Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

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  THE CORD BETWEEN US unraveled on Saturday, July 18, 1970.

  When I came out of the house in the morning I stopped at the door, went back, and told Ali that Khetz was going to die today. “Aki came to call him,” I told her.

  Her eyes grew big, and she waved me away like a fly, saying I was tired and stressed, and talking nonsense. “Go to work, and when you get back we’ll take a couple of days off. I have to take you in hand.”

  “But Ali, Khetz agreed—”

  “Go.”

  I went. I didn’t fly that day. We were just a minor side show to that day’s performance. Menachem led our four-ship division on patrol. A heavy haze hung over the canal when the Phantoms charged into Egypt, and my Mirages didn’t see much of what happened on the other side.

  That evening the debriefing of Operation Challenge took place. Again we met in the same barracks building in Tel Aviv, and the same audience was present. Sam Khetz was already gone, and his navigator, Einy, was a prisoner in Egypt, joining his predecessors there. The story of the failure of the Phantoms was told by Avihu, the commander of the second Phantom squadron. He himself got back by sheer luck, with his aircraft badly damaged, and survived a very ugly crash landing in Refidim.

  The debriefing was fragmented and disjointed. The audience didn’t listen. The officers in the front rows conferred secretly all the time with Moshe Dayan, who looked with one eye at the ground near Moti Hod. An EW man stood and began defending the electronic warfare gear that had failed us, giving out details and data; suddenly the whole thing ceased to be a secret. At last Moti took the podium and said, “Gentlemen, we failed in this operation, but the war goes on.” Then Dayan and the senior officers left.

  In the door out I spoke to my new base commander, Col. Rafi Harlev, who had just replaced Yak, and sheepishly asked if the Falcons squadron was available. Harlev looked at me for a long time.

  “No,” he finally replied. “We’ve named a replacement.”

  RIGHT AWAY I KNEW WHO THE MAN was. Even before the name was announced, before I saw Ran Pecker shaking hands with Moti, it was as clear as day that Ran was the right man, the one in the whole air force on whom this terrible mission was built. Frank Savage, the veteran fighting general, brave as the devil, came once again ready to do battle. Ran unpacked his suitcases—already cleared to go for a year of studies in London—returned the plane tickets, silenced his wife, Kheruta, and the kids, who longed for a happy, calm, green year, and reported to Hatzor to take the broken and ailing Falcons under his wing.

  Pecker took upon himself a difficult mission, to restore that squadron and lead it while continuing to fight the war, without one day’s rest. And he took on one more thing that even Frank Savage—the original—hadn’t done: he did all this with a complicated aircraft he didn’t know and had never flown before. Ran took off into battle almost immediately, without any grace period.

  Truly, when he first harnessed himself in the Phantom, the War of Attrition was close to its end, and he had only three weeks of fighting before the end came. But neither he nor any of us, who watched him admiringly, could have known that. Battles raged daily, and the end was not in sight. The fact is that the moment Ran took over the battered Falcons, this squadron was energized and continued fighting. They didn’t win over the missiles, and they suffered additional losses. But they returned to being a squadron, a fighting unit.

  THE FUTURE HAD MORE TROUBLE in store for this interesting and problematic squadron, and in 1973 she would need one more Frank Savage. But at the end of the war of attrition, in July 1970, it was Ran Pecker who grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out of the deep mud she was stuck in.

  Chapter

  15

  Comradeship

  Sidewinder: a second-generation air-to-air missile. The principle of heat sensing was revealed in the 1940s, when it was found that lead sulfide was sensitive to heat radiation. This feature was used to build nose cones that can find the exhaust pipe of jet engines.

  The development of a heat-seeking missile began in 1946 at the U.S. Naval Laboratories. It was called Sidewinder, after the venomous snake that detects its prey via body heat.

  A FIRST OPERATIONAL EXPERIENCE with this missile was attained in 1958 over the Strait of Formosa, when Taiwanese fighters launched Sidewinders against Chinese MiGs. One of the American missiles fell into the hands of the Chinese and was transported to the USSR, where a Soviet imitation received the name Atoll. The basic design was used all over the world for the development of many similar missiles, including the Israeli Shafrir. The Sidewinder and its derivatives are the most common air-to-air missiles in the world and are used in most air forces.

