Esther's Sling (41 page)

The last two of the four UAVs carried completely different payloads from the first two. Developed from the American BLU-114B, the payload of each of the last two UAVs was a series of two and a half inch wide by eight inch long cylinders that would be ejected downward on command. Each cylinder contained tens of thousands of hair-thin graphite filaments that uncoiled into strands twenty feet in length. A small explosive charge at the rear of the canister would detonate in the vicinity of their target and scatter the filaments. Each of the UAVs had a flat-bottomed protrusion underneath the fuselage that ran for five feet along its length and contained 140 of the cylindrical canisters. The target of these particular UAVs was the high voltage power lines leading from the
Urmia Power Complex. The filaments would short these power lines, creating a catastrophic transmission failure and power blackout. One UAV would hit the power lines west of Tabriz and the other the power lines east of Tabriz. The American version of the weapon had been proven in combat inside Iraq in 2003.

Over the next ten minutes, the remaining nineteen UAVs took off on their missions into Iran. In addition to the four UAVs flying to Tabriz, six UAVs were on missions to short high voltage electricity transmission lines
carrying electricity from the main western Iranian power plants. Besides Urmia, these included the hydroelectric dams at Karoon and the fossil fuel plants at Khorramabad, Zanjan, Sultanyeh, Mahshahr, and Behistun. Five UAVs were sent on missions to jam communications at each of the main tactical air bases in western Iran. The eight other UAVs were all configured with two Hellfire missiles each to strike early warning radars located at Kabudrahang and Delbaran and command, control and communication centers located at the tactical air bases at Omediyeh and Kabudrahang and the heavy water nuclear plant complex at Arak.

The fourth Hermes 450M that departed Shangri-La that evening – the one headed for the power transmission lines on the east side of Tabriz – had the longest journey to its target. Assuming the prevailing winds, the planners had estimated that the trip would take 3 hours and 22 minutes at the modified UAV’s top speed of 145 miles per hour. The time of arrival of this UAV would be 1
0:34 p.m. Iran time. The flight computer on all of the remaining UAVs, flying autonomously, would ensure their arrival at their targets within the same minute.

Each Hermes, painted a flat charcoal black, flew in the dark – emitting no light and no electromagnetic signals. The Hellfire armed drones would establish satellite contact with two
-person flight crews waiting at Palmachim Airbase in Israel, but not until they were within two minutes of arrival over their target areas. The last three Hermes launched that night included one configured as a Hellfire armed drone, one as a jamming platform and one with the graphite filament submunitions. They were all carried as backups in case any one of the other UAVs failed to launch. Fortunately, all of the UAVs operated as designed and the three backups were each sent on secondary priority missions.

The senior loadmaster clicked his stopwatch off as the twenty-third Hermes 450M lifted off from the access road at Mudaysis airfield. The attack on Iran was underway. Hostilities were three hours away. The man checked his watch. The time was 1552 hours Zulu, 6:52 p.m. local Iraqi time. They took five minutes longer than his original charge. “Fifteen minutes,” he yelled as men were congratulating themselves. “Not bad.” He recalled the first nighttime exercise carried out at
Palmachim sixteen months earlier. It had been conducted using only handheld flashlights, without the helmet mounted lights. It had taken the team 37 minutes to get all of the UAVs operational. They had come a long way.

He turned to walk back to the C-130. The technician joined him with his laptop computer and antenna dome in each hand and the folding table wedged under his arm. The two empty rack systems, now comparatively light at about 1,000 pounds each, were pushed back into the cargo cabin and secured in place. The four loadmasters and the technician found spots where they could sit down and relax on the flight home. Their role in Block G was now done. But for eighteen other men, there was still a lot more work to do before it would be their turn to board a C-130 and head home to Israel. They all headed off to wait for their next assignments on the tarmac at Mudaysis.

