An Autumn Hunting Read online

  ‘We should be able to stand up in a minute,’ Aliyev said. ‘The tunnel widens into a chamber: look for the ladder against the far end.’

  I reached above my head, sensed cold damp air on my face, slowly started to climb to my feet. In the torch’s dim glow, I could see the metal rungs of the ladder, welcome after an eternity since escaping the cellar. I reached for one of the rungs and slowly pulled myself upright. My knees, elbows and shoulders all shrieked at the effort, but I bit the inside of my mouth to ensure my silence. I didn’t know what was waiting for us up in the open.

  Nor, I was certain, did Aliyev.

  ‘Any idea who attacked us?’ he whispered, his breath hot against my cheek.

  ‘Run through the list of your enemies, it must be long enough,’ I said. ‘Maybe the crew that bombed the bar?’

  ‘Or Tynaliev’s men looking to make you pay for what you did to their boss?’ he suggested. ‘But how would they know where to find us?’

  I rubbed thumb and forefinger together. Money is the usual reason. There’s always someone who will sell you out if the price is right, no matter how much they protest their loyalty. It’s the ones who say they’ll die for you who are the ones happy to let you die first.

  ‘Here, take this.’

  Aliyev reached into an alcove behind the ladder and handed me a Makarov. I checked it was loaded, a bullet in the chamber. Aliyev did the same with his gun, reached for the ladder.

  ‘I go left, you go right,’ he whispered. I nodded. No percentage in presenting a single target.

  ‘Try not to shoot anyone,’ he added. I hadn’t figured Aliyev as a pacifist, until I realised he was more concerned about giving away our location than sparing the lives of whoever might be above our heads.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ he said, starting to climb. The better cover must be to the left, that’s why he’d picked it. And going first, he had a better chance of surprising whoever might be up there. I’d be in the perfect place and time for someone to recover and target the tunnel exit as I emerged.

  I thought about shooting Aliyev, persuading the people on the surface I’d arrested him, shot him while he was trying to escape. But I had no way of knowing if our attackers were police, or if they’d riddle us with bullets first, then interrogate our corpses. And, ministers apart, I don’t believe in shooting anyone in the back.

  I followed Aliyev up the ladder, the bare metal greasy and damp, trying to ignore the dirt and dust falling onto my upturned face. It was an awkward climb, one-handed. Tucking the Makarov into my belt would make climbing easier but could prove a fatal delay once we were outside.

  The flashlight showed a steel trapdoor, a single bolt smeared in grease so it could be opened with the minimum amount of noise. Aliyev looked down at me and raised a finger to his lips. From below, his face looked grotesque, distorted with hate or fear. He slid the bolt back, jaw tense with effort. The trapdoor swung down across from the ladder. Smart to have the trapdoor swing that way; less chance of being observed. Aliyev was more cautious, more dangerous, than I’d given him credit for. He moved quickly up the remaining rungs, swung himself over the edge, disappeared.

  I took a deep breath, tried to move as swiftly and silently as he had, emerged like some clumsy mole into the light.

  I’d lost track of time down in the cellar, and I was surprised to realise it was dusk, the light fading behind the trees. I rolled away from the hole until I came up against the rough edge of a tree trunk, hunted around for any sign of danger, tensed my finger on the Makarov’s trigger.

  The escape tunnel’s exit had been carefully planned; we were in a small clearing surrounded by thick brush and mature trees. It was a good site from which to assess the threat that had made us use the tunnel in the first place; more smart planning by Aliyev.

  The shadows were lengthening and I calculated we had about an hour to wait before it would probably be dark enough to move on. No moon, which was a bonus. The air was bitter, and I shivered, not sure whether from the cold or shock. Either way, I wasn’t happy about spending the night outside, surrounded by people who wanted to kill us.

  Aliyev patted the air downwards; stay still, keep calm. We couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred metres from the safe house but the silence seemed absolute. I thought I caught a whiff of cordite on the air, decided it was my imagination. The shooting over, I was certain everyone in the cellar would be dead. All we had to do was evade their killers. Child’s play to a tough guy like me.

