Esther's Sling (35 page)

Each of these men grappled with
his own complicity and each could only rest his own conscience by adding the enormous weight of this mission to their internal scales of justice. For the mountain goat himself, the photo of the driver’s family ran through his brain like a movie caught in an endless loop. He wanted to cry, but that was his weak side. His inner will and drive, his strong side, would carry the moment as it always did. The weak side could wait for the days when he was no longer a warrior and when, he told himself, he would entertain bar patrons with alcohol fueled tales that no one would believe. For now, those days were somewhere in the distant future.

The mountain goat reached back into the compartment and pulled out a one liter bottle of water, the first of many in the compartment, to pass around as requested. Then he reached in and pulled out an M-4 carbine assault rifle with an eight inch suppressor attached to its muzzle. He laid the M-4 on its side and removed the AKM that had been slung over his shoulder. He removed its magazine, cleared the chambered round, and placed the weapon into the now empty slot where the M-4 had been. He reached down again and pulled out several 30 round magazines for his M-4. “I already feel safer,” said Hisami, a dangerous smile on his face. “Pass your AKs in.” Each man on the team received an M-4 and the AK-
47s were all placed into the vacated rack space. Everyone felt more comfortable with the weapon they always trained with. Two men on the team would exit the trailer at their destination with both an M-4 slung over their back and an Israeli Military Industries SR-99 sniper rifle with a very long suppressor extending from the end of its foregrip, along with an integrated night vision scope. The 7.62 millimeter weapon had the long range accuracy and stopping power that the smaller caliber M-4 lacked.

In the tractor, the commander and the Armenian settled in for the drive ahead.
“Let’s go,” said the captain, eager to put distance between the team and the Iraqi border. The commander understood that the discovery of the Toyota Corolla and its contents would result in a manhunt. As the truck moved south down Road 15, Yoni Ben Zeev slowly unwound, his body relaxing for the first time since he stepped foot on the American Chinook helicopter in Kuwait. He had not slept in almost 24 hours. He knew he needed to. He turned to his Armenian friend. “Head into Ilam. Wake me if you have any question. Wake me if we have trouble. Finally, wake me when we are closing in on Ilam. Okay?”

“Ilam. Got it.”

“You okay? Good to drive?”

“I am good.” The Armenian thought about his next words, debating different ways to phrase his point. “I am happy to have your team on board.”

“Thank you, Hamak. It is mutual. You are a brave man.” Ben Zeev reclined his seat the few inches available. He closed his eyes. The sleep washed over him. Even the lateral G-forces of the endless mountain curves could not diminish his body’s desire to shut down and recover. In the hidden compartment only ten feet or so behind the captain, the men of Task Force Camel attempted to join their commander in sleep, some finding it easier than others.

Hamak Arsadian did not mind the deep sleep of his companion despite the occasional snoring
that would start and last until the next hard mountain curve threw the Israeli’s head to the opposite side and interrupted his snoring pattern. The captain’s sleep allowed Hamak to smoke without enduring comment or dirty looks. He was not a chain smoker, but he needed a cigarette every hour or so. He had just finished his fifth cigarette since Point Kabob II when a sign for Ilam jogged his memory. He reached over and shook the left shoulder of the Israeli commando. “Younis. Wake up. We are nearing Ilam.” He looked to his right for an instant. “Younis.” He was almost shouting.

Ben
Zeev’s mind slowly found its way back to consciousness. He opened his eyes. “Where are we?”

“Close to Ilam. You wanted me to wake you up.”

“What time is it?” In response, Arsadian simply pointed to the dashboard clock with his right hand. The time was 2:47 in the afternoon. “Good,” replied the captain, his mind now regaining its full tactical awareness. “What road are we on now?”

“Seventeen.”

“I want to take a different route.”

The Armenian took the news in stride. He had fully bought into the adventure of this mission. He would drive that truck wherever Ben Zeev commanded. “Okay. Where?”

“Stay on Road 17 and follow the signs to the Ilam Airport. When we get to the Darreh Shahr Road, turn left. It’s the same road that goes past the airport entrance. Take that road south to Darreh Shahr. Have you been this way?”

The driver shook his head. “Not that I recall. But we will find out soon what it’s like. It can’t be worse than Road 15 is south of Dezli.” There was excitement in the driver’s voice and Ben Zeev picked up on that. This was the same type of reaction from the Armenian that had
caused the captain to grow to like him so much while they trained in Yerevan. If Arsadian were younger, thought the commander, he would recruit the man into Sayeret Matkal.

