The pilot of the third plane made his approach to Mudaysis only thirty seconds following the second plane. By now, darkness had completely swallowed the desert landscape. The pilot and co-pilot wore AN-AVS 6 night vision goggles inside the blacked-out plane. As they lined up on the infrared strobe lights that outlined the runway for their final approach, they turned on their landing lights about a half mile off the end of the runway. The pilots removed their night vision goggles and the co-pilot concentrated on the altimeter to call the rate of descent and the distance remaining to touchdown. The plane was very heavy, as were all of the planes that had landed before it. Its weight as it touched down would be just under 157,000 pounds, a weight that was tolerated only out of combat necessity.
The heavy weight of the plane put tremendous stress on the landing gear and all of the cargo planes landing that night had higher than usual air pressure in their tires to help compensate. But the most important factor was the individual skill of each pilot. The heavy loads meant that the pilot needed to land at as gentle a descent rate as practical. However, the same heavy load put a premium on landing as close to the start of the runway as possible to allow for the maximum amount of runway to slow down. As the third plane approached the runway threshold, the pilot was concentrating on his descent rate. He wanted to touchdown at a descent rate of somewhere around 200 feet per minute.
“One fifty-five,” said the co-pilot as the plane passed over the end of the runway. The wheels were 155 feet above the runway. The co-pilot had concern in his voice. At their current speed of 170 knots, they were covering 1,150 feet of runway every four seconds they remained airborne. They had found through trial and error that they wanted to be about 30 feet above the runway as they passed over the runway threshold.
The pilot pushed forward on his control yoke slightly to force his plane down, but his throttle setting was still too high and his rate of descent barely changed. The plane was dropping too slowly. The pilots had been picked for their ability to land successfully on the first pass and the expectation was that no one would abort and go around — after all, there was another C-130 only thirty seconds behind him and blacked out planes were all over the area. The timetable had been drilled into their heads — it was sacrosanct.
“One forty. Need to get down,” said the co-pilot. They were now 1,000 feet further down the runway and had already passed the point at which they wanted to touch down.
The pilot reduced throttle and the heavy plane instantly reacted, suddenly dropping at a rate of just over 518 feet per minute. Twenty feet over the runway, the pilot flared his plane to ensure that the four tires of the main landing gear touched down before the nose gear. The plane touched down 5,785 feet down the runway. The impact was hard but nothing that would have been a problem had their weight been more typical. Worse, a last minute course correction input from the pilot in response to a gust of wind caused the plane to land with most of its weight being borne by the main landing gear on the right hand side. One of the two tires on the right hand main gear struts was unable to handle the force. The tire blew apart and the other tire split slightly along the sidewall, its air pressure now escaping slowly into the desert night. The pilots felt and heard the tire explosion as they went to full power reverse thrust and heavy braking to slow their plane down in the 4,015 feet of runway they had left.
The co-pilot understood the real threat before the pilot did. Another C-130 was right behind them and more than likely there was now one or more large chunks of shredded tire on the runway — the type of debris that can destroy a propeller or an engine. After ten seconds of deceleration, the co-pilot took his hands off the control wheel and reached down to turn on the radio transmit button. The radio was set to the encrypted spread spectrum frequencies all inbound aircraft were using to communicate with the ATC trailers at Shangri-La.
“Abort, abort, abort,” said the co-pilot into his mounted microphone. “Hold for clearance.”
In the fourth KC-130, the pilot heard the transmission and recognized the voice. He was about to turn on his landing lights, but instead added power and turned his plane to the south to start a long oval ”go-around” pattern.
On the ground, the KC-130 slowed and turned onto the last connector to make its way to the tarmac. The pilot knew he had a problem because he had to use more power than normal on his two starboard side engines to taxi. An alert plane director in his white shirt noticed the tires and decided to send the plane to the first available spot on the tarmac, which is where the last KC-130 was scheduled to be parked. The plane stopped as directed and the pilot opened his cockpit window and waved for the plane director as the co-pilot turned off the engines. The plane director ran to the side of the cockpit and lifted his ear muff away from his head to hear the words from the pilot.
“There is tire debris on the runway,” shouted the pilot, pointing vigorously toward where they had just touched down. “We sent the next airplane around.”
The plane director immediately talked into his microphone, utilizing the low power radio sets that everyone with a helmet had available for emergency communication. In one of the ATC trailers, the transmission from the plane director, which was directed to the second-in-command, was picked up on a handheld walkie-talkie. The final approach air traffic controller contacted the fourth KC-130 to hold in pattern.
Major Meyer heard the update from his second-in-command standing next to him. Ten purple shirted fuelers were standing nearby and Meyer told them what happened and sent them to the runway. All ten men left on the run and the runway was cleared within several minutes. The fourth and final KC-130 came in five minutes behind schedule, but the landing was uneventful.
Now there was more than 136,000 gallons of aviation fuel available at Shangri-La, all of the fuel that had been planned for by Mount Olympus. The first warplanes headed into Iran would land within ten minutes.
55 — The Hammers Fly
The town of Abasan al-Kabirah has a population of just over 23,000. It is located in the southern half of the Gaza Strip, but to its inhabitants, it feels a world away from the threat of conflict and sudden death that can often intrude into life in Gaza City neighborhoods like Rimal and Jibaliya to the north. Life in this town proceeds at a pace that has been set by centuries of Middle Eastern rural agricultural tradition. This tradition survives despite the influence of the nearby city of Khan Yunis. What Hamas activity goes on in the town is quiet and discrete.
But the town has a strategic distinction lost to all but the most interested observers. The highest point in town is 29 kilometers, or 18 miles, from the western end of the main runway of Hatzerim Airbase in the Negev desert. Hatzerim is perhaps the most important airbase of the IAF because of a simple reason: it is the base of the 69 Hammer Squadron. The Hammer Squadron flies all of the 25 F-15I Ra’am fighter-bombers of the Israeli Air Force, the single most potent strike weapon of the State of Israel. The prevailing winds, coming out of the west, mean that almost all takeoffs from Hatzerim are toward the west, almost in a straight line in the direction of Abasan al-Kabirah. For the nation of Iran, that made the town very important indeed, since knowledge of when the airplanes of Hammer Squadron were airborne, how many were airborne and which direction they headed, was the single most important early warning indicator of a strike on the Islamic Republic.
In order to observe the comings and goings of the Hammer Squadron, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, had quietly and secretly taken control of a three story apartment building on the highest hill in town. The eastern side of the building had an unobstructed view toward the east. During 2006 and 2007, the IRGC had moved undercover Iranian revolutionary fighters — some with their families — into each of the six apartments of the building as prior families moved out. Inside the top floor apartment, in a living room that had a large plate glass window facing east, the IRGC had set up very expensive optical equipment, night vision and infrared detectors. The passive instruments enabled the men in the room to affirmatively identify any F-15 departing or arriving at Hatzerim. No light was allowed in the room and no electronic messages were sent from the building. Observations were written down on paper in a simple code and taken by messenger to different safe houses in nearby Khan Yunis for transmission to Tehran by various methods that had evolved with technology. No one was involved in the chain who had not been recruited and trained in Iran by the IRGC.