“Leave it, Yonni,” I said quietly but emphatically. “It’s just his drill.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Yonni repeated his order. Like me, he and Giora were carrying silenced 22-caliber Berettas, useful for very close quarters shooting. Giora Zussman cocked his Beretta and aimed it out his window at the Ugandan. The car continued veering toward the Ugandan, away from the terminal.
“Giora, let’s take care of him,” Yonni said, cocking his own gun.
“No,” I tried again. The entire effort of the last week was to deliver us to the front doors of the terminal in peace and quiet. The memory of Ma’alot raced through my mind. We were making a mistake, even before we reached the terminal. “Forget it, Yonni,” I tried again. But I was too late.
Yonni and Giora both fired from the moving car from ten meters away, using the silenced .22s. They were the only guns at the time that could carry silencers. I knew them well from my El Al air marshal work. It was a shot I wouldn’t have tried to make. But it was too late. The silencers turned the crack of the small handguns into bare whispers. The Ugandan fell.
I sighed with relief. We could still get there and get our job done before he caused us any trouble. I tried to resume my focus on the terminal building. Amitzur continued driving toward the old terminal, now barely fifty meters away. The Land Rovers kept to the path behind us.
Suddenly, from behind us came a terrifying sound — the long burst of a Kalashnikov cutting down the Ugandan.
I jerked my head around, just in time to see the Ugandan, back on his feet and aiming his rifle at us, cut down by a burst of Kalashnikov fire from the Land Rover.
The order was clear and simple: no shooting until the operation starts, but then heavy fire to keep the Ugandans away. Someone in the Land Rover behind us had seen the Ugandan soldier get up and take aim at us. Instintinctively, he had wanted to protect us. But now all of us were in danger as shooting erupted all around us.
Fifty meters from the target, I was seeing the entire element of surprise evaporate in front of my eyes. The rattling gunfire certainly alerted the terrorists. At any moment the terminal building might turn into a fireball of explosions as the terrorists followed through with their threats to blow up the hostages.
From the very start of the planning, I had recited the lessons of Ma’alot. “We failed there because of our own mistakes,” I warned. And now it was happening again.
“Drive!” Yonni shouted at Amitzur, who braked instinctively with the first burst of Kalashnikov fire from the Land Rover behind us. “Fast!” Amitzur sped ahead another ten meters. Fire came at us from the darkness around the tarmac.
Crammed together in the car, we became sitting ducks for the Ugandans. Yonni realized it, too. We shouted at the same time: “Stop!” Amitzur braked hard. The car slid to a stop, the Land Rovers behind us screeching to a halt.
I flung open the door and began running toward the building, still at least fifty meters away, instead of the five meters we planned for. I flanked left to avoid the pool of light on the tarmac directly in front of the terminal, hearing the thumping of the fighters’ boots behind me. Long bursts of fire shattered the night air. But I continued running, still focused on the canopied entrance to the terminal building, my target, aware that I was pulling the fighters behind me in the same direction.
Some Ugandan fire blasted toward us from my right, screaming lead past my head. Still running, I flicked the Kalashnikov to automatic and aimed a long burst at the source. I needed to create cover for all of us — myself and everyone in the column behind me. It was just like this in el-Hiam, I thought for a second as I raced ahead at the front of the column, creating as much fire as possible. The African flew backward, and I ran on, followed by all the fighters.
Finally I reached the building, directly below the control tower, barely a dozen meters away from the entrances to the building. The rattle and crack of rifle and submachine-gun fire shook the air, kicking up bits of asphalt at our feet. And behind me, thirty-three Sayeret Matkal soldiers bunched up, instead of heading to the assigned entrances. It was a complete contradiction of the battle plan, indeed of any combat formation.
But then I realized that no explosions had yet rocked the building. We still could prevent another Ma’alot. I was first in line, and the only way to proceed was forward. I took a deep breath and resumed the race to my assigned entrance, knowing that my example would spur the fighters behind me to follow suit.
Half a dozen strides into my run, a terrorist came out of the building from the second canopied entrance. I knew I had used up most of the magazine creating the cover fire in order to reach the control tower. But I also knew that once inside, I only needed a few bullets to do the job. Now, surprised by the terrorist, I aimed and fired. Only a couple of bullets spat out of the barrel. And I missed. He ducked back into the terminal building.
Racing forward, I pulled out the empty ammo magazine and flipped it over, reloading on the run, all the while keeping my eyes on my target — the canopied entrance to the building a few meters away. Still, no explosion racked the building. The plan could still succeed.
Instead, a second disaster struck: no glass doorway opened at the end of the canopied path into the hall.
I found myself facing a blank wall. We had planned according to Solel Boneh’s original architectural plans, and they clearly showed an entrance. Somehow, we had lost one of the most crucial pieces of information the Frenchman gave Amiram.
Withering machine-gun fire poured down at us from the control tower. Yonni’s backup fighters were supposed to take out the machine-gun nest up there. But obviously, the fighters were still confused by the bad start. The fifty-meter run from the cars, instead of the few meters we had practiced, threw everything off. At any second, I feared, the terrorists would ignite the explosives they had planted in the hallway. I had no choice but to get inside, to prevent that from happening.
With my preassigned entrance blocked, I began running to the second entrance, where I had seen the terrorist duck inside. Amir, a fighter from my second break-in team, suddenly ran past me, followed by his team leader, Amnon. Later, Amir said that in the confusion he lost his crew and thought they had already made it inside. Meanwhile, he became the first of us to get into the building.
He immediately spotted a terrorist and cut him down with a burst. Just then, Amnon ran in and saw the German man and woman terrorists kneeling side by side aiming guns at Amir’s back. Amnon fired at the two Germans, sending them flying, just as I came in through the door, with Amos Goren on my heels.
I immediately added my own shots to the two German terrorists, to make sure they were out of the action.
For a second, silence fell over the room. Then suddenly shooting erupted again from outside, and screaming began inside the hall. I stood in the doorway, Amnon to my left and Amos and Amir on my extreme right, totally focused on the fully lit hall, searching for more terrorists.
People were lying all over the floor on mattresses. Some were frozen with fear, others screamed and shouted. People covered their heads with blankets as if to protect themselves from the bullets.
To my left, about fifteen meters away, a man came out from behind a column, bringing a rifle up to firing position. Amos and I fired simultaneously, knocking the terrorist off his feet. Again we scanned the hall. A dark-haired young man jumped up from amidst the hostages. Bullets from all four Kalashnikovs cut him down.
The shooting continued outside. Suddenly, Amir remembered the megaphone he carried. “Lie down, we’re the IDF. Don’t get up!” He shouted the instructions in Hebrew and English. We stood that way in the room for a long moment, ready to fire again.