Hesitantly, one of the hostages raised his hand. “You got them all,” he said. “All of them. But that one,” he added sadly, pointing at the body of the young man we had just shot, “he was one of us. A hostage.”
The radio clasped to my web-belt gave me no time to respond. “Muki, Muki,” it squawked.
“Muki here.”
“Giora here. Mission accomplished.” He had taken the VIP room, which the terrorists had made into their dormitory. “Two terrorists down. No casualties on our side.”
“Yonni,” I called over the radio. No answer came back. I tried again. “Yonni?” I tried again, “Muki here. Mission accomplished.” A long, foreboding silence followed, finally broken by a squawk.
But instead of Yonni’s voice, I heard Tamir Prado, the signals man from Yonni’s command-and-control team. “Muki,” he cried out. “Yonni’s down.”
I gave orders to the medics to treat any wounded among the hostages and went outside. Yonni was lying flat on his back on the tarmac. The bullet had come from the control tower, which had now fallen silent. The slug ripped into his chest and exited from his hip. David Hessin, the doctor, kneeling by his side, had torn open Yonni’s shirt and was trying to treat him.
Karameh flashed through my mind — Arazi’s body on the stretcher in the chopper, the doctors working on him to no avail. I looked around. Shaul Mofaz and his BTRs, from the second and third planes, were already patrolling the perimeter. Omer Bar-Lev’s BTR from the third Hercules was headed toward the MiG airfield.
I clenched the radio clipped to my belt. “Dan,” I called Shomron, who was on the other side of the airport at the new terminal, overseeing the Hercules landing. “Muki here,” I continued. “Yonni’s wounded. I am taking command.” Dan Shomron confirmed my report with a terse “Okay.”
Shaul Mofaz reported in. “Muki, everything’s fine with me,” he said. Then Yiftach Reicher, who led the break-in to the second floor, reported that he and his crew had also finished their job.
I kept Dan Shomron informed as my medics and the doctors took care of the few wounded hostages and collected the terrorists’ weapons. Dan showed up, his face grave and worrying as he watched Hessin work on Yonni.
The shooting was over. But the noise continued. The spinning propellers of the Hercules approaching us to collect the hostages and the clanging of the BTRs’ metal treads on the asphalt protecting us from any potential Ugandan assault filled the air.
Dan left us to handle shepherding the passengers to the Hercules while he headed back to the fuel depots, where the air force technicians readied to refuel the planes. But by the time he reached the fuel depot, word came through the command-and-control communications center circling overhead that the Kenyan government, informed of the operation, had given permission for us to land in Nairobi for refueling.
We knew that we had killed six terrorists — four in the main hall, and two taken out by Giora’s force in the corridor outside the VIP room. Yiftach Reicher’s team took out some Ugandan soldiers on the second floor. But we found no other terrorists at the old terminal. The other four terrorists, we later heard, spent that night in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, a few miles away from Entebbe airport.
Three hostages died in the rescue: Pesko Cohen, hit by one of our bullets when we hit the terrorist near the column; Ida Bobovitz, killed by terrorist fire; and the young dark-haired man who we mistook for a terrorist when he jumped up — Jean-Jacques Maimon, a young French Jew on his way home to visit family before coming back to Israel to join the army. (One other civilian from the hostages died — Dora Bloch, a Tel Aviv matron who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital the day before, when she choked on some food. Amin’s thugs murdered her after the rescue.)
We loaded a Land Rover with the wounded to take to the flying hospital plane. “Yonni first,” I ordered. While the Land Rover disappeared into the darkness across the tarmac to the field hospital, I went back inside to find Amos Goren pleading with the hostages to leave their possessions behind, to free them for the race to the airplane.
But the same passengers who only a few moments before had listened to everything we told them now ignored Amos’s request to leave behind their belongings. Realizing that Amos’s efforts were in vain, I let the passengers collect their valuables before the crews organized them for the hike to the airplane across the wide tarmac at the front of the terminal.
The fighters formed a protective wall around the civilians to ferry them out across the tarmac to where the Hercules stood waiting about 150 meters away. The Golani troops waited by its open rear door to help the freed civilians aboard.
I took the lead position of the box, Amir beside me as we stepped out of the terminal building. A heavy burst of fire came at us from the control tower.
Nervous, Amir accidentally let loose a bullet. It whizzed past my ear. “Hey, Amir, don’t overdo it,” I joshed him as we ducked back inside the building.
“Shaul,” I called to Mofaz in the BTR. “Take out the control tower, please.”
A moment later, a powerful burst of heavy machine-gun fire and several rocket-propelled grenades slammed into the control tower, silencing its occupants.
Again I stepped out onto the tarmac, into view of the control tower. And for a second time a blast of machine-gun fire raced across the asphalt at me from the control tower.
“Shaul,” I called over the radio again. “How about giving them something that will really convince them.”
RPGs and machine-gun fire from the BTR again riddled the tower. Shaul’s shooting went on for a full minute.
That should silence it for good, I thought. But I waited for a long minute to be sure. “That’s it,” I told the boys, and we began moving the passengers out to the tarmac and the plane, about 150 meters away.
I watched from the distance as they trooped to the Hercules, remembering the last Israeli departure from Entebbe airport barely four years before. Nobody helped us then as we climbed, heavy-hearted, onto the plane to Nairobi. Then we felt like refugees, helpless and defeated. Now, at first glance, the freed hostages boarding the Hercules also looked like refugees, struggling to carry a few precious possessions across the tarmac. But they were not helpless. Or alone. They were free citizens of Israel, and we had fulfilled our roles as their protectors.
The back door to the Hercules slowly rose and the plane began its lumbering run down the runway to take-off. I turned back to the business at hand. The forces scouted the building one last time looking for stragglers, and then we boarded the Land Rovers and the Mercedes to carry us to the planes waiting near the new terminal.
We threw out demolition slabs behind us as we started the trip across the tarmac, to create a smoke screen behind us for any Ugandans who might decide to be heroes as we left the old terminal. But suddenly someone announced that Udi Bloch, one of the fighters accompanying a BTR, was missing.
Everything froze as fighters went to find him, taking care to avoid the demolition slabs. Within a minute he showed up, and we finally began rolling, packed into the Mercedes, the Land Rovers, and the BTRs.
But as we drove away, shooting resumed from the machine gun in the control tower.
“God, he’s stubborn,” I said out loud. But, finished with our job, we had no good reason to stop to shoot back. Someone in the car laughed at my joke as we raced away from the tracers flashing past us. Our fight in Entebbe was over.
The final force to leave Entebbe, on the fourth plane, we took off exactly fifty-nine minutes after we had landed in the first plane, flying off into a night lit up by the flaring destruction of the Ugandan Air Force.
A row of eleven MiGs parked about a hundred meters away from the old terminal, were sitting ducks for Omer Bar-Lev’s BTR. He and his fighters blasted them with machine guns and RPGs before driving onto their Hercules. Only afterward did we find out that he had acted without a direct order. Something disrupted his Motorola communication with me or Dan, so Omer decided to act on his own.