while. They were good-natured kids, educated and well mannered and not scary at all, but meanwhile they turned me around and stopped my progress home. My fuel kept going down and down, while I crawled turn after turn through the endless Wadi El-Khafayer, among the shallow, barren hills, and no Red Sea appeared.
Once I lost airspeed completely and had to open the throttle to stay airborne. There I lost all hope of a landing anywhere. I pulled the gunsight camera from its chassis and hid it in my flight suit, on my chest. Let this proof of victory be some compensation for the Fighting First’s Mirage No. 33 that I was about to foolishly destroy.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I learned a dictum from my mother: “all inside.” In times of personal distress I whispered this incantation and fortified myself with it. And here in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, when I was sinking into despair and losing my fighting spirit, this mantra returned to me with a slight variation, but a huge change of meaning. I heard it as if somebody were saying it in my cockpit, clearly and calmly. The words were: “from inside.”
“From inside.” Just a change of one word—in Hebrew it’s a change of one letter—but it sounded in my consciousness like a bell and energized my thinking on the spot. From inside, namely listen up, Iftach Spector, it’s all in you; all depends on you. The question is only how worthy you are. This short phrase saved me then and was to support me in difficult times to come. To this day I teach it to my children till they complain, “Come on, Dad, enough with this proverb of yours.”
I saw no mysticism in this discovery. Like a great teacher I had, Benny Peled, I never had any inclination to mysticism. All I believe is that in the cacophony of the many voices that thrashed about in my overworked mind during my predicament, the healthy and balanced one won out. This voice was always there. The real miracle, and my luck, lay in the fact that this voice knew not to shout and prate, but narrowed its message down to two simple words that silenced everything else and sent me back to my struggle. And still I wonder why this happened there in Wadi El-Khafayer; how those two words were formed just then, not before and not after, but just at the right moment, and directed me there as they did in hard times that came later.
And so, instead of opening full throttle to accelerate and escape from this trap—and be dead meat in a few kilometers—I recouped my patience and continued to walk a tightrope, watching not the horizon but the next turn of the wadi, shutting off my engine and evading the MiGs’ attacks at the rim of the wadi. I used every wrinkle in the ground ahead, and once or twice hills rose up to knock me down but missed. So I slid one kilometer ahead, and then another, and suddenly the horizon lit blue between two hills and a blinding ribbon of sharp blue appeared: the Red Sea.
The wadi descended, and I accelerated. An Egyptian antiaircraft base at the estuary sent long bursts of fire in my direction. I turned south and wafted out to sea. There, over the water, I looked back again, and lo and behold, nobody was there! My pursuers had abandoned the chase and gone home.
Oh, how I gained altitude! I gulped altitude like a man dying of thirst who finds a river and sticks his head in it. A thousand feet and another thousand feet, and Egypt fell farther behind, and the mountains of Sinai appeared in front, still twenty kilometers away beyond the purple-blue surface of the Bay of Suez, the Red Sea. But I kept myself in check; I still had to find a place to land. The fuel indicator was already kissing the empty mark. So again I restrained myself. I didn’t bolt, but continued my climb at a low, optimized speed, saving every liter.
WHEN I REACHED FIVE THOUSAND feet, radio communication, which hadn’t worked during the duration of the low-level chase, became available again.
“Control, this is Armchair Two.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Give me data on landing strips on the Sinai coast. Urgent.”
“Armchair Two?” I heard the surprise and relief in his voice. “Right away, immediately! Roger!”
But I was not relieved. At an altitude of twenty thousand feet my fuel indicator became rooted to the bottom of the gauge. I stopped climbing, reduced power to a minimum, and began cruising horizontally. I tried to fly as perfectly as possible, not moving any control surface, to minimize drag. I kept counting the passing seconds. Every second meant another 125 meters east.
Zero fuel. The little fuel pressure light began to flicker. I didn’t know where the fuel that fed my engine was coming from, but the engine continued to sing its impossible music.
