wig, which came off in his hand. As she began screaming, Marco instinctively struck her across the face, but he used the hand in which he had his Beretta. The gun went off, and the bullet grazed Bibi in his upper arm. When Uzi Dayan had finally got in through the rear door, he’d run up against a stocky, suntanned man blocking in his way, and fired — thankfully, only into his midsection. He turned out to be one of the passengers, a film- maker from Austria. Still, there was the other woman hijacker to deal with. Several of the passengers pointed to the floor just ahead of Uzi, where she lay curled up, holding a grenade with the pin out. Ordering her loudly, sternly, not to move, Uzi wrapped his hand over hers, extracted the grenade from her grasp finger by finger, replaced the pin, and had one of his men lead her out of the plane and down the stairs. All the hijackers had been either killed or captured. Tragically, in the initial crossfire, a 22-year-old passenger named Miriam Holtzberg, had been hit. Although the man whom Uzi had mistakenly shot recovered, she did not. Yet all of the remaining passengers and crew were now free and safe, alive and unharmed. I felt a mix of emotions when it was over: pride, a sense of achievement against all the odds. And huge relief at having succeeded in ending the ordeal of the captives. Without my saying so, everyone in the unit understood that my inaugural comments as commander, about our need to become a full special- forces unit, were no longer a distant wish. Still, I knew this was only one step, and I wanted to make sure we kept our feet on the ground. The day after the Sabena rescue, Israeli newspapers devoted acres of newsprint to how the operation had succeeded. Since Sayeret Matkal’s existence was still an official secret, the headline writers called us, variously, a “special” unit, a “select” unit and even in one case, because of our El Al coveralls, “angels in white.” We did, briefly, celebrate back at the sayeret b