The Armenian drove the big rig with its elite cargo down the road for about 15 minutes. They were going downhill, and the main purpose of the tractor’s big diesel engine now was to provide engine breaking to manage the speed of descent. Ben Zeev was not yet ready to relax. The team had more work to do in the trailer, work that was originally planned to occur while they were at Point Kabob. To the east, the first hints of orange began to appear on the horizon. Sunrise was only about fifteen minutes away. Finally the Armenian saw a lush area of vegetation and bushes on the left where a small stream intersected the road, passing underneath it through a man-made culvert. He slowed the truck and pulled over to the left hand side. “This looks good,” he stated to the captain, the two men communicating in Farsi, the only common language they shared. The Armenian understood Hebrew no better than the day he first heard it spoken between his mother and Rabbi Rothstein.
“Agreed.” Ben Zeev jumped out of the cab and ran to the back to liberate his men. He opened the doors. “Sunrise in fifteen minutes. You know what do. Let’s move. Yosef on front point. Benny back here.” The two men who had the dirty assignment of body disposal would sit this drill out, keeping watch over the road above and below them. Most of the rest of the team hopped out as Ben Zeev pulled himself up into the trailer. “Find a good spot,” was the last order the captain gave as his men went to work. They had to dump 200 cartons of Charmin in the brush, hoping that the valuable waste would not be found for a couple of days at least.
The team accomplished its task efficiently. They had practiced this maneuver with empty cartons a half a dozen times. The weight of the loaded cartons, as Ben Zeev expected, did not slow his men down. The cartons were off loaded in under five minutes. Inside the trailer, the men rearranged the remaining cartons so that they were packed in all the way to the rear door, looking as they did 24 hours before when the truck left Yerevan. From the rear door moving forward, 248 remaining cartons of Charmin toilet paper were packed solidly, leaving an open void in the trailer about 20 feet deep at the front. The five men inside were now trapped by the cartons between them and the rear door. Along the ceiling, lights were flush mounted every six feet, providing a well-lit working environment.
Now one of the men did as he had rehearsed many times before and, using the blade of a combat knife, wedged up a single strip of two inch wide oak that lined the floor of the trailer. This specific strip of oak was easy for him to pick out because it had been intentionally stained with red paint at each end. It was right in the middle of the floor and, like all the oak strips, ran lengthwise along the trailer floor. After it was pried loose, another man grabbed it, lifted it up and placed it out of the way on the trailer floor. The man with the knife now dug his blade under a small metal plate on the subfloor, in the process cutting through security tape that had been placed over the plate after the trailer was loaded in Tel Aviv three weeks earlier. The plate raised up enough for him to put his fingers underneath and pull a wire handle upward, releasing a hidden latch and allowing the floor on the driver side of the trailer to pivot upward on a hinge.
Another man grabbed this floor and pivoted on its hinges into a vertical position until it rest perfectly against the sidewall. Two latches that looked like ordinary tie down points on the wall now were revealed to be clips that locked the false floor open. The first man now dug his fingers under the flooring on the passenger side of the trailer and the floor lifted, pivoted and was locked against the sidewall on the passenger side of the trailer. Two other men next took hold of two silvery blankets that were now exposed and lifted each up and away from the floor to reveal the secret cargo that Arsadian had been carrying from Yerevan. The newly revealed compartment was eight inches deep, eight feet wide and ten feet long. Inside this void, form fitting foam kept various weapons, ammunition, gear, food, computers and other devices secure. The team had all it needed to complete its mission.
A man reached down and grabbed a cargo net that was then unrolled and lashed to each sidewall to hold in place the wall of cartons that formed the rear of the newly created interior room. Reaching into the now exposed compartment, adjacent to the passenger sidewall, a commando unlatched a previously hidden hatch to open access to the ground underneath. The six other team members who would ride in the trailer were waiting to board. The last man in was Yosef, who closed the hatch behind him as Ben Zeev returned to the passenger seat of the tractor.
Sergeant Yosef Hisami was the man in charge whenever the captain, as now, was out of sight. This was despite the presence of three other officers inside the trailer. Hisami’s leadership was by acclamation. It was earned through the respect of his comrades. The man who liked to call Ben Zeev “boss” was a natural leader at the age of 23 who stood only five feet seven inches. He would brawl with a man a foot taller to help his mate. But each man knew better than to call him “boss” — that moniker belonged only to Ben Zeev, he would retort.
Yosef reached into the compartment to pull out a sealed plastic bag full of blueberry crisp Clif Bars. He dug his finger into the plastic to create a tear and pulled the bag open. “We have blueberry, blueberry or blueberry,” he joked in Farsi, maintaining the mission protocol that the team speak only in the native Persian tongue. He started to toss one energy snack at a time to each hand outstretched in his direction. Some of the men thought they saw his hand shaking. Everyone on the team tried not to think about what Yosef had just done, but each man could think of nothing else. For some, the incident only cemented their opinion that the “mountain goat” was the rock of the unit — the man that would be there for them when the situation was dark and in doubt, the man that each one would pick first to join them in battle. These were the professional soldiers, the men who knew that when you peeled away all of the platitudes and slogans, killing was what they did for a living. Others, especially the technical experts like Manu, could only think about the fact that two innocent civilians had been murdered in cold blood and the man who pulled the trigger seemed to never give it a second thought.
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.