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“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.
