The Sixteen

by John Urwin

  By the time I arrived on the garrison rooftop, Dynamo had already begun to remove some old bits of canvas and wood from a broken skylight, or possibly a trapdoor, which had been boarded up. He cautiously lifted one corner and we peered through the small opening. Two guards were standing talking to one another by some stairs at the end of a corridor directly below. Silently replacing the cover, Dynamo swiftly went to the edge of the roof and signalled to Chalky that there was a problem, in order to stop him from coming over.

  ‘Two guards!’ he hissed, holding up two fingers and pointing over to the skylight.

  Chalky held up his hand and whispered back: ‘Five minutes.’

  Then he disappeared inside the derelict building. We waited a few minutes before he reappeared on the opposite roof and quickly began to make his way over to us.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I quietly asked him. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘All in good time, Geordie. Wait a couple of minutes and you’ll see. I’ll show you how to get rid of them,’ he said, nodding towards the skylight.

  We silently waited a few more minutes, then Spot turned to him.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Give it time, old boy.’ Chalky grinned back.

  At that moment, there was a commotion at the front of the building, a lot of shouting and the sound of running feet. Smoke began rising from a small hut in the corner of the compound followed by a series of small explosions. Spot dashed to the edge of the building, looked over briefly, and then strolled back to where we were waiting.

  ‘Your handiwork I presume?’ he said evenly to Chalky.

  ‘Small store area, full of paint and paraffin – came in rather handy. Right then, let’s get on with the damn job,’ Chalky calmly replied.

  We felt secure leaving the rope in place at this stage. It ran parallel to the numerous telephone cables and wires from the telegraph pole across to the adjacent building and anyone looking up wouldn’t have been able to spot it amongst the masses of wires already attached to the pole.

  Dynamo led the way over the roof to the skylight and peered through the hole he’d made earlier again, to see if the guards were still there but by now they’d gone, presumably to see what all the noise was about in the compound.

  ‘It worked, they’ve gone!’ he whispered to Chalky. Squeezing his hand through the hole, he released the bolts holding the skylight in place. Once it was removed, we dropped through the opening and landed on to a large box about seven feet below, before dropping quietly down from this into the corridor. Dynamo immediately took out the small photograph of our target he’d hidden in the waistband of his trousers, looked at it briefly, then systematically began to try all the doors leading off the landing. The first couple he tried were locked and as no light shone beneath them, he swiftly moved on. He paused by the following door, listening, and then looked through the keyhole.

  ‘There’s someone in here,’ he whispered, then turned the handle and took a step into the room. Immediately he backed out again, pulling the door shut behind him, and looked at the photograph in his hand.

  ‘That’s him, in there!’

  Politely he knocked on the door before re-entering the room with the three of us close behind him and walked straight over to a man sitting behind a large desk. The man looked furious. He stood up and walked towards Dynamo with his hand pointing towards the door, and said something in Arabic, no doubt words to the effect of ‘What the hell are you all doing in my office?’

  Dynamo replied, also in Arabic, before adding in English, ‘Sorry about this, old boy.’

  Using the ‘Machine’ moves he knocked the man’s outstretched arm out of the way and spun him around, before delivering two instantaneous blows, his left hand to the back of the guy’s head while the base of his right palm hit the guy on the right side of the chin. But just as he was about to break the man’s neck, I grabbed his arm and stopped him.

  ‘Don’t kill him!’

  ‘Bloody hell, Geordie, what’s the matter with you?’ he exclaimed in surprise. ‘That’s what we’re here for isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes I know but I think I can do this without having the whole Egyptian army looking for us. I’m fairly certain that I can make it look like suicide. I think I know just how to do it!’ I explained. ‘If he’s got a gun, we can do it.’

  I began to search the guy but there was nothing on him.

  ‘He’s bound to have one,’ Spot said, looking around the room.

  ‘What about this, any good?’ Chalky pulled a service revolver out of one of the desk drawers. ‘What’s on your mind, Geordie?’

