The Moses Legacy

Chapter 40

Sarit’s training had involved the advanced driving course, including night driving, but she still felt uncomfortable doing it. Along the way she had evaded a donkey cart and two parked cars and nearly been demolished by a heavily loaded truck that shed some of its load in an effort to overtake her.

And now she caught sight of what she thought was the jeep that Goliath had driven away from the tomb, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. She could make out the form, but not the colour, much less the occupant. In any case, there were too many other cars on this stretch of road to be able to do anything. She would have to bide her time.

But she stayed in contact, keeping several car lengths back. The drive back to Cairo would take seven or eight hours all told, and she had barely been driving for two.

It was some three hours later that she finally got her opportunity. The traffic had thinned out considerably because many people did not want to drive that late, and somewhere along the line it got to the point that she was no longer able to keep other vehicles between them because they were on a stretch of road that had no other vehicles. That meant that the time to strike was now. She opened the driver’s window, knowing that she would not be able to reach over to her passenger window whilst controlling the vehicle, but this also meant that she could not throw the Molotov cocktail while overtaking him. Instead, she would have to get him to overtake her.

Steeling herself, she overtook him in a highly aggressive manoeuvre and then slowed down in front of him, just sitting there in the single lane, knowing that he was getting increasingly annoyed. She didn’t respond when he hooted and flashed his lights at her. But when he started moving out to overtake, she knew the time had come. Holding the steering wheel with her right hand, she lit the rag with her left, dropped the lighter and took the Molotov cocktail out of the side pocket.

As Goliath pulled up level with her and shouted something out at her, she threw the Molotov cocktail as hard as she could through the open driver’s window of her car and the passenger window of his. She had been intending to throw it through the rear window, so that it would shatter on impact and explode. But at the last minute, she realized that she couldn’t be sure that it would penetrate. It would depend on how strong or reinforced the windows were. Within seconds, the interior of Goliath’s car was ablaze, including his clothes, as he screamed with pain and skidded this way and that.

But Sarit had no time to survey the results of her work. She put her foot down and pulled away quickly, casting a brief glance in her rear-view mirror to satisfy herself that the job was done.

What she didn’t see was the old man with the donkey and cart on the side road. But he had seen her and was surprised that she didn’t stay to help. It was for that reason that he whipped out a pen and wrote down what he remembered of her registration number on his hand.