Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

  Which reminded her. She told Abalov to call her on the radio if anything remotely out of the ordinary occurred, and took the architectural plans of the lodge home with her. Once there, she spread them out on the only table, took a notepad and pen and started jotting down a timetable for an assault. One diversion tactic that occurred to her was for a telephone conversation to be in progress at the time.

  That started her thinking about the wisdom of leaving the phone line open in the first place. She had mentioned her doubts to Zhakidov earlier that day, but his response had been to ask how else they were going to communicate with the terrorists. Which sounded like common sense. The line was being tapped, of course, so there was no possibility of the terrorists using it to organize anything without the NSS knowing.

  She walked out on to her veranda, and leaned on the balcony rail overlooking the still far from sleepy street, thinking that if the government thought they could come to some sort of compromise with the new Islamists then they were making a big mistake. There was no room for compromise between male gods and a society based, theoretically at least, on equal rights for women.

  To pretend otherwise, she thought, staring at the slim cream crescent which had just cleared the rim of the southern mountains, was – in the words of the old Uzbek proverb – to throw seeds at the moon.

  11

  After consuming a pint and a Cornish pasty in one of Ilkley’s ungentrified pubs, Dave Medwin drove back across the moors towards Bradford. It had turned into a beautiful day, with fluffy white clouds floating serenely across the blue sky.

  He wasn’t looking forward to interviewing the sister. Her family seemed to have suffered enough without all this. The whole business was like a wound that refused to heal.

  Maybe if they had caught the bastard responsible it would have been different. Maybe not. He would be in his early thirties by this time, probably a father infecting his kids with the virus of hatred.

  Medwin swerved to avoid an oncoming car that was straddling the centre of the road, and only just restrained himself from turning in pursuit and throwing the book at the bastard. But there seemed to be enough anger going around without him adding to it.

  It was shortly after two-thirty when he reached the sister’s house, a well-kept semi in a neat suburban street. Medwin sat in the car for a moment drinking in the air of contented conformism, and wondered for the thousandth time how he could both envy and despise the same thing.

  He recognized the face of the woman who answered his knock from the photograph he had seen in Martin’s flat. ‘Sheila Salih?’ he asked formally.

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I am Sheila Majid now.’

  Medwin showed her his ID, and asked if he could talk to her inside.

  ‘What about?’ she asked.

  ‘Your brother Martin.’

  ‘Has something happened to him?’

  ‘He’s in good health,’ Medwin said noncommittally.

  A shadow fell across her face, and she stepped aside to let him in. ‘It’s not very tidy,’ she said.

  It wasn’t. The first downstairs room looked like a tornado had passed through, or maybe just a bunch of children. The second was festooned with adult mess – papers, mostly. It had that ‘lived in’, family look, Medwin thought.

  She offered him a seat at the kitchen table, and sat down opposite him. Over her shoulder he could see a riotous garden sloping down towards an abandoned railway line.

  ‘What has Martin done?’ she asked.

  He came straight to the point. ‘It looks as though he has been involved in hijacking a bus full of tourists in Central Asia.’

  She stared at him in disbelief for a moment, then sighed and looked down at the table.

  He waited for her to say something, to ask for details.

  ‘You know what happened to our mother?’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The man was never caught,’ she said, echoing Medwin’s thoughts on the drive over. ‘Not that catching him would have brought Mum back, but it would have been something, like a line drawn underneath it…you know what I mean? Like some sort of place to start again.’ She looked straight at him, her dark eyes dulled by resignation. ‘As it was, well, we all carry it. David has always buried himself in business, and…well, I suppose I bury myself in my family. Martin found religion, but he was the youngest. And I thought…’ Her voice faded away, as if she was listening to another one inside her head. ‘He was there,’ she said at last. ‘He opened the door.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We thought that he was coming out of it – building up his business.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, but he couldn’t have been planning…what exactly has happened?’ she asked.

  Medwin told her most of what he knew, omitting only Sarah Holcroft’s presence in the tourist party. ‘The more we know about Martin, the better chance there is that the authorities out there can resolve things peacefully,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, as if it had suddenly occurred to her that this conversation constituted a betrayal of her brother.

  ‘In negotiations like this it’s important that people don’t misunderstand each other,’ he explained. ‘For everyone’s sake.’

  She absorbed this, and seemed to find it made sense. But she didn’t see what she could tell him. ‘He’s an honest man,’ she said. ‘If he says something, he means it.’

  Medwin forbore from pointing out that the hostages had good reason to doubt such an assessment of Nasruddin’s character. ‘Is your brother a desperate man?’ he asked, thinking as he did so what a ridiculous question it was. ‘Do you think he wants martyrdom?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Part of him, maybe. But…you should see him with the children. He loves them so much. Especially Meyra.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Do you think he could kill someone?’

  Her eyes widened again, but only for a second. ‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly.

