Esther's Sling (32 page)

Almost 25 minutes had passed when Hamak noticed motion at the front of the line. A dark sedan had pulled up to the military truck and the Armenian estimated that almost twenty men were hanging around the IRG truck. He was struck by the realization that he had not noticed other than a handful of men before that instant. Arsadian was nervous for the first time since becoming a Mossad spy. He tried to tell himself that he was just one of many stuck in this line. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized just how much he stood out in this setting – an Armenian Christian driving a large tractor-trailer rig through the mountains of eastern Iran just a couple of miles from the Iraqi border. It was not logical. With the exception of the other truck in the line, everyone else looked like normal Iranian civilians simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He then noticed the dark sedan driving down the road toward him. A half dozen men from the IRG truck were walking in his direction as well. He felt his chest tighten.

The dark sedan stopped in the road beside his truck. An older officer of the IRG stepped out of the back door and paused for a moment to look at the tractor-trailer unit in front of him. Arsadian noticed that this man was holding the clipboard. Obviously he was superior to the first officer and appeared to be the man in charge. The man stood there waiting for the six soldiers to arrive on foot. As they did, the senior officer approached the driver door of the truck. “Mister Arsadian,” he said hesitantly. “Did I pronounce your name correctly?” The Armenian nodded his head. “I am Captain Javed Samadi. Please step out of your truck.”

Arsadian opened the door and stepped out of his cab, grabbing the down jacket that he kept draped over the passenger seat. He kept his engine running as did the straight truck driver up ahead of him. In this cold a diesel engine could be very hard to start if left off for too long. He was scared that his nervousness would show. The first thing he noticed as his feet hit the pavement was that the captain, at six feet tall, seemed to tower over him. The Armenian was four inches shorter, but the gap seemed to him to be at least a foot – the height difference magnified by the fact that the driver was on the downhill side of the pair. The captain extended the clipboard to Hamak. Inside the Armenian breathed a sigh of relief, interpreting the returned paperwork as a positive sign, the first one since he had stopped on this spot. Nevertheless, his right hand shook as he reached for the clipboard. The IRG captain noticed. “Why are you taking toilet paper to Ahvaz?”

“This is how I make my living. Iranian companies hire me to deliver goods. Today it is toilet paper. Next week it is machine parts. Next month it is computers. I never know until I am hired.”

“Why do you take this route?”

Arsadian had practiced his response to this question. “Because this route to Ahvaz is faster than driving on twenty-one through Sanandaj. If I had driven that way I would have hit rush hour traffic. Either way I drive through the same mountains. No way for me to avoid that. I have been driving through Iran for many years.”

“Do you know any Kurds in this area?”

“No. None.”

“Do you have friends in any of the villages along your route?”

“No. I just drive and deliver my goods so I can get home to my family in Yerevan as I have done for over twenty years.”

“I think maybe you are sympathetic to Kurdish rebels, no?”

“No, not at all. Kurds are no friends to Armenians.”

The tall captain stood quietly in the dark night air studying the older truck driver. He wore no winter jacket, just his standard field tunic. The lights of his sedan lit up the left side of the truck. “We will inspect your cargo.” Again, it was a statement, not a request. Arsadian was quickly learning to detest the IRG. This was the first time in his two decades that he had interacted with any of them. “Open your doors.”

“At your service,” replied Arsadian. The officer caught a hint of sarcasm in the driver’s response even though Hamak was consciously trying to avoid that. The driver went to the rear and opened his trailer doors as the driver of the captain’s sedan drove past the truck, executed a three point turn in the middle of the curved roadway and came back up the road behind the truck, shining his lights into the now open trailer.

The captain signaled his men and they began removing cartons of Charmin toilet paper onto the road. It seemed the IRG officer had a hunch and was determined to follow it. The soldiers unloaded the first couple of rows of cartons which gave them about six feet of trailer floor to work with. The IRG officer stood next to the Armenian driver, alternately watching him and his men. Finally he broke the tension. “You appear nervous.”