  The advantages of the heat-seeking missile are its simplicity, low cost (“electronically sophisticated like an ordinary radio set, and mechanically complex like a washing machine”), and independence. Once the seeker is locked on a target, the missile goes for it without any need to enslave the shooting aircraft or its radar to direct it to the target. The limit of the missile is the necessity to have visual contact; thus it is useful mainly at shorter range.

  ONCE MORE I HAVE TO PRESENT a fair picture. The world is not perfect, and so when the air force’s pilots were fighting, getting killed, or falling into enemy prisons, not everybody in the air force behaved exemplarily. One day, when I was still in the flight school in Hatzerim, we drove up to the base for lunch. Near the dining hall there is a large field, and some air cadets were playing soccer on it. Among the players was one black-haired, handsome officer, tall and well built. He took balls on the fly and converted them into goals. I remember his happy face and his big laugh. He and his way of playing were very impressive. I shall call him Eddy.

  We stood near the field and watched. Suddenly somebody slapped me on the back. I turned and saw Asher Snir. I jumped for joy: where did he come from? Snir was not stationed at Hatzerim, and lately we saw each other rather rarely. As a substitute, we wrote letters. He used to call me Baller and I called him Brainer and we both were happy, since we thought we both had this and that. So we stood there gabbing.

  Suddenly, when he saw me watching the game, Snir said in contempt and anger, “Come on, let’s go away from here. I can’t look at him.”

  “At whom, Eddy?” I asked. “What the problem with him?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  I admitted I didn’t. I had no notion of what he was talking about.

  Snir told me that this Eddy, a navigator and instructor in the flight school, had refused transfer to Phantoms.

  The new aircraft, already involved in a very tough war, were critically short of navigators. The navigator in a Phantom is the operator of many instruments and weapons systems from the rear seat. It is a special and vital job, and at that time and for years later, too, the shortage was so serious that sometimes the squadrons had to put pilots in the backseat as “weights.” The Phantom squadrons were screaming for navigators, and the air force scraped them from the bottom of the barrel and from every hole and corner. Navigators were created from the aging, stiff-jointed transport crews yanked from their seats in Dakotas. Navigators were produced by shortened courses in flight school, kids not yet ready to shave. They were put in the backseat and sent, a day after they got their wings, straight into the maelstrom over enemy territory, to find their way and sometimes death or imprisonment.

  “Eddy,” Snir told me, “decided he was not ready to go to Phantoms.”

  “So what is he doing here?” I asked.

  Snir didn’t understand my question: “He instructs, he gives classes. On the evenings he goes to class at the university.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” I corrected myself. “How come he is still here?”

  “Fact.”

  Indeed a fact. Eddy would go on as an educator, sending his friends and students to battle, until he finished his full hitch and retired honorably, handsome with his unused wings, and with all the academic titles. To this day he continues publishi
ng his Zionist articles in magazines.

  BACK TO JULY 1970. Again, we are in the War of Attrition, and I am just a major, the new commander of the Fighting First Mirage squadron.

  The one Dagger missile I got from Khetz was still being test-flown on our Mirages, and it was doing well in spite of the hard time we gave it—jettisoning tanks and so forth. On Tuesday we launched it against a decoy. It launched well, hit the target, and that was it. We typed a one-page report and got it to Joe Aretz’s pals at headquarters, asking for approval to use the new weapon in flight operations—and for some supply, just a few of the missiles. No answer.

  On the other hand, Khetz’s promise was kept in spite of his death. On Thursday, five days after his death, carts arrived from the Falcons carrying six long, grayish tubes. The First flew down to the Sinai, to take over the ready line at Refidim. Three of our seven Mirages carried Daggers, two on each. My direct superior, Colonel Harlev, and all the headquarters staff knew about it without knowing. My squadron was armed with the new unauthorized weapons, and my commanders sat in their offices, keeping silent and waiting to see what would happen.

