while the bearded Akbar Makhamov was almost perched on the edge of the large leather sofa, as if fearful of being contaminated by such decadence. Of the other four members of the group, Farkhot and Sabir were on guard outside the hostage’s rooms, Shukrat and Chunar out front of the lodge, some fifty metres down the approach track.
The hunting lodge itself had been built and half finished under the last government of the Uzbek State Socialist Republic, and had been intended for the use of both the local Party bigwigs and any visiting cronies from Moscow. Though the same people were still in power in Tashkent and Samarkand, they had become rather more discreet about enjoying the perks of office, and the lodge had not been used for over two years. Nasruddin had been able to date the abandonment of privilege with some accuracy – among the pile of pornographic magazines found in one of the furnished bedrooms the most recent issue had been that of August 1992. Akbar had burnt the magazines out on the hillside, along with the mass-produced portrait of Red Army Marshal Frunze which had held pride of place above the hearth.
‘Two of us should sleep,’ Nasruddin said, though without much conviction. A day of anxious waiting had given way to that sense of liberation which came with an irrevocable leap into the unknown. He had started a new life that day, and the adrenalin was still pumping through his veins in celebration.
‘Have we no decisions to take?’ Akbar asked. Neither Nasruddin’s manic calm nor Talib’s stoicism seemed to have rubbed off on the Tajik.
‘I don’t think so,’ Nasruddin said. ‘Everything has gone exactly as we hoped.’
‘God willing,’ Talib murmured.
‘What about the hostages?’ Akbar asked. ‘Do we have anything to fear from them? The soldier, for example.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Nasruddin said. He had liked the Dochertys – they were the only members of the party who had not treated him differently because of his race. The Americans, being liberals of the old school, had overcompensated.
‘I think it might be better to keep him separate from the others,’ suggested Akbar.
‘Then we would have to guard him separately as well. The fact that his wife is here will keep him from doing anything foolish.’
‘Should we not discuss what we intend to do if our demands are not met?’ Akbar asked.
Nasruddin considered. A tendency to talk too much was one of the perils of shared leadership, but it was a relatively harmless one. And in one way Akbar was right: the more eventualities they had mentally prepared themselves for, the easier it would be to take difficult on-the-spot decisions.
But at that moment he did not want to consider the possibility of such a setback. Today marked the end of his fifteen-year struggle to find a way of fighting back, and he wanted to let his heart revel in the moment. In the morning he could apply his mind to the practicalities once more.
‘I think tomorrow will be soon enough for that,’ he said, looking at Talib.
His cousin took the hint. ‘And let us hope that God spares us from such a choice,’ he said softly.
In Talib’s sunken eyes Nasruddin caught an unwelcome premonition of pain both given and endured.
President Yegor Bakalev had had a premonition of disaster the moment he heard Bakhtar Muratov’s voice on the other end of the line. Just when things were going so well, and the West was ready to put some serious money into the Uzbek economy, this had to happen.
It wasn’t just the money, but what it represented. If the West invested in the future of a secular Uzbekistan, then he would have a powerful ally against the fundamentalists. On the one hand an improving economy would give the people less desire for change, while on the other there would be no serious criticism of the way he dealt with the Islamic dissidents. The Americans and the British knew what democracy had served up in Iran, and they weren’t about to make the same mistake again. The bleeding-heart organizations like Amnesty International might complain, but they complained about everybody. The people who mattered would turn a blind eye in the interests of stability. On his last visit to London, Bakalev and the British Prime Minister had been united in the belief that a prosperous Uzbekistan would keep the fundamentalists at bay throughout Central Asia.
And now this, just four days before the deals were due to be signed. Maybe a miracle would happen, and they could keep the matter quiet for those four days. Maybe it could be resolved in such a way that confidence in his country and government would even be increased.
Maybe camels would fly. The chances of keeping this business off the world’s TV screens seemed remote. He wondered who these people were and what they wanted. He hoped they were foreigners, and preferably Iranians. He hoped they would ask for something utterly ludicrous, and thereby brand themselves as lunatics. After all, every country had its share of them, and no one would expect Uzbekistan to be any different.
In England it was still only seven o’clock, and Detective Sergeant Dave Medwin was one of the many whose plans for the evening had been interrupted by the disappearance of a bus in far-off Samarkand. His had included taking Ben to see the comedy movie Mrs Doubtfire, but the call from Special Branch Central in London had put an end to that. Maureen had not been pleased. He wondered how long it would be before she gave him another opportunity to spend a whole evening with their twelve-year-old son.
His own people in London had hardly spoken to him before handing over the phone to an MI5 smoothie. The man had given him his instructions in triplicate, and then faxed the relevant papers to the Leeds office.
Now he was on his way to Bradford, and the registered office of Central Asian Tours Ltd in Westfield Street. At least the rush hour was over. And once he was finished with this errand he could see if Lynn fancied a drink in the Dog & Biscuit.
He found the office in question occupying the top half of a two-storey building, above a newsagent’s, in a street mostly populated by Asian fabric shops. There were no lights showing upstairs, and the newsagent’s was in the process of closing.
