Esther's Sling (43 page)

“One fifty-five,” said the co-pilot as the plane passed over the end of the runway. The wheels were 155 feet above the runway. The co-pilot had concern in his voice. At their current speed of 170 knots, they were covering 1,150 feet of runway every four seconds they remained airborne. They had found through trial and error that they wanted to be about 30 feet above the runway as they pa
ssed over the runway threshold.

The pilot pushed forward on his control yoke slightly to force his plane down, but his throttle setting was still too high and his rate of descent barely changed. The plane was dropping too slowly. The pilots had been picked for their ability to land successfully on the first pass and the expectation was that no one would abort and go around – after all, there was another C-130 only thirty seconds behind him and blacked out planes were all over the area. The timetable had been drilled into their heads – it was sacrosanct.

“One forty. Need to get down,” said the co-pilot. They were now 1,000 feet further down the runway and had already passed the point at which they wanted to touch down.

The pilot reduced throttle and the heavy plane instantly reacted, suddenly dropping at a rate of just over 518 feet per minute. Twenty feet over the runway, the pilot flared his plane to ensure that the four tires of the main landing gear touched down before the nose gear. The plane touched down 5,785 feet down the runway. The impact was hard but nothing that would have been a problem had their weight been
more typical. Worse, a last minute course correction input from the pilot in response to a gust of wind caused the plane to land with most of its weight being borne by the main landing gear on the right hand side. One of the two tires on the right hand main gear struts was unable to handle the force. The tire blew apart and the other tire split slightly along the sidewall, its air pressure now escaping slowly into the desert night. The pilots felt and heard the tire explosion as they went to full power reverse thrust and heavy braking to slow their plane down in the 4,015 feet of runway they had left.

The co-pilot understood the real
threat before the pilot did. Another C-130 was right behind them and more than likely there was now one or more large chunks of shredded tire on the runway – the type of debris that can destroy a propeller or an engine. After ten seconds of deceleration, the co-pilot took his hands off the control wheel and reached down to turn on the radio transmit button. The radio was set to the encrypted spread spectrum frequencies all inbound aircraft were using to communicate with the ATC trailers at Shangri-La.

“Abort, abort, abort,” said the co-pilot into his mounted microphone. “Hold for clearance.”

In the fourth KC-130, the pilot heard the transmission and recognized the voice. He was about to turn on his landing lights, but instead added power and turned his plane to the south to start a long oval ”go-around” pattern.

On the ground, the KC-130 slowed and turned onto the last connector to make its way to the tarmac. The pilot knew he had
a problem because he had to use more power than normal on his two starboard side engines to taxi. An alert plane director in his white shirt noticed the tires and decided to send the plane to the first available spot on the tarmac, which is where the last KC-130 was scheduled to be parked. The plane stopped as directed and the pilot opened his cockpit window and waved for the plane director as the co-pilot turned off the engines. The plane director ran to the side of the cockpit and lifted his ear muff away from his head to hear the words from the pilot.

“There is tire debris on the runway,” shouted the pilot, pointing vigorously
toward where they had just touched down. “We sent the next airplane around.”

The plane director immediately talked into his microphone, utilizing the low power radio sets that everyone with a helmet had available for emergency communication. In one of the ATC trailers, the transmission from the plane director, which was directed to the second-in-command, was picked up on a handheld walkie
-talkie. The final approach air traffic controller contacted the fourth KC-130 to hold in pattern.

Major
Meyer heard the update from his second-in-command standing next to him. Ten purple shirted fuelers were standing nearby and Meyer told them what happened and sent them to the runway. All ten men left on the run and the runway was cleared within several minutes. The fourth and final KC-130 came in five minutes behind schedule, but the landing was uneventful.

Now t
here was more than 136,000 gallons of aviation fuel available at Shangri-La, all of the fuel that had been planned for by Mount Olympus. The first warplanes headed into Iran would land within ten minutes.

The town of Abasan al-Kabirah has a population of just over 23,000. It is located in the southern half of the Gaza Strip, but to its inhabitants, it feels a world away from the threat of conflict and sudden death that can often intrude into life in Gaza City neighborhoods like Rimal and Jibaliya to the north. Life in this town proceeds at a pace that has been set by centuries of Middle Eastern rural agricultural tradition. This tradition survives despite the influence of the nearby city of Khan Yunis. What Hamas activity goes on in the town is quiet and discrete.

