Escaping Iran to save Israel.

• Author: Bloomfield, Jonathan
• Position: Literary Scene - Novel Palestine - Excerpt

ROUTE 98 was as dark as black coffee. Tonight, this southernmost highway of Iran was traveled by special guests--itinerants who were leaving the country. Several Saipas and Samands, their lights off, were speeding east, 20 minutes apart, making a right 70 miles east of Band Jask; their drivers were wearing night-vision goggles. After passing the tiny fishing village of Vanak, they drove off the road to a low grove on the left, 1,000 feet from the shoreline.

They were armed and did not know each other. Their instructions had been not to communicate with anyone, and shoot to kill if they were about to be searched. They had been driving the entire evening and half the night, and some the whole previous day. One of them, Ron Bloomstein, had been behind the wheel for eight hours straight, down from Bushehr. He had lived there for five years, holding a job as a mechanical technician responsible for maintaining spinning and weaving machinery at the Etemadieh Company.

After serving in the elite Shayetet naval commando unit, Bloomstein had joined the Mosad. He finished his special agent training and took an intensive course in Persian language and culture. Then he studied machinery and mechanics at the Technion in Haifa. He had to discuss his schoolwork every day in Persian with an engineer who had immigrated to Israel from Iran in 1979 after the Islamist revolution. The engineer once said that, if Germany had retained its Jews, it would have developed the atomic bomb first, and, just as Germany had lost precious Jewish minds when the Nazis came to power, so did Iran when the ayatollahs took over. One of Bloomstein's grandparents had been a Holocaust survivor.

Now he was closing a chapter in his life, leaving Iran forever. The friends he had made --wonderful people whom he grew to genuinely love--soon would be incinerated in a nuclear inferno that he had helped to bring about. Grief was weighing down on him. Not even the thought of seeing his family again lightened his sorrow, but he knew there was no other way; good, innocent Iranians were going to die because their government decided to build nuclear reactors next to them. It was either their death or another Jewish Holocaust.

He passed Vanak and veered off the road, bouncing and destroying the underbelly of his Samand while searching through the green glow of his goggles for a good spot to park. Toward the end of the grove, between two trees, he found a perfect space; the Samand survived its wounds long enough to...