Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  “Where are they going?” Hopkins asked someone in the room.

  Charlie couldn’t hear an answer.

  “Map, please,” Hopkins said.

  Charlie heard a muffled shout by a female voice. “He’s making a break for it! Holy Christ, he’s heading for . . .” But Charlie couldn’t make out the destination.

  “What’s going on?” Charlie asked. “Where’s he taking her?”

  “They’re on the A376,” Hopkins said. “They’re heading for Tajikistan.”

  In a flash, Charlie knew where they were going. “There’s a town there,” he told Hopkins. “An old town just over the border that Byko’s father used to own. I think there may even be a landing strip and a couple of planes.”

  “Yes, yes, we know it,” Hopkins replied. “Just east of Kokon on the A386 . . .” He paused, presumably studying a map. “Konibodom.”

  “That’s the one,” Charlie said.

  “Look, we’ve got an entire company of SAS lads en route to Uzbekistan. We’ll simply re-task them to Tajikistan and set up an ambush. We’ll take him down the moment he crosses the border. I can’t tell you how grateful we are to you, Mr. Davis. But I really must get back to work. I’ll call you the moment we have Julie in hand.”

  And the line went dead.

  Charlie stared at his phone for a long moment. The screen winked off and he gazed into the semidarkness, feeling oddly numb. The sky was growing black now and the wind bit into his skin. Salim sat on a curb a few feet away, resting his wounded leg, his clothes rattling and rustling in the frigid breeze.

  Charlie should have felt encouraged. This was what he’d wanted all along. But when he thought about the reality of a military ambush on Byko’s heavily armed contingent . . .

  Charlie had seen Byko up close and there was simply no way that he would allow himself to be taken alive. And Quinn, those mercenaries—he just didn’t see them throwing up their hands and walking placidly toward a lifetime in prison.

  How could Julie avoid getting caught in the cross fire? How would an SAS team possibly protect her?

  The answer was . . . they couldn’t.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Charlie drove in silence for almost an hour, first down the dirt road from the command center, then on the highway. He was exhausted and famished and despondent. And Salim seemed to recognize it.

  “Would you like me to drive?” the kid asked.

  Charlie slowed and pulled off onto the dark shoulder of the road. Uzbek highways were never that busy, but at this time of night there was not a single headlight in view. As Charlie got out of the car and leaned against the trunk, he realized he had been driving aimlessly down the highway, no particular destination in mind. He pulled out his phone, not expecting to find any signal available. To his surprise, the screen showed three bars.

  Charlie dialed home. Becca answered.

  “Hello?”

  “I lost her,” Charlie said. “I was so close. But I lost her.”

  “Oh, Charlie . . .” Becca’s voice was thin, distant. “Is she . . . ?”

  “No. But it doesn’t look good. I know I shouldn’t be telling you that, I . . .” He didn’t know what to say or why he was saying it to her. “She’s the only woman I ever loved.”

  He could hear Becca crying, then manage to gather herself. “She loves you, Charlie. No matter what happened . . . you know she loves you.”

  He stared out into the blackness. He supposed he was parked at the edge of a cotton field, but there was no way to know for sure. No moon, no street lamps, not a farmhouse or a car in sight. Just utter darkness. He had never felt so alone, so empty, so defeated.

  In the background Charlie heard Meagan’s joyful voice. “Daddy! Daddy! Is that Daddy? I wanna talk to Daddy!”

  The sound of her voice cut through Charlie’s despair. “Put her on,” he said.

  “Hi!” Meagan shouted.

  Charlie wiped his face with the back of his arm and tried to steady his voice. “Hey, sweetheart.”

  “Are you coming home soon?”

  Charlie’s heart felt like it would wrench itself out of his chest. “Yeah, sweetie, I am. Real soon.”

  “We’re having a cake tomorrow. For Ollie’s birthday.”

  Ollie’s birthday. Jesus, he’d almost forgotten. It seemed like something from another life. “I know. I’m going to try to make it home for that . . . I’m really gonna . . .” Charlie’s voice trailed off.

