Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  “Outstanding. We’re still gathering intel on the location. We’ll brief you in the air.”

  “Roger that. I’ll ring off now. We’ll be wheels up in twelve minutes.”

  Sturbridge was Hopkins’s kind of soldier. No hand-holding, no bollocks. And the SAS was the mold from which every group of commandos in the world—the SEALs, the Delta Force, GSG 9, you name it—was descended. If anybody could get Byko and save Julie Davis, it was Sturbridge and his team.

  “Get me Bryce,” he said to the comms specialist. The young man nodded and within a minute, Hopkins was on the line with Bryce. Hopkins gave him a quick update on Byko, saving the news about Julie Davis’s abduction until the end.

  “Let’s not lose focus,” Bryce said tartly, cutting Hopkins off as he speculated about various strategies for finding and saving her. “The Davis woman’s safety is rightly a concern. But job one is Byko. Clear?”

  Barely more than a few hours ago, Bryce had been tearing him a new one about the death of Marcus Vaughan. And now, suddenly, the life of an MI6 asset—an innocent civilian no less—was merely an ancillary priority.

  “I told you we needed to protect her,” Hopkins fumed. “But we abandoned the woman in order to advance your political agenda. If you think I’ll sit still this time while we let the woman die—so you can get your peerage—you’d best think again.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Bryce spoke, his voice mild as milk. “Did I just hear you say what I think I heard you say?”

  If Hopkins wanted to commit professional suicide, accusing his boss of trading a woman’s life for a title of nobility was certainly a rather fine way of doing the job. But at this point, he didn’t care.

  “You heard me quite correctly, sir. We’re not going to throw this woman to the wolves. Not as long as I’m in this service.”

  “Nobody said anything about throwing her to the wolves,” Bryce replied, actually sounding intimidated. “I was merely reminding you that our number one priority must be to contain Byko.”

  “That goes without saying, but I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you that her husband is well aware of her role in this affair and he will be a liability for all of us if we don’t do right by her.”

  “Her husband . . . ?”

  “Is a journalist of some renown. And quite a bit of reach. I’ve got him under control for now, but he’ll need to see results.”

  Bryce exhaled sourly and Hopkins knew he had won the point.

  “We’ll need permission for the SAS to make the hit on Byko,” Bryce conceded. “After that disaster last week, we can’t allow the Uzbeks to derail this train again. I’ll contact the Prime Minister directly. I’m sure a call from the PM to Karimov will sort it out.”

  “Good. RAF transport should have SAS entering Uzbek airspace at 2100 hours Greenwich Mean Time.”

  “Excellent. I’ll join you in the War Room as soon as I’m off the phone with the PM.”

  Hopkins hung up and stared at the screen again. There in front of him was the satellite image of Alisher Byko’s Fergana Valley compound.

  If Byko was in fact still there, then they had him.

  They finally had him.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  What the hell do you mean you can’t find them?” Byko yelled into the phone.

  The security guard at the other end of the line answered nervously, “We can’t get Arman or Victor on the radio and there’s no sign of the Escalade, sir.”

  Byko checked his watch. It had been almost an hour since he’d allowed Charlie to leave with his two men. They should have reached the missile complex by now.

  “What about the surveillance cameras?” Byko demanded.

  “They don’t cover that portion of the road, sir. We thought we would have picked them up on the approach about fifteen minutes ago. That’s when we started radioing to them.”

  “Well have you sent out a patrol?”

  “Of course, sir. So far, we’ve seen nothing, sir, I—”

  “What?” Byko barked impatiently. He could hear the crackle of a radio and voices at the other end of the line.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” his guard said. “Our patrol just found a piece of the Escalade. It looks like it went off the side of the road and tumbled into the river.”

  Byko felt a catch in his breath. “Did you find the car?”

  “Looks like it sank, sir. We can’t tell if anyone made it out.”

  “Keep looking!” Byko hissed. “And send a patrol to the other side of the river.”

  He hung up the phone, mind racing.

  What was it Charlie had said to him?

