looked like a small, round dot, black on the burning background of red and yellow. My face heated up under the visor.
“One, you’re clean—I am clean.” That was Yaari, a good man to have on your wing.
I overtook the last one. Air brakes out just for a second—a hard buffet and my Mirage stood on her head like a horse about to take a hurdle, but soon calmed down again. I had equalized my speed with the target. For a second I sat behind the MiG in close formation, just three hundred meters away. We both were almost touching the water flying at extremely high speed, more than six hundred knots; from the corners of my eyes I felt the water streaming past me like mad, as though I were on the deck of a very, very fast speedboat, sitting high in my seat, my ass above the streaming surface below. To aim right I had to get down an extra two to three meters below my target. So I did it very slowly and gently—I held myself down, led my gun-sight pip into the center of the jet pipe in front of me, and fixed it on the yellow eye of his afterburner’s flame. Carefully, I aimed.
A caress of the trigger. My cannons roared. A hit! Something broke off the MiG and flew toward me, rolling, passed near, and was lost behind. The MiG descended just a bit and touched the water. A big jet of spray, and he took off again with rocking wings, came down and touched again, and continued bouncing like a stone. As I pulled up he disintegrated beneath me. Some fire. No ejection. I looked up. There was the other MiG farther ahead, continuing his flight west.
“Number two, the other one is yours.” I pulled up and passed over Yaari’s plane to the other side and set myself in a defensive formation. My eyes scanned the surrounding area, and right away I saw another section of MiG-17s. They approached from the north, at an acute angle to our heading. They were still far away, and we were much too fast for them, but suddenly one of them fired in our general direction. Flickers and flashes came out of his nose.
“Come on, Hassan,” I muttered, “don’t waste your time.”
We continued at extremely high speed westward, still shaving the marshes.
“Two, you’re clean,” I informed Yaari. No use bothering him with those new MiGs; let him concentrate on the kill. We would deal with these two later, on the way back.
A LARGE FLARE BROKE OUT on Yaari’s wing. For a moment I was stunned. I even thought I had made a mistake—could it be that Hassan had hit him? But then I understood. Yaari had decided to launch a Dagger at the MiG in front of him. What? Was it possible that the Dagger’s sensor could pick up the target engine against this hot background at such a long distance?
“Wow,” I thought, “the older missiles could never do it.” I didn’t even think of trying it myself.
I waited to see how the first launch of a Dagger from a Mirage would play out. I waited and waited, but no missile launched from Yaari’s plane. What was going on here? Fire continued to flare beneath Yaari’s wing; something nasty was developing.
“Number two,” I ordered, “you are on fire. Turn back immediately!”
Yaari obeyed and turned hard to the east. I followed to escort him. But as I began my turn, my windshield passed over that distant MiG. My gunsight traversed it, and instantly my Dagger announced a lock-on, humming loud and clear in my earphones. My finger acted on its own, and the missile launched and flew ahead on a large plume of flame. I stopped my turn and watched, spellbound. The MiG and my Dagger raced ahead, the white trail of the missile curling and then going down and uniting with the MiG. A short crack and a large bonfire flared out and smeared the wet, green surface of the Nile delta. Oh, yeah.
Instantly I returned to my sharp turn east, but now I didn’t see Yaari. We were flying so fast in opposite directions that we must be many kilometers away from each other. I slapped my brow with an open palm. How could I let myself lose Yaari in this smoggy air! And him with a fire on his wing. To add to my worry, he didn’t answer my radio calls. I slapped myself again, even harder: a separation. And my fault!
And so I raced east, looking for some sign of Yaari, my heart thumping heavily. On our super-fast chase west we had gone deep into Egypt, some thirty kilometers or more, and the minutes on the way back seemed long.
AND AS IN A CHILD’S GAME, all the signs left behind appeared again. First the two MiG-17s reappeared, with my friend Hassan the shooter in the lead. For a moment I was almost lured into a little action with them, with my second Dagger. But I passed through their formation like the wind and let them fade into oblivion.
