The Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert, of Iran is a five-hundred-mile-long and two-hundred-mile-wide expanse of sand and salt (kavir is Farsi for â??salt marshâ?) located in the high plateau region of north central Iran. It is both desolate and unpopulated. Large tracts of it are broad, flat, and hard packed. Its western edge is roughly a hundred miles southeast of Tehran.
The desolate nature of the terrain made it a preferred location for mounting a covert rescue operation. On this cold, early spring night, a De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft, favored by the CIA for deep penetration clandestine missions, was parked not far from a forlorn stretch of graded dirt road almost sixty miles from the closest thing that might be called a town. While the two pilots remained in the airplane, a motorcyclist assembled his collapsible offroad vehicle for a specialized midnight cruise on a night he would later say was â??so black you couldnâ??t have found warts on a toad.â? The biker, dressed in black Leviâ??s, black shirt, black cap, and wearing night vision goggles, began driving his dirt bike over the compacted ground in a seemingly random yet purposeful geometric pattern. The three men were supposed to be on the ground for less than an hour; the man on the dirt bike had much to accomplish before they left.
The motorcyclist was U.S. Air Force combat controller Major John Carney, nicknamed Coach as the result of an eight-year stint as an assistant football coach at the Air Force Academy. Described as a natural leader and a person worth a hundred planes or ships, Carney had been â??volunteeredâ? for this mission by Colonel Charles Beckwith, who wanted someone he knew and trusted to personally eyeball the site.
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