Hellfire (33 page)

I looked down at the screen by my knee. Simon’s TADS image gleamed in the midday sun. There was no sign of activity in the main street.

We kicked left of the Shrine by about a kilometre, as if to go round Now Zad. Jon kicked right. We were separated by about a kilometre and getting into combat attacking positions on the DC’s southern flank.

Our sights and sensors zoomed in the white building. Puffs of smoke blossomed along its rooftop.

We tracked west of the town, and came in perpendicular to the alleyway between the DC and the white building; the area of interest. The place was heaving with Taliban, whirling like dervishes as
they lobbed grenades over the fifteen-foot wall. Our guys in the DC were flinging back their own.

They had been forced out of their sangars at the south-east and south-west corners of the DC by weight of fire, so had no idea their grenades were exploding ineffectively on the enemy’s roof.

Robed figures moved backwards and forwards between the alleyway and the building, rearming with grenades.

‘Bring me onto them,’ Simon snapped.

I dragged across the cyclic and buried it in the inside of my right thigh, throwing the aircraft into a steep banked turn. I rolled it out again, facing the DC, then leaned us over so we moved crablike until I’d lined us up with the alleyway.

At this point, Jon and Jake were still wheeling round to our left.

I brought them up to speed. ‘We’ve got Taliban in the alleyway to the south of the DC and PIDd them as hostile. Tipping in on a gun run, but it’s danger close so call for clearance quickly.’

‘I’ve seen them, stand by.’ Jon broke off to speak with the JTAC. Positive ID lobbing grenades was sufficient for ROE to engage but the proximity wasn’t. It was scary. Danger close was a major league understatement.

‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. We’ve PID’d them. They are danger close. Repeat, danger close. Confirm you want us to fire.’

Widow dropped his callsign to make the calls quicker. ‘How accurate is your thirty mil?’

‘I can put them through the window if you want,’ Jake replied, ‘but I repeat, they are danger close. Danger close. Get your men under cover with body armour and helmets on if you want us to engage.’

That was brave. He
could
post them right through the window in theory. In practice, I wasn’t so sure. Neither of us had fired this gun and we didn’t have time to test it either.

I’d pulled the stick back and dropped the collective to slow our approach until we got permission to fire. I could see the Taliban still criss-crossing the five metres between the alleyway and their building.

The JTAC came back to us within thirty seconds.

‘A-firm. Clear hot.’

Jon jumped in: ‘Checkfire! Don’t fire!’

‘Checkfire,’ I called back.

We were running in. I threw the stick left and slowed her right down. Then I crabbed her to the right, hugely reducing our closing speed, so Simon could keep the TADS on the enemy, ready for the call.

Come on! We need to get the shot in here!
The Taliban had seen our approach and run for cover.

‘Acknowledge danger close with your initials and your clearance,’ Jon said.

We didn’t have cockpit recorders. If there was a board of inquiry, Jon wanted to be able to say: ‘He knew we were danger close because he said danger close. To confirm it, here are his initials.’ That was what made him one of the best SupFACs around. He was way ahead of the game.

‘A-firm, Charlie Alpha-Charlie Alpha-that’s a danger close, danger close. Clear hot, clear hot. Acknowledge.’

‘Charlie Alpha, danger close. Clear hot,’ Jake copied, cool as cucumber.

‘Running in,’ Simon called to Jake.

I could see everything on the MPD. Simon placed his crosshairs where the roof stopped and the wall facing us began. I turned us head-on to keep his sight as steady as it could be.

‘Only go for ten rounds, buddy.’ I didn’t want to cramp Simon’s style, but I didn’t want things to go horribly wrong.

‘I’ve already set it to ten. And I’m only going to pull a few of them off.’

Good call. He wasn’t going for a normal combat burst of twenty. The longer the burst, the greater was the chance of accidental movement. If you fired a fifty-round burst, it meant five seconds of holding that crosshair absolutely dead still with an aircraft that’s swooping towards the target. I was going to have to hold her steady and point straight at them to give Simon a fighting chance.

‘Do you think it’s accurate enough?’ he said.

The slightest accidental movement of his thumb would shift the TADS and moving at that speed the weapons computer would assume he was tracking the target.