The rear ramp closed and the pilot of the C-130 immediately pushed all four throttles forward to full military power while he and his co-pilot held the brakes. Once the Allison turbine engines reached the desired rotation rate of 13,820 rpm, the pilots released the brakes and the C-130 leapt forward. It had half the length of the taxiway, or a little over 4,000 feet to achieve takeoff speed. The lightened aircraft needed only a third of that distance. It lifted off and began a slow turn to the west and home.

Twelve minutes after the departure of the C-130J Samson, an Israeli Air Force C-130 touched down 1,250 feet from the northwest end of the runway at Mudaysis Airfield, now known within Mount Olympus as Shangri-La. The C-130’s pilot, despite the heavy cargo his plane carried, barely had to engage his brakes as he used another 7,460 feet of runway to slow down to five miles per hour, relying on reverse thrust from his propellers. Finally he turned the nose wheel and steered his plane to the left along a short concrete connector. He crossed the long taxiway that paralleled the runway and steered his plane onto the tarmac, a concrete rectangle that measured 1,380 feet in length by 380 feet wide. He taxied to the far side of the tarmac and brought his plane to a halt, simultaneously lowering the rear cargo ramp door.

The first man off the ramp was tall at six foot two inches. But it wasn’t his height that made him stand out. He wore a German
Afrika Korps pith helmet. He had worn it as a joke during the first small-scale daylight rehearsal exercise almost two years earlier. It had been passed down to him by his grandfather, a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II who had liberated the helmet from the body of a dead German officer in Tunisia in April 1943. Now the helmet, minus the Afrika Korps eagle and swastika emblem that had once been proudly worn by the original owner, was returning to wage war in the deserts of the Middle East. For the man who now wore the helmet, it served a practical purpose that became clear the first night he put it on – it made him easily identifiable in the midst of the chaos that would soon unfold around him. His name was Gideon Meyer and he was a major in the Israeli Defense Force. He would be the commander of Shangri-La for as long as Israeli forces were on the ground this night.

As he walked off the ramp, he was saluted by the Shaldag commander. “Welcome to Iraq, Major,” said the Shaldag
officer. “My men are under your command.”

Meyer
saluted back and smiled at the man who had parachuted into this location the prior evening. “Happy to be here. I understand you had a loss.” The two men discussed what had occurred the prior evening. The Shaldag commander pointed out the area where the mine had claimed his man. When he was done, Gideon Meyer instructed him to have his men bring the body bag over so they could load it aboard the C-130.

“Did you bring any mine clearing equipment?” asked the Shaldag commander.

Meyer looked at him as if caught in a lie, even though he had no reason to feel that way. “No. The decision was made at Olympus not to alter any of the load outs. We will just stay on the concrete.”

“Except for the tankers.”

“I have thought of that. The risk is acceptable.”

The Shaldag commander was silent for a moment. “Have you told the men who will be walking in the sand?”

“No, and I will not. Where your man stepped on the mine is where I would expect the Iraqis to have laid them. The area around the tarmac would be illogical for mines. It seems to me that the Iraqis tried to clear the minefields and unfortunately the one that got your man was just missed.”

The Shaldag commander did not agree with this assessment, but the point was now moot and he knew it. He changed the subject, asking what he could do to help. Major
Gideon Meyer simply responded that they would repeat their numerous rehearsals one more time tonight and nothing would change. As they spoke, a second C-130 pulled onto the tarmac and came to a stop about two hundred yards behind Meyer’s plane. It lowered its rear ramp. Both planes held identical loads, except that the first man off the ramp of the second plane was the second in command, a captain in the IDF.

Gideon Meyer
knew exactly how the night would go. Like a top quarterback in the National Football League, every contingency he could think of occurring that evening was like a movie playing in his mind. He had personally led four previous full nighttime rehearsals where planes had flown into Ovda Air Base near the southern tip of the Negev. There, on a section of the base that had been laid out exactly like the Mudaysis Airfield, the teams had rehearsed their roles and made their mistakes when they could afford to make them. Every step in the choreographed process was burned into Meyer’s mind.

