Marat drew the obvious conclusion – Nasruddin had stayed either at one of the small hotels or in a private home.
He laboriously worked his way through the former to no avail. He then tried checking through the phone book for the name Salih, also in vain. Finally, he went through the old Soviet electoral register for the city, and drew a blank for the third time.
Marat checked his drawers for cigarettes and was pleased to find there weren’t any. He leaned back in his chair and yawned, just as a tall blond man in obviously foreign clothes appeared in his doorway. ‘Major Marat Rashidov?’ the man asked.
‘That’s me.’
‘Simon Kennedy,’ the man said, walking forward with hand outstretched. ‘From the British Embassy,’ he added in Russian. ‘I am told you can take me to Major Ismatulayeva.’
Marat shook the proffered hand. ‘I don’t know where she is at the moment,’ he said in the same language, realizing with some surprise how long it had been since he had spoken Russian. A sign of the times. ‘But you can either wait here, or I can tell her you called in. She can reach you at your hotel?’
Kennedy frowned. He had been warned that the NSS might give him the runaround, and told to be brutal if they did. ‘She must be in touch with this building,’ he said.
Marat scratched the back of his neck. ‘I’ll see,’ he said, and picked up the phone to ask the operations room where she was. From the expression on the Englishman’s face Marat guessed he didn’t understand Uzbek. As he waited for the operations room to find her he suddenly had a brilliant idea.
The voice on the other end told him Nurhan had just left the airport and was on her way back to the office. He replaced the receiver and smiled at Kennedy. ‘She’ll be back in about twenty minutes,’ he said.
‘Then I’ll wait here, if that’s all right…’
‘Of course. Mr Kennedy, I understand we are to share…I think “pool” is the English word, yes? To pool all the information we have?’
‘So they tell me,’ Kennedy said breezily.
‘Good.’ He told the Englishman that he was trying to find out where Nasruddin Salih had stayed on his earlier visits to Samarkand. ‘I presume your police have searched his house in England. Can you find out whether they have discovered anything which might help me – an address book, perhaps, or letters?’
Kennedy considered, and could see no harm in it. In fact it might win him the Uzbeks’ trust. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said, and gestured towards the phone with a questioning look.
Marat pushed it towards him.
Kennedy dialled the Tashkent number, and Janice answered. He passed on Marat’s request and the number he was on. ‘They’ll phone here direct from England if they have anything,’ he said.
Marat smiled at him.
‘Now if you can give me a rundown of what’s been happening,’ Kennedy said.
Marat wondered whether Nurhan would consider that her job, and decided that she would probably have more important demands on her time. He went through the official version of the story so far, which carefully omitted any governmental knowledge of the hijack prior to that morning. Kennedy, who knew better after his fact-finding trip to Shakhrisabz, chose to let sleeping dogs and NSS agents lie. As far as he could tell, the only thing they knew which he had not was the exact location of the hostages.
Marat was just describing the lie of the land around the mountain lodge when the call arrived from London. He handed the phone to Kennedy and watched him write down two names and addresses on the piece of paper he pushed his way.
‘These…’ Kennedy started to say once his call was over, but the phone rang again. It was the operations room telling Marat that Nurhan had returned. He pocketed the piece of paper, and walked Kennedy down a floor just in time to intercept her on the way back out again.
She shook Kennedy’s hand distractedly, and just about noticed a large-boned Englishman with an arrogant red face and straw-like blond hair cut short at the back and sides. At the same time he was confirming the impression gained at a glance from his car that morning. The revealing red dress was unfortunately gone, but even in the baggy black blouse she looked much sexier than a Soviet policewoman was supposed to.
‘Marat, can you…?’ she pleaded, but to no avail.
‘Mr Kennedy wants to see the lodge,’ Marat said. ‘And I have a lead,’ he added, moving towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Annabel Silcott’s eyes roamed round the courtyard, noting the grey-brown walls, the dresses drying on the line, the broom with its fan of twig bristles leaning against a balustrade, and the pomegranate tree under whose shade they were sitting. A moment ago a small boy had stuck his head round the edge of the open doorway in front of her, dark eyes full of curiosity. He had probably never seen a blonde goddess before, she thought.
