Esther's Sling (36 page)

The soldier went to the cart and finished unloading the rest of the cargo, which included ammunition, food, tools, a range of push brooms, navigation lights, small flood lights, a small weather machine, four
Shipon anti-tank missiles and a large rotating brush cylinder. He grabbed hold of the cylindrical brush, which was an attachment for the front of the cart. Kneeling down in front of the cart, he inserted two arms that extended from each side of the brush into sockets built into the cart. As soon as he was done, he hopped into the driver’s seat. The commander grabbed his arm and offered unnecessary advice. “Stay only on the paved surfaces.”

The driver headed off into the night. His job was to use the brush, which now was rotating along the ground as the cart moved, to sweep off the entire runway, taxiway and tarmac before morning light. The cart contained several extra batteries in series that provided enough power to keep it going for the next 12 hours. If necessary, they could retrieve the other cart in the second pallet left in the desert, an option that the commander was now hoping would not be necessary.

The commander grabbed two Shipon missile tubes and headed out to visit the two soldiers guarding the only road onto the airfield.

The Iranian town of Derrah Shahr lies in middle of a high valley of the first range of the Zagros mountains, known as the Folded Zagros. Along the long valley, which runs northwest to southeast parallel between the Folded Zagros and the High Zagros mountain ranges, the high waters of the Karkheh River wind their way gracefully to the southeast. With a population of just over 60,000, the town itself is not on anyone’s must-see list of destinations, but adjacent to the town are the ruins of the ancient city of Takht-e-Tavoos, dating from 5
th
century BC and the Archaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great. The ruins attract Iranian and foreign tourists – those with either an adventurous side or a high level of interest in archaeology.

But it’s the unrelenting beauty of the Zagros mountain scenery that surrounds Derrah
Shahr that has been a source of inspiration for Persians for centuries. Most people arrive into town using the well maintained valley road that runs north from Dezful, about an 80 mile drive away. Still others, as did Hamak Arsadian, come down from the north, along the Derrah Shahr road from the provincial capital city of Ilam.

The town
of Derrah Shahr is arranged perpendicular to the main valley road, along a road that runs southwest through town and then into and over the Folded Zagros mountain chain forming the southwestern flank of the high valley. A traveler on this road will eventually be delivered into the town of Abdanan at the foot of the Folded Zagros. Along this route, only two and half miles outside of Derrah Shahr, lies a local tourist attraction, the fountains and modern bathhouse of the Sarab-e Derrah Shahr. The five acre site draws Iranians from near and far for a relaxing break among its well manicured grounds in the clean mountain air.

Continuing along this same road, drivers heading for Abdanan would pass through the
Kabir Kooh Gorge, land that had been a trail through this section of the Zagros mountains for centuries. At the highest point of the gorge, as you drive along the eastern slope of the Kabir Kooh peak, you would be forgiven if you failed to notice a non-descript road about four meters wide that ran off to the east. The turnoff for this road was only seven miles driving distance from the fountains of Sarab-e Derrah Shahr.

The road has
no markings to identify it, but if the curious turned onto it they would be soon met by ominous signs, written in Farsi, Arabic and English, that identified the road as Iranian military property, warning any vehicle that the use of deadly force was authorized if they continued any further. A single swinging metal pole – the type that guards the driveways of isolated farms the world over – acts as the sole barrier to progress. It is only twenty meters or so further past the sign and has no lock, just a simple latch.

Those who
are authorized – or the foolhardy – need drive only one mile and four hairpin turns further to arrive at the site of the Dehloran early warning radar, an indigenous Iranian-built Ghadir radar system installed in the summer of 2012. Perched on a small knob at an altitude of 6,068 feet, the radar can pick up aircraft flying at a range of up to 450 kilometers from the installation, depending upon atmospheric conditions. The site is so strategically located that the Iraqi army had set its capture as one of its early objectives during the opening weeks of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. The Iraqis failed in their attempt, stopped by the sacrifice and determined fighting of Iranian army and air force units.

The
Ghadir radar is a new system built by Iran and based on the Russian Nebo UE “Tall Rack” radar system. The long wavelength of the system helps it to identify and track smaller targets such as drones, cruise missiles and – according to the Iranians – stealth aircraft. The system was a meaningful upgrade from the prior Russian built P-14 Tall King that had been inside the radar dome for many years prior to 2012.