Medwin showed the man his warrant card, and said he would like to ask a couple of questions about the business upstairs.
‘They are closed,’ the man said.
‘For how long?’
The Asian looked at his watch. ‘Three hours?’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t see the girl leave today.’
‘But she was there today?’
‘Oh yes. Of a certainty.’ He grinned. ‘She is not so light on her feet, you know.’
Medwin went back to his car. If Pinar Ishaq Khan had been there that day, it seemed unlikely she was involved in any major villainy that was under way in Samarkand. Wherever the hell that was. And it also meant she had a key to the office. The MI5 man had told him to make as few waves as possible, and breaking into the office across the road might well generate some, at least in daylight. He looked up the secretary’s address in the vetting report which had been faxed to him, found out where it was in the A–Z, and started up the car.
She lived with her mother in a rather nice old house on the outskirts of Bradford. It was the older woman, looking rather worried, who showed him in. She, as Medwin had already learnt from the vett
ing report, taught in an elementary school in the centre of the city. Her son Imtiaz lived with his wife in Leeds.
Medwin waited while Pinar was summoned from the depths of the house, idly noting that the Guardian on the table was open at the women’s page. This was not a traditional family.
Pinar, despite the newsagent’s unflattering comment, was only slightly plumper than average, and had a face which made Medwin think of princesses in the Arabian Nights. He told her there was probably nothing to worry about, but that there was a chance the current ‘Blue Domes’ tour party had run into trouble. They were still waiting for details from Samarkand.
She looked stunned.
‘I have to ask you a few questions,’ he went on.
She looked at him blankly, and then nodded.
‘Was there anything unusual about this particular tour?’
‘No. Well, this was the only one which Mr Salih escorted personally. The Jordan/Syria and Pakistan tours are escorted by local employees. But…’
‘I meant this particular group of people,’ Medwin said. ‘You do handle the bookings?’
‘Most of them.’ She thought. ‘I can’t remember,’ she said at last. ‘I’m taking bookings almost all the time – the next five trips are already fully booked.’
Medwin handed her his copy of the list. ‘Does this help?’ he asked.
She studied it. ‘There’s one thing I remember,’ she said. ‘The Jenningses. Mr Salih was pleased we had some Americans at last. They were the first we’d ever had book with us.’
Medwin wondered whether it was worth giving the office the once-over, and decided not. If it was still functioning as normal, he found it hard to imagine finding anything relevant, and Pinar looked intelligent enough to ask if he had a warrant, which he did not.
He thanked her for her help, went back to the car, and consulted his street guide again. Nasruddin Salih’s home was not far from the office, back towards the centre of the city.
He reached it in twenty minutes, a small terraced house in a dead-end street. After parking the car a hundred metres or so away he checked round the back, and found a path running along between a playing field and the back entrances. There was still too much daylight for a surreptitious forced entry, so he went looking for a pub.
An hour and two pints later he was walking back towards Salih’s house. Reaching it, he counted the houses to the end and then walked down the back path, counting them off in reverse. A couple of lights showed and a dog barked, but the neighbourhood seemed almost deserted.
The back door presented no problem to his customized piece of plastic. He took a few seconds to let his eyes grow used to the darkness, then walked through the kitchen to the living-room and pulled the curtains before taking out the torch he had brought from his glove compartment. The room looked incredibly tidy, as if Salih had been expecting guests. Maybe he had been expecting a visit from someone like me, Medwin thought.
He went slowly through the house, touching as little as possible. There was no sign of a woman’s presence, and no sex magazines either. There was no alcohol.
There were a lot of bookshelves, both downstairs and up, most of them full of books about religion and politics. An incongruous group of books about railways caught Medwin’s attention. He took one down and fingered through it. It was full of pictures of British Rail diesel locomotives, photographed in and around Leeds. Inside the front cover the name Martin Salih had been written.
Did Nasruddin have a son? he wondered. There had been no mention of it in the vetting report. And anyway the diesels were mostly painted the old blue colour – the book had to be fifteen years old.
He tried some of the political books, all of which had the name Nasruddin Salih inscribed inside their front covers. It was a mystery, Medwin thought, but probably not a relevant one.
It was ten minutes later that he found the photograph album, and recognized Nasruddin as one of the children in the family group pictures. There he stood, his face fifteen years younger but otherwise strikingly similar, next to a brother and sister, and behind his seated mother and father. Martin, Sheila, David, Ma and Pa, the caption read.
Medwin stared at the photograph for several seconds before inspiration struck. He picked up the telephone, called West Yorkshire Police Headquarters, and asked for the Records Department. Once connected, he asked for Rose or Mary. Rose was there. ‘I need a name checked out,’ he told her.
‘How thrilling,’ she said.
‘Martin Salih,’ he said patiently. ‘S-a-l-i-h.’
‘Your wish is my command.’
