Samarkand Hijack

by David Monnery

In a couple of hours, Docherty thought, things would change. Either it would be all smiles, or the situation would start to deteriorate. The hostages, after all, would not be the only disappointed ones if the deal fell through. Their captors would have to start making tough decisions.

  Docherty looked down the valley, thinking that there had to be men out there now, watching them through binoculars or telescopic sights. Someone out there would be working on a plan of how to storm the lodge, and Docherty didn’t envy him. The hijackers had chosen well – the site would be a bastard to approach unobserved. It would have to be after dark, but even then…There had been a new moon the night before, and a clear sky. Anyone trying to scale the cliff behind the lodge would be a sitting target to anyone at the front. Snipers would have to take the guards out first with silenced rifles.

  And then the hostages would have to do whatever needed doing to keep them alive. That might be to hug the floor, or it might be to try to disarm whoever came to kill them. There was no way of knowing until the time came.

  He needed some sort of weapon, no matter how crude. On the next circuit he went down on one knee, and as he pretended to tie his shoe managed to pocket a smooth, round stone. It wasn’t much, but Docherty hadn’t lasted twenty years in the SAS without working out that the difference between life and death was often measured in inches. And when it came down to it, aiming a gun had to be easier if stones weren’t flying past your head.

  The two SAS men were a very different proposition from Kennedy, Nurhan thought, as she sipped her black coffee and watched them work their way steadily through breakfast. There was a sense of self-containment about them both, almost a glow of self-assurance. It might be all front, of course, and she would probably never know the truth of the matter, but they certainly gave an impression of men who knew exactly who they were and what they were doing.

  Sitting across from her, Terry Stoneham was thinking that the SAS had taken him to some pretty weird places, and that the old KGB canteen in Samarkand had to qualify as one of the weirdest. The room itself was unremarkable – they could have been in England but for the slowly whirring fans overhead and the unfortunate lack of Weetabix but the combination of cruelties which it represented had to be unique. Breakfast courtesy of Tamerlane and Stalin!

  He had to admit that Major Ismatulayeva didn’t look much like Rosa Klebb, but there was no way of knowing whether she had a retractable poison blade concealed in the toecap of her shoe.

  ‘So shall I fill you in on what’s been happening?’ Simon Kennedy asked in English.

  ‘I think the Major is probably the best person to bring us up to date,’ Brierley said diplomatically in Russian. He had taken an instant aversion to the MI6 man, and wasn’t making much of an effort to disguise the fact.

  Nurhan smiled and did as Brierley asked, tracing the crisis through from the first telephone message to the present, and, to the Englishman’s surprise, openly expressing anger at her government’s capitulation to the terrorists’ demands. Of course, he realized, she probably didn’t know how much pressure London had exerted on Tashkent. From her point of view, the government’s reaction must have seemed nothing short of spineless.

  ‘How were communications established at the beginning? I mean, who contacted who, and how?’

  She told him about the first call from someone in Samarkand.

  ‘I wonder why,’ he asked himself out loud.

  ‘To keep us guessing,’ Marat volunteered.

  ‘Did it?’ Stoneham asked.

  ‘Oh yes. It was about sixteen hours before we found them.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Brierley murmured. They must have known that they would be found, and that staying undetected, even for sixteen hours, would not make a great deal of difference. Nasruddin Salih – assuming he was the terrorist leader – was obviously a man who took any slight edge that the situation offered. Brierley thought about the new information from Bradford which the woman had passed on to them in Tashkent. A map-drawer. Precision. Care. ‘The telephone line,’ he asked, ‘is it still open? To the rest of the system, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Nurhan said. ‘They said they needed independent confirmation that their programme had been printed in the newspaper. We offered to deliver…’

  ‘But they realized you could have doctored a copy.’

  ‘Exactly. So one of their supporters phoned them this morning, from a public phone in the city.’

  ‘It might be wise to cut it off now.’

  ‘I suggested it, but my boss decided that it wasn’t worth taking any action which could be considered hostile.’

  Brierley nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Kennedy asked them, with the air of someone who had just consulted a fortune-teller.

  Brierley smiled. ‘Not a lot, yet. There are obviously two separate problems in situations like this – how to conduct the negotiation and how to rescue the hostages when the negotiations break down. In this instance there haven’t really been any negotiations to conduct – not yet anyway. And to evaluate the rescue option we need an on-site inspection.’

  ‘When you’re finished, the helicopter’s in the car park behind the building,’ Nurhan told him.

  Brierley and Stoneham both gulped down the rest of their tea and got to their feet. ‘Lead on,’ Brierley said.

  She did. As the pilot started up the engine and the three Englishmen climbed aboard, she shared a few words with Marat, who raised a hand in farewell and walked back into the building. Both Brierley and Stoneham found themselves wishing that it was Kennedy they were leaving behind.

  The flight took less than half an hour, but packed a lot of scenery into the available time. Views of the city gave way to wider vistas of the green Zerafshan valley, and these to desert before the land crumpled and climbed beneath them into a wilderness of mountains.

