Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  A black mass shot into sight, and then there was my poor single-winged Ouragan No. 22, churning in the air not far away. It rolled and whirled, shrouded in flames, a long, corkscrewing tail of fire and black smoke dragging behind it. The empty cockpit disgorged a thin white line of smoke. White clouds of fuel sprayed through holes in its skin, then converted into spiraling sheets of fire. I remembered my burning face, tore off my oxygen mask, and threw my helmet away. The air was cold on my cheeks. The burning Ouragan passed near me, and I suddenly heard it growling, whistling, and whining. Then I noticed the wing, too, above me, fluttering on its own, burning through the blue sky.

  And still I fell and fell, spinning in my seat, waiting for the automatic release to open the parachute at the right altitude. It was beginning to annoy me, all that crap coming close and threatening me again and again. Finally I decided to get out of there on my own. I opened the buckle and released the belts, then kicked the seat away from me. When it floated away, I caught the parachute handle under my left armpit and pulled.

  Whew! The parachute opened. Far below, the Earth steadied and settled down. All of a sudden the entire swarm of airplane junk shot past and below me like a dark cloud, continuing to revolve around the falling aircraft. Amazed, I watched this small solar system of a large, burning star, surrounded by its many asteroids, all fluttering and sparkling on their way to fall like a cutting rain on the yellow fields of the Negev below.

  My face burned. I looked up and saw a torn section in my parachute. I decided that would be all right. Anyway, there was a lot of time; I was still very, very high. Farther above I could still see the whole trail of smoke, beginning up there with the cloud of the collision.

  At that instant I recalled the other pilot, my student. Burned and panicky, I searched for him, and was relieved to see him not far away, hanging under his own parachute. For a long time, more than fifteen minutes, I continued to hang in the air, freezing, until finally the ground grew large and all of a sudden came up to meet me. I hit and rolled in the yellow dust of a dry field, near Kibbutz Ruchama.

  AFTER THIS ACCIDENT I continued flying. But ever since then, a feeling of nausea hit me when in training dogfights metal bodies materialized suddenly from nowhere and passed by my canopy, bumping my aircraft and stopping my heartbeat. Then, after a split second of freezing, ants in my skin would remind me that I was still alive and could continue fighting. The dark shadow was still there, waiting.

  AND SO MY FRIENDS AND I were going out for aerial combat training flights and operational missions once, twice, and three times a day. In each of these we, young men, walked silently together on the asphalt in the sunlight, our helmets dangling, whistling to ourselves. I felt how my feet caressed the ground, stuck to it before I climbed the aluminum ladder and into the cockpit. And I looked around and saw that each of the pilots was visiting his private eucalyptus tree to pee on it, and secretly knock on the warm, sleek trunk so it would wait for him to return and pee on it again.

  Sometimes this other side of our world, together with the heavy burden of the war of attrition, intensified, and small cracks opened. Once I stood in the operations room, getting from the clerk the last details before going to my aircraft. A small radio was playing there as usual, whispering, and suddenly several clear strumming notes caught my attention, and I stopped to listen. A honeyed voice came out of the box and said right to me, “Why take it to heart? I have new things in my head… ”

  I thought I was fainting. A dear friend of mine, Asher Snir, also a Mirage pilot, had disappeared from his squadron suddenly and wasn’t found for some days. I waited to hear what was coming.

  Then a young, happy voice came in and advised me, “Take it easy, walk slowly. After a time you’ll be able to run again.”

  I took a deep breath and smiled at the clerk. The band continued strumming its guitars, and I shouldered my gear and went very slowly to the Mirage, for another sortie. When Asher returned, after five days, it turned out that he hiked to Eilat and lay there on the beach by the Red Sea, out of contact, until he was able to come back and fly again in the war of attrition.

  ONE NIGHT THE COMMANDER of the Fighting First, Lt. Col. Oded Marom, phoned and asked me to come over. He and I took off early in the morning, June 26, 1969. We were a special mission team, and Marom received his orders directly from the commander of the air force, Maj. Gen. Moti Hod. That day’s mission was to go deep into Egypt, to find MiGs and shoot them down. At the time, the Egyptians were shelling our soldiers at the canal; there were losses. Our commander chose this way to pay back and deter the enemy.