  In Samarkand, Kennedy was still chortling over Nurhan’s farewell remark as he came down the hotel stairs in search of a belated dinner. He held no grudges over either the fact or the manner of her rejection, having long since accepted that some women found him attractive and some did not. Since he had yet to discover a better way of ascertaining which was which than simply asking, he took it for granted that every now and then a woman would say no. Luckily there had always been enough who said yes to provide him with ample compensation. Spotting the blonde woman from breakfast across the dining-room, he immediately began to wonder which category she fell into.

  Annabel Silcott had been waiting almost two hours for him to appear, and the second of two coffees was only beginning its work of cancelling out the bottle of Georgian wine she had worked her way through. Still, here he was, and as far as she could work out no one else was likely to unravel the mystery of the missing tourists for her. There was nothing in the papers here, and nothing in the papers at home either, as she had verified at great length and expense by calling up an old and not very bright school friend. An offer of more money had failed to elicit more information from the receptionist. Kennedy was her last chance.

  She waved an invitation for him to join her. He needed no second bidding. As in the morning, he was convinced he had seen her somewhere before, but couldn’t remember when or where.

  ‘Simon,’ she said, having bolstered her shaky memory of his name by checking with the receptionist.

  ‘Er, hi,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she said. ‘We only met for a few seconds in Tashkent – at the Brunanskys’, remember? I’m Annabel Chambers.’

  So that was where. Though he still couldn’t remember ever having spoken to her.

  ‘You’re with the embassy, right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And I’m with UNERO,’ she reminded him. ‘The United Nations Equal Rights Organization. I’m here on a fact-finding tour, almost literally. Not so much gathering statistics as gathering the different statistical bases which differen
t countries use, so that we can start making useful comparisons.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry, you probably don’t need to know all this.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Kennedy smiled. ‘UNERO does a great job.’

  This was news to Annabel, who had spent part of the last two hours inventing it. Having once ruled out the possibility of approaching Kennedy in a journalistic role, she had decided that a little subtlety would be required. She had chosen to bank on him being one of those chauvinists who couldn’t resist the chance to make a play for a feminist. And he was young enough and good-looking enough to spend a night with, if that seemed worthwhile or necessary.

  His dinner arrived, and she accepted his offer of more wine. They talked about travel in general, Central Asia in particular, what a hole England was becoming, why Phil Collins was better off without Genesis, the problems of the New World Order. He was kind of sweet, she decided. Not someone you’d want to spend your life with, but fun for a few hours.

  ‘What are you doing in Samarkand?’ she asked, about an hour into their relationship.

  ‘Just checking out a few trade possibilities. Nothing interesting. Do you fancy another drink upstairs? I’ve got some whisky in my room.’

  ‘I’ve already had enough,’ she said suggestively, ‘but I’ll come and watch you drink.’

  They went up in the lift, somehow slipped an arm round each other in the corridor, and were twining tongues the moment his door was closed behind them. Feeling his cock swelling against her belly she undid his belt, pulled down the zip and lifted it free of his boxer shorts.

  Kneeling down she ran her tongue lightly up the back, and then abruptly took it into her mouth. For a minute or more she had him moaning with pleasure, only ceasing the tongue massage when she suddenly felt him swelling even more.

  ‘Oh, don’t stop,’ he said breathlessly. Janice wasn’t half as good at this.

  ‘If I don’t stop, you won’t have anything left to give,’ she murmured, standing up and turning her back on him. ‘The zip,’ she said.

  The dress fell to the floor, swiftly followed by her bra and panties. She lay back on the bed, arms above her head and legs bent. ‘It’s your turn, now.’

  He kissed her breasts and stomach before obliging, using his own tongue on her clitoris with rather more delicacy than she had expected.

  Soon she was stopping him, and asking if he had…

  He pulled a condom out of nowhere like a conjuror with his rabbit, slipped it on with more ease than any other man she had ever known, and then lay on his back for her to climb astride him. As she eased herself to and fro with mounting pleasure, a voice in the back of her mind reminded her that this was just a bonus. She was here for a story.

  They came together, just like in the manuals, and lay side by side in silence for a few moments. ‘That was good,’ he said, with a self-satisfied smile.

  ‘Mmmm,’ she agreed, managing to keep the surprise out of her voice. It was a long time since she had enjoyed sex anything like as much.

  ‘We must do it again sometime. Like in the next half an hour.’

  She snuggled closer. ‘OK. But you have to tell me a story in the meantime. Have you seen any excitement since you came here?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  She decided to take the plunge. ‘What about the disappearing tourists?’ she asked casually.

  He stiffened. ‘What disappearing tourists?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Maybe it’s not true, then. There’s a rumour going round the town that some foreign tourists have simply gone missing or something. I must admit, when I saw you this morning – knowing you were from the embassy – I thought that must be why you were in Samarkand…’

  He sighed and then smiled. ‘I don’t suppose it matters if you know,’ he said. After all, the deal had been struck, and the hostages would be free by noon. ‘A bunch of tourists were hijacked yesterday, but it’s all been sorted out. The Uzbek government agreed to the demands and they’re being released in the morning.’

  ‘Who were they? Where are they? What were the demands?’

  He told her.

  ‘Lucky for the hostages it wasn’t the British government in charge,’ she said.

