We were as ready as we were ever going to be. We got the final go-ahead from in mid-February. Our backpacks were crammed full with the whole array of equipment we’d designed, commandeered or purchased for the mission — including a metal detector we got from a hobby shop in Pennsylvania. All the cargo except our personal gear, our weapons and our communications equipment was loaded onto the cart. A command post was set up in a few wooden huts on Mount Keren in the Negev, complete with special antennas to receive the intercept transmissions if we succeeded. Not since the first Golan operation had the attention of the kirya been so keen, or the stakes so high. In addition to Meir Amit, and of course Avraham, also flying down to Mount Keren would be General Tzur’s successor as armed forces chief of staff —a gruff Palmach veteran whom I’d met very briefly at the end of my officer’s course but who I would come to know well, and work closely with, in the years ahead: Yitzhak Rabin. * * * The helicopter lifted off at about six-thirty at night. Compared to special operations nowadays, the mission still had a somewhat improvised feel about it. Certainly, that was true of the equipment we were ferrying in, and the tools we'd devised to make sure we could get it installed and working. But the men in my team were soldiers I’d trained from the day they arrived in the sayeret. Achihud Madar was unfailingly surefooted, whether finding his way alone at night on unfamiliar ground or in a firefight inside a building. He also had natural dexterity. He and another of the soldiers who was also gifted with his hands, Nissim Jou’ari, would be performing the most technically delicate part of the operation on the cable. The third member was Oded Rabinovitch. Tall, thin and quiet, he was absolutely reliable in whatever part of an operation he was given to execute. And as my deputy commander, I’d chosen a sayeret officer named Kobi Meron, who’d been with me on a number of Golan missions. Ove