“Amazing,” he said, passing the bayonet back to Tariq. “I really hope you don’t have to use it today!” He truly meant it.
“Don’t worry, George,” Ben reassured him. “We’ll do our best to get Gail back without bloodshed. But don’t forget, we’re not starting this; they took her away. And because they left a body in her place, we know that they have no plans of ever releasing her. They’re going to kill Gail if we don’t rescue her first, George.”
He nodded slowly, looking from face to face as he summed the situation up. He felt that they were waiting for his approval before moving forwards with their plans; my wife - my call, he thought grimly. There were seven of them in total; five well-armed and, he assumed, well-trained people, alongside Ben, whom he was sure would be getting a gun from somewhere before Patterson arrived. And then there was him, the odd one out, with no previous experience, he’d never even been in a fight, save for punching Captain Kamal and the odd bust-up at school, let alone fired a weapon. When he had held the bayonet, the one thought that occurred to him was how much heavier than his bread knife it was. This alone told him he was better off out of the combat zone.
But his emotional side was in conflict with this calm analysis. Gail was being held by Patterson, who would be in Amarna in a matter of hours. Would he be happy to simply stand by and watch as people he barely knew did all the work? Like hell I will, he thought. For the past few days, she had been officially dead. Now the man responsible for that was going to be handed to him on a plate.
He looked at Zahra sternly. All trace of a smile vanished from her face as she waited to hear his assessment of the situation.
Ben leaned forwards. “George, this may be our only chance to get close to these people. Once they leave Egypt, they’re untouchable,” he urged. “What do you say?”
“Do you have a spare gun?”
Chapter 65
Squatting in the shade of the gatehouse, they went over the plan once more, with Ben and Leena translating into English, to make sure George was comfortable with it.
“I will greet Patterson at the foot of the cliff, with Zahra’s Toyota, on my own. I will be unarmed, and carry with me the fake excavation permits that we made last night back in Cairo,” Ben said.
“And if he realises they are fake?” George asked.
Ben shook his head. “He won’t. Zahra was completely taken in by them at first, so an American will be fooled for sure. Besides, he has no reason not to trust me.” He looked at his watch and realised they had little more than an hour until Patterson’s scheduled arrival time. They had all agreed that they should be in position with three quarters of an hour to spare, in case he was early. Otherwise they would all be clearly visible from a distance, standing on the small plateau. “I will then lead him round the road to approach the plateau from the rear. Zahra, you will observe from the ridge. This then gives you five minutes to prepare before we arrive at the Library entrance, and to make sure we are not followed by anyone. We then have one of three options.” He gestured to Leena to explain.
“Option one, this Patterson man is alone: we meet him at the top with guns. Option two, he is not alone, but there are more of us: we meet him at the top with guns. Option three, he is not alone, but there are more of them.” She pointed to a narrow gulley, at the bottom of which a rough trail led up towards the Library entrance. “There, if there is more than one car, we attack the rear one when it passes through. This makes a trap.”
“So if there are two cars, the front one has nowhere to go,” George agreed.
“We attack first,” Ben added. “If they outnumber us, then we have one chance only to take advantage. Once we lose the element of surprise, it’ll be impossible to win. If he brings people with him, I have no doubt that they will be well trained.”
George nodded in understanding. “What do we do to the trapped car?”
“Hopefully, the trapped one will be the Toyota with me in it.” Ben replied.
“And Gail?”
Ben looked at Zahra. “You have the photo of her, so you know what she looks like. If she is here, I will make sure that she gets in the Toyota with me and Patterson. Just in case she doesn’t though, you will need to make sure everyone knows which car she is in.”
George mused this for a few moments, scratching his chin. “What if she’s in the last car?”
“Then I let them go ahead of me on the way up. They go through, and I block the exit,” Ben replied simply.
The three of them thought this through in silence for over a minute, before Zahra stood up, stretched her legs and picked up her AK-47. “Good plan,” she said with a yawn. They’d all been there for over three hours now, and had been over the plan several times in Arabic already.
Ben started to stand up as well, but George put his hand on his shoulder. “Ben, what is the worst case scenario? What don’t we want?”
“That they get inside the Library, especially if they have Gail. If they get her down there, they have her as a hostage, and it gets complicated.” He looked back at him and put his hand on George’s comfortingly. “But don’t worry, we won’t let that happen.
George looked at the door hanging loose on its hinges, the padlock and bolt mechanism, now useless, sat in a heap in the sand. “If you hadn’t broken the lock, it would be a lot harder for them to do that, you know?” he said sarcastically.
Ben shrugged and picked the padlock up as he made it to his feet. “True, but if they have guns, and they live that long, then they’ll have bullets to open the door anyway.”
George brushed out the attack plan diagrams they had made in the sand with his foot, and picked up his own AK-47 that had been leaning against the breeze-block wall. The first time he had held a weapon had been an hour ago, when they had passed him the rifle from the back of the Toyota. It was heavier than he had imagined it would be, more so than a six-pint container of milk. He shook his head as he thought of the comparison; it was odd to find that the only things he could compare weapons to had so far been things found in the kitchen.
Tariq had walked him through the basics of holding, arming and firing the rifle, which seemed simple enough that even a child could do it. He thought of news stories from the Middle East and central Africa, and realised that children did do it.
The AK-47 had two firing modes. The first of these was semi-automatic, where one bullet, or round as Ben kept reminding him, was fired every time the trigger was fully depressed. To fire another round, the trigger needed to be fully released and then pressed again. The second mode was full-automatic, which everyone seemed to refer to as full. This meant that when the trigger was depressed, rounds would continue to fire until either the trigger was released, or the magazine was empty. You chose which mode to fire by operating a selector on the right-hand side of the rifle to the lowest position for semi-automatic and middle position for full. In its topmost position, the selector acted as the safety catch, and stopped the rifle from firing. “The most important thing,” Leena had reminded him, “is to make sure you turn the safety off before firing, and when you hear click, let go of the trigger and reload.”
While firing seemed pretty straight forward, reloading was something he was less comfortable with. Although it seemed simple in theory, he was sure that in the thick of things, he would forget to do something crucial and the magazine would simply fall out of the bottom in a slapstick fashion, leaving him with an empty weapon and a stupid grin on his face. As he stood in the shade on his own, Zahra and Ben having gone to meet up with the others to confirm their plans, George decided to run through the reload a few more times.
He turned the AK-47 on its side and found the magazine catch, which was underneath the trigger assembly, behind the magazine itself. I can just see myself pressing that by mistake, he thought nervously. Pressing it, he pulled the magazine out, and placed it at his feet. He then put the selector on the right of the rifle from safety to semi-automatic. Grasping the bolt catch, also on the right side of the AK-47, he pulled it back firmly and the single round that had been in the chamber of the rifle popped out of the side. It fell to the floor, and he picked it up cautiously, feeling the weight of the bullet in the palm of his hand before sliding it into his pocket.