  ‘I hope this isn’t going to take too long,’ Dynamo said, glancing towards the door. ‘Do you really think you can do it?’

  ‘Just help me set up some light lines, lads, we’ll be out of here in no time!’ I said confidently.

  Immediately on entering the room, I’d looked around and noticed that it had three barred windows and only one door. I’d also noticed that the door had an unusual lock, which could only be locked from the inside, as there was no keyhole on the other side. It also had a standard lock higher up the door, with a keyhole either side and two bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom. After quickly examining the type of locks on the door, and seeing that the key in the half-lock had a ring with two other large keys hanging from it, I’d come up with an idea.

  I knew that by using our light lines, I could lock the door, pull the two bolts across and put the keys back into the guy’s pocket from outside of the room! Anyone trying to get in after we’d gone would assume that he had locked the door himself from the inside – which meant that it would look like suicide and no one would be looking for us.

  The man was still lying on the floor, unconscious. Dynamo picked him up and sat him upright in his chair with his head slumped forward.

  ‘Right, Chalky, do that trick of yours with the oil filter,’ I told him.

  Chalky wrapped some cloth around his hand and the gun, then placed the oil filter on the end of the barrel, while Dynamo grabbed the man’s hair and pulled his head upright. Chalky placed the oil filter hard against the man’s right hand temple and squeezed the trigger. The gun made a faint popping sound and part of the left side of the guy’s head came away. Blood immediately gushed from the wound, up the wall, over the desk and down on to the floor. Chalky and Dynamo lay him over his desk with his right hand hanging down towards the floor, where Chalky placed the gun beneath his fingers.

  The gun had made only a slight sound but Spot still checked the corridor to make sure no one had heard it.

  ‘It’s OK, there’s still so much racket going on outside they wouldn’t have heard an elephant gun!’ he said, coming back into the room.

  In the meantime, I’d made a small hole in the man’s jacket pocket with my boot-knife and had begun to rig up most of the lines.

  Chalky looked at me quizzically for a moment then, being quick on the uptake, he smiled slowly. ‘I’ve got the idea, Geordie. Spot, give me a hand.’

  Dynamo watched the corridor while the two of them helped to set it up.

  We rigged up lines over and under the door and through the keyhole. I now took one line, looped it through the key ring attached to the key in the lock, which made a double line, that I ran over the top of the desk, through the tiny hole in the dead man’s jacket pocket, back underneath the desk and then underneath the door. I then attached a single line to this where it looped through the key ring and took this over the top of the door.

  The next line, I wound around the two spare keys hanging from the key ring, again this made a double line, which I also hung over the top of the door. Chalky wrapped a third and fourth line around the door bolts, one top and one bottom, and took one over the door and the other underneath it, while Spot pulled a chair to within two feet of the door. Taking a fifth line, he wrapped this around the top of the chair back and fed both ends through the keyhole, then I did a similar manoeuvre around the two back legs of the chair, taking th
ese lines underneath the door.

  ‘Right, now let’s get out of here into the corridor and I’ll close the door behind us.’

  ‘Why have you got the lines going through his pocket?’ Dynamo asked, puzzled.

  ‘Because I want to put the keys into his jacket pocket,’ I explained.

  ‘Bloody hell, is that really necessary?’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Look, when I do a job I do it properly. You want it to be convincing, don’t you? You want this lot to believe he’s just topped himself, well, watch this!’

  By looking underneath the door, I pulled on the line around the chair legs and manoeuvred it to within a foot of the door. Then Spot pulled on the other one around the chair back, which caused it to tip over and lie against the door, and kept pulling it until it wedged underneath the handle, then we released one end of each line and pulled them both back under the door.

  I was holding the line around the spare keys and now I pulled it to use them as leverage to turn the key in the half-lock. Then, by allowing these two keys on the key ring to drop again under their own weight I was able to straighten and square up the key in the lock, retrieving this line over the top of the door.

