The Lion’s Gate

by Steven Pressfield

  I glance to my indicator. I’ve still got one bomb. This is worse than the sheep on the railroad track. With one bomb still hanging, my cannons won’t fire. This is part of the safety systems of the Mirage. The bombs are carried under the fuselage; each one has its detonator fuse protruding from the front. The 30-millimeter cannons are forward of this. When you fire the cannons, the spent shell casings come streaming back past the bombs at 400 or 500 miles per hour. The safety system is designed so that, if for any reason the bombs are still in place under the fuselage, the cannons won’t fire.

  So I can’t strafe. Meanwhile, the other three Mirages in my formation have gone into their strafing runs. They are blasting the hell out of the Tupolev-16s on the ground. What can I do? I pull to altitude, wait for the second strafing pass to finish and my formation-mates to get out of the way. Now I drop my second bomb. Antiaircraft fire is coming from everywhere and all of it is aimed at me because I’m all alone, high and exposed, and the gunners now know exactly what I’m trying to do and where I am heading. I’m not panicking; my mind is clear. I’m embarrassed. I’m no big talker on the radio but now I have shut up completely.

  Finally I get into the strafing pattern. But I’m so late, and the smoke is so thick from the Egyptian bombers burning beside the runways, that I can’t see a thing. No targets. This nightmare is never-ending.

  I’m thinking, Okay, what’s Plan B? What other damage can I do? I see a building. The biggest building on the base. Oh, boy. I fly straight at it at 100 feet and blow the hell out of it.

  Back at Tel Nof, we’re debriefing fast; ground crews are bringing up rearmed and refueled planes. We’re getting our second mission briefing. There’s just time to take a piss, tell a few stories, then run for the aircraft. But first I have to see what building I shot up at Cairo West. I’m hoping it’s something good. That will redeem a small measure of honor. I find the base layout in the ops room. What did I shoot up? Was it intel, a major fuel depot, the base HQ?

  The motor pool!

  That is like destroying the room that contains the urinals.

  Now I feel even more humiliated.

  Second mission: Gardaka. Ran Ronen is the leader. It’s past noon and we are over the base. Surprise is gone. The Egyptians are waiting for us.

  I had thought the antiaircraft fire was bad at Cairo West, but it is nothing compared to what we’re seeing now. This is real triple-A. It looks like a lid has been placed over the runways, a lid of angry, red fire. I can see muzzle flashes from what look like fifty different guns. Worse, Gardaka is wide open, a broad desert plateau with no trees, no tall buildings, nothing to disrupt the triple-A gunners’ lines of sight.

  “One, in.” This is Ran, diving into that murderous crossfire.

  “Two, in.”

  That’s me. I can see the triple-A “stepping up.” The next black burst will get me, I’m certain.

  “Three, in.”

  “Four, in.”

  Somehow we survive. We put our bombs on target. Gardaka is one of the fields that Egyptian planes have fled to from the other fields. Reuven Rozen is our number three; Buki Kenan is number four. Buki normally has a high voice. Suddenly we hear it even higher:

  “Migim! Migim!” “MiGs, MiGs!”

  I have never actually seen a MiG in the air. But I am reacting like every other fighter pilot: First my head is doing a one-eighty to locate any plane on my tail; second, I am red-hot to shoot one of these bastards down.

  “How many?”

  “Four.”

  It is as if the sky has exploded. Planes are zooming in all directions. Forget about our strafing passes. Almost before I can think, I see one explosion. Ran has shot down a MiG-19.

  Buki is chasing another.

  I’ve got one myself. He is in my sights. Suddenly he breaks hard and runs. His afterburner lights. A MiG-19 can do 600 knots, but a Mirage can hit 700. I light my burner. Over the radio I hear Ran:

  “Two, hurry up! MiG on your tail!”

  Ran is behind me, going after a MiG that is going after me. Everything leaves my mind except the plane I’m chasing. I have forgotten Gardaka, the mission, the whole war.

  I want my MiG.

  He runs like hell but my plane is faster. The MiG-19 has a very distinctive fuselage, shaped like a cigar. I’m closing in, my pipper is almost on his tail. Over the radio I hear Ran shoot down the MiG behind me. Suddenly my MiG breaks! MiG-19s can turn very, very sharp. I will overshoot him! He’ll get away!

