Esther's Sling (38 page)

The daytime hours passed uneventfully for Task Force Camel, each man dealing with his anxieties about the coming night as best he could. For soldiers heading into certain combat, this time was a heavy mix of apprehension, nervousness and fateful resolve – each man working out the relative balance of each emotion quietly as he did everything in his power to exude outward confidence and fearlessness.

Most of the men in this unit had combat experience somewhere inside Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank, but all of those actions were in situations in which the main power of the Israeli Defense Force was an emergency call away. Here they were completely isolated. There would be no emergency helicopter pickup and no sortie from an F-16 or Apache helicopter to tilt the battlefield in their favor if they were discovered. There would be only a fight to the death and the lingering knowledge that their loved ones may never know their fate. Capture meant torture, humiliation, emotional isolation and, ultimately, execution – probably at the end of a hangman
’s noose. Success meant they would be national heroes. The utter juxtaposition of the two possible outcomes could drive the strongest man to despondency. Each man fought an internal war to keep the thoughts of defeat out of his mind. All the men had varying degrees of success.

The luckiest men of the team were Yosef Hisami and Benny Stern. They had something to do that occupied their minds professionally. The men took turns watching the complex, trying to steal precious hours of sleep when they could. It was easier for Benny Stern. The men joked that he could sleep at will – sleeping through an artillery barrage as long as he had a place to rest his head. True to form, once the morning came and he passed watch duty to Hisami, he fell fast asleep. Hisami was supposed to wake him after three hours, but the Kurd felt great when the scheduled time came and he let Benny Stern sleep until two in the afternoon. Besides, thought Hisami, his life might depend on Stern
’s aim later that night and he wanted the sniper to be as rested as possible.

The sun set at
5:43 p.m. Iranian time on the mountain. Two hours later, the main body of Task Force Camel had gathered the camouflage net and packed it away. Captain Ben Zeev had every man check his weapons and, for the first time since leaving Israel, told every man to chamber a round in his rifle, being careful to ensure that his weapon’s safety was in the horizontal “Safe” position. After another ten minutes, with the darkness now total, Ben Zeev pointed to one of his team, a man named Isaac Mofaz. He had been born and raised in Israel, but his parents had both been born and raised in Tehran, immigrating to Israel three decades earlier.

“Almost ready,” said Mofaz. He was completing the assembly of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV, that was not much bigger than a radio-controlled airplane that any hobbyist would fly. The UAV was known as the Boomerang and it was built by an Israeli company called Bluebird Aero Systems Ltd. It was lightweight and, being powered by an electric motor, very quiet. Under its nose, a small gyro-stabilized infrared video camera could lock on
to a location and provide up to eight hours of continuous real-time video feed to its ground controller.

When he was done, Mofaz removed what looked like a large tablet computer from his backpack. He booted the machine up. After less than a minute, the tablet and the UAV established an encrypted radio link. The commando waited for the tablet control computer to establish its exact GPS coordinates and then to synchronize those coordinates into the miniature brain of the UAV. The Boomerang, which was painted
dark grey, was programmed to takeoff and climb to an altitude of 7,500 feet, roughly half a kilometer above the radar station, and then to establish a wide orbit around a target designated by Mofaz, which would be a point in the middle of the Dehloran radar complex. Once that point was designated, the UAV would autonomously remain in orbit around that point until Mofaz told it to do something else or until its power source died and it fell from the sky.

Isaac Mofaz then unpacked a flat panel receiver and a tripod. The receiver, which resembled a very small phased array radar panel measuring a mere fourteen inches in diameter, would pick up the encrypted video feed from the Boomerang as it flew, so long as it maintained an unencumbered line of sight. A two foot long antenna extended above the receiver panel that enabled it to communicate with the control tablet that would remain with Mofaz. The Israeli checked to make sure that the tablet, the Boomerang and the flat panel receiver were all communicating with each other. He then turned to a
team member kneeling beside him. “Take the receiver,” he said. The man lifted the flat panel receiver and its tripod and headed out to place it at a location on the plateau that was above the rock wall formation the team was hiding under.