We were flying at thirty knots. The Hughes M230, single-barrel, externally powered 30 mm chain gun had a three-millimetre error. At this distance-2,000 metres-that equated to six metres.

And the gun wasn’t the only variable. I doubled the figures in my head-make that as much as twelve metres at this range. So some of our rounds could land in the compound. One thousand five hundred metres should bring the fudged error down to about nine metres-clear of the compound-if Simon was a good enough shot. If not, we’d have an authorised blue-on-blue.

‘Mate, this is it. Three mil error, double it to six for the wife and kids. Two thousand metres is twelve mils and that’s inside the compound. We need to be at a maximum of 1,500, which gives us nine. You don’t want to fire before fifteen, buddy.’

I had to hold this thing 100 per cent steady, Simon had to perform flawlessly, and we didn’t even know if the cannon was capable of hitting the target he aimed at. We both knew that if our rounds zapped into the compound, we’d be highly likely to kill or seriously injure our own troops. We would also be putting ourselves right in the Taliban’s engagement zone; we’d be sitting ducks.

Whatever we did, it was going to be a nightmare down there.

We were busting every rule, doing everything our training told us not to do.

But what choice did we have? If the enemy broke through it would be like a knife fight in a bar. We’d be useless.

We had a JTAC under such immediate threat that he was prepared to risk bringing rounds down on his own men to save the majority and hold the base. To them, surrender was not an option; the Taliban would skin every one of them alive.

We had one shot and this was it.

I accelerated to sixty knots so I had speed to manoeuvre if we were shot at.

I called down the range. ‘One point nine…One point eight…’

‘Nice and steady, Simon. Any movement will throw those rounds.’

‘I fucking know that, Ed.’

Of course, he did. But just saying it made me feel better.

I saw figures spilling out into the alleyway again. They moved towards the DC wall with what looked like a wooden cross in their hands.

Simon had his TADS on the same point-he had no choice but to hold it perfectly still-and I was still counting down. Simon had zoomed in to make sure there was no error on trigger pull, and when you zoomed in at that range, the image on the screen was massive.

The figures moved out of the frame and I looked up to see what they were up to. They’d got to the base of the wall.

‘…One point six…one point five…’

A split second before Simon pulled the trigger, they bomb-burst away from the wall and ran back towards the building, dragging the cross with them.

The gun pumped. My feet vibrated. Simon’s crosshairs never moved a millimetre. I saw the counter on the MPD drop quickly from 300 to 295 as the rounds swirled away, but didn’t need to look; I’d heard and felt five distinctive thumps.

After throwing their grenades, the last three Taliban returned to what they thought was the safety of their building, just as the rounds ploughed into the wall and roof. I saw all five rounds impact. Three bored small black holes in the roof and the two that hit the wall head-on made a much bigger splash. To the casual observer it must all have looked pretty insignificant, but to me it meant one thing: the gun was on. It was Deadeye Dick.

I called Delta Hotel-Direct Hit-on the JTAC’s frequency.

My jubilation was swept aside by Widow Seven One. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

I broke hard right with the cyclic and ripped up the collective from the floor, climbing away from the building. We’d descended to 1,000 feet and were now 1,000 metres away from the Taliban. I’d been trying to keep the same aspect all the way, and I didn’t want to change the profile of the aircraft while Simon was fighting to keep his crosshair still.

I flew the death profile, straight into their eyes. If they stood their ground now and decided to fire, they could shoot us just as easily as we could shoot them. I shouldn’t have been doing it. But there was no one looking up at us-the men I’d seen on the street had run back. My only concern was that these rounds had gone into the compound. I’d witnessed the damage they did to buildings and the men hiding within.

‘STOP STOP STOP,’ the JTAC repeated. ‘Your rounds are landing inside the DC. Copy?’

Simon yelled, ‘Fuck!’

‘Wildman has stopped,’ I called back. I craned my head over to the left as the DC came into view. No one was firing up at us; it was just dust billowing in our own courtyard.