  I put my nose up and do a “yo-yo.” My MiG is losing speed fast in his turn, too tight for me to follow. He is pulling a lot of Gs. But I am losing speed faster by going straight up. This is good. I turn above him. I can see his head on a swivel, looking for me. I come down on him like a hawk and squeeze the trigger. No flames. No explosion. What the hell? I know my guns have fired.

  Then I see his parachute.

  I am redeemed.

  Squadron commander Ran Ronen, returning from Gardaka:

  The red radio in a Mirage is the squadron channel; green is ground control. Ten minutes after hitting Gardaka, on the way home, the green comes alive with an emergency transmission: “Any airborne formation with suitable ordnance and fuel to reach Amman, notify me immediately!”

  Amman? Jordan! Has King Hussein entered the war?

  I can speak in the clear to my formation leaders; we know each other’s voices as if we were brothers. “Who’s in the air with bombs?”

  Avramik Salmon responds that he’s on his way to Gardaka.

  I ask: “Where are you?”

  “South of Eilat.”

  I tell him my formation has destroyed Gardaka. We have wiped out the runways, shot down three MiGs, and watched another plunge in the chaos into a bomb crater on the runway.

  “Switch to the GCI’s channel, tell him you can attack Amman.”

  Menahem Shmul is in Salmon’s formation, approaching Gardaka:

  We’re at 25,000 feet, descending to attack Gardaka. The war has been raging for hours now; there’s no need anymore to fly below the radar approaching a target. My formation is Salmon number one, Omri Hoffman two, Jacob Agassi three. I’m number four.

  Suddenly Ran comes on the air. He tells us his formation has hit the base and wiped it out. Forget Gardaka. Call the GCI.

  You’re going to Amman.

  Amman? This is big news—it means Jordan has entered the war.

  But we have no maps to Amman. We’ve studied the base. We know it by heart. But Amman is not on the Moked target sheet. The only fields we have maps for are Egyptian. We have nothing for Jordan.

  “Two, have you got a map? Three? Four?”

  Nothing.

  We’re blank.

  Wait! Our survival maps.

  I dig mine out from the survival kit under the ejection seat. The booklet is in a waterproof wrapper. On the cover is an illustration that includes Eilat and Amman. We’re over Eilat now.

  “One, this is four. I’ve got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “I see Amman on the survival map.”

  Ran Ronen:

  This is why you as squadron commander must put so much thought into the composition of a four-ship formation. It’s not just chemistry. Each player must complement the others. He must fill gaps.

  Shmul is number four in Salmon’s formation. Four sounds like the least important, the last car in the train. But four has its special role. Everything is in front of him; he can see the whole formation. This gives number four a unique perspective. He is the backstop.

  So when numbers one, two, and three are all saying they’ve got no chart to Amman, it’s Shmul in the caboose who remembers the survival map.

  Menahem Shmul:

  The genius of Moked is that it is modular. We attack like wolves, meaning we know the pattern, we know the sequence. The alpha wolf only has
to tilt his tail and every beast in the pack knows what to do.

  The basic pattern is bomb, strafe, strafe, strafe. Come in low, pull to six thousand, put your bombs on the runway, then go after the parked planes, three passes in a 270-degree cloverleaf pattern. Sha’yish is left-right-left. Yishai is right-left-right.

  Salmon calls yishai and in we go, attacking Amman. The elite warplanes of the Royal Jordanian Air Force are Hawker Hunters—British built, fast, very maneuverable. They have just returned from strikes against Israel. They are parked like ducks in a row, being refueled and rearmed.

  Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Agassi, left, and Lieutenant Menahem Shmul, June 8, 1967.

  Courtesy of Jacob Agassi and Menahem Shmul.

  When you strafe, you come in fast, with the afterburner if you need it. This is what keeps you safe from triple-A. Start shooting at 900 meters. The distance goes by fast at 550 knots. Aim low so you can see the bullets strike. Walk them up over the parked planes. On the first pass, note your targets for the second. The 30-millimeter cannon does not have a high rate of fire, but the bullets are big. They do the job. Every wolf gets his share.