Finally, Mofaz placed the Boomerang UAV on a metal frame launch ramp that another man had set up. The launch ramp, which measured six feet in length with one end supported in the air by a bipod, looked like a slingshot on steroids. “Everybody stand clear,” he said to the team. He touched a command on his tablet and the silent motor on the UAV came to life in an instant, only the whirr of the propeller indicating its motive force. He reached down and pulled a lanyard that trailed on the ground behind the launch rail, releasing a restraining catch. The UAV shot forward into the air. Within a second
, only men using their night vision monocle could still see it. As it flew off, even the men with night vision could soon no longer make it out. The UAV climbed to its programmed altitude and started to circle above its launch point awaiting further direction from Mofaz.

“Situation
?” Ben Zeev asked into his tactical microphone.

Almost a mile away, Yosef Hisami tapped the shoulder of his partner in the ditch. Benny Stern was once again using his night vision-enabled sniper scope to scan the radar complex. Stern raised up his left hand a
nd put one finger in the air. The pair had worked out their code over the prior fourteen hours. “One man moving. Standard. Negative NVG,” the mountain goat said into his microphone.

The captain understood what his sergeant was telling him – the guards standing outside had no night vision equipment. “Let
’s move,” Ben Zeev commanded to the men around him after the UAV was on its way. Isaac Mofaz slung his M-4 over his shoulder and back and put on his backpack over the weapon’s sling. He lifted the tablet, which had a cable attached to the backpack. Extending from the top of his backpack was an antenna that allowed communication between him and both the UAV and the flat panel receiver. The rest of the team followed their commander, who notified Hisami and Stern that they were on the move to the assault assembly point.

As the men moved onto the plateau, they first went to the spot where the flat panel receiver had been set up on its tripod. Isaac Mofaz and Manu Moresadegh took up a position by a large tree that was close to the flat panel receiver. The man who carried the flat panel receiver from the hide to where it now stood
, joined the rest of the team as they moved slowly in the direction of a clump of trees about 350 meters to the east of the diesel storage tank. Once they were in position, each man assumed a prone position to wait.

Mofaz commanded the UAV to widen its orbit. On one pass over the radar complex, he sent a command that locked a set of crosshairs in the center of the UAV
’s video feed onto the first trailer, the one that housed the radar’s operational consoles. The UAV immediately adjusted its flight path to begin a quarter mile diameter orbit around that point. The software on the Boomerang handled the flying, freeing Mofaz to watch the video feed on his tablet. Mofaz zoomed the video focus out until he could see the two guards overlooking the access road and the one guard who was walking around. The mobile guard seemed to follow a path that formed a triangle between the diesel storage structure, the two guards watching the access road and the radar dome structure.

With the UAV now providing tactical reconnaissance, Ben Zeev ordered Stern and
Hisami to leave their hide and join the assault team. It took the pair of men only eighteen minutes to reach the rest of the team at the assault assembly point. Benny Stern and the other sniper joined up and, along with one other man from the team, began to move out toward the south. The three men moved quietly and quickly, following the undulating eastern slopes that ran down from the radar complex ridge. Their destination was just over a kilometer of walking distance away. They continued south and then southwest, circling around the radar dome and the trailers.

Suddenly the team heard the voice of Manu Moresadegh come over the
tactical communication system, his flawless Farsi standing out among the team. “Mobile one approaching radar.” Manu was passing along to the team what Mofaz pointed out to him on the tablet’s screen.

Ben Zeev and the seven men remaining at the assembly point heard Manu clearly. But the captain wondered if the three men now maneuvering along the slope to the southwest of the IRGC guard could hear the communication. The assembly point was about half way between the three men on the slope and the spot where Stern and Moresadegh watched the UAV video feed. “Benny. Guard on the move. Copy?”