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  ON JULY 27, BEFORE DUSK, we were scrambled to the northern section of the Suez Canal. The controller directed us to search the area thoroughly: “There are MiGs!” The haze was heavy, and the setting sun in the west added to the difficult conditions and created a brown, blinding halo. We kept a safe distance, and the water of the canal looked like a shining strip.

  My wingman, Yaari, saw them first and called them out, “Bogies at eleven o’clock!”

  Immediately I saw them, too—two small, black silhouettes with swept-back wings. The planes rose from the ground and climbed. It was hard to discern in which direction they were flying, toward us or away. They rolled over in front of me and dived, dropping black dots, and straightened over the Egyptian sands to flee home. In a minute I passed over the blast of the bombs they left behind.

  At low level, my Mirage was wild and wanted to go. My speed indicator ran up fast and reached 750 knots—more than 1,300 kilometers per hour, high over the speed of sound. We raced deeper and deeper into Egypt, like tornadoes over the surface of the delta marshes, skimming the water plains that in the setting sun were painted with different textures by slow currents of water and wind. We buzzed dozens of boats with their white sails. The low sun blinded us with reflections in the water, broken here and there by wide, muddy expanses. The closest MiG looked like a small, round dot, black on the burning background of red and yellow. My face heated up under the visor.

  “One, you’re clean—I am clean.” That was Yaari, a good man to have on your wing.

  I overtook the last one. Air brakes out just for a second—a hard buffet and my Mirage stood on her head like a horse about to take a hurdle, but soon calmed down again. I had equalized my speed with the target. For a second I sat behind the MiG in close formation, just three hundred meters away. We both were almost touching the water flying at extremely high speed, more than six hundred knots; from the corners of my eyes I felt the water streaming past me like mad, as though I were on the deck of a very, very fast speedboat, sitting high in my seat, my ass above the streaming surface below. To aim right I had to get down an extra two to three meters below my target. So I did it very slowly and gently—I held myself down, led my gun-sight pip into the center of the jet pipe in front of me, and fixed it on the yellow eye of his afterburner’s flame. Carefully, I aimed.

  A caress of the trigger. My cannons roared. A hit! Something broke off the MiG and flew toward me, rolling, passed near, and was lost behind. The MiG descended just a bit and touched the water. A big jet of spray, and he took off again with rocking wings, came down and touched again, and continued bouncing like a stone. As I pulled up he disintegrated beneath me. Some fire. No ejection. I looked up. There was the other MiG farther ahead, continuing his flight west.

  “Number two, the other one is yours.” I pulled up and passed over Yaari’s plane to the other side and set myself in a defensive formation. My eyes scanned the surrounding area, and right away I saw another section of MiG-17s. They approached from the north, at an acute angle to our heading. They were still far away, and we were much too fast for them, but suddenly one of them fired in our general direction. Flickers and flashes came out of his nose.

  “Come on, Hassan,” I muttered, “don’t waste your time.”

  We continued at extremely high speed westward, still shaving the marshes.

  “Two, you’re clean,” I informed Yaari. No use bothering him with those new MiGs; let him concentrate on the kill. We would deal with these two later, on the way back.

  A LARGE FLARE BROKE OUT on Yaari’s wing. For a moment I was stunned. I even thought I had made a mistake—could it be that Hassan had hit him? But then I understood. Yaari had decided to launch a Dagger at the MiG in front of him. What? Was it possible that the Dagger’s sensor could pick up the target engine against this hot background at such a long distance?

  “Wow,” I thought, “the older missiles could never do it.” I didn’t even think of trying it myself.

  I waited to see how the first launch of a Dagger from a Mirage would play out. I waited and waited, but no missile launched from Yaari’s plane. What was going on here? Fire continued to flare beneath Yaari’s wing; something nasty was developing.

  “Number two,” I ordered, “you are on fire. Turn back immediately!”