“Armchair Two, come in.”
“Armchair Two, go ahead.”
“Your only available field is Abu Rudeis. Do you copy?”
“Copy that, control.”
I pulled out a map and located Abu Rudeis. Then, scanning the landscape, I decided that it had to be somewhere on that line of sand below that distant high, black mountain to the south, beyond this terrible sea. Then the details came in: Abu Rudeis was a single asphalt strip, 1,500 meters in length. Fit for light aviation, not for jet fighters with a landing speed of 165 knots (300 kilometers) per hour. Oh, shit.
And as if sensing my hesitation, the whining sound of the falling engine revolutions meant that my engine gave up and died. The air pressure in the cockpit fell. I lowered the nose and began to glide down the slope. I had twenty thousand feet to descend, and under me passed the bewitching, frighteningly beautiful surface of the Red Sea, its depths covered with a dark blue curtain. No pilot who ditched there had ever come out alive. Not even their bodies were ever found. This was the sea that had already swallowed up Aki, Dovik, Raz, and Khagay.
And then another call: “On the landing strip at Abu Rudeis,” said the controller, “strong northwesterly winds, twenty-five knots.”
I was coming in from the northwest, too, and I understood—this strong tailwind was pushing me forward, helping me to reach the strip. But if I did arrive at Abu-Rudeis and came in to land, the tailwind would add to my landing speed. At 190 knots only God would be able to stop me in just 1,500 meters. I knew if I couldn’t stop we would go off the end of the runway into the soft sand. My Mirage would flip over. And even if I was not in pieces by then, there was nobody at Abu Rudeis to pull me out of the wreck.
The nose of my Mirage didn’t like this plan. It kept trying hard to turn left and take me to the nearest beach. There was no place to land there, but the sand was white, soft, and nice, and I could punch out over there and parachute safely to the ground. And I really wanted to let my Mirage take command and take me there. But somehow something in me was already committed to Abu Rudeis. I already knew that all comes from inside, and that part of me was being tested again. So I forced myself to point the nose at that black mountain in the distance, and we continued gliding toward it, crossing the sea in a long, diagonal line. I knew that if we ran out of altitude halfway, I would have to bail out low into this terrible beautiful water with all the disgusting creatures swarming there, waiting. And so, with chills along my spine, I continued to glide, losing a thousand feet and then another.
My hands were shaking but my Mirage had turned into a glider. We floated silently in a blue space, out of this world, and I felt the plane’s body getting cold. Down and down, and to my amazement—not my relief—it gradually became clear that the tailwind was really pushing us. The mountain came closer and closer. Gradually, yellowing sand hills appeared at its foot. And then I saw a comma among the dunes. The comma grew, and a whitish strip materialized, dreadfully short and narrow. But the wind worked in my favor, and the closer I approached, the steeper the glide angle became. At five thousand feet I had to make my final decision, whether to go for this landing, or turn left and bail out safely on the beach nearby. I lowered my landing gear, and this was it.
“We’ll make it and land safely,” I told my Mirage. “We just have to brake successfully.”
“All from inside,” it answered me, and I understood. It was just a Mirage, a speedy metal missile that couldn’t possibly stop in 1,500 meters with a strong tailwind. The solution had to come from me, from inside.
And I found it inside, too, the last answer to the last puzzle of this hard, spectacular morning. I told myself to imagine my touchdown point way before the real beginning of the paved runway. I flew my aircraft as if we were to touch down on the coastline, several hundred meters before the actual landing point, and I forced myself to descend between lines of foaming surf. It was weird, and I had to convince us both that that was where we would really touch down.
“And when we get there,” I silently told my ship at the last moment, “all we have to do is stay airborne just a bit more, a few hundred meters more, avoiding those white sands.” No fighter aircraft flies this way. But this was the only way we could get to the beginning of the tarmac almost “standing on our tail.”
