The Glory (90 page)

Kishote and Danny visited with Aryeh while Bruria bustled out and after a while bustled back in, inviting them to supper.
“Our chairman wants to talk to you,” she told the pilot. “Come, Aryeh, I’ll get you ready.”

Kishote led Danny on a tortuous path through cottages and blooming fragrant trees to the brightly lit dining hall. “A stagnant
little kibbutz,” he said. “Nice people, though.”

At the community tables, where the kibbutzniks were already eating, the uniformed pilot caused stares and whispers. Bruria
brought Aryeh in a wheelchair. The chairman, a thickset heavily wrinkled graybeard, told Yossi over the chopped vegetables
and baked carp that the army was getting slack. The highest fences, the most tangled barbed wire barriers, weren’t enough
to stop infiltrators. Security meant men and guns! The Arabs were always close by with wire cutters, full of hate and looking
for trouble.

As the meal ended, the old kibbutznik turned to Danny. “Will you talk to my people? They’ll be thrilled.”

“That I doubt, but okay.”

With noisy shuffling of chairs and benches when the chairman introduced him, all turned to hear the aviator, weary-looking
men and women in farm clothes or shorts, many elderly and middle-aged. The chairman murmured to Danny as he stood up, “Urge
the youngsters to stay on the kibbutz. That’s our biggest problem, not infiltrators.”

Danny talked in a monotone about the F-16, as though giving a briefing, but the kibbutzniks listened with intent faces and
shining eyes. About to sit down, he laughed and said, “Ai, I almost forgot. I’m supposed to tell the young folks not to leave
the kibbutz for the big city. That I can’t do. Who am I to advise you? But one thing I can say, because it’s the truth. I’ve
just driven down here from the big city. There I was feeling terrible about Israel, and here I feel good.” He was astonished,
and so was Kishote, at the loud applause in which the young kibbutzniks heartily joined.

As the Volvo rolled out through the gate to a dark dirt road lined with tall trees, the aviator said, “Nice people is right.
I loved them. But isn’t the kibbutz movement finished, sir, an anachronism from the pioneer days?”

“Well, I used to think so myself, but since Aryeh married that Marilyn Monroe back there, I’ve been wondering.” Danny chuckled.
“I mean it. An iron girl! And a sweetheart. These border kibbutzim are important for security, no argument.”

They drove on the moonlit main road to Jericho without talking. Kishote was turning into the highway that climbed to Jerusalem
when Danny spoke up. “I really do feel better, sir. Talking my heart out to you helped. You’re a good listener.”

“Everything you said was true, and well put. Too well.”

“Look, why was the strike aborted?” No response. “We should have been told why. We’re used to scrubs in the air force, but
this last-second abort was alarming. It gave us a feeling, I tell you frankly, that the government doesn’t know what it’s
doing. All aircraft were on the ramp, loaded up with bombs, extra fuel tanks full, engines roaring —”

“All right, Danny. This goes in one ear and out the other.”

“Trust me.”

“The French were having an election then. We’ve got an election coming up too. At the last minute, Begin came under pressure
to wait and see whether a new French government would cut off the Iraqi nuclear connection. He gave in. They got the new government,
but went right on supplying that reactor.”

“Okay.” The aviator nodded. “Now, confidence for confidence, I’ll tell you something. When we unloaded the bombs and checked
the time fuses,
they had all been set wrong
. It’s still being investigated. If the mission had flown not only would it have failed, but the mistimed explosions might
have killed some of us diving in.”

“My God, you’re telling me,” Kishote almost groaned, “that the abort was a good thing, for the wrong reasons?”

“For the wrong reasons, it was a miracle from heaven.”

“At least,” Yossi said after a shocked silence, “a very unusual circumstance.”

“You said it. Our level of maintenance is marvellous, but a million things can go wrong in such an operation and it only takes
one …” He broke off, as Yossi swung swiftly past a bus grinding uphill. “Sir, will the mission ever go?”

“It will go.”

“Well, and even if it succeeds, what will it accomplish, in the long run?”

“What do you call the long run? The days of the Ezrakh’s Messiah? It will give us ten years.”

