Instinctively I reached out and caught the revolver, its handle slick with sweat.
Around me, men were once more rising to their feet. Fortunately their attention had been on Sam, and to my surprise, I survived any real scrutiny. Maybe they were simply relieved not to have been shot, but no one appeared to realise I’d been an accomplice to the mad Englishman who’d just fired his pistol into the air.
I traced a path back to where I thought Irani had stood, but found nothing. Onstage someone was shouting. I looked up and saw Gulmohamed, flanked by his bodyguards and pointing at me. The crowd might have failed to notice me, but he certainly hadn’t. It was then that I saw it. At the foot of the platform, wedged between two of the wooden struts which held up the stage and almost directly below where Gulmohamed now stood, was the brown leather Gladstone bag I had seen in Irani’s hotel suite.
Without a thought, I began to run towards it. Gulmohamed must have thought I was coming for him, for a moment later one of his men leapt from the stage. There was but one thing for it. I lifted the revolver and pointed it squarely at his head.
The man froze.
‘Police!’ I said, then pointed behind him to the bag and shouted in Hindi. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, or your boss. I just need to get to that bag.’
He stood aside and I brushed past him. Reaching the case, I tried the clasp. It was locked, but this time I had no choice but to snap the flimsy mechanism. I threw it open and stumbled backwards. What was inside was unmistakable. Sticks of explosive and a few wires attached to a timing clock. I’d seen bombs before, but nothing like this, at least not outside of a training manual. The bombs used by our Calcutta anarchists were crude devices compared to this thing, just metal spheres with an explosive charge and a fuse sticking out of the end. Only once before had I seen a timed bomb, and even then, it had been an amateur affair which had failed to go off. This appeared to be something quite different. Either Irani had received professional instruction while in the army, or someone with a detailed knowledge of these things had given it to him. Whatever the explanation, the chances of my defusing it were negligible.
I turned to Gulmohamed’s bodyguard who still stood with his hands in the air, beckoned him over and pointed to the bomb. ‘Your burra sahib needs to tell the crowd to get as far back from the stage as possible, and then you need to get him out of here and into the mosque.’
The man quickly understood what was at stake. He clambered onto the stage, explained to Gulmohamed what he had seen and what I had told him. The politician stared down at me, then reached for the microphone and in a voice that hardly wavered, ordered his followers to get up and quickly make their way either into the mosque or back along the causeway.
It took agonising seconds for the people to react. If the device exploded now, tens, if not hundreds of men, myself and Gulmohamed included, would be killed. I’d no idea how long we had, but I needed to speed things up. Once more I reached for the revolver, and as Sam had done earlier, I lifted it skyward and fired. It achieved the desired effect and a minute later I had succeeded in clearing an area of some twenty feet around the bomb.
From there, I risked a glance back at the stage to make sure Gulmohamed had also heeded my advice, but before I could focus, there was a flash and a sound like thunder rent the air. I felt myself hurled backwards, and the last thing I remember before blacking out is the platform collapsing amid a cloud of dust and debris.