  As he stared out into the blackness, something struck him. He stood and looked at Salim, standing there on his one good leg, leaning against the driver’s side of the car.

  “Daddy?”

  “Sweetheart, I gotta go,” Charlie said, his voice suddenly urgent. “I gotta call you back later, okay? I love you. Tell Ollie I love him, too.”

  “Bye!” Meagan’s voice was cheerfully oblivious.

  Charlie came around the car, close to Salim. “The rally in Andijan—who organized it?”

  Salim shrugged. “Nobody knows. The word just spread.”

  That was exactly the answer Charlie wanted to hear.

  Something had been tugging at his mind. It was what Byko had said to him on the phone a few hours ago.

  Always with the squares. It seems that is our destiny.

  Charlie reached past Salim and opened the car door. “I’m driving.” He hopped in and fired up the motor as Salim circled around and got back in the passenger seat. Charlie thumbed Hopkins’s number as he pulled onto the highway again.

  “Hopkins!” Charlie could hear a loud engine whine in the background. It sounded as though Hopkins was inside a chopper.

  “What is it?” Hopkins had to shout to be heard over the sound of the engine.

  “There’s going to be a major demonstration in Andijan tomorrow. Commemorating the massacre.”

  “And?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence. Byko’s going to be there!”

  “No, Mr. Davis, he’s not. I already told you—”

  “Listen! It doesn’t make sense. It’s been six years and there’s never been any kind of ceremony. Not so much as a couple of old ladies lighting candles. I’m telling you, Byko organized this demonstration himself. And that’s why he’s keeping Julie alive. He wants to take her there. To show her. So everything comes full circle in some way.”

  “Maybe he did organize it, Mr. Davis. Maybe he even intended being there. But now you’ve been chasing him around the country, his cover’s blown—he’s going underground.”

  “And you’re sure it was him on the satellite?”

  “We’re tracking his every move. He’s still heading straight for Tajikistan and I’m going to be there personally to supervise the SAS ambush. I promise you, if Julie is there, I’ll do everything I can to make sure she walks away safely.” The jet engine was rising in pitch. “Now do yourself a favor. Get to the capital, sit tight and wait to hear from us. I have to go now.”

  The phone clicked.

  Salim looked at Charlie as a road sign swam up in front of them.

  Tashkent 130 km

  Get to the capital, sit tight.

  Charlie had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. After all of this, was he really going to check into the Radisson and wait to hear from Hopkins?

  He thought of everything that had happened in Andijan six years ago, everything that he’d been through, how much of his life had been structured as a reaction to the tragedy there.

  Tashkent: 130 kilometers.

  Safety.

  No, Charlie heard himself say. Some things are written.

  One way or another, he had to return to Andijan.

  Charlie blew past the exit for Tashkent and pressed his foot to the accelerator. If he drove straight through, they would be at the rally by sunrise.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Julie sat in the backseat next to Quinn, hands manacled behind her, feet bound to hooks in the floor. There was no way to struggle and nothing to do but try to figure out where they w
ere headed. She gazed out the window, hoping she might be able to see a street sign or something in the landscape that might give her a clue. She could tell they were speeding down a highway, but the rest was a blur.

  “Where are we going?” she asked Quinn.

  “Where do you think?” he replied.

  “It’s not like I can do anything to hurt you with that information.”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said. “You’re pretty cunning.”

  “Are we headed for the border?”

  “That would be a logical idea.”

  “Tajikistan or Kazakhstan?”

  “Hmmm . . . what makes you think I even know?”

  He smiled with that malevolent glint in his eye, toying with her.

  The idea of vengeance had always seemed anathema to Julie, a reductive idea that only perpetuated a cycle of violence that still enslaved half the world. But sitting here now, staring at this horror of a man, she found herself yearning for the chance—one chance—to bludgeon him to death. Or better yet, to within an inch of his life. Then maybe to pour gasoline all over his wounded body and stand over him with a match. Yes, that might be something. To watch him writhe in agony, begging to be spared.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Quinn baited.