  Accordingly, we didn’t sneak into Egypt but flew at high altitude. Anybody with a radar set could see us. We entered Egypt at dawn and cruised directly in at thirty thousand feet. Over the Nile we turned north and then south, waiting for MiGs to show up.

  Marom led beautifully, calmly, and I was on his wing in a wide-open formation—a couple of thousand meters away—watching his six while he watched mine. Dawn broke, the sky reddened in the east, and the contours of the land under us acquired a patina of gold.

  Suddenly I saw a faraway twinkle—a single MiG-21, some two thousand meters behind us, coming from below and closing fast. We broke together toward him. In the middle of our turn, when Marom was behind me, he warned me, “Another MiG at eleven high!”

  I raised my head and saw the MiG, now outside my turning radius, as I had turned inside him. In calm voices we divided the job: Marom would take the first MiG and I the second one, which was still trying to close on me. Within seconds Marom and I lost sight of each other, and each of us was on his own.

  And now, time for a kill. Something rumbled in my gut, “Don’t blow it.”

  I BEGAN WITH A DISADVANTAGE with the MiG on my six, but I was armed with the cunning I learned from Yak. I eased my turn a bit and reduced power to slow down, in a casual sort of way. Let him come in really fast. Then, when he ardently approached me, I performed abruptly a “pass me” maneuver, and exactly as I anticipated, he shot past me and pulled up. I hurried after him, relighting my afterburner.

  This was a mistake.

  At that altitude the air is thin, and the Mirage’s engine—a variant of the Super Mystere engine—is very sensitive. With a loud bang my compressor stalled, and the engine choked. Here I was, stuck behind and below the MiG, too slow to get to him and with no engine power. The MiG rolled over above my head and turned back toward me.

  But high altitude and gravity can be used to give a trained pilot—for a limited time—a good substitute for an engine. I lowered my nose down together with the MiG, and in a dive we rolled down, each opposite the other in a descending vortex. The fall kept me alive and maneuvering, and at lower altitude the air pressure was higher. I caressed my engine carefully, and it sprang back to life. Cautiously I lit the afterburner, and was rewarded by its wonderful kick forward. I was back in the game.

  THE MIG WAS STILL FASTER and higher than I, pushing itself into me like a dog chasing a bicycle.

  “Hassan,” I told him, “you’re not going to get anywhere this way.”

  I began to give him what he wanted, leading him on, titillating him. I reduced my rate of turn and widened the radius, accelerating, while he was avidly scrabbling to stuff his nose into me. Now we were at much lower altitude, as in training, but the difference was that instead of the desert of Ruchama, I saw under me strange, red hills. The sun broke out on the eastern horizon, and the MiG’s silhouette on the background of the narrow, blinking silver line of the faraway Red Sea looked like a black arrow.

  Now my engine was working fine and my Mirage began to do its magic again. My disadvantage was gone, and I started taking command of the battle. I gradually eased my wing bank and lifted my Mirage’s nose gently. I began to rise above the MiG’s tight circle, moving to its center. I paid with some of my speed, but caught the pivot point high above him. My next move should be to lower my nose at the right moment and nail him from above.

  At this point H
assan understood what was happening to him. I watched, and the flight instructor in me nodded approval when in a clear and correct decision he leveled his wings, gave up the fight, and dove straight to the northwest. He fled, using the little altitude he still had to dive to the deck and increase his speed.

  I had an answer for this, too. I finished my turn, came in behind him, and launched my two Shafrir heat-seeking missiles after his hot jet exhaust. But this time luck was on Hassan’s side—both missiles missed. This was no surprise. The Israeli Shafrir 1 was just a prototype from our research and development laboratories, and usually it didn’t work very well.

  And still Hassan flew on ahead of me, racing toward Cairo, and it seemed he had made good his escape. All I had left were my guns, and the range was far too long for them. I couldn’t continue the chase—Cairo was coming up fast, and I was already at my fuel limit for a safe return. I had to give up. Unhappily, I shut down the afterburner to head for home.

