“Destroy it,” Ben David ordered.
Major David Harkabi sat in the cockpit of his F-16 and glanced at his watch. Fifteen seconds to go. He pointed at the crew chief standing by the switch that would open the blast doors to his bunker. When the second hand touched twelve, he shouted, “ZANEK!” the Hebrew word to go or launch. It was the Israeli Air Force’s war cry. The sergeant hit the switches and the doors at both ends started to roll back. At the same time, Harkabi started the F100 engine, bringing the F-16 to life. He taxied out of the bunker and raced for the runway. He was leading three other F-16s, the small strike force from Ramon Air Base that would go against the command headquarters of the Syrian First Army at Homs, over 350 nautical miles away.
His wingman fell into place on his wing when he paused at the end of the runway. He snapped his head back against the seat’s headrest and then gave a sharp nod forward, the signal for takeoff roll. The two F-16s rolled together and the second two took the active. They would follow in ten seconds. It was Harkabi’s fifth mission that day and his fourth new wingman.
Matt handed the telephone back to the harried girl behind the hospital desk and went looking for Shoshana. He found her in a hall bent over a gurney, tending a badly burned woman they had pulled from a bombed-out store. “I still can’t get through to anyone,” he told her. “If I can’t find Ambler, I’m going to have to head back on my own or get in contact with our air attaché.” She ignored him and kept working on the woman. Finally, two nurses took over and wheeled the gurney into the emergency room.
“We can make another run,” she told him and walked out the doors to the bread van she had appropriated as an ambulance. A dispatcher gave her directions and she climbed behind the wheel. Matt hopped onto the passenger seat and she wheeled the van back into the burning port area of Haifa.
The attack Dave Harkabi was leading had been laid on by the Citadel, the Israeli Air Force’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Now it was being controlled by a direction officer in the hardened command bunker at Ramat David Air Base. He was standing at his console monitoring the takeoff of Harkabi’s F-16s from Ramon and two F-4E Phantoms from his base that the Israelis had modified to function as Wild Weasels. The F-4s had been packed with electronic gear and antiradiation missiles to counter hostile radars, surface-to-air missiles, and antiaircraft artillery. The F-4s could jam and deceive radar signals and, if need be, send a missile down a radar tracking beam and destroy the command guidance system of a hostile radar.
The F-4s had one additional feature that Harkabi’s life would depend on. The Israelis had just installed a new black box designed to defeat the monopulse guidance and tracking radar of the SA-11 Gadfly surface-to-air missile the Syrians had deployed with their armies. The Soviet-built Gadfly had taken a heavy toll of Israeli fighters that day as the Mach 3 missile proved it could hit anything that came within its launch envelope. Each missile transporter had four 18-foot-long missiles mounted on a turntable that could traverse through 360 degrees. The specially modified tank chassis the missiles rested on could travel and shoot on the run as it moved along with an armored force.
Israeli intelligence had identified over a hundred of the new missile launchers that were providing an umbrella for the three advancing armies. Twenty-six Israeli fighters, more than a squadron, had fallen victim to the Gadfly any time they had come within eighteen miles of a missile and were higher than a hundred feet off the deck. Out of desperation — and out of new ideas — the IAF could only stand off from the tanks thrusting toward them and wait until the Syrians were within artillery range and counterbattery fire could suppress the deadly missiles while the fighters worked over the ground forces.
Intelligence had reported four SA-11 Gadfly tracks surrounding the target headquarters at Homs and now it was up to Harkabi to challenge the missile again.
The street Shoshana drove down was in the working-class section of Haifa, not too far from the docks. The strident tones of a Klaxon split the air as an ambulance demanded the right-of-way down the narrow street. Shoshana pulled onto the sidewalk and let the ambulance pass. Ahead of them, they could see smoke rising from a pile of rubble in the street. “Damn them,” Shoshana said, “they didn’t care what they hit.” She slammed the makeshift ambulance to a halt in front of the smoldering rubble that had been the front of a building.
An old man wearing a fireman’s coat came up to them. “We’ve transported all the survivors,” he told them. “The fire’s almost out but the building is collapsing. She”—he pointed to a hysterical woman two men were restraining from rushing into the building—“says her three-year-old daughter is trapped inside. We can’t get to her.”
Matt got out of the van and followed Shoshana to the weeping woman and listened while she spoke softly in Hebrew. Then Shoshana took the woman into her arms and held her. Matt studied the men around him. Like the fireman, they were all in their sixties and older. All the younger men had left to fight the war, leaving the women, children, and old men to rescue the survivors. “Where’s the girl?” he asked no one in particular.
The mother understood English and pointed at a rear corner of the building. “In the basement.”
“There’s an unexploded bomb in there,” the fireman said. “Probably a time-delayed fuse. Who knows when it will go off.”
“I wonder …” Matt said as he recalled the pattern of the attack he had witnessed from the hilltop cemetery. The one fighter that had flown over him at low-level had been carrying four general-purpose five-hundred-kilogram bombs and he had counted the attacking aircraft and explosions. If each aircraft had been carrying four bombs, then as best he could determine, 80 percent of the bombs had detonated. That tracked with an intelligence report he had read that claimed Soviet-designed bombs experienced a 20-percent dud rate.
“They weren’t using time-delay fuses,” he said. Silence but no movement on the part of the man. “Give me your coat and gloves,” he said.
“Matt,” Shoshana said, “it’s too dangerous. Don’t do it.” She had almost said that it was their battle and not his. Matt ignored her and pulled on the fireman’s heavy coat and tugged on the gloves, eyeing the building as another part of the front wall collapsed.
“Strictly a professional interest,” he growled. “Always wanted to see what the business end of one of these puppies was like.” Carefully, he worked around the outside of the building, looking for a way in.
The old fireman followed him, keeping up a running commentary on the destruction inside. He pointed to an unlikely opening in the back wall. “I’d go in through there,” the old man said. Matt nodded and dropped to his hands and knees and worked his way into the building. Twenty feet inside, a masonry wall stopped him. “It’s a load-bearing wall,” came from behind him. The old man had followed him into the building, relishing the chance to give advice over his personal safety. Matt could see his gleaming bald head behind him and wondered how he had squeezed his big potbelly through the narrow opening.
“Why the hell aren’t you doing this?” Matt grumbled.
“I’m retired.”
“Great.” The pilot wiggled through a crack in the floor and found himself in an open space. “Now what?” he mumbled.