  “I’m a little in awe of you, Alisher”?

  Had Davis played him? Was it possible he’d somehow managed an escape? But he was handcuffed! It couldn’t be.

  Three minutes later, he got the call. The second patrol had found Arman’s body beneath a pile of rubble at the edge of the river.

  Byko smashed his phone against the wall, beating it until there was nothing left in his hand. He noted with clinical detachment that his knuckles were bleeding profusely then walked swiftly up the stairs into the communications room and grabbed the ancient phone. It was a hard line connecting him to Quinn’s location by a buried cable that had been installed back in the Soviet days. Because it was a simple copper wire buried forty feet belowground, designed to weather a direct nuclear strike, no one on the planet could pluck the signal out of the air, off a satellite, or out of a fiber-optic cable connection running through some NSA outpost in Turkey. It was as secure as secure lines got.

  “Get me Quinn!”

  Byko waited impatiently a few moments before a voice on the other end of the line greeted him. “She’s not going to give us any more,” Quinn said. “Should I go ahead and kill her?”

  “Shut up and listen to me,” Byko carped. “Davis got away.”

  “Away away? Or is he just running around out in the bushes somewhere?”

  “We don’t know. We’re scouring the area but so far there’s no sign of him.”

  “You know the minute that sneaky son of a bitch gets to a phone, he’ll call the American State Department. It’ll take Karimov a couple of hours to deploy an air assault, but that’s not who you have to worry about. Once State calls the NSA, you’ve got about seven minutes before somebody vectors in a satellite.”

  “Bloody hell,” Byko said, all too aware that he’d picked up that expression at Cambridge.

  “We need to get out of here,” Quinn continued. “All of us. Kill the girl, rendezvous at Location Alpha. Everything’s prepared. We’re less than twenty-four hours from—”

  “You say you’re done with her?” Byko prodded.

  There was a brief pause. Byko could tell that Quinn didn’t like being interrupted, but he was paying the man a small fortune and he could scarcely give a shit.

  “She was an errand girl,” Quinn answered. “Bait. Nothing more.”

  “And she knows how much . . . ?”

  “They told her you were up to no good, but never gave her any of the details.”

  Byko hesitated. He had a hard time imagining Julie betraying him and putting herself at such risk without something more.

  “Don’t do anything,” Byko said. “I want to talk to her myself one more time.”

  Byko could hear Quinn’s doubt and disapproval in the silence that hung between them, but he felt no need to offer the hired hand any explanations.

  “I’ll be there in less than an hour,” Byko promised. “We’ll take the tunnels.” He hung up the phone and turned to Homer the tech. “Set the self-destruct protocol.”

  “Yes, sir.” Homer typed rapidly into his keyboard. After a moment a set of red numbers appeared on every screen. In three minutes, all of the computers and video equipment in this room would be destroyed.

  “There’s quite a lot of explosives involved here, Mr. Byko,” the young tech said. “We’d better hurry.”

  Hasan flashed a look at Byko—eliminate hi
m? Byko shook his head; the kid was still useful. For now.

  Thirty seconds later, Byko’s personal Esacalade was tearing through a concrete tunnel that would transport them to the other end of the complex.

  Even if the CIA or MI6 had a satellite watching the compound, they would have no idea that Byko was escaping underground.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Hopkins assessed the faces on his bank of screens: the director of the CIA, top men and women from the FBI, Homeland Security, and the NSA alongside reps from the intelligence agencies of Germany, Sweden, France, Japan and Australia. This was the group that had been working together for months to try to avert Byko’s plot. Now, they were about to hear something that none of them would have expected.

  “I’ve some remarkable news,” Hopkins began. “An asset of our agency has located Byko and we have an SAS team en route to Uzbekistan as we speak. We have TopSat II tasked to Byko’s most recent location and every reason to believe he’s still there.”

  These were stoic people by nature, so their murmurs of approval may as well have been whooping and hollering.