He could hear her fingers on the keyboard. ‘One arrest,’ she said eventually. ‘Vandalism,’ she added. ‘He went on a window-breaking spree in the middle of Bradford. He was only thirteen. Got put on probation.’ There was a silence lasting several moments, followed by a muted ‘wow’.
‘What is it?’ Medwin asked.
‘The poor little bugger had his reasons. His mother had just been killed in an arson attack. Somebody tossed a fire-bomb through their front door, and the house burned down with her in it. She was probably too afraid to come out.’
Medwin sighed. ‘Thanks, Rose,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you around.’
‘Make sure you remember your wallet next time.’
Medwin smiled and sat back on Nasruddin’s sofa. His parents must have done what many immigrant parents did, and given their children English names in an attempt to smooth their passage in an adopted country. At some point after his mother’s death, unable to bear the shame of an English name, Martin had rechristened himself Nasruddin. And the violence in his past had slipped between the cracks of the vetting procedure.
If there had indeed been a hijacking in Samarkand, it seemed more than possible that Nasruddin Salih had been one of its perpetrators.
5
Nurhan Ismatulayeva woke to find the new day’s light filtering through the window above her head. The Volga’s dashboard clock said it was six-fifteen. In the adjoining seat Marat was snoring gently. His face looked a lot younger in sleep, she decided, much more at peace. He probably wasn’t much older than she was.
She reached forward for the door handle, eased open the door, and levered herself out into the dawn air. It was quite cold, and she reached back in for the rug to wrap around herself. Across the road the sun suddenly alighted on the very top of the ruined entrance gate, like a match catching fire. The birds were singing up a storm in the trees.
She stood there for a moment, savouring the scene, remembering mornings like this at the family dacha in the Tien Shan foothills north of Tashkent, and then started walking slowly across the park, her thoughts turning to who the hijackers might be, and what they might want. They might be nothing more than bandits, but she thought it much more likely that they would prove to be Islamic terrorists of one sort or another. She hoped so. If anything could set back the rise of Islam as a political force in Uzbekistan it was a bunch of psychopathic loonies masquerading as the children of Allah.
She should be back in Samarkand, she thought, where the decisions would be taken about who was to handle the potential hostage situation. By rights it should be her, but her male superiors would probably need reminding of that. She strode back to the car, pulled her seat back up and poked her colleague in the stomach.
He opened one eye, and didn’t like what he saw. ‘I thought you had gone for coffee,’ he said.
She turned the key in the ignition. ‘We can grab a cup at the bus station in Kitab,’ she said, sliding the gear lever into first and bumping the car back on to the road, as he struggled to get his seat into the upright position.
‘Hey, what’s the hurry?’ he asked.
‘Why don’t you call Samarkand and find out if there’s any news,’ she suggested.
‘They’d have called us.’
‘We might not have heard them over your snoring,’ she said brutally.
He grimaced. ‘I can’t have been snoring that much – I was only asleep for a
bout five minutes. You don’t have anything for a headache, do you?’
‘There’s some pills in my bag.’
He reached into the back seat for it, and looked inside for the pills.
‘A small brown bottle,’ she said.
‘Got it.’ He had just noticed the pack of condoms she carried. A woman of the nineties, he thought, and wondered how happy she was behind the beautiful mask. He used thumb and forefinger to place two pills at the back of his throat, and swallowed.
‘Are there any roads off this one before Kitab?’ she asked him.
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Where would you go if you had just hijacked a tourist bus in Shakhrisabz?’
He thought for a minute. ‘That would depend on what I wanted,’ he said at last. ‘If I wanted the maximum publicity splash I suppose I’d drive back to Samarkand and take over one of the tourist sights – one of the Registan madrasahs, maybe.’
‘If they’re Muslims wouldn’t that be like defiling holy ground or something?’ She should know something like that, she told herself. She should know more about Islam if she was serious about fighting it.
Marat didn’t know either. ‘Maybe Tamerlane’s mausoleum then,’ he suggested. ‘The whole world’s heard of him.’
‘And it would be difficult to use force without damaging the building,’ she thought out loud.
He reached for his first mint of the day. ‘There’s one problem with all this,’ he said. ‘If they wanted to make their stand in Samarkand then why go to all the bother of taking them hostage in Shakhrisabz. Whatever they did, they could have done it just as well before they left the city. Or at least a few miles outside.’
‘And if they’re not in Samarkand?’
‘Simple choice,’ he said. ‘They either turned left for the desert or right for the mountains. In the desert they’d be easy to find, but it would be hard to sneak up on them. In the mountains vice versa.’
‘It would be easier to stay alive in the mountains,’ she suggested.
The first houses of Kitab slipped by, and a minute later Nurhan brought the Volga to a halt beside the crossroads at the centre of the small town. Even at this hour there were quite a few people on the streets, and the cafés were already doing a roaring business in morning glasses of tea. Marat and Nurhan walked across to the nearest establishment and ordered coffee. Sitting down, she became conscious of the angry looks she was getting from the men occupying the kravats. Short red dresses obviously weren’t too popular in Kitab.
Samarkand Hijack Page 7