P4

P4

Shyla took the charges and put them on the pylon of the forward landing gear of each fighter  where it emerged from  two hinged panels on the front of the plane. Only a thorough inspection by a pilot or a mechanic would have revealed them, certainly not by untrained guards. The idea was to render the  planes nose-down after detonation.

With twenty planes prepared in this way, a square of thirty-six would be taken completely out of action. The ones that were not disabled would be trapped in  place by  the ones that  were, so closely were they positioned.

When Shyla said, "Reset!" she was whisked to another airfield to evaluate the layout  and  repeat her  performance. A half-hour after sunset on the 5th of June she had completed the set parked at the Arish airfield, the final airfield, the one the Israelis wanted to  leave with  its  runways  intact  to use  after  the immanent war.

From a  safe  distance  she  gave the  order  to  detonate  and witnessed the two long rows of planes immediately  go nose down on the tarmac. Shyla knew that the  same scene  was repeated, simultaneously, at sixteen other bases across Egypt.

Rav seren Judith  Margolies  received the  phone  call she  was expecting from her contacts in the B'nei Elohim and reported the sabotage of the Egyptian air force to the other officers in the Kirya, the sprawling IDF headquarters in Tel  Aviv. Orders were given to four Israeli air  force fighters flying on  Combat Air Patrol (CAP) to turn north  in the Mediterranian until,  it was estimated, they had disappeared from Egyptian  radar. They were already hovering on the edge of view. Then the planes descended to just sixty  feet  "off the  deck" to  avoid  radar and  SA-2 missiles and turned south  toward Egypt. Their mission was to evaluate  the massive  damage  that Judith  had assured  Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, in the final four days of planning for the war, would be inflicted by the B'nei Elohim.

When the fighter pilots saw what Shyla had done they were quite satisfied. They had been briefed  that should the  B'nei Elohim prove successful they were to  fly to the airfield  holding the greatest number of large bombers, the ones  capable of striking Israeli cities, and inflict as much damage as possible. The rest of Israel's entire air  force, just two  hundred planes  to the Arab's five hundred, were then scrambled for the first wave.

In just a quarter of an hour on the morning  of June 5 hundreds of Egyptian warplanes were mortally crippled.