Reluctantly she refocused her attention on the woman she was interviewing. Jenah, the senior wife of Samarkand’s head imam, was putting the case for Islam as the best thing that had happened to women since sliced bread. ‘Adam and Eve equally guilty,’ Annabel had written in her notebook – apparently Islam didn’t share the Christian penchant for loading all the blame on poor old Eve and her seductive wiles. Nor were Muslim women’s prayers – their link to God – mediated through men, as they were in the Catholic Church. And women had control over their own possessions – they could conduct business without their husband’s consent.
So why are you stuck in this courtyard, Annabel wanted to ask, and only able to go out dressed up like the Invisible Man in drag?
But she didn’t ask it. Jenah seemed so content with her lot, sitting there in her beautiful courtyard, wearing her gorgeously coloured, flowing silk atlas. And why shouldn’t she be? The imam no doubt had a bob or two stashed away, so his wife would hardly be wanting for any of the necessities of life. In fact her worries were probably as few and far between as they seemed to be.
Thinking about her friends in London, most of whom had dysfunctional relationships with their partners, their own bodies, their jobs and – if they could afford it – their therapists, Annabel had no difficulty understanding the attraction of a life like Jenah’s. In fact this woman was a much better advert for Islam than the hotshot liberal she had interviewed earlier had been for secularism. That particular woman had spent the first half of the interview talking about how wonderful it was that Uzbek women were coming out of the dark ages, and the second half complaining about how hard it was to get decent cosmetics in Samarkand.
I’m too young to be this jaded, Annabel thought.
The interview over, she decided to brave the heat and walk back up Tashkent Street to the hotel. Eyes followed her every step, and what were probably ribald comments floated past her ears. She ignored it all, stopping occasionally to look at the rugs hanging outside the carpet emporiums, and feeling her appetite respond to the smell of skewered meat being barbecued on the braziers.
The sun was halfway down in the western sky, but it was still hot, and the shade offered by the Bibi Khanum mosque was too much to pass by. She paid a few kopeks at the small office and walked in under the huge ruined arch. The interior courtyard seemed almost the size of a football pitch; at its far end a group of Western tourists were having something explained to them. Annabel sat down in a shady corner and stared up at the half-restored dome filling half the sky above.
She didn’t want to write this story. It had seemed like a good idea at the time: a vital contemporary theme – she had said so in her original submission – and lots of free travel to exotic places, all on expenses. She had already been to Egypt and Saudi, with India and Indonesia still to come. Most people would give their eye-teeth for a job like this, she thought. She felt bored by it, bored by its predictability, its sleazy opportunism, its utter inconsequentiality. Filling newspapers and magazines these days was like painting the Forth Bridge. No one had anything new to say, so it was just a matter of endless recycling. There would be an article on ‘Women under Islam’ in
some magazine or other every three months, all saying much the same thing with different pictures. What was the point?
Earning a living – that was the point.
She walked out of the mosque and continued up Tashkent Street to the Registan, where she turned right towards her hotel. The man from British Intelligence intruded on her consciousness. What was he doing in Samarkand? Come to that, what did any of them do anywhere these days, now that the Cold War was over and the old enemy laid low? Who were the new enemies? Drug smugglers and terrorists, probably. It could be either around here.
At the hotel she took her key from the receptionist, turned away and then, on a whim, turned back. ‘The Englishman who is staying here on his own,’ she said.
‘Mr Kennedy?’
She described him.
‘It is Mr Kennedy.’
‘Can you tell me about him?’ she asked. ‘I will pay for information.’
The receptionist looked around, satisfied himself that they were alone, and leaned forward confidentially. ‘How much?’
‘That depends on the information. Can you tell me why he is in Samarkand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ten dollars.’