  We lay there for several minutes, until we heard a car start up in the distance, listened to the engine retreat until we could no longer hear it. If anyone had set a trap to flush out any survivors, this would be the time to spring it.

  The night crept in on tiptoe, but we continued to lie still. My shoulder started to cramp, the muscles biting into my neck, and I struggled to hold back a cough. The need for a piss was growing urgent as well. I looked over at Aliyev, but the dark had camouflaged him so completely I couldn’t read his expression.

  I was about to whisper to him, to try to catch his attention, when I heard it, so faint at first I wondered if my imagination was playing tricks. But no: someone was walking towards us, cautiously, placing each foot with care, waiting a few seconds between steps before carrying on.

  Whoever had attacked us must have found the tunnel and was now hunting for the exit. I took a tighter grip on the Makarov and wished I had a hunting knife. To use the gun would bring twenty kinds of shit down on our heads, and I was pretty certain neither of us could outshoot a semi-automatic.

  A torch beam stabbed out through the dark, pointing down, showing grass and the first of the autumn’s fallen leaves. I watched the light edge nearer to the tunnel exit. The footsteps stopped, and I could sense the man’s legs almost within my reach, the sour smell of his sweat mixed with cheap tobacco, rancid on the night air.

  The beam flicked over to my right, as if suddenly alerted by a suspicious sound, found Aliyev’s face. I didn’t know if the man had been left alone to guard the site, but I knew we couldn’t risk him raising a warning. I grabbed at his ankles, grasped the thick leather of army boots and pulled backwards with all my strength.

  As the man fell to his knees, Aliyev pulled him forward, slamming his head hard against the metal edge of the tunnel, once, twice. I heard the sullen crack of bone, felt the man’s feet jerk and convulse out of my hands, as if suddenly electrocuted, then lie motionless.

  ‘You’ve killed him,’ I whispered. It wasn’t a question.

  Aliyev simply nodded, reached for the torch, its beam lighting up the nearby bushes.

  ‘You had a better solution? Help me turn him over.’

  The dead man wore a mix of grey-green fatigues, the sort soldiers of fortune and wannabe mercenaries wear all over Central Asia. No name tag, no suggestion he was part of any military unit. Aliyev shone the light at the man’s face. Broken teeth from the fall, blood dark in the torchlight smearing his lips and smudging his face.

  See enough bodies and they turn into pieces of some giant puzzle, where you rearrange them over and over in your mind, trying to find a pattern, a reason, the bigger picture. None of it makes any sense, but you keep trying. Not to find a god in charge of the universe, but simply to assure yourself lives have a significance that murder takes away.

  Some people believe the dead look like they’re merely asleep. The body lies with all the energy that drove it evaporated, a lightning strike dissipated into the ground. Nothing left but empty flesh, hopes discarded, ambition washed away, love and anger, pain and joy no longer even memories.

  As we dragged the body into the cover of the bushes, it was the face that interested me, beyond the staring eyes and the rictus of pain.

  No doubt about it: I wasn’t looking at a Russian or Kyrgyz hitman. The body at my feet was unmistakably Han Chinese.

  Chapter 19

  We didn’t have time to work out what this new surprise meant. No telling if he was alone, or if one of his collea
gues would come in search of him, suspicious of his silence. But I had no idea how we could get away; the last thing we needed was to blunder into a group of armed men hunting us down.

  ‘With any luck, they’ll think he stumbled when he found the tunnel, fell forward, brained himself. No proof we were here,’ Aliyev said, rising to his feet, holding out a hand to help me up. My knees protested but I knew we had to get moving.

  I didn’t mention the patches of crushed grass, the open tunnel, the two deep gashes on the man’s forehead. A crime scene officer would piece the whole thing together in a couple of minutes. There are advantages to being a detective, but I couldn’t see how they would help me right then.

  ‘You’ve got a car stashed somewhere?’ I asked as we pushed through the bushes.

  ‘Only one road near here; a simple roadblock would snare us,’ Aliyev answered, and snapped his open hand shut into a fist, to press the point home.

  ‘So we walk back to Bishkek?’

