The other sights – another blue-domed mosque, a couple of mausoleums, a covered market – all paled in comparison. At around five-thirty, with the light beginning to take on a golden tinge, they stopped for a drink at the Ak Saray café. ‘We’ll leave for Samarkand in twenty minutes,’ Nasruddin said, before disappearing back outside.
The tourists sipped their mint tea and watched the sun sliding down over the western desert horizon. As the jagged-edged tower of Tamerlane’s gateway darkened against the yellow sky Docherty felt at peace with the world.
He smiled across the table at Isabel. Twelve years now, he thought, twelve years of the sort of happiness he hadn’t expected to find anywhere, let alone behind enemy lines in Argentina during the Falklands War.
It was an incredible story. At the beginning of the war Isabel, an exiled opponent of the Junta living in London, had agreed to return home as a spy, her love of country outweighed by hatred of its political masters. Docherty had been the leader of one of the two SAS patrols dropped on the mainland to monitor take-offs from the Argentinian airfields, and the two of them had ended up escaping together across the Andes into Chile, already lovers and more than halfway to being in love. Since then they’d married and had two children, Ricardo and Marie, who were spending these ten days with Docherty’s elder sister in Glasgow.
Isabel had made and mostly abandoned a career in compiling and writing travel guides, while Docherty had stayed on in the SAS until the early winter of 1992. Pulled out of retirement for the Bosnian mission a month later, his second goodbye to the Regiment in January 1993 had been final. Now, eighteen months later, the couple were preparing to move to Chile, where she had the offer of a job.
Chile, of course, was a long way from anywhere, and they had decided to undertake this Central Asian trip while they still could. It hadn’t been cheap, but it wasn’t that expensive either, considering the distances involved. The collapse of the Soviet Union had presumably opened the way for young entrepreneurs to compete in this market. Men like Nasruddin, Docherty thought, and idly wondered where their tour operator and guide had got to.
Nasruddin had crossed the road to the car park, and walked across to where two cars, a Volga and a rusting Soviet-made Fiat, were parked side by side under a large mulberry tree. There was no one in the cars, but behind them, in the circle of shade offered by the tree, six men were sitting cross-legged in a rough circle. Four of them were dressed modern Uzbek-style in cotton shirts, cotton trousers and embroidered skullcaps, but the other two were wearing the more traditional ankle-length robes and turbans.
As Nasruddin appeared the men’s faces jerked guiltily towards him, as if they were a bunch of schoolboys caught playing cards behind the bicycle sheds. Recognition eased the faces somewhat, but the tension in the group was still palpable.
‘Everything is going as expected,’ Nasruddin told them, squatting down and looking across the circle at Talib Khamidov. His cousin gave him a tight smile in return, which did little to soften the lines of his hawkish face.
‘They all came?’ Akbar Makhamov asked anxiously, ‘the Americans too?’ Despite Nasruddin’s assurances the others had feared that the two septuagenarians would sit out the side-trip to Shakhrisabz.
‘Yes. I told you they would come.’
‘God is with us,’ Makhamov muttered. The bearded Tajik was the other third of the group’s unofficial ruling triumvirate. He came from a rich Samarkand family, and like many such youths in the Muslim world, had not been disowned by his father for demonstrating a youthful excess of religious zeal. His family had not objected to his studying in Iran for several years, and on his return in 1992 Akbar had been given the prodigal son treatment. Over the last year, however, his father’s patience had begun wearing a little thin, though nothing like as thin as it would have done had he known the family money was being spent on second-hand AK47s and walkie-talkies for a mass kidnapping.
‘Everyone knows their duties?’ Nasruddin asked, looking round the circle.
They all did.
‘God be with us,’ Nasruddin murmured, getting to his feet. He caught Talib’s eyes once more, and took strength from the determination that he saw there.
He walked back to the tour bus, and found the driver behind his wheel, smoking a cigarette and reading one of the newly popular ‘romantic’ graphic novels. Nasruddin was angered by both activities, but managed to restrain himself from sounding it.
‘I told you not to smoke in the bus,’ he said mildly.
Muran gave him one contemptuous glance, and tossed the cigarette out through his window.
‘We’ll be picking up two more passengers on the way back,’ he told the driver. ‘A couple of cousins of mine. Just on the other side of Kitab. I’ll tell you when we get there.’
Muran shrugged his agreement.
Nasruddin started back for the café, looking at his watch. It was almost six o’clock. As he approached the tables the Fiat drove out of the car park and turned up the road towards Samarkand, leaving a cloud of dust hanging above the crossroads.
The group was ready to go, and he shepherded them back across the car park and into the bus, wondering as he did so which of them might make trouble when the time came. The ex-soldier and the builder looked tough enough, but neither seemed the sort to panic and do something stupid. Ogley was too fond of himself to take a risk, and the American was too old. Though neither he nor his wife, Nasruddin both thought and hoped, seemed the type to drop dead with shock.
Muran started up the bus, and Nasruddin sat down in the front folding seat. Once out on the road he sat staring ahead, half listening to the murmur of conversation behind him, trying to keep calm. He could feel a palpitation in his upper arm, and his heart seemed to be beating loud enough for everyone in the bus to hear.
He glanced sideways at the driver. There was a good chance the man would take the hundred American dollars and make himself scarce. But even if Muran went to the authorities, it wouldn’t matter much.
Nasruddin took a deep breath. Only ten minutes more, he told himself. It was almost dark now, and the fields to left and right were black against the sky’s vestigial light. Ahead of them the bus’s headlamps laid a moving carpet of light on the asphalt road. In the wing mirror he had occasional glimpses of the lights of the following car.
They entered the small town of Kitab, and passed families sitting outside their houses enjoying the evening breeze. In the centre a bustling café spilled its light across the road, and the smell of pilaff floated through the bus.
Nasruddin concentrated on the road ahead as they drove out through the northern edge of the town. A hundred metres past the last house he saw the figures waiting by the side of the road.
‘Just up here,’ he told Muran.
Docherty’s head had begun to drop the moment they started the return journey, but the jerk of the bus as it came to a halt woke him up. His eyes opened to see two men climbing aboard, each with a Kalashnikov AK47 cradled in his arms. A pistol had also appeared in Nasruddin’s hand.
The three men seemed to get caught up in one another’s movements in the confined space at the front of the bus, but this almost farcical confusion was only momentary, and all three guns were squarely pointed in the passengers’ direction before anyone had time to react.
A variety of noises emanated from the passengers, ranging from cries of alarm through gasps of surprise to a voice murmuring ‘shit’, which Docherty recognized as his own.
A stunned silence had settled on the tour party.
‘Mr