Another Kfir and four reconnaissance Phantoms, which possessed a strike capability, also launched that evening. The night was clear, not requiring infrared goggles for the pilots. Since the Israelis were intimately familiar with the geography surrounding their borders, navigation was not difficult.
Ran penetrated Saudi airspace at low level. Rarely topping 500 feet, he streaked along the desert at 400 knots, navigating mostly by dead reckoning. As he approached his target he would accelerate more. The trick was a fast run-one pass in and out.
On the centerline was a special-purpose bomb cradle weighing 70 pounds. The silver-and-orange weapon it carried weighed 760 pounds, measuring nearly twelve feet long and thirteen inches in diameter. Ran, always a methodical pilot, rechecked his precombat list. There had been no opposition thus far, and he had heard nothing from his two F-15s. So far, so good.
Ran's gloved hand engaged the master armament switch, then checked the settings marked FUSING and YIELD. The indicators showed IMPACT and 400, respectively. The latter was adjustable from 100 to 500. The automatic release sequence was timed so the intervalometer would induce weapon separation in a few seconds after pitch-up from the 3,000-foot desert floor.
When his elapsed time showed five minutes remaining to target, Ran pushed his throttle to the stop, selecting afterburner. In minutes he was making nearly Mach 1. Despite the speed and altitude, he felt calm and controlled in the dim red light of his cockpit. He had practiced for this mission many times. But one aspect was different. When the operations order came through listing the two Kfir targets, Ran had exercised his rank. He wanted this sortie for himself, and relegated the adjacent assignment to the captain selected for the mission.
A crisp call came through Ran's headset. 'Jehovah Four, Eagle Seven. All clear. Will meet you as briefed. Out.' Ran keyed his mike twice in acknowledgment. The F-15s would withdraw along an alternate route to avoid retracing the ingress. If all worked as planned, the three jets would rendezvous along a course back toward the Red Sea. David Ran was now on his own.
John Bennett stood immobile atop his command post. Another missile lifted off, then another. Three launches in a few seconds. There had been no advance warning. He wondered if it was a jittery antiaircraft unit. He decided to stay and watch a little longer. Airbase defense was the realm of the Saudi lieutenant colonel.
To his right, at about two o'clock, David Ran was startled by the ignition of a rocket booster some twenty miles away. He watched the tail of the SAM as it arced high into the dark sky, then began to turn and come down toward him. He glanced at his electronics panel and noted his RHAWand ECM gear were activated. Then he saw two more missiles rise from the dark and follow the trajectory of the first.
The French-designed countermeasures package in the Kfir worked on two independent but related strategies. It attempted to deceive the SAMs' radar guidance, while affecting the fusing of the missile warhead by electronically picturing the target aircraft as closer than it actually was. The black box picked up the radar tracking signals and in milliseconds fed them back to the Saudi fire-control radar. The Israeli watched the missile arcing down and, when the red light pulsed on his warning panel, he started a hard right climbing turn into the missile. He wrapped up the delta-winged bomber in a high-G barrel roll to the right. Completing the roll over the top, he saw the SAM explode harmlessly beyond a range of 350 feet.
Though his night vision was degraded by the blast, Ran resumed his high-speed dash toward the target. The second missile passed well behind him, and he evaded the third with a less violent maneuver.
Two miles out, David Ran yanked back on his control stick and arced the Kfir into a zoom climb. Pulling into the pure vertical, he held that attitude momentarily. He felt the lurch of weapon separation, then continued the arcing pull-up until he was inverted.
Topping out of his four-mile-high Immelmann, Ran pulled the nose down through the horizon before rolling right-side up and diving away to the north.
The Israeli's aiming point was midway between Ha'il's two runways, 800 yards apart. The Kfir pilot knew from long practice that he had made a good release, and he was confident the weapon would land within 200 yards of either runway.
Bennett sensed more than saw the jet describe its startling pull-up and arc over the top. He picked up the tiny fast-moving mote of light which was the American-built]79 engine in afterburner.
Involuntarily, he shivered and wrapped his arms about himself.
The dream came rushing back-the elevated platform, the jet exhaust in the night sky, the bomb which must now be on its way. He knew to a mortal certainty that the fast jet now diving away to the northwest was a delta wing.
He sat down and waited.
The bomb, released at 530 miles per hour, immediately deployed its Kevlar drogue chute and two seconds later was drifting downward at 35 miles per hour. From release it would take almost six minutes to reach the ground. By that time the Kfir's headlong plunge would take David Ran 60 miles away.
The Israeli weapon was similar to the American B61 Mod 5, with a permissive action link safety system. All models of this type are one-point safe, meaning that in an accidental detonation in its high-explosive components, the probability of a yield greater than four pounds of TNT is not over one in one million.
Though the bomb weighed over 700 pounds, it contained less HE than an eight-inch artillery shell. Its nose shrouded a package of electronic safety, arming and fusing devices. In the middle of the casing stood two geometric solids-a sphere and a cylinder-composed of the lightest and heaviest elements in the universe. Their architecture resembled a fifty-pound globe on an eighty-pound pedestal, the cylinder resting in a plastic foam structure and the sphere covered with wires.
Bennett sat with his arms folded about his knees. He had time to think of the course of his life, and he was glad of that. One of his friends, a Marine lieutenant colonel, had said that dying should be neither too fast nor too slow. Now Bennett knew what the officer meant. One wanted time to ponder it-but not too much time.
He had been sitting in this same posture that wonderful day at Jacksonville Naval Air Station the first time he saw a Navy airplane up close. His uncle, recently returned from combat, had taken the ten-year-old enthusiast out to the flight line to watch pilots practice carrier landings. The hour that young John Bennett sat alongside the runway, legs drawn up to his chest, had passed like seconds.
But the mold had been formed. John Bennett followed his idol into naval aviation and seldom had cause to regret the choice. It had been a wonderful career, with all but two of twenty years spent in the cockpit. That seldom was possible anymore. Bennett reflected on his carrier deployments-the Mediterranean cruises with fabulous liberty ports, and even his four combat tours in the Tonkin Gulf. Vietnam had been fraught with pain and frustration, but combat flying had its own challenges and rewards as well.
Bennett remembered his backseat ride in Dave Edmonds's Phantom. Dave had been one of the aggressive, experienced F-8 pilots transitioned to F-4s to impart air combat knowledge to the Phantom community. After an extremely low practice mission, Bennett had climbed from the rear seat on unsteady legs. ''That was just a might low, Dave. If an engine had coughed we'd be dead.'
His friend had shrugged fatalistically. 'Beats the hell out of cancer.'
The fusion weapon drifted·downward. In another three minutes its electronic fuse circuit would close on