  And then things began to happen.

  PERHAPS HASSAN LOST SIGHT of me. Perhaps he thought he was home free, where Mommy and Daddy would protect him. I don’t know. But exactly when I gave up the chase, Hassan also shut off his afterburner. The flame from his engine diminished. He was a thousand meters in front of me, slowing down and stopping his run from me. This was an invitation that the fighter pilot in me could not refuse.

  My left hand pushed the throttle again beyond the detent and lit the afterburner, sucking up my reserves of fuel. My right hand pushed the stick forward, aiming my Mirage into the ground shadows. The distance between us vanished in a flash. In no time I was on him, my gunsight stuck in the center of his black jet pipe and my cannons spitting fire. The houses of a peripheral suburb of Cairo were passing under us when a large piece of aluminum tore off his plane—a part of a wing or a stabilizer—and passed me. Hassan rolled left, turned over, and hit the ground. Shutting down my afterburner, I passed victoriously over him and immediately turned east, to get out of there—fast.

  If I flew really carefully, I still had enough fuel to get back. Though I might not make it to Hatzor, certainly I could make it to a safe landing in Refidim, our nearest airfield in the Sinai. But I was not out of the woods yet. I still was alone over Cairo, having to cross a hundred kilometers of enemy country to the Suez Canal, and then another fifty over the Sinai. Fuel was short, so I had to repress the impulse to open full throttle and get out of there. I had no reserves for any hot-dogging. So I began climbing up to the east slowly, flying carefully, not wasting a drop of fuel.

  When I reached an altitude of twenty thousand feet, two MiGs caught up with me.

  I SAW THEM WHILE THEY WERE still far away, two silver specks approaching from the north. They came closer and materialized, long and sharp, right beside me, sniffing at me. I had no fuel to deal with them and continued placidly on my way, so for a while we flew east together, as though we were part of the same formation. It was such an unbelievably peaceful trip together toward the black line of the Suez Canal that I asked myself, “Could it be they don’t see me?”

  But then they were satisfied with what they saw, and a decision was made. Pulling up, they split into a line in back of me, one of them staying put behind and up to watch from above, while the other turned confidently to attack my six. I could do something, or continue flying forward and wait for the bang.

  I decided to do something.

  I rolled my Mirage on its back, and for the second time that day, gravity was my engine and accelerated me down to the waiting Earth. The hills were nearing, but the prospect of a safe landing in Refidim was shrinking fast.

  When I came out of the dive at low level I was again among flat desert hills, and those two MiGs came after me, one after the other. I watched them pulling out of their dive, and for some reason they seemed soft and easy, like a couple of trained poodles. But even so, I was definitely screwed, and my chances of getting out of this seemed so small that my hands twitched with an abrupt wild desire to go for it and shoot them both down, one after the other, and then see what would happen. But then reason took command over my emotions and forced me to cool off and try to find a way out.

  Two MiGs behind me and it played out like this: I couldn’t run away from them, and they didn’t need to do any tough fighting. All they had to do is run me around in circles here, and here I would remain, forever. All that was left for me was to slip-slide slowly to the east, to try to reach the Suez Canal. I must hug the earth, for only an extremely low flight, following in the ripples of the earth, could save me from their guns and missiles. I had to hope for poor marksmanship from them until I crossed…

  Crossed what?

  Suddenly I realized that I could not continue east to Suez. There was not a chance in the world that I could cross it alive. At low altitude and slow speed, even if those MiGs didn’t shoot me down, the canal’s dense antiaircraft systems would make mincemeat of me. Without wasting time on any detailed plan I made up my mind and turned south. A wide, yellow valley opened before me, and I glided into it. Certainly all the streams here led to the Red Sea. And beyond the sea was Sinai. I would have to find someplace to land there. I remembered there were some landing strips along the coast, left by the Egyptians: Ras-Sudr, Abu-Rudeis, E-Tur, maybe more. I should be able to find something over there.

