relieving himself. He nodded in gratitude when he’d finished, and returned to Bibi’s team on the far wing. I gave him a full minute to be certain he was in place.
Then I whistled. From my initial position beside the plane, I saw Danny Yatom and his team begin to move one of the tall ladders toward the front door. Shifting my eyes toward the wing doors as the “crucial first five seconds” ticked by, I saw both the ones on my side of the plane were still shut. I climbed up on the wing. When I got to the smaller, rear door I saw the main one cave inward and Mordechai Rachamim rush in. But the soldier on the other door was trembling and frozen in place. I slapped him, hard, on the back. “Move!” I shouted. Instantly, he pushed the door in and rushed inside. I then noticed Uzi and his team had still not entered from the rear. I jumped from the wing and ran toward the ladder at the back, but by the time I got there, they had made it inside, and I followed them in.
Everything was over within 90 seconds. As I’d expected, the planning and training turned out to matter less than instinct and initiative. Within seconds, Uri Koren managed to get into the nose-wheel assembly. Though he couldn’t dislodge a metal-mesh panel separating it from the cockpit, he spotted the outline of a man’s foot above him, fired, and wounded Captain Rifa’at. The other members of Danny’s team in front were less lucky. With the ladder, they had no trouble getting to the passenger door, but they struggled to force it open. When they did nudge it open a crack, one of the hijackers opened fire, slightly wounding one of the men and forcing them to abandon the attempt.
Mordechai went in shooting, but immediately drew fire and had to retreat. But Omer Wachman, another air marshal I’d posted on the far wing, was ina couple of seconds later. Coming face-to-face with one of the hijackers, he shot him in the head. That allowed Mordechai to get back inside. He quickly exchanged fire with the hobbled Captain Rifa’at, hitting the hijacker in the side. As Mordechai ducked down to reload his pistol, Rifa’at managed to lock himself inside one of the toilets near the cockpit. Mordechai ran after him. He fired through the bathroom door, then kicked it open and confirmed that he was dead. Rushing back toward the center of plane, he spotted the main woman hijacker, wearing a bulky explosive vest. Grabbing her hands, he reached inside the vest and yanked out the battery pack. With two of the hijackers already dead, Mordechai had now subdued the third. But knowing that there was still another woman unaccounted for, he handed her over to Bibi and Marco Ashkenazi. Bibi grabbed her by the back of her hair, but it turned out to be a
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