But the town has a strategic distinction lost to all but the most interested observers. The highest point in town is 29 kilometers, or 18 miles, from the western end of the main runway of Hatzerim Airbase in the Negev desert. Hatzerim is perhaps the most important airbase of the IAF because of a simple reason: it is the base of the 69 Hammer Squadron. The Hammer Squadron flies all of the 25 F-15I Ra’am fighter-bombers of the Israeli Air Force, the single most potent strike weapon of the State of Israel. The prevailing winds, coming out of the west, mean that almost all takeoffs from Hatzerim
are toward the west, almost in a straight line in the direction of Abasan al-Kabirah. For the nation of Iran, that made the town very important indeed, since knowledge of when the airplanes of Hammer Squadron were airborne, how many were airborne and which direction they headed, was the single most important early warning indicator of a strike on the Islamic Republic.

In order to observe the comings and goings of the Hammer Squadron, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, had quietly and secretly taken control of a three story apartment building on the highest hill in town. The eastern side of the building had an unobstructed view toward the east. During 2006 and 2007, the IRGC had moved undercover Iranian revolutionary fighters – some with their families – into each of the six apartments of the building as prior families moved out. Inside the top floor apartment, in a living room that had a large plate glass window facing east, the IRGC had set up very expensive optical equipment, night vision and infrared detectors
. The passive instruments enabled the men in the room to affirmatively identify any F-15 departing or arriving at Hatzerim. No light was allowed in the room and no electronic messages were sent from the building. Observations were written down on paper in a simple code and taken by messenger to different safe houses in nearby Khan Yunis for transmission to Tehran by various methods that had evolved with technology. No one was involved in the chain who had not been recruited and trained in Iran by the IRGC.

The secret of the observation network had been so well maintained that the Israelis did not learn about the existence of the network until the NSA provided intercept data to Israel in late 2010. Even as of the date of the launch of Block G, despite the best efforts of Aman, the exact location of the observers was unknown to Israel. But the codes used to communicate with Tehran had been broken and every message from Khan
Yunis to Tehran was read by Unit 8200 at the same time as the IRGC was reading each message in Tehran.

The existence of the network had resulted in significant discussion among the Olympus planning team on how to eliminate the early warning notice that would go out to Iran when all of the planes of the Hammer Squadron left Hatzerim. Alternative ideas included jamming and having all of the F-15I aircraft spend a day or so prior to launch at dispersed airfields around Israel. But in the end, it was a suggestion by Amit Margolis that resulted in the plan finally adopted. Now th
at plan was in motion.

At 7:22 p.m. local time,
one hour after sunset and before total darkness had set in, the first four of 24 F-15I Ra’ams of 69 Hammer Squadron took off in pairs in quick succession from parallel runways 28L and 28R at Hatzerim. Each plane had a pilot in the front seat and a weapons system officer, or “wizzo,” in the back seat. Each plane was loaded to within one ton of the maximum takeoff weight of 81,000 pounds and used most of the available concrete of each of the two long runways.

The first plane to
lift off was piloted by Gil Bar-Kokhba, call sign “Gadget,” with his longtime partner Ronen Isser, call sign “Pacer,” in the rear seat. Gadget’s F-15I carried two GBU-121B thermobaric bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds and mounted underneath the fuselage on each side of a centerline mounted 600 gallon external fuel tank. The bombs could not be dropped safely until the centerline fuel tank had been successfully jettisoned. The plane also carried two Python-5 air-to-air infrared missiles on underwing launch mounts located just to the outside of two 600 gallon external fuel tanks mounted under the wings. The plane’s M61A1 Vulcan gun system had been removed to save weight, its right side wing root opening now covered for aerodynamic improvement – the mission of this plane was to deliver its GBU-121B bombs, not to engage in a dogfight. Gadget and Pacer would cover the longest distance of any the pilots involved in Block G and would explore the range limits of the F-15I.

All of the crews had been told only that morning that this was the day when Block G, for which they had all been training for years, was going to become a reality. As they had during the week long period running into the prior two new moons, they had been confined to base and following an enforced work-sleep pattern that had them waking at 4 in the afternoon, flying only nighttime training missions and going to sleep at 8 in the morning. The crews had begun to joke about the schedule as
“Hammer Time.”

The takeoff of the entire squadron, with the exception of a single plane, had been done many times over the prior two years. Tonight, the planes climbed toward the west, in the direction of
Abasan al-Kabirah, and then banked to the north to continue their climb over Israel, being careful to stay clear of the airspace over the Gaza Strip. By the time the squadron turned west again, the planes were climbing through 18,000 feet as they passed over the coastal Israeli city of Ashdod. They continued to climb as they headed west over the Mediterranean Sea and started a slow turn to the north.

At 7:54 p.m. in Israel, equipment operated by Unit 8200 intercepted a telephone call originating from somewhere inside the
Gazan city of Khan Yunis and going to a cell phone number somewhere in the West Bank town of Nablus. The phone call was cryptic but was easy to decode for the team assigned to this network. Once passed from the West Bank to Tehran, it would inform the senior commander of Iran’s air defense forces that the entire 69 Hammer Squadron had departed Hatzerim at 1625 Zulu – 7:25 p.m. local time, 7:55 p.m. Iranian time – headed to the west over the Mediterranean. The planes were heavily loaded with weapons ordnance.

