Usman called out to Rehmat in a low voice. He was pacing up and down near the boundary wall, keeping an eye out for any movement or sound while waiting for Rehmat to join him. When he didn’t get a response, he quickly walked back to the breach and realized immediately what had happened. He pulled Rehmat out, dragging him by the fabric of his khakis. Once Rehmat was through the breach, he knelt down on the ground and thanked the Almighty for helping him.

It was 4.03 a.m. and still dark, except for a few lights dotting the IIS&T campus and the slum.

‘Good we did not wait till 6 a.m. as Babar told us,’ Usman said. ‘Just imagine. At 6 a.m., that American, Dr Samuel Price himself, would have come to rescue you, thanks to the racket you were creating,’ Usman laughed.

Rehmat punched Usman playfully on his shoulder. ‘I got scared; it was too small a breach, brother.’

The fidayeen, clad in khakis with fake Maharashtra Police insignia, followed the road by the boundary wall for fifty metres. Then they stepped off the road and, as instructed by Babar, ran to the right towards an abandoned building, earlier a part of the mechanical engineering department. They took the stairs up to the terrace of the single-storey building and ducked into a spacious concrete overhead water tank that was lying empty.

They were to lie inside till 1.15 p.m., at which time they would emerge to take up their positions to attack Price and the other scientists, as per Babar’s plan.

From their small backpacks, the fidayeen took out their AK-47s and their hand grenades, eight for each of them. The convention centre’s entrance was just across the road from the building they were hiding in, around thirty metres away. The spot where Price and the others would get into their bulletproof vehicles, which were introduced into their security detail at the last moment on the orders of Commissioner Saxena, was within the range of the fidayeen’s AK-47s and also the grenades.

Rehmat and Usman took turns to sleep and keep a vigil while waiting for the action to begin.

At 1.30 p.m., Dr Price, along with a group of scientists, emerged from the convention centre and walked towards a fleet of reinforced white Ambassador cars. Just as the chauffeur opened the door for the tall, bespectacled American luminary, there was a deafening blast near the car, followed by shock waves and a blizzard of metal shrapnel and glass.

The blast was followed by another explosion, even as bullets began raining down on all those around Dr Price. There were two more blasts and three bursts of gunfire. Price lay on the ground, face down, while two other men lay motionless near him.