Sheikh Talal bin Walid walked into his fourth floor corner office in the sprawling Ministry of Foreign Affairs building on the corner of Prince Talal Road and Al Imam Abdulaziz bin Muhammad bin Saud Road in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The office was temporary for the Sheikh since the headquarters building of the agency he ran was undergoing renovation and reconstruction following a bombing the prior summer. On the wall hung a series of digital readouts that had the local time in eight of the world’s largest and most important cities. In the middle of the city times, a single device read out two different dates. On the top, the date read “28 Dhu al-Qa’da 1434,” which was the date according to the Hijri, or Islamic calendar. Underneath, the date read “04 October.”

On his desk, Sheikh
Talal’s male aide had laid out the prior day’s edition of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, a morning reading ritual that dated from the days of his youth as a student at Columbia University. After thirty minutes of perusing the various articles, his aide entered the office with a tea setting and a red manila file. The file contained summarized reports of the key events that had occurred overnight.

“Don’t forget your appointment with the King today for lunch
,” the aide said. The aide acted as the Shiekh’s secretary and valet.

“Ah, yes. Thank you, Aziz,” replied the Sheikh. The aide quietly left the offic
e, closing the door behind him.

Sheikh
Talal bin Walid, the head of Saudi Arabian intelligence, enjoyed a sip of his favorite tea, Earl Grey. He opened the red file, beginning the next portion of his morning routine. On his desk, a Blackberry cell phone sat in a cradle in a permanent state of recharging. It was not his regular cell phone. This phone never left his office.

The Sheikh noticed a red light blinking in the upper right corner of the phone. He returned his tea cup to its sterling silver tray and reached for the Blackberry. The phone had been provided to him by his internal communications group. The SIM card had been randomly and anonymously purchased in Paris. The phone had only
one purpose: Every day or every other day – it didn’t really matter – an innocuous text would come in. Every text was the typical type of text that a daughter who was off to college would send to a loving father.

He turned on the phone and opened the text messages icon on the screen. He then touched the singl
e text to open it on the screen.

Hi daddy. I’m flying home tomorrow and land at 17:00. Will you pick me up at the airport? Love you.

He typed a response.

Yes, of course. See you tomorrow.

He hit send. The head of Saudi intelligence had just communicated with someone within Israeli Mossad who was based in Paris and using an equally anonymous cell phone. The Sheikh deleted the text and replaced the cell phone in its cradle. He then hit a button on his office phone. “Aziz, please have General Ratish come see me this afternoon.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the electronic voice. “What time?”

“Anytime after I am back from seeing the King.”

“Yes, sir.”

A formation of four IAF C-130 Karnafs leveled out at flight level 280 as it headed east over the northern Saudi desert. The mission was a routine training exercise and a continuation of the large formations flown by the IAF seemingly every month around the new moon. The formation flew with the full knowledge and approval of both the USAF and the Royal Saudi Air Force, but was still spread far apart to maximize its radar signature. The four planes maintained vertical separations of 200 feet, with the lowest airplane, the one trailing the formation, maintaining 28,200 feet.

The night of
October 4 was the new moon. Over the desert sands of northern Saudi Arabia, with the few small towns offering almost no light, the view out of the cockpit window was the color that inspired the term “midnight black.” With absolutely no visual horizon, the pilots of the trailing C-130 had to concentrate on their flight instruments. It was closing in on midnight local time and only the navigation lights of the other three transports were visible. Somewhere above them, a flight of three F-16C jet fighters that had just refueled behind a KC-707 aerial tanker was keeping watch over the four turboprop airplanes. But these welcome guardians were not visible to the crew of this C-130.

The formation of transports maintained a constant altitude and cruise speed of 290 knots. The flight continued toward the northeast on a heading of 52 degrees, passing over the Iraqi border at 11:50 p.m. local, or Juliet time. Just a minute after midnight, when the formation had flown a little over 50 nautical miles into Iraqi airspace, the two pilots overheard a conversation between the formation’s lead aircraft and the
Balad air control center. The air traffic controller was agitated and demanded that the formation of aircraft descend immediately to flight level 230 and begin a 180 degree turn to the south to exit Iraqi airspace as quickly as possible. The pilot of the lead aircraft offered his apologies at the inadvertent navigation error and confirmed the air traffic command to descend to 23,000 feet and begin a southward turn away from the prevailing traffic lanes over Iraq. The three lead C-130s all began the ordered maneuver.

The trailing C-130 began the same sou
thward turn but maintained its altitude, the pilot lowering the plane’s speed to 230 knots. The navigator reached to his left and rotated a small dial one click in a clockwise direction. In the cargo cabin, the white lights turned off and green nighttime cabin lights turned on. The navigator then leaned over and tapped the flight engineer on the shoulder. “Commence depressurization,” he said into his microphone.