Fuck, had Jake blown it and hit the compound? I couldn’t see Wildman Five One. They’d continued round the wheel and would have set themselves up to cover us. I knew Jon would be right
behind me in my six o’clock position, with Jake’s cannon at the ready. As we broke off our attack run, Jake would fire straight down to cover our sharp break. Setting up the racetrack, we called it, or setting up a pattern-one shooting, one setting up, then one breaking off, one running in.

Jon came through: ‘Mate, you hit the DC.’

What the fuck was he thinking?

I guess he thought we’d just fired a ten-or twenty-round burst, only saw a few splashes on top of the building and assumed the rest had raked the compound.

I flung the Apache onto its left side as we hit altitude and spotted Jon and Jake off to the west, where we’d begun our attack run.

I flipped onto the inter-aircraft radio and pressed the mic button on the cyclic while Simon scoured the target and DC for enemy and friendly fire. ‘We didn’t. Every round landed on the building. Did you fire to cover our break?’

This wasn’t a bitching contest. I just needed to confirm my theory.

‘Negative,’ Jake said. ‘We did not fire.’

‘I thought not. I’m 100 per cent sure that it
wasn’t
our thirty mike mike in the DC. They were grenades, not thirty mil. I saw them being thrown from the alleyway just before we fired.’

I switched back to let the JTAC know what had happened.

‘Negative, negative. That’s not us. That’s grenades coming into your compound. We had a Delta Hotel on the building to your south. They’re trying to break into the DC. Copy?’

‘Widow Seven One, copied. Re-attack…Re-attack.’

I thanked God that as the SWO I’d been watching the rounds like a hawk. I’d been studying the effects of weapons on different buildings so I could improve our effectiveness. I’d looked at every single cannon round fired in-theatre to learn how they impacted on different surfaces, and had taught the tactics accordingly.

If you had a man running along a boggy track in the Green Zone and there was a wall behind him, you didn’t aim down at him and the ground. If the rounds missed, they were going to explode harmlessly in the earth. Smack the wall next to him as he was running and the frag would get him first time. You didn’t even have to hit the guy.

‘Wildman Five Zero, running in with ten rounds of thirty mike mike.’

Brilliant-they were on ten rounds as well.

I’d levelled off and turned the aircraft so we were on the opposite side of the target from Jon. The white building was orientated east-west. I’d run in from the west, fired the cannon rounds, kicked off south-east, then climbed, constantly turning the aircraft left so I could keep an eye on the compound. I didn’t want to fly away from it; I wanted to keep it in sight.

Simon was concentrating on his target and I was concentrating on the landscape around it. I looked for leakers so I could call Simon onto them. Exactly the same was happening in the other Apache.

Simon zoomed in to see if there was anyone in the building. He studied doorways and windows.

With a final jink we were now turned head-on. Looking down on the compound from the east, I saw Jon flying directly towards it from the west. He was much closer than us.

We were facing each other and Jake would shoot straight ahead. It wasn’t a problem; I knew the rounds were going downwards. But I had a job to do in a few seconds. There was no chance the enemy would go one-on-one with an Apache, but when we turned tail on them they’d send a heat-seeker up our backside or loose off some RPGs.

We needed to cover each other.

As soon as Jon and Jake had finished their run, I had to be in position for Simon to fire his cannon rounds at the building to
cover their break-or if I saw any hostiles outside the building, to shoot them myself. By the time I’d talked Simon onto it, it would have been too late; platform protection was a split second win or lose decision.

I could see Jon tanking in towards the target.

We were 2,500 metres out and closing slowly. We were pointing nose to nose. They were closer and faster. When they turned to get away, Simon would have his crosshairs ready to go and I would be looking through the cockpit window; looking at the alleyway and the main street in front of the building for any leakers or Taliban trying to shoot up Jon’s bird.

Either of us could fire-whoever had control of the gun last. We both had weapon controls. He had the gun up and it was now slaved to his crosshairs. But if I saw something I’d call, ‘My gun’, press ‘Gun’ on the cyclic and it would jump to my eye and be under my control instead.

It was Simon’s job primarily to attack the target; to achieve mission success. He was this aircraft’s mission commander. It was mine to defend the aircraft; to maintain platform protection. If I spotted a threat to my Apache or Jon’s that took higher priority than killing a Taliban any day. It was all about mutual support. That was why we always made sure we could see and defend one another.