Sacred Stone

50

THE HINDU MERCENARIES arrived outside the hatch that led down to the water cooling pipes under the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. The hatch was located in an open space next to an apartment building on the far edge of a dirt lot used for overflow parking.

The lot was nearly empty, with only a dozen or so cars near the building itself.

The leader of the Hindus simply backed the truck up next to the hatch, cut the padlock with bolt cutters, and then led a team down the iron ladder into the tunnel. Once they were inside, the driver and another man who had stayed behind backed up on top of the hatch and waited.

The concrete tunnel was six feet in diameter with a series of pipes marked in Arabic that denoted their purpose. The pipes were propped up from the bottom of the tunnel on brackets, and there was a thin walkway along the side for inspections. The inside was dark and cool with the smell of wet concrete and mold. The leader turned on his flashlight and the other men followed suit.

Then they began walking single file toward the mosque.

They had traveled nearly a mile underground before they came to the first fork. The leader stared at a handheld GPS. The signal was weak because of the concrete sheathing above his head, so he pulled out the tunnel diagram Hickman had provided and whispered to his men.

“You five go that way,” he said, quietly pointing to the men. “The tunnel will arc around and eventually form a rectangle. Set charges as you go at the intervals we discussed, then meet up with us at the far side.”

The one group set off along the tunnel to the right, the leader and his men to the left.

Forty-seven minutes later they all met up on the far side.

“Now we switch sides,” the leader said. “You men go down our tunnel and check our charges as you go. We’ll take yours and do the same.”

The men set off in opposite directions, their flashlights waving through the tunnel.

At each of six spots along each passage, C-6 and sticks of dynamite were wrapped together in bundles almost a foot in diameter and attached to the pipes with duct tape. On each of the stations was a digital timer that was counting down the hours.

The first timer read 107 hr: 46 min. The charges were set to go off midday on the tenth, when the mosque would be crowded with nearly a million pilgrims. The amount of explosive force the Hindus had stowed would reduce the mosque to near rubble. The largest charge they placed, with double the C-6 and dynamite, was directly under the spot on the diagram showing Muhammad’s tomb.

If the charges worked, in less than five days, centuries of history would be erased.

THEY MADE THEIR way back through the tunnel to the hatch that led up to the surface, and the leader climbed under the truck and slipped out the side. Stepping over to the driver’s window, he tapped and the driver rolled it down.

“Pull forward,” he said.

Once the men were back in the truck, the leader took out a padlock he had brought and relocked the hatch.

Four minutes later, under a thin sliver of moon, they set off back to Rabigh.

AT 6 A.M. THAT same morning, Hanley assembled the Corporation operatives in the conference room of the Oregon. The ship was offshore of Tel Aviv in the Mediterranean, making slow, lazy circles in the water. Hanley stared at a television screen showing the Robinson approaching from the bow.

“That’s the chairman,” he said, pointing. “He’ll be leading the briefing. Until he makes it down here I want each of you to go over your notes. There’s coffee and bagels on the side table. If you need something to eat, get it now. Once Mr. Cabrillo starts, I don’t want any interruptions.”

Hanley walked out to go to the control room for the latest updates. He picked them up from Stone and was just exiting the room again when Cabrillo and Adams walked past.

“Everyone’s waiting for you in the conference room,” he said, following the pair.

Reaching the conference room, Cabrillo opened the door and the three men walked inside. Adams, dressed in his flight suit, took a seat at the table. Hanley positioned himself next to Cabrillo, who walked behind the podium.

“Good to see you all again,” Cabrillo began, “especially Gunderson and his team. It’s nice to see they finally let you go,” he said, smiling to Gunderson. “We’ll need everyone for what is about to happen. I just returned from Tel Aviv and a meeting with the Mossad. They sent a large team into the mosque around the Dome of the Rock early this morning to search for explosives. Nothing of any type was located. Nothing conventional, nuclear or biological. They did locate a video camera that was not supposed to be there, however. It was hidden alongside a building inside a garden in a tree.”

No one spoke.

“The camera was hooked to a wireless uplink that sent the images out to a processing unit outside the mosque, then on through a conventional cable to a nearby building. The Mossad was making plans to enter the building when I left. They should have an update for me soon.”

The group nodded.

“The interesting thing about the camera was that it was positioned to point up at the sky above the Dome of the Rock, just catching the top of the structure. This indicates to me that Hickman, if he has recovered Abraham’s Stone, is planning some type of aerial assault that destroys the stone and damages the Dome of the Rock at the same time. His plan is to tape the destruction and somehow televise it to the world.”

The team nodded.

“The situation with Mecca and Medina is this,” Cabrillo continued. “Kasim and a United States Air Force officer will be leading a pair of teams, all comprised of U.S. military men who are Muslims, to check for bombs. I left Pete Jones in Qatar to coordinate things with the emir, who has offered to help us any way he can. I’ll let Mr. Hanley explain those efforts.”

Cabrillo stood away from the podium and Hanley took his place. Walking over to the coffeepot, Cabrillo poured two cups and took one over to Adams, who nodded his thanks.

