A cool morning for late April in Jeddah, and a breeze sweeping over the Red Sea coast stirred the normally oppressive humidity away toward the escarpment to the east of the old city. The airport in Jeddah is the terminal through which nearly a million pilgrims a year enter the Kingdom on the annual Haj, the pilgrimmage to Mecca that is one of the pillars of Islam every Muslim must try to make once in his lifetime. At the airport there is a huge outdoor structure, white, tent-like, where these often poor pilgrims are held during both their inbound and outbound marshalling periods, and many people worldwide remember that shelter as the place where a small cooking fire got out of control in the nineties and something like a thousand piligrims died in the fire and the stampeding mass of humanity trying to flee it.
What most people in America don’t know, but might find ironic, is that the gate system at Jeddah International is almost exactly like the old system at Washington Dulles, the latter still partially in use. Huge vehicles move people between terminals high off the ground, at the height of the aircraft doorways, and these huge buses can change their height up and down as needed to match the aircraft for each load of passengers. The vehicles at the two airports are identical in every way. At Jeddah, passengers still board one of these at their departure gate, and then the vehicle takes them to their waiting aircraft somewhere out on the sweltering tarmac.
The airport was crowded this morning as it always was, and several flights were boarding their vehicles at a variety of “gates”. None of this was remarkable.
But unknown to any airport authority or policeman, terrorists were moving. Three of the flights boarding were headed for Europe: one to Rome, one to Athens, and one to Barcelona. Each of the large buses now packed and heading for their airplanes contained a determined young Saudi man, traveling for now on his Saudi passport, but in his pocket each also held an American passport. They were the first of Khalid’s men to begin moving West.
Five others would also go today, but they departed from Dhahran and from Riyadh. Two of those were actually going the long way around, East via Tokyo and then across the Pacific to Vancouver. Sunday there would be more who would leave. In less than ten days sixty trained terrorists would be in the United States, prepared to execute Khalid’s plan whenever he chose to order it.