Sacred Stone of-2

by Clive Cussler

  CABRILLO ANSWERED HIS phone just as he was reaching the rental car.

  “The Hawker just crossed over the edge of the Mediterranean,” Hanley said. “It looks like she is bound for Rome.”

  “Call Overholt and have the plane impounded when it lands in Rome,” Cabrillo ordered. “Maybe Hickman has decided to pull out.”

  “I doubt it,” Hanley said.

  “Me, too,” Cabrillo said. “In fact, I’ll bet that’s not the case.”

  “Then how is he planning to make his escape?”

  Cabrillo paused. “I don’t think he is—I think he’s planning a suicide mission.”

  The line was silent. “We’ll factor that in,” Hanley said at last.

  “I have to go meet with the Mossad,” Cabrillo said. “I’ll call you after.”

  THE SUN WAS setting as the old pearling ship carrying Hickman entered the Khalij as-Suways at the northern end of the Red Sea. The five-hundred-mile trip from Rabigh had been slow but steady, and the ship would be entering the Suez Canal this evening as planned. The ship was cramped and Hickman had spent his time alternating between the small cockpit where the helmsman steered and the rear deck where the air was not polluted with the thin cigars the pilot chain-smoked.

  Abraham’s Stone was wrapped in a tarp on the deck next to Hickman’s single bag, which contained a change of clothes, some basic toiletries, and a three-ring folder that he had been studying off and on the entire voyage.

  “HERE’S WHAT I have,” Huxley said as she walked into the control room. “I took the photographs Halpert and the others shot at Maidenhead, then erased the gas mask and used the biometric computer program to create a composite.”

  Hanley took the disc and walked over to Stone, who inserted it into the drive on the main computer. An image popped up on the monitor.

  “Hell,” Hanley said, “he doesn’t look anything like the rumors.”

  “It’s weird,” Huxley agreed, “but it makes sense. If I was a recluse like Hickman, I would want to foster the most normal appearance I could have—that way I could blend in wherever I went.”

  “I guess the Howard Hughes rumors were just that,” Stone said, “rumors.”

  “Click forward, Stoney,” Huxley said.

  Stone entered the commands. A 3-D image of the outline of a man appeared.

  “This is a re-creation of his movements,” Huxley said. “Each individual has unique mannerisms. Do you know what the security teams at casinos use to identify cheaters?”

  “What?” Stone asked.

  “Their walk,” Huxley said. “A person can use disguises, alter his appearance, even some personal mannerisms—but no one ever thinks to change the way they walk or carry themselves.”

  Stone played with the computer and the image walked, turned and moved his arms.

  “Let’s make a copy and send it to Overholt,” Hanley ordered. “He can distribute it to the Israeli officials.”

  “I can overlay this with the live cameras from the Suez,” Stone offered.

  “Do it,” Hanley said.

  AT THE SAME time Hanley was staring at the pictures of Hickman, eight men exited a commercial flight from Qatar to Riyadh and walked through customs without a hitch. Meeting outside the baggage claim area, they climbed into a white Chevrolet Suburban that the State Department had borrowed from an oil company official.

  Then they made their way to a safe house to wait for nightfall.

  “WE CAN DO what you need this evening,” the head of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, said, “but we can’t use dogs—we’ll have to do it with agents carrying chemical sniffers. Dogs in a mosque are a no-no.”

  “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 cannot enter Saudi Arabia using a commercial flight. The risk of interception is simply too great. From here in Qatar to Mecca is over eight hundred miles, and that route is across bad desert with no fuel supplies, so what we came up with is this: the emir has arranged a cargo flight that will take us to Al-Hidayah in Yemen, and from there it is less than five hundred miles to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, along a paved road that runs along the Red Sea. The emir paid off the Yemeni authorities and cleaned out a motorcycle distribution warehouse here in Qatar for our transportation. The motorcycles have a couple of advantages—the first is that we can cross the border above the checkpoint to avoid detection by driving across a stretch of desert then back to the road once we’re inside Saudi Arabia. The second is the gas mileage—there are several cities along the road for fueling but they are far apart—the motorcycles can make it from city to city. The third is the most important. Each of us will be alone on our bikes—if the authorities stop one person, the entire mission is not compromised.”

  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 dinner.

  AT THE SAME time Vanderwald was falling asleep, a pair of men approached his home in a Johannesburg suburb. Slipping around to the back, they slowly disabled the elaborate security system and unlocked the rear door and entered. Then they slowly and methodically began to search the inside.

  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 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 o
n 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.”