All three men heard their commander’s voice at the same time and all three stopped in place and slowly dropped into a prone position. Benny Stern clicked his transmit button twice to signal the receipt of the message. “Hold,” Captain Ben Zeev added.

On the video screen,
Mofaz and Moresadegh watched as the guard walked past the radar dome structure, coming to a stop on the south side of the round foundation. Manu stared at the screen as the UAV’s continued orbit placed the radar dome between the video camera and the IRGC guard, who disappeared behind the structure. As the Boomerang continued its silent orbit, the slope that the three Israeli commandos were on came into view and the camera’s infrared imaging could distinguish the three men despite the near infrared reducing chemicals their uniforms had been treated with in Israel.

“Hold,” the captain
repeated into his transmitter as agonizing seconds stretched into a full minute. At the tablet screen, Manu and Isaac held their breath as the small UAV continued its counterclockwise orbit, finally sweeping around its northern arc and heading back south. There had been no sign of the guard. As the flying camera came around on its western arc, the southern side of the radar dome structure slowly came into view. Finally the men could see the side of the body of the Iranian. Seconds later his full body was in view. He was leaning against the radar’s foundation, his back against the concrete wall.

Mofaz saw it first – the movement of the guard
’s arm, bending at the elbow as it dropped to his side. “The idiot is smoking,” said Isaac. The red hot tip of the man’s cigarette stood out brightly on the video screen.

Manu pressed the
“push to talk,” or PTT, button mounted to his belt. “The guy is smoking. Hold.”

The team waited one more orbit for the guard to extinguish his cigarette and return to his usual patrol pattern. “Okay, clear,” said Manu.

“Clear. Advance,” said the captain into his system. Two clicks came back. The three man team continued on its way, soon turning uphill to climb to a small knob that was only 468 feet to the south and west of the radar dome. The men climbed 219 feet in altitude to take up positions that were a few feet higher than the level of ground where the guard smoked his cigarette.

The two snipers quickly assumed prone positions facing the northwest that were about three meters apart. Benny Stern was on the left, to the south of the other sniper. The second sniper was a couple of meters behind Stern such that if they altered their firing direction to the northeast, the second sniper would be clear of Stern
’s weapon. Each man folded down a bipod attached to the fore grip of their SR-99 sniper rifle just forward of the 25-round magazine.

The rifle typically fired a 7.62 millimeter caliber bullet weighing 172 grains with a muzzle velocity of 2,652 feet per second, making it deadly as far out as a kilometer in the hands of the two Sayeret Matkal snipers. The weapons were generally set to fire in a semi-automatic mode, but each man had selected single action mode. The result was that when they fired, the bolts would stay closed, reducing the amount of sound emitted. The sound from the business end of the weapon was reduced by a long sup
pressor attached to the muzzle.

But no suppressor could stop the
“crack” of air produced by a bullet flying at supersonic speeds. For tonight’s mission, that supersonic crack – a miniature sonic boom – was not acceptable. So each weapon was loaded with a round developed just for these circumstances, when the bullet needed to be subsonic but still deadly at range. To achieve this, each bullet was a long boat tail shaped projectile with a thin rod of depleted uranium comprising its central core. This increased the weight of the bullet to 269 grains and the added weight, combined with the energy-robbing effects of the suppressor, reduced the muzzle velocity of the round to 1,032 feet per second, just below the speed of sound at the elevation of the radar complex.

The third man
lay down between, and slightly behind, the two snipers. From his pack, he removed a small tripod and a device that looked like a cross between a scope and a pair of vertical binoculars. He mounted the device to the tripod and pressed a button on the side. The device was a powerful night vision scope with a built in laser rangefinder. He looked through the magnified spotting scope and scanned the ridgeline line across a small dell from their position. He found the access road and followed the road to the west toward its junction with the Derrah Shahr-Abdanan road.