In the rear of the plane, six members of an elite IAF commando unit known as Shaldag and one loadmaster each put on oxygen masks. The loadmaster
motioned for all of the men to stand. Each man began to perform a quick check of the equipment of the man in front of him, starting by ensuring that the valve on the small oxygen tank each man carried was fully open. The loadmaster performed the check on the last man in line and then walked to the rear cargo ramp. He hooked a single tether strap to a harness he was wearing that wrapped around his shoulders and thighs. He then turned toward the six men and placed his right fist in the air.

All six men gathered near the ramp in a tight group. The loadmaster now raised his arm up and formed an
“A-OK” sign. Each man returned the sign. The loadmaster turned and waited. In the earpiece inside his helmet, he heard the navigator say “Two minutes.” Thirty seconds later, he heard “Ramp down.” Moments later the ramp door opened, an action which only took eighteen seconds to complete. As always, he was surprised at how calm it was to stand at the back end of a C-130 with its ramp open in flight.

The loadmaster turned to his men and put one finger in the air, giving them the one minute warning. The next fifty seconds passed by at different rates for each man. For the loadmaster, the time passed quickly. He suspected otherwise for the six Shaldag warriors by his side. Finally, the loadmaster heard a countdown in his ear. When the navigator said “Go”, the loadmaster waved his right arm across his waist in an outward motion. Within two seconds, all six men had jumped off the end of the ramp and into the freezing black void. Now the loadmaster stepped back and pulled the release tab on two pallets that immediately rolled down the built-in rollers along the floor of the cargo cabin and out the door into the void. Static lines connected to an overhead cable deployed a sophisticated parafoil on each of the two cargo pallets.

The six men of Shaldag repeated what they had rehearsed on over 20 previous nighttime jumps. They used parafoils to “fly” over 10 kilometers to a point in the desert that was a little over one kilometer to the west of Mudaysis Airfield in the middle of Anbar Province, Iraq. They were the first Israeli soldiers to step foot on Iraqi soil. They would be the first of many.

After gathering their chutes, the
unit commander sent two men ahead to reconnoiter Mudaysis, an airfield that satellite photos taken just twelve hours earlier indicated to be in the same abandoned condition as when Yosef Sayegh, disguised as a Kuwaiti engineer, had examined it over two years before. With his remaining men, the commander scanned the area with his night vision equipment. The night was so dark that his system used an infrared illuminator to make up for the lack of natural light available to amplify. Toward the south he saw what he was looking for: the two cargo pallets had landed about 150 meters apart and were only half a kilometer away.

The pallets had been delivered using an autonomous GPS
-guided parafoil known as the Firefly Joint Precision Aerial Delivery System. The Shaldag unit needing only one of them, but two had been dropped under the assumption that at least one pallet would arrive at the designated location. The commander jogged to the nearer of the two pallets with his men. They cut open the thick webbed canvas strapping that held the cargo in place.

What was revealed looked something like a stripped down golf cart. There was just room enough for one man to drive it and its cargo of over six hundred pounds of
pre-loaded equipment. The transport cart was powered by battery and very quiet. One of the men sat in the driver’s seat and headed off slowly toward the airfield, the commander and one other man following in single file behind the vehicle, but only after they had gathered in the large parafoil to carry with them to the airfield. The last man headed toward the other pallet. His job was to gather up its parafoil and drape it over the pallet. Each parafoil had been designed to double as camouflage netting and was made of a fabric that had an effective desert camouflage pattern.

As the electric transport came within a hundred meters of the main landing strip, the commander ran ahead of it to gesture for the driver to stop. The commander got on his radio and spoke a single word in Arabic. Seconds later a
single Arabic word came in response. The simple code, which told the commander that it was clear to come onto the airfield, would be innocuous chatter to any Iraqi picking up the broadcast. The commander gestured for the driver to continue and the transport headed off. The commander and the other soldier in the group were quickly on the runway and heading toward the tarmac located on the southeastern portion of the airfield.

Trailing behind, the sixth man who had placed the camouflage parafoil over the remaining pallet, came running to join his comrades. He took a more southerly route, cutting the
distance to get from the drop site to the tarmac. The advance guard of two men had already taken up positions that allowed them to watch the single entrance road that led onto the airfield. They would spend the night guarding the only likely way for any Iraqi military vehicles to pay an unwanted and untimely visit to Mudaysis.

A sudden and sharp boom ripped the night air.
An explosion
.
We are under attack.

