With everything in place, one side of the hidden compartment cover was folded down and the other was released from the latch holding it against the side wall. Each man had a larger backpack than the prior night when they infiltrated the Iranian border. But like the prior night, each man wore the same AN/PVS-14 night vision monocle. Only now each member of the team added a tactical communication headset, allowing the team to communicate with each other up to about two kilometers apart.
Ben Zeev used the truck’s intercom to talk to Arsadian, who would watch for any passing traffic. There were no cars on the road. Ben Zeev checked his watch. The time was 12:02 a.m. Iran time. “Okay. We go.” He pointed to the mountain goat, who led the way as usual. “Remember, get cover from the road then get your bearings. Make sure you’re heading in the right direction.”
The captain watched eleven men drop through the hatch to the sandy earth below and quickly disappear. Finally, Ben Zeev lowered himself down as he pulled the heavy compartment cover down. After he had replaced and locked the hatch lid from underneath, he crawled out from under the trailer and walked to the tractor door. He reached in as Hamak Arsadian reached over to shake his hand. “You are on your own, my friend. God bless you.”
“I don’t know what your team is doing, but God be with you. If you need me, I will come.”
Ben Zeev smiled. “The oak doors to the compartment are down, but the center oak strip is loose. You will want to fix that before you get too far down the road.”
“Okay.” Arsadian was nodding his head.
“You have a home in Israel with your family whenever you say the word. I will personally make it happen.”
“I will see you there,” said the Armenian, smiling.
Ben Zeev began to close the door, but pulled it back open. “Make your delivery as soon as you can and then get out of Iran the fastest way you can. I would waste no more time sleeping.”
“I understand.”
Task Force Camel budgeted two hours to cover 2.7 miles of uphill climbing that would take them from their current altitude of 2,657 feet at the truck, up to 5,905 feet, a climb of more than 3,200 feet. Fortunately, their route would take them along the edge of a small stream bed that formed a gentle upward-sloping valley bordered by two ridge lines running away to the north from the Dehloran radar. The stream path would take them to a small plateau that was just below the ridgeline that held the Dehloran installation. The mountains in this area were little different from the mountains crossed by the team the night before. The land was rocky and largely barren, although the scattered trees were a little more numerous than along the border a couple hundred miles to the north as the crow flies.
A constant soft breeze came out of the northwest, carrying any sounds the team made to the southeast, away from the radar station. The radar station at the top of the mountain had been under constant U.S. and Israeli satellite surveillance for over six months, and the routine and disposition of the Iranian men who occupied the site were well known. Nothing in the routine had changed since concentrated surveillance had commenced the prior spring. About 8 a.m. each morning and 9 p.m. each night — the men at night being rewarded with a shorter stint for their graveyard shift duties — a white unmarked Ford passenger van and a white unmarked Chevy Suburban would pull off the Derrah Shahr-Abdanan road and drive the final mile to the station. The vehicles came from a military complex in the town of Abdanan on the opposite side of the mountain from the high valley town of Derrah Shahr. A single white crew cab pickup truck was kept parked on the grounds of the radar station so that crews had a way to get to town in an emergency.
At every shift change, four new technicians and six new IRGC guards arrived in the large passenger van. Another three guards accompanied the van in the Suburban during the drop off and then followed the van back to Abdanan with the ten men from the prior shift. The four radar technicians worked in shifts of two while they were on station, rotating two hours on and two off.
The IRGC guards tried to maintain four men on watch, with two overseeing the single road leading onto the site, two men walking the property and two men inside the middle of three white trailers set up along the ridge. This middle trailer acted as the sitting room, bunk room and kitchen for the men on station. But often the high resolution satellite photos showed that one or both of the men assigned to roam the property were actually in the sitting trailer, especially at night when it seemed that the roaming guards never ventured more than a hundred meters or so from the structures and the security of the lights mounted to them.
In addition to the sitting trailer in the middle, another trailer, the one closest to the large white radar dome, housed the radar operations and network communications equipment. The last trailer, furthest along the ridge, housed two diesel generators and an encrypted directional microwave transmitter and receiver that was aimed at a similar device 59 miles away on top of an 8,767 foot mountain peak located just to the northwest of the city of Khorramabad. About 80 meters past the last generator trailer, situated below the ridgeline, a large diesel storage tank was located. But the generators were only for backup. The radar complex was powered primarily by electrical wires that ran onto the site from higher voltage wires than ran alongside the Derrah Shahr-Abdanan road. From the first major structure on the ridge, the radar dome, to the diesel storage tank, the complex stretched for 262 meters, or 861 feet, following the ridgeline running to the northeast away from the radar dome.
With about a half mile to go to reach the diesel storage tank, the team stopped. They had reached the start of the plateau that was just underneath the radar station’s ridgeline. There had been no man-made obstacles. No sensors. No barbed wire. No landmines. The Iranians relied on the guards and the natural isolation of the radar’s location for defense. Off to the right from where the team stopped, Yosef Hisami had found their objective for the night. It was a spot along a sheer rise of rock wall averaging about 4 meters in height that ran for over 300 meters and formed the northern edge of the plateau. The particular spot where the Kurdish Jew now stood had been identified by space-based synthetic aperture radar surveys of the mountain top. It was underneath an overhanging rock that created a natural roof only two meters high at the opening and receding downward as it ran back, so that the space formed underneath was in the shape of a wedge. At the rear of the space, the available height was only a few inches. But a number of men could lie down with their feet toward the rear and their weapons trained out the opening of the natural shelter, which faced north — away from the radar station.
Captain Yoni Ben Zeev directed nine of his men to take positions in the natural shelter. Two of those men immediately set to work erecting a camouflage net designed specifically for this mission. The net created a cloaking wall that effectively cut the men off from visible and infrared observation. Without saying a word, Hisami and Benny Stern headed off to another spot that had been pre-identified. The spot was almost a mile away and was on top of the next knob along the ridgeline that ran to the northeast and then turned east away from the radar station structures. The knob was actually at an elevation higher than the radar dome.
When the two men reached their destination, they found a pair of large rocks, each about a meter in diameter, forming a barrier that was perpendicular to the radar complex. They spent the next hour taking turns digging a shallow ditch on the east side of the rocks. The finished trench was just deep and wide enough for the two men to lie down side by side, their weapons and binoculars trained between the two rocks toward the radar structures that were almost a mile away.