As Unit 8200 intercepted the call from Khan
Yunis, the first six aircraft of a wave of 25 F-16s took off to the northeast in pairs from three parallel runways at Ramon Airbase located south of Hatzerim in the middle of the Negev desert. They would soon be joined by another 40 F-16s and 20 F-15s taking off from Ovda, Ramon and Nevatim Airbases, all within the Negev desert. All 85 of these aircraft flew south to the Gulf of Aqaba before turning to the east to head toward Shangri-La by flying over northern Saudi Arabia. All of these aircraft were configured for Suppression of Enemy Air Defense, or SEAD, missions. The majority of planes carried two AGM-88D or E model high speed anti-radiation missiles, all of them designed to home into and destroy sources of radar emissions. Half the planes carried a single Delilah missile. The Delilah is an Israeli stand-off cruise missile that can travel over 200 miles to find and strike stationary and mobile targets, including the ability to loiter over an area and search for targets. Almost all of the planes carried air-to-air missiles, including AIM-120 AMRAAM beyond visual range missiles and Python 4 and 5 infrared missiles.

The twenty F-15Cs that took off from Nevatim Airbase were configured for SEAD and Combat Air Patrol, or CAP, missions over Iran, some being armed with similar weapons as their smaller F-16 partners
. But the primary mission of all of the planes was CAP support in the event that Iranian Air Force aircraft rose into the skies. Some of the planes carried the Spice 1000 or Spice 2000 winged glide bomb for use against specific targets in route.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea, the F-15Is of 69 Hammer Squadron that took off from Hatzerim Airbase reached their cruising altitude of 37,000 feet and then turned back to southeast to fly back over Israel, turning due south until they had passed over the Israeli city of Eilat, situated on the Gulf of Aqaba. The planes flew in a tight trailing formation of four planes per group. About fifteen miles south of Eilat, they turned east to head over the northern desert of Saudi Arabia. Another 445 miles later, at a point in the sky designated Point Romeo, the planes of Hammer Squadron descended 10,000 feet to begin aerial refueling from seven IAF KC-707s.

E
ach F-15I filled all available space within its internal fuel tanks, two conformal fuel tanks, two wing mounted external fuel tanks and one centerline mounted external fuel tank. After refueling, each plane left Point Romeo with 5,568 gallons, or 37,860 pounds, of JP-8 fuel, enough to fly about 3,870 kilometers, or 2,405 miles, depending on when the planes unloaded their lethal payloads. This was just enough for each plane to reach its target inside Iran, maneuvering as necessary to hit targets or evade air defenses, fly south to the Persian Gulf and then head west over the Saudi desert to return home to Hatzerim.

At 8:45 p.m. Israeli time, while the 24 planes of 69 Hammer Squadron were on their way to Point Romeo, the IRGC men inside the apartment in
Abasan al-Kabirah were scanning the dark sky to the east with binoculars and night vision equipment when the man in next room started to call out. This man was looking at the flat panel display of a very sophisticated and expensive forward-looking infrared unit mounted on the roof of the building and cleverly concealed inside one of the six air conditioning condenser units. Even the fan on top of the faux unit would turn on when other units came on, but the east facing metal side wall would lower on command to allow the unit an unobstructed view toward Israel. The device enabled the man to see aircraft coming in from the north and apparently descending toward Hatzerim Airbase. The two men in the living room looked out the window in the indicated direction.

After half a minute, one man spoke out:
He had acquired an F-15 moving slowly and descending. It had its navigation lights on and was following a standard landing approach route into Hatzerim that the IRGC had witnessed countless times in the past. He verbally directed the other man to the plane. The other man picked it out as well, along with several other F-15s. Over the next ten minutes, the two men counted twenty F-15 aircraft returning to Hatzerim and landing, all apparently with their heavy payloads still in place. The proper note was created and taken by runner to a nearby home, where another Iranian volunteer put the paper in his pocket and headed toward Khan Yunis on a motorcycle.

At
that moment, 20 F-15E Strike Eagles of the U.S. Air Force’s 492
nd
Fighter Squadron, the “Madhatters,” which had departed Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily two and a half hours earlier, were directed to refueling tarmacs at Hatzerim. Lieutenant Colonel James “Slim Jim” Nolan, commanding officer of the squadron, exited his plane and was welcomed by the commanding officer of Hatzerim, who presented the squadron commander with the flag of Israel. None of the men of the 492
nd
knew why they were visiting Israel this particular evening, but they knew they had received orders earlier that day to be on standby at Sigonella ready to take off within ten minute’s notice to proceed by the most direct route to Hatzerim. They also knew that they would be welcomed with food, soda, coffee and bathroom facilities, and they knew that they would be taking off to return to Sigonella approximately 70 minutes after their arrival. Once back at Sigonella they would be free to get some sleep before returning the next day to their base at Lakenheath in England.