  And if my fuel should run out before that? It better not, since wherever the fuel ran out would be my last stop.

  I CRUISED SLOWLY AT VERY LOW level, perhaps two to three meters above the stony bottom of the wadi, hopping over small hills and practically hiding behind bushes. The MiGs followed me. One of them hovered up on my left side, high above the wadi’s left wall, and the other came up on my six. In spite of my decision to ignore them and continue flying east, when that MiG disappeared behind my back I got a chill down my spine. I could not restrain myself and broke sideways, up to the rim. Immediately I saw him, eight hundred meters behind me, and nosed out. As I broke, he quit and pulled out.

  Then the second one tried his luck. I slipped back into the wadi using the flat slope to regain the speed I lost, and continue toddling along with minimum engine power, preparing myself for the next break. When the second MiG disappeared behind me I broke, and then he quit, too. The first one went in again. We danced around like that for while. They were good-natured kids, educated and well mannered and not scary at all, but meanwhile they turned me around and stopped my progress home. My fuel kept going down and down, while I crawled turn after turn through the endless Wadi El-Khafayer, among the shallow, barren hills, and no Red Sea appeared.

  Once I lost airspeed completely and had to open the throttle to stay airborne. There I lost all hope of a landing anywhere. I pulled the gunsight camera from its chassis and hid it in my flight suit, on my chest. Let this proof of victory be some compensation for the Fighting First’s Mirage No. 33 that I was about to foolishly destroy.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I learned a dictum from my mother: “all inside.” In times of personal distress I whispered this incantation and fortified myself with it. And here in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, when I was sinking into despair and losing my fighting spirit, this mantra returned to me with a slight variation, but a huge change of meaning. I heard it as if somebody were saying it in my cockpit, clearly and calmly. The words were: “from inside.”

  “From inside.” Just a change of one word—in Hebrew it’s a change of one letter—but it sounded in my consciousness like a bell and energized my thinking on the spot. From inside, namely listen up, Iftach Spector, it’s all in you; all depends on you. The question is only how worthy you are. This short phrase saved me then and was to support me in difficult times to come. To this day I teach it to my children till they complain, “Come on, Dad, enough with this proverb of yours.”

  I saw no mysticism in this discovery. Like a great teacher I had, Benny Peled, I never had any inclination to mysticism. All I believe is that in the cacophony of the many voices that thrashed about in my overworked mind during my predic
ament, the healthy and balanced one won out. This voice was always there. The real miracle, and my luck, lay in the fact that this voice knew not to shout and prate, but narrowed its message down to two simple words that silenced everything else and sent me back to my struggle. And still I wonder why this happened there in Wadi El-Khafayer; how those two words were formed just then, not before and not after, but just at the right moment, and directed me there as they did in hard times that came later.

  And so, instead of opening full throttle to accelerate and escape from this trap—and be dead meat in a few kilometers—I recouped my patience and continued to walk a tightrope, watching not the horizon but the next turn of the wadi, shutting off my engine and evading the MiGs’ attacks at the rim of the wadi. I used every wrinkle in the ground ahead, and once or twice hills rose up to knock me down but missed. So I slid one kilometer ahead, and then another, and suddenly the horizon lit blue between two hills and a blinding ribbon of sharp blue appeared: the Red Sea.

  The wadi descended, and I accelerated. An Egyptian antiaircraft base at the estuary sent long bursts of fire in my direction. I turned south and wafted out to sea. There, over the water, I looked back again, and lo and behold, nobody was there! My pursuers had abandoned the chase and gone home.

  Oh, how I gained altitude! I gulped altitude like a man dying of thirst who finds a river and sticks his head in it. A thousand feet and another thousand feet, and Egypt fell farther behind, and the mountains of Sinai appeared in front, still twenty kilometers away beyond the purple-blue surface of the Bay of Suez, the Red Sea. But I kept myself in check; I still had to find a place to land. The fuel indicator was already kissing the empty mark. So again I restrained myself. I didn’t bolt, but continued my climb at a low, optimized speed, saving every liter.