Hellfire (46 page)
‘My gun,’ Billy called. He was as fast as they came in the Apache world and knew from this point onwards that I was just talking baggage. I had no offensive capability beyond firing the weapons in their restrictive head-on-only redundant mode. He could still fight using his monocle.
Jon and Jake were running in on the same approach path. I looked at the gap through the cockpit window to make sure the sniper team hadn’t reached it and quickly ran my eyes southwards.
‘Billy, left and low,’ I called. He wouldn’t see my crosshair now so I had to talk him on.
The trees ran north, bordered by tall crops on either side, and I glimpsed a stretch of track on the right. I could see two of the team almost directly below us.
‘Halfway down the tree line…this side…two men…’
‘Seen.’
As the cannon growled into life the leading Taliban wanted to run, but couldn’t manage much more than a hobble. His companion staggered to a halt and waved frantically to someone behind him, as if trying to hurry him on.
I spotted the third. He was bent double, moving slowly about ten metres behind his mates. He wasn’t in good shape at all, and could barely put one foot in front of the other.
A huge explosion burst through the foliage above their heads.
Taliban Number Three disappeared in a cloud of dust and leaves. Jake and Jon’s rockets had impacted spot on target, a fraction of a second before Billy’s HEDP rounds sent a series of ghostly orange pulses along the track. He’d fired using his monocle and even though we never saw what they struck, the flashes told us his aim was spot on.
The dust wasn’t settling. The ground was like talcum powder. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The gap was still clear.
‘Have I got them?’ Billy said.
‘No idea. But they haven’t escaped north. I’ve got that covered.’
‘Engaging.’ He fired three further bursts into the billowing cloud.
We pulled into a tight orbit and dropped down low.
Jon was flying in the same direction, clockwise, and 180 degrees out. We swarmed the target, waiting for the first sign of life.
‘Wildman Five Four, Wildman Five Five,’ I called. ‘Three Taliban were hit indirectly by your rockets and we think directly by our cannon. They’ve gone unsighted in the dust. Confirm the southern escape route was secure and the fourth man never leaked out that way.’
‘Negative. We can confirm one Taliban dressed in white jumped into the haystack before our rocket hit it.’
What fucking haystack?
We didn’t need to look hard. On the western side of the tree line, just north of the Y junction, was a pall of grey smoke. The haystack was burning ferociously.
Billy and I needed Flechette clearance, and soon. The HEISAP rockets were magic against buildings but rubbish in the open.
When the dust settled, there was nothing left but the smouldering remains of a haystack, a line of burning trees, a succession of craters, splintered branches and fragments of rock. The four Taliban had completely disappeared.
Jon and Jake reported a heat source in the crops to the west, but no movement, and it was debatable if it was big enough to be human.
The crop was about eight feet high and must have had a very damp base to reflect sunlight. If their legs and arms were in the water, or if they were lying hunched up, trying to look smaller, all we’d see was a glowing torso.
Billy and I looked at his PNVS image. We’d just lost a British soldier and the DC had been under months of relentless sniper fire. The only Afghan we had seen down here was the old-timer in the grass shelter by the crossing point. We were sure these scumbags had killed our boy and Widow had taken fire earlier from this very spot. We didn’t want a single one of these guys to fight another day.
Billy opened up with another twenty-round burst.
Mud, water and shredded foliage blossomed along the line of fire and the heat source disintegrated.
We had a perfect view under the trees at this low altitude. We continued to search. But there was no one there.
‘Wildman Five Four, Widow Seven Zero. That’s the convoy in the Green Zone. Send sitrep.’
Jon called on the inter-aircraft radio, ‘We’ll get that.’
‘Widow this is Wildman Five Four,’ Jake said. ‘The sniper team has been destroyed. We are short of gas but will hold on for as long as possible. We’ll be overhead in two minutes.’
‘Wildman Five Four. Wildman Five Two Flight will be with you in two minutes for RIP,’ Pat called. ‘Send update.’
We were just about to cover the convoy back up the slope. There wasn’t much to say.
We broke off and tanked it back across the desert.
I felt relieved, but numb. Billy and I were now fighting on redundant systems, in more ways than one. I’d lost all line of sight, which meant I had no control of the TADS. If I needed to fire I’d have to fix the cannon forward and then point the aircraft directly at the target and dive at it.
There wasn’t any dialogue between us. The next patrol was out, so they had primary use of that radio frequency. We could flip onto another frequency for a chat, but then we wouldn’t hear what was going on at the pointy end. We still had to keep listening to what was happening behind us, in case we were needed to relay something back to base. We could have sent text messages to each other, but none of us was in the mood for doing anything unless we really had too. It was all too much effort.
3 Flight was out there now, watching the convoy pass through the Green Zone.
I was still trying to fix my aircraft. We might find ourselves straight back out if one of 3 Flight got hit. If I succeeded by the time we got to Bastion, we’d just need a suck of gas and ammunition.
I disconnected and reconnected my helmet, trying to bore sight it. Nothing. I switched over the systems processors. Nothing. I ran diagnostic checks on the equipment and attempted to reboot the systems. Nothing. I had no control over the line of sight. Nothing worked.
We listened to the fading sounds of the battle as we flew back across the desert.
I heard a beep and saw a text message.
Send FARMC
Jake wanted to know what we had left. We’d fired 120 rounds of 30 mm HEDP and ten HEISAP rockets. I typed my reply into the keyboard:
F 490 LBS
-Fuel remaining
A 180
-Ammo. 30mm remaining
R 28 HEISAP
-Rockets remaining
M 4
-Missiles. All of our Hellfires remain
C Full
-Countermeasures. All of our chaff and flares remain
TECHNICIAN TO REPAIR TADS FAIL INVALID LOS
‘Saxon, Saxon,’ Jake called. ‘Wildman Five Four and Wildman Five Five are RTB to you. With you in two zero minutes. Stand by for farm-c.’