  “As you know,” he continued, “our satellite resources are dwarfed by our American friends. Would it be possible to put a wider-range bird over the location, Eric? It’s rather a sprawling facility.”

  “As soon as you send us the coordinates,” said Eric Nielsen, head of the NSA.

  “Done,” said Hopkins.

  “If I might add my two cents . . .” The face of CIA director Patrick Freehold reappeared on the main screen. “I think we all have implicit confidence in the skills of the SAS. But the U.S. has significant assets in the region. I suspect we could task a team from Kanibadam more quickly.”

  From the very beginning it had been clear that the U.S. resented MI6’s leadership on this. But so far they had been unable to bring anything to the party that would dislodge MI6’s position at the center of the effort to stop Byko.

  “I think not,” Hopkins said evenly. “Special Air Service has been preparing for this operation for weeks and we’ve kept them on standby. Every pump is primed. As I say, they’re already airborne.”

  “I presume,” Freehold pursued, “that you have Uzbek approval for the mission?”

  “They jumped us through those hoops for the abortive mission last week,” Hopkins said breezily. “All we need is the word from Karimov.”

  “If a call from our President would help . . .”

  “Our PM is making that same call as we speak. The matter is very well in hand,” Hopkins said, then moved on to a series of other issues, anticipating what the group would need to do once Byko was in custody and—presumably—giving up actionable intelligence about his operation.

  Hopkins had been immersed in the call for nearly half an hour when it occurred to him that Bryce was taking an unusually long time to get to the meeting. Normally this was the sort of thing he did not like to delegate and nothing pleased him more than having a rare opportunity to outmaneuver the Americans.

  Just as Hopkins began to worry, the red light over the far door blinked on, the door opened and Bryce entered. Hopkins’s relief quickly froze into a lump of ice in the pit of his stomach: Bryce’s face was ashen.

  “Pardon me a moment,” Hopkins said to the screen. He made a slashing motion across his throat, signaling for the comms tech to mute the microphones, then crossed the room to intercept his superior.

  “We can’t bloody reach Karimov,” Bryce said.

  Hopkins frowned. “What do you mean we can’t reach him?”

  “He’s on a hunting trip or something. Falconry, oryxes, some bloody thing in the mountains near Kyrgyzstan. They claim they don’t know his exact location, can’t reach him by phone or radio.”

  Hopkins was appalled. Karimov knew that the Byko situation was at a full boil right now. He should have been waiting by the phone. And now he was hunting? With no radio or phone contact? Paranoid dictators never lose contact with their own levers of power. Never.

  “Bloody hell,” Hopkins said. “Do you want to tell them?”

  Bryce looked at the silent screen in front of the War Room. “You do it, Frank,” he said. “I need to stay in touch with the Foreign Office. We’ll keep banging away of course . . .” He swallowed, his mouth twisting sourly. Then he turned abruptly and left the room.

  Bryce was never there when it came time to dole out bad news.

  Hopkins nodded to the comms tech, then sat back down at the chair in front of the video camera.

  “What’s the good word?” Freehold asked.

  For a moment, Hopkins was so angry he couldn’t even speak. But there was only one way to read this.

  “I’m afraid that Karimov has fucked us.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Charlie ordered a glass of tea and a sandwich from the harelipped waiter, then sat for a moment in a daze. He was in a town just big enough to have one café—a sort of Uzbek version of a convenience store. The tiny mud-brick building had three tables sitting on the dirt courtyard, a few stacks of canned goods, a pile of wrinkly old apples and a very large number of flies. The town was just a dozen miles from Byko’s compound and Charlie had wondered if some of his spies or security force might be in the vicinity. But other than the waiter, Charlie seemed to be alone.

  From the moment he’d found out about Julie’s kidnapping, Charlie had been trying to find some duly constituted authority which would use its power and reach to help him. Now he finally had. So the only thing to do now was wait and pray.

