The formation of transports maintained a constant altitude and cruise speed of 290 knots. The flight continued toward the northeast on a heading of 52 degrees, passing over the Iraqi border at 11:50 p.m. local, or Juliet time. Just a minute after midnight, when the formation had flown a little over 50 nautical miles into Iraqi airspace, the two pilots overheard a conversation between the formation’s lead aircraft and the Balad air control center. The air traffic controller was agitated and demanded that the formation of aircraft descend immediately to flight level 230 and begin a 180 degree turn to the south to exit Iraqi airspace as quickly as possible. The pilot of the lead aircraft offered his apologies at the inadvertent navigation error and confirmed the air traffic command to descend to 23,000 feet and begin a southward turn away from the prevailing traffic lanes over Iraq. The three lead C-130s all began the ordered maneuver.
The trailing C-130 began the same southward turn but maintained its altitude, the pilot lowering the plane’s speed to 230 knots. The navigator reached to his left and rotated a small dial one click in a clockwise direction. In the cargo cabin, the white lights turned off and green nighttime cabin lights turned on. The navigator then leaned over and tapped the flight engineer on the shoulder. “Commence depressurization,” he said into his microphone.
In the rear of the plane, six members of an elite IAF commando unit known as Shaldag and one loadmaster each put on oxygen masks. The loadmaster motioned for all of the men to stand. Each man began to perform a quick check of the equipment of the man in front of him, starting by ensuring that the valve on the small oxygen tank each man carried was fully open. The loadmaster performed the check on the last man in line and then walked to the rear cargo ramp. He hooked a single tether strap to a harness he was wearing that wrapped around his shoulders and thighs. He then turned toward the six men and placed his right fist in the air.
All six men gathered near the ramp in a tight group. The loadmaster now raised his arm up and formed an “A-OK” sign. Each man returned the sign. The loadmaster turned and waited. In the earpiece inside his helmet, he heard the navigator say “Two minutes.” Thirty seconds later, he heard “Ramp down.” Moments later the ramp door opened, an action which only took eighteen seconds to complete. As always, he was surprised at how calm it was to stand at the back end of a C-130 with its ramp open in flight.
The loadmaster turned to his men and put one finger in the air, giving them the one minute warning. The next fifty seconds passed by at different rates for each man. For the loadmaster, the time passed quickly. He suspected otherwise for the six Shaldag warriors by his side. Finally, the loadmaster heard a countdown in his ear. When the navigator said “Go”, the loadmaster waved his right arm across his waist in an outward motion. Within two seconds, all six men had jumped off the end of the ramp and into the freezing black void. Now the loadmaster stepped back and pulled the release tab on two pallets that immediately rolled down the built-in rollers along the floor of the cargo cabin and out the door into the void. Static lines connected to an overhead cable deployed a sophisticated parafoil on each of the two cargo pallets.
The six men of Shaldag repeated what they had rehearsed on over 20 previous nighttime jumps. They used parafoils to “fly” over 10 kilometers to a point in the desert that was a little over one kilometer to the west of Mudaysis Airfield in the middle of Anbar Province, Iraq. They were the first Israeli soldiers to step foot on Iraqi soil. They would be the first of many.
After gathering their chutes, the unit commander sent two men ahead to reconnoiter Mudaysis, an airfield that satellite photos taken just twelve hours earlier indicated to be in the same abandoned condition as when Yosef Sayegh, disguised as a Kuwaiti engineer, had examined it over two years before. With his remaining men, the commander scanned the area with his night vision equipment. The night was so dark that his system used an infrared illuminator to make up for the lack of natural light available to amplify. Toward the south he saw what he was looking for: the two cargo pallets had landed about 150 meters apart and were only half a kilometer away.
The pallets had been delivered using an autonomous GPS-guided parafoil known as the Firefly Joint Precision Aerial Delivery System. The Shaldag unit needing only one of them, but two had been dropped under the assumption that at least one pallet would arrive at the designated location. The commander jogged to the nearer of the two pallets with his men. They cut open the thick webbed canvas strapping that held the cargo in place.
What was revealed looked something like a stripped down golf cart. There was just room enough for one man to drive it and its cargo of over six hundred pounds of pre-loaded equipment. The transport cart was powered by battery and very quiet. One of the men sat in the driver’s seat and headed off slowly toward the airfield, the commander and one other man following in single file behind the vehicle, but only after they had gathered in the large parafoil to carry with them to the airfield. The last man headed toward the other pallet. His job was to gather up its parafoil and drape it over the pallet. Each parafoil had been designed to double as camouflage netting and was made of a fabric that had an effective desert camouflage pattern.
As the electric transport came within a hundred meters of the main landing strip, the commander ran ahead of it to gesture for the driver to stop. The commander got on his radio and spoke a single word in Arabic. Seconds later a single Arabic word came in response. The simple code, which told the commander that it was clear to come onto the airfield, would be innocuous chatter to any Iraqi picking up the broadcast. The commander gestured for the driver to continue and the transport headed off. The commander and the other soldier in the group were quickly on the runway and heading toward the tarmac located on the southeastern portion of the airfield.
Trailing behind, the sixth man who had placed the camouflage parafoil over the remaining pallet, came running to join his comrades. He took a more southerly route, cutting the distance to get from the drop site to the tarmac. The advance guard of two men had already taken up positions that allowed them to watch the single entrance road that led onto the airfield. They would spend the night guarding the only likely way for any Iraqi military vehicles to pay an unwanted and untimely visit to Mudaysis.
A sudden and sharp boom ripped the night air. An explosion. We are under attack.
The explosion that cracked through the still desert night did not produce any flash that any of the men noticed, but the sound was sharp and unexpected. All of the men of the Shaldag unit instinctively dropped into crouched positions and froze, each man desperately searching for the source of the attack. In the desert vastness of Iraq it was difficult to know which direction the explosion had come based on the sound alone. The commander was looking toward the entrance road when one of his men tapped his shoulder and pointed back in the direction they had just come from. Through his night vision system, the commander could see a cloud of dust that was already settling back to the desert floor.
The commander instructed the man who had been driving the cart to stay with it. He took the other soldier back with him toward the source of the explosion at a fast jog. Each man scanned the horizon as they moved, desperate to locate the enemy forces that were responsible for the blast. As they came nearer to the explosion site, the commander could make out the silhouette of his man on the ground, the same man he had just sent to cover the second pallet only minutes earlier. He was lying on his back in the sand only fifty meters or so off the edge of the runway. When the two men reached the runway’s edge, the commander ordered the other soldier to stay where he was and provide cover. The commander now walked across the desert sand, unsure about what exactly had occurred.