W
hen Ruti Barak came home for the summer, it was like having a teenager in the Barak flat. The telephone rang and rang. To
her father she appeared to have faded; scrawny, peaked, and for the first time wearing glasses. All the same the young men
obviously disagreed. They kept pestering her for a date on Shavuot, until Danny Luria snared her. The one-day festival celebrating
the Revelation on Sinai fell on a Monday, so the beach hotels were all booked for a holiday weekend. The day after Ruti said
yes to Danny, Amos Pasternak also called, to her visible vexation. But on Friday she showed up all smiles at breakfast, chirruping
that Danny had backed out, and she and Amos were going to Eilat together.

Nakhama said, “
Danny
backed out of a date with you? Impossible.”

“Well, he did! If you think I did it, you’re wrong.”

“Did he say why?” Barak asked.

“Not a word. Just called it off.” Ruti gave her parents a deep dark-eyed look which ended further inquiry into her love life.

To Zev Barak this was a red light. He had been watching the calendar anxiously as Sunday after Sunday slipped by. A strike
on the reactor would go on a Sunday, if at all, when the French and Italian technicians would not be in the structure. The
absolute deadline was the first of July. The reactor was scheduled to go critical that month, according to intelligence gleaned
from friendly Frenchmen on the project. Once the uranium rods were in and “hot,” bombing was out, for it would spew a lethal
cloud all over Baghdad. Was the decision then, after all, really to do nothing and let a dictator acquire atomic bombs, a
man who openly boasted that he would
“burn half of Israel”
? The French government had pooh-poohed that statement as overheated Arab rhetoric, but Barak took it very seriously. Danny
Luria’s cancelled date with Ruti was a hint that this Sunday the air force was at last going to strike. It all fitted together.

But by now Israel’s election was only three weeks away. If the strike was a failure, Menachem Begin would fall in execration.
The thing would have to be a flawless success, and even so, the voters might simply take it for granted. Wasn’t the IAF the
most accomplished air force in the world? What else was new? And when the opposition raised the howl — as it surely would
— that he had played petty politics with pilots’ lives and Israel’s world repute in desperate grandstanding for votes, how
could he prove in rebuttal that the reactor would have gone critical in July? Zev Barak had never liked Begin as Prime Minister
in Golda’s shoes, but he had guts. One had to give him that.

O
n Saturday night Danny could not sleep, thinking about the morrow, and regretting his missed weekend with Ruti. He put on
a quilted jacket and took a walk under glittering Sinai stars. At Ramat David the June nights were becoming warm and hazy,
but here in Etzion it was a night of crystal air and desert cold. Ah, this gloomy doomed Etzion base! Ah, his father’s melancholy
duty to destroy this marvel of underground hangars and advanced avionics which he had helped to build!

Wandering into the recreation room, he found Mussa, number three in his attack foursome, drinking beer. Mussa was the silent
one of the Chosen, short and swarthy, with thick curly black hair. His home was in upper Nazareth, a mixed Arab and Jewish
town. Even among the pilots, who tended to reticence except about flying, he was considered taciturn. Danny did not so much
as know whether Mussa was married or single. As an aviator, he was professional as the best. Taking a beer from the refrigerator,
Danny said, “Tell me something, Mussa. What’s our motivation for tomorrow?”

Mussa looked up at him with veiled brown eyes. “Our motivation? Why?”

“Okay, forget it. Dumb question.”

“No, I’ll answer you. My mother’s a survivor. Both her parents died in Maidanek, and if I can help it, nobody will ever incinerate
Jews again. That’s my motivation. What’s yours?”

“To gain ten more years for Israel.”

“Not all that different,” said Mussa. “One decade at a time.”

J
une 7, 1981, 3
P.M
.

“Okay, Dov, here I come.”

The words break unbidden from Danny as the screaming shaking heavily overloaded F-16 struggles into the air. At once it strikes
him that this blurt is a bad omen. Is he really on his way to join his brother in death?

The eight fighter-bombers flash over the deep blue Gulf of Aqaba and the barren Saudi coastal range, then drop to ground-hopping
level to evade radar. Brown desert sands race backward under his wings, and the words return to haunt him. His first combat
mission is in fact as hazardous as anything his brother ever did. Within two hours he is going to draw even with Dov or die.
He drove himself to qualify for the F-16 so as to measure up to his dead brother. Hence the blurt, no omen but the truth,
one way or the other.

