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tower and the pipeline. But when we reached the site of the underground
communications cable, the mission literally ran into the ground. We dug for
more than two hours, but still hadn’t found the cable, and our mail-order metal
detector stubbornly refused to chirp out any sign of it.

Just when I’d decided to call the helicopter back in to get us, it finally
peeped a faint signal. I still wasn’t convinced, but as we manipulated it back and
forth, it got louder. Still, my instinct was to abort. We’d placed the explosives
on the electricity tower and the pipeline. That would at least divert attention
from our real mission, which meant we could return in a few months and have
another attempt. After all, the part of the operation that had been causing the
most concern in the kirya – our ability to get deep inside Egypt undetected –
had succeeded. We were nearly three hours behind schedule. Unless we worked
a lot more quickly than planned, by the time we installed the communications
intercept and covered our tracks, it would be daybreak.

Digli and several other sayeret officers were following the mission from
their command post in the Sinai, part of the intelligence base our military
engineers had built after the war into a 2,400-feet-high mountain called Gebel
Um-Hashiba, 20 miles back from the Suez Canal. When I radioed in to tell him
I’d decided to abandon the operation, I could hear the surprise in his voice, and
what seemed reluctance as well. “If that’s your judgement…” he said. But
before I could reply that, yes, I felt withdrawal was the wisest course, I heard
him speaking to someone whose voice I also recognized: Avsha Horan. He was
the soldier on guard duty in the command post for our first intercept operation
in the Sinai, the one who’d told me of how Rabin was chain-smoking and biting
his nails when it appeared we might be in trouble. Now, he was a sayeret
officer. Digli came back on the radio. “We can see more from here,” he said.
Then, pausing, he added: “Avsha says he thinks you can still do it.”

I had grown to respect Avsha’s judgement. And while Digli hadn’t explained
what “more” they saw from the command post, I assumed that, since they were
also following the other helicopter teams further south, they were concerned
that the Egyptians had figured out at least that Israeli units were involved. Both
he and I knew that it ultimately had to be my call. Whatever happened, I’d be
responsible. Yet I realized that discussing it further would change nothing, and
time was now what mattered most. “We’ll do it,” I told him, and signed off.

We’d planned for the cable work to take something like five hours, which I
knew we couldn’t afford. With all of us pitching in, sweat drenching our
“Egyptian” uniforms, we managed to finish in slightly less than four. But we

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