But for the planners at Mount Olympus, the capabilities of the radar itself were not important. What was important was the integrated air defense network to which the radar was connected. The Iranians had learned the lessons of the preceding years well and they had spent handsomely to separate their radar network from the internet or any other network connected to the outside world. However, they also knew that a modern air defense network had to be connected across as many radars as possible to be effective and su
rvive an intensive air assault.

Not only was the exchange of information across the network essential, but the ability to turn radars on and off intermittently – one radar tracking a target for a few seconds and then shutting down and handing the tra
cking off to another radar – has become a key tactic to survive the wave of incoming radar-homing missiles that is the standard opening air assault tactic of the U.S. or Israeli Air Force. Next to the nuclear program itself, there had been no higher defense priority in the Islamic Republic of Iran than the creation of a modern integrated radar network that was isolated from the outside world. The senior officers of the Olympus planning team were counting on the success of the Iranians in this effort.

After almost ten hours of hard and winding mountain driving to cover only 342 miles of roadway, Hamak Arsadian turned his MAN tractor-trailer unit right as it entered the town of Derrah
Shahr. He then drove another five and a half miles before turning into the large parking area of Sarab-e Derrah Shahr. Arsadian found a spot to turn around and then parked his rig. He and Yoni Ben Zeev – still in his guise as Younis Mohammed, the helper – stepped out of the tractor, each man stretching in the way that is automatic after a long road trip. They spent the next forty minutes walking around the grounds of the facility, enjoying the garden and the fountains, as everyone was doing that was there on this beautiful spring day. They stopped in front of a cart vendor as the sun settled lower into the western horizon and purchased a Kurdish meal of lamb strips and tea.

Both men walked to a nearby masonry wall that was about a meter tall and capped with a granite cornice. They sat down to enjoy their meal and the spring sunshine. Yoni Ben Zeev thought about the beauty of this location and the coming storm that would engulf both Iran and Israel. He desperately tried to get the thought out of his mind, turning to Hamak to engage in small talk in Farsi. As he started to ask a question about the weather, a small trembler shook the ground and the wall the two men were sitting on. It successfully jolted Ben
Zeev’s mind out of his prior thoughts. “What was that?”

Arsadian smiled. “Earthquake. Not used to them?” The fact was that Ben Zeev was not used to feeling earthquakes
. But in the Zagros mountains, which were formed by the subduction of the Arabian sub-continental plate beneath the main Eurasian continental plate, they were a very common experience. The Israeli commando didn’t respond. “You feel them all the time here in the Zagros.”

The Israeli shivered. “Odd feeling,” was all he added. He checked his watch. It was
almost six in the evening Iranian time. The sun had set only minutes earlier. “Let’s finish and get out of here.”

Inside the trailer, the men of Task Force Camel opened their trap door and let the cool mountain air ventilate their temporary prison. They knew they still had six hours to wait. Some men continued to sleep, but others checked their weapons. Manu checked the status of several
ruggedized laptop computers the team was carrying and the satellite communications gear they had available. One man read a novel he had sneaked into his backpack against orders. It was in English. When he pulled it out, he argued that it did not violate the rule against carrying anything Israeli. As he had correctly calculated, no one cared at this point.

Arsadian and Ben Zeev returned to the truck and started up the engine. The Armenian driver pulled back o
nto the Derrah Shahr-Abdanan road, now heading back toward the town of Derrah Shahr. He drove only about 300 meters – just enough to navigate a bend in the road. He pulled over onto a flat sandy section of runoff. Arsadian shut down the engine and reached back to pull down the bed that ran behind the rear of the cab. “You are welcome to it,” he said to Ben Zeev.

“No. I am wide awake. Please.” Ben Zeev motioned toward the bunk, officially ceding it to the Armenian. Hamak Arsadian slipped off his shoes and crawled into the small bunk rack. The Israeli captain entered the simple
“3-2-1” code into the truck’s SatNav unit, informing Mount Olympus that they were in position for the evening.

As
darkness settled over the Folded Zagros mountains on October 4, Captain Yoni Ben Zeev of the Israeli Defense Force leaned his head back against the passenger seat head rest and closed his eyes, searching for any way to make the time go by faster.

A little before 11 p.m., Captain Ben Zeev exited the tractor cab and walked back a few meters to slip underneath the trailer and up and through the trap door. He lifted himself into the trailer compartment. “Ready to do what we came here for?” asked the captain to his team as he closed the hatch underneath his feet.