Excellent weather, a bumpy ride through the thick hot air above the sunbaked sand, the escorting F-15s in sight, flying along
in line with the eight F-16s. So far everything on the mark, but the departure started badly. In the leader’s plane all electronic
systems failed just before takeoff, no explanation, and he had to leap into a backup F-16 he had never flown. There was an
omen, a bad one! Malfunction in one of these single-engine mechanical wonders, on a three-hour attack mission over enemy territory,
is almost as grave a hazard as enemy opposition. The most fanatical maintenance and checking by ground crews cannot forestall
a crump fated to happen.

And the probable enemy opposition is hazard enough. The force is running the gamut of Jordanian, Saudi, and Iraqi radar. The
Iraqis, at war with Iran, have to be on highest radar alert, for Iranian planes have already ineffectually attacked the reactor.
A single radar report, or a secrecy leak in Israel, and the attack on arrival will touch off a volcanic eruption of SAM-6
missiles and AA fire, and a scrambling cloud of MiGs from three nearby air bases. That is why the F-15s are along, to patrol
over those fields, two for each field, to hold off the Iraqi air force …

The first operational hazard: time to discard the two detachable wing tanks, each snugged up against a two-thousand-pound
bomb. American doctrine for the F-16 prohibits such loading, but the IAF is chancing it, as the only way for the planes to
get to Baghdad and back. The risky arrangement has not been tested, no detachable tanks to spare. Danny’s eye is on the leading
plane of his foursome, off to the left in echelon with Mussa.
There!
The tanks are tumbling away. Now there go Mussa’s. He trips his release, feels the jolt, feels the new lightness of the plane.
B’seder, one big hurdle passed. Now for the job ahead. Review, review, review the approach plan. In radio silence there can
be no orders, no calls of correction, the whole attack has to run off as rehearsed, come what may …

Okay. When the objective is sighted, turn on the radar jammer of the SAM-6s and pray it works. Accelerate to throw off the
mobile ack-ack, which sprays heavy shells like an Uzi but loses accuracy as targets speed up. Remember, every minute of afterburn
adds risk of flameout on the way home, so watch it. Up to five thousand feet. Pair up with Mussa for the bombing dive. Fix
the bomb-fall line in your sights on the white dome over the reactor. It’s just a concrete vacuum chamber for radiation leaks,
the target itself is buried thirty feet underground, but there’s where your bombs go in, that’s all in the computer. When
the “death dot” on the line merges with that dome, hit the bomb button. Be ready with flares and chaff if the radar warns
of incoming SAM-6s. Go to afterburner again, pull four G’s on a fast climbing turn and activate IFF identifier. We’ll be coming
out of the setting sun. We don’t want our own F-15s shooting us down for MiGs …

And still the sand flies past a few yards below and the plane jolts on in the heated air, needing hands-on flying all the
way with the right-side control handle instead of the old joystick between the legs, a bit strange yet, even after so many
months in the F-16. Plenty of time left to think. Too much.
Roar, roar, roar of the engine … Longest hour and a half of my life … Random thoughts …

… The hollow jocularity of the flight leader after the briefing, passing around a plate of dates, “to get you used to the
Iraqi cuisine.” The rumor that he refused to distribute Iraqi money to the pilots:
“Money won’t help a Jew falling into Iraqi hands.”
The rumor of a high-brass decision against using “smart bombs.” The F-16s could have stood off beyond SAM-6 and ZSU range
and released those superaccurate guided bombs at the reactor. Why not, then?
“Because you need smart bombs with a dumb plane, not smart bombs with a smart plane.”
The supersmart F-16 can drop its dumb bombs with greater accuracy than any smart bomb could achieve. Greater risk for the
pilots?
Zeh mah she’yaish
.

Ah, is that the lake at last or a mirage, that shimmer of blue ahead beyond the brown desert? By my life, the lake, bigger
than described. The crucial landmark. Great navigation by the flight leader. Baghdad buildings, as in the photos. So this
is it, and sure enough there’s that big cursed white dome, slightly pink in the low sun. In minutes they’ll cross into the
zone of AA fire. So far, not a sign of enemy action; the winding Tigris glittering off to the right, the Baghdad high-rises
far ahead, not a MiG in the clear sky, and there go the F-15s, climbing to circle high over the airfields. One of the great
things about the F-16 is the visibility; you sit in a bubble atop the hurtling machine and see everything, everything, in
all directions …