Samarkand Hijack

He hesitated in the doorway to the hall, but there was no sign of his mother coming out. It was probably only one of those political canvassers in any case, and Martin enjoyed telling them what he had once heard his father say: ‘A secret ballot should be just that!’

He walked towards the door, noticing the shadow through the leaded glass, and pulled it open.

Almost immediately a foot pushed it back, and Martin himself was propelled backwards into the hall. He had a momentary glimpse of a helmeted figure silhouetted against the starry sky, before something flew over his head and exploded into flames in the hall behind him.

It all happened so fast. ‘Burn, you Paki bastards!’ The words seemed to echo down the street as the attacker scrambled back down the path and disappeared into the darkness. Martin turned to find a sheet of flame where his mother’s wall hangings from home had been, and fire already spreading up the carpeted stairway. Then a sudden draught fanned the flames and he heard her scream.

He started forward, but the heat from the flames threw him back, the smell of singed hair in his nostrils. His mind told him his mother could get out of the window into the back garden, while his heart told him she needed him. But now the flames were forcing him back towards the front door, and he knew that to try to run through them would be suicide.

He backed into the front garden, and then spun round and raced next door, where he banged the polished iron knocker like a madman.

‘What the blazes…?’ Mr Castle said as he opened the door.

‘There’s a fire!’ Martin screamed at him. ‘Our house is on fire! Mum’s inside!’

Mr Castle advanced two steps down the path and saw the light from the flames dancing in the porch. ‘I’ll ring 999,’ he said, and disappeared back inside, leaving Martin in a paroxysm of indecision.

Then inspiration struck. He ran back out to the street, past their house and the other neighbour’s, to where the passage ran through to the allotments. At the end of his own garden he clambered over the rickety fence and ran to the back of the burning house. The kitchen door was closed, and so was the back room window. Inside there was nothing but fire.

In later years, the rest of the evening would come to seem like a blurred sequence of images – the sirens of the fire engines, the people gathered in the street, his father, brother and sister coming home, the policemen with their bored expressions and stupid questions. But that moment alone in the darkened garden would never lose its sharpness, with the windows full of flames and the dreadful truth they told.

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They were standing on a dry, broken slope. There were no fragments of masonry to be seen, no shards of tile or pottery, but the configuration of the land, the angular ditches and the flattened hillocks all suggested human occupation.

‘This was the southern end of the original Afrasiab,’ Nasruddin Salih told the tour party, ‘which became Maracanda and eventually Samarkand. It was razed to the ground in 1220 by the army of Genghis Khan. Only a quarter of the population, about a hundred thousand people, survived. It was another one and a half centuries before Tamerlane revived the city and made it the centre of his empire. These buildings here’ – Nasruddin indicated the line of domed mausoleums which gracefully climbed the desolate hillside – ‘were probably the finest architectural achievement of Tamerlane’s time.’

‘Bloody incredible,’ Mike Copley murmured, holding up his exposure meter.

It was, Jamie Docherty thought. The blue domes rose out of the yellow-brown hill like articles of faith, like offerings to God which the donors knew were too beautiful to be refused.

‘“Shah-i-Zinda” means “The Living King”,’ Nasruddin was explaining. ‘This complex was built by Tamerlane to honour Qutham ibn Abbas, who was a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, and one of the men most responsible for bringing Islam to this area. He was praying in a shady spot on this hill when a group of Zoroastrians attacked and beheaded him. Qutham finished his prayer’ – Nasruddin acknowledged the laughter with a slight smile – ‘picked up his head and jumped into a nearby well. He has lived there ever since, ready to defend Islam against its enemies.’

The guide smiled again, but there was something else in his expression, something which Docherty had noticed several times that morning. The British-born Pakistani had been with them since their departure from Heathrow six days before, and for the first few days of the tour had seemed all affability. But over the last twenty-four hours he had seemed increasingly under some sort of strain.

The tour party was moving away, down the path which led to the Shah-i-Zinda’s entrance gate. As usual, Charles Ogley was talking to – or rather at – Nasruddin. Probably telling the guide he’d made yet another historical mistake, Docherty thought sourly. The lecturer from Leeds seemed unable to last an hour without correcting someone about something. His lecturer wife Elizabeth was the most frequent recipient of such helpfulness, but seemed to thrive on it, using it to feed some reservoir of bitterness within her soul. They were not an attractive couple, Docherty had decided before the tour’s first day had ended. Fortunately they were the only two members of the party for whom he felt any dislike.

He banished the Ogleys from his mind, and focused his attention on the magical panorama laid out before him.

‘I think you take photographs with your eyes,’ his wife said, taking an arm and breaking into his reverie.

