Raid on the Sun(59)
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.
Ahead of him Katz saw Raz’s two external tanks—one, then the other—separate from the wing undercarriages, float in midair for a split second, then tumble end over end to the desert sands below. Katz pulled his switch and felt the same jump in acceleration. Yadlin and Yaffe dutifully dropped their fuel pans next. Raz gave the pilots a thumbs-up to let them know the tanks had fallen cleanly away. Soon the other planes were jettisoning their fuel pans as well, pelting the Saudi desert with sixteen 245-pound wing tanks. They could lie there rusting in the sands for hundreds of years, forgotten markers of a historic mission, Raz thought.