On this morning, activity at Beersheba was frantic. Reserve personnel were still streaming into the base from the previous day’s devotions and family-visiting all over the small country. Those men on duty had been so for too long a time for the tricky job of arming aircraft
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with lethal ordnance. Even the newly-arriving men had had precious little sleep. One team of ordnancemen, for security reasons not told the nature of their task, was arming a flight of A-4 Skyhawk strike-fighters with nuclear weapons under the eyes of two officers, known as ‘watchers,’ for that was their job, to keep visual track of everything that had to do with nuclear weapons. The bombs were wheeled under the center-line hardpoint of each of the four aircraft, lifted carefully by the hoisting arm, then shackled into place. The least exhausted of the groundcrew might have noticed that the arming devices and tail fins had not yet been attached to the bombs. If so they doubtless concluded that the officer assigned to that task was running late – as was nearly everything this cold and fateful morning. The nose of each weapon was filled with electronics gear. The actual exploder mechanism and capsule of nuclear material -collectively known as the ‘physics package’ – were already in the bombs, of course. The Israeli weapons, unlike American ones, were not designed to be carried by alert aircraft during the time of peace, and they lacked the elaborate safeguards installed in American weapons by the technicians at the Pantex assembly plant, outside Amarillo, Texas. The fusing systems comprised two packages, one for attachment to the nose, and one integral with the tail fins. These were stored separately from the bombs themselves. All in all, the weapons were very unsophisticated by American or Soviet standards, in the same sense that a pistol is far less sophisticated than a machine-gun, but, at close range, equally lethal. Once the nose and fin packages were installed and activated, the only remaining activation procedure was the installation of a special arming panel within the cockpit of each fighter, and the attachment of the power plug from the aircraft to the bomb. At that point the bomb would be ‘released to local control,’ placed in the hands of a young, aggressive pilot, whose job was then to loft it in a maneuver called The Idiot’s Loop which tossed the bomb on a ballistic path that would – probably
— allow him and his aircraft to escape without harm when the bomb detonated.
Depending on the exigencies of the moment and the authorization of the ‘watchers/ Beersheba’s senior ordnance officer had the option to attach the arming packages. Fortunately, this officer was not at all excited about the idea of having half-live ‘nukes’ sitting about on a flight line that some lucky Arab might attack at any moment. A religious man, for all the dangers that faced his country on that cold dawn, he breathed a silent prayer of thanks when cooler heads prevailed in Tel Aviv, and gave the order to stand joshua down. The senior pilots who would have flown the strike mission returned to their squadron ready-rooms and forgot what they had been briefed to do. The senior ordnance officer immediately ordered the bombs removed, and returned to their place of safe-keeping.
The bone-tired groundcrew began removing the weapons, just as the other teams arrived on their own carts for the task of rearming the Skyhawks with Zuni rocket clusters. The strike order had been put up: The Golan. Hit the Syrian armored columns advancing on the Barak’s sector of Purple Line from Kafr Shams. The ordnancemen jostled under the aircraft, two teams each trying to do their jobs, one team trying to remove bombs that they didn’t know to be bombs at all, while the other hung Zunis on the wings.
There were more than four strike aircraft cycling through Beersheba, of course. The dawn’s first mission over the Suez was just returning – what was left of it. The RF-4.C Phantom reconnaissance aircraft had been lost, and its F-4E fighter escort limped in trailing fuel from perforated wing tanks and with one of its two engines disabled. The pilot had already radioed his warning in: there was some new kind of surface-to-air missile, maybe that new SA-6; its radar-tracking systems had not registered on the Phantom’s threat-receiver; the recce bird had had no warning at all, and only luck had enabled him to evade the four targeted on his aircraft. That fact was flashed to IAF high command even before the
aircraft touched down gingerly on the runway. The plane was directed to taxi down to the far end of the ramp, close to where the Skyhawks stood. The Phantom’s pilot followed the jeep to the waiting fire-fighting vehicles, but just as it stopped, the left main tire blew out. The damaged strut collapsed as well and 45,000 pounds of fighter dropped to the pavement like dishes from a collapsed table. Leaking fuel ignited, and a small but deadly fire enveloped the aircraft. An instant later, 2omm ammunition from the fighter’s gun pod started cooking off, and one of the two crewmen was screaming within the mass of flames. Firelighters moved in with water-fog. The two ‘watcher’ officers were the closest, and raced towards the flames to drag the pilot clear. All three were peppered by fragments from the exploding ammunition, while a fireman coolly made his way through the flames to the second crewman and carried him out, singed but alive. Other firemen collected the watchers and the pilot, and loaded their bleeding bodies into an ambulance.