  The helicopter landed in a flat clearing about the size of a tennis court. Two lorries stood to one side, and several young soldiers were sitting in the shade their awnings offered. A dirt road wound up from the valley below, skirted the clearing and climbed out of sight around a protruding ridge some hundred metres further up.

  ‘Some of my unit,’ Nurhan explained, gesturing towards the lorry. ‘They’re on an eight-hours-on four-hours-off duty cycle.’

  They looked fit enough, Brierley thought.

  Nurhan led the SAS men up the steep path towards one of the observation points, talking into her walkie-talkie in Uzbek as she did so. Sergeant Abalov met them, and they all squatted in a circle as he brought her up to date. She translated into Russian for the SAS men. Both the men and the women hostages had been allowed their half hour of exercise, the latter having been taken back in not much more than twenty minutes before. Nothing unusual had occurred – the two terrorists standing sentry on the road were still there, and were relieved, one at a time, every three hours. The other five remained indoors, except at exercise time, when one would stand guard in front of the lodge.

  The observation point was fifty metres further on. Abalov led the way, with Nurhan and the two SAS men following the Uzbek down a rocky gully. At its end the path ducked through a narrow gap between two huge boulders, and a few metres further on came to an abrupt halt behind what looked like a pile of flat rocks some local giant had arranged in a spare moment. Between the second and third from the ground a natural slit some three inches high and four feet wide presented a fine view of the valley’s upper reaches.

  Some two kilometres away Brierley could see the long, low building, its back up against the cliff wall at the valley’s head. Looking through the binoculars, he could make out more details of the structure itself, but nothing of what might be going on inside. They would have to get a good deal nearer than this, Brierley thought. He turned his attention to the intervening space below, which offered a veritable labyrinth of cross-cutting ridges, crevasses and jumbled rocks. There was plenty of cover, he thought, but it was all a long way below the altitude of the lodge.
To get near enough for a proper eyeful they would have to practically push their noses up against the front windows.

  As Stoneham took his turn with the binoculars, Brierley looked at Nurhan’s copy of the architectural drawings and asked her about the building. She told him its history in a tone which suggested she would rather not entertain questions. It occurred to Brierley for the first time that someone like this – an ex-KGB, Uzbek, apparently intelligent woman – might be having an interesting time making sense of where her loyalties lay in post-Soviet Uzbekistan.

  13

  After Kennedy had left the room, presumably to meet whoever was arriving at ‘around 0800’, Annabel Silcott had started going through the rest of his belongings. She found nothing, which at least went a little way to restoring her faith in British Intelligence. Back in her own room she ran as deep a bath as the hotel’s plumbing would allow and lay in the water wondering what to do next. Basically, she only had two things to work with: the address with the phone number and the phone number without the address. First she would have to find out who or what the NSS was. It sounded vaguely educational.

  She was rummaging through her suitcase, trying to decide what to put on over her underwear, when she suddenly remembered that in Kennedy’s story the tour party had been hijacked in the middle of a day trip. So where was their luggage? Still somewhere in the hotel, was the first answer that came to mind.

  She put on baggy black trousers and a black T-shirt and went downstairs, hoping against hope that the same receptionist would be on duty. He was, albeit surrounded by an incoming tour group. After extracting all the cash from her money belt in the toilet, she browsed in the souvenir shop in the lobby until the new party had all been dealt with, then walked over and came straight to the point. ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars to let me see the missing tourists’ luggage,’ she said.

  He wasn’t slow on the uptake. He turned, picked a key off the rack, and placed it on the counter. ‘Two hundred in dollar bills,’ he said. ‘And if the police ask I shall say you must have stolen the key.’

  She counted out four of her five fifty-dollar bills and took the key. He pocketed the notes and said: ‘Second floor.’

  She walked up and found the room without difficulty. On the outside it looked like any other of the twelve doors leading off the corridor, but the room inside looked more like a left luggage office. Belongings had been gathered in neat piles, and atop each one sat a passport. Annabel went through the names one by one, and then the photographs inside. Inside the one bearing the name Sarah Jones she found the face of Sarah Holcroft.

  When the women were let out for their half hour’s exercise Isabel found Sarah walking by her side. This wasn’t a great surprise – she had the feeling that the young woman had been wanting to talk to her for some time, and there were certainly no chances of a private conversation in their room.

  For a few minutes they talked about their situation, and Isabel, struck by how level-headed Sarah seemed, realized that she too had been half expecting the degenerate airhead that the tabloids had presented to the world. Being Isabel, she took the bull by the horns, and asked Sarah if the newspapers had made it all up.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ was the rueful answer. ‘I did a lot of stupid things, and I didn’t make much effort to do them in private. In fact’ – she smiled – ‘I probably did them in public on purpose. But on the other hand, if I had slept with as many men as the papers said, I would never have been off my back.’ She laughed, but there was a brittle edge to it. ‘I’ve slept with about fifty men,’ she suddenly confided. ‘Do you think that’s a lot?’

  Yes, Isabel wanted to say, but who was she to judge? She and her friends might have been revolutionaries but they had also been pretty puritanical with it. There had been none of that ‘free love’ so popular in the northern hemisphere’s sixties. Sarah had probably been sexually active for about eight years, so fifty lovers equalled about one every couple of months. Put that way…

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t sound much like a recipe for happiness either.’

