At 7:58 p.m., Arsadian turned right around a sharp mountain corner. The drive had been uneventful since his near miss with the pickup truck. The nighttime weather was beautiful and the temperature was falling rapidly. He was only a mile from the Iranian Kurdish village of Dezli. That meant he was only a few miles from Point Kabob where he could pull over and get some sleep as he waited for Ben Zeev and his team to arrive.
Suddenly the Armenian slammed his foot on the brake pedal, engaging the engine braking system and forcing highly pressurized air into the push rods that rotated S-cams on both front wheels as well as the wheels on the single tractor axle and three trailer axles. In turn, each S-cam forced its mated brake pads against their braking drums, turning kinetic energy into heat. The brake management system of the MAN GTX took over to coordinate all of the numerous braking points, including implementing the anti-lock system for the inside wheels of the trailer brakes. The truck was going uphill at only 21 kph, but the small sedan in front of him was at a dead stop and Hamak had only a short distance to bring his rig to a full stop. He made it with about a meter to spare, much to the relief of the family sitting in the sedan.
Hamak looked down the road as is straightened out in front of him. There was a line of about a dozen cars all stopped. A single straight truck broke the silhouette of the cars in the line. The Armenian’s eyes followed the line, expecting to see an accident at the front. What he saw made his pulse quicken. An Iranian military truck was placed perpendicular to the road, ensuring that no vehicle passed through. Several soldiers were mulling around the truck, each of them fondling his G3 assault rifle. As the air brakes released their pressure, loudly announcing the arrival of the big tractor-trailer rig, Arsadian saw a soldier walking on the road past each of the vehicles, clearly heading to the latest traveler to hit this roadblock. As the man grew larger, Hamak was not certain about his uniform. He was wearing a heavy dark olive pea coat. Once the soldier approached the tractor door, Arsadian recognized the patch of the Army of the Guardians of the Iranian Revolution, more generally known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or IRG for short, on the soldier’s dark olive patrol cap. Arsadian’s Mossad handler had given him a book to study the various uniforms of the Iranian military and police branches. The IRG emblem, a raised forearm clutching a stylized AK-47, was easy to spot. The driver could not tell the man’s rank, but his bearing suggested he was an officer.
He lowered his window and smiled. The cold air hit the Armenian hard. He had climbed several thousand feet since he last exposed himself to the outside air and had paid no attention to the thermostat on his dashboard. He looked down quickly to see how cold it was. The readout said “39ºF/4ºC.” His breath was instantly visible as condensation. The clear skies had come with the first cold front of the fall.
“As-salamu alayka.” This officer was very different from the customs agent earlier in the day. He was young and in good shape. Hamak guessed his age to be only 24 or 25. There was an intensity in his eyes that immediately put the Armenian on notice: This was not a courtesy call.
“Wa’ alayka s-salam. Has there been an accident?”
“No.” The young officer was curt. He was not used to having questions asked of him by civilians. The tone of his answer was intended to make that fact clear to Arsadian, who absorbed the message. “You are not Persian.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Armenian.”
“You are Christian?”
“Yes.” This question did not concern Arsadian. Most Iranians respected Christians as fellow believers in the one true God. Still, thought the driver, it was not the same as if he were Muslim and the man he was talking to now was a zealot — the patch on his cap proved that much.
“What are you doing here?”
“I am delivering my load to Ahvaz.”
“Delivering what?”
“A shipment of toilet paper.”
The IRG officer hesitated, not knowing how to respond to that information. “Let me see your papers.”
Arsadian passed the same clipboard to this officer that he had passed to his friend Abdul Hamid, the customs officer in Nordouz, about nine hours earlier — only this time there was no money strategically placed for quick retrieval. The officer looked at the first two items and turned away to walk back to his comrades hanging around the military truck at the front of the line. The Armenian’s passport was attached to the clipboard and this action by the IRG officer violated the first rule of international traveclass="underline" Never let your passport out of your sight. Arsadian had no options, however. The power at this moment was completely on one side of the equation.
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.”