The engine on the UAV turned on almost immediately, the three propeller blades spinning to life. On the screen of the laptop, a new dialogue box opened with the query to “Initiate Mission.” The technician clicked the “Initiate” icon. The Hermes 450M sat in its position for another half minute as the technician repeated the same process with the second UAV.
The senior loadmaster yelled out, “Five minutes.” Suddenly the engine revolutions on the first UAV increased to full power and the flying machine started down the access road, rapidly gaining speed and autonomously taking off after a takeoff roll of 952 feet. Along with the next three UAVs, the flight of four was now on a journey to Tabriz in the northeastern corner of Iran. Their course would take them well north of Baghdad and cover over 450 miles, taking 3 hours and 22 minutes. The first UAV was on a mission to strike the Tall King early warning radar located near Tabriz International Airport, which shared its two parallel runways with a tactical airbase. The next UAV had no missiles, but carried the Skyjam electronic jamming system in its payload bay. Its mission was to suppress communications at the tactical airbase at Tabriz.
The last two of the four UAVs carried completely different payloads from the first two. Developed from the American BLU-114B, the payload of each of the last two UAVs was a series of two and a half inch wide by eight inch long cylinders that would be ejected downward on command. Each cylinder contained tens of thousands of hair-thin graphite filaments that uncoiled into strands twenty feet in length. A small explosive charge at the rear of the canister would detonate in the vicinity of their target and scatter the filaments. Each of the UAVs had a flat-bottomed protrusion underneath the fuselage that ran for five feet along its length and contained 140 of the cylindrical canisters. The target of these particular UAVs was the high voltage power lines leading from the Urmia Power Complex. The filaments would short these power lines, creating a catastrophic transmission failure and power blackout. One UAV would hit the power lines west of Tabriz and the other the power lines east of Tabriz. The American version of the weapon had been proven in combat inside Iraq in 2003.
Over the next ten minutes, the remaining nineteen UAVs took off on their missions into Iran. In addition to the four UAVs flying to Tabriz, six UAVs were on missions to short high voltage electricity transmission lines carrying electricity from the main western Iranian power plants. Besides Urmia, these included the hydroelectric dams at Karoon and the fossil fuel plants at Khorramabad, Zanjan, Sultanyeh, Mahshahr, and Behistun. Five UAVs were sent on missions to jam communications at each of the main tactical air bases in western Iran. The eight other UAVs were all configured with two Hellfire missiles each to strike early warning radars located at Kabudrahang and Delbaran and command, control and communication centers located at the tactical air bases at Omediyeh and Kabudrahang and the heavy water nuclear plant complex at Arak.
The fourth Hermes 450M that departed Shangri-La that evening — the one headed for the power transmission lines on the east side of Tabriz — had the longest journey to its target. Assuming the prevailing winds, the planners had estimated that the trip would take 3 hours and 22 minutes at the modified UAV’s top speed of 145 miles per hour. The time of arrival of this UAV would be 10:34 p.m. Iran time. The flight computer on all of the remaining UAVs, flying autonomously, would ensure their arrival at their targets within the same minute.
Each Hermes, painted a flat charcoal black, flew in the dark — emitting no light and no electromagnetic signals. The Hellfire armed drones would establish satellite contact with two-person flight crews waiting at Palmachim Airbase in Israel, but not until they were within two minutes of arrival over their target areas. The last three Hermes launched that night included one configured as a Hellfire armed drone, one as a jamming platform and one with the graphite filament submunitions. They were all carried as backups in case any one of the other UAVs failed to launch. Fortunately, all of the UAVs operated as designed and the three backups were each sent on secondary priority missions.
The senior loadmaster clicked his stopwatch off as the twenty-third Hermes 450M lifted off from the access road at Mudaysis airfield. The attack on Iran was underway. Hostilities were three hours away. The man checked his watch. The time was 1552 hours Zulu, 6:52 p.m. local Iraqi time. They took five minutes longer than his original charge. “Fifteen minutes,” he yelled as men were congratulating themselves. “Not bad.” He recalled the first nighttime exercise carried out at Palmachim sixteen months earlier. It had been conducted using only handheld flashlights, without the helmet mounted lights. It had taken the team 37 minutes to get all of the UAVs operational. They had come a long way.
He turned to walk back to the C-130. The technician joined him with his laptop computer and antenna dome in each hand and the folding table wedged under his arm. The two empty rack systems, now comparatively light at about 1,000 pounds each, were pushed back into the cargo cabin and secured in place. The four loadmasters and the technician found spots where they could sit down and relax on the flight home. Their role in Block G was now done. But for eighteen other men, there was still a lot more work to do before it would be their turn to board a C-130 and head home to Israel. They all headed off to wait for their next assignments on the tarmac at Mudaysis.
The rear ramp closed and the pilot of the C-130 immediately pushed all four throttles forward to full military power while he and his co-pilot held the brakes. Once the Allison turbine engines reached the desired rotation rate of 13,820 rpm, the pilots released the brakes and the C-130 leapt forward. It had half the length of the taxiway, or a little over 4,000 feet to achieve takeoff speed. The lightened aircraft needed only a third of that distance. It lifted off and began a slow turn to the west and home.
51 — Major Meyer Takes Charge
Twelve minutes after the departure of the C-130J Samson, an Israeli Air Force C-130 touched down 1,250 feet from the northwest end of the runway at Mudaysis Airfield, now known within Mount Olympus as Shangri-La. The C-130’s pilot, despite the heavy cargo his plane carried, barely had to engage his brakes as he used another 7,460 feet of runway to slow down to five miles per hour, relying on reverse thrust from his propellers. Finally he turned the nose wheel and steered his plane to the left along a short concrete connector. He crossed the long taxiway that paralleled the runway and steered his plane onto the tarmac, a concrete rectangle that measured 1,380 feet in length by 380 feet wide. He taxied to the far side of the tarmac and brought his plane to a halt, simultaneously lowering the rear cargo ramp door.
The first man off the ramp was tall at six foot two inches. But it wasn’t his height that made him stand out. He wore a German Afrika Korps pith helmet. He had worn it as a joke during the first small-scale daylight rehearsal exercise almost two years earlier. It had been passed down to him by his grandfather, a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II who had liberated the helmet from the body of a dead German officer in Tunisia in April 1943. Now the helmet, minus the Afrika Korps eagle and swastika emblem that had once been proudly worn by the original owner, was returning to wage war in the deserts of the Middle East. For the man who now wore the helmet, it served a practical purpose that became clear the first night he put it on — it made him easily identifiable in the midst of the chaos that would soon unfold around him. His name was Gideon Meyer and he was a major in the Israeli Defense Force. He would be the commander of Shangri-La for as long as Israeli forces were on the ground this night.
As he walked off the ramp, he was saluted by the Shaldag commander. “Welcome to Iraq, Major,” said the Shaldag officer. “My men are under your command.”