  He grunted, muttered ‘maybe’, and hoisted himself up on one side. ‘I’m ready,’ he murmured, cupping one breast in his hand and leaning down to kiss the other.

  Her body felt ready too, but her mind was not so easy to put on hold this time around. The grunt and the sardonic ‘maybe’ seemed to hint at deeper concealments, though what they might be she couldn’t begin to imagine. Later, Annabel told herself, letting him in and crossing her legs behind his back.

  This time they took a longer and slower route to the same lovely destination. Afterwards she lay there thinking how amazing it was that she could have such perfect sex with someone she didn’t care a jot about. Amazing and somehow sad, she decided, because it meant that true love was just what she had always feared it was – a convenient lie.

  She was about to share this revelation with her bed partner when he began to snore.

  Instead she turned her mind to what he had confided to her. That grunt had been so…so definite. She should search the room, she decided. He wasn’t going to wake up, and in any case what could he do if he caught her?

  As it happened she didn’t need to search very far. His jacket was lying on the floor on her side of the bed, and she managed to reach it without falling out. There was a notebook in the inside pocket, and just about enough light coming in through the window to examine it by. Half expecting to see ‘Simon Kennedy, Secret Agent’ written inside the front cover, she opened it up.

  The first thing she found was a list of CDs, presumably ones he wanted to buy. The second was a list of armaments, together with numbers followed by question marks. Looking through it, the notebook seemed a dizzying mixture of the mundane and the stuff of which espionage thrillers were made. Had he really jotted down possible arms sales in a Ryman notebook? She supposed he had, and could think of no real reason why not. It just seemed ludicrous.

  She reached the last used page. On it, the letters NSS had been written, followed by an address and Samarkand phone number, and underneath this the name Nurhan Ismatulayeva in capital letters. The word ‘superwoman’ had been doodled to one side.

  Beneath this was what looked like an out-of-town phone number.

  Lastly, he had written ‘Tashkent arrive 0630, Samarkand around 0800.’

  Annabel slid out from under the sheet, walked round the bed to where she had dropped her bag, and extracted a pen. With one eye on the sleeping Kennedy she copied out the address, phone numbers and times into her own notebook. She then retraced her steps, replaced his notebook and walked across to the open window. Outside on the balcony she leaned against the balustrade and looked out across the darkened city towards the silhouetted line of mountains. Maybe the tourists were out there somewhere, she thought.

  For some reason she suddenly felt the need to fight back tears. It had to be that time of the month, she thought.

  In one of the finished guest rooms Nasruddin Salih lay in the gloom on the double bed, fingers intertwined behind his head, staring at the faintly lit ceiling. He was thinking about the others, how they had all come together, how a plot born one evening of an idle conversation beneath a cherry tree had grown, so effortlessly and logically, into events which would change the lives of so many people.

  Talib had been on one of his rare visits to the house of his uncle in the northern outskirts of Samarkand, and Nasruddin, staying with these far-flung members of his family while he organized the arrangements for his agency’s planned tour programme, had met him for the first time. He had heard a lot about him, of course. Talib had disappeared on active duty in Afghanistan, and for several years no more had been heard of him. Then the break-up of the Soviet Union had made it possible for many Uzbek deserters to return home, and he had been one of them. He brought with him the wife and children he had acquired in Peshawar, and a stern
new faith which made many in his extended family uncomfortable.

  Nasruddin was not one of them. Though their lives up to that point could hardly have been more different, each had grasped hold of a purified Islam to pull them through when all else had failed. Almost from the first moment both knew that, whatever their differences in upbringing or culture or tastes, they were brothers of the soul.

  The day of that first meeting had been important for another reason: Muhammad Khotali – whom both men had come to greatly admire over the preceding months – had finally been arrested by the government authorities. Nasruddin, Talib and Akbar Makhamov, who was there as a friend of Nasruddin’s cousin’s family, had discussed the case as the sun went down, and wondered out loud what they could do about it.

  Akbar had an answer ready for them – direct action. He had spent several years in Iran as a religious student, and during that time had taken a basic training course in the use of weaponry and explosives. There was no point in trying to work within the system, he said – you could not expect justice from men who had no fear of God.

  The three men had discussed possibilities, at first tentatively, and then with increasing seriousness. At one point in that evening’s conversation they had all looked at each other, as if each man needed to be reassured that the other two were as serious as he was.

  The preparations had taken nearly two years, but not because of any intervening difficulties. Everything had fallen into place with unerring certainty. Akbar had provided ideas, money and a meeting place, Talib the contacts necessary for buying weapons and the four other members of the unit. Nasruddin had offered up the victims.

  It had all dovetailed so beautifully, he thought, lying there on the bed. As if it was meant to work. As if God knew that their hearts were pure and their aim true.

  Bourne drove the two CRW instructors to Brize Norton, and from there a chopper took them south-east to RAF Northolt, where another car was ready to ferry them across the last few miles. At Heathrow a young man from Airport Security took them through a maze of empty corridors to a room overlooking the runways. They just had time to watch a Virgin Airbus lumber up and away before the door opened to admit a tall, dark-haired man in a navy pinstripe suit.