Raid on the Sun(25)

Raz was aware of Yaffe’s pedigree. He seemed the well-connected class smart-ass, good-looking, easy-to-know. Raz on the other hand was the no-nonsense, mission-oriented, quintessential team captain, the up-by-the-bootstraps kibbutz boy. But over the months the two men drew closer together. For one thing Yaffe was no prima donna. A jokester, he could always get a laugh out of Raz, and brought him into the group of American pilots he had befriended. The two would have an occasional beer at local off-base clubs with the Yank pilots. Yaffe appreciated Raz’s knowledge of flying and his attention to detail. In turn, Raz deeply respected Yaffe’s professionalism and courage, and especially his incredible, God-given talent to fly. Yaffe was a born ace. By the time they left Miramar, the men were fast friends.

On a whim, before returning to Israel, Raz and Yaffe took a side trip to General Dynamics’ manufacturing plant in nearby San Diego, where they were given a tour of the production line, which was busy assembling the aerospace firm’s brand-new, cutting-edge aircraft, the F-16. The idea that they might one day be asked to fly the plane never occurred to Raz or Yaffe.

When Ivry informed Yaffe of the assignment, he could not believe his luck. Unlike the skeptical old veterans, Yaffe had been enamored with the F-16 since the trip to General Dynamics. Raz’s team was dispatched to Hill in early February 1980, while Ivry finished assembling the second team to leave in May. For team leader he chose Lt. Col. Amir Nachumi.

Tall, boyishly handsome, with sandy brown hair and thin as a reed from a Jordan River bank, Nachumi was a bundle of energy. As far back as high school in the early sixties, he and his classmates had bet on who would get into the toughest army unit. At graduation, barely eighteen, he immediately applied to the air force’s notoriously torturous pilot training. But after passing the entrance exams, Nachumi had stumbled during a desert survival test, succumbing to the heat and fainting briefly. During the medical checkup, the air force doctor, a major, pulled a crisp new twenty-shekel note from his pocket and scraped it across either side of the young recruit’s pink cheeks. Satisfied, the doctor nodded to himself and, stuffing the bill back into his pocket, sent Nachumi on his way, telling him at the door: “Come back when you start shaving.”

Instead, Nachumi joined the tank corps. Following compulsory service, he attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, two days before graduation, was called up as a reserve tank officer at the outset of the Six-Day War. After a murderous week of fighting in the Sinai, driving Nasser’s mechanized units back to the canal over the craggy desert terrain, Nachumi, dusty and sweaty, looked up one day from the furnace of his turret to see a wing of shiny Israeli Phantoms strafing gracefully across the cool blue skies above and wondered, What am I doing down here?

When hostilities ceased, he finished school and then, more determined than ever, reapplied to the IAF. The first man he met was the commander of the air force flying school at Hatzerim, Col. David Ivry. Looking up from Nachumi’s military file, Ivry stared at the young tank commander.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I was stopped by some of your doctors,” Nachumi replied. “But now I’m back.”

By the time Nachumi finished his story, Ivry had approved him on the spot.

Five years later he was a twenty-eight-year-old F-4 Phantom pilot stationed in the wilderness of Ophir Air Force Base at Sharm al-Sheikh on the sweltering tip of the southern Sinai Peninsula, when unconfirmed reports came in that Israel was being attacked. Unlike Raz in the north of Israel, Nachumi had no way of knowing that Egypt had already crossed the banks of the Suez, the “canal of shame,” as President Anwar Sadat had called it. But he knew that if a war had begun, Egypt’s first target would be Sharm al-Sheikh, the long-disputed gateway to the Red Sea lying in the V between the Suez and the Strait of Tiran.

Without orders, Nachumi rounded up his wingman and their weapons officers and sprinted to the runway, firing up the F-4’s GE turbines. Stationed at the front, the planes were already fully armed. Despite orders over the cockpit radio to “delay,” Nachumi and his wingman taxied their Phantoms down the runway and climbed steeply up, away from the base. Seconds later, as the two pilots circled to the west, they saw a squadron of Egyptian MiG-17s and 21s pounding the airfield below.

Nachumi’s radio crackled. It was Ophir command. “Who is this? Who’s the flight leader?” the base commander demanded.

“There is no flight leader,” Nachumi replied. “Just the two of us.”

There was a long silence.

“You’re it then,” came the reply.