  He took the girl’s pink diamond-studded phone out of his pocket and dialed his house. It rang twice before he realized it would be four in the morning there and he would wake everyone. He hung up and thought about them. What they must be going through. Were they even able to sleep? Was Meagan bounding into their bedroom looking for Mommy and Daddy? He hoped that Becca was sleeping upstairs in his and Julie’s bed, and that she remembered to leave the hall light on, and the bedroom door open, in case Meagan came looking for her, and that Ollie slept with his Curious George curled up next to him.

  He ached to talk to them, to see them, to hold them. But every time he imagined it, the fantasy quickly went sour. Because Julie wasn’t alongside him.

  Charlie looked around at the miserable little town, trying to shake the sinking feeling that it was all going to shit. The village was a cluster of run-down brick buildings and houses that gave way to cotton fields stretching off in all directions. In the distance, a man in traditional Uzbek garb was urging a donkey cart forward, whipping savagely at the swaybacked donkey with a thin stick. But the donkey seemed uninterested—or incapable—of going any faster, the rain of blows nothing more than an exercise in pointless cruelty.

  Charlie didn’t know if it was his hunger—he hadn’t eaten in a day and a half—or the sight of that man beating the innocent animal, but he suddenly felt light-headed. As if everything was spinning.

  And his mind began to taunt him. If everything Hopkins had said was true—that dirty bombs were going to be set off in locations across the world—then far too much was at stake for MI6 to place Julie’s life anywhere near the top of their priority list. If an SAS team happened to hit the location where Julie was, they would undoubtedly do their best to save her, but what if Byko had already moved her? Or if they were in separate locations? Would MI6 really split the SAS team in two? When push came to shove, no matter what Charlie had threatened, would they really beat the bushes to find out where Julie was?

  Charlie didn’t like the answers to any of these questions and he couldn’t help thinking about some of the accusations that had been hurled at him recently. Both Byko and Faruz had made essentially the same point—that Charlie was a self-serving coward who had cut and run when the going got tough, retreating to the easy shelter and security of America.

  There were many times, back in Los Angeles, especially in those first couple of years, when Charlie had thought about Palonchi Ursalov and her sons, and all of those demonstrators i
n the Square, and he’d beaten himself up pretty nicely for giving up on them. But as time went on, he’d been able to push away that guilt, to focus on his new life and his new family. He’d told himself he was entitled to have that life, that God hadn’t put him on the earth to liberate Uzbekistan, that it was a kind of hubris to even contemplate taking on all of that.

  But now that he was back here, he had to face it. The man who had been standing in his shoes the last six years was a scared man, a reactive man, a man just trying to survive.

  Charlie picked up the phone and made a call.

  “Garman,” he said, “it’s me.”

  “Charlie!” The mercenary sounded enormously relieved—and a bit surprised. “You made it! Damn, I was worried about you.”

  Charlie gave Garman a quick update about what had happened at the bathhouse, along with a thumbnail account of his escape and his conversation with Hopkins detailing Julie’s role as bait in the blown takedown.

  “Holy shit!” Garman said. “That finally makes sense. I had heard that Byko came out of hiding. I couldn’t figure why. Of course, the Uzbeks blew it.”

  “The Uzbeks?”

  “The famous Twenty-seventh Air Assault Brigade. The Brits must have had to defer to them. It being their home turf and all.”

  That made sense and actually made Charlie feel a bit better about the competence of Hopkins and his people.

  “Anyway,” Charlie said, “the main thing is that MI6 is on the job now.” He hesitated for a moment, waiting to see if Garman would comment. “How long do you think it’ll take for an SAS team to get to her?”

  “Depends where they’re deploying from. Let’s say they’re flying from Hereford on a C-17—that’s a cargo jet that cruises at about four hundred and fifty knots—you’re talking six hours absolute minimum. If they’re coming from Afghanistan, on the other hand, they could be there in a couple of hours. But the real delay is likely to come from the Uzbek bureaucracy.”

  Charlie thought about it. If there was even a shred of plausibility to Karimov’s posture as one of the West’s biggest allies in the war on terror, surely he would be waiting by the phone right now, looking to give MI6 all the help he could.