  ‘If you haven’t already realised, I always have a backup plan to the backup plan. But no talking until we’re clear. Tread as if you’re not a flatfooted policeman. And keep your gun ready.’

  We walked in silence, single file, Aliyev leading the way. He didn’t bother holding the branches back for me so I kept my head down to avoid being lashed across the face. After about twenty minutes pushing our way through the wood, I could hear the sound of running water, getting louder as we approached, until we stood on the banks of a narrow and rapid river, gurgling and dancing past water-smoothed rocks. Dim starlight gave them the look of sleeping creatures, bodies half-submerged in the constant flow.

  ‘I suppose you’ve got a motorboat moored nearby,’ I said.

  ‘Too noisy, too easily tracked and that means too easily ambushed,’ Aliyev replied, casting round to get his bearings before scrambling down to the riverbank. ‘And you look like you could use a little exercise.’

  He reached beneath a low-lying tree whose branches hung out over the water. A rope trailed from the lowest branch and I watched as Aliyev hauled on the line. After a moment, a package broke the surface of the water, and I helped pull it out. Aliyev stripped off the waterproof cover and laid the contents by the edge of the river.

  ‘A dinghy,’ he said. ‘I assume you know how to paddle.’

  I shrugged. Living in the world’s most landlocked country hasn’t made my countrymen keen mariners, and I was no exception. But I could see the dinghy’s advantages: silent, disposable and untraceable.

  ‘I’ll learn,’ I said.

  Aliyev gave me a dubious look, but he had no option but to take me along. Leave me there and who knew who would find me, kill me and end his chances of finding out what Tynaliev had planned for his takeover.

  ‘We’ll be here all night inflating that,’ I said.

  Aliyev gave me another look, this time of despair at my stupidity.

  ‘Self-inflating,’ was all he said, tugging at a cord. I watched as the dull synthetic rubber blob transformed into a craft big enough for both of us. We pushed it into the water, and I scrambled into the front as ordered. Aliyev wouldn’t want an ex-cop with a loaded Makarov sitting behind him.

  We used the small paddles to push ourselves out into the current; the water was running fast enough to make the paddles necessary only for steering.

  ‘Is this the Chui?’ I asked, genuinely curious, turning round to stare at the pakhan. In reply, Aliyev put his finger to his lips.

  ‘Sound carries a long way over water,’ he muttered, and I lapsed back into silence.

  For the next three hours, we floated down the river, not using the paddles for fear of attracting attention, unless we had to steer clear of rocks or overhanging trees. The adrenalin which had fired me throughout our escape had been spent, and I ached in every muscle and joint. The soft-throated murmur of the river almost had me drifting away into sleep.

  I remembered my first professional encounter with the Ala-Archa, the river that rises in the mountains, fed by glacier and snow melt, then ploughs its way through Bishkek in a wild spring tumult that becomes a dry rocky bed in late summer. A woman’s body had been spotted, wedged between two boulders down where the water was channelled between concrete culverts. As the junior officer, I was the one elected to wade in and tie a recovery rope around her body. I waded in quickly up to my thighs, spring water brutally cold against my skin. My colleagues yelled crude jokes as I took the woman’s naked body in my arms, slipped the rope over her head, past her breasts and around her waist. It was the first corpse I’d ever recovered from a river, and her unthinking embrace filled me with a kind of sorrow I’ve never quite been able to lay aside.

  Once she was on dry land, I could inspect the damage caused by her passage down the river. Large slices of skin and flesh filleted and torn away by sharp rocks, bruising from the constant punches of the water as it cascaded down towards its final drowning in the Chui river. Her left eye was missing, gouged out, but her other eye stared up at the sky with a look of faint surprise.

  It’s almost impossible to tell how someone has died, or been murdered, if they’ve spent enough time in the water, unless the marks are evident. But the stab wounds in her stomach told their own story. I knew we’d question her husband, her brother, her father, maybe a lover. We’d observe the shock, hear the denials, finally bear witness to a confession. Murder is rarely glamorous or mysterious; usually it’s as mundane as the lives of the people it devours. And to someone like Aliyev, it’s merely part of business. As I suppose it is to me.

