Chapter 63
IDF AIR BASE, ISRAEL
Strictly speaking, the action wasn’t part of the official preflight sequence, but Yossi liked to get a feel for his jet before strapping himself into the fighter.
The nimble little plane flew like a rocket ship with wings, but each aircraft had its own personality.
For this flight, Yossi had requested and received permission to fly the Barak with his name stenciled below the canopy.
To his shock, the crotchety old colonel agreed.
Then again, maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised.
Even death row prisoners had the right to request a final meal.
“Cohen! You gonna stroke that jet or fly it?”
Yossi turned toward the speaker as a smile pulled at the corner of his lips.
Raising his right hand, he extended his middle finger toward his best friend, Grover.
Though the Israeli Air Force had much in common with their US counterparts, there were also some distinct differences.
For instance, their F-16s were known as the Barak instead of the Viper, while their F-15s were called the Baz rather than the Eagle.
These differences also extended to a pilot’s call sign.
While the American Air Force employed Hollywood-style call signs like Duke or Pom Pom, Israelis tended to call each other by their surnames.
When call signs were given, it was usually for something embarrassing the recipient had once done.
In most cases, the mistake was temporary and long forgotten, but the resulting call sign was eternal.
Case in point, Yossi had no idea why the sandy-haired aviator standing in front of his F-15 was known as Grover, but that would be the man’s name for the rest of his life.
Grover hated his call sign, but this was the point.
Call sign aside, it was what Grover could do behind the controls of his air superiority fighter that truly made him a legend.
During the Yom Kippur War, Grover was credited with three shoot-downs and an additional two possibles that hadn’t been verified by his aircraft’s gun tape.
Yossi was hopeful that the air-to-air Python missiles hanging from the hardpoints on Grover’s fighter wouldn’t have to be fired, but if enemy aircraft did take to the skies, he was glad that his friend would be leading the section of F-15s tasked to deal with them.
After a final wave to Grover, Yossi crouched below his Barak’s belly and inventoried the payload.
The aircraft’s hardpoints were, in a word, cluttered.
In addition to the standard pair of AIM-9L Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, Yossi’s fighter carried two jettisonable external fuel tanks.
These drop tanks would allow his fuel-guzzling jet to transit the six hundred–plus miles to Iraq and back without the need for aerial refueling, but it was the ordnance hanging adjacent to the tanks to which he paid the most attention.
The munition on the right side of his jet was a one-thousand-pound Mark 83 “dumb bomb” that had been transformed into a laser-guided weapon thanks to an Israeli-manufactured Griffin conversion kit.
With the addition of a seeker head attached to the bomb’s nose and articulating tail fins mounted to the bomb’s rear, the ordnance could now fly a trajectory dictated by the laser incorporated into the Litening targeting pod carried by Yossi’s Barak.
In essence, he could now hit a moving target from altitude while traveling at four hundred miles per hour.
The second munition also featured a Griffin conversion kit, but unlike the Mark 83 bomb, it did not contain conventional high explosives.
Instead, the unassuming gray exterior concealed a potent mixture of kerosene and white phosphorus.
Israeli weapons effects specialists had spent hours debating the most efficient way to destroy the Iraqi convoy’s chemical weapons while keeping the ensuing contamination to a minimum.
As with the strike against Iraq’s nuclear reactor more than a decade earlier, these requirements were in conflict.
Ensuring the complete destruction of the various munitions and chemical precursors meant violently rupturing the devices with high explosives, which in turn led to a higher likelihood that dangerous agents would be propelled into the atmosphere.
This increased the odds that the chemical agents would drift over populated areas and kill innocent Iraqis.
While the prime minister had assured the commander of the Israeli Air Force that he was prepared to stand behind his pilots if the operation went wrong, the PM also wanted to limit the contamination as much as possible.
As with most things Israeli, a compromise was reached between the squabbling parties.
The strike against the convoy would use two munitions—high explosives to rupture and detonate the containers and munitions followed by incendiary bombs to incinerate the chemical agents before the poison could spread.
The defense minister referred to the strike as a double tap and now that terminology had been adopted as the mission’s formal name.
Operation Double Tap. While Grover and his flight of six F-15s kept the sky clear of enemy aircraft, Yossi and his strike package of four Baraks would reduce the convoy to a raging inferno.
At least that was the plan.
After spending half his life in his nation’s military, Yossi knew that no operation unfolded exactly as planned.
As his American counterparts were fond of saying, the enemy had a vote.
In this operation, the term enemy extended well beyond just the Iraqi intelligence officers and Republican Guard charged with providing security for the convoy or even their military comrades manning the air defense sites or crewing Iraq’s much diminished but still lethal fleet of Russian- and French-built jet fighters.
The extreme distance the Israeli strike package had to traverse, the possibility of sandstorms or other inclement weather, and the environmental conditions along the convoy’s route were all factors that had to be mitigated.
This was to say nothing of the Saudi and Jordanian militaries that would not respond favorably to a flight of Israeli fighters transiting their airspace if the strike package was detected.
Operation Double Tap was not a suicide mission, but neither was it a simple bombing strike against Hezbollah militants in Lebanon or Hamas jihadis in Gaza.
Double Tap was the sort of operation that would strike fear into the hearts of Israel’s enemies everywhere if it was successful.
If it failed, Double Tap would serve as a recruiting campaign for more Islamic radicals in Syria, Iran, and beyond.
The stakes were higher than any Yossi had ever experienced.
Flipping Grover the bird showcased the expected fighter pilot bravado, but Yossi’s stomach was in knots.
Even if the mission was successful, there was a good chance that the explosions would alert the enemy to their presence and the strike package would have to fight its way back to Israel.
There was a very real possibility that the embrace he’d shared with his wife this morning might be their last.
But Yossi had never entertained the idea of not flying.
Risks to his safety he could tolerate, but the notion that the homicidal regime in Damascus would be allowed to acquire the means to visit death upon his wife and daughter was too much.
Yossi would gladly trade his life for theirs if that’s what it took to give little Dani a chance to grow up.
With practiced motions Yossi removed the arming pins with their red fluttering “Remove Before Flight” tags from the ordnance hanging beneath the Barak.
Then he climbed up the ladder to the cockpit, settled into the reclined seat, and strapped into his aircraft.
It was time to go to war.