He was greeted by a soft chorus of affirmative responses. He spent ten minutes changing into the uniform of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the same uniform now worn by his team. He lifted up his new backpack and reached in to pull out a checklist. He spent the next fifteen minutes reviewing with each man the equipment in their possession to make sure that they departed this trailer w
ith everything they would need.

When
the captain was done, he returned the paper to his pack and grabbed the last M-4 carbine. Like all the others, it had a long suppressor on the muzzle threads in lieu of the standard issue flash hider. He then spent a half hour reviewing each step of the mission with his men, making absolutely sure that each man knew his role in the upcoming operation. When the time came, everyone would need to act as instinctively as possible.

With everything in place, one side of the hidden compartment cover was folded down and the other was released from the latch holding it against the side wall. Each man had a larger backpack than the prior night when they infiltrated the Iranian border. But like the prior night, each man wore the same AN/PVS-14 night vision monocle. Only now each member of the team added
a tactical communication headset, allowing the team to communicate with each other up to about two kilometers apart.

Ben Zeev used the truck’s intercom to talk to Arsadian, who woul
d watch for any passing traffic. There were no cars on the road. Ben Zeev checked his watch. The time was 12:02 a.m. Iran time. “Okay. We go.” He pointed to the mountain goat, who led the way as usual. “Remember, get cover from the road then get your bearings. Make sure you’re heading in the right direction.”

The captain watched eleven men drop through the hatch to the sandy earth below and quickly disappear. Finally, Ben Zeev lowered himself
down as he pulled the heavy compartment cover down. After he had replaced and locked the hatch lid from underneath, he crawled out from under the trailer and walked to the tractor door. He reached in as Hamak Arsadian reached over to shake his hand. “You are on your own, my friend. God bless you.”

“I don’t know what your team is doing, but God be with you. If you need me, I will come.”

Ben Zeev smiled. “The oak doors to the compartment are down, but the center oak strip is loose. You will want to fix that before you get too far down the road.”

“Okay.” Arsadian was nodding his head.

“You have a home in Israel with your family whenever you say the word. I will personally make it happen.”

“I will see you there,”
said the Armenian, smiling.

Ben Zeev began to close the door, but pulled it back open. “Make your delivery as soon as you can and then get out of Iran the fastest way you can. I would waste no more time sleeping.”

“I understand.”

Task Force Camel budgeted two hours to cover 2.7 miles of uphill climbing that would take them from their current altitude of 2,657 feet at the truck, up to 5,905 feet, a climb of more than 3,200 feet. Fortunately, their route would take them along the edge of a small stream bed that formed a gentle upward-sloping valley bordered by two ridge lines running away to the north from the Dehloran radar. The stream path would take them to a small plateau that was just below the ridgeline that held the Dehloran installation. The mountains in this area were little different from the mountains crossed by the team the night before. The land was rocky and largely barren, although the scattered trees were a little more numerous than along the border a couple hundred miles to the north as the crow flies.

A constant soft breeze came out of the northwest,
carrying any sounds the team made to the southeast, away from the radar station. The radar station at the top of the mountain had been under constant U.S. and Israeli satellite surveillance for over six months, and the routine and disposition of the Iranian men who occupied the site were well known. Nothing in the routine had changed since concentrated surveillance had commenced the prior spring. About 8 a.m. each morning and 9 p.m. each night – the men at night being rewarded with a shorter stint for their graveyard shift duties – a white unmarked Ford passenger van and a white unmarked Chevy Suburban would pull off the Derrah Shahr-Abdanan road and drive the final mile to the station. The vehicles came from a military complex in the town of Abdanan on the opposite side of the mountain from the high valley town of Derrah Shahr. A single white crew cab pickup truck was kept parked on the grounds of the radar station so that crews had a way to get to town in an emergency.

At every shift change, four new technicians and six new IRGC guards arrived in the large passenger van. Another three guards accompanied the van in the Suburban during the drop off and then followed the van back to Abdanan with the ten men from the prior shift. The four radar technicians worked in shifts of two while they were on station, rot
ating two hours on and two off.

The IRGC guards tried to maintain four men on watch, with two overseeing the single road leading onto the site, two men walking the property and two men inside the middle of three white trailers set up along the ridge. This middle trailer acted as the sitting room, bunk room and kitchen for the men on station. But often the high resolution satellite photos showed that one or both of the men assigned to roam the property were actually in the sitting trailer, especially at night when it seemed that the roaming guards never ventured more than a hundred meters or so from the structures and the security of the lights mounted to them.

