Steven Gold pulled a small Japanese camera out of his shirt pocket and looked at the intelligence officer. “Go ahead.” She shrugged. “It is your airplane.” He walked around the F-15 and snapped six pictures, recording the damage the jet had suffered in the rocket attack. Since no one stopped him, he walked outside and took a picture of the damage to the underground bunker. It was the first time he had been allowed to take photos on an Israeli air base. Well, at least authorized pictures. He managed to take two more of the area around the bunker as he slipped the camera back into his pocket. He hoped the two unaimed photos would come out. Then he walked back inside and joined Matt and Furry.
“What do you think?” he asked the two young officers.
Furry crawled out from under his aircraft and brushed his hands. “Obviously she ain’t going to fly for a while, but she’s fixable. Can you get the Israelis to do it so we can get the hell out of here?”
“I doubt it,” Gold answered. “They’re maxed out just keeping their own aircraft in the air.”
“I can’t believe it,” Matt said. “This place takes a direct hit form a two-thousand-pound warhead and all it does is blow some concrete loose and part of the blast door away.” He studied his Eagle, making mental notes. “Most of the damage must have been caused by the blast door shredding.”
“And that hunk of concrete that fell out of the ceiling and tore the radome off,” Furry added. He was examining the damage to the nose of the F-15. “With the right parts, a combat repair team should be able to fix her in about forty-eight hours.”
“I’ll see if we can get a team in here,” Gold said.
“How in the hell did they build this puppy,” Furry said, waving his hand at the bunker. “There should’ve been a fire, what with all the fuel lines they’ve got in here, and hell, they even store weapons over there.” He pointed to a small metal blast door set in the side of the bunker.
“Can I look around?” Matt asked the captain. She nodded yes and watched him inspect the bunker. It was obvious that Matt had studied civil engineering at the Air Force Academy as he poked around the bunker. Then they were ready to go and she escorted the three Americans back to the squadron.
Gold seemingly ignored the F-16s taking off while he calculated the Israelis had repaired the runway in less than twenty minutes. He tried to be unobtrusive as his eyes swept the base. He caught the captain studying him. She knows, he thought. He was certain that the base had become fully operational within thirty minutes after the attack as four F-16s landed and fast-taxied past them. “We need to talk alone,” he told the two Americans.
The air-cooled V-12 diesel engine in the American-built M60A1 tank ticked over and came to life when the driver, Nazzi Halaby, hit the start button. Without thinking, he sat and locked the throttle at 1,200 RPM. He stuck his head out of his hatch on the sand-gray-colored tank and listened to the engine as it warmed up. He decided it sounded good and that the repair team had done their job well. He laughed when the other three members of his crew had to scurry out of the way of the M88 recovery vehicle as it moved around to mount the left track they had thrown in the last seconds of the battle that had raged around them less than four hours ago. Another forty-live minutes, Halaby calculated, and we’ll be ready to roll.
“Why’s the Druze laughing at us?” the tank’s loader, Amos Avner, snarled. Avner was glaring at the skinny, ratlike Halaby who was climbing out the driver’s hatch. Moshe Levy scratched the heavy black beard he had been cultivating for months, ignored Avner’s latest jab at their driver, and decided to report in on the M88's radio. The tank commander crawled up the side of the United States-built tank recovery vehicle that made him think of a ship’s superstructure built on a tank chassis, thankful that the M88 had been around to pull them to safety.
Moshe Levy was a thirty-six-year-old veteran tank commander who had cut his teeth in combat against Syrian tanks in Lebanon during the summer of 1982. He stood barely five feet five inches high and his stocky frame fitted easily into the M60. He knew how lucky they were to still be alive after throwing a track and then taking a hit in the engine compartment with an RPG.
Damn, he thought, why can’t I be as lucky with my crew. Nazzi Halaby was the best tank driver he had ever met and it wasn’t his fault the track had come off. But Avner wouldn’t believe it and, as usual, had used the incident to give Halaby hell. Only the tall and lanky gunner, Dave Bielski, had kept the driver and loader from ripping into each other. One of them has got to go, Levy decided. He couldn’t afford to have his crew fighting each other harder than the Syrians. It wasn’t much of a choice, the loader Amos Avner would be the easiest to replace and he would never find another driver like Halaby. Levy did not miss the irony of his decision. He was getting rid of the only Orthodox Jew on his crew and keeping die Druze — an Arab.
The three Americans were hunched over a light table in the captain’s office at Ramon Air Base studying another set of photos a reconnaissance drone had taken an hour after Matt’s attack on the Syrian headquarters. The high-resolution pictures chronicled the death and destruction the two two-thousand-pound bombs had caused and it reminded Furry of another mission he had flown years before. “Nothing but hot hair, teeth, and eyeballs in there,” he said.
Gold was going over the photos with a magnifying glass and his face paled. What Furry had said was true and he could see three dismembered, charred bodies. Gold was very vain about his full head of dark hair, beautiful teeth that his parents had spent a small fortune on, and deep brown eyes that women loved. He could see himself in the photos. He shuddered when he realized the two men standing beside him could be so cavalier about the deaths they had caused. The tall colonel’s only flying experience had been in MAC and he had never met the likes of Matt and Furry. Smooth and normal exteriors of the two men masked the rock-hard, highly competitive nature of two professional warriors.
“I’m going to need the details of all you’ve learned for a report,” Gold said, eager to return to the antiseptic world of reporting intelligence. “There’s a wealth of information here.”
“I actually learned more on my first flight,” Furry said.
“You’ve flown twice for the Israelis?” Gold was incredulous as Furry nodded in reply. The air attaché had to fight for his self-control. “No. Don’t say a thing.” He bit his words off in anger. “I’m going to see your ass court-martialed. This is too fucking much. Just who in the hell do you think you are?”
“What about me?” Matt asked. The colonel spun around to face the young pilot. “Look,” Matt said, “court-martial us both if you want but first, I think you had better find out what we Ve learned.”
For the next two hours, Matt and Furry briefed the colonel on all that they had observed and done. Furry sketched four pages of diagrams and equations for the colonel on the Gadfly missile and how the Israelis had successfully modified the F-15’s TEWS. At one point, Gold stopped to warn them. “You know all this can be used as evidence against you in court-martial.”
“So?” Matt answered for both of them. “We’re not going to lie or cover up what we’ve been doing here.”
“Especially when it can save some other jock,” Furry added.
The colonel leaned forward over the table, his hands resting on the photos, maps, and diagrams scattered there. “You two don’t have a clue what’s happening, do you?” The two officers were quiet, not following what he was saying. “Because of you two, I have more up-to-date, hard intelligence about the Israelis and their capability than we’ve learned in the previous four years. The information on their hardened bunkers alone is worth an entire squadron of F-Fifteens. Now I have to ask myself why have the Israelis decided to show you two all this? Why is our liaison officer the prettiest, sexiest woman I’ve met here?” In Gold’s world, another type of situational awareness was essential.