Samarkand Hijack

‘That doesn’t make them very unusual,’ she said, putting her eyes to the window. ‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’

‘Somewhere remote.’ Docherty was watching Nasruddin out of the corner of his eye, thinking that he would never have suspected the man of pulling a stunt like this. He suddenly remembered something his friend Liam had said the last time he’d seen him, that the more desperate the times, the harder it was to recognize desperation.

He turned his attention back to his wife’s question. They seemed to be travelling mostly uphill, and the road was nowhere near as smooth as they were used to. He tried to remember the map of Central Asia he had examined before the trip, but the details had slipped from his mind. There were mountains to the east of the desert, and Chinese desert to the east of the mountains. Which wasn’t very helpful.

He thought about leaning across the aisle and asking to borrow Mike Copley’s guide book, but decided that would only draw attention to its existence and his own curiosity. Better to wait until they reached their destination, wherever that might be.

He turned round to look at Isabel, and found her angrily wiping away a tear. ‘I was just thinking about the children,’ she said defiantly.

He took her hand and grasped it tightly. ‘It’s going to work out OK,’ he said. ‘We’re going to grow old together.’

She smiled in spite of herself. ‘I hope so.’

Diq Sayriddin plucked a group of sour cherries from the branch above the kravat, and shared them out between the juice-stained hands of his friends. ‘I have to go inside for a while,’ he told them.

It was fifty-five minutes since he had received the call from Shakhrisabz at the public telephone in Registan Street. Nasruddin had expected him to make his own call from there, but somehow the place seemed too exposed. He had decided to use his initiative instead.

Sayriddin passed through the family house and out the back, climbed over the wall and walked swiftly down the alley which led to Tashkent Street. His father, as always, was sitting outside the shop in the shade, more interested in talking with the other shopkeepers than worrying about prospective customers. Sayriddin slipped round the side of the building and let himself in through the back door.

The whole building was empty – no one stayed indoors at this hour of the day – and the office was more or less soundproof, but just to be on the safe side he wedged the door shut with a heavy roll of carpet. Exactly an hour had now gone by since the call from Talib – it was time to make his own.

He pulled the piece of paper with the number, name and message typed on it from his back pocket, smoothed it out and placed it on the desk beside the telephone. He felt more excited than nervous, but perhaps they were the same thing.

After listening for several seconds to make sure he was alone, he picked up the receiver and dialled the Tashkent number. It rang once, twice, three times…

‘Hello,’ an irritable voice said.

‘I must speak with Colonel Muratov,’ Sayriddin said. His voice didn’t sound as nervous as he had expected it would.

‘This is Muratov. Who are you?’

‘I have a message for you…’ Sayriddin began.

‘Who are you?’ Muratov repeated.

‘I cannot say. I have a message, that is all. It is important,’ he added, fearful that the National Security Service chief would hang up.

There was a moment’s silence at the other end, followed by what sounded like a woman speaking angrily.

‘What is this message?’ Muratov asked, almost sarcastically.

‘The Trumpet of God group…’ Sayriddin began reading.

‘The what?!’

‘The Trumpet of God group has seized a party of Western tourists in Samarkand,’ Sayriddin said, the words tumbling out in a single breath. ‘They were with the “Blue Domes” tour, staying at the Hotel Samarkand. There are twelve English and two Americans among the hostages…’

Muratov listened, wondering whether this was a hoax, or simply one of his own men winding him up. Or maybe even one of the Russians who had been jettisoned when the KGB became the NSS. It didn’t sound like a Russian though, or a hoax.

‘Who the fuck are The Trumpet of God?’ he asked belligerently.

‘I cannot answer questions,’ Sayriddin said. ‘There is only the message.’

‘OK, give me the message,’ Muratov said. Who did the bastard think he was – Muhammad?

‘There are eight men and six women,’ Sayriddin continued. ‘All will be released unharmed if our demands are met. These will be relayed to you, on this number, at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Finally, The Trumpet of God does not wish this matter publicized. Nor, it believes, will the government. News of a tourist hijacking will do damage to the country’s tourist industry, and probably result in the cancellation of the Anglo-American development deal’ – Sayriddin stumbled over this phrase and repeated it – ‘the Anglo-American development deal…which is due to be signed by the various Foreign Ministers this coming Saturday…’

Whoever the bastards were, Muratov thought, they were certainly well informed. And the man at the other end of the line was probably exactly what he claimed to be, just a messenger.

‘Is that all clear?’ Sayriddin asked.

‘Yes,’ Muratov agreed. ‘How did you get my private number?’ he asked innocently. His answer was the click of disconnection.

In the office of the carpet shop Sayriddin was also wondering how Nasruddin had got hold of such a number. But his second cousin was a resourceful man.

He placed the roll of carpet back up against the wall, and let himself out through the back door.

In the apartment on what had, until recently, been Leningrad Street, Bakhtar Muratov sat for a moment on the side of the bed, replaying in his mind what he had just heard. He was a tall man for an Uzbek, broadly built with dark eyes under greying hair, and a mat of darker hair across his chest and abdomen. He was naked.

His latest girlfriend had also been undressed when the phone first rang, but now she emerged from the adjoining bathroom wearing tights and high-heeled shoes.

‘I’m going,’ she said, as if expecting him to demand that she stay.

‘Good,’ he said, not even bothering to look round. ‘I have business to deal with.’

‘When will I see you again?’ she asked.

He turned his head to look at her. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. Why did he always lust after women whose tits were bigger than their brains? he asked himself. ‘Now get dressed,’ he told her, and reached for his discarded clothes.

Once she had left he walked downstairs, and out along the temporarily nameless street to the NSS building a hundred metres further down. The socialist slogan above the door was still in place, either because no one dared take it down or because it was so much a part of the façade that no one else noticed it any more.

Muratov walked quickly up the stairs to his office on the first floor and closed the door behind him. He looked up the number of the Samarkand bureau chief and dialled it, then sat back, his eyes on the picture of Yakov Peters which hung on the wall he was facing.

‘Samarkand NSS,’ a voice answered.

‘This is Muratov in Tashkent. I want to speak to Colonel Zhakidov.’

‘He has gone home, sir.’

‘When?’

‘About ten minutes ago,’ the Samarkand man said tentatively.

The bastard took the afternoon off, Muratov guessed. ‘I want him to call me at this number’ – he read it out slowly – ‘within the next half hour.’

He hung up the phone and locked eyes with the portrait on the wall once more. Yakov Peters had been Dzerzhinsky’s number two in Leningrad during the revolution, just as idealistic, and just as ruthless. Lenin had sent him to Tashkent in 1921 to solidify the Bolsheviks’ control of Central Asia, and he had done so, from this very office.

If Peters had been alive today, Muratov thought, he too would have found himself a big fish in a suddenly shrunken pond. And an even less friendly one than Muratov’s own. Peters had been a Lett, and from all the reports it seemed as if the KGB in Latvia had actually been dissolved and had not simply acquired a new mask, as was the case in Uzbekistan.