Raid on the Sun(26)

Nachumi turned and dived, facing off against twelve Egyptian fighters. It was his first combat experience, and he was outnumbered six to one. He fixed the lead MiG on his radar and fired off his first missile. The MiG dived, trying to shake the heatseeking Sparrow. It failed, bursting into flames and plummeting to the desert floor far below, where it blossomed in a puff of smoke like a tiny blue mushroom. Nachumi, pulling up fast, lost an engine. The heavy plane began stalling out as he quickly refired the turbine. It caught and he resumed the attack. His wingman beside him arced left and launched another Sparrow, which dropped and acquired its target, flashing across the sky toward a second MiG-17. It disintegrated in a flash of fire and black smoke. In the end Nachumi shot down four MiGs and his wingman three. As the two Phantom pilots circled above the airfield, the remaining five MiGs turned and headed west back to Egypt.

Nachumi would later be awarded the OT HAOZ, the IAF’s second-highest award for courage on the field of battle. No one was prouder than his former flying school commander, Brig. Gen. David Ivry.

Ten minutes after he walked into Ivry’s office in February 1980, Nachumi “volunteered” to lead the second team to Hill.



By February, the Italian manufacturer SNIA Technit was finishing work on Iraq’s chemical reprocessing unit and its main components—the “hot cells,” shielded labs designed for handling radioactive materials in safety and for separating plutonium from the spent fuel. President Carter had personally asked Italy to reconsider selling Iraq the hot cells at the time the deal was discovered, but the Italians demurred. As a deal sweetener, Iraq had agreed in addition to the hot cells to also purchase four Italian naval frigates—despite the fact that they were powered by U.S.-made General Electric turbines. Italy assured the United States and Israel that they had nothing to worry about: it was sending its own technicians to al-Tuwaitha to guarantee the Iraqis would never use the equipment to separate weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods. Finally, the Israelis could sleep in peace . . .

One balmy Mediterranean evening in August, the getaway month for French and Italian workers, a bomb exploded on the front porch of the SNIA director’s tony “villa” apartment in the suburbs just outside Rome, obliterating the front of the building. The director was out of town with the rest of Rome, and so was spared. Simultaneously, two other bombs exploded inside SNIA’s Rome headquarters, causing extensive damage. The director rushed back to the capital to investigate and assess the damage. As with the Seyne-sur-Mer bombing, a group no one had ever heard of claimed responsibility for the blast the next day: the Committee to Safeguard the Islamic Revolution. This time, instead of a phone call to the city newspaper, a message was left for the SNIA director: “We know about your personal collaboration with the enemies of the Islamic revolution. All those who cooperate with our enemies will be our enemies.” Demanding the company quit all business dealings with Iraq, the note went on to warn: “If you don’t do this, we will strike out against you and your family without pity.”

Hofi had not given up on buying Ivry more time.





SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1981

1501 HOURS: T-MINUS 1:00

BEERSHEVA AIR FORCE BASE

The second lieutenant sat just inside the open doorway of the CH-53, the blades of the heavy-duty combat helicopter whirring overhead and kicking up dust from the asphalt. He and his six-man CSAR (combat search-and-rescue) team had sat steaming on the hot tarmac waiting to spin up for more than an hour, inhaling diesel fumes and trying to find a comfortable position in the back of the cramped chopper. His desert fatigues were already sweat-ringed under the arms and around the collar. At 1501 the mission chief appeared out of the operations hut and signaled the “go” sign. The lieutenant pulled his body back into the bird so that his legs cleared the door as the engines revved, the vibrations shuddering the metal frame and rattling his teeth until the chopper lifted off the tarmac and climbed skyward, its nose banking eastward as it gained speed, already crossing the rugged sands of the Negev toward the border. He ran through his orders: CSAR would helo east, maintaining radio silence, to the Jordanian border, then hold position just west of the line, hovering at one hundred feet. There, they would stand ready, awaiting word of downed pilots, the CH-53’s tracking frequencies tuned to the mission pilots’ PRCs. The CSAR team had been given no briefing about the mission or the pilots’ destination. Their orders were simple: in the event of pilot downing, proceed east, violating Jordanian and any and all sovereign airspace as necessary, and effect rescue as quickly as possible, then return to base. All secrecy was maintained. In fact, as far as anyone outside the base was concerned, CSAR had not even been deployed.