“What if there are other prisoners still alive?” Costas asked. “Sahirah was probably one of many.”
Ahmed shook his head. “We get her out first. Anyone else waits inside until we’re sure we’ve cleared the building. If there are many of them and we try to get them out together, it will be chaos and a massacre.”
Jack heaved Costas to his feet, grimacing from his wound, and then approached the door with the Beretta held ready. He glanced back at Ahmed. “You good to go?”
“On your six.”
Jack nodded, turned, and stepped cautiously into the corridor, peering left and right, and then made his way quickly to the stairway and down to the entrance foyer. Bodies were strewn everywhere, and Jack saw Ahmed’s other two men guarding the street entrance. He could orientate himself now and turned along a ground-floor corridor through a swinging door and down a flight of stairs to the basement level. The labs lay through two more doors ahead and were visible through the glass partition. He turned to the others, putting a finger up for quiet, and slowly opened each door in turn. He led them forward until they all stood silently in the corridor outside the labs. The walls were still covered with archaeological posters, one showing artifacts from the travelling Tutankhamun exhibition, the same poster that Hiebermeyer had in the institute in Alexandria. Another advertised a forthcoming conference on the Cairo Geniza, with a section of medieval manuscript text in Arabic prominently displayed beneath it.
Jack turned to the first of the labs and slowly raised himself until he could see through the glass partition that divided it from the corridor. The scene inside was like something from a horror film. The lights were off, but he could see a body strapped to a chair, with electrical wires attached to its hands. Another body was suspended from a hook that had once been used to raise heavy artifacts onto the lab bench. A terrible stench came through the cracks around the door as he passed it. Neither of the bodies had been a woman, and he turned back to Ahmed, who was crouched behind him, and shook his head. He moved forward to the next lab, crawled along to the door, and slowly raised himself up, holding out his hand for the others to wait. He was expecting the worst, but this one was different. The lights were on, bright florescent bulbs used for archaeological work, and he could see that the lab was filled with crouching people, perhaps twenty-five to thirty of them, their hands behind their heads and their faces down. Against the back wall were two gunmen with black headbands, chewing khat and fingering their Kalashnikovs, evidently left to guard these people while a decision was made about what to do with them.
Jack slowly dropped down and turned his back to the door. It was impossible to make out any faces, but if Sahirah were alive and in the labs, this was the only place where she could be; there were no other rooms. He looked at his Beretta, his hand stuck with his own congealing blood to the grip, and opened the slide to check that a round was chambered, letting it back silently against the spring. He ejected the magazine, checked it, and slid it back in again until it clicked in place. He looked back at Ahmed and Costas and the other two, putting his fingers to his eyes and pointing toward the door, holding up two fingers, and then raising his hand for them to stay where they were. If one of them tried to come up to him and dropped his weapon or made any other noise, it might provoke the gunmen to open up inside, causing carnage. Jack slowly turned toward the door and shuffled back a meter or so, keeping low so that he was invisible from inside, holding the Beretta out in front of him with both hands. He would have to ignore the pain in his shoulder when he struck the door. He closed his eyes and counted down. Three. Two. One.
He leapt up and crashed into the door, pushing it hard against the people squatting inside, turned to the left and fired twice in quick succession, hitting both gunmen in the head, the blood and gray matter splattering against the wall behind as they crumpled to the floor. The crack of the Beretta had deafened him, and for a moment he sensed only the smell of the smoke curling up from the muzzle. The people began to look up at him, their faces contorted with fear, the men with days of stubble and the men and women alike streaked with dirt and dried blood. A figure stood up and detached herself from the rest, a young woman, and lurched toward him, falling into his arms. He realized that he was shaking her by the shoulders, the pistol still in his left hand, trying to snap her out of her shock, shouting at her to pull herself together. He had never spoken to her before, had never even seen her except in Rebecca’s photograph, but in that split second she was all that mattered to him. His hearing came back, a hiss and then a roar that became yells and screams and gunshots, and he heard himself shouting at her. “We’ve come to get you out of here. Stay close behind me. Everyone else has to remain here until the building is clear. You tell them.”
