Raid on the Sun

by Rodger W. Claire

  Where in God’s name did he come from? Katz wondered. And where could he be going?

  After another forty miles, the squadron crossed a narrow asphalt road and a rusted rail line that had once connected the Saudi Arabian city of Tabuk with southern Jordan back in the days of T. E. Lawrence. Raz was following the “blind corridor” in the north that Saguy believed existed between Jordan’s radar space and the east-looking Saudi AWAC. Raz heightened his awareness. To the south of Tabuk was a large Saudi air force base. It had wide-ranging radar and occasionally sent out air patrols. As Raz and his squad overflew the road below, the pilots searched up and down the ribbon of asphalt for any signs of traffic on the ground. The road was deserted. Miles and miles of nothing, just sand and sagebrush.

  Raz was in a mental zone. He continually checked the HUD, his navigation system, his maps, his wingman, Yadlin. He monitored the rate of fuel use and checked the cockpit computer to determine the most efficient speed and navigation for conservation as the weight of the plane gradually decreased with the fuel burn. Already he was being forced to decrease acceleration to remain at a constant 360 knots with the lighter plane. He made his turns as smoothly as possible, giving the follow-on planes plenty of lead time in order to avoid power spikes that burned more fuel. The baking heat rising from the desert floor began to bounce the aircraft, literally lifting and dropping them in the air currents, making concentration harder and demanding even more mental focus. Though he had switched planes with Yadlin, Raz found himself fighting the same navigation problems he thought he had experienced with his No. 107 on the flight to Etzion on Friday.

  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.

  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 dangero
us 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.”

  Miles behind, Sella picked up the transmission and relayed it on. Inside the bunker, Ivry breathed a private sigh of relief. At least the men were past H-3. He told Eitan, who picked up the secure line and phoned Begin in Tel Aviv: “They’re in Iraqi airspace, three-quarters there.”

  Raz changed his course 30 degrees north, heading straight for Bahr al Milh Lake, west of Osirak. The lake was a critical staging point for the mission: it was the IP, the all-important initial point, sixty miles from the target. There, the pilots would arm ordnance and commence final ingress. It was also the point at which the F-15s would rendezvous before climbing to their predetermined barcaps—that is, predetermined protective overhead combat stations—where they would circle on patrol at twenty-five thousand feet between the Israeli strike force and the Iraqi airfields. Raz and Operations had used a satellite photo (one of the “ill-gotten” KH-11 photos) of the area to fix the IP at the eastern bank of a tiny island in the middle of Bahr al Milh. That would be the final navigation fix from which pop-up, tracking, targeting, everything was calculated. Raz would break radio silence one last time to confirm their position.

  At 1734 he spotted the lake up ahead. He was right on time. As he approached from the west, Raz noticed that the lake looked larger than it had on the satellite photo. He began searching for the tiny island so he could update his INS and fix his final navigation. He glanced down. There was nothing. The lake surface was flat and empty as far as he could see in every direction. He was rapidly traversing the length of the lake. He couldn’t believe his eyes. His stomach knotted. Where the hell was it? This had to be Bahr al Milh. At six and one-half miles a minute, Raz, the mission leader, did not have long to make up his mind. He was soon soaring past the eastern edge of the lake. The roads below matched his military map. There was a town to the left with a tower. There was another village on his right. Ar Rahhaliyah . . . ? That had to be Al Mardh. Was he crazy?

  It suddenly struck him! It had rained heavily throughout the winter of ’80–’81. The lake had obviously swollen with the flooding and the rising rivers. The island was underwater! The waypoint cross on the HUD was sitting some four feet under the muddy waters below.

  Abuk! Shit! Raz swore to himself, using the Arab word, since profanity does not exist in Hebrew.

  Following on Nachumi’s left wing, Col. Iftach Spector was alarmed. Throughout the flight the commander had maintained his own navigational record, tracking times and degrees and checking off map points in a little four-inch pocket-sized book he had whimsically entitled “Paradise Found.” Spector saw immediately that Raz had missed the IP. It was a critical miscue. If they were off by as much as one hundred meters, the entire targeting approach would be off. At the IP, Nachumi’s team, trailing Raz’s squadron at two miles, was to drop back to four miles, or thirty seconds behind, to allow enough time during attack for the concussion and frag pattern of the first bombs to subside before they followed in on target.

  As a fallback, the veteran commander Spector had before takeoff selected his own secondary IP: Akhdar Castle, a famed, historical Arabian castle he had read about during his studies, and that he noticed was on the flight path. He had always wanted to see the castle and, since he needed his own backup IP, Spector had factored it into his preflight navigation. Now, as he and the mission team flew above Akhdar, Iftach looked down, satisfying his curiosity as a tourist and student of history, and at the same time verifying their position as yet another enemy invader.

  As his group approached the Euphrates River, Spector quickly identified a unique curlicue bend in the river he had noted and circled in ink on the operational map while still at Etzion. Despite the fact that Raz had missed the IP, according to Spector’s calculations, the strike force was still on point, some two minutes from pop-up. But the missing IP had thrown Raz a curve, and the squadron leader was clearly doubting his own navigation. But because of radio silence, he could not contact Raz. Spector prayed that Raz would quickly see that he was on track.

  Up ahead, Raz rechecked his INS. It showed the squadron to be exactly where he would have assumed they were had he verified the IP. He was right, the IP was simply underwater. But he had overflown the point in any event. Raz reentered his new position and had the computer rescramble the computations. He turned his plane slightly south, some two hundred yards, heading directly for al-Tuwaitha.

  On Raz’s left wing, Yadlin prepared for the bombing run. He tucked his F-16 in tight to Raz in what was called a “weld wing” formation. He could see Yaffe and Katz maneuverin
g similarly on the right wing. The pilots would attack in staggered pairs, each pair thirty seconds apart. Yadlin was concerned. He had seen Raz miss the IP and second-guess himself. In fact, Yadlin thought Raz had seemed a bit off the entire flight, but radio silence prevented him from checking in with the leader. Maybe the 129’s navigation system was off. Ironically, the 107 aircraft Raz had swapped to Yadlin was flying beautifully. He looked over at Raz on his right and could see his white helmet inside the cockpit. Yadlin felt his hand grow tense on the control stick. This was no time for the leader to hesitate.

  Yadlin spotted the ancient Euphrates River up ahead. He was stunned. He had never seen such a huge river in his life. It stretched on and on between its shallow muddy banks, flowing lazily past mudflats and sandpits seemingly for miles. No wonder it had figured so prominently in the early history of mankind. Something on the ground up ahead caught Yadlin’s attention. Bizarrely, Iraqi infantrymen on the far bank were waving enthusiastically at the Israelis as they zoomed by overhead, obviously mistaking the planes for their own. What next? He checked to make sure his nose camera was on.

  “Now we enter the territory of the bandits,” Yadlin said out loud.

  The mission planners had calculated that if the F-16s remained below one hundred feet, Iraqi search radar on the ground could not pick them up any earlier than twelve miles out. But after the F-16s crossed the Euphrates, they would be within easy range of Al Habbaniyah and Al Taqqaddum air bases thirty-five miles north. Yadlin anxiously searched the skies to his right and left. They were empty. But for how long?