An Autumn Hunting Read online

  Black clouds were moving in over the mountains, and I could smell rain in the air. Not yet cold enough to turn rain into snow, but that time was fast approaching. The end of the year, perhaps the end of many things.

  I sat down, back to one of the tombstones, where I was concealed but could watch the road. My fingers brushed the incised lettering of the name of the young man who slept beneath me. Twenty-four, his face open and trusting, unweathered by experience, a slight smile for the photographer. Did he have a wife, children? Did they think of him as they played with their toys, sat through boring maths lessons? I’ve tried to find a meaning to life, to death, but never been able to reach any conclusion other than: it simply is.

  I wondered about lighting a cigarette, decided against it. Smell carries a long way on mountain air, and I didn’t need to give Aliyev any more clues to where as I was than I had to.

  I checked both the Makarov and the Yarygin again. I could smell gun oil on my fingers, sharp, acrid, the scent of death.

  It was a little before three o’clock when I saw the SUV turn off the main road, stop at the guard hut, then drive on up to the car park. After parking, no one got out for a couple of moments. Looking to see if I was waiting and welcoming with open arms: here I am, come and kill me.

  The rear doors of the SUV opened and three men clambered out. No one I’d ever seen before, bulky in warm winter jackets that left their arms free. They stood looking around, stamping their feet on the ground, ensuring the coast was clear before Aliyev left the safety of the vehicle. I couldn’t see anything through the heavily tinted glass, but my guess was he’d been driving, taking complete control at the climax of the mission.

  My rifle barrel felt like an extension of my arm, the barrel a giant finger pointing towards the SUV. As I watched, finger taut on the trigger, the tallest of the men reached into the back seat, began to pass out weapons. I knew it was time.

  The man’s navy blue watch cap pulled low over his ears suddenly flowered into a scarlet mask as I shot him in the head. A spray of red spattered the side and roof of the car as he fell back, slumped and slithered to the ground. My mouth was dry, tasted sour and metallic from fear and adrenalin.

  I shot again, missed, saw the side window shatter, the remaining men diving for cover. My next shot was luck rather than aim, and I saw one of the men half-sit then roll back, clutching his right thigh, the blood already pouring in a thick stream. I wondered if I’d hit an artery, decided I didn’t care.

  At this distance, I couldn’t hear him, but I watched his mouth freeze open in a long, drawn-out scream. I didn’t expect Aliyev to rush to his rescue, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was no movement from the guard hut by the road. Aliyev must have made a pay-off; either that or the guard had more sense than to come to investigate.

  The SUV rocked slightly as the doors on the side away from me opened, and I put another shot into the bodywork, just to keep things interesting.

  Bullets were coming in my direction now, none close enough to cause me any worries. In any case, being shielded by a dead man’s tombstone is a great way of ensuring you don’t earn one yourself.

  The man lying on the ground had stopped moving, and I wondered if he’d bled out already. The SUV was moving forward now, slowly, acting as cover for whoever was left. My guess was Aliyev and the last of his men; the odds were better but still not in my favour.

  As I watched, one man broke cover, raced towards the shelter of a statue of three men in chains. I aimed, fired, missed, turned my attention back to the SUV. Their aim was to outflank me, knowing I couldn’t watch every direction. It was time to move.

  I dropped the rifle, crawled behind the line of tombstones, rose and raced for the upper level of the complex, expecting a bullet between the shoulder blades every step of the way.

  Chapter 59

  The upper level of Ata-Beyit is dominated at one end by a marble memorial wall behind Chingiz Aitmatov’s grave. It was there I took cover, waiting for Aliyev and his men to hunt me down.

  The sound of the wind driving the clouds down from the mountains had been joined by a curious melancholy clatter. At the far end, a giant terracotta-coloured arch commemorates the dead of 1916. The top of the arch holds a giant tunduk, from which are suspended cables which end in oversized metal stirrups, evoking horses without riders. In the wind, the metal swayed and created the noise I’d heard. The desolation and sorrow of the noise was an appropriate soundtrack to the setting, and the situation I was in.

  ‘Akyl, this is crazy,’ I heard Aliyev shout. ‘We should talk, there’s no need for this nonsense.’

  ‘Walk towards me then,’ I shouted back. ‘I promise I won’t shoot.’ Yet, I added to myself.

  After a couple of moments, Aliyev appeared, walking down the steps by the 1916 memorial, which was flanked on either side by bas-relief murals showing the suffering and death of the Kyrgyz people a century earlier. His hands were held out before him, to show he wasn’t carrying a weapon.

