Raid on the Sun(65)
As Raz had struggled to modify his approach, he saw Yadlin cut in beneath him. Not a bad move, he thought. He pulled all the way back on the stick, angling the F-16 backward and, finally, all the way over, executing a maneuver pilots called an “overturn,” an incredible, circuslike loop-de-loop in which his F-16 turned full circle like a Ferris wheel. Raz came swooping down on the dome at a perfect angle. His eyes were glued to the HUD display, the bomb-fall line tracking toward the target. His right thumb rested on the red button atop the control stick. His threat receiver was ringing in his ears, his headset crackling with Iraqi voices.
The pipper moved slowly into the target icon on the screen. Down, down. Raz reminded himself not to get “target fixation,” that was, to continue the dive so close to the ground that he would not have enough altitude left to pull out. At last the death dot completely covered the target symbol. Raz squeezed off the 2,000-pounders and immediately cut ninety degrees left and began his escape. His chaff bundles fired behind him as the thrusters pinned him back, his G-suit bladders filling with air, holding him immobile. Raz switched on his IFF: he did not want the F-15s to mistake his radar blip for an enemy plane.
Suddenly he felt the aircraft shake violently. His heart leaped to his throat. Had he been hit? AAA or SAM? He twisted in his seat but could not make out a thing. The instrumentation showed zero. There was nothing he could do about it now anyway. Raz continued to climb until he rendezvoused with Yadlin. Both pilots began to level off at thirty thousand feet, now far out of range of SAMs and AAA and safe from any pursuing MiGs.
One of the French electricians working at Osirak, Jean François Mascola, stood outside his apartment in the foreigners’ compound just down the road from al-Tuwaitha. He heard the fighter planes streaking in from the northwest. Straining to see in the fading light, Mascola could make out a number of planes in the sky above the Nuclear Research Center. He was shocked when the fighters began diving at the Osirak dome. Though not partial to Saddam Hussein, he had worked long at the nuclear reactor and made friends with many of the Iraqi technicians and scientists. He immediately worried for their safety.
To Mascola, the planes diving at the Osirak dome looked like something out of a movie. Flames leaped into the evening sky and the ground shook with the explosions of the powerful bombs. But unlike the world of make-believe, he heard no sound of AAA fire or saw no streaking tracers in the heavens for a long while. Then, finally, after the first detonations, the sky erupted in a fireworks display of missiles and AAA. It was somehow both beautiful and awful to behold.
Just seconds behind the group leaders, Yaffe finished his pop-up and roll and began his approach on final. Katz followed close behind him. Neither pilot had seen Yadlin cut in front of Raz and release first. Yaffe felt the adrenaline flowing. His muscles tensed. Over his headset he thought he heard pilot chatter between the Iraqi Tupolev fighters stationed at Al Habbaniyah to the northwest. How did the Americans put it? The shit would hit the fan soon. The ground was now dark beneath him and it was becoming difficult to distinguish the horizon line from the darkening sky. Suddenly the ground below seemed to jump at them. Sparks and flares and tracers exploded all around them as Katz began to zigzag in order to become a harder target to hit. Finally, up ahead, he could see the Osirak dome caught in the final rays of sunlight. As he neared, Katz could see that the dome had already partially collapsed, its shiny arc marred by jagged holes left by Raz’s and Yadlin’s bombs.
I’ve trained my whole life for this mission, Katz thought. I have one chance to do it right. Don’t screw it up!
As he watched the pipper moving toward the target, Yaffe, diving just ahead of Katz, thought he saw white puffs out of the corner of his eye to the left. Soon the sky was filling with them. Those are not clouds, Yaffe realized with horror. They’re shooting at us! Sealed within the cockpit canopy, drowned out by the whine of the Pratt & Whitney and the ringing of the threat receiver, Yaffe could not hear a thing going on outside. But he knew, for whatever reason, that the mysterious absence of antiaircraft and SAM fire was over. Nothing to do about it now, he told himself. He focused on the bomb-fall line. The crippled dome rushed toward him. The delayed fusing on Raz’s and Amos’s bombs had kept them from exploding so far. He had a clear shot—4,000 feet, 3,700, 3,500. Now! Yaffe pulled back on the control stick and at the same time pressed the red button, pickling off his two bombs. They fell cleanly away without a hitch. Seconds later Katz released his MK-84s. A total of eight 2,000-pound bombs had crashed through the now-gaping reactor dome. Yaffe and Katz climbed to altitude, their chaff bundles igniting behind them. Raz’s Blue Flight was away.