The four-plane formation taxied in perfect order to the end of runway zero-one. It seemed a good omen, taking off due north, towards an enemy only fifteen minutes away. On command of his flight leader – himself a mere twenty-one – all four pilots pushed their throttles to the stops, tripped their brakes, and dashed forward into the cool, calm, morning air. In seconds, all were airborne and climbing to five thousand feet, careful to avoid the civilian air traffic of Ben Gurion International Airport, which in the mad scheme of life in the Middle East was still fully active.
The captain gave his usual series of terse commands, just like a training flight: tuck it in, check engine, ordnance, electrical systems. Heads up for MiGs and friend-lies. Make sure your IFF is squawking green. The fifteen minutes it took to fly from Beersheba to the Golan passed rapidly. Zadin’s eyes strained to see the volcanic escarpment for which his older brother had died while taking it from the Syrians only six years before. The Syrians would not get it back, Motti told himself.
‘Flight: turn right to heading zero-four-three. Targets are tank columns four kilometers east of the line. Heads up. Watch for SAMs and ground fire.’
‘Lead, Four: I have tanks on the ground at one,’ Zadin reported coolly. ‘Look like our Centurions.’
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‘Good eye, Four/ the captain replied. ‘They’re friendly.’
‘I got a beeper, I got launch warning*.’ someone called. Eyes scanned the air for danger.
‘SHIT!’ called an excited voice. ‘SAMs low at twelve coming up!’
‘I see them. Flight, left and right, break now!’ the captain commanded.
The four Skyhawks scattered by elements. There were a dozen SA-2 missiles several kilometers off, like flying telephone poles, coming towards them at Mach-3. The SAMs split left and right too, but clumsily, and two exploded in a mid-air collision. Motti rolled right and hauled his stick into his belly, diving for the ground and cursing the extra wing weight. Good, the missiles were not able to track them down. He pulled level a bare hundred feet above the rocks, still heading towards the Syrians at four hundred knots, shaking the sky as he roared over the cheering, beleaguered troopers of the Barak.
The mission was a washout as a coherent strike, Motti already knew. It didn’t matter. He’d get some Syrian tanks. He didn’t have to know exactly whose, so long as they were Syrian. He saw another A-4 and formed up just as it began its firing run. He looked forward and saw them, the dome shapes of Syrian T-62S. Zadin toggled his arming switches without looking. The reflector gunsight appeared in front of his eyes.
‘Uh-oh, more SAMs, coming in on the deck.’ It was the captain’s voice, still cool. Motti’s heart skipped a beat: a swarm of missiles, smaller ones – are these the SA-6s they told us about? he wondered quickly – was tracing over the rocks towards him. He checked his ESM gear; it had not sensed the attacking missiles. There was no warning beyond what his eyes told him. Instinctively, Motti clawed for altitude in which to maneuver. Four missiles followed him up. Three kilometers away. He snap-rolled right, then spiraled down and left again. That fooled three of them, but the fourth followed him down.
ii
An instant later it exploded, a bare thirty meters from his aircraft.
The Skyhawk felt as though it had been kicked aside ten meters or more. Motti struggled with the controls, getting back level just over the rocks. A quick look chilled him. Whole sections of his port wing were shredded. Warning beepers in his headset and flight instruments reported multiple disaster: hydraulics zeroing out, radio out, generator out. But he still had manual flight controls, and his weapons could fire from back-up battery power. At that instant he saw his tormentors: a battery of SA-6 missiles, four launcher vehicles, a Straight Flush radar van, and a heavy truck full of reloads, all four kilometers away. His hawk’s eyes could even see the Syrians struggling with the missiles, loading one onto a launcher rail.
They saw him, too, and then began a duel no less epic for its brevity.
Motti eased as far down as he dared with his buffeting controls and carefully centered the target in his reflector sight. He had forty-eight Zuni rockets. They fired in salvos of four. At two kilometers he opened fire into the target area. The Syrian missileers somehow managed to launch another SAM. There should have been no escape, but the SA-6 had a radar-proximity fuse, and the passing Zunis triggered it, exploding the SAM harmlessly half a kilometer away. Motti grinned savagely beneath his mask, as he fired rockets and now twenty-millimeter cannon fire into the mass of men and vehicles.
The third salvo hit, then four more, as Zadin kicked rudder to drop his rockets all over the target area. The missile battery was transformed into an inferno of diesel fuel, missile propellant, and exploding warheads. A huge fireball loomed in his path, and Motti tore through it with a feral shout of glee, his enemies obliterated, his comrades avenged.
Zadin had but a moment of triumph. Great sheets of the aluminum which made up his aircraft’s left wing were being ripped away by the four-hundred-knot slipstream. The A-4 began shuddering wildly. When Motti
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turned left for home, the wing collapsed entirely. The Skyhawk disintegrated in mid-air. It took only a few seconds before the teenaged warrior was smashed on the basaltic rocks of the Golan Heights, neither the first nor the last to die there. No other of his flight of four survived.
Of the SAM battery, almost nothing was left. All six vehicles had been blasted to fragments. Of the ninety men who had manned them, the largest piece recovered was the headless torso of the battery commander. Both he and Zadin had served their countries well, but as is too often the case, conduct which in another time or place might have inspired the heroic verse of a Virgil or a Tennyson went unseen and unknown. Three days later, Zadin’s mother received the news by telegram, learning again that all Israel shared her grief, as if such a thing were possible for a woman who had lost two sons.
But the lingering footnote to this bit of unreported history was that the unarmed bomb broke loose from the disintegrating fighter and proceeded yet further eastward, falling far from the fighter-bomber’s wreckage to bury itself meters from the home of a Druse farmer. It was not until three days later that the Israelis discovered that their bomb was missing, and not until the day after the October War ended that they were able to reconstruct the details of its loss. This left the Israelis with a problem insoluble even to their imaginations. The bomb was somewhere behind Syrian lines – but where? Which of the four aircraft had carried it? Where had it gone down? They could hardly ask the Syrians to search for it. And could they tell the Americans, from whom the ‘special nuclear material’ had been adroitly and deniably obtained?
And so the bomb lay unknown, except to the Druse farmer who simply covered it over with two meters of dirt and continued to farm his rocky patch.
CHAPTER 1
The Longest Journey
Arnold van Damm sprawled back in his executive swivel chair with all the elegance of a rag doll tossed into a corner. Jack had never seen him wear a coat except in the presence of the President, and not always then. At formal affairs that required black tie, Ryan wondered if Arnie needed a Secret Service agent standing by with a gun. The tie was loose in the unbuttoned collar, and he wondered if it had ever been tightly knotted. The sleeves on Arnie’s L. L. Bean blue-striped shirt were rolled up, and grimy at the elbows because he usually read documents with his forearms planted on the chronically cluttered desk. But not when speaking to someone. For important conversations, the man leaned back, resting his feet on a desk drawer. Barely fifty, van Damm had thinning gray hair and a face as lined and care-worn as an old map, but his pale blue eyes were always alert, and his mind keenly aware of everything that went on within or beyond his sight. It was a quality that went along with being the President’s Chief of Staff.
He poured his Diet Coke into an oversized coffee mug that featured an emblem of the White House on one side and ‘Arnie’ engraved on the other, and regarded the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence with a mixture of wariness and affection. ‘Thirsty?’
‘I can handle a real Coke if you have one down there,’ Jack observed with a grin. Van Damm’s left hand dropped below sight, and a red aluminum can appeared on a ballistic path that would have terminated in Ryan’s lap had he not caught it. Opening the can under the circumstances was a tricky exercise, but Jack ostentatiously