  I was watching, expecting Aliyev to shoot me. But when the shots came, they were from the bridge of the entrance, where the inscription in raised bronze letters read ‘Ak iyilet, birok synbait’ – ‘The people: bowed but unbroken’.

  I felt a force grab me by the wrist, flinging my right arm high into the air and away from me. When I looked at my hand, I realised I’d been hit. My ring finger had been smashed to pulp, the first two joints missing entirely, the rest a sodden mass of tissue from which bone protruded like an insult. It didn’t hurt, but I knew that would soon pass. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting married after all.

  I pumped three shots in the direction of the bridge, heard them whine off marble, a scream of pain as I hit the third man with the second bullet. The Makarov clicked empty. I dropped it, took the Yarygin from my belt. I knew I needed the extra firepower; the killing hadn’t quite finished yet.

  It felt like an afterthought that a bullet had bitten into my thigh. No pain yet, but plenty of blood, enough for me to bleed out fairly quickly.

  ‘I want to end this, Kanybek,’ I said, wincing as the pain began to gnaw at my hand. More blood on the ground now, and a fierce ache in my hand, as if someone had held my fingers to a naked flame.

  ‘You had me fooled, I admit that,’ Aliyev said. ‘Assassinating Tynaliev was the perfect way to show you weren’t a government plant. I give you credit for that.’

  ‘Tynaliev’s idea,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t be that devious.’

  ‘Shame you didn’t use live ammo; we could all have made a lot of money, lived happily ever after.’

  I knew he was dragging things out, waiting for me to grow weak so he could finish me off.

  ‘You don’t have the balls to shoot me?’ I asked, making sure he saw the Yarygin.

  ‘Do I need to? All I have to do is watch; my hands stay clean.’

  My eyes felt sore, the lids heavy, and the blood dripped onto the marble like melting roses.

  ‘You never saw the big picture, did you, Akyl?’ Aliyev laughed. ‘You were hunting me, I was hunting Quang, he was hunting me, and Tynaliev was out to fuck all of us. You didn’t have a clue; “Drunk on reckless might-have-beens”, that was you.’

  The phrase sounded familiar, nagged at my mind.

  ‘Wasn’t your wife a poetry lover?’ Aliyev taunted. ‘You don’t have a memory for such things.’

  It was then that the story turned sharp, pieces falling into place as if preordained from day one.

  ‘The dead girl down in Alamedin, the drug overdose, the one with the poem tucked into her clothing,’ I said. ‘You knew her?’

  ‘From the day she was born,’ Aliyev said. ‘My daughter, my Roza,’ and I could hear the madness in his voice. I said nothing, tried to see the bereaved parent in his face, glimpsed only rage.

  ‘She wasn’t a user, not ever,’ he continued. ‘I’d kept her away from that shit. My team was warned what would happen if it went wrong, if she got mixed up. The best schools, holidays, whatever she w
anted, nothing was too good for Roza.’

  Now I had a name to fit to the body; Roza Aliyeva, drug dealer’s daughter. I wondered if I’d live long enough to tell Usupov he could attach a name tag to her toe.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong; she knew who I was, what I was. Hard to pretend with the kind of money I had, with the way we lived. She knew.’

  ‘So what got her started?’ I asked. His face twisted into a mask of sorrow.

  ‘She went on holiday. Chiang Mai, Bangkok, the whole thing. She called it “finding herself”.’

  Aliyev gave a mirthless laugh, the sort that usually means death for someone. I tightened my grip on my gun. Blood pooled on the ground below me; I could smell its metal sweetness, almost taste it on my tongue. I was dying by the glassful.

  ‘Instead Quang found her. Someone squealed, got an envelope under the table. Next thing I hear from her, she’s met this wonderful man. Guess who. I find out who it is, I go nuclear. Quang and I had already had some opening discussions about the business, but we hadn’t been able to agree. Then I discovered he was using my daughter to get at me.’

  Aliyev shook his head, as if in wonder anyone could have been so foolish.

  ‘When I wouldn’t give in to his demands, he gave Roza the hot shot that killed her. Not him personally, but one of his employees. Adding to the pressure to reach a deal. He knew I had other children.’

  ‘You saw the autopsy report?’ I asked.

  ‘Dollars buy a lot of information,’ Aliyev said. ‘The blood spatter on her pants was just another humiliation, a defiling, blood from another dead junkie squirted onto her from a syringe, I imagine. One more way to insult me, prove how weak I was.’

  That explained the different blood groups, reminded me once again that hate and violence against the weak never rests, never goes away.

