Samarkand Hijack

Muratov opened one of the drawers of his desk and reached in for the bottle of canyak brandy which he kept for such moments. After pouring a generous portion into the glass and taking his first medicinal gulp the NSS chief gave some serious thought to the hijack message for the first time. If it was genuine – and for some reason he felt that it was – then it also represented a new phenomenon – hijackers who didn’t want publicity. Their name obviously suggested some strain of Islamic fundamentalism, but could just as easily be a cover for men who wanted money and lots of it. Which it was would no doubt become clear when the demands arrived on the following morning.

Muratov walked across to the open window, glass in hand. The dim yellow lights on the unnamed street below were hardly cheerful.

The telephone rang, and he took three quick strides to pick it up. ‘Hamza?’ he asked. The two men had known each other a long time. Four years earlier they had been indicted together on corruption charges for their part in the Great Cotton Production Scam, which had seen Moscow paying Uzbekistan for a lot of non-existent cotton. The break-up of the Soviet Union had almost made them Uzbek national heroes.

‘Yes, Bakhtar, what can I do for you?’

The Samarkand man sounded in a good mood, Muratov thought. Not to mention sleepy. He had probably gone home for an afternoon tumble with his new wife, whom rumour claimed was half her husband’s age and gorgeous to boot.

‘I’ve just had a call,’ Muratov told him, and recited the alleged hijackers’ message word for word.

‘You want me to check it out?’

‘Immediately.’

‘Of course. Will you be in your office?’

‘Either here or at the apartment.’ He gave Zhakidov the latter’s number. ‘And make sure whoever you assign can keep their mouth shut. If this is genuine we don’t want any news getting out, at least not until we know who we’re dealing with and why.’

Nurhan Ismatulayeva studied herself in the mirror. She had tried her hair in three different ways now, but all of them seemed wrong in one way or another. She let the luxuriant black mane simply drop around her face, and stared at herself in exasperation.

The red dress seemed wrong too, now that she thought about it. It was short by Uzbek standards, far too short. If she had been going out with an Uzbek this would have been fine – he would have seen it as the statement of independence from male Islamic culture which it was intended to be. But she was going out with a Russian, and he was likely to see the dress as nothing more than a come-on. His fingers would be slithering up her thigh before the first course arrived.

She buried her nose in her hands, and stared into her own dark eyes. Why was she even going out with the creep? Because, she answered herself, she scared Islamic men to death. And since the pool of available Russians was shrinking with the exodus from Central Asia her choice was growing more and more limited.

There was always the vibrator her friend Tursanay had brought home from France.

She stared sternly at herself. Was that what her grandmother had fought for in the 1920s? Was that why she’d pursued the career she had?

She was getting things out of proportion, she told herself. This was a dinner date, not a life crisis. If he didn’t like her hair down, tough luck. If he put his hand up her dress, then she’d break a bottle over his head. Always assuming she wasn’t too drunk to care.

That decided, she picked up her bag and decided to ring for a taxi – most men seemed to find her official car intimidating.

The phone rang before she could reach it.

‘Nurhan?’ the familiar voice asked.

‘Yes, comrade,’ she said instinctively, and heard the suppressed amusement in his voice as he told her to report in at once. ‘Hell,’ she said after hanging up, but without much conviction. She hadn’t really wanted to go out with the creep anyway, and after-hours summonses from Zhakidov weren’t exactly commonplace.

She called her prospective date at his home, but the line was engaged. Too bad, she thought, and walked out to the balcony and down to the street. Her car was parked in the alley beside the house, and seemed to be covered in children. As she approached they leapt off and scurried into the darkness with melodramatic shrieks of alarm. Nurhan smiled and climbed into the driver’s seat. Of the two Samarkands which sat side by side – the labyrinthine old Uzbek city and the neat colonial-style Russian one – she had always loved the former and loathed the latter. One was alive, the other dead. And the fact that she had more in common with the people who lived in the Russian city couldn’t change that basic truth.

As she started up the car she suddenly realized that her dress was hardly the appropriate uniform for an NSS major in command of an Anti-Terrorist Unit. What the hell – Zhakidov had said ‘now’. She pressed a black-stockinged leg down on the accelerator.

It took no more than ten minutes to reach the old KGB building in Uzbekistan Street. There was a light burning in Zhakidov’s second-floor office, but the rest of the building seemed to be in darkness.

