Raid on the Sun(63)

Khidhir Hamza stood outside a car repair shop just off the dusty main highway from Baghdad, about a mile and a half north of al-Tuwaitha. It was about 6:30, and the cars normally roaring by during evening rush hour had thinned. The week before, a pickup truck had rammed Hamza’s late-model Volkswagen Passat in the side, crumpling his fender. He had brought the car in to the body shop for repairs and painting. A Passat was something of a prestige car in the Middle East, and it was more than worth the money to keep the car looking sharp. As the Atomic Energy project director stood on the lot, waiting for his car, he was startled by a thunderous noise in the west. He looked skyward as a flurry of Israeli fighter planes suddenly shot past the rooftops of the village, two by two by two by two, heading straight for the concrete-and-aluminum dome of Osirak down the road. He could not believe his eyes. Oh my God! Hamza thought. They are going to bomb the Nuclear Research Center. If he had not arranged to have his car repaired that day, he would have been sitting in his office in the administration building this very second.

Yadlin, Yaffe, and Katz glanced down at the tiny village where Hamza stood rooted to the garage parking lot, then prepared for their final approach behind the leader, Raz. Yadlin punched up the targeting control panel on the console above his left knee. The digital screen sprang to life, lighting up in green characters and numbers, showing that the “pickle-button,” the red firing pin on the end of his control stick, was selected to fire Sidewinders. With his left thumb he clicked the three-way switch to the right, changing the pickle to the MK-84s. He glanced at the display screen for the readouts on the bombs, checking that they were armed and programmed to drop together at the same instant. The screen display gave him the minimum altitude the bombs had to fall before the delayed fuses would arm: 4.8 seconds. The MK-84s would need to fall at least twenty-five hundred feet before hitting the reactor, otherwise they would fail to arm and be nothing more than duds.

In the lead, Raz had also switched on his weapons and bomb display. The dot of the pipper, the round bull’s-eye circle at the end of the vertical bomb-fall line, glowed on the screen. The digital symbol resembled a clock pendulum. As Raz closed on Osirak, the pipper dot moved toward the target icon. When the dot covered the target completely, he would squeeze the “bombs away” button with his right thumb. He checked the INS: eighteen miles to al-Tuwaitha. He watched the mileage click by: fourteen miles, ten miles, six. Up ahead, through the cockpit, Raz could now make out the white, shiny dome of Osirak and the outline of some of the surrounding building. He could see the towering earthen revetments that surrounded the entire compound. They looked mammoth, even at this distance. God, the work that went into all this, flashed through his mind. He squinted, searching for the antiaircraft balloons. There were none. And there was no AAA fire. Raz was puzzled. Maybe they had really surprised them after all. Well, he wasn’t going to complain about it.

Behind Blue Flight, Nachumi could also see the dome of Osirak. It was much bigger than he had imagined. The concrete and aluminum dome was covered in mud to reduce its brilliance and help conceal it from enemy eyes. The Iraqis had done that after the Iranian bombing raid. But the dodge was a pipe dream: on the flat river delta, less than a mile from the Tigris to the east, the monumental orb still glinted golden-red in the fading rays of the setting western sun.

Four miles. Time to pop up. Raz pushed back in his seat again. At this point the F-16s were actually flying south, at a 45-degree angle to the target. Raz pushed the throttle to full afterburner and pulled back on the control stick. The Gs pinned him back into his seat as he soared to five thousand feet in four seconds, climbing out of the blinding setting sun behind him. He executed a 90-degree climbing turn and headed straight for the target, then rolled belly-up to maintain positive G forces, keeping the blood pumping to his brain and making it easier to sight the target directly below. While dramatic-looking from the ground, flying upside down for the pilots was nothing particularly spectacular and not at all disorienting.

Raz maintained his focus. In seconds he would roll back and start his dive to the target.



At Etzion, 580 miles to the west, the mission commanders smoked or stared at the radio. It took all of Ivry’s willpower not to start pacing. It was 1742 Baghdad time. According to Operations, the attack would, should, commence any second—or already had. That was the trouble—no one knew. The strike force was on radio silence. There was no real-time intelligence from Baghdad. They had nothing to do but wait.

Miles behind, circling in an F-15 over Saudi Arabia, Sella sat tensely, balancing the ice chest–sized SSB on his aching knees. Just over the Jordanian border, the line of CH-53 Sikorskys hovered. Near the Saudi border the 707 circled, waiting. In Tel Aviv, six hundred miles west, Begin and his entire cabinet were holed up in the ministry offices, surrounded by a pile of empty teacups and overflowing ashtrays. Waiting.