“How far is town?”
“You mean the nearest village? Shit, gotta be at least twenty klicks from here.” Rican leaned forward, talking to the soldier in the front passenger seat. “Hey, Chris, check the map for the nearest village.”
Christian Watson, a 21-year-old specialist from Iowa, had been navigating. He looked down and, cupping the back of the map with his left hand, raised it up and pointed at a dot on the detailed map. The town of Al Kasrah was indicated to be 13 kilometers from this airfield as the crow flies. However, to get there would require driving back up the road connecting this airbase to Highway 21 and then turning south, a total of 22 kilometers of driving. Watson also pointed out another small village called Al Habariyah that was even further south along Highway 21. It was 29 kilometers, or 18 miles, from where they were now parked.
Hajjar slept only sporadically that night. Somewhere in the middle of the night, with the temperature close to freezing, the Kuwaiti engineer got out of his sleeping bag, rolled it up and walked over to his Humvee. He spent the rest of the night trying to stay warm in his seat, the sleeping bag now acting as a blanket. Thankfully, the sun finally began to illuminate a sky that had more blue than gray for the first time in days. Hajjar was eager to get to work but took the time to drink two cups of coffee one of the men had brewed up and eat a MRE, picking the vegetable lasagna when offered the choice between that and chicken and dumplings.
At 0716, with the power of the sun quickly dulling the coldest edges of the wind, the convoy drove off. Hajjar’s Humvee headed to the southeastern end of the single runway, which ran from the southeast to the northwest. He began the process that was now well rehearsed. Rican took over the coring duties as he had the prior day. The other two Humvee’s assumed covering positions, one on the tarmac and the other, the one with the .50 caliber machine gun, by the only road leading into the airfield. Unlike the larger H2 and H3 airfields, where cars occasionally passed by on the nearby roads, there was no sign of any life or movement around this airfield.
The Kuwaiti could not help but think that Mudaysis Airfield reminded him of the western ghost towns in the movies he used to watch as a kid, only minus the tumbleweed. He took numerous photographs of the airfield, noting that, unlike the first four airfields, no major obstacles existed on the runway or its adjacent parallel taxiway. During 2008, U.S. Marines of Wing Support Squadron 374 of the 3 Marine Aircraft Wing had occupied Mudaysis to create a forward refueling base in support of U.S. military activities in Anbar Province. The Iraq “surge” was in full bloom. As part of that operation, the obstacles on the runway and taxiway had been removed. After the operations had ended, the airfield quickly reverted to its abandoned state. Since then, the entire airfield seemed to be forgotten by the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Army and the local populous.
The engineer, along with every soldier in the convoy, was happy to find that all of the water of the prior evening was completely gone, leaving behind no hint that this land was anything other than an arid desert. As they worked their way to the northwest up the long runway, Rican realized that Hajjar had decided to stop at five points to take samples and make radar readings instead of the three per runway on the previous days. They repeated the same five stops coming back down the adjacent taxiway. Finally, Hajjar took samples and readings at three spots on the tarmac.
At 1300 hours, with the men of the convoy now thoroughly bored with this assignment and eager to head back to Camp Victory, their home base outside Baghdad, Hajjar approached the lieutenant. “Okay, thank you and the men.”
“We are here to help Iraq,” replied the lieutenant. “Ready to return to Baghdad?”
“Yes. I have question, ah… what is word?”
The lieutenant was not sure what Hajjar meant. “Question?” Then it hit him. “Oh, you mean a request?”
“Yes, that is the word. Request.”
“Okay.”
“Please we go south on road two-one. I need to see towns.”
The lieutenant could not understand why this engineer would want to go by the local villages, but walked over to Hajjar’s Humvee. “Watson, let me see the map.”
Chris Watson stepped out and spread his map out on the hood of the Humvee, holding down the edges with his hands as the officer reviewed distances. The lieutenant guessed that returning the way Hajjar wanted would add a couple of hours to the trip home, but he was under orders to accommodate the engineer’s needs.
The lieutenant walked back to the engineer. “Is this really important?”
“Yes. Part of my job to get done.”
“Okay, we will head south on Highway 21. That will take us through Kasrah, Habariyah and Nukhaib at the junction with Highway 22. Does that work for you?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Hajjar offered his hand in gratitude and the lieutenant shook it firmly.
The convoy set out on its new route back to Baghdad that took them south for 35 miles before turning to the northeast on Highway 22. From there, they passed through Karbala and Iskandariyah on the 180 mile journey back to Baghdad.
Ibrahim Hajjar, whose real name was Yosef Sayegh, had everything he needed to create a report for his employer, Mossad. As a Syrian born Mizrahi Jew, Yosef had grown up in Damascus and then moved with his parents to Amman, Jordan, when he was 12. After two years in Jordan, his parents immigrated for the last time to Jerusalem to become Israeli citizens under the Law of Return. Yosef Sayegh had been spotted early by Mossad recruiters and had become a much in demand katsa for Mossad, intimately familiar with Arabic and Islamic customs and very much at ease portraying a Muslim professional. The contract from the Iraq Civil Aviation Authority was real and he would deliver a full report to them — one that would be essentially the same as that delivered to Mossad. But the CIA officer who had skillfully maneuvered to deliver the funding to the ICAA from the State Department for this study, had also assured his contacts at Mossad that, as with most government funded studies, nothing would ever come of it.
27 — Outback Games
Exercise Talisman Sabre 2011 commenced on July 11, 2011. The biennial exercise has become a major war gaming operation to test the planning and operational integration of U.S. and Australian military forces — a continuation of the military alliance between the two nations that dates back over 100 years and spans both world wars, Korea, Vietnam and the first and second Persian Gulf wars. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be spent by the Pentagon to deploy American naval, ground and air forces into Australia for the exercise. The rise of Chinese military and economic power had provided renewed impetus behind the historic American-Australian ties. The result was that Talisman Sabre, along with other exercises with codenames like Tandem Thrust and Green Lightning, was growing accordingly. This year’s exercise was slated to last two and a half weeks.
On July 12, a flight of four F-15E Strike Eagles landed in quick succession on the main 9,000 foot runway of Tindal Air Base, a major facility of the Royal Australian Air Force located just to the southeast of the city of Katherine in the Northern Territory. The American planes proudly displayed their tail code of “MO” in large black letters. They were from the 389 Fighter Squadron based permanently at Mountain Home Air Force Base, 40 miles southeast of Boise, Idaho. But they had flown in from Guam, where they were in the middle of a four month rotation. They would spend the next two weeks practicing their skills on the nearby Delamere Air Weapons Station, a bombing range operated by the RAAF that had previously been a large cattle ranch in the heart of Australia’s rugged Outback.