FORTY-TWO

Iranian Airspace

Joel was at the head of the formation of Israeli F-16 fighter bombers. They were flanked by a protection squadron of F-15s. They were flying low, perilously low, at ninety feet above the desert floor. In the valley between the Karkas Mountains, they were hoping to avoid any ground radar within a twenty-mile radius. At the speed they were traveling, they would reach Iran’s Natanz nuclear launch facility and drop their bombs before Iran’s antiaircraft missiles were ready to launch. They would have loved to have the new American F-35 jets, but the U.S. government balked at giving Israel the new fighters.

David, flying on Joel’s starboard, noticed something and laughed. Below, a goat herder, who had heard the roar of the low-flying jets and must have thought the sky was falling, was sprawling spread-eagle on the hardscrabble ground, surrounded by his herd. “Let’s hope he doesn’t have a cell phone,” David quipped.

“Okay, final checkpoint approaching,” Joel radioed back to the formation behind him.

So far the flight had been uneventful, which was surprising. Maybe this would be a repeat of the Israel’s bombing of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facility in Iraq in 1981. They had used a similar flight plan back then. The IAF launched a surprise attack and swept over the location, bombed it, and got out without a scratch.

“Check your radar-detection receivers, and keep your eye on the circle on your screen for the incoming missiles nearest you …” Joel checked his flight-deck clock. “Right about now they’re probably scrambling their jets.” He knew that the Iranians had the newest generation of Russian MiG fighters. But the F-15s would be able to handle them. Command had calculated the time that would be needed for the Iranians to prepare their antiaircraft-missile controls and then hone in on the incoming jets. If they were lucky …

“Okay, everybody, let’s get into welded wing formation; tighten up folks.”

The jets pulled into a near wing-tip-to-wing-tip position. Just a matter of moments now until the strike.

The large buildings of the Natanz facility came into sight in the distance. Since most of the centrifuges and uranium-enrichment equipment were underground, the F-16s were carrying super bunker-busters that would crack the ground wide open and blow down deep enough to destroy everything, including the nuclear-launch missiles they were told were in the adjacent silos.

Joel only knew what IDF command had told him. Those in charge of the operation, like General Shapiro, had to rely on intelligence, information from people like Rafi, their own clandestine agent in Jordan, and Yoseff, the Iranian insider whose motivation was unimpeachable: he needed to rescue his brother and sister from an Israeli prison.

But there was something the pilots did not know, any of them.

As each of the bomber pilots hit their Drop buttons to let loose their deadly payload, their flight-deck radar-detection screens lit up. One circle. Two circles. Three circles.

“We’ve been painted!” Joel cried out. “Drop and get out …”

Now the sky was filled with antiaircraft missiles. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.

Joel dropped his bombs and pulled his F-16 skyward. But something — a red flash — caught his eye to the starboard. It was from the ball of fire from the missile strike that had just decimated David’s F-16. No parachute. No escape.

“I’m hit,” another F-15 pilot screamed over the radio.

Below, Joel saw bright explosions from the fighter jets of his team being destroyed, one after another. His radar showed three Iranian MiGs fast on his tail.

Everything had gone wrong.

Miles away, in another part of Iran, at the nuclear launch site at Bushehr, the facility that the U.N. and the IAEA had declared to be safe and used only for public-energy purposes, the chief of operations and his officers were cheering wildly. “Allah Ackbar!”

The plan had worked. Yoseff and Rafi had been deliberately duped. The site at Natanz had been abandoned, and the equipment moved to tunnels in the mountains. The empty facility was a piece of dramatic stage dressing. Military theater. The real nuclear-launch command and the silos loaded with nuclear warheads at Bushehr were untouched. When Iranian intelligence grew suspicious that some of the local citizens in Bushehr might try to filter information to the West about the nuclear missile site, they evacuated the entire city, forcing the residents to move out. Iranian nuclear command would take no chances. The Bushehr facility was too valuable.

The Iranian chief of operations smiled now as he thought of the gift of good fortune concerning the useless Israeli strike against Natanz. Thank you, Israel. Now we can launch our nuclear warheads at you and can claim to the whole world that it was self-defense.