  I am not literally thinking about my father. In the moment there is no time. But under every pass sits the knowledge that I am attacking the people who murdered him ten days before I was born. I have waited my whole life for this.

  Three days from now, Jordan’s King Hussein will appear on television in a news conference, fighting back tears as he speaks of his beloved Hawker Hunters being massacred on the ground. I will think, I wish you had more Hunters, Hussein, so we could have massacred more of them.

  I am here to kill everybody.

  Landing back at Tel Nof, I don’t want to waste even a minute to debrief. “Give me the next mission? Let’s go! Darkness is coming!”

  Giora Romm:

  Each time we land to refuel and rearm, the briefings get shorter. We are told the target field, that’s enough. Besides, the missions keep changing. By now every pilot knows how successful the first attacks have been. We have destroyed 198 Egyptian planes in the first wave, 101 more in the second. Eight Israeli squadrons have hit seventeen Egyptian bases. Incredible. But the more we get, the more we want.

  Jordan has joined the war now. Our planes have wiped out her two primary fields, Amman and Mafraq. At Amman we destroyed every single plane. One of our Mystères even made two passes on King Hussein’s office, the first with rockets, the second with guns. Fortunately for Hussein, he was not there. At Mafraq, the only building left standing was the mess hall. I was patrolling the Sinai border through all this, a total waste of time that left me so furious and frustrated I was shaking.

  Finally in the afternoon: a bombing mission! To Syria. Now she too has entered the war. Ran is supposed to lead our formation, but he gets called out of his cockpit at the last moment by air force chief Motti Hod. We won’t learn why till later. It seems a number of MiGs have survived this morning’s attacks on Egypt’s military fields; they have escaped to Cairo International, the capital’s civilian airport, and are hiding now under the wings of commercial airliners. Only Ran has a cool enough head to be entrusted to nail the MiGs without touching the civilian jets.

  (Which he does, by the way.)

  But our formation has lost him as its leader. Ran’s second deputy, Eitan Karmi—my leader from the first sortie this morning—takes over. Our formation is Karmi number one, Asher Snir two, Layzik Prigat three, and me four. Our target is a field called T-4 in Syria.

  T-4 is at the fourth station along the Tapline oil pipeline, near a city called Tadmour. We must cross all of Jordan to get there.

  The idea that suddenly you can fly all over the Middle East—this is great! I cannot get enough of it.

  Menahem Shmul:

  The third mission is briefed to be Cairo West. But as we’re on our way to the planes, the tower changes the target to a base called Saikal in Syria. We know the place. It’s not far over the border, so no fuel problems. Oded Sagee is number one, Reuven Rozen two, Udi Shelach three. I’m always number four because I’m the youngest.

  But between Gedera and the Sea of Galilee, the controller comes on the air with a second target change: We’re rerouted to T-4.

  This is a mystery field to us. We haven’t briefed on it. We have no maps. We don’t know where it is, except that it’s a long way. Plus we’re flying right on the deck to avoid detection by Syrian radar, so we can’t navigate by landmarks. We need headings. Meanwhile, our number two, Reuven Rozen, has had to drop out because his afterburner won’t light. Now there are only three of us.

  Where the hell are we going? This is serious.

  Suddenly I remember that there’s another four-ship from our squadron with orders to attack T-4. I chanced to hear them talking when we were on the way to the planes. Ran was supposed to lead this formation, but he got called away to a more sensitive mission. Karmi has taken over, with Asher, Giora, and Prigat.

  They’re ahead of us.

  They can tell us where to go.

  I inform my leader, who has not heard about this. I take my plane up to 10,000 feet, alone, to get line-of-sight radio reception. I’m thinking: T-4, man! Syria, Jordan, everybody is getting into this war!

  I raise Karmi, commanding the other four-ship formation, who tells me to get to Beit She’an, take such-and-such heading to Sheikh Maskin; he gives me two more headings and minutes on each. I scribble it all and drop back down to my formation.

