Samarkand Hijack

‘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.

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.

She wasn’t here for his body this time either.

‘There’s been no call from Samarkand,’ she said. ‘I thought you ought to know.’

He looked at his watch, and found only an empty wrist. ‘What time is it?’

‘Eight-thirty. She should have called in at seven.’

‘What were they doing today?’

‘The Shah-i-Zinda this morning, and Shakhrisabz this afternoon.’

‘That must be it then. It’s a long drive – the bus probably broke down on the way back. Or something like that.’

‘Probably. I just thought you should know.’ She started for the door.

‘Wait a minute,’ Pearson-Jones said. There might be no brownie points for being too careful, but the Foreign Office sure as hell deducted them for not being careful enough. ‘Maybe we should check it out. We have the number of the hotel?’

‘It’s in the office.’

‘Can you get it? We’ll ring from here.’

He got dressed while Janice descended a floor to the embassy office, thinking that he’d never heard her mention a boyfriend. Still, she handled the post, and for all he knew there were a dozen letters a day from England that arrived reeking of Brut.

Dressed, he poured himself another G&T, and took it out on the concrete balcony. In the forecourt below a couple of early drunks seemed to be teaching each other the tango.

Janice knocked again, and he went to let her in. ‘You do the talking,’ he said, ‘your Uzbek is better than mine.’

Nurhan Ismatulayeva and Marat Rashidov arrived at the Hotel Samarkand some five minutes after leaving the NSS building. The coffee shop in the lobby was full of local youths, all of whom looked like bad imitations of Western rock stars. The hotel restaurant was almost empty, but one long table had been set and not used, presumably for a tour party.

Nurhan showed the receptionist her credentials, and got a scowl in return. One of these days, she thought, it would be nice to have a job which encouraged people to smile at her. Maybe she could join the state circus as a clown.

‘The Central Asian Tours group,’ she said. ‘Are they in the hotel?’

The receptionist shook his head, his eyes apparently fixed on her black-clad lower thighs.

‘Do you know where they are?’

He shook his head again.

‘Look, friend,’ Marat said cheerfully, ‘let’s have a little co-operation here.’

Reluctantly turning his attention to the male member of the duo, the receptionist gave him a pitying look. ‘They’re not back yet – that’s all I know.’

‘From where?’ Nurhan asked patiently.

‘I don’t know. This is a hotel, not a travel agency.’ Seeing the look on Marat’s face, he added: ‘You could try the notice-board in the lounge – they sometimes put the itineraries up there.’

Marat went to look.

‘Which rooms are they in?’ Nurhan asked.

He sighed and opened the register book. ‘Three-o-four to 310.’

‘Keys,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘All of them?’

‘All of them.’

He passed them over, just as Marat returned. ‘Nothing,’ the NSS man said.

They walked up the four flights of stairs to the third floor, and let themselves into the first room. Two open suitcases half-full of neatly folded clothes lay up against a wall. If the group had been hijacked it was without a change of underwear. A novel – A Suitable Boy – lay on the bedside table. Inside the front cover ‘Elizabeth Ogley, May 1994’ had been inscribed.

They had been through three of the seven rooms before Marat found what they were looking for. Inside another paperback – Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean – the folded piece of paper used as a bookmark yielded a handwritten copy of the tour itinerary. A trip to Shakhrisabz had been scheduled for that afternoon.

‘That’s it then,’ Marat said. ‘That road across the mountains is terrible. They’ve had a puncture, or driven into a ravine or something.’

Nurhan looked at the itinerary. ‘Bit of a coincidence,’ she said, ‘that the only time they go off on a jaunt into the countryside we get a call to say they’ve been hijacked.’

‘For someone in the know that would be the best time for a hoax,’ he suggested, but with rather less confidence.

‘I think it’s for real,’ she said, walking across to the window. A car was drawing up down below, not a tour bus. This would be her first real chance to prove herself, she thought.

‘We’d better call Zhakidov,’ Marat said.

They went back downstairs to the desk, and found the receptionist had disappeared. Nurhan used his phone to call in.

‘You’d better drive over to Shakhrisabz,’ Zhakidov said. ‘If you meet them on the way, fine. If you don’t, then find out if they ever got there.’

Nurhan was not pleased. ‘Why can’t we just phone our office there?’ she wanted to know.

‘Discretion, remember?

‘It’s a nice ride,’ Marat added for good measure. And besides, he thought, it would remove him from temptation for a few hours.

Another phone suddenly started ringing in the office behind the counter.

‘Maybe it’s them,’ Marat suggested. ‘Maybe someone got taken ill and they had to find a doctor in Shakhrisabz.’

‘Maybe,’ Nurhan agreed. She moved towards the office’s open door just as the receptionist re-emerged from wherever it was that he had been skulking.

‘I’ll answer that,’ he said indignantly.

‘If it’s anything to do with the Central Asian Tours party I want to speak to them,’ Nurhan said.

‘OK, OK,’ the receptionist said, picking up the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he said, in answer to some question, glancing across at Nurhan and Marat. ‘Wait a moment,’ he told the caller, ‘the police want to speak to you.’ He held out the phone for Nurhan. ‘Who is that?’ she asked.