Arsadian turned to the Iranian. “This is my livelihood, Captain Samadi. This shipment is my responsibility. I have never failed to deliver.” His nervousness was rapidly being replaced by anger. He decided to play offense. “Why is this roadblock here? Why do you treat me this way?”

The captain did not respond. He next issued orders to his men, telling them to pull out a single column along the side until they reached the wall at the front of the trailer. His men complied with their orders, carefully pulling out cartons along the right hand sidewall. The captain was waiting for the void that his gut told hi
m would turn up in the trailer.

When his men reached the front wall of the trailer, creating a lane that stretched from the back door 44 feet to the front wall, the captain became agitated. He walked among the now displaced cartons of Charmin stacked haphazardly on the mountain road. He grabbed several cartons and lifted them, judging the weight of each to determine if it approximated what he expected. After he returned the third carton to the ground, he ripped the carton open, pulling out its contents. Then he climbed on board the trailer, telling the few men still inside to move out of his way. He walked along the thin corridor created by the removed cartons and picked a row about a third of the way from the front. He pulled a carton from the top of the next column and yelled at his men to grab the cartons that he kept pulling out, working his way in from the corridor to the opposing sidewall. He kicked cartons on either side of this new perpendicular corridor, certain that he would find weapons or explosives hidden in the cardboard boxes. When he made it to the other side he realized that his hunch was wrong. The officer had to swallow his pride that night. H
e had not caught a Kurdish spy.

The IRG officer walked back out the corridor to the rear of the trailer and jumped down to the road pavement below. He barked orders to his men to repack the trailer as it was and started to walk to his sedan.

Hamak Arsadian interjected. “Is everything in order Captain?” The driver was rubbing salt in the man’s wounded pride.

The captain paused. He had grown up in an upper middle class household in Tehran. He suddenly remembered the teachings of his mother and grandmother regarding Persian t’aarof, or hospitality. They would be displeased with him right now. He turned toward the driver. “My apologies. My men will return your cargo to the trailer.”

Arsadian bent over and picked up the single carton that the IRG officer had opened moments before. “I understand that you are doing your job. Please take this box as an offering of respect for the job you do. I think your men will enjoy its contents.” The Armenian knew that the contents would not wind up in the hands of the soldiers, but also knew that the captain would not accept the carton under any other pretense.

Samadi pondered for a moment before signaling for one of his men to carry the box to the trunk of his sedan. “For my men,” he said. With those words the officer turned and was in the back of his sedan in moments. As soon as the trunk lid was shut, the sedan drove off up the mountain and past the roadblock. Arsadian had still not received an answer about why the roadblock was in place. Over the next twelve minutes the half dozen men remaining repacked the boxes into the trailer, now short two cartons f
rom when Arsadian left Yerevan.

The soldiers left the Armenian standing behind his trailer and headed quickly back up the road, each one desperate to find some warmth. Hamak closed his trailer doors and walked 50 feet along the left side of the rig until he reached the driver side door. He began to reach for the handle when he stopped and walked another 20 feet further up the road to speak with the man who was driving the car in front of him. He learned that they had arrived about 15 minutes before Arsadian. The soldier who checked their papers told them that Kurdish rebel fighters had
been operating in the area and that they would probably be able to pass in a couple of hours. The man and his family then offered water to Arsadian, but the truck driver politely refused and returned to his cabin to wait and get warm.

Arsadian pulled down the bed that stretched across the tractor cabin just behind the driver and passenger seats. He figured he might as well try to rest. The next few hours resulted in fitful periods of sleep, his eyes opening every half hour or so to check the dashboard clock that glowed red in the otherwise dark cabin. Finally he opened his eyes to see that midnight had arrived. During the prior two hours several cars had started up, only to turn around and head back down the mountain away from Dezli, each one waking him in the process. But like the straight truck driver that was waiting about 70 meters in front of him, Arsadian had no such option. He would wait out the IRG and their roadblock.