‘Twenty.’
She smiled. ‘All right.’
He waited for her to produce it from the purse tied around her waist. ‘He is looking for the tourists.’
‘Which tourists?’ she asked, more sharply than she intended.
‘The ones who do not come back from Shakhrisabz.’
Bakhtar Muratov lay full length on the sofa in his apartment, reading a copy of The Trumpet of God’s manifesto. The original, which had been faxed from Samarkand an hour before, was now en route to Voice of the People. God knew what they would think of the order to publish it. Muratov supposed they were lucky the editor still did what he was told, as was no longer the case in some of the neighbouring ex-Soviet republics.
He had to admit that whoever had written the manifesto knew what he was doing. It was not couched in terms only likely to stir the already faithful, and it didn’t claim that Islam would solve all the people’s earthly woes. It simply put forward, with some coherence, the argument that an Islamic Republic would provide a better moral, political and economic framework for the people of Uzbekistan. Though a distinct whiff of puritanism seemed to seep out between the words, there was little in the words themselves that most Uzbeks would object to.
It was a more dangerous document than he had expected, Muratov decided. But it was too late to worry about that now.
And maybe releasing Khotali and his acolytes would actually help to undo the damage. Khotali had never shown this much subtlety.
The timer on his VCR said two fifty-nine. Muratov levered himself into a sitting position and reached for a cigarette.
In the hunting lodge nearly six hundred and fifty kilometres to the south Nasruddin Salih was watching the second hand on his watch cover the last minute before three o’clock, his hand poised over the telephone. He supposed they should be grateful that the Party leaders had wasted so much of the people’s money stringing a fifty-kilometre line across the mountains for their personal convenience, though they could always have communicated by radio. Still, Nasruddin preferred using technology he was familiar with.
He dialled the number.
Muratov let the phone ring twice, and then picked up.
‘Good afternoon,’ Nasruddin said.
‘Good afternoon.’
‘What is your answer?’ the Englishman asked, his voice sounding more nervous than he would have liked.
Muratov allowed a few seconds of silence, just for the hell of it. ‘We have accepted your demands,’ he announced coldly.
‘The prisoners are being released, and our programme printed in full in Voice of the People?’
‘Yes’
‘I am glad,’ Nasruddin said. And he was. Another day and it would be over. As long as Muratov was not lying to him.
‘The prisoners will arrive at the specified time in the helicopter you requested,’ Muratov added.
The NSS chief sounded almost indifferent, Nasruddin thought, as if none of it mattered. It felt suspicious, somehow. ‘We have heard your helicopters this afternoon…’
‘None has approached within the two kilometres you specified.’
‘Perhaps. I will just tell you again that if anyone, whether on foot or in the air, attempts to get any closer then one of the hostages will pay the price. Am I making myself clear?’
‘Very.’
‘It would serve no purpose for anyone to be hurt when we have already reached an agreement.’
‘I understand.’
Nasruddin put the phone down, a huge smile spreading across his face. ‘They agreed,’ he told the others. ‘No questions, no time-wasting, no demands to speak to one of the hostages. They just agreed. Our manifesto will be in the paper tomorrow morning, and the Imam Khotali will be here at eleven o’clock in the morning.’
‘And the others?’
‘All of them. They agreed,’ he repeated, as if unwilling to believe it.
‘Maybe they are saving the time-wasting for later,’ Talib suggested pessimistically.
‘Maybe we asked for too little,’ Akbar retorted. When they had been planning the operation he had consistently argued for increasing their demands.
‘Maybe it worked out exactly as we planned it would,’ Nasruddin argued. ‘If they have no idea what a great man the Imam Khotali is, then they are bound to think exile will be just another prison for him.’ He smiled. ‘They cannot see the threat. Whereas losing out on development deals and tourist revenue – they know what a collapsing economy will do to their popularity.’
Talib let a rare smile cross his lips. ‘It just seems too easy, somehow,’ he said.