Sahirah turned and spoke quickly in Arabic, her voice shaky and hoarse, repeating herself more loudly as several men got up and tried to push themselves toward the door until others pulled them down. Jack turned back, holding her wrist with his right hand and the Beretta with his left. Two gunmen rushing down the corridor were cut down in a hail of fire from Ahmed and his men, the bullets smashing through the glass screens and pinging off the pipes overhead. Jack crouched down, the girl behind him, and poked his Beretta into the corridor. A voice yelled her name, and Ahmed showed himself at the end of the corridor, his M4 aimed. Jack pushed her ahead and turned back, emptying his Beretta down the other end of the corridor where more gunmen had been shooting at them. He dropped the magazine, inserting the last one and releasing the slide, and then followed Sahirah and Ahmed. He was conscious of Costas ahead of him, and Ahmed’s men firing bursts behind them as they ran. Seconds later they were outside, running down an alley toward a street. As they turned the corner, a pair of pickup trucks hurtled by, the gunmen aboard oblivious to them, heading in the direction of the execution ground in Fustat.
Ahmed pulled Sahirah under an archway and the rest came after him, Jack following. One of the men spoke rapidly in Arabic to Ahmed, who bowed his head briefly and put a hand on the man’s shoulder before turning to Jack. “We’re down to three men. We lost another in the foyer. But there are others like us around the city, pockets of fighters. Every able-bodied Egyptian man has done military service and knows how to use a rifle, and they’ll start coming to us now. That bloodbath in Fustat is going to work against the extremists, a sign of weakness, not strength. While they’re focused on executions, we’re going back into the ministry to kill any others in there and collect their weapons and ammunition, and get those other people out. Now is the time to rally resistance, not later when the gunmen have come down off their high and begun to establish order.”
“I take it you’re not coming with us.”
Ahmed gave him a bleak look. “What would you do in my position? Even if there is Western intervention, it will be too late to save most of my family and friends. This is my country, and I haven’t seen an Egyptian face among the gunmen. I will stay and fight.”
Ahmed turned to Sahirah, embracing her. He released her and peered out into the street. “It’s about three hundred meters to the river. I’ll hold this position until we see you safely on the felucca. Then I’m back inside to help my men get those people out. Walk quickly, but don’t run.”
Costas turned to Ahmed and clasped his hand. “God be with you.”
He nodded, squeezed Costas’ hand and released it, and glanced again at Jack. “And with you too, my friends. Now go.”
Dawn was just breaking as the felucca finally motored clear of the last dilapidated dwellings of northern Cairo, the way ahead of them now clear through the delta toward the sea. It had been a tense hour since they had scrambled on board, with gunmen in trucks careering along the banks and firing bursts into the air. But Ahmed had been right; all attention appeared to be focused on the feeding frenzy in the center of the city. Lanowski had been in satellite contact with Sea Venture and the IMU security team, who had modified the extraction plan in the light of the events of the past twenty-four hours. With the Egyptian air force dysfunctional and the extremists having no air capability, the Israelis had total air superiority over northern Egypt and the Sinai. Ben had liased with their contacts in the Israeli Defense Force and arranged for air cover for a revised helicopter extraction deep within Egypt, only a few kilometers ahead of them now on the east bank of the Nile. Not for the first time Jack was grateful to David Ben-Gurion, whose reserve rank in the IDF had allowed him to pull off something that would never have been officially sanctioned. Israel would undoubtedly maintain her presence in the air over Egypt to secure a buffer zone, but her ground forces were needed to the north and east, where the threat of invasion was greatest by organized, well-equipped forces rather than ragtag gunmen in pickup trucks. Any hint of intervention by Israel in Egypt would only provoke the crisis further, leading to all-out war and extreme acts of terrorism not only against Israel but also against the Western powers, which were perceived to be her allies.