Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  The system worked so well that American Special Forces had copied the idea lock, stock and wraparound screen. And it offered the sort of training that a few years before had only been possible at enormous risk to life and limb.

  Brierley waited for the participants to file in through the door for debriefing. On this particular morning he was feeling more than usually pleased with life. He enjoyed his teaching work, despite originally expecting not to. He had a whole weekend of flying coming up, and Margie had finally accepted that he wasn’t going to give her the sort of commitment she wanted. He supposed it was kind of sad that they couldn’t go on the way they had started – like friends who enjoyed sex together – but the way things had been going lately her decision to stop seeing him was also something of a relief. When all was said and done they just didn’t want the same thing, and all the resulting hassles had taken a lot of the fun out of being together.

  It was better to be single. Even most of the happy couples he knew told him so.

  Watching the group of young men now taking their seats in front of him, he wondered how many of them had been stupid enough to replace their mothers with a wife.

  ‘Two hostages were killed,’ he began. ‘The first question is why.’

  ‘Because they stood up,’ one man said.

  ‘They weren’t trying to get shot,’ Brierley began, before his attention was captured by the adjutant who had appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Major Bourne wants to see you immediately,’ the man said.

  Brierley acknowledged the message with a wave and handed the class over to a fellow-instructor. Two minutes later he was walking into Bourne’s office. Terry Stoneham was already sitting in one of the two chairs facing the CRW boss’s desk.

  ‘Right,’ Bourne began the moment Brierley sat down, ‘you two are leaving today for the middle of nowhere.’ He turned the opened atlas around, placed it in front of them, and jabbed a finger at the map. ‘Samarkand. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘It was on the old Silk Road,’ Brierley said.

  Bourne tried not to look impressed. ‘It was also in the Soviet Union until a couple of years ago. Now it’s in Uzbekistan. Lots of tourists go there apparently, though I have no idea why. Lots of monuments, I suppose.’

  ‘The Registan is supposed to be one of the finest pieces of Muslim architecture in the world,’ Brierley told him. ‘There was a documentary about it on the TV a few weeks ago,’ he added. ‘They’ve run out of money for the restoration work since the Russians pulled out.’

  ‘Are we taking them the Regimental savings, boss?’ Stoneham asked with a straight face.

  ‘There aren’t any. Fourteen of these tourists – all but two of them Brits – have been hijacked, and you two are being sent out as advisers to the Uzbek authorities.’

  ‘Who are the hijackers?’ Brierley asked.

  Bourne shrugged. ‘They call themselves The Trumpet of God…’

  ‘Fundies,’ Stoneham murmured.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘Publicity and some friends out of jail. The government has agreed, and it should all be over by eleven a.m. their time tomorrow. Samarkand is five hours ahead of us, by the way.’

  ‘I don’t understand, boss,’ Stoneham said. ‘We’re flying all that way just to watch a handover? They don’t need advice on how to cave in, do they?’

  ‘You’re flying all that way at the taxpayers’ expense just in case,’ Bourne said. ‘And the reason you’re going, just between us, is that one of the hostages happens to be the Foreign Minister’s daughter.’

  ‘Not Sarah Le Bonk?’

  Bourne smiled wryly. ‘The very same.’

  Stoneham’s eyes narrowed. ‘Excuse me for saying so, boss, but…are you saying that we’re only going out there because her dad’s got clout? If so, it stinks.’

  ‘It does,’ Bourne agreed. ‘But we do what we’re told. And in this instance we do it knowing that Alan Holcroft will have an important voice in whether we get the funding we need over the next few years.’

  Stoneham said nothing, but the expression on his face was lucid enough.

  ‘There are also a couple of good reasons for going,’ Bourne said mildly. ‘First off, the other thirteen will get the same luxury treatment from Her Majesty’s Government as Miss Holcroft. And by the way, from what we can gather the hijackers haven’t twigged who she is.’

  ‘That’s a bit of luck.’

  ‘Looks like it. Second, one of those thirteen also happens to be one of our old boys. Jamie Docherty. I trust you agree he deserves our best shot.’

  ‘Of course, boss. Why didn’t you tell us that first?’

  ‘Do either of you know him, personally I mean?’ Bourne asked.

  Neither did, but both knew of his reputation. ‘I wonder if he’s enjoying captivity with Sarah Le Bonk,’ Stoneham wondered out loud.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Bourne said drily. ‘His wife is with him.’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘When do we leave?’ Brierley asked.

  Bourne was about to say he didn’t know when his phone rang. He jotted down the times on his notepad and put back the receiver.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ he told them. ‘Uzbekistan Airways flies direct to Tashkent three nights a week, and this is one of the nights. Twenty hundred hours from Heathrow, arriving 0730 their time in Tashkent. The locals will fly you down to Samarkand from there.’ He looked at his watch. ‘That gives us more than nine hours to get you kitted up and on to the plane.’

  ‘More than enough,’ Brierley said. ‘What sort of set-up is it? I mean, where are the hostages being held?’

  ‘In a hunting lodge up in the mountains, that’s all we know at the moment.’