‘You overestimate them,’ Akbar said. ‘What are they? Just a few communists clinging to power, that’s all.’
That angered Talib. ‘I fought them in Afghanistan, remember? And the power they are clinging to is real enough. We must stay alert, particularly tonight but tomorrow as well. The helicopter could be booby-trapped…’
‘With their pilot flying it?’ Nasruddin asked.
Talib gave him a look which told him not to be so naïve. ‘And expect there to be “unavoidable delays”. They are bound to test us at some point. I’m only surprised that they haven’t already.’
His cousin might be right, and Nasruddin was more than prepared to act as if he was, but neither he nor Akbar had heard Muratov’s voice. There had been more than a trace of repressed anger in the tone, as if the NSS boss was bitterly resenting every word he was forced to utter.
Nasruddin was convinced they had got it right. He and the others might be outlaws everywhere but Iran for the next few years, but during their exile there seemed every chance that Central Asia would fall to a resurgent Islam for only the second time in thirteen hundred years.
10
Brierley and Stoneham spent the last hour of the morning deciding what to take and the early afternoon gathering it all together. Their role was to be purely advisory, so equipping themselves fully for a combat role was obviously out of the question, but both men knew enough SAS history to realize that ‘advisory’ could be pretty loosely defined. Sometimes a teacher just had to show his pupils how something should be done.
For personal armament they agreed on a well-tested combination – a Browning High Power 9mm handgun and the silenced MP5SD variant of the Heckler & Koch sub-machine-gun. The latter had been specially fitted with laser guidance to pick out targets in darkened rooms. They also decided to take one Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. Men in purely advisory roles weren’t usually given the task of blasting open doors, but who knew what might happen in a crisis?
By the same token they packed two sets of GPV 25 body armour, pouches for the spare ammo, stun and CS gas grenades, two AC100 helmets, and a pair of respirators fitted with CT100 Davies communications gear. Working on the assumption that the Uzbek
authorities would lack such equipment, and that their hosts might be grateful to receive some, Stoneham added three more helmet-respirator combinations to the pile. ‘It’s like kids in the park,’ he explained. ‘If you turn up with a better ball then they tend to let you join the game.’
To Brierley’s insistence on their including two abseiling harnesses Stoneham retorted: ‘Why not? We can hang outside the windows offering advice.’
Clothing was more of a problem. Uniforms were not to be worn, in case some local bright spark started wondering out loud what the SAS were doing in Central Asia. ‘Dress like tourists,’ Bourne had told them. But how did tourists dress?
‘Camera, dark glasses and a straw hat,’ was Brierley’s suggestion.
‘You’ll cause a sensation. I’m wearing clothes. I take it it’s hot in Samarkand at this time of the year.’
‘Very. Which reminds me – mosquito repellent. And I assume we’re not going to need any jabs for this one.’
Stoneham shrugged. ‘Doesn’t look like it. The whole business seems a bit iffy, if you ask me.’
‘I’m glad I didn’t.’
‘The Crow,’ Javid Zahid said, grinning at his cousin.
‘Never heard of it,’ Copley said.
‘I have,’ Ogley said surprisingly.
It was almost three-thirty, and seven of the eight male hostages were almost an hour into a game dreamed up by Copley. The first person had to think up a film beginning with A, the second one beginning with B, and so on. When Z was reached the next person started again with A, and anyone failing to come up with a title had a point deducted. X, they soon realized, had to be omitted.
Docherty and Nawaz Zahid were tied for last place. Ali Zahid had had the sense not to play.
The panel on the door abruptly swung back, a piece of paper was pushed through and the panel swung shut. The paper floated slowly to the ground.
They all looked at it. ‘And I said we wouldn’t get any post,’ Copley said wonderingly.
Docherty walked over and picked it up. ‘The government of Uzbekistan has agreed to our demands,’ he read. ‘Providing everything goes according to plan you will all be released around noon tomorrow. The Trumpet of God.’
Samarkand Hijack Page 14