She parked outside the front door and climbed out of the car. As she crossed the pavement a taxi pulled up and disgorged Major Marat Rashidov, commander of the largely theoretical Foreign Business and Tourist Protection Unit. Rashidov had been a friend of Zhakidov’s for a long time, and those in the know said he had been given this unit for old times’ sake. The bottle was supposed to be his real vocation.

‘My God, is it an office party?’ he asked, looking at her dress.

She smiled. ‘Not unless it’s a surprise.’ There was something about Marat she had always liked, though she was damned if she knew what it was. At least he was sober. In fact, his brown eyes seemed remarkably alert.

Maybe he had moved on to drugs, she thought sourly. There were enough around these days, now that the roads to Afghanistan and Pakistan were relatively open.

The two of them walked up to Hamza Zhakidov’s office, and found the bureau chief sitting, feet on desk, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, his bald head shining like a billiard-ball under the overhead light. He too gave Nurhan’s dress a second glance, but restricted any comment to a momentary lifting of his bushy eyebrows.

‘We may have a hijack on our hands,’ he said without preamble. ‘Someone phoned the office in Tashkent claiming that a party of tourists has been abducted here in Samarkand…’

‘Have they?’ Marat asked.

‘That’s what you’re going to find out. It’s supposedly the “Blue Domes” tour…’

‘Central Asian Tours – it’s an English firm,’ Marat interrupted, glad he had thought to do some homework on his way over in the taxi. ‘They do a ten-day tour taking in Tashkent, Bukhara and Khiva as well as here. They use the Hotel Samarkand.’

Zhakidov looked suitably impressed.

‘Has the hotel been contacted?’ Nurhan asked.

‘No. Tashkent’s orders are for maximum discretion. The hijackers…well, you might as well read it for yourselves.’ He passed over the transcription he had taken from Muratov over the phone.

Nurhan and Marat bent over it together, she momentarily distracted by the minty smell on his breath, he by the perfume she was wearing.

‘Publicity-shy terrorists,’ she muttered. ‘That’s unusual.’

‘The tourists are probably all sitting in the Samarkand’s candlelit bar, wondering when the electricity will come back on,’ Zhakidov said. ‘But just go over there and check it out.’

‘And if by some remote chance they really are missing?’ Marat asked, getting to his feet.

‘Then we start looking for them,’ Nurhan told him.

Zhakidov listened to their feet disappearing down the stairs and lit another cigarette. He supposed it was rather unkind of him, but he couldn’t help thinking a hijacked busload of tourists would make everyone’s life a bit more interesting.

Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Uzbekistan lay in the bath, his heels perched either side of the taps, a three-day-old copy of the Independent held just above the lukewarm water, an iced G&T within reach of his left hand. Reaching it without dipping a corner of the newspaper into the water was a knack gathered over the last few weeks, as the early-evening bath had gradually acquired the status of a ritual. The long days spent baking in the oven which served as his temporary office had required nothing less.

The British Embassy to Uzbekistan had only opened early the preceding year, and James Pearson-Jones had been given the ambassadorial appointment at the young age of thirty-two. His initial enthusiasm had not waned in the succeeding eighteen months, for post-Soviet Uzbekistan was such a Pandora’s Box that it could hardly fail to be continually fascinating. It was ‘the mullahs versus MTV’ as an Italian colleague had put it at one of their unofficial EU lunches, adding that he wouldn’t like to bet on the outcome.

‘God save us from both,’ had been a French diplomat’s comment.

Pearson-Jones smiled at the memory. His money was on the West and MTV – from what he could see the average Uzbek was much more interested in money than God. And the trade and aid deals to be signed over the coming weekend would put more money within their reach.

His thoughts turned to the arrangements for putting up the junior minister and various business VIPs. He had been tempted to place them all in the Hotel Uzbekistan, where his own office was, just to give the minister an insight into what life was like in Central Asian temperatures while a hotel’s air-conditioning was – allegedly, at least – in the process of being overhauled. But he had relented, and booked everyone into the Tashkent, which had the added advantage of being cheaper. After all, no one had said anything about increasing his budget to cover the upcoming binge.

There was a knock on the outside door.

He ignored it, and started rereading the cricket page. Cricket, he had to admit, was one very good reason for being in England during the summer. That and…

The knocker knocked again.

‘Coming,’ he shouted wearily. He climbed out of the bath, reached for his dressing-gown and downed the last of the G&T, then walked through to the main room of the suite and opened the door. It was his red-headed secretary, the delicious but apparently unavailable Janice. He had tried, but these days a man couldn’t try too hard or someone would start yelling sexual harassment.