‘I am calling from the British Embassy in Tashkent,’ a female voice said in reasonable Uzbek. ‘I wish to talk to someone staying at the hotel. Brenda Walker.’

Nurhan cursed under her breath. ‘The group has not returned from their trip yet,’ she said.

‘Do you know why they’re late?’ the woman asked.

‘No. A problem with their bus, most likely. Do you wish to leave a message?’

‘Why are the police involved?’ the woman asked.

‘We just want to talk to the tour operators,’ Nurhan improvised. ‘Is there no message?’

‘No, I’ll try again in an hour or so.’

Nurhan put the phone down. ‘Why did you say “police”, you idiot?’ she asked the receptionist.

He shrugged. ‘You didn’t tell me not to.’

She looked at him. ‘The woman will be calling back. You will tell her the same thing I told her – that you don’t know why the tour group has not returned, but it’s probably that their bus has broken down. Is that clear?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then don’t fuck up,’ Marat warned him. ‘Or our next meeting will not be as convivial as this one has been. Now what sort of bus are they in?’

‘A small one. Green and white.’

The two NSS officers headed out through the glass doors in the direction of their car, oblivious to the disdainful finger being raised to their retreating backs.

Four hundred kilometres to the north-east Janice Wood was trying to explain the tone of the policewoman’s voice to James Pearson-Jones. ‘I’m sure she was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. Something’s happened.’

Pearson-Jones sighed, thought for a moment, and muttered ‘shit’ with some vehemence. ‘We’d better call London,’ he said.

‘And bring Simon in?’ she asked. Simon Kennedy was ostensibly Pearson-Jones’s number two at the embassy, with a portfolio of responsibilities which included that of military attaché. He was also MI6’s representative in Central Asia.

‘Yes, bring him in,’ Pearson-Jones agreed. ‘I’ll go down to the office and make the call.’

3

In London it was nearly four in the afternoon, and the tall patrician figure of Alan Holcroft had just arrived back at the Foreign Office from the House of Commons. Prime Minister’s Question Time had been its usual farcical waste of time, and Holcroft had sat on the front bench wondering why they didn’t put a cock-fighting arena by the dispatch box, and give the two sides some real blood to cheer about. He was quite willing to agree that the occasion was a useful theoretical demonstration of democracy in action, but could see no reason why anyone with real work to do should have to sit through the damn thing twice a week.

And as Foreign Minister he had plenty of work to do. The rest of the world seemed even more of a mess than usual. The Americans had found something new to panic them – North Korea, this time – but at least for the moment they seemed to have dropped the idea of invading Haiti. Russia was still collapsing, the Brussels bureaucracy its usual irritating self, and the French as difficult as ever. Bosnia continued on its bloody way, despite losing top spot in the genocide league to Rwanda. And then there was the Middle East…If this was the New World Order, Holcroft thought, then he would hate to see chaos.

On his desk he found a memo waiting for him. The two British hostages held by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were getting a full-page write-up in tomorrow morning’s Independent, and it was expected that the Labour MP championing their cause would be seeking a government response the following afternoon.

Holcroft sighed. What did they expect – a gunboat? That the government would send the hostage-takers to bed without any supper? The honest answer would be to say that Her Majesty’s Government had no influence whatsoever on the Khmer Rouge, and to admit in addition that it had more important things to worry about than a couple of British citizens who had been stupid enough to travel in a country that was clearly unsafe. As far as Holcroft was concerned they were like transatlantic rowers or potholers – he had no objection to them taking risks, but every objection to their using taxpayers’ time and money to pull themselves out of jams of their own making.

None of which he could say at the dispatch box. He settled down to read through the memo, confident that the author would have supplied him with either a more acceptable reason for doing nothing or a convincing explanation of how much he was already doing.

Holcroft was nearly halfway through the three-page memo when there was a sharp rap on his door. He looked at his watch – there was still at least forty minutes left of the one hour without interruption which he demanded each day. ‘Come,’ he snapped.

It was his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Michael Allsworth. ‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ the intruder said, ‘but the embassy in Tashkent has been on the line.’

Holcroft felt the familiar mixture of anger and frustration seize him by the throat. ‘What in God’s name has she done now?’ he demanded.

‘No, it’s nothing like that…it’s…well…’ Allsworth took a seat. ‘It all seems a bit iffy, Minister. The gist of it is that the tour party your daughter is with seems to have disappeared. Or at least not returned to the hotel in Samarkand when it should have. As you know, the agent assigned to your daughter is supposed to report in each day at seven local time. Today she hasn’t. But we have no actual reason to suspect foul play…’

‘No actual reason?’

‘Well, when the embassy tried to contact her at the hotel they were asked to speak to the police, which they found a bit odd.’

‘Was there no reason given for the tour party not being there?’

‘Just lateness. And that may be…’

‘What’s the time there now?’ Holcroft wanted to know.

‘About ten o’clock in Samarkand, eleven in Tashkent.’