  Pulling on the second line through the guy’s pocket, I managed to yank the keys out of the lock and by holding on to the first line over the top of the door, I prevented them from hitting the floor. By manipulating the second line, I manoeuvred the keys across the top of the desk into the man’s pocket. Chalky looked through the keyhole and told me when the keys were secure, then I pulled on the first line and let go of the second and brought both of them over the top of the door.

  Chalky then yanked on the two remaining lines and locked both the top and bottom bolts and by releasing one end of either line, retrieved them.

  All of this had taken only a few minutes to set up and it gave the impression that the man had locked and bolted the door from the inside, placed a chair under the door handle, then put the keys back into his pocket before proceeding to shoot himself.

  ‘Well, if that doesn’t look like suicide, I can’t imagine what would!’ Dynamo exclaimed. ‘But just to make sure…’

  As the rest of us climbed out through the skylight and made our way back across the roof, Dynamo leant back down through the opening and fired a shot into the corridor.

  I spun around at the sound. ‘What did you do that for?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘Well, we want them to believe that he’s just shot himself, don’t we, so they need to hear a gunshot. I think that should bring them running.’

  Quickly the two of us closed the skylight behind us and pushed the wood and canvas back into place to make it look as though no one had tampered with it. Not that they probably would check it anyway; if they believed the guy had committed suicide there was no reason for them to.

  Chalky, Dynamo and I made our way back across the gap between the buildings using the ropes and pulleys we’d left there and Spot was the last man over.

  He unhooked the karabiner and heavy rope from the telegraph pole and then fastened the rope back around the metal bar, still forming a slipknot by using the karabiner. Attaching a light line to the karabiner and, using the pulley-wheel system again, he made his way back over to us with the other end of the light line attached to him. When he reached us, we released the rope with the pulley wheels from the telegraph pole on our side, which we’d used to keep our heavy rope taut, and then by pulling on the light line we brought the karabiner back towards us.

  Quickly removing it, I fastened the light line on to the heavy rope where the karabiner had been and then we retrieved our heavy rope, preventing it from falling down onto the fence below, the same method we had used when we put the rope up. There was no trace of us having been there.

  Gathering our equipment together, we silently made our way uneventfully back through the derelict building to the street below.

  ‘It’s early yet, lads, we’ve got bags of time. I fancy seeing that big mosque, I didn’t get to see it last time I was here!’ Dynamo joked.

  Chalky grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a shove.

  ‘Come on, stop messing about, let’s get out of this bloody place.’

  ‘Aw, I really fancied seeing that mosque and we’ve got the time to do it too, thanks to Geordie!’ Dynamo continued as we began to make our way back towards the square. ‘It’s not that far away either!’

  Chalky turned to me, saying, ‘He’s not joking you know, he really means it! Bloody tourist!’

  Without further discussion, we quickly retraced our steps back along the side of the building towards the narrow alleyway but as we turned into it, they suddenly began to slap me on the back, grinning and shaking their heads in amazement.

  ‘Jeesus, Geordie, how the hell did you come up with that idea?’ Dynamo burst out excitedly. ‘It was ingenious.’

  ‘Well, I had good teachers, didn’t I?’ I said, a little embarrassed at the fuss they were making.

  ‘Yeah, but we didn’t show you anything like that!’ Chalky exclaimed. ‘We just showed you a few tricks with bits of string, nothing like that!’

  ‘It was brilliant!’ Spot added, thumping me on the shoulder and grinning from ear to ear. ‘Absolutely brilliant! And it’ll make it a lot easier to get back without a general alert, that’s if the truck’s still there.’

  Chalky turned to Dynamo and gave him a nudge. ‘Now we know why the team picked him, eh lads!’ he said, laughing. ‘The man’s a bloody genius!’

  ‘Aw, stop it!’ I said, blushing and shoving them away but secretly I was thrilled that I’d pleased them so much. They were the only people in the world, other than my mother, whose opinions meant anything to me.