Thirty
-two minutes later, as the 69 Hammer Squadron was refueling at Point Romeo, the team at Unit 8200’s listening post just to the northeast of Urim, a kibbutz in the Negev not far from Hatzerim Airfield, intercepted another telephone call originating from the city of Khan Yunis to a number in the West Bank. The intercepted message was interpreted and forwarded to Mount Olympus by email. A young woman working at Mount Olympus as an IAF communications officer printed out the email and walked over to the adjacent desks of General Schechter and Amit Margolis. She was smiling broadly as she handed the printed email to Margolis. The co-commander of Block G stood and handed the paper to David Schechter, who looked at him expectantly.

Amit Margolis simultaneously punched his right fist in the air and loudly shouted, “Hell, yes.”

General Schechter smiled and clapped his hands. “Amit, please do the honors. You earned it.”

“Attention, please,” Margolis
shouted to the large team within the command room at Mount Olympus. Sixty-two men and women, many crammed into tiny cubicles just large enough to hold their computer screens, stopped and turned toward Margolis. “The Iranian command has been officially notified that twenty of the twenty-four aircraft of Hammer Squadron have now returned to Hatzerim.”

A
round of applause erupted along with scattered whoops and yells. The senior air defense officials of Iran were now concluding that this night was going to pass without an Israeli attack. They would be proven wrong.

As expected by the Olympus planners, IRGC headquarters in Tehran sent an update of the status of 69 Hammer Squadron to the night watch commanders of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Air Force and the Air Defense Forces. But unknown to anyone at Mount Olympus, inside Iranian Air Force headquarters at
Doshan Tappeh Air Base in Tehran, Brigadier General Hassan Shahbazi, the senior commander of the Iranian Air Force on duty that evening, sent along a coded message to the commander on duty at every air base in Iran. The message let the commanders know that 69 Hammer Squadron was at its home base in Israel and therefore unlikely to attack Iran this evening.

This communication, which took advantage of the valuable intelligence about 69 Hammer Squadron that came from the Gaza Strip, had been implemented by the Iranian Air Force fourteen months earlier. The extended periods of being on tripwire alert every night had resulted in meaningful fatigue among the crews and mechanics of the Air Force. Men who were highly trained had been leaving the service in numbers that threatened the viability of the Air Force if it persisted. So a decision had been made after much debate to limit the highest levels of alert readiness to those times when at least half of 69 Hammer Squadron was away from its home base.

At 8:22 p.m. Israeli time, exactly one hour after Gadget’s F-15I lifted off, the first six of 55 F-16I Sufa strike aircraft lifted off from Ramon Airbase, taking off in pairs and using all three parallel runways. The planes had a one hour flight to Point Romeo where they would line up to refuel behind the seven KC-707s that had just finished refueling 24 F-15Is and 20 F-15Cs. Minutes later, a flight of 20 F-16Cs took off from Ovda Airbase, just north of the city of Eilat, to join the Sufas on the trip into Iran. The F-16Cs would be dedicated to Combat Air Patrol, or CAP, missions this evening. Refueling at Point Romeo in under two minutes per plane, the entire flight of 55 Sufas and 20 F-16Cs would take only nineteen and a half minutes to refuel behind seven KC-707s.

Like the F-15I, the F-16I
Sufa represents the cutting edge development of the F-16 fighter-bomber, incorporating advanced Israeli electronic communications and counter-measure equipment and conformal fuel tanks that give the plane substantially more range than the typical F-16. All of the F-16Is were configured for strike missions, carrying a mix of guided bombs, Delilah missiles and the Popeye Lite standoff cruise missile. At 2,500 pounds, the Popeye Lite could be launched from as far away as 95 miles from its target, depending on the altitude of the F-16I at launch. For this night, all of the Popeye Lites were autonomous once launched, delivering their 776 pound high explosive warheads by a combination of GPS and inertial guidance.

Fourteen minutes after the
Sufas began to depart from Ramon, two G550 Special Electronics Missions Aircraft, or SEMA, aircraft took off from Nevatim. They would soon join the growing wave of aircraft overflying Iraq to enter Iran at or near a point on the map that the Olympus planners referred to as Point Delta. Each plane was packed with the latest radar and communication jamming electronics – far more powerful and sophisticated than the jamming systems built into the Hermes 450Ms already on their way into Iran. These two planes would be in the line of fire, both flying deep into Iran before the night was over.