tion id="u94713304-241f-5ea5-addc-6ddd2ac2ea50">
Samarkand Hijack
DAVID MONNERY
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1995
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1995
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover photographs © Nik Keevil/Arcangel Images (soldier); MILpictures, Tom Weber/Getty Images (background); Shutterstock.com (textures)
David Monnery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008155339
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155346
Version: 2015-11-02
Contents
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES
Bradford, England, 14 March 1979
It was a Wednesday evening, and Martin could hear the Coronation Street theme music through the wall. His mother was in the back room ready to watch, but he had not been allowed to join her, allegedly because he had homework to finish. The real reason, though, was that there was a sex scandal going on; one of the characters was sleeping with another’s wife, or something like that. His mother didn’t like any of her children watching such things, and certainly not Martin, who at twelve was the youngest of the three.
He continued drawing the blue border around the coastline of England with the felt-tip pen. He liked drawing maps, and he was good at it, both as a copyist and from memory. England, though, was always something of a challenge: it was so easy to make the fat peninsulas too thin and vice versa.
The coastline was finished, and he stopped for a moment. It was dark outside now, so he walked over to draw the curtains across the front windows. The sound of raucous laughter floated down the street; it was probably the youths with the motor bikes who habitually gathered outside the fish and chip shop. Thinking about the latter made Martin feel hungry, even though he’d only had supper an hour or so earlier. His father, brother and sister