  ‘OK, enough of the carry on, lads, we’re not out of the woods yet!’ Spot quietly reminded us as we neared the street that led into the square.

  The square was empty now and we couldn’t see anyone around. In the background faint strains of music could just be heard but as there didn’t appear to be any guards around we quickly made our way over to where we’d left the truck. Now and then a door would open and a shaft of light would fall across the square but no one approached us.

  Chalky pointed it out. ‘Hey look, lads, it’s still there!’

  Spot immediately dashed over to the truck and jumped inside.

  ‘One of you buggers can get in the back this time! Do they work nightshift around here, Chalky? You look like a workman, get on the back!’

  Chalky grinned and climbed onto the back of the truck.

  ‘Suits me fine, just take it easy, lads, I want to get some kip,’ he said calmly, wrapping a canvas sheet around him.

  ‘The jammy sod! Why didn’t I think of that?’ Spot exclaimed as I climbed in next to him. ‘What’s that horrible smell, Geordie? Have you stepped in something a camel left behind?’

  ‘It’s this damn jacket, I don’t know what the hell they had in the pocket but it stinks. I’m surprised that bloody guard dog didn’t smell it when we were behind the building!’

  Dynamo tried three or four times to start the engine. ‘Oh, hell. That’s all we need,’ he moaned.

  ‘Does he always have this trouble?’ I asked Spot, giggling. ‘If I remember he couldn’t start a jeep up the Troodos Mountains either.’ Dynamo nudged me hard in the ribs.

  ‘Can’t we just take one of these other trucks?’ Spot suggested.

  ‘Come on, you know better than that! Even these silly sods would notice straight away if one of those is missing in the morning and start looking for it. Besides, this one’s supposed to be a hundred miles north of here.’

  Just then the engine started. ‘Thank goodness for that.’ Dynamo heaved a sigh of relief and drove off. ‘Right lads, we’ll just take it easy and have a nice slow ride back. We’ve got bags of time now, thanks to the genius,’ he said, grinning in my direction.

  We drove out of the city along the same route we’d followed on entering it, and passed only a few small groups
of civilians and armed troops along the way. The broken-down lorry was still at the side of the road by the bridge but the area was quiet now.

  The traffic was virtually non-existent on our return journey, which was as uneventful as Dynamo had said it would be. About forty miles outside of Cairo, he pulled over and stopped to check on the fuel and found Chalky sound asleep on the back.

  ‘How the hell can he sleep at a time like this?’ Dynamo commented dryly as we lifted the petrol cans off the truck to refuel it.

  We drove almost all the way back to the beach area, passing the point where we’d initially commandeered the truck ‘without the owner’s consent’, about two miles before we turned off the main road onto an old track.

  Dynamo followed the track for roughly six miles to a desolate swampy area on the bank of the river, an ideal spot to dump the truck. He drove it straight into the reeds and halfway down the embankment towards the river. Jumping out of the cab the three of us went around to the back to wake Chalky. He was still sound asleep wrapped in the canvas sheeting.

  ‘Come on, Sleeping Beauty, the truck’s starting to sink into the mud!’ Dynamo said, pulling the canvas off the back of the wagon with Chalky still in it.

  ‘Aw, come on, lads, leave me alone it’s lovely and warm in here. OK, OK, I’m coming,’ he said as Dynamo yanked hard at the sheeting.

  ‘We want to dump it in the river, come on, give it a push.’

  He climbed back into the cab and released the handbrake. Slowly the heavy vehicle began to roll forwards and then as it suddenly gathered momentum he jumped out again. The four of us stood watching it roll into the water then slowly begin to sink out of sight.

  ‘If it’s ever found, they’ll probably just think those guys had an accident,’ Spot commented.

  Dynamo took the canvas sheeting from Chalky and using his boot-knife he tore the sheeting into four strips and gave a piece to each of us. We faffed about with it, putting holes into it so we could wrap the bits around us and wear it like a coat, tying them around our waists with bits of string.