The soldier was back down on the ground within a handful of seconds. There was no intention of cutting the electrical service — the planners at Olympus were hoping that the inhabitants of the two villages would spend the evening watching their TVs. The young European football season’s first “El Classico” was due to start in a few hours and Amit Margolis had incorporated this into his planning. Televisions all over Europe and the Middle East would be tuned in to watch Real Madrid and Barcelona — the two giants of Spanish soccer — square off for the first time this season. Minds would be focused on football, guards would be lowered.
The two men returned to the pickup and the two vehicles now parted ways. The Humvee continued on its way north for another twelve and a half miles, or twenty kilometers. The vehicle stopped and parked in the middle of the southbound land, its lights on. The men in this vehicle had a single job to do for the next several hours: They would turn away all traffic headed south on the road during that time. The men removed two stop signs and placed them in the road, each one had a flashing red light mounted on top of the sign.
The pickup truck turned back south and parked at the turnoff onto the Mudaysis Airfield access road. Their secondary job was to stop any of the locals from turning down the access road. But the primary mission of the men in the Ford truck was to use sophisticated jamming equipment mounted into the bed of the truck to stop any outbound transmissions from the two small villages to the south. The single phone line had been cut and the spreading cellular service in Iraq had not yet reached into these villages, but many of the homes had satellite phones to communicate with the outside world. More importantly, the single police station located on the southern edge of Al Kasrah had a two-way satellite connection to the provincial government in Ramadi.
The Shaldag soldiers retrieved a parabolic dish and mounted it on a pole swiveled upwards from the bed. They positioned it to point south toward the two villages. Then they opened a box and rotated what looked like a flat panel TV upward, swiveling it on its base until its business side was pointed south. The equipment in the pickup bed worked automatically, sending out signals which interfered with satellite phone frequencies and the frequencies used by the police satellite system. The parabolic dish listened for other suspicious signals and the computers in the system were programmed to respond to any known transmission frequencies other than those being used by the IAF.
Fifty kilometers to the south, the other two vehicle team of Shaldag soldiers set up a similar roadblock just to the south of Al Habariyah. At this location, the Ford pickup was parked on the edge of the southbound road, its jamming equipment quickly put into operation. Within fifteen minutes of their arrival, a sedan approached the Humvee from the south. It was stopped and its two occupants were searched. A cell phone was confiscated and the occupants were forced to turn around and head back to south, cursing the Iraqi Army the entire way.
At 7:23 p.m., one minute behind schedule and only four minutes after the second C-130 lifted off, a huge Ilyushin 78 Midas aerial tanker touched down on the runway. The plane was carrying over 25,000 gallons of JP-8 aviation fuel, having burned just over 9,000 gallons to fly from Kuwait International Airport. The plane had departed Kuwait one hour and forty-eight minutes earlier to fly to Mudaysis. The large tanker, carrying fuel weighing 170,660 pounds, needed most of the long runway to slow down. The pilot used his reverse thrusters and full braking, finally getting the plane slowed down to a speed that left the pilot comfortable, but doing so with less than three football fields of runway length left in front of him.
Like the C-130s before it, the Il-78 turned left at the last connecter and then made its way onto the tarmac. An Israeli soldier acted as the marshal for the plane, wielding two orange coned flashlights and signaling to the pilot from the far northern edge. The plane turned left and headed to the north-facing corner at the top of the tarmac. As it neared the corner, the pilot turned his nose gear to the right to taxi toward the northeast edge of the tarmac. The soldier acting as marshal walked backward, continuing into the desert sand and waving on the Ilyushin as he walked. The plane’s nose tires went off the edge of the tarmac. The sand had the consistency of dirt, not as soft as a fine powdered beach but not as hard as compacted gravel. The pilot did not know what to expect since this aspect of his journey had never been rehearsed. He and his co-pilot each kept one hand on the four throttle levers located between them, ready to add power if the plane felt like it was bogging down.
After a few feet in the sand, the pilots increased throttle. The plane continued on deeper into the sandy desert. The soldier guiding them was backpedaling faster as he heard the jet engine whine increase. The plane continued on until the main landing gear tires left the tarmac. The goal was to get the entire tail section clear of the tarmac and the pilot could feel the plane slow. He applied more power to drive the plane forward, but the nose tires were burying deeper into the sand. The plane was able to make it another thirty-seven feet before the pilot shut down the engines. The nose gear was now almost completely buried. This was a one-way trip for all three of the Il-78 Midas tankers. They would never leave the Iraqi desert.
The crew of the first Ilyushin lowered the rear ramp, allowing access to fuel pumping equipment in the cabin. The engines were shut down, but the plane’s auxiliary power unit continued to run, providing power for the plane’s fuel pumps and systems.
Over the next eight minutes, two other Ilyushin 78s landed. Each of these was guided into the sand off the long northeastern edge of the tarmac. The planes were maneuvered into the spaces between the telescoped floodlights that had been placed along the edge only minutes earlier. Once all three of the big Russian-built planes were in position, more than 30 men, along with the electric cart and its rotating brush attachment, set to work sweeping sand off the tarmac. They had a seventeen minute window.
The three large Ilyushin tankers collectively held over 75,000 gallons — 500,000 pounds — of aviation fuel for the thirsty warplanes on their way. But that amount of fuel was still not enough for all of the aircraft that would be passing through Mudaysis. Before the night was over, 85 IAF warplanes would refuel on the outbound strike mission to various targets inside Iran and up to 45 on the return from Iran, the final number to be determined by the randomness of war.
53 — Flight of the Herons
Israeli Aircraft Industries and the IAF publicly unveiled a new UAV on October 8, 2007. As large as a Boeing 727, it was called the Eitan — Hebrew for “steadfast.” The twin-tailed aircraft, also called the Heron TP, had been under development by IAI for several years and brought a new generation of UAV capabilities to the IAF. With a length of 43 feet and a wingspan of 86 feet, the Eitan could carry sizable payloads in its fuselage and stay airborne at high altitude for up to two days.
But to achieve this endurance, the Eitan relied on a propeller driven engine that allowed the UAV to cruise at a speed of only 145 knots, perfect for loitering over Lebanon but ill-suited for the requirements of the Olympus planning team. In early 2010, the IAF planners at Olympus approached IAI to create an upgraded version of the Eitan that could fly higher, faster and carry a heavier payload, including underwing mounted weapons.