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“Will there be any problems?” Cabrillo asked.
“A few years ago when the Israeli prime minister went to the Dome of the Rock there was rioting for weeks afterward,” he said. “We’ll need to do it swiftly and quietly.”
“Can your people completely cover the entire area?”
“Mr. Cabrillo,” the man said, “Israel is faced with terrorist bombings on a weekly basis. If there are any explosives inside Haram al-Sharif, you’ll know about it by sunrise tomorrow.”
“And you will defuse anything you find?” Cabrillo asked.
“Defuse or remove,” he said, “whatever is safer.”
“MEN, PLEASE TAKE your seats,” Kasim said.
The twenty-eight remaining men sat down. Skutter stood alongside Kasim at the blackboard. “Who here has never ridden a motorcycle?” Kasim asked.
Ten of the men raised their hands.
“This is going to be tough for you,” Kasim said, “but we’ve assembled some instructors for a crash course. After we finish here, you ten will need to go outside and start practicing. In four hours’ time you should all have a basic knowledge of the fundamentals.”
The ten men nodded.
“Here’s the situation,” Kasim continued. “We ca
Kasim stared at the men.
“Does anyone have a problem with this?”
No one spoke.
“Good,” Kasim said, “then if the men needing practice would follow Captain Skutter out onto the tarmac, we have cycles and instructors standing by for your training. The rest of you get some rest, we leave at ten tonight.”
VANDERWALD DABBED SOME cologne under his nose. The first leg of his flight home was from Cairo to Nairobi, Kenya, and it was packed. The interior of the jet smelled like sweaty bodies and the lamb they had served for di
AT THE SAME time Vanderwald was falling asleep, a pair of men approached his home in a Joha
Two hours later they were finished.
“Let me call and load his telephone onto the mainframe,” one of the men said, “so they can scan for call records.”
Dialing a number in Langley, Virginia, the man entered a code and waited for a beep. A CIA computer would take the number and search the South African telephone company’s mainframe for a record of all calls out of and into the number for the last month. The results would be available in a few hours.
“What now?” the other men asked.
“We can take turns sleeping while we wait.”
“How long are we going to be here?”
“Till he returns,” the first man said, opening the refrigerator, “or someone else takes care of him first.”
50
THE HINDU MERCENARIESarrived 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 tu
The concrete tu
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 tu
“You five go that way,” he said, quietly pointing to the men. “The tu
The one group set off along the tu
Forty-seven minutes later they all met up on the far side.
“Now we switch sides,” the leader said. “You men go down our tu
The men set off in opposite directions, their flashlights waving through the tu
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 tu
“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.