  Yaari obeyed and turned hard to the east. I followed to escort him. But as I began my turn, my windshield passed over that distant MiG. My gunsight traversed it, and instantly my Dagger announced a lock-on, humming loud and clear in my earphones. My finger acted on its own, and the missile launched and flew ahead on a large plume of flame. I stopped my turn and watched, spellbound. The MiG and my Dagger raced ahead, the white trail of the missile curling and then going down and uniting with the MiG. A short crack and a large bonfire flared out and smeared the wet, green surface of the Nile delta. Oh, yeah.

  Instantly I returned to my sharp turn east, but now I didn’t see Yaari. We were flying so fast in opposite directions that we must be many kilometers away from each other. I slapped my brow with an open palm. How could I let myself lose Yaari in this smoggy air! And him with a fire on his wing. To add to my worry, he didn’t answer my radio calls. I slapped myself again, even harder: a separation. And my fault!

  And so I raced east, looking for some sign of Yaari, my heart thumping heavily. On our super-fast chase west we had gone deep into Egypt, some thirty kilometers or more, and the minutes on the way back seemed long.

  AND AS IN A CHILD’S GAME, all the signs left behind appeared again. First the two MiG-17s reappeared, with my friend Hassan the shooter in the lead. For a moment I was almost lured into a little action with them, with my second Dagger. But I passed through their formation like the wind and let them fade into oblivion.

  Then came the fire on the marsh: smoke and a large ellipse of wreckage, here and there some small tongues of scattered fires. I lowered a wing to make sure, and no, this was not Mirage wreckage. I passed over the junkyard and continued east to Sinai. Next came the water mirrors, and now with the sun at my back, their light was dimmed, and the wide, muddy expanses with the many white sails. The marshes ended and the sand dunes came, and then, at full speed, I finally pulled up and crossed the canal. Passing under me I saw the outpost of Fortress Alon. A thin thread of smoke still rose from it, a reminder of the bombs the MiGs dropped. Amazing how fast it had been. Such a short time!

  Only when I approached Refidim and communication was renewed did I find Yaari. He was on his final landing approach, his wing black with soot, but he and his Mirage were safe and sound.

  Back on the ground, we found out what had caused the fire. The rocket engine of the Dagger had burned fine, but the missile couldn’t launch. Simply, the mounting of the American missile on its French pylon had been done wrong. The training of my mechanics had been quick and dirty, and this was the price we pai
d. Before I court-martialed someone, I recalled that Khetz had been right. There was good reason for orderly procedures. True, the Dagger had given us an exceptional MiG kill , but we definitely might have lost a Mirage, too.

  I issued a report and waited tensely for the reaction. Somebody surely would wake up now, after we had used Daggers in battle. What would happen now? To my amazement, absolutely nothing. So we trained our mechanics some more, put our four remaining Daggers back on our wings, and waited.

  TWO DAYS PASSED, and on July 30 it was again our turn to be one of the first sections to scramble. The red bell rang. When I crossed the canal over the city of Suez I saw, far away to the west, short white trails in the air. I directed my Mirage there and went to maximum speed. When I came closer I saw a bunch of black dots dancing in the air like a cloud of insects in summertime. I climbed up over the mess, lowered a wing, and found a big dogfight under me. Everywhere there were MiG-21s, Mirages, and Phantoms turning and shooting at each other. Missiles’ smoke trails streaked through the air. In the middle a lone parachute stood out like a dislocated mushroom.

  I selected a good MiG and joined another Mirage who was scuffling with him. I saw immediately red, five-pointed stars on the MiG’s wings. The MiG itself was painted beautifully and shone like a new car fresh from the factory. It was clear, these MiG jockeys were not Egyptians, they were Russians! I almost saluted my childhood hero, the defender of the motherland, Alexei Merseyev.

  My MiG began fleeing west. I began to chase him. He had a two-thousand-meter head start, a little too far for a good shot. Before I managed to get closer, an order came over the radio: “Abort battle!” and all our aircraft complied and turned east. The area emptied within seconds, and here I was alone again, chasing west. I sent both my Daggers after him and saw them closing on him. The long range gave him time to see them, and he broke hard left and then right. Both my missiles burst right near him, and something sprayed out from his fuselage. Now I had to hustle back before somebody else showed up. I crossed the canal behind all my pals, and when I was again over the Sinai I remembered something.