  ‘It isn’t, but I guess happiness wasn’t what I was looking for then. I don’t know. Did you read the orgy story last year?’

  Isabel admitted she had.

  ‘That was partly true. It was a party, and we all got very high, and I ended up in bed with two men. That wasn’t a recipe for happiness either, but it was fun. And it didn’t do anyone any harm. The press…I mean, it’s all double standards. Men are always fantasizing about going to bed with more than one woman.’ She sighed. ‘But you’re right – it’s fun but it gets pretty empty after a while.’

  This wasn’t a stupid woman, Isabel thought. A damaged one perhaps, but not beyond repair. ‘So what are you going to do with the rest of your life?’ she asked.

  ‘Something positive. I’ve given up drugs, and I’ve decided to be more choosy when it comes to men. You know, I think I was afraid to say no before, as if somehow I didn’t have the right to. Does that sound crazy?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. It sounds like you had a really low opinion of yourself.’

  ‘I did. I still do, but maybe not so much, and I have found something I really want to do. You know, in London there’s all sorts of fabric shops these days – Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Latin-American, hundreds of them, all specializing in one culture. Well, I had the idea for a shop selling fabrics from all around the world, just the best from each place, you know.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘But that’s not all. I want to get local co-operatives to supply the shop, so that the women who actually make them share in the profits. I don’t want it to be just a money-making thing – we have enough of that in my family already. But that’s where Brenda and I were the other day in Tashkent, when the rest of you were at the History Museum – we went to see these people whose names I’d been given. And they were really interested.’

  Her eyes were shining now, and she was looking at Isabel with a need for reassurance which was almost heart-breaking.

  ‘It sounds fantastic,’ Isabel said.

  After watching the helicopter drift away across the old city Marat had climbed into his car and driven out to the airport. The plane from Tashkent had arrived half an hour earlier, and the four released prisoners were being held in an ordinary office in the airport’s administration building.

  It was almost half-past ten. Marat gave the order for them to be taken to the transport helicopter which was waiting on the tarmac nearby, and watched as they filed out of the building, blinking in the sunlight. Muhammad Khotali was the second in line, a tall man in traditional clerical garb, with deep-set eyes under bushy black eyebrows. Marat had seen him in person only once, through a one-way window at the post-arrest interrogation, some two years before. He had been reluctantly impressed at the time, without really knowing why. There was something about those eyes, the intelligence that filled them and the honesty they seemed to promise, even when the mouth was spouting Stone Age nonsense. The man had charisma, all right. In dangerous quantities.

  Marat followed the four men across to the helicopter, and watched them received into its cavernous belly. Uzbekistan’s new flag had recently been painted on the machine’s sides, but the two pilots were both Russian. Marat recognized the senior of the two from his time in Afghanistan.

  ‘Hey, Marat,’ the man said with a smile. ‘I don’t think much of the cargo you’ve given us.’

  Marat grimaced. ‘Join the club,’ he said drily. ‘You’re clear about what you have to do?’

  ‘Land outside the lodge, pick up the bad guys and their hostages and take them where they want to go.’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘So I can’t just drop these four out at six hundred metres?’

  Marat sighed. ‘Not this trip.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better get going. We don’t want them getting nervous.’

  ‘If you’ll step out of the way…’

  Marat did so. As the giant hel
icopter strained its way into the air, he called Nurhan on the radio link to say it was on its way. Then he stood watching it dwindle into the south-eastern sky, before walking back across the tarmac towards his car. Tonight they would have to play host to the SAS men, he thought, but maybe tomorrow she would have dinner with him again.

  Isabel could remember that last morning in Córdoba with the glass manufacturer. The deal had been struck, but he had grown more terrified as the hour agreed for his release had approached. As they left him there, still blindfolded, for the authorities to find, he had been sobbing with fright.

  Now she understood why. The anticipation of release was a good feeling, a safe feeling, but the actuality represented a plunge back into the unknown.

  It was almost a quarter to eleven, and it was hard not to simply lie there listening for an approaching helicopter. Instead, she heard the distant ringing of a telephone. That puzzled her for a moment, but she supposed there had to be some means of contact between the hijackers and the authorities, and searching her memory she could see the line of telephone poles which led away down the mountain road.

  ‘Yes?’ a male voice asked.

  ‘Hello, who is that?’ Annabel asked.

  ‘Who are you?’ Nasruddin answered in English. He shrugged at Talib to show that he didn’t know who it was.

  She found his accent both strange and familiar. ‘My name is Silcott. I’m a journalist. If you are who I think you are I would like an interview…’

  ‘I think you have a wrong number,’ Nasruddin said. It sounded ridiculous, but it was the first of several things that came into his mind. The second was that talking to a journalist would constitute a breach of their agreement with Muratov. The third was to wonder whether that mattered.

  ‘Surely you can only benefit from publicity,’ Annabel insisted. His answering in English had been the giveaway. These had to be the people.

  Nasruddin didn’t offer a reply, mainly because he couldn’t decide on what it should be.

  ‘Are you in contact with the British government?’ she asked, taking his silence as assent.