It was only the luck of the draw—and perhaps some late-in-the-game political maneuvering—that had knocked him out of the first eight. Now, instead of soaring toward Baghdad, he taxied his plane back down into the underground hangar, firing down the Pratt & Whitney engine and popping the canopy. He shimmied down the metal ladder, nodded to the crew techs, and, alone with his thoughts, strode toward the stairway that led up to Operations, where, along with the comm techs, commanders, and generals, he would wait and pray for the return of the pilots. It was the hardest duty he could have drawn.
SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1981
1644 HOURS (1744 LOCAL BAGHDAD TIME)
AL-TUWAITHA, IRAQ
One hour, three seconds into the mission, the darkening sky lighted up before Ilan Ramon in a phantasmagoria of bright flashes, streaking contrails, and gray puffs of smoke. The skies above the target were pumped full of AAA fire and red tracers streaming in a rising phosphorescent spray from nearly every corner of the shadowland beneath his plane. He had never seen anything like it outside a movie theater. The thin, white contrails, he knew, were probably from SA-7s, shoulder-mounted heatseeking missiles. The larger and deadlier SAM-6s left a wider trail. That was small comfort at the moment. A solid hit in the exhaust from an SA-7 would be every bit as fatal as from a 6. The Iraqi batteries had obviously had enough time to recover from the surprise of Raz and Yadlin’s opening assault and warmed up their antiaircraft radars. Triple-A fire now was more directed and intense, a curtain of showering destruction. More SAMs would follow soon. Ramon quickly checked his targeting display, then pushed the nose of the fighter straight down and into the seemingly impenetrable net of 23mm fire crosshatching beneath.
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.