NORTHERN PAKISTAN
Their moon shadows shot across the mountainous terrain at dizzying speed. They were sleek, alien to their stark surroundings, slaved to the squadron of camouflaged Israeli Air Force F-16Is from Ramat David Airbase, southeast of Haifa.
Chief Commander Maya Behrman led the sortie, holding one hundred feet while flying at just under the speed of sound to conserve fuel.
Just aft of her right wingtip flew Captain Ben Sammet, her wingman. Like Maya, Sammet was a veteran pilot with countless sorties during his ten-year military career.
Her squadron of eleven “Netz” fighters—the Israeli nickname that meant “Falcon” in Hebrew—had left Ramat David six hours ago. They had jettisoned their external fuel tanks over the Red Sea and refueled twice from American KC-135 flying tankers—once over the Arabian Sea near the coast of Yemen, and again prior to entering Pakistani airspace, within sight of the imposing U.S. Seventh Fleet. Then they had continued northeast into the still-darkened country, its power infrastructure crippled by the American EMPs.
At twenty kilometers from the reactor complex, Maya climbed to two thousand meters. The Khushab facility, with its five weapons-grade-plutonium-producing reactors, covered most of the long valley. Perimeter fences under the yellowish glow of emergency lights surrounded massive domes, cooling towers, and endless structures, pipes, buildings, and cranes.
At a distance of ten kilometers from her assigned target, Reactor 1 on the northeast side of the complex, Maya inched the control stick forward, commanding the Netz into a forty-degree dive.
Sammet followed closely while the rest of the squadron broke up into pairs, one per reactor plus a solo fighter to eliminate the heavy water production plant in the southeast.
At an altitude of one thousand meters, Maya began to release her load of Mark 84 general-purpose bombs at six-second intervals. She then climbed to five thousand meters to lead their escape run into India, less than two hundred kilometers away.
The facility lit up the valley as dozens of two-thousand-pounders detonated on target. The containment domes of all reactors vanished in multiple fireballs of orange and yellow-gold, before secondary explosions propagated across the rest of the complex.
Maya’s squadron resumed its formation while flames pulsated in the desert, reflecting their glow on the steep walls of surrounding mountains, turning the remote valley into a nuclear wasteland.
Breaking silence for the first time since entering Pakistani airspace, she recited a passage from the Book of Joshua.
“On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel, ‘Sun, stand still over Gideon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.’ So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies.”
Her squadron replied in unison, “There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!”