As he lay there wondering when he could proceed to Point Kabob, only a few frustrating miles further along Road 15, he noticed a blinking light on his navigation system panel. Arsadian quickly swung his legs over the edge of the bed and lowered himself into the passenger seat, from which access to the navigation system was easier. He turned the system’s display panel on and pressed several buttons in combination. A menu appeared and the Armenian pressed the screen to cause a message to appear. The message said nothing, but only contained four digits. The simple code told Arsadian what he needed to do once he was free to continue his journey.

“One hour out,” shouted the chief as the formation of helicopters passed north of Baiji, Iraq and turned due east toward the drop zone. The local time was 9:36 p.m. Outside was complete darkness. The Night Stalkers were operating in their natural environment. Captain Ben Zeev pointed to two of his men, who each pulled out a device that looked like an iPad, only with a thick antenna attached and a rubber frame that was the tipoff that this device had been “ruggedized” to survive the rigors of combat. Each man powered up his unit and waited for about 30 seconds while the unit came to life. The man sitting next to the captain pushed several buttons on his screen and then handed it to his commander. The man with the other device, sitting on the opposite side of the helicopter, looked up at his commander and raised his right hand to give a fast thumbs up. He then turned his unit off.

The Israe
lis referred to the device as the tactical situation unit, or TSU. The TSU that was now in the hands of the Israeli captain, was connected via satellite to an uplink in the Negev desert. The screen presented synthesized information being fed to Olympus from a single unmanned USAF RQ-4 Global Hawk flying at 64,000 feet above the eastern border between Iraq and Iran, and a manned U.S. Rivet Joint electronic intelligence plane flying over Turkey. On the screen, the captain could see real-time infrared images of Iranian and Iraqi border guards and posts for a 20 mile radius around the drop zone. Periodic blinking lights pinpointed the approximate location of Iranian radio transmissions on frequencies used by the border guards and the military. Transmissions that were unencrypted or for which the code was easily broken on board the Rivet Joint aircraft were forwarded to Olympus, which analyzed them and decided which were relevant and important enough to send on to the device in the captain’s hands. Ben Zeev could choose from his menu a chronological transcription of the communications, all presented to him in Farsi written in Arabic script.

On the Iraqi side, the image was as expected, with border guards in their static shelters scattered sporadically among the mountains about two miles inside the border. The primary drop zone was well chosen. It was in a high valley that was uninhabited and unobserved by any known border post either Iraqi or Iranian. But the initial relief was interrupted by tension as the captain looked at the Iranian side of the border. To his horror, he saw dozens of small red dots on the screen, most stationary but some moving south. All of the dots were close to the border and in the very valleys that he had planned to move through while crossing into Iran. They appeared to his experienced eye to be in ambush positions. On the screen, a light yellow star flashed in the lower left corner indicating that a message or messages were waiting for him. He pressed a button on the bottom of the device and a menu popped onto the lower left quadrant of the screen. He touched the screen and a
message from Olympus opened up.

IRGC activity vicinity Dezli. Estimated company strength.

Of course
, Yoni Ben Zeev thought,
tell me what I already know. I need to know why?
The captain reviewed his alternatives. His secondary drop zone was just to the north of the primary, which would route his men through the valley just north of the primary infiltration route. But on the Iran side, that valley was full of tiny red blips. During mission planning this scenario was discussed. Two more alternate drop zones had been identified, but both of them added miles of hiking for the team once inside Iran. More time on foot meant greater risk of bumping into unfriendly elements – or Kurdish goat herders. Contact with anyone other than Arsadian equaled danger and risk.

The captain had the authority to scrub the mission.
Are we compromised?
He thought about Hamak Arsadian, a man he had spent considerable time training in Yerevan. He had grown to like, respect and, most importantly, trust the Armenian. Had Arsadian been arrested? Iranian interrogators were not shy about the use of torture, especially in the case of anyone suspected of spying for Israel. Even worse, was he a double agent all along? The truck driver knew nothing about the mission other than that he was supposed to meet Ben Zeev and an undetermined group at Point Kabob sometime before the coming dawn. The driver would then continue on his route until told to pull over by the captain, at which time the Israelis would depart and go on their way.

