Without warning

A few minutes before they would overfly the resort city of Eilat, he pushed the stick over and sent them rocketing towards the Egyptian border. Beyond lay the Sinai Peninsula and the rocky wastes of the biblical Wilderness where David and the Israelites wandered for so many years. Mountains lay ahead, a jagged-edged void of darkness blotting out the stars, corresponding to the image scrolling down the APG 70 screen, bathing him in the softest of glows.

During a brief interlude, they traversed a particularly desolate and empty stretch of mountainous wasteland, and the pilot became aware of the beating of his heart. For one perverse second he couldn’t help thinking of the millions of hearts he was about to still forever. Pushing the thought away like a fearful spectre, he concentrated on the return from the radar and the threat boards. Nothing untoward. The Egyptian Air Force was steadfastly refusing to offer even the slightest provocation to its neighbour, for fear of unleashing exactly the sort of hellfire that Molenz now carried with him. They didn’t seem to know he was even in their airspace.

Whatever moral qualms Molenz had suffered before accepting this mission – and there had been many – he had nonetheless volunteered for it. They all had. He would destroy the dam and doom millions tonight, none of whom had raised a hand against him or his country. But there were millions more who would, who wanted to, and who even now were battling with the Egyptian Government’s security forces on the streets of a dozen cities, attempting to overthrow the Mubarak regime because of its supine response to what they called Zionist aggression. And they were wi

He shook his head, a quick, constrained movement inside the helmet. They were coming up on the Gulf of Suez, one of the trip points in the fight, where they would be exposed to the radar and weapons of the western naval forces operating in the area. They had no IFF codes for this flight; and as lead pla

He checked the mission clock. Fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes they would find out, via the diplomatic envoy.

But in half that time he would be over the target.

The Gulf flashed beneath them and Ephron sat quietly waiting for the warning tones and pings that would tell them they had been painted by the sophisticated arrays of the naval vessels below. The warning was not long in coming. Three harsh, discordant tones sounded and Lieutenant Ephron went to work, firing up jamming sets and countermeasures. Molenz focused his attention down to a stiletto point, determined to see them through this passing hazard.

It was over as quickly as it had begun. The waters dropped away and suddenly the giant wind farm at Zafarana appeared in the crisp aquamarine glow of his terrain-rendering APG screen. Huge, alien-looking structures blurred beneath them, recalling for Molenz an unbidden childhood memory of ru

Behind him, Ephron requested permission to arm the warhead.

‘Granted,’ said Molenz. ‘Primary release code: Alpha Two Four Delta Zero Two November Three Two Five One Echo. Confirm.’

‘Confirmed.’

‘You are released to arm.’

Ephron, whose voice was shaking, busied himself on a small keyboard, tapping out a long series of commands before a

Molenz dry-swallowed.

The port wing dipped thirty degrees and the plane began to track to the south as he levelled off, dropping the flight into the folds of a long valley that ran roughly parallel to the Nile. The faintest silver crescent of light bleeding over the ridgeline to the west would be Luxor, often acclaimed as the world’s greatest open-air museum. The temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the ruins of Thebes, they were all just a few minutes’ flying time away.

Molenz pressed on, allowing the Strike Eagle to begin its climb to a safe release height.

As all three birds emerged, screaming from the folds of the ancient valley, he finally saw what he was about to do. Towns and villages clung to the edge of the Nile, their weak, twinkling lights marking its sinuous path through the night like illuminated buoys. The IAF colonel pressed back into the flight seat as he poured on power for altitude.

Ephron a

There was an audible clunk and the plane jumped, suddenly free of the dreadful burden that had fallen away from beneath them. All three aircraft then pitched over and raced due east, away from the terrible thing they had just done.

The warhead slipped quietly down through the warm moist air. It did not whistle or shriek to a

Designed to spear deep into extremely hard, multilayered underground facilities, the penetrator – an elongated narrow-diameter spike of superhardened nickel-cobalt steel alloy – was enhanced with a void-sensing hard target Smart Fuze that measured the progress of the warhead into the body of the dam, delaying detonation until an optimal depth had been reached. Israel had long ago learned the art of reducing the size of its nuclear devices without sacrificing their destructive power. Some of the bombs falling on cities throughout the Middle East at that very moment topped out in the megaton range. The blast and heat and radiation effects they yielded were vastly greater than the primitive bombs that the US had dropped on Japan in 1945.

The device that lay, for all of a millisecond, sleeping beneath millions of tons of cement, was modest in comparison, although twice as powerful as the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. It did not need to be a city-killer, however. It merely needed to bring down a wall, and did so by instantly turning a significant portion of it into white-hot plasma. The Smart Fuze, having determined that an optimum penetration had been reached, signalled the bomb to compress a sphere of subcritical explosive material around a plutonium core, setting off a fission reaction.