‘Aye,’ Docherty agreed. ‘It saves on film.’

Isabel smiled at the idea, and for the hundredth time felt pleased that they had come on this trip. She was enjoying it enormously herself, particularly since phoning the children and setting her mind at rest the night before. And he was loving it.

They caught up with the rest of the party at the foot of the hill, and waited by the archway which marked the entrance to the complex of buildings while Nasruddin arranged their collective ticket with the man in the booth. Then, their guide in the lead, the party started climbing the thirty-six steps which led up past one double-domed mausoleum towards the entrance gate of another.

‘This is called the “Stairway to Heaven”,’ Nasruddin said. ‘Pilgrims count each step, and if they lose count they have to start again at the bottom. Otherwise they won’t go to heaven.’

‘I wonder if this is where Led Zeppelin got the song title from,’ Mike Copley mused out loud.

‘Idiot,’ his wife Sharon said.

At the top of the stairway they passed through an archway and into the sunken alley which ran along between the mausoleums. Here the restoration work seemed to be only just beginning, and the domes were bare of tiles, the walls patchy, with swathes of mosaic giving way to expanses of underlying buff-coloured brick. At the end of the alley they gathered around the intricately carved elm door of Qutham’s shrine, and Nasruddin pointed out where the craftsman had signed his name and written the year, 1405. Inside, the Muslim saint’s multi-tiered cenotaph was a riot of floral and geometric design.

Docherty stood staring at it for several minutes, wondering why he always felt so moved by Islamic architecture. He had first fallen in love with the domes and mosaics in Oman, where he had served with the SAS during the latter years of the Dhofar rebellion. A near-fluency in Arabic had been one legacy of that experience, and in succeeding years he had managed to visit Morocco and Egypt. His final mission for the SAS, undertaken in the first weeks of the previous year, had taken him to Bosnia, and the wanton destruction of the country’s Islamic heritage had been one of several reasons offered by that war for giving up on the human race altogether.

Not to worry, he thought. After all, Qutham was down there in his well taking care of business.

He looked up to find that, once again, the tour party had left him behind. Docherty smiled to himself and walked back out into the shadowed courtyard, from where he could see the rest of the party strolling away down the sunken alley. Isabel, her black hair shining in the sun above the bright red dress, was talking to Sam Jennings. The silver-haired American didn’t walk that gracefully, but at seventy-five his mind was as young as anyone’s in the tour party. Both Docherty and Isabel had taken a liking to him and his wife Alice from the first day.

Their small bus was waiting for them outside the entrance. It had six double seats on one side, six single on the other, and a four-person seat at the back. Despite there being only fourteen in the party – fifteen counting Nasruddin – the four Bradford Pakistanis usually sat in a tightly bunched row on the rear seat, as if fearful of being contaminated by their infidel companions. This time though, one of the two boys – Imran, he thought – was sitting with Sarah Holcroft. Or Sarah Jones, to use the name she had adopted for this trip.

Docherty wondered if Imran had recognised her as the British Foreign Minister’s daughter. He hadn’t himself, though the girl had made no attempt to disguise her appearance, and her picture had been in the papers often enough. Isabel had, and so, if their behaviour was anything to go by, had both the Copleys and the Ogleys.

Brenda Walker, the social worker who usually sat with Sarah, was now sitting directly behind her. Docherty had his suspicions about Brenda, and very much doubted whether she was the social worker she claimed to be. He had come into fairly frequent contact with the intelligence services during his years in the army, and thought he knew an official minder when he saw one. But he hadn’t said anything to anyone else, not even Isabel. He might be wrong, and in any case, why spoil the generally good atmosphere that existed within the touring party? He wasn’t even sure whether Sarah herself was aware of her room-mate’s real identity.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Isabel asked, leaning forward from her seat directly behind his, and putting her chin on his shoulder.

‘Never better,’ he said. ‘We seem to go from one wonder of the world to another.’

The driver started the bus, and they were soon driving back through the old city, up Tashkent Street and past the ruined Bibi Khanum mosque and the Registan assemblage of madrasahs, or Muslim colleges, both of which they had visited the previous afternoon. It was almost half-past twelve when they reached the cool lobby of the Hotel Samarkand. ‘Lunch will be in five minutes,’ Nasruddin told them, ‘and we shall be leaving for Shakhrisabz at one-thirty.’

While Isabel went up to their room Docherty bought a stamp and postcard from the post office on the ground floor and then took another look at the Afghan carpets in the hotel shop. They weren’t quite attractive enough to overcome his lifetime’s hatred of having something to carry.