Then came the fire on the marsh: smoke and a large ellipse of wreckage, here and there some small tongues of scattered fires. I lowered a wing to make sure, and no, this was not Mirage wreckage. I passed over the junkyard and continued east to Sinai. Next came the water mirrors, and now with the sun at my back, their light was dimmed, and the wide, muddy expanses with the many white sails. The marshes ended and the sand dunes came, and then, at full speed, I finally pulled up and crossed the canal. Passing under me I saw the outpost of Fortress Alon. A thin thread of smoke still rose from it, a reminder of the bombs the MiGs dropped. Amazing how fast it had been. Such a short time!
Only when I approached Refidim and communication was renewed did I find Yaari. He was on his final landing approach, his wing black with soot, but he and his Mirage were safe and sound.
Back on the ground, we found out what had caused the fire. The rocket engine of the Dagger had burned fine, but the missile couldn’t launch. Simply, the mounting of the American missile on its French pylon had been done wrong. The training of my mechanics had been quick and dirty, and this was the price we paid. Before I court- martialed someone, I recalled that Khetz had been right. There was good reason for orderly procedures. True, the Dagger had given us an exceptional MiG kill , but we definitely might have lost a Mirage, too.
I issued a report and waited tensely for the reaction. Somebody surely would wake up now, after we had used Daggers in battle. What would happen now? To my amazement, absolutely nothing. So we trained our mechanics some more, put our four remaining Daggers back on our wings, and waited.
TWO DAYS PASSED, and on July 30 it was again our turn to be one of the first sections to scramble. The red bell rang. When I crossed the canal over the city of Suez I saw, far away to the west, short white trails in the air. I directed my Mirage there and went to maximum speed. When I came closer I saw a bunch of black dots dancing in the air like a cloud of insects in summertime. I climbed up over the mess, lowered a wing, and found a big dogfight under me. Everywhere there were MiG-21s, Mirages, and Phantoms turning and shooting at each other. Missiles’ smoke trails streaked through the air. In the middle a lone parachute stood out like a dislocated mushroom.
I selected a good MiG and joined another Mirage who was scuffling with him. I saw immediately red, five- pointed stars on the MiG’s wings. The MiG itself was painted beautifully and shone like a new car fresh from the factory. It was clear, these MiG jockeys were not Egyptians, they were Russians! I almost saluted my childhood hero, the defender of the motherland, Alexei Merseyev.
My MiG began fleeing west. I began to chase him. He had a two-thousand-meter head start, a little too far for a good shot. Before I managed to get closer, an order came over the radio: “Abort battle!” and all our aircraft complied and turned east. The area emptied within seconds, and here I was alone again, chasing west. I sent both my Daggers after him and saw them closing on him. The long range gave him time to see them, and he broke hard left and then right. Both my missiles burst right near him, and something sprayed out from his fuselage. Now I had to hustle back before somebody else showed up. I crossed the canal behind all my pals, and when I was again over the Sinai I remembered something.
“Two scalps,” I whispered in a low voice, either to myself or to somebody else who couldn’t hear me anymore.
WE ALL LANDED IN REFIDIM, and my Fighting First hosted the happy gang of Mirage and Phantom jockeys from all over the country. It seemed they were all together for that Russian feast. We figured out that there had been twelve Mirages and Phantoms on our side, and some sixteen Soviet MiG-21s on the enemy’s side. Four MiGs were shot down. I didn’t announce my MiG as a kill, since I hadn’t seen him go down. Some years later it came out that this MiG didn’t make it back to base—he was seriously damaged and the pilot ejected on his way home. The kill was then divided between the two Mirage pilots who had fired at him.
This battle—the mother of all multiparticipant battles—gave me reason for joy: all the hits were from missiles alone; cannons had played no part. Suddenly we were modern. And all the Soviet aircraft that went down had suffered Dagger hits.
True, we didn’t come out completely clean. A Soviet missile also hit my friend Snir, but he managed to land