In addition to the sitting trailer in the middle, another trailer, the one closest to the large white radar dome, housed the radar operations and network communications equipment. The last trailer, furthest along the ridge, housed two diesel generators and an encrypted directional microwave transmitter and receiver that was aimed at a similar device 59 miles away on top of an 8,767 foot mountain peak located just to the northwest of the city of Khorramabad. About 80 meters past the last generator trailer, situated below the ridgeline, a large diesel storage tank was located. But the generators were only for backup. The radar complex was powered primarily by electrical wires that ran onto the site from higher voltage wires than ran alongside the Derrah Shahr-Abdanan road. From the first major structure on the ridge, the radar dome, to the diesel storage tank, the complex stretched for 262 meters, or 861 feet, following the ridgeline running to the northeast away from the radar dome.

With about a half mile to go to reach the diesel storage tank, the team stopped. They had reached the start of the plateau that was just underneath the radar station’s ridgeline. There had
been no man-made obstacles. No sensors. No barbed wire. No landmines. The Iranians relied on the guards and the natural isolation of the radar’s location for defense. Off to the right from where the team stopped, Yosef Hisami had found their objective for the night. It was a spot along a sheer rise of rock wall averaging about 4 meters in height that ran for over 300 meters and formed the northern edge of the plateau. The particular spot where the Kurdish Jew now stood had been identified by space-based synthetic aperture radar surveys of the mountain top. It was underneath an overhanging rock that created a natural roof only two meters high at the opening and receding downward as it ran back, so that the space formed underneath was in the shape of a wedge. At the rear of the space, the available height was only a few inches. But a number of men could lie down with their feet toward the rear and their weapons trained out the opening of the natural shelter, which faced north – away from the radar station.

Captain Yoni Ben Zeev directed nine of his men to take positions in the natural shelter. Two of those men
immediately set to work erecting a camouflage net designed specifically for this mission. The net created a cloaking wall that effectively cut the men off from visible and infrared observation. Without saying a word, Hisami and Benny Stern headed off to another spot that had been pre-identified. The spot was almost a mile away and was on top of the next knob along the ridgeline that ran to the northeast and then turned east away from the radar station structures. The knob was actually at an elevation higher than the radar dome.

When the two men reached their destination
, they found a pair of large rocks, each about a meter in diameter, forming a barrier that was perpendicular to the radar complex. They spent the next hour taking turns digging a shallow ditch on the east side of the rocks. The finished trench was just deep and wide enough for the two men to lie down side by side, their weapons and binoculars trained between the two rocks toward the radar structures that were almost a mile away.

Benny Stern laid his M-4 in the ditch and positioned his primary weapon, one of the two
SR-99 sniper rifles the team was carrying, on its bipod. Its powerful scope and integrated light intensifier allowed Stern to observe everything happening at the radar station within his line of sight. Finally, Hisami pulled out a camouflage net – a smaller version of the one being used to protect the main body of the team – and covered both men and all their gear including their weapons. This spot would be their “hide” for the next 17 hours. During the coming daylight hours, they would be unable to move out from under the netting. Any required bodily function would have to be taken care off within the claustrophobic confines of their enshrouded ditch.

They maintained sparse radio contact with the captain, using single Farsi words to let Ben Zeev know they were in position and had visual contact with their ultimate objective. The mountain goat put his M-4 down by his side and pulled out his suppressed SIG Sauer P226 9-millimeter pistol, holding it in his hand. He assumed that the only way they would be found before the next nightfall would be if someone happened to walk within a few meters of their hiding spot. If that misfortune were to occur, Hisami would make sure whoever it was did no
t live to reveal what they saw.

Stern told Hisami to get some sleep. Dawn was about four hours away. Stern would sleep sometime during the day.

Back underneath the natural overhang, Captain Ben Zeev pulled out a TSU and turned it on. While they were hiking up the mountain, the device had been passively receiving encrypted information. The captain tapped on the screen to open a specific file. A small number of high resolution photographs of the Dehloran radar station appeared on the screen in cascading files. The photos were in both visible and infrared light and spanned the prior 24 hours in four hour increments. He looked through the photos. They were no different than the ones he had been viewing for months. His conclusion was that the Iranians were not expecting his team.