The big chopper flared briefly to scrub off speed and then leveled in hover, maintaining very slow forward motion. The man on the starboard side of the ramp rotated his upper body and extended his right arm out. With his palm open and facing upward, he raised his forearm toward the ceiling by bending his arm at the elbow. The crew chief signaled for everyone on the Israeli team to exit and all stood and moved to the ropes. Each man grabbed the rope and stepped off the platform into the Kurdish mountain blackness. The captain was the last, but took a moment to shake the hand of the crew chief and salute the CIA officer who had now succeeded in his part of this mission. It only took ten seconds for all twelve men of Task Force Camel to make it to the ground. Another thirty seconds later and the Chinook helicopter was already indistinguishable against the night sky, the sound of its counter-rotating blades fading rapidly into the dark as it headed for a reunion with its smaller partners and the long trip back to Kuwait.
The team had rehearsed this part of its mission dozens of times. The men all removed their night vision monocles from their backpacks and mounted them to their head gear. Every man on the team save one took the opportunity to relieve his bladder. It had been a long flight. One man, Yosef Hisami, the member of the team who was born and raised until the age of eight in the Kurdish city of Erbil, headed out to take point. He was moving rapidly to the east, bounding uphill to gain the advantage of a ridgeline that was one mile away. Yosef had proven his mountaineering skills to the team over the prior two years and the relatively gradual slopes of this terrain were like a casual stroll for the Kurdish Jew. The men on the team jokingly called him the “mountain goat.” He was driven by his own paranoia — he hated being in a valley since he could never shake the feeling that he was being watched. At this moment, Yosef would not be comfortable until he could observe the valley on the other side of the ridge with his own eyes. Ben Zeev never let him see the screen of the TCU because he never wanted the mountain goat to relax. Yosef was the team’s human early warning system. If anyone or anything was out there, he would see it first. Since the team was radio silent, he carried a small pen light that emitted an infrared flash when he pressed a button on the back. He could signal the team from a long distance with this device.
The main body of men followed at a distance that was initially a hundred meters. They had learned that they could not keep up with Yosef when he was obsessed on attaining a certain point on the map. They all knew that the gap would continually widen between them and Yosef by the time the Kurd made it to the ridgeline. The captain checked his GPS device to make sure he agreed with the direction of movement. The team had a two mile trek to reach the Iranian border. But their instant motivation was to get as far away from the insertion point as rapidly as possible. The village of Sargat was less than a mile to the north and no one wanted to run into a curious Kurd. Even worse, an Iraqi border post was only 4,000 feet away on the other side of the ridgeline that formed the southern edge of this valley that ran to the east toward Iran. However, Ben Zeev knew that since U.S. forces left this region during 2011, Iraqi border guards were never known to venture out of their posts at night. He prayed that tonight would not be a first.
Task Force Camel moved along the valley floor as quietly as possible. The terrain was barren and rocky with the exception of isolated wild pistachio trees that grew randomly throughout the valley along with patches of alpine milkvetch plants. The team set a pace that reflected their youth, fitness and level of training, which had included several extended visits during the prior two years into Kurdistan, the northern part of Iraq controlled by the Kurds and run as an autonomous part of Iraq. It took slightly more than an hour to reach the border where the mountain goat paused as had been practiced so many times in the past. The captain gathered his men about a hundred yards in front of the invisible line that formed the Iranian border. They had climbed more than 2,000 feet from the insertion point to this point that passed between two rocky pinnacles looming above them on each side. As the men gained altitude, the vegetation had become more scarce with the trees disappearing completely.
The captain told his men to rest, drink water and eat. Removing the TSU device from the backpack of the man standing next to him, the captain turned it on while two of his men used their open winter coats to ensure that no light emanating from the device gave their position away. The first thing the officer noticed was a dozen grouped blips in blue on the Iran-Iraq border. As he looked at his own men on the screen, Ben Zeev thought about how happy he was that the Iranians were not deploying this level of technology against him. Beyond that, the commander liked what he saw. The Iranian land in front of him was barren of human activity save for a lone border post over a mile away and in a direction that the team had no intention of heading. The absence of Iranians, Kurdish fighters, smugglers or the errant villager was the best possible outcome. The air was still, and the team was cognizant to the point of paranoia about how the sounds they made carried along the rocky valleys. Their isolation was welcome. No new messages from Olympus had been received so Ben Zeev shut down the device and placed it carefully back into the pack of his underling.
He called his point man over and together they discussed in hushed Farsi the path to Point Kabob II. They each set waypoints on their GPS units, making sure they stayed clear of the tiny Iranian village of Baharvas that lay in their path only a half mile ahead of them. The commander then synched up this set of waypoints with each man in the team. In case of separation in the darkness, each man now had the capability to navigate to Point Kabob II. Finally, Captain Yoni Ben Zeev motioned for all his men to gather together. He now did something that they had never rehearsed before. He spoke quietly in Hebrew. “This will be the last time any of us speaks or hears our language until this operation is complete. I ask you to bow your heads.” The background of this team — reflecting the wide range of religious experience in Israel — varied greatly, but each man knew their leader was an observant Jew. And as all men do when combat was imminent, their hearts were open at this moment to their God. Six of the team bowed their heads. Four men continued to look at their leader. Yosef Hisami, suddenly nervous about the volume of his leader’s voice combined with the use of Hebrew, scanned the valley around them.
The captain continued. “He who dwells in the covert of the Most High will lodge in the shadow of the Almighty. I shall say of the Lord that He is my shelter and my fortress, my God in Whom I trust. For He will save you from the snare that traps from the devastating pestilence. With His wing He will cover you, and under His wings you will take refuge. His truth is an encompassing shield. You will not fear the fright of night, the arrow that flies by day, pestilence that prowls in darkness, destruction that ravages at noon. A thousand will be stationed at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not approach you. You will but gaze with your eyes and you will see the annihilation of the wicked. For you have said, ‘The Lord is my refuge.’ The Most High you have made your dwelling. No harm will befall you, nor will a plague draw near to your tent. For He will command His angels on your behalf to guard you in all your ways. On hands they will bear you, lest your foot stumble on a stone. On a young lion and a cobra you will tread and you will trample the young lion and the serpent. For he yearns for Me, and I shall rescue him. I shall fortify him because he knows My name. He will call Me and I shall answer him. I am with him in distress. I shall rescue him and I shall honor him. With length of days I shall satiate him and I shall show him My salvation.”