  The first signs of dawn were beginning to dance upon the water, a smudge of faint light here and here, and it was staring into these that I saw the face below me, submerged and indistinct, deep in the water.

  Chapter 20

  At first I thought it was simply a trick of the reflections on the water’s surface, a false portrait created by the swirling and weaving of the current. But the face grew nearer, a swimmer rising up through the water towards the air, body half-distinct. As I watched, the features grew clearer, sharper, and I was staring at the face of my dead wife, Chinara.

  Her hair wove and swam around her face, as if it were alive, as if she were alive, rising to break the surface, the way she used to when we would dive into Lake Issyk-Kul, over and over, until we would clamber out onto the shore, and drink water-chilled vodka, eat fruit, share kisses.

  I wanted to stretch out my hand, grasp her wrist, help her scramble into the dinghy, brush the tendrils of wet hair back from her face. But Chinara remained tantalisingly just out of reach, her eyes staring up at me, a smile on her face, the smile that broke my heart every time I remembered it. And just as my delight at seeing her was overwhelmed by the knowledge I was dreaming, her expression changed to one of anger.

  She pointed to the back of the dinghy, to where Aliyev sat. Then she pointed her finger at me, mimicking a gun, pretended to fire. A warning or an instruction, I didn’t know which.

  Her final smile showed her sorrow at leaving me, her eyes never straying from my face. I watched, helpless, as she sank back and was lost into the dark. And it was then I woke back into a world that no longer held the woman I once loved.

  *

  We floated down the river until the sky began to lighten in the east, and it was no longer safe to be on the water. I scrambled over the side, gasping as the water’s icy bite gnawed at my legs. I dragged the dinghy the last metre or so into the bank, stretched my hand out to help Aliyev, remembered he could walk perfectly well.

  He slashed the side of the dinghy to deflate it and we watched it slowly settle into the water. With any luck, it wouldn’t be found until we were long gone, with no reason to connect it to us.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘We walk.’

  Two hours later, the sun was up, a thin mist rolling across the farmland in front of us. There wasn’t any sign of civilisation ahead, and I wondered if Aliyev had any idea of where we were going.

  ‘There’s a road about three k
ilometres ahead. I’ve arranged a pickup from there, made the call while you were asleep,’ he said.

  An hour or so later, we reached a narrow track that gave every appearance of being abandoned.

  ‘Now we wait,’ he said, and gave a rare smile, coloured by a gold filling towards the back of his mouth. I found it reassuring that the pakhan had endured Kyrgyz dentistry along with the rest of us. No expensive private dental work in Moscow for him. A man of the people, as long as the people are also criminals. I sat down with my back resting against a tree, trying to ignore the chill seeping into my legs and sodden feet.

  I must have dozed off again for a few minutes when Aliyev woke me. For a few seconds I wondered where I was, then remembered my strange nocturnal cruise along the Chui.

  ‘Time to go, Inspector.’

  ‘You’re taking me with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Aliyev said, his grin hardly reassuring. ‘You’re much too important to leave behind.’

  The waiting truck was held together by rust and some army-green paint. An exhaust pipe gave out an occasional tubercular cough followed by a cloud of blue smoke. I gave Aliyev a look of surprise.

  ‘What dim-witted rural ment is going to stop a broken-down shitheap like this?’ he said. ‘Everyone knows a pakhan wouldn’t travel anywhere in anything less than a Mercedes.’

  He led the way towards the truck, with me walking off to one side, keenly aware of the rifle aimed at us from the half-open passenger window. I didn’t want to get in the line of fire if this turned out to be a bid for a new leader for the Brothers. I could tell Aliyev had the same thought, as he let his gun swing seemingly nonchalant by his side, eyes alert to a possible ambush.

  He only relaxed when he saw the driver and his passenger, recognised them as loyal men. Or possibly his feet hurt as much as mine did.

  ‘You’re riding in the back, I’m afraid, Inspector,’ Aliyev said. ‘Don’t worry, there are enough holes in the sides to see you get lots of fresh air. And the boys will have cleaned out most of the goat and sheep shit.’