  Aliyev paused, looked into the sky as a few drops of rain danced across the ground.

  ‘The same with tucking those lines of poetry into her bra. Roza wrote that poem. She always wanted to be a writer.’

  I said nothing, felt pity for her, perhaps even for him. I understood what he’d felt: I wrote the manual about the loss of love.

  ‘I was off the investigation almost before it had even started,’ I said. ‘We never found who gave her the hot shot.’

  Aliyev gave a grim smile, and I felt my pity for the bereaved father melt away.

  ‘I did,’ he said, said no more. He didn’t need to.

  ‘Yet you sent me to broker a deal with Quang?’

  Aliyev shook his head.

  ‘I sent you there to fuck him and his business over, not that you knew. Of course, I could have had him killed. But I didn’t want him to die fast, the way Roza did. I wanted him rotting in a Bangkok shitpit, his organisation destroyed. I wanted him to know I’d taken over from him, that I was running things, making the money, calling the shots.’

  I thought about ripping the sleeve from my shirt to make a tourniquet, knew I didn’t have the strength, knew I couldn’t put the gun down, knew I had to keep it aimed at Aliyev. I only had a few moments of life left, and I had to use them.

  ‘Tynaliev will wipe you out, you know,’ I muttered, my voice thick and sour with pain. ‘He’ll take over everything you’ve worked for.’

  ‘He’d like to, I’m sure,’ Aliyev smiled, ‘but let me tell you a fact of life, Inspector. Politicians rise, politicians fall. Cemeteries are full of men who thought they could have it all, that the names on their graves now overgrown with weeds would never be forgotten. But crime and money? They go on for ever, hand in hand.’

  He paused, reached into his pocket, took out a gun, pointed it. One of those .25 Berettas people carry as a hideaway. Tough guys think of them as a woman’s gun, but they’ll kill you just as dead as a .45. For a few seconds, I remembered the dream where Chinara had mimed shooting me.

  The rain on my forehead ran into my eyes, and without thinking I used my hand to wipe it away. Blood joined the rain, and I had to blink to focus on Aliyev.

  ‘You’re right, of course. I don’t expect to live long enough to grow a white beard and complain about the state of the world. Burn brighter, burn faster. But until then, everything I want is mine for the asking. Or the taking.’

  ‘Except for getting your daughter back,’ I said, and pulled the trigger of the Yarygin, just as he fired twice. I felt Aliyev’s bullets slam like fists into my chest, hurl me backwards, saw Aliyev’s mouth gape and his face dissolve into a catastrophe of blood.

  Chapter 60

  Redemption is always tentative. All you can wish for is that your hopes, your motives and your actions don’t make things worse, maybe even improve them. You do wrong, you do your best to right it. A parent dies, their child lives. There’s a balance and a harmony in that; maybe that’s enough.

  I slumped against the memorial wall, the marble chill against my back, shirt crimson and sticky with blood, gun strangely leaden in my hand. I could see the blood pouring out of me, watched with a curious detachment. I coughed, tasted blood in my mouth. The rain was falling harder now, and the sky had taken on an ominous dark as the mountains loomed over me.

  I thought of Chinara, at rest in her grave overlooking the valley and the mountains beyond, the poets she loved safe and eternal on a thousand shelves.

  Of the dead child I’d found dumped in Yekaterina Tynalieva’s mutilated belly like so much rubbish, now both of them avenged and at peace.

  And of Saltanat, journeying back to safety and Otabek, the mute boy we’d rescued, the new life in her womb turning and stirring, waiting to enter the light.

  For the briefest of moments, I sensed all their kisses on my cheek, light and insubstantial as a moth’s wing beating its rhythm on my skin.

  And I realised how beautiful and unknowable the world is, in all its mystery and passion and danger, how relentlessly hard it would be to leave it, and how easy it is to die.

  Acknowledgements

  The previous three novels in the Kyrgyz Quartet thanked the many people who have helped in their creation.

  This book is no different, and I repeat my thanks to all of them.

  However, four people deserve individual mention.

  Stefanie Bierwerth at Quercus; her patience, encouragement and commitment to the series has been immeasurable.

  Simon Peters, who has improved my grammar, spelling and plotting throughout; he helped the books gain whatever merit they may have.

  Tanja Howarth, my agent and, more importantly, my friend; all I can say is sine quo nihil (without whom nothing).

  And finally, Sara, who first introduced me to Kyrgyzstan.

  Spasibo.

  Everything in this book is solely the product of my imagination. Any flaws or mistakes are mine alone.

  Bangkok – Bishkek – London – Dubai, 2017–2018