P6

P6

The canal-crossing operations originating on there were intense. Poor planning had caught up to the Egyptians and  they now knew the fragility of the thread on which the entire war now hung. It turns out that troops need to drink water, oddly enough, and in the scorching desert  of the Sinai Peninsula,  doubly so. Judith took aim at a water tower with her Anti-Tank Guided Missile and fired. The trick  was  to  keep the  target  centered  in  the crosshairs until  it hit. This could  be difficult  with  the intense pressures of  combat,  but Judith's  people had  earned their reputation by their steely  cool under fire. Her missile hit, becoming one of five to hit that tower. Judith dropped the firing mechanism  and turned  south  to  reach the  prearranged marshalling point in the rear.

Captain Shaul Ben-Elissar  found a  parked water  truck in  his sights, and successfully took  it out before  following Judith. The truck was not armored, certainly not to  the 30 centimeters of steel which the ATGMs were capable  of penetrating. Sergeant Binyamin Gafhi fired and hit a raft returning  across the mouth of the canal where it entered the Great Bitter  Lake, making it unavailable to pick  up one of the parked  water trucks. Private Marina Merom  fired  her  missile. The rocket  screamed  away, spooling out a  fine  guidance command  wire  behind it. Using electrical signals sent down  that wire, Marina  carefully kept her crosshairs on target and  struck a steel aqueduct  pipe. It would soon be field-repaired, but not quickly enough to help the Egyptians trapped on the other side of the canal.

By that time the Egyptians realized the threat was coming from a levee bordering the lake and directed fire southeast.

Private Uzi Herschson advanced closer to Deversoir to get inside the 2,500 meter range of  his weapon. There he struck a large raft with a  water truck  on board. Lieutenant Noami Meridor, rattled by shrapnel dinging the sand nearby,  couldn't keep her target centered and missed. Her missile struck the ground inside the old airfield and exploded, but still she contributed to the fog of war and served as suppressing fire to keep the Egyptians from retaliating effectively. Captain Maxim Shahal wiped out a large crane  truck which  was busy attempting  to right  a water truck overturned by an earlier blast.

The ATGW attack fell silent. Nearly a thousand wires lay on the sands. Judith's raid was  complete. In roughly one half-hour's work, she had ensured a swift denouement to the war. Not all the water supplies were destroyed, but  enough to ensure  that only the Egyptian officers  would taste  fresh water  in the  desert tomorrow. What would follow was full-scale mutiny.