After an hour’s flying time, the strike force crossed into Jordanian airspace just miles north of the country’s southeastern corner—far from the radar installations and airfields around Amman. Like a horse nearing the barn, the pilots now raced toward Israel, at one point shaking the ground below with a thunderous sonic boom as they shot homeward at the speed of sound. Behind them, north of Amman, IAF radar picked up MiG chase planes scrambling west and south. But Raz’s group was too high, too fast, and too far ahead to be engaged.
General Ivry picked up the radio microphone and, for the first time anyone at IAF command could recall, directly called the mission pilots from the command bunker.
“Good job!” he said. “Now make a safe landing.”
Raz racked his brain, desperately trying to think of something clever or memorable to say. He was not the talkative type. Shafir and Yaffe were the phrasemakers. All he could manage was, “Roger.” But that did not mean he could not feel the weight of the moment. After ninety minutes he could finally make out the lights of Eilat on the west banks of Aqaba. He felt something akin to an electric jolt, then began his descent from 38,000 feet.
Flying behind, off the right wing, Katz followed in his descent. For Hagai, the entire return flight had been surreal. The flight path west was directly into the red glow of the setting sun. The F-16s were flying just a tad slower than the sun was setting. Instead of the usual four-minute sunset, Katz, at 38,000 feet above the curve of the earth, had watched the sun in front of him set continually for forty minutes. Now, as the planes dropped down toward the earth, they dove out of sunlight into darkness in seconds. In a heartbeat, all was nighttime. It was an eerie feeling.
Yaffe was especially relieved to be landing. He had been second-guessing his decision to take off without topping off and worried about running out of fuel for the last half hour. But the lack of headwinds saved the squadron many gallons, and his gamble paid off. The landing lights at Etzion were on; the rest of the base was blacked out. The soldiers on the base did not know the details of the F-16s’ mission, but they knew that something important had happened. After the planes had taken off, standby fighters had taxied to the end of the runway, ready to go wheels-up. The maintenance crew had busied itself in various ways, knowing the mission would be a long one judging from the amount of fuel the jets were carrying. Most of the crew chiefs played cards or dominoes in the hangars, but by the time the planes were back in Israeli airspace, the majority of the men were out on the tarmac or waiting anxiously outside the maintenance hangars, looking to the darkening east.
Finally, just after 1900, they could make out the first dots in the sky. They anxiously counted the numbers. One, two, three . . . six . . . finally, eight! They were all back. The F-15s broke off and headed directly for Tel-Nof in the north. For ten minutes the eight planes dropped one by one to the tarmac, their tires smoking rubber as they hit the runway. All accounted for. The crew was ecstatic.
In the bunker, Eitan called Begin for the last time.
“All planes have returned safely,” he informed the prime minister.
“Barach hashem!” Begin sighed.
“Blessed be God.”
He signaled Mitka to retrieve the bottle of vintage French cognac he had promised himself half a year ago that he would drink to toast the success of the mission. Mitka set out glasses for the entire cabinet. Everyone suddenly felt thirsty.
Five hundred and eighty miles to the east, al-Tuwaitha was in chaos. The Nuclear Research Center security guards and Iraqi military troops carrying Kalashnikovs raced back and forth across the compound, challenging anyone not in uniform and dodging fire engines and emergency vehicles. Everyone was jumpy. Darkness had fallen, adding to the confusion. The shadows were sliced by the headlights of fire trucks and jeeps racing across the grounds. Eight people had already been confirmed killed. One was a Frenchman named Damen Chaussepied, a twenty-five-year-old nuclear technician caught in a lab hallway attached to the reactor. Osirak itself was completely demolished, the once monumental dome looking like a broken eggshell in the flickering flames, which still danced high into the sky from deep within the reactor.
As Mossad had discovered, the Iraqi units manning the AAA batteries at al-Tuwaitha had made it a habit to break for supper every night before six o’clock—one of the reasons Ivry had planned the attack time for after 6:30, Baghdad time. Before heading to the center’s cafeteria, the battery teams inexplicably shut down their ZSU-23–4 and SAM radars. The men were just sitting down to dinner at the cafeteria tables when they heard the first bombs hit the Osirak dome. Surprised, they raced back to their stations. But by the time the gunners reached their AAA emplacements, Raz’s team, the first four planes, had already dropped their bombs. As Yaffe dived, the antiaircraft gunners were desperately fumbling to start the radars, which were completely cold. Most of the ZSU radars had nowhere near enough time to warm up in the four minutes the planes were in range. The gunners decided to begin targeting manually, without the aid of radar or computers. The fire was wild and intensive. In the excitement, AAA gunners manually tracking the diving F-16s dropped their line of fire so close to the ground that they actually began mowing down their own gun emplacements on the opposite side of the compound, killing several soldiers and wounding at least a dozen men. Meanwhile, the explosions from the bombs sent debris sailing high into the air, crashing back down to the ground and wounding workers and guards scurrying across the compound. The cries of the wounded and the frightened could be heard everywhere across the installation.