  “Oh,” Julie said, “maybe I’ll tell you some other time.” She opted for another tack. “Alisher! Alisher!”

  The tinted window divider lowered and Byko stared at her from the front seat.

  “You’re not being a very gracious host,” she said. “The least you could do is tell me where we’re going.”

  “You haven’t asked me why,” he said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why I am doing all of this.”

  “Well, go ahead then. Enlighten me.”

  “After you left—after Andijan—all the politicians from the West came out with those sanctimonious faces. You remember . . . ? The ‘shock’ and ‘horror’ as they declared: ‘There must be progress on human rights in Uzbekistan.’ For years they had been saying this while they casually turned a blind eye to the regime. But this time, Karimov was on the defensive. He tells the U.S.: ‘You don’t like how I do things, sorry, no more military base.’ And he kicks them out.

  “So what does the almighty USA do? Well, their multinational corporations need our resources, the military needs that base on the Afghan border, so . . . they come groveling back to Karimov. America leads and then here comes England and Germany, Australia and Japan—and soon they all begin to trade again, as though nothing at all had happened. The gold, the cotton, the oil . . . this is what they care about. Not the people. Only what they can buy and sell. And your media? The humanitarians like your beloved Charlie?” His lips curled into a bitter smile. “Of course, your media forgets about us entirely.”

  Byko was leaning over the seat, as though by his sheer physical effort he could convince her of his point and she realized that he wasn’t really talking to her but to some idea of her, some idealized, invented Julie who had betrayed him.

  “So now Karimov knows for sure: he can trade our resources and land for the silence of the West. He can do anything he likes to quiet us—there will be no limits, no consequences for his actions. In fact, America and Britain declare Uzbekistan a ‘close ally’ in the war on terror. Your security agencies even lend a hand, helping us to root out extremists in our country. ‘Extremist,’ of course, is a code word

  for anybody who doesn’t do precisely what Karimov tells them to do.”

  Julie was no stranger to this argument. It was the same thing every liberal-minded person who knew anything about Uzbekistan said. But it didn’t exactly give Byko an excuse to blow up thousands of people. And after all of the lying and begging, obfuscating and cajoling she’d done with him, she couldn’t take it anymore. So she finally let it rip . . .

  “You think you’re the only one who’s felt pain? You think this is what Daniella would have wanted you to do? Kill thousands of innocent people? You disgrace her name, you disgrace your son’s name!”

  Byko’s eyes burned. “Listen to me!” he said.

  “No!” she cried. “I don’t want to listen to one more word from you!”

  “Listen.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I told you about my sister being tortured . . . how she came home and killed herself . . . ? What I never told you was that the CIA was at Jaslyk. CIA was leading the interrogation.”

  Julie’s eyes met Byko’s. Guys like Quinn didn’t appear in a vacuum. Guys like Quinn became who they were because the CIA manufactured them. But maybe Byko had just heard some spurious rumor and chose to believe it because it justified his insanity.

  “And MI6,” he continued, “your MI6—well, my dear, it turns out they are the ones who tipped off Karimov about the rally in Andijan six years ago.”

  “Who told you that?” She flashed a hateful look at Quinn. “Him?”

  “You don’t believe it? How do you think Karimov had so many soldiers ready?”

  Her mind was racing. And it had always needled her. How had so many soldiers and choppers and armored personnel carriers converged on Andijan so quickly? Even if they’d been tipped off by Karimov’s secret police, there was only a small military garrison in Andijan. The rest had to have come from someplace miles and miles away. And it wasn’t as if the Uzbek military was the most efficient organization in the world. . . .

  She looked at Byko and knew he could read what was going through her mind. Her own bearings were vulnerable now. But maybe if she could acknowledge his point of view, meet him halfway, it would give her some credibility to penetrate him.