The possibilities screamed through the head of the Israeli officer. Ben Zeev ran through the scenario that had gnawed at him for weeks. If Arsadian was compromised and the Iranians knew an Israeli team was on the way, then they could easily understand how this last minute helicopter mission to ostensibly retrieve a wayward American drone was an obvious cover for the insertion. It was common knowledge in the IDF that Iranian intelligence had deeply penetrated the Iraqi military since the Americans purged the mostly-Sunni Saddam Hussein loyalists in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion. But the 28-year-old Israeli captain, as well as every member of his hand-picked team, also knew that this mission was perhaps the most important operation
of Project Block G. If Task Force Camel failed for any reason, there was a back-up plan, but the cost to the Israeli military of having to turn to the alternative plan would be very steep. And the potential cost to Israel of failure could mean its very existence. Against that cost, Ben Zeev weighed the cost of the capture of any member of his team. Such an outcome could jeopardize all of Project Block G and the avoidance of capture under all scenarios was the first priority of the mission. This fact had resulted in a discussion with his men many months earlier in which a unanimous pact was made to fight to the death if the situation arose, including an oath to kill any wounded man if that man was unable to fight on and was in danger of capture.

All of these
possibilities had been thought through in advance. In his final meeting with General Schechter a week earlier, the general had told Ben Zeev that scrubbing the mission and evading detection was a better outcome than a firefight with the Iranians. But none of these discussions made this decision any easier for Ben Zeev. As he thought through his alternatives, the captain looked at the number of enemy soldiers in and around the Iranian village of Dezli. Point Kabob was only a few kilometers south of the village on Road 15. He had expected no military presence in the village and now the amount of men was consistent with the entire mission being compromised. For the sake of security, in case anyone unintended was picking up and reading the same screen that Ben Zeev was looking at, the position of Arsadian’s truck was not being broadcast. The captain suddenly cursed this decision. He was uncomfortable not knowing precisely where that truck was located.
I need more information
. Just as his mind began to entertain the unthinkable, a new message from Olympus popped up on the screen.

Confirmed negative AISR.

Flying just south of Hakkari, Turkey, about 200 miles north of the Chinook helicopter, a single USAF RC-135 Rivet Joint, a converted Boeing 707 with a 22 man crew and millions of dollars worth of the latest electronic equipment and computing power, quietly vacuumed in every radio transmission over northern and western Iran. Over years of experience and intelligence gathering, the Americans had learned all of the frequencies used and characteristics emitted by the growing fleet of Iranian drones. While often hard to pick up on radar, drones had to communicate with their pilots on the ground and provide real time intelligence, which was their purpose. This meant that they had to broadcast either upward to overhead satellites or downward to listening stations on the surface. Either way, the Rivet Joint picked up their radio wave emissions. On this night, the crew on the Rivet Joint could locate the approximate location of four Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles. One was operating at high altitude just south of the Azerbaijan border, two were at medium altitude in circular patterns over the Iran-Afghanistan border and one had recently taken off from Mashhad Air Base in the northeastern corner of Iran. This fourth drone was climbing to the south, apparently heading for the Afghanistan or Pakistani border. No Iranian drone was airborne over the country’s long border with Iraq.

Captain Ben Zeev immediately recognized the acronym for aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and knew that the message meant that there were no Iranian drones operating in his area of concern. He processed this new information in a logical manner. Iran’s operational drone fleet was growing, but its best reconnaissance drones were expensive to operate and the financial pressures on the Iranian regime limited their flight time. This had the practical effect that every mission had to be prioritized and approved by Revolutionary Guard headquarters in Tehran. As Ben Zeev reviewed this situation in his mind, he concluded that there could be no higher priority operation for the Islamic Republic of Iran than to catch or kill a group of Israeli commandos on Iranian soil. This would command all available resources and the fact that Iranian drones were looking for drug smugglers coming into the country from Afghanistan instead of his team coming in from Iraq meant to him that the Iranians must not know about his mission. Or so he reassured himself.

