Raz rechecked his INS: less than ten minutes to checkpoint Zebra. He was on course and on schedule. The leader looked left and right, checking his group pilots on both wings—Yadlin, Yaffe, and Katz. Everyone held spread formation, two thousand feet apart. Raz “checked six,” looking behind him, and could just make out Nachumi’s team: Spector on the left, then Nachumi, Shafir, and Ramon. Everyone was where they should be. He relaxed a little. He thought briefly of the target. Would there be balloons to contend with? How many SAMs?
Nachumi’s mind also wandered to the attack—and to the SAM-6s Saguy had warned them about. For ten years he had flown the two-seat F-4 Phantom with a navigator. Though it wasn’t much comfort, when going into combat Nachumi, in the back of his mind, always knew that if he were shot down, at least he would have his navigator as company as a POW. In the F-16, however, he was alone. If downed, he would have to face Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi dungeons all by himself. How lonely would he get? Would he crack?
“What are you thinking?” he reproached himself, almost laughing out loud. “I’m a Jew. If they catch me, they’ll hang me from the nearest tree.”
Out past the left wing, Nachumi saw that the seemingly endless barren stretches of desert were now broken by jagged outcroppings. On the right rose waves of sand dunes, marching south to the horizon as far as one could see. The Saudis’ Sakakah airfield should be to the north. He checked his INS. They were right on schedule.
Ilan Ramon was the number-eight man, the last pilot in the group. It was a dangerous position: as the last bomber, he would be exposed to the most AAA and SAM fire, assuming the Iraqi defenders were surprised at all. Either way it was a certainty that by the time he made his run, the antiaircraft batteries would have had time to fire up and begin tracking. Only twenty-six, this was Ramon’s first combat mission, and he was tense, no question. He and Relik Shafir had talked about how historic the mission would be, and both had decided they wanted a record of the event. The two pilots made a plan to use the cockpit’s HUD TV to record the entire mission. A video camera was mounted in the nose of each plane, complete with audio. But there were only thirty minutes of videotape. Command would want the bombing run on tape in order to confirm target accuracy and assess damage. If the camera were activated at the IP and allowed to run until bombing and escape, it would use an estimated fifteen minutes of tape. That left Ramon and Shafir with a surplus of fifteen minutes to record whatever they wanted for posterity. As he followed Nachumi’s lead plane, Ramon kept himself busy by recording various points of interest during the entire journey, so when he returned—if he returned—he would have a complete visual diary of the raid.
Up ahead, Raz rechecked his INS. They were at the second checkpoint. He clicked on the radio long enough to utter the word “Zebra,” then clicked off. The word crackled in the headsets of the other pilots. Sella picked up the transmission over his headset in the F-15 a hundred miles behind Raz and relayed it on to the 707 and command. Back at the bunker, Ivry heard the second checkoff. The attack group was halfway to target. They would penetrate Iraqi airspace in ten minutes. Ivry grew anxious. The squadron would soon be passing what he considered one of the most hazardous points of the journey—H-3.
An original oil pipeline ran for six hundred miles, all the way from Iraq through Jordan to the Israeli shipping port of Haifa on the Mediterranean. A series of dirt airfields had been constructed at strategic points along the length of the pipeline so that small planes could fly in oil company engineers and techs to conduct maintenance and repairs on hard-to-reach backcountry segments. These airfields were numbered H-1, H-2, H-3, and so on, all the way to Haifa in northern Israel. The H-3 field in western Iraq had originally been a small landing field, but Iraq had years before converted it into a large, modern military base.
Raz’s group would pass relatively close to this base on the way to the next checkpoint, close enough, Ivry worried, that the planes could conceivably be picked up by the base’s radar—or worse, by an Iraqi MiG on routine patrol. Superstition exacerbated his fears: in the ’67 War, Ivry had lost two Mirages during a bombing raid over H-3. As they flew this leg of the journey, Raz’s group would observe radio silence and be out of range of the F-15s. Ivry would not know whether the squadron had made it past H-3 safely until Raz checked in at the next point, “Grazen,” the name of an Israeli axe.
As the planes grew lighter, Raz increased airspeed to 390 knots. Fuel burn was 75 pounds a minute. They were leaving Saudi Arabia and passing over the border of Iraq. Raz could not tell the difference. The terrain was the same endless miles of barren desert—except that now it was gray and brown. The flight had been uneventful so far, but once in Iraqi airspace, all the pilots increased their vigilance, scanning the pale skies for any sign of MiGs. They were entering a defended area now. Away to the northeast were the Al Habbaniyah and Al Taqqaddum airfields. About a quarter of an hour into Iraqi airspace, the pilots heard the crackle of Raz’s voice in their headsets: “Grazen.”