  Brierley grimaced. ‘It would be nice to have an idea of the terrain. Still…I take it our equipment will be cleared through customs at Heathrow?’

  ‘If it isn’t we can always hijack the plane,’ Stoneham observed. ‘We have the expertise.’

  9

  In Leeds a slight rain had just begun to fall, and Detective Sergeant Dave Medwin was able to savour the cooling drops on his face as he walked across the police station car park. This sense of relaxation was short-lived – he had barely poked his head through the front doors of the building when the duty officer barked out that London had been calling him every five minutes for the last half an hour.

  ‘Bloody Londoners think they’re the only people with a rush hour,’ Medwin snarled back, and walked slowly upstairs. He had only downed three and a half pints on the previous evening, so it could hardly be the alcohol to blame for another semi-sleepless night. Maybe he was allergic to something. Celibacy, perhaps.

  The phone was ringing as he entered his office. It was London, telling him to mount a full-scale investigation of Nasruddin Salih. They wanted personal history, psychological profile, estimates of intelligence. They wanted any evidence of who his contacts might be in Central Asia. They wanted anything he could find. The local CID had been instructed to issue him with any search warrants he required, but had not been told anything. Nor would they be. Complete discretion was still required, right up to the point where it might hamper the investigation. If that point was reached, then Medwin should call London for fresh instructions.

  He sat there for a few moments trying to focus his mind, before reminding himself that such a difficult process required coffee. He walked down the hall, inserted his coins, and kept his thumb jammed on the extra sugar button as the machine coughed up its usual ‘fresh-brewed’ monstrosity. Back in the office he started with the obvious, calling British Telecom to check on Nasruddin’s long-distance phone calls over the last few years, both from home and the office. There were none from the former, and all the latter were apparently to hotels. He took the numbers down anyway.

  He then called Records and asked them to send up copies of both Nasruddin’s personal file and the incident report on the arson attack. While he w
aited for these to arrive he called the local probation service, and found out that Nasruddin’s officer had recently retired to Ilkley. He took down the address and decided against the hassle of demanding a copy of their file. He could do that song and dance later, if and when it proved necessary.

  The copies arrived from the basement. He read through the arson incident report, and found nothing much more than Rose had told him the previous evening. The father and two elder children had been watching a Leeds game at Elland Road, and young Martin had gone to answer a knock on the front door. A youth in a crash helmet had thrown the Molotov cocktail over his head, and it had smashed on the living-room door jamb, setting both the hall carpet and wall hangings ablaze. His mother had apparently been trapped in the downstairs back room, on the other side of the flames from Martin. By the time the fire engines arrived most of the house had been consumed or blackened, but the spray-painted words ‘Paki scum’ were still visible on the front gate.

  Medwin sighed and picked up Nasruddin’s personal file. There was nothing much new here either – the boy had just gone berserk one evening, smashing windows in what seemed to be a paroxysm of grief. God only knew why they had put him on probation. If someone had done that to his family, Medwin thought, he would have gone and killed somebody.

  He locked the two copies in his desk and walked down to the car park. The rain was still falling gently, almost like a lawn sprinkler. Once in the car, he turned on the local radio station, and spent most of the next half hour wondering why pop music sounded so much the same these days. Was he just too old to hear whatever subtleties it might contain? No, he didn’t think he was. Lynn’s fourteen-year-old son spent half his time listening to Hendrix and Dylan. The music really had been better twenty-five years ago.

  He drove to Bradford and parked outside the newsagent’s in Westfield Street, found the travel agency was open for business, and walked upstairs to find Pinar Ishaq Khan sitting and looking industrious behind her desk.

  ‘Do you have more news?’ she asked immediately.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’ With her lustrous hair and beautiful skin colour Pinar looked even better than she had the evening before. Even the faint shadow-line on the upper lip, which Medwin usually found a little off-putting, seemed part of her attractiveness.

  ‘I tried to ring Samarkand a little while ago,’ she said, ‘but there’s a problem with the line.’

  I bet there is, Medwin thought. ‘I have to take a look through the office,’ he said, hoping she wouldn’t want to see his authorization.

  ‘Shouldn’t you have a search warrant?’ she asked politely.

  He reluctantly retrieved the paper from his inside pocket and passed it over. She examined it with interest. ‘This is serious, isn’t it?’ she said.

  He shrugged and began methodically working his way through Nasruddin’s desk.

  ‘Can’t you tell me any more?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. There was nothing in the desk, and, as it turned out, nothing in the office. At the end of twenty minutes Medwin knew a bit more about travel agenting but nothing new about Nasruddin. ‘Have you got a phone number for his sister, brother or father?’ he asked Pinar.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know where they live?’

  ‘Sheila lives in Bradford, I think. He didn’t…he doesn’t talk about his family much.’

  ‘OK, thanks for your co-operation.’

  ‘Should I just carry on?’ she asked, as he made for the stairs. Medwin stopped and thought about it. He could hardly say no without giving her more of an explanation. ‘You might as well,’ he said. ‘When I hear anything definite I’ll let you know.’

  She smiled without much conviction.