The captain shook the doubts from his mind and looked anew at the TSU device on his lap. His eyes scanned to Point Kabob on his screen. More good news. There were no soldiers indicated any closer to the rendezvous point than in the village of Dezli. Surely, he thought, they would have soldiers lying in wait around the rendezvous point if they knew about it. He had two more alternative landing zones that he and his team had reviewed, one to the north of the first two sites and one to the south. The northern route, designated drop zone four, made no sense. The Iranian unit in and around Dezli would be between his men and where they had to get to in order to successfully rendezvous with Arsadian. That left only drop zone three, which was a few miles south of the primary drop zone. This was less preferable to the drop zones to the north because there were a couple of small Kurdish villages that would each be within a mile of the drop. In addition, the southern route meant that the rendezvous with Arsadian would also have to be moved south to Kabob II, the back-up point. Ben Zeev didn’t like changes to the plan, but he was out of options. He motioned for the CIA agent to come over. The American had a small pad that he handed to the Israeli, who wrote down his instructions in English in block letters.

CHANGE TO DZ-3 (SOUTH SARGAT)

As the CIA agent walked up to the cockpit to relay the change in plan, Ben Zeev opened up his backpack which was sitting at his feet. He pulled out a communication device that looked like a handheld GPS unit. He turned it on and entered a four digit code using the small keyboard. The keyboard filled up the bottom half of the device and the keys were marked in both English and Arabic letters. He pressed the send key and waited for confirmation of a successful transmission before turning the device off and repacking it. Six minutes later a message popped onto the screen of his TSU.

Confirmed 4033.

Olympus knew they were heading for drop zone three and that the rendezvous would therefore be at Point Kabob II. They would notify Arsadian.

What no one on board the helicopter or at Olympus knew was that something had occurred earlier that day that the Israelis had not planned for. A group of five men belonging to PJAK, the Party for a Free Kurdistan, had opened fire on an isolated Iranian border post only two miles north of the spot where Task Force Camel had planned to cross the border. As was usual with these events, no one on either side was hit. The Iranian border guards had returned fire with their AKMs and a single U.S. built M2 .50 caliber machine gun left over from the days of the Shah. The latter was convincing enough to drive the Kurdish rebels back across the
border into the safety of Iraq.

The news was greeted by the commander of the local Iranian Revolutionary Guards unit based in
Biakara as a good reason to take his men into the field and set up some ambush positions for the night. The young commander was full of religious zeal, an outlier even by the standards of the IRG. He yearned for combat against the enemies of Islam and the Islamic Republic and dreamed of being recruited into the elite Quds Force. He needed to exhibit his zealotry to achieve that goal. Taking on PJAK guerillas was not exactly the same as the U.S. Army, but opportunity was opportunity. He knew the odds were against anyone coming along, but he was feeling lucky that day. Besides, the 165 men in his unit needed the field experience.

“Fifteen minutes to delta zulu three,” stated the Chinook pilot into his helmet microphone. He was keyed into the internal system and the four other crew members simultaneously heard the communication. “Go dark.” The co-pilot reached down and manipulated several switches, turning off the tactical formation navigation lights and infrared strobes and the helicopter’s transponder. The three helicopters had for the past five minutes been flying in a very tight formation, much tighter than at any time in the prior five and a half hour flight. One Blackhawk was in front of the formation and maintaining an altitude about 100 feet higher than the other two choppers. The other Blackhawk flew at the same altitude as the Chinook, only off to the port side and slightly trailing the larger helicopter. When the pilot of the trailing Blackhawk helicopter saw the tactical formation lights of the Chinook go out, he immediately turned on a second transponder in his craft that mimicked the signal that had been being squawked by the Chinook. The pair of Blackhawks stayed in formation and began a slow turn to the north. They would spend the next 30 minutes executing a simulated search for a non-existent drone crash site about 15 miles north of the drop zone area. The Night Stalkers would not make it easy for any adversary to track the exact point where their elite cargo was being dropped off.