A week later, the Archer was eating a meal of hummus and kubbeh at the appropriate time when he noticed a man walk out of the restroom. He didn’t recognize the man, but he recognized the old home jersey for Manchester United that the man was wearing. On the back it had the number 7 and the name “Ronaldo,” a relic of days past for the English football club. The man returned to his table and ordered a cup of tea. Muhjid continued to finish his meal, taking another ten minutes to eat and pay his bill. He stood and went to the restroom. After relieving himself, he washed his hands in a basin. Behind him, the man in the football jersey walked into the restroom and paused to make sure they were alone. The Archer turned toward the man, who handed him an envelope. Muhjid quickly stuffed the envelope into his pants and exited the restroom.
Muhjid headed back toward Iraq. After a hundred kilometers of driving, he pulled off the highway to find a spot in the desert where he could spend the night and read the contents of his package from Tel Aviv. What he saw when he opened the envelope got him both excited and scared. If he was able to pull off the attack outlined, he would gain fame inside al Qaeda. He stopped to think about why Israel would want him to attack an airbase inside Syria, but he couldn’t come up with any logical reason other than that the Israelis and the Syrians seemed destined to an eternal death match. But it didn’t matter to the Archer. He liked the assignment and, in his judgment, it would renown to the glory of al Qaeda, his new family. When he was recruited, Mossad told him that if they gave him an assignment, he would like it. They had been true to their word.
The final page of his instructions, which were always careful to look as if they had come from within al Qaeda, told him to be ready to go operational by the first of September. The other item in the envelope was a small stack of American $100 notes, one hundred of them. The money was better than gold in this part of the world. The Archer had work to do.
The Archer was ready to go on the morning of September 14, three days after receiving the green light via code in a photo posted on muslima.com. His target was the Palmyra Air Base in Syria, a military airfield located forty miles east of Tiyas Air Base, the main airfield of the Syrian Air Force. Tiyas was, in turn, about ninety miles to the northeast of Damascus.
Palmyra Air Base was just south of the M20 highway and adjacent to a town called Tadmur. The base had only a single landing strip with a shorter parallel taxiway. Both ran east to west. Sixteen earth-covered concrete revetments housed a half dozen MiG-23BN Flogger ground attack aircraft. But it was not the aircraft that Muhjid was tasked with destroying, it was a single building that had been constructed during 2011 on the northern edge of the base.
The building was not huge, encompassing 11,465 square feet, but its importance was enormous. It was funded by Iran and built by the Russians to serve as the central command, communication and analysis center for all of the early warning radar inside Syria. Inside the building, eight Iranian Air Force and Revolutionary Guard liaisons, twenty-one Syrian Air Force personnel and fourteen Russian technicians operated 24 hours per day, 365 days a year to collect and analyze all of the data that showed up on the various radar and monitoring units that were being fed into the building via hard wire from a microwave communication tower located on top of the town hospital. This tower communicated with a microwave tower on top of the 6,043 foot ridge of Jabal ash Shamail, located to the north of Damascus. The building was connected to the headquarters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp in Tehran via telephone and the Internet. If an Israeli action was detected, Tehran would know about it even before the Syrian air defense network was put on alert.
Archer was given intelligence on his secondary targets as well. The men who occupied the target building all lived in housing just to the northwest of the base. The Russians had insisted, against the advice of the Syrian security service, on constructing a road that connected the building to the small community of homes in the town of Tadmur where the Russian advisors lived, some with their families. The connecting road was only one mile long. Mossad not only wanted Archer to destroy the building, but also for him to kill all the Russians who were not on duty at the time. They had given him a map that had all of the homes of Russians highlighted. He also had high resolution satellite photos of the base and the housing area.
Finally, Mossad gave him two tertiary targets. About ¾ of a mile to the east of the target building was a Russian P-14 Tall King radar with a range of up to 400 kilometers. Another third of a mile to the southeast of that was one of the two Chinese JY-27 radar units that were now based in Syria.
The original package delivered to Archer had all of the information that he needed to plan his attack. He was feeling very confident, since the Syrians had done little to guard the Palmyra Air Base. It was far to the east of the population belt of Syria that ran north to south within 70 miles of the coast line — and that meant that it had so far escaped the worst of the civil war now raging. But Archer had to change his plans when he was called into Jordan again in early August to receive the latest intelligence. In the chaos of war, events occur beyond the ability of even the brightest minds to predict or control. Mossad analysts had come to realize that the information they gave to Archer on the defense of the base was outdated. IAF reconnaissance flights over the eastern deserts of Syria, combined with intelligence gathered by Unit 8200, had shown that far more Syrian troops had been deployed to protect Palmyra in recent months. Instead of a simple guardhouse with one or two soldiers, a Syrian army company was now stationed on the base. A squad had set up a Russian DShK heavy machine gun to protect the entrance to the connecting road.
But the new package given to Archer also included a nugget that Abu Muhjid knew how to take full advantage of. Somehow Mossad had obtained a list of the men in the Syrian army unit now tasked with defending Palmyra Air Base. Beside each name was their religious affiliation — Sunni or Shia. Since this duty was not considered front line work, most of the men in this unit were Sunni Muslims. Next to some of these men was an asterisk. A note on the bottom of the page indicated that the asterisk meant that these men were known to harbor fundamentalist beliefs.
The sun on the morning of Saturday, September 14 rose unencumbered by any cloud formations. The day promised to be a gorgeous fall offering. Muhjid thought it a perfect day for combat. Combat. That is what Abu Muhjid thought of his actions, regardless of whether the targets were soldiers or civilians. Everyone was a combatant in his mind. He had spent the night in As Sukhnah, a small Sunni village only forty miles further to the east of Palmyra along the M20 highway. Muhjid was the honored guest of the local imam, a man who dreamed of the end of the secular decadence of the Assad family. Just about the entire village of As Sukhnah was of like mind to the imam. The one family known to spy for the regime had been threatened enough to stay inside and mind their own business.