In the largely empty dining-room fourteen places had been set on either side of a single long table. The four Bradford Pakistanis had already claimed the four seats at one end: as usual they were keeping as separate as civility allowed. The two older men flashed polite smiles at Docherty as he sat down in the middle of the other empty places.

On the first day he had made an effort to talk to them, and discovered that the two older men were brothers, the two younger ones their respective sons. Zahid was the family name, and the elder brother, Ali Zahid, was a priest, a mullah, attached to a mosque in Bradford. The younger brother, Nawaz, was a businessman of unspecified type, which perhaps accounted for the greater proportion of grey in his hair.

Ali’s son Imran and Nawaz’s son Javid were both about seventeen. Unlike their fathers they wore Western dress and spoke primarily in Yorkshire-accented English, at least with each other and the other members of the party. Both were strikingly good-looking, and the uneasy blend of respect and rebelliousness which characterized their relationship with their fathers reminded Docherty of his childhood in working-class Glasgow, way back in the fifties.

The two academics were the next to arrive, and took opposing seats at the other end of the table from the Zahids, without acknowledging either their or Docherty’s presence. The Ogleys had really fallen on hard times, Docherty thought. They had probably expected a party full of fellow academics, or at the very least fellow-members of the middle class. Instead they had found four Pakistanis, a Glaswegian ex-soldier and his Argentinian wife, a builder and his wife, and a bluntly spoken female social worker with a northern accent. Their only class allies turned out to be a cabinet minister’s daughter known for her sex and drug escapades, and elderly Americans who, it soon transpired, were veterans of the peace movement. The Ogleys, not surprisingly, had developed a bunker mentality by day two of the Central Asian Tours ‘Blue Domes’ package holiday.

Isabel came in next, now wearing a white T-shirt and baggy trousers. She was accompanied by Brenda Walker and Sarah Holcroft. The first had changed into a dress for the first time, and her attractively pugnacious face seemed somehow softened by the experience. The second had swept back her blonde hair, and fastened it with an elasticated circle of blue velvet at the nape of her neck. Even next to Isabel she looked lovely, Docherty thought. On grounds of political prejudice he had been more than ready to dislike a Tory cabinet minister’s daughter, but instead had found himself grudgingly taking a liking to the girl. And with a father like hers, Docherty supposed, anyone would need a few years of letting off steam.

The two Americans arrived at the same time as the soup. Sam Jennings was a retired doctor from a college town in upstate New York, and his wife Alice had had her hands full for thirty-five years raising their eleven children. The couple now had twenty-six grandchildren, and a continuing hunger for life which Docherty found wonderful. He had met a lot of Americans over the years, but these were definitely the nicest: they seemed to reflect the America of the movies – warm, generous, idealistic – rather than the real thing.

As usual, the Copleys were the last to arrive. Sharon had changed into a green backless dress, but Mike was still wearing the long shorts and baseball hat which made him look like an American in search of a barbecue. With his designer stubble head, goatee beard, stud earrings and permanently attached camera, he had not immediately endeared himself to Docherty, but here too first impressions had proved a worthless guide. The builder might seem like an English yobbo who had strayed abroad by accident, but he had a smile and a kind word for everyone, and of all the party he was the most at ease when it came to talking with the locals, be they wizened women or street urchins. He had a wide-eyed approach to the world which was not that common among men in their late thirties. And he was funny too.

For most of the time his wife seemed content to exist in his shadow. Isabel had talked with her about their respective children, and thought her nice enough, but Sharon Copley, unlike her husband, had rarely volunteered any opinions in Docherty’s hearing. The only thing he knew for certain about her was that she had brought three suitcases on the trip, which seemed more than a trifle excessive.

After announcing an hour’s break for lunch, Nasruddin Salih had slipped back out of the hotel, turned left outside the doors and walked swiftly up the narrow street towards the roundabout which marked the northern end of Maxim Gorky Boulevard. A couple of hundred metres down the wide avenue, in the twenty-metre-wide strip of park which ran between its two lanes, he reached the bank of four public telephones.

The two at either end were in use, one by a blonde Russian woman in jeans and T-shirt, the other by an Uzbek man in a white shirt and a tyubeteyka embroidered skullcap. In the adjoining children’s play area two Tajik children were contesting possession of a ball with their volume controls set on maximum.

Nasruddin walked a few more metres past the telephones and sat down on a convenient bench to wait. He was sweating profusely, he realized, and maybe not just from the heat. Still, it was hot, and more than once that morning he had envied Mike Copley his ridiculous shorts.

The Uzbek had finished his call. Nasruddin got up and walked swiftly across to the available phone. The Russian woman was telling someone about an experience the night before, alternating breathless revelations with peals of laughter. These people had no sense of shame, Nasruddin thought.