  “Even if it’s true, Alisher, it doesn’t justify what you’re doing.”

  Byko had turned all the way around in his seat, his left arm gripping the headrest as though he wanted to strangle it, his eyes looking through her into his own private horror. “I saw her body,” he whispered. “I saw what they did to my beautiful little sister.”

  “Then think of her,” Julie said. “Think of what she would have wanted. Not this. Not this, Alisher.”

  For a long moment, he held her gaze. Then the tinted window rose with a soft whine and he disappeared.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Hopkins stamped in the cold to keep his feet warm. He was standing outside an abandoned farmhouse overlooking the virtually deserted A377 highway, just over the border in Tajikistan. The sun was beginning to paint the horizon, but it had done nothing yet to cut the chill.

  Two companies of SAS soldiers were now set up to interdict Alisher Byko’s convoy, which had been racing toward the border for the last seven hours. Hopkins had been an infantry officer before joining MI6, but he was making no attempt to give “helpful” tips to the SAS. They were the best in the world at what they did. All he needed to do was tell them to stop the convoy and capture Byko and that’s what they would do.

  “Eighteen minutes,” one of the SAS men said into his microphone.

  The convoy was being tracked by satellite—U.S. and UK—just to make sure no one lost them. A sortie of American F-22s lurked over the horizon in case close air support was required. Hopkins was monitoring the convoy on his laptop.

  At the window, a half-dozen snipers were busy stuffing bits of foliage into the mottled fabric of their ghillie suits while a platoon of paras jogged toward the road. A large tractor-trailer was pulled round on the shoulder of the A377. In another two and a half minutes, it would back out onto the road, mimicking a jacknifed truck and cutting off the highway.

  Byko’s convoy would slow at the sight of it and the SAS lads would pounce.

  Gordon Bryce was monitoring the op from the command center at the Puzzle Palace, adding his two cents by radio when necessary. The last time he had given instructions, though, the SAS commander, a Major Rowbotham, had gotten unnecessarily testy, something to the effect that he ought to “bloody well piss off until the professionals have bloody well done their job.”

  Just as well—he had better things to do
than hand-hold some gun-toting prima donna in Uzbekistan. He’d been on the phone almost constantly since two o’clock in the morning, riding point on the dissemination of information to the various parties who were threatened by Byko’s plan. In fact, he’d had a rather long conversation with the PM himself, briefing him again on the specifics of the threat.

  The information that had come from Charlie Davis had yielded some serious results—arrests in Copenhagen, Vienna, Sydney and London (including a raid on a warehouse in the East End where they’d recovered some of the uranium), but all of the captured men seemed to be at the lower levels of their respective terrorist organizations. By all accounts, the bombers were still out there and the intelligence agencies were no closer to finding them. The one piece of intel that gave everyone hope was this: under interrogation, each captured man had insisted the same thing. That everyone in their organizations was still in the dark about the targets and that Byko was intending to wait until the last possible moment to disseminate those targets to the bombers. Which meant that capturing Byko had the utmost importance. If they could get to Byko before the targets were given out, it seemed clear that there was no backup plan, that the cells would be standing by with no instructions and that the bombings would in fact not occur.

  “Put the SO feed on,” Bryce said to Wilson, a doughy-faced comms tech.

  The young tech flipped some buttons, toggling over to one of the dozens of tiny screens on the wall, and the satellite view of Uzbekistan disappeared.

  Now the main screen showed hundreds of uniformed police, tactical officers and plainclothes SO detectives gathered in a warehouse for a briefing. At a lectern stood London’s Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Craille, along with the commander of Special Operations and various other police functionaries. The briefing had begun a few minutes earlier and the police commissioner, a long-faced man with white hair, was in midsentence: “ . . . suffice it to say that we are to be on the highest alert. All leave is canceled and every available officer will be assigned to protect all the usual sensitive targets. Due to the lack of specificity of our intelligence we must prepare for the possibility that the attack could come from anywhere at any time.”