SIXTY
On board the Kiev, Russian Vice Admiral Sergei Trishnipov had just conferred with his invasion chiefs. In thirty minutes he would give the flight order for his jet fighters, in squadrons of fifty each, to head toward the Israeli air bases. Early intelligence indicated that the ships’ electronic radar-masking systems had worked, that they had become invisible to Israeli radar. The IDF had been successfully tricked about where the first wave of the naval invasion would take place and believed it would be much farther south.
At the same time, a dozen bombers, with fifty MiGs protecting them, would soon begin battering Haifa, with a similar formation bombing Tel Aviv.
In the north, near the Syrian border, General Viktor Oragoff, who would lead the Russian troops, and General Izmet, commander of the Turkish army, were meeting in a makeshift command center in a farmhouse. The map of Israel was laid out on the table.
General Oragoff was making sure the Turks were on the same page. He leaned over the table and pointed to the northern tip of Israel. “We enter here, between Nimrod’s Castle and Tel Dan. We secure entrance onto Highway 99, and then our fastest mechanized units must race south to Highway 90 and then take 90 south. Our tanks will be right behind to clean up the resistance. We blast down 90, and in the first five hours I want to take the Hula Valley and enter Galilee. Along the way we should be able to pick up support from the local Hamas groups embedded in Nazareth and farther south at Nablus. They will start liquidating the Jewish resistance for us. Understood?”
Oragoff straightened up. “Then we push south to Jerusalem, followed by the dirty business of mopping up pockets of resistance, burning down houses, shooting any Jews that are left … that sort of thing. I would like to be able to begin a slow pullout in a few weeks. I’d like to see my home in St. Petersburg in two or three months. We’ll leave an occupying force, of course … two hundred thousand from Russia, another hundred thousand from the rest of the coalition. That should do it.”