  His next stop was Nasruddin Salih’s local police station, where he picked up a constable to stand guard during his second search of the hijack leader’s house. It was an easier job in daylight, but as on the previous evening he was close to conceding defeat when he finally found what he was looking for. Having failed to discover either an address book or a hoard of letters, he lifted a large, unmarked volume from a shelf, only to have several empty envelopes fall out to the floor. The volume was a stamp album, and two of the envelopes bore return addresses in Samarkand.

  After the meeting with Zhakidov, Nurhan used the phone in her own office to call the city’s army barracks, where the twelve men in her unit had been on alert since earlier that morning. The Anti-Terrorist Unit was in fact considerably less grand than it sounded. Nurhan was its only permanent member; those under her command were regular army soldiers who had been given special training in anti-terrorist situations, and placed on permanent standby should one such arise.

  She filled in the ranking NCO Sergeant Abalov on what they were up against, and went through the list of what would be needed in the field, both for daily survival and completion of the task in hand. Most of what they required would be stored at the barracks, and if it wasn’t then there was little likelihood of their finding it anywhere in Uzbekistan. Night-sights and goggles unfortunately fell in the latter category, as did stun grenades. Nurhan told the sergeant to gather together what he could and get the men to the airport, where she would meet them in an hour.

  She then unrolled the map they had taken to the mountains, weighed it down at the corners on her desk, and studied it once more. During their flight that morning Marat had drawn in both the unmarked road and the lodge where it ended, high up the steep-sided valley. The terrorist leader had forbidden anyone to approach within two kilometres, so she drew a rough circle centred on the lodge with the appropriate radius. There were only a couple of points outside this circle from which the lodge and its approach road could be kept under long-range observation – in most directions visual contact was lost in considerably less than the specified distance.

  There was only the one approach road, so if anyone wished to reach or leave the lodge in a vehicle that was the way they had to go. On foot the options were more numerous, in fact almost infinite for anyone fit enough to cope with the broken terrain. The border with Tajikistan was about sixty kilometres away to the east, perhaps two days’ journey for a group of determined young men. With the hostages it would be more problematic. And probably impossible for the two American septuagenarians.

  She sighed and stared straight ahead for a moment. It was all academic anyway, since the terrorists’ demands had been granted. Still, it would be good practice for the next time, and maybe by then she would have political masters with backbones.

  Nurhan decided she would put three men in each of the observation points, and spread the other six, in pairs, in a rough semicircular cordon to the east of the lodge. When darkness fell two men from each observation post could begin scouting out the land immediately in front of the lodge, to see if a surprise approach was possible from that direction. They could also pinpoint any guards the hijackers had posted on the road, and ascertain how easy their silent removal would be, before a direct approach at speed up the road itself.

  The lodge itself was another matter. She needed more information, either through talking to people who had been there or through tracking down the architectural plans. Both options probably involved treading on sensitive toes. She seemed to remember that the Chairman of State Construction had been one of the big names in the last of the Soviet-era corruption trials.

  She looked at her watch, and decided that the lodge could wait; it was more important to get the unit out into the mountains before nightfall. Downstairs she made a dozen photocopies of the relevant portion of the map, and then headed out for the car. As expected, it felt like climbing into an oven. In America, someone had told her, you could even get cars with air-conditioners.

  At the airport the twelve men were still sitting in the lorry that had brought them from the barracks. A few of them managed a welcoming smile but most maintained the distance she had come to expect from them. She thought they had been disabused of any notion that she was incapable of running
the unit, but the fact remained that they weren’t used to taking orders from women in general, and generally uncomfortable with a woman who was so aggressively modern by Uzbek standards. And then there was the additional psychological complication of her sexual attractiveness. Wanting to fuck one’s infidel boss was probably a hard thing to live with. Sometimes Nurhan almost felt sorry for them.

  She took the austere Sergeant Abalov aside and swiftly briefed him on the entire situation. As usual he absorbed the information in silence, with the minimum of questioning. Fifteen minutes later she watched two Ka-26 helicopters carry the twelve men and their equipment off into the eastern sky.

  After their meeting with Zhakidov had broken up, Marat had also felt more than a twinge of disappointment. The last eighteen hours had been among the most diverting of his NSS career – there had even been fifteen-minute stretches when he had forgotten he wanted a drink. And he had been finding Nurhan’s company more than a little enjoyable.

  He remembered the look on her face when Zhakidov had said she was in charge, and smiled to himself. She was so transparent in some ways. But, he had to admit, they would have to go a long way to find someone better able to run such a unit. And next time around maybe she really would get the chance to show all the men how good she was.

  Marat reminded himself that, for the moment, they were pretending that the terrorists would still be in Uzbekistan this time tomorrow. He picked up the phone, called Immigration Control in Tashkent, and asked the woman who answered to check the arrivals and departures of Nasruddin Salih. Once armed with a list of dates, he phoned round all the major hotels in Samarkand and got them to check their registers against it. Over the previous two years the terrorist leader had stayed three nights in every month at the Hotel Samarkand, presumably as part of his own tour group. Before that none of the major hotels had any record of a stay, although the list from Immigration showed that he had been making regular visits to Uzbekistan for at least two years more.