Sacred Stone

ON THE OREGON, Hanley was monitoring the various operations. It was just after 1 A.M. when the truck that had been dispatched to pick up Skutter and his men reported that they had left Medina and were racing toward Jeddah.

The distance was a little less than a hundred miles.

Barring any surprises, part two was almost completed.

Hanley reached for the phone and called Cabrillo.

“Jones met up with the group with the prayer rugs and all is well,” he said. “They have been doused with antiviral agents, given clean clothes, and are now sleeping. Team two in Medina has completed their mission and is on their way toward you now. They should be arriving in a few hours.”

“They found explosives?” Cabrillo asked.

“Apparently enough to level the Prophet’s Mosque,” Hanley said. “They disabled them and left them in the tunnel. The CIA or someone will eventually need to handle that.”

“Then it’s all up to Kasim,” Cabrillo said.

“So it seems.”

AT THAT EXACT instant, Kasim and his team were approaching the mosque containing the Kaaba. Even being U.S. citizens did not provide the team much comfort—they were deep inside a foreign country whose capital punishment was beheading. And they were entering the holiest of the country’s sites for a mission that could be easily mistaken for a terrorist action. The fourteen servicemen and Kasim were very conscious of that fact.

One mistake, one misstep, and the entire operation would unravel.

AT THE SAME time Kasim was walking through one of the gates leading into the courtyard where the Kaaba was sheathed in cloth, a C-17A troop transport plane was lifting off the runway in Qatar. The Boeing-built jet, a replacement for the venerable Lockheed-Martin C-130 prop plane, could carry 102 troops or 169,000 pounds of cargo.

Designed to land on either short or rough dirt airfields, she was manned by a crew of three. The C-17A had a range of three thousand miles and tonight she would need that.

After leaving Qatar on the Persian Gulf, she was scheduled to fly out over the Gulf of Oman and into the Indian Ocean. There she would turn, fly over the Arabian Sea, into the Gulf of Adan, then through the gap between Yemen and Djibouti, Africa, and into the Red Sea. She would loiter there until called or released.

The C-17A was the ace everyone hoped they would not need to deal.

KASIM WALKED FARTHER inside the mosque, then he and four others hid off to the side and watched the guards walk through their routine from a distance. It seemed simple enough. Every five minutes the guards would walk from one corner to the next in a clockwise direction. The exaggerated steps they used looked simple enough to duplicate.

Kasim studied the plans he had, seeking out the small stone building inside the mosque that the guards used to change from their street clothes into their uniforms. Locating it on the hand-drawn diagram, he motioned for the men with him to stay in place, and then he walked back to where the rest of his group was hiding.

“You stand guard,” he said to one of the men, “and whistle if you need to attract our attention.”

“What am I looking for?” the man asked.

“Anything that doesn’t look right.”

The man nodded.

“I want the rest of you to follow me. We are going to sneak over to that structure,” he said quietly, “and wait for the first incoming guard to arrive. I’ll take him down as soon as he unlocks the door to the building.”

The men nodded their assent.

Then they fanned out across the mosque, slowly sneaking toward the small stone building. A few minutes later they were all in place.

ABDUL RALMEIN WAS tired. His schedule as a guard rotated throughout each month. Sometimes his four-hour shift took place in the heat of day, sometimes at sunrise—the time he liked best—and sometimes at 2 A.M., like tonight. It was the late-night shifts he had never learned to adjust to—his personal clock stayed the same, and when his time came to work through the night, it took everything he had to fight off sleep.

Finishing a steaming cup of coffee flavored with cardamom seed, he slid his bicycle into a rack on the street near the Great Mosque and locked it with a chain and padlock.

Then he walked toward the entrance and through the gate.

He was partway across the courtyard when the shrill whistle from a bird sounded.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he slid the keys from his pocket as he neared the building. He grasped the padlock and slid the key in the slot. He was just twisting the lock open when he felt a hand across his mouth and a tiny prick on his arm.

Ralmein grew even more sleepy.

KASIM OPENED THE door to the room and dragged Ralmein inside. Flipping the light switch on the wall, a single bulb lit up and illuminated the crowded space. The inside of the building wasn’t much—a rack against the wall holding uniforms in plastic sleeves to keep them clean, a large laundry-type sink, and a toilet behind a curtain.