But right now it was first things first. Two C-
130s had to be unloaded and they only had fifteen minutes to get it done and get both planes on their way back to Israel, one carrying the body of Uzi Helzberg. The Major wanted to think the young Shaldag soldier would be the only Israeli to die in Block G, but he knew better.

After
Meyer, two John Deere Gator four-wheel utility vehicles drove down the ramp, each towing a telescoping set of floodlights with its own generator mounted on a single axle between two wheels. The wheeled floodlights, which would soon be telescoping 30 feet into the air, were each driven to a spot along the long northeastern edge of the rectangular tarmac and spaced about 400 feet apart. With identical lights from the other C130, four sets of floodlights were soon illuminating the tarmac.

After the Gator vehicles exited the aircraft, a Humvee was driven down the ramp, followed immediately by a Ford F-250 crew cab pickup truck. Each
vehicle was painted the color of desert sand with intermittent splotches of brown, the camouflage scheme preferred by the Iraqi National Army. Iraqi flags and unit designations were prominently painted onto their front doors. In each vehicle were four members of Shaldag wearing the uniforms of the Iraqi National Army. The vehicles did not stop to allow for the exchange of any greetings. They drove across the tarmac back toward the main taxiway. There they turned to follow the taxiway northwest for half a mile until it intersected with the main airfield access road – the same access road where 23 UAVs had taken off minutes earlier. They turned right to drive the 11 mile distance to Highway 21. Two similar vehicles from the second plane were only a minute behind them.

Once the two faux Iraqi Army vehicles had cleared the cargo ramp, six men and the plane’s loadmaster began to push eight pallets of equipment out of the cargo cabin and down the ramp. Each pallet was on its own manually operated pallet truck – a hand operated device seen in warehouses the world over and capable of lifting heavy palletized loads for m
ovement across warehouse floors – or concrete tarmacs in the middle of the Iraqi desert. Six of the pallets held fuel pumps and hoses, each fuel pump powered by its own 12 horsepower generator. The remaining two pallets held electrical cords and various connectors with the tools necessary to properly connect all of this equipment. Next, two 750 gallon bladders of JP-8 aviation fuel, each weighing about 5,200 pounds, were man-handled off the ramp and out of the way as the Gator returned and backed into the cargo hold of the C-130. After thirty seconds, the Gator came back out, now towing a wheeled JP-8 fueled generator. The 102 kilowatt Pramac generator was placed next to the second telescopic floodlight.

The C-
130’s loadmaster walked to the end of the ramp and made eye contact with Major Gideon Meyer. He saluted the ground commander and quickly disappeared into the now empty cargo cabin of the C-130. The ramp closed and the four turboprop engines of the airplane powered up enough to begin to move the plane toward the long taxiway. The co-pilot turned on the navigation lights. Forty seconds later, the plane turned onto the main taxiway to face the northwest as the pilots pushed all four throttles forward to produce maximum power. The plane quickly accelerated, now unencumbered by the large load it had ferried to Shangri-La.

It only took 1,340 feet of taxiway for the C-130 to reach rotation speed and another 52 feet to lift off. As soon as the plane was airborne and the landing gear had been retracted, the plane banked to head due north in accordance with the departure protocol established for this mission. After thirty seconds, the co-pilot turned off the navigation lights. The plane leveled off at 1,000 feet and began a slow turn to the right, taking it toward central Iraq, but ensuring that in the blacked-out conditions – its transponder, radar and navigation lights all inactive – its flight path was deconflicted with
incoming aircraft.

The plane continued its slow turn, taking it to the east and maintaining a distance no closer than eight miles to the tiny villages of Al
Kasrah and Al Habariyah, before heading due south toward Saudi Arabia. After flying another 68 miles, the C-130, with its partner trailing about four miles behind, began a turn to the south west. Another 37 miles later, the plane crossed the border into Saudi Arabian airspace and began to climb slowly to 26,000 feet. The pilot’s grip on the control wheel relaxed for the first time since departing Nevatim Air Base in the Negev almost three hours earlier.