scheduled all his trucks for other duties. The earliest he could truck the rugs was January 7. He’d arrange it so they were sprayed on the eighth, left to air out for a few hours, and then moved into place on the ninth.
That still gave him twenty-four hours before the official start of the hajj. Al-Sheik was cutting it close, but what choice did he have? He had a million details to cover and only so much time to do the impossible.
It would all come together, he thought as he rose to leave the office and climb back into bed—it always did somehow.
THE CHALLENGER 604 was over the Mediterranean when the pilot opened the cockpit door and shouted to the rear.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “Saudi is refusing us entrance until we have the proper documents. We have to decide what to do now.”
Cabrillo thought about it for a few moments. “Divert to Qatar,” he said. “I’ll call the emir’s representative in a couple of minutes. Don’t worry, he’ll honor our request.”
“Qatar it is,” the pilot said, closing the door again.
IT WAS SUNRISE when Hickman’s Hawker crossed over the Red Sea into Saudi Arabia and across the desert to Riyadh. Touching down smoothly, the pilot taxied over to the jet terminal and slowed.
“Keep her fueled and ready,” Hickman said.
As soon as the door opened he walked out, down the steps and onto Saudi soil carrying the boxed meteorite.
“So this is the country I will ruin,” he whispered as he looked around at the dry hills near the airport, “the heart of Islam.”
Spitting on the ground, he smiled an evil smile.
Then he walked to where a limousine was waiting to take him to the hotel.
HICKMAN WAS ALREADY checked in and sleeping before the Challenger raced up the Indian Ocean, turned and crossed atop the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf en route to Qatar. The emir had come through with flying colors. His representative had smoothed out entry into the country and a suite of hotel rooms was awaiting Cabrillo and his team. It was arranged that Cabrillo would meet with the emir himself at noon today. First Cabrillo would grab a few hours’ sleep. Then he’d explain the problem in person.
The pilot opened the door again and shouted back, “The tower has cleared us, sir.”
Cabrillo stared out the window at the azure waters of the gulf. Dhows, the strangely shaped boats that carried fishermen and cargo across the water, bobbed peacefully. In the distance to the north, Cabrillo could make out the long expanse of an oil tanker heading south. The wake trail from the tanker’s massive propellers trailed back for miles.
Cabrillo heard the engines on the Challenger start to slow.
Then they began to descend for landing.
46
TWELVE HINDUS WERE clustered into a cheap apartment in an aging building in downtown Riyadh. They had arrived in Saudi Arabia a week prior using work visas listing their occupations as laborers. Once through customs and immigration they had disappeared, never meeting with the employment agency that had arranged their entry.
One by one they had made their way to the apartment that Hickman had had stocked with food, water and supplies enough to last for several weeks. Never venturing out or communicating with anyone, they were to lie in wait until contacted.
The twelve men would be the only forces that Hickman would use in Saudi Arabia for the plan he was about to initiate. What Hickman had in mind was simple on the surface, considerably more complex in application. He and the twelve Hindus were first planning to make their way to Mecca. Once there, Hickman was planning to steal the most sacred artifact to Islam, the meteorite inside the Kaaba that had allegedly been discovered by Abraham, and switch it with the one from Greenland.
Then he would take Abraham’s meteorite elsewhere to destroy.
Hickman was planning to stab Islam in her heart.
IN HIS HOTEL room in Riyadh, Hickman stared at his notes.
Mecca is the center of Islam. The city was the birthplace of Muhammad and the religion he founded. Located forty-five miles from the Red Sea on a dusty plain studded with hills and mountains, the city was once an oasis on a trade route that linked the countries along the Mediterranean with Arabia, Africa and Asia. There, according to legend, some two thousand years before the time of Jesus Christ, God ordered Abraham to build a shrine. Over the centuries the shrine was destroyed and rebuilt numerous times. In 630 the prophet Muhammad took control of Mecca and rid the structure of all false idols. All that Muhammad left was the Kaaba and the sacred stone housed inside. He made this the centerpiece of his new religion.
Over the centuries that followed, the area housing the stone was ringed by a series of walls and larger, increasingly more elaborate structures. The last major rebuilding, in the twentieth century, was funded by the Saudi royal family. This construction resulted in the surrounding mosque, al-Haram, the largest on Earth.
In the center of the mosque lies the Kaaba, a small structure draped in a black silk covering that is embroidered with passages from the Koran in gold thread. The silk covering is changed yearly, and once each year in a show of humility the floor around it is swept by the king of Saudi Arabia.
Pilgrims come to kiss the sacred stone and drink from the spring of Zamzam nearby.
In less than a week, over a million people would pass alongside the Kaaba.
For now, however, it was closed in preparation.
Hickman turned on the computer in his hotel suite and logged on to a mainframe at one of his aerospace companies in Brazil. He had stored his most important files there. Downloading the pictures and documents, he scanned through them.
He stared at an aerial photograph of the mosque at Mecca.
