Raid on the Sun (22 page)

CHAPTER 6

                                                                                                                                       
SIXTY SECONDS OVER BAGHDAD

An’ if we live, we live to tread on kings;
If die, brave death, when princes die with us!

—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
HENRY IV, PART I

The brown banks of the Gulf of Aqaba rose quickly before the nose of Raz’s plane as the ground raced below. The pilots flew in two groups, about seven hundred meters apart, line abreast, and in spread formation. Yadlin flew on the far left, then Raz, then Yaffe and Katz on the right wing. Nachumi’s group followed two miles behind. There were several advantages to this formation. If one of the pilots crashed because of fatigue or mechanical failure, he would be far enough apart that he would not hit another plane. The distance between the fighters, broken into two groups, also dispersed the noise of the jet engines, and it had one added advantage: if they were spotted from the ground, it would appear that there were not as many planes in the squadron. The leader Raz held the speed steady at 360 knots, or six nautical miles a minute.

The flight plan took them across the eight-mile-wide gulf, just clipping the southern tip of the Jordanian border, and then diagonally across the northern hump of Saudi Arabia to the western border of Iraq. The Israelis would violate Jordanian airspace south of an abandoned airfield called Haql. Doglegging around the south of the country burned more fuel, but Ivry wanted to avoid as much Jordanian airspace as possible and the country’s sophisticated radar network. On the return trip home, assuming there was one, the pilots would fly directly across Jordan from the Iraqi border, but they would be flying at thirty-eight thousand feet and at the speed of sound.

Behind and high above, to his left and to his right, Raz could make out tiny specks that were the F-15s shadowing them. Raz double-checked that his DME (distance-measuring equipment) was in standby mode and his IFF in “standby/receive.” He was not due to break radio silence and check in with Command until the 38-degree-longitude point, about one-quarter the distance to Baghdad, another twenty minutes. Then he would break silence only long enough to utter the code word
Moscow,
indicating “so far, so good.” Any communication would be in English, the international language of aviation—if overheard, he could easily be mistaken for a commercial flight. As Raz skimmed across the gulf water, close enough to the choppy surface to almost smell the salt spray, he spotted a stunning white yacht at anchor below. Glancing at the fine lines of the ship, he wondered who could own such an incredible vessel, probably Arab royalty or some rich industrialist he thought vaguely, and then, within a second, he blew by the yacht and was across the gulf.

On the deck of the yacht, Jordan’s King Hussein, alerted by the distant but unmistakable roar of jet fighters, held a hand to his brow to shade his eyes and peered west toward the Sinai. Several dignitaries and the ship’s military officers joined the king on deck, their eyes also straining to the west. To his amazement, Hussein saw what appeared to be four Israeli F-16s streaking toward his ship. As the planes screamed by just overhead, the king could clearly make out the desert-tan camouflage paint on the fuselages and, more alarmingly, two huge bombs hanging from beneath the wings of each aircraft. The wooden planks of the deck beneath his feet trembled as the two fighters thundered by. A moment later a second group of four fighters shook the air again as they missiled by. Immediately Hussein grabbed a secure ship-to-shore telephone and was patched through to Jordanian defense command back in Amman.

“Do you have reports of Israeli aircraft in our airspace?” Hussein asked excitedly.

The king was informed that Jordanian defenses had received no reports of Israeli aircraft.

“Eight Israeli fighter planes just flew over our position in Aqaba, heading east,” Hussein informed the colonel on the other end of the line. “They were not more than fifty meters off the ground.”

The colonel assured the king that they would investigate immediately. Jordan had signed a nonagression treaty with Israel, and the two nations had not seen any serious skirmishes in years. But the sight of eight heavily armed Israeli fighter planes avoiding radar and heading east was never a comforting prospect. What could they be up to? Hussein wondered.

The king returned to the pleasures of his yacht and his guests who had joined him on this short summer vacation. But he was not nearly as relaxed as he had been.

Amos Yadlin was flying just off the leader’s left wing. His eyes were moving back and forth from the HUD to Raz’s plane to the contours of the ground below, keeping a lookout for any unmapped power lines or ridges. Already he could see by his fuel gauge the drain caused by the denser air of the gulf and the low altitude. Yadlin could not make out the tiny Arab village of Al Humaydan that he knew from studying the maps had to be somewhere below and to the south. He climbed higher to skirt the first rocky ridges of barren, rust-red mountains, which at some points reached peaks nearly five thousand feet above sea level. Yadlin and the F-16 pilots tightened their formation as Raz led them down the valleys that snaked through the mountain range. Behind, Nachumi’s squadron also tightened formation and followed the first team in, with Spector the wingman on Nachumi’s left and Shafir and Ramon on his right. Though it was slower going, cutting through the valleys used far less fuel than seesawing up and over mountain peaks, and it made radar detection almost impossible, though the pilots expected Saudi or Jordanian radar—probably both—to spot them eventually.

As he crossed southern Jordan into Saudi Arabia, Katz was amazed at the sight of the desert formations below, a beautiful and eerie rock forest of towering sandstone poles in red, yellow, and orange hues, their long shadows in the late-afternoon sun stretching across the barren floor. The sentinels of rainbow-colored poles appeared to grow out of pyramid-shaped dunes of pure white sand that rose up the trunks. There was not a soul in sight, not a road, not a house, or a tent. He found himself thinking back to the pilots’ field trip to Bryce Canyon National Park when they were training at Hill. He had to jerk his mind back to the present: Hey, he reminded himself, this is not a regular flight across the Sinai, this is the real thing!