  We’re over Syria now, 420 knots, at what the books call zero altitude but is actually about 100 feet. You see camels, gazelles, Bedouin camps; the landscape is an ancient volcanic plateau. Austere, raw, magnificent. It’s beautiful to be up here seeing this.

  Smoke ahead. Our target: T-4. We can hear over the radio Karmi’s formation attacking the field. Karmi, Giora, Prigat, and Snir. I know three of them, if not all four, are demons for dogfighting. They are doing their patterns and they start to talk about MiGs. MiGs are chasing them and they are chasing MiGs.

  Giora Romm:

  I hear the call come in from Shmul. Shmul is a wild man, very smart, an animal in any kind of fight. Give him credit: It took tremendous presence of mind, when his formation got the change-order to attack T-4, to remember that another four-ship from Squadron 119 was heading to that same target—and to radio ahead to get the routing.

  So now we know four Mirages from our squadron are behind us. This is good and bad. Good because it means together we will give T-4 a real pasting. Bad because now there is more competition for killing MiGs.

  Since Karmi stole that MiG-21 from me this morning at Abu Suweir, I have resolved that such an outrage will never happen again. I will not give away my candy. Now over T-4 we see three or four MiGs loitering but in a nonthreatening posture, so we ignore them and go into the attack. I have made up my mind that I am going to make all three strafing passes no matter what. Asher Snir can’t wait. As soon as the bombing pass is finished, he flies the coop and starts fighting with a MiG. Prigat and I come out of the third strafing pass with a MiG-21 behind us. Now I have two problems. One, to shoot down the MiG; two, to make sure that no one else gets him before I can. I tell Prigat, “There’s a MiG behind you—break!” I drop my fuel tanks and turn after the MiG.

  Suddenly Shmul and his formation appear. They are only three, not four. Shmul is an incredibly courageous flier. He later became a famous test pilot. He sees the MiG, pulls his nose out of the bombing run, puts his pipper on the MiG in a very sloppy way, and fires a burst. At this instant, his engine goes out!

  He’s got a compressor stall.

  I say to myself, Shmul is a POW. He has lost all power, and the geometry is such that the MiG is now behind him. He will get Shmul on a plate. The MiG looks at Shmul and shoots at him in a very unprofessional manner. I’m thinking, What a bunch of schmucks!

  Shmul is shouting over the air that he has a compressor
stall, the MiG is shooting at him, and I’m coming back on the MiG and I get him in the first burst. But he doesn’t explode. Maybe I didn’t hit the fuel tank. Smoke is pouring from the MiG; he’s dropping fast and starting to spin. I’m following him down because in all the Battle of Britain books that I read as a kid, you don’t get credit for a kill unless you see the plane hit the ground. Meanwhile, Shmul has gotten his engine restarted. My MiG plows into the dirt east of the runway. Shmul is now going into his interrupted bombing run. He’s okay, he says. He is back in business.

  Menahem Shmul:

  We’re in the attack, very low, just starting to pull, when here comes a MiG-21 directly above. He doesn’t see us. I decide to go after him. My afterburner is on, I line the MiG up and pull the trigger, but my sights are still on air-to-ground for the bombing run. The MiG keeps flying, but I don’t. My engine stalls and shuts down.

  The Mirage engine is notoriously prone to compressor stalls under certain conditions and I have put my plane in exactly that position, not to mention failing to switch my sights from air-to-ground to air-to-air. This is the first MiG I have seen in my gunsight and I’m so excited, I am fucking up big time. (To my relief, after I land, the engine’s fuel control will be found to be faulty.)

  Under my fuselage are two 500-kilogram bombs and two tanks of fuel; I’m 450 kilometers from home, over the Syrian desert, and I have no engine. In emergency moments you always go to the basics. Over the radio I report: “Number four, lost engine.” Silence for a moment. Then Karmi comes on: “So relight it.”

  I’m trying! I jettison my tanks, punching the button wildly. I’m in a dive, 90 degrees to the ground, when the engine relights and my heart starts beating again. I have to go very low to gain speed, so that now I’m north of the target, by myself. Sagee and Shelach are attacking. Giora takes the MiG behind me (there are two) and Asher Snir, a little later, shoots down the other. These are the first MiGs that I’ve seen in my life.