The explosion that cracked through the still desert night did not produce any flash that any of the men noticed, but the sound was sharp and unexpected. All of the men of the Shaldag unit instinctively dropped into crouched positions and froze, each man desperately searching for the source of the attack. In the desert vastness of Iraq it was difficult to know which direction the explosion had come based on the sound alone. The commander was looking toward the entrance road when one of his men tapped his shoulder and pointed back in the direction they had just come from. Through his night vision system, the commander could see a cloud of dust that was already settling back to the desert floor.

The commander instructed the man who had been driving the cart to stay with it. He took the other soldier back with him toward the source of the explosion at a fast jog. Each man scanned the horizon as they moved, desperate to locate the enemy forces that were responsible for the blast. As they came nearer to the explosion site, the commander could make out the silhouette of his man on the ground, the same man he had just sent to cover the second pallet only minutes earlier. He was lying on his back in the sand only fifty meters or so off the edge of the runway. When the two men reached the runway’s edge, the commander ordered the other soldier to stay where he was and provide cover. The commander now walked across the desert sand, unsure about what exactly had occurred.

As he came upon the man, the unmistakable sign of a landmine was apparent even in the greenish twilight world of night vision. The soldier had stepped on a mine and his right foot was blown off. The solder was still breathing but made no sounds. The commander kneeled at his side, quickly removing the man’s fabric waist belt and placing it around his right calf, tightening it up as tight as it would go. The commander checked hi
s soldier’s pulse. It was weak.

“Uzi, can you hear me?” No response. The soldier was going into shock. The commander raised up the man’s legs and maneuvered his own knee underneath the man’s thighs to support them, trying to keep blood from leaving the soldier’s vital organs. The commander looked at the stump. With his night vision goggles it was difficult to draw conclusions, but the commander correctly guessed that the shredded ankle was not bleeding heavily. The explosion had apparently cau
terized the open blood vessels.

The mouth of the soldier named Uzi suddenly opened involuntarily and the muscles of his body went limp. The commander realized that the man was not breathing. He removed his leg from the support position and straddled Uzi’s body. He spent the next two minutes compressing his soldier’s chest at a rate of 100 beats per minute. He stopped to
check Uzi’s pulse. Nothing. His soldier was gone. What the commander would not realize until the sun rose the next morning was that a piece of shrapnel from a Soviet-built mine that had been buried in the sand for over a quarter century had severed the femoral artery in Uzi’s left leg. The soldier had bled to death – the first combat casualty of the IDF during Project Block G.

Fourteen minutes later, the commander had dragged the body to the edge of the runway and removed his pack and M-4 carbine, giving each to the man standing watch. The commander then sent that man back to tell the cart driver to come over with the cart. The corpse was loaded on, now just another source of dead weight. The team headed to the same hardened aircraft shelter that the American unit had spent the night in two years earlier.

Among the items that had been unloaded from the battery-powered cart were two communication devices and a few body bags. The mission planners had planned for the loss of half the team and assumed that if more than half were killed, the entire team would be lost. What was not available to the team was any mine detection or clearing equipment. There was not supposed to be any landmines around this abandoned base and the contingency had not been planned for. Now within the relative protection of the hardened aircraft shelter, the commander operated one of the communication sets as two of his men placed the body of their friend into a bag that was then zippered shut.

The commander typed the following into the device’s keyboard:

Oscar Sierra. Equipment intact and operable. One KIA, UH – landmine. Send mine equipment. Shangri-La.

The simple code words at the start told Mount Olympus that the objective, Mudaysis Airfield, was secure. The third sentence informed them that Uzi Helzberg had been killed in action. The sign off was the codename given by the Olympus planners to this small patch of earth in the Iraqi desert that would play such a critical role in deciding whether or not Block G succeeded. The name had been christened by General Schechter, a World War II history buff who recalled that Franklin Roosevelt, when asked by reporters where the B-25 bombers that bombed Japan
during the famous Doolittle Raid in April 1942 had come from, had simply replied “Shangri-La.”

The communications device encrypted the message in a series of random digits and then waited to receive a signal from a passing satellite. With the satellite in line of sight, the device sent a burst signal that lasted less than one second. The message was decoded and read at Mount Olympus within two minutes.

The commander turned to the man who had been driving the cart. “We only have one thing to accomplish tonight, let’s get to it. Uzi’s gone. Let’s make sure his death is for a reason.” The driver was Uzi’s close friend, the two having shared a bond built on common interests, complementary personalities and the shared hardships of life in a special operations unit. He was shaken but there was no time to mourn his friend – that would have to wait.