“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.