“As you all know, Mecca and Medina are the two holiest sites to Islam. Because of that, they are off-limits to any non-Muslims. Kasim is the only member of our team who practices the Islamic faith, so he was selected to lead the teams. The emir arranged for a cargo plane and a fleet of multipurpose street and trail motorcycles to be shipped along with the members of Kasim’s group to Yemen. They arrived early this morning and slipped across the border to Saudi Arabia by driving along a wadi, or dry streambed. The latest update shows them already past the Saudi town of Sabya and driving north. Then they will board public buses to take them to the two mosques. Once there, they will spread out and search for explosives.”

“What about the shipping containers?” Halpert asked.

“As you all know,” Hanley continued, “the team that was in Maidenhead discovered traces of a toxin that we believe was sprayed onto the prayer rugs inside the containers. Kasim dispatched eight men on a commercial flight to Riyadh and they have already taken up positions around the cargo area where the shipping containers are stored, awaiting delivery to Mecca. Quite simply, we caught a break there. If those containers had arrived on time, they probably would have been unloaded by now and the toxins would have been released into the air. As it was, Hickman was so late with the delivery that the trucks were rescheduled for other tasks. According to the schedule the NSA intercepted from the planner’s PDA, he moved the delivery date to tomorrow, the seventh. The plan is to have the team at the cargo depot hook up the containers themselves and start down the road to Mecca. Somewhere between Riyadh and Mecca, we’ll need to destroy them or move them out of the country.”

Just then the telephone in the conference room buzzed, and Cabrillo walked over and answered. “Got it,” he said, and hung the receiver back in the cradle. Hanley looked at him in expectation.

“That was Overholt,” Cabrillo said. “His agent detected radiation near the curtain around the Kaaba. Hickman somehow managed to switch the meteorites.”

IN LONDON, MICHELLE Hunt had spent the last few days cooped up in a hotel room being grilled by CIA agents. She was tired but still cooperating. Quite frankly, the CIA was beginning to realize there was little she could do to help their efforts. Right from the start they had dismissed the idea of her calling Hickman. Even if he was carrying a portable telephone, once he saw that she was not phoning from her usual number he’d know something was up.

A plane had been scheduled to fly her back to the United States, and it was scheduled to leave within the hour. For the most part, all Hunt had been able to do was shed some light on Hickman’s life.

And that she had done in minute detail. They had asked her about everything, and she had complied. The agent in charge just needed to wrap up details on a few more points and he could submit his report.

“Now, back to the beginning,” the agent said. “When you first met, you said he flew into Los Angeles to inspect an oil property he was thinking of purchasing.”

“Yes,” Michelle Hunt said, “we met that day at lunch at Casen’s. I had a gift certificate from a girlfriend for a recent birthday. I was not in a position to afford expensive meals—even lunch—at that time.”

“What happened next?”

“He came over to my table, introduced himself, and I asked him to join me,” Hunt said. “We were there all afternoon. He must have known the owners because when the lunch crowd cleared out, they left us alone. They were setting the tables for dinner around us—but no one said anything.”

“Did you eat dinner there that night?”

“No,” Hunt said, “Hal arranged for us to fly over the oil field at sunset so he could check it out. I would guess he was trying to impress me.”

“So you flew over the field and glanced at it from the window of the plane?”

“No windows,” Hunt said. “It was a biplane. I sat in the seat behind.”

“Hold on,” the agent said, “it was a two-seater?”

“An old Stearman, if I remember correctly,” Hunt said.

“Who was flying?” the agent asked.

“Well, Hal was,” Hunt said, “who the hell else?”

“Mr. Hickman is a pilot?” the agent asked quickly.

“Well, he was back then,” Hunt said. “If Howard Hughes did it, then Hal tried it too.”

The agent raced for the telephone.

“THIS ADDS ANOTHER layer to the picture,” Hanley said. “Now we not only need to recover Abraham’s Stone from Hickman, we have to switch it back without being detected. The president has advised us that he wants to keep the Saudi government out of this operation if at all possible.”

At that moment one of the hundred-inch monitors in the conference room lit up. The screen was split in half vertically, and Stone could be seen on the left side. “Sir, I’m sorry,” he said, “I know you asked not to be interrupted, but this is important. Watch the other half of the screen.”

An image filled the right half.

“This is from a pair of cameras the CIA stationed at the locks on the Suez Canal. The image was recorded within the last fifteen minutes.”

The camera panned across an old work ship. A couple of crewmen were working the lines as the ship passed through the locks. A single man stood on the rear deck drinking coffee. The camera caught him looking up.

“I overlaid it with the program Ms. Huxley created,” Stone said.

Everyone in the room watched as the 3-D image floated over the man. The edges of the lines matched up perfectly. When the man in the boat moved, the computer-generated re-creation tracked along.

“Sir,” Stone said quickly, “that’s Halifax Hickman.”

“Where’s the ship now, Stoney?” Cabrillo said.

The left side of the screen showed Stone in the control room glancing at another monitor. “She’s out of the locks and slowing to come into Port Said, Egypt.”

“George—” Cabrillo started to say.

“We should be fueled and ready by now,” Adams said, rising from his seat.

Four minutes later the Robinson lifted from the deck. It was two hundred miles from the Oregon’s position to Port Said. But the Robinson would never reach Egypt.