Meyer saluted back and smiled at the man who had parachuted into this location the prior evening. “Happy to be here. I understand you had a loss.” The two men discussed what had occurred the prior evening. The Shaldag commander pointed out the area where the mine had claimed his man. When he was done, Gideon Meyer instructed him to have his men bring the body bag over so they could load it aboard the C-130.
“Did you bring any mine clearing equipment?” asked the Shaldag commander.
Meyer looked at him as if caught in a lie, even though he had no reason to feel that way. “No. The decision was made at Olympus not to alter any of the load outs. We will just stay on the concrete.”
“Except for the tankers.”
“I have thought of that. The risk is acceptable.”
The Shaldag commander was silent for a moment. “Have you told the men who will be walking in the sand?”
“No, and I will not. Where your man stepped on the mine is where I would expect the Iraqis to have laid them. The area around the tarmac would be illogical for mines. It seems to me that the Iraqis tried to clear the minefields and unfortunately the one that got your man was just missed.”
The Shaldag commander did not agree with this assessment, but the point was now moot and he knew it. He changed the subject, asking what he could do to help. Major Gideon Meyer simply responded that they would repeat their numerous rehearsals one more time tonight and nothing would change. As they spoke, a second C-130 pulled onto the tarmac and came to a stop about two hundred yards behind Meyer’s plane. It lowered its rear ramp. Both planes held identical loads, except that the first man off the ramp of the second plane was the second in command, a captain in the IDF.
Gideon Meyer knew exactly how the night would go. Like a top quarterback in the National Football League, every contingency he could think of occurring that evening was like a movie playing in his mind. He had personally led four previous full nighttime rehearsals where planes had flown into Ovda Air Base near the southern tip of the Negev. There, on a section of the base that had been laid out exactly like the Mudaysis Airfield, the teams had rehearsed their roles and made their mistakes when they could afford to make them. Every step in the choreographed process was burned into Meyer’s mind.
But right now it was first things first. Two C-130s had to be unloaded and they only had fifteen minutes to get it done and get both planes on their way back to Israel, one carrying the body of Uzi Helzberg. The Major wanted to think the young Shaldag soldier would be the only Israeli to die in Block G, but he knew better.
After Meyer, two John Deere Gator four-wheel utility vehicles drove down the ramp, each towing a telescoping set of floodlights with its own generator mounted on a single axle between two wheels. The wheeled floodlights, which would soon be telescoping 30 feet into the air, were each driven to a spot along the long northeastern edge of the rectangular tarmac and spaced about 400 feet apart. With identical lights from the other C130, four sets of floodlights were soon illuminating the tarmac.
After the Gator vehicles exited the aircraft, a Humvee was driven down the ramp, followed immediately by a Ford F-250 crew cab pickup truck. Each vehicle was painted the color of desert sand with intermittent splotches of brown, the camouflage scheme preferred by the Iraqi National Army. Iraqi flags and unit designations were prominently painted onto their front doors. In each vehicle were four members of Shaldag wearing the uniforms of the Iraqi National Army. The vehicles did not stop to allow for the exchange of any greetings. They drove across the tarmac back toward the main taxiway. There they turned to follow the taxiway northwest for half a mile until it intersected with the main airfield access road — the same access road where 23 UAVs had taken off minutes earlier. They turned right to drive the 11 mile distance to Highway 21. Two similar vehicles from the second plane were only a minute behind them.
Once the two faux Iraqi Army vehicles had cleared the cargo ramp, six men and the plane’s loadmaster began to push eight pallets of equipment out of the cargo cabin and down the ramp. Each pallet was on its own manually operated pallet truck — a hand operated device seen in warehouses the world over and capable of lifting heavy palletized loads for movement across warehouse floors — or concrete tarmacs in the middle of the Iraqi desert. Six of the pallets held fuel pumps and hoses, each fuel pump powered by its own 12 horsepower generator. The remaining two pallets held electrical cords and various connectors with the tools necessary to properly connect all of this equipment. Next, two 750 gallon bladders of JP-8 aviation fuel, each weighing about 5,200 pounds, were man-handled off the ramp and out of the way as the Gator returned and backed into the cargo hold of the C-130. After thirty seconds, the Gator came back out, now towing a wheeled JP-8 fueled generator. The 102 kilowatt Pramac generator was placed next to the second telescopic floodlight.
The C-130’s loadmaster walked to the end of the ramp and made eye contact with Major Gideon Meyer. He saluted the ground commander and quickly disappeared into the now empty cargo cabin of the C-130. The ramp closed and the four turboprop engines of the airplane powered up enough to begin to move the plane toward the long taxiway. The co-pilot turned on the navigation lights. Forty seconds later, the plane turned onto the main taxiway to face the northwest as the pilots pushed all four throttles forward to produce maximum power. The plane quickly accelerated, now unencumbered by the large load it had ferried to Shangri-La.
It only took 1,340 feet of taxiway for the C-130 to reach rotation speed and another 52 feet to lift off. As soon as the plane was airborne and the landing gear had been retracted, the plane banked to head due north in accordance with the departure protocol established for this mission. After thirty seconds, the co-pilot turned off the navigation lights. The plane leveled off at 1,000 feet and began a slow turn to the right, taking it toward central Iraq, but ensuring that in the blacked-out conditions — its transponder, radar and navigation lights all inactive — its flight path was deconflicted with incoming aircraft.
The plane continued its slow turn, taking it to the east and maintaining a distance no closer than eight miles to the tiny villages of Al Kasrah and Al Habariyah, before heading due south toward Saudi Arabia. After flying another 68 miles, the C-130, with its partner trailing about four miles behind, began a turn to the south west. Another 37 miles later, the plane crossed the border into Saudi Arabian airspace and began to climb slowly to 26,000 feet. The pilot’s grip on the control wheel relaxed for the first time since departing Nevatim Air Base in the Negev almost three hours earlier.
52 — Securing Shangri-La
Underneath the two returning C-130s, four vehicles loaded with sixteen Shaldag soldiers sped along the access road from Mudaysis to Highway 21. The Humvee and Ford pickup from the first plane reached the highway and turned to the north, away from the two small villages. The two vehicles drove three kilometers along the two lane road and pulled over just before a 350 meter long section of bridge passing over the Wadi al Tubal. Two soldiers exited from the back seat of the Ford pickup and quickly walked across the road and through twenty meters of desert sand to the base of a telephone poll that carried both electrical and telephone lines from the main east-west artery of Highways 10 and 11 down to the villages of Al Kasrah and Al Habariyah.
One soldier was wearing a pole climbing belt and a pair of steel climbing spikes over his boots. He stopped at the base of the pole and wrapped a leather strap around it. He was ten meters up the pole in less than a minute. After setting his position on the pole just underneath the lowest wire, he reached down and pulled up a pair of bolt cutters that was hanging from his belt by a short tether. He cut through the cable that was attached to the pole just above the level of his head. The telephone service that connected the two villages to the rest of Iraq was now severed.