The nearby fire distracted the ordnancemen under the Skyhawks. One bomb, the one on aircraft number three, dropped a moment too soon, crushing the team supervisor’s legs on the hoist. In the shrieking confusion of the moment, the team lost track of what was being done. The injured man was rushed to the base hospital while the three dismounted nuclear weapons were carted back to the storage bunker – in the chaos of an airbase on the first full day of a shooting war, the empty cradle of one of the carts somehow went unnoticed. The aircraft line chiefs arrived a moment later to begin abbreviated pre-flight checks as the jeep arrived from the ready shack. Four pilots jumped off it, each with a helmet in one hand and a tactical map in the other, each furiously eager to lash out at his country’s enemies.
‘What the hell’s that?’ snapped eighteen-year-old Lieutenant Mordecai Zadin. Called Motti by his friends, he had the gangling awkwardness of his age.
‘Fuel tank, looks like,’ replied the line chief. He was
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a reservist who owned a garage in Haifa, a kindly, competent man of fifty years.
‘Shit,’ the pilot replied, almost quivering with excitement. ‘I don’t need extra fuel to go to the Golan and back!’
‘I can take it off, but I’ll need a few minutes.’ Motti considered that for a moment. A sabia from a northern kibbutz, a pilot for barely five months, he saw the rest of his comrades strapping into their aircraft. Syrians were attacking towards the home of his parents, and he had a sudden horror of being left behind on his first combat mission.
‘Fuck it! You can strip it off when I get back.’ Zadin went up the ladder like a shot. The chief followed, strapping the pilot in place, and checking the instruments over the pilot’s shoulder.
‘She’s ready, Motti! Be careful.’
‘Have some tea for me when I get back.’ The youngster grinned with all the ferocity such a child could manage. The line chief slapped him on the helmet.
‘You just bring my airplane back to me, menchkin. Mazeltov.’
The chief dropped down to the concrete, and removed the ladder. He next gave the aircraft a last visual scan for anything amiss, as Motti got his engine turning. Zadin worked the flight controls and eased the throttle to full idle, checking fuel and engine-temperature gauges. Everything was where it should be. He looked over to the flight leader and waved his readiness. Motti pulled down the manual canopy, took a last look at the line chief, and fired off his farewell salute.
At eighteen, Zadin was not a particularly young pilot by IAF standards. Selected for his quick boy’s reactions and aggressiveness, he’d been identified as a likely prospect four years earlier, and had fought hard for his place in the world’s finest air force. Motti loved to fly, had wanted to fly ever since, as a toddler, he’d seen a 61-109 training aircraft that an ironic fate had given Israel to start its air force. And he loved his Skyhawk. It was a pilot’s aircraft. Not an electronicized monster like the
Phantom, the A-4 was a small, responsive bird of prey that leaped at the twitch of his hand on the stick. Now he would fly combat. He was totally unafraid. It never occurred to him to fear for his life – like any teenager he was certain of his own immortality, and combat flyers are selected for their lack of human frailty. Yet he marked the day. Never had he seen so fine a dawn. He felt supernaturally alert, aware of everything: the rich wake-up coffee; the dusty smell of the morning air at Beersheba,- now the manly scents of oil and leather in the cockpit; the idle static on his radio circuits; and the tingle of his hands on the control stick. He had never known such a day and it never occurred to Motti Zadin that fate would not give him another.