Sacred Stone

“We’ll be there,” Kasim said.

The telephone went dead, and Kasim turned to his team. “Listen up,” he said, “we have our orders.”

CABRILLO TOOK THE sheets from the fax and quickly briefed the CIA agent. Once that was done, he boarded the shore boat with the agent for the ride across the water to the port of Jeddah. It was a pleasant night, seventy-five degrees with almost no breeze. The moon was waning and cast a pale glow on the water as the boat skimmed across the placid sea.

The lights of the Akbarfaded and the ones of Jeddah loomed larger.

AS SOON AS the Pepsi truck pulled up by the dune and honked, Perkins and the other two men in hiding peered over the dune, waited until there was no traffic coming down the road, then made their way to the road. Perkins’s knee was heavily swollen and one of the men supported him as the other approached the truck.

“You here for us?” the man asked the driver.

“Hurry up and get in,” the driver said, reaching across the cab and opening the passenger door.

Once the three men were situated, the driver spun around in a U-turn, then headed toward the lights of Mecca. Skirting the main part of the city on an expressway, he was two miles down the road to Jeddah before he spoke.

“You guys like the Eagles?” he asked as he slid a CD into the player.

The first cut on Hotel Californiabegan to play as they drove through the night.

AS SOON AS the shore boat reached land, the CIA agent climbed off and raced to a waiting Chevrolet Suburban. A minute later the Suburban spun off, throwing gravel from the rear tires as he raced away.

“What now brown cow?” one of the Florida mechanics who was piloting the shore boat asked.

“Now we back off and wait for a Pepsi truck,” Cabrillo said.

The mechanic put the drive in reverse and started backing away. “So you men are Pepsi smugglers?” he asked.

“Is there a radio aboard?” Cabrillo asked.

The mechanic turned a dial on the dash. “What’s your poison?”

“Find the news,” Cabrillo said.

Cabrillo and the mechanic sat in the moonlight, bobbing in the bay.

A CHEVROLET SUBURBAN blew past the Pepsi truck headed in the opposite direction just as the driver exited off the main road onto the one to Jeddah’s port. The driver steered down the road he was instructed to take, then pulled to a stop with the nose of the truck facing the sea. He flashed the lights three times, then waited.

A SHORT DISTANCE out in the water, the tiny red lights from the bow of a boat answered.

“Okay, men,” the driver said, “I’m done here. There’s a boat coming in to get you.”

The first man climbed out of the cab and helped Perkins to the ground. Once the two men had stepped away from the cab, the last man climbed down.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said, closing the door.

“I’ll send you the bill,” the driver shouted through the open window as he started his engine and backed out.

The three men made their way out to the edge of the water just as the Akbar’s shore boat edged itself on land. Cabrillo slipped over the side and helped the three men aboard, then climbed back inside.

“Home, James,” he said to the mechanic.

“How’d you know my name was James?” the mechanic asked, backing away from shore.

As soon as Perkins and his men were safely on board, Cabrillo ordered Joseph to begin steaming north up the coastline at high speed.

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 tu

“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 ma

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 fa

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.