Traversing the stretch of mountain valleys took less than ten minutes. With Raz in the lead, the planes burst out of the last gorge and soared across the flat, burning desert sands of western Saudi Arabia, the fabled no-man’s-land of the sun’s anvil. The desert was nothing but white sand stretching away in all directions, like Katz had always imagined the Sahara. To experience a mechanical failure here and be forced to bail would mean serious trouble. Temperatures on the ground could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. The squadron flew on and on, seeing nothing. And then, amazingly, out of nowhere, Katz spotted a lone Bedouin walking in the middle of no-man’s-land.

Where in God’s name did he come from? Katz wondered. And where could he be going?

After another forty miles, the squadron crossed a narrow asphalt road and a rusted rail line that had once connected the Saudi Arabian city of Tabuk with southern Jordan back in the days of T. E. Lawrence. Raz was following the “blind corridor” in the north that Saguy believed existed between Jordan’s radar space and the east-looking Saudi AWAC. Raz heightened his awareness. To the south of Tabuk was a large Saudi air force base. It had wide-ranging radar and occasionally sent out air patrols. As Raz and his squad overflew the road below, the pilots searched up and down the ribbon of asphalt for any signs of traffic on the ground. The road was deserted. Miles and miles of nothing, just sand and sagebrush.

Raz was in a mental zone. He continually checked the HUD, his navigation system, his maps, his wingman, Yadlin. He monitored the rate of fuel use and checked the cockpit computer to determine the most efficient speed and navigation for conservation as the weight of the plane gradually decreased with the fuel burn. Already he was being forced to decrease acceleration to remain at a constant 360 knots with the lighter plane. He made his turns as smoothly as possible, giving the follow-on planes plenty of lead time in order to avoid power spikes that burned more fuel. The baking heat rising from the desert floor began to bounce the aircraft, literally lifting and dropping them in the air currents, making concentration harder and demanding even more mental focus. Though he had switched planes with Yadlin, Raz found himself fighting the same navigation problems he thought he had experienced with his No. 107 on the flight to Etzion on Friday.

Two miles behind, Nachumi followed within visual sighting of Raz’s lead group. He was tense, keeping a careful eye on all his instrumentation. The replacement plane felt foreign, and he worried about something going wrong. The plane’s handling seemed stiffer. His eye constantly moved from Raz’s group to his HUD to his instrumentation to the ground. Oddly, he found himself thinking about his family. He kept seeing mental pictures of his children playing in the yard or sitting at the dinner table. He was aware of a deep longing to be with them.

Back in the command bunker at Etzion, Ivry anxiously awaited word from the first checkpoint. Unlike the U.S. Air Force, where the lead pilot was in command, in the IAF the chief of staff on the ground was in ultimate command of a mission. Behind Ivry on a huge map of the Middle East, his command staff was tracking the progress of the attack group as well as the position of the command search-and-rescue helos and the F-15 support teams. Finally, at 4:23, Avi Sella, crammed into the small copilot seat in one of the Com F-15s, heard a transmission through the bulky, long-range SSB HF (single sideband, high frequency) radio balanced painfully on his lap: “Moscow.” One word. He recognized at once the unmistakable voice of his good friend Zeev Raz. Colonel Sella quickly relayed the message and the group’s longitude to the 707 circling above Saudi Arabia and then to General Ivry in the Etzion command bunker. Ivry practically flew to the radio when the call came through. Raz and the team were one-quarter of the way there. Ivry reported the progress to Eitan, and the IDF chief of staff immediately phoned Prime Minister Begin and the cabinet ministers, who had gathered anxiously together in Tel Aviv to await the success or failure of the mission.

As the planes continued across the northern Saudi desert to the next check-in position, Point Zebra, Nachumi’s mind began wandering again. He found himself thinking of his early days in the Hatzerim flying school, where most of the class had flunked out. He remembered one of the instructors lecturing them: “There are four types of students in flight training. Those who think slow and decide wrong. Those who think slow and decide right. Those who think fast and decide wrong. Those who think fast and decide right. It is the last group we want as pilots. . . .”

The blinking fuel-warning light brought him back to the present. The external wing tanks were nearly empty. Flying just off Nachumi’s left wing, Spector also noticed his fuel gauge. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His eyes were burning, his head pounding. The colonel had awakened that morning with what he had to admit now was a bad case of the flu. He had a low-grade fever and a runny nose. His throat was killing him. Staring into the mirror in the barracks bathroom, he could not believe his poor luck. Spector told no one, however. Nobody ever stayed home from a war because of a cold. After all, he was hardly disabled. He checked his fuel gauge again and waited for the signal to jettison.

Hagai Katz watched his fuel gauge with some concern. Although he had checked with the GD engineers about jettisoning the wing tanks, he still worried. Would the “pans” careen into one of the bombs, jamming the bomb’s release clips or, worse, detonating it? Or, as when the maneuver was tried with F-4s, would the tanks topple back over the tops of the wings, causing damage to the fuselage, the flaps, God-knows-what? Maybe, Katz found himself thinking, it would be safer just to keep the tanks attached and not risk spiking the entire mission.

Raz was thinking the exact same thing. The moment of truth was upon them, as it were. It was the one part of the painstakingly planned mission that remained more or less an unknown. They could not afford to sacrifice the extra wing tanks they had, so they had not practiced dumping them. No one knew for sure what would happen. He knew the rest of the men were waiting for his cue. But still Raz hesitated. To continue on with the tanks would make the aircraft harder to handle during tracking on final and targeting, there was no question. And, Operations had insisted that the drag from the empty tanks would burn up the crucial amounts of fuel the planes needed to return to home base.

Raz took a deep breath, reached forward, and pulled the switch to release the tanks. He rolled the plane to the left a bit to see if the tanks had cleared the wings. He felt no jolt to the plane as the tanks separated, but did notice an immediate increase in flight speed with the sudden trimming of nearly five hundred pounds of metal.