Saxon Ops acknowledged.
‘We require 140 rounds of thirty mike mike, eighteen high-sap, and can you get a Greenie to the radio to speak with my wingman? He has a Tango Alpha Delta Sierra fail and an invalid Lima Oscar Sierra.’
A moment or two later, an avionics technician’s voice came through my earpiece. He sounded tentative. The techies didn’t much like talking on the radio.
‘Erm…Technician speaking…erm…over.’
He told me there was no way I could repair the fault in mid-flight and that it would have to wait until I got on the ground.
‘I’ll be ready when you get on the ground, sir. No problems, sir. Over and erm…out, sir.’ He gratefully signed off.
Calls between Pat and Chris were still coming through loud and clear. The vehicles were making their way up the slope to freedom. D Company and B Company were peeling back through the Green Zone at warp speed.
We landed, taxied, and pulled across to the refuel point. The spring in the groundies’ step had disappeared over the last few weeks. They connected the hose and started to refuel. The Greenie
tech made his way to the door and pointed towards the arming bays. I signalled a ‘6’ to him and he set off to meet us there. He walked like a zombie. I knew the last thing he needed was hours and hours of work repairing my chariot. I had no idea how they managed to fix these flying computers when they could hardly keep their eyes open.
Billy taxied along the hardened area in front of the hangar and pulled into bay 6. As we ground to a halt, I heard Pat on the radio.
‘Saxon Ops, this is Wildman Five Two. That’s the convoy safe, in the wadi to the west. All troops now making their way back towards the LS. Send in the CH-Forty-Sevens to collect.’
We wouldn’t have to go out again.
I looked at the Up Front Display.
17:15:08…17:15:09…17:15:10…
We’d been on the go for fifteen hours, and that didn’t include getting up to discover the timing had slipped.
I’d jumped into this aircraft at 3.45 this morning. Actually, maybe ‘jumped’ was too big a word.
I dipped my head and gave my eyes a rub.
When the blurriness cleared I looked left out of the cockpit window towards my wingman.
Jon was slumped back, arms by his side, head resting on the back of the seat, his visored face pointing upwards.
Jake had his arms crossed over the ORT in front of him. They were all that prevented his head from touching his feet.
Their ALPC waited patiently for a thumbs-up so he could plug in.
I looked up and left at the mirror in the corner of the cockpit frame. Billy had flaked out, just like Jon. All I could see was his chinstrap.
It was over.
Automaton-like, I placed my right arm on the ORT and my left on top of it. I lowered my head until the browpad of my helmet was resting on my arms. Then I closed my eyes.
I heard the click of a comms lead being plugged into the wingtip.
There was a long silence before a broad Welsh lilt filled my earpieces.
‘You all right, sir?’
Billy was dead to the world, and I was too ball-bagged even to lift my head.
‘No, mate,’ I replied. ‘I’m totally and utterly fucked.’
I only flew three more sorties after Operation Snakebite.
The Taliban took the death of their sniper very badly, and they didn’t take it lying down. They hit Musa Qa’leh DC day after day with everything they had but without his elite marksmanship skills they failed to hit our boys again, and for us, every mission became a turkey shoot.
We were in predictably high spirits on our final return to Camp Bastion, knowing we were only one night away from being whisked back to the UK to catch some well-earned zeds. And this was my last tour; my twenty-two years were up. I’d miss the camaraderie of the squadron, and I’d miss the awesome Apache gunship, but the damage I’d sustained in that car accident was starting to take its toll, and I’d finally be able to give my family the time they so richly deserved.
Billy bet me that the RAF’s big white freedom bird wouldn’t turn up and we’d be stuck in the Desert of Death until the end of time. I typed Emily’s coordinates into the computer; it told me she was 3,601 miles away. If Billy was right, at a walking speed of 4 mph it would only take us 900 hours to get there. I told him that if we kept going for ten hours a day we’d be home on 7 November.
We both burst out laughing. It was the date he was due to return to Afghanistan for his next tour. I said I’d raise a pint of Guinness to him at my local-but as it turned out, he had the last laugh.
Brigadier Ed Butler, Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, was now hailing the Apache as ‘mission essential’, and we certainly felt we’d done our bit to bring it centre stage. Whitehall was ecstatic. The visits programme was now crammed full with Members of Parliament, random dignitaries and anyone they could usher from the corridors of power in front of a fully tooled-up Apache gunship.
During 664 Squadron’s tour immediately after ours, the mangled remains of an AA gun mount were discovered in the alleyway behind the building we Hellfired in Now Zad. I heard a rumour that the gunner had been Iranian-trained and brought in to deal with the ‘mosquitoes’. Whether or not that’s true, we’d come a long way since taking pot shots at the drone on Salisbury Plain.
But as we prepared to land at Brize Norton and I gazed out at the startlingly green Oxfordshire countryside, I couldn’t help wondering what we’d really achieved. We’d been sent on a reconstruction mission to a patch of desert no bigger than 150 square miles and one government minister thought we might return without having fired a single shot. We ended up covering an area ten times that size, found ourselves constantly under siege and unable to patrol far from any of our bases without our ground troops being at significant risk, and fired off more ammunition than even Taff cared to think about.
We were also told that our mission had nothing to do with the Taliban or the narcotics trade. But during the three sweat-soaked months we spent with 3 Para in Helmand we were in contact with the Taliban every single day and found ourselves fighting for survival in villages that grew vast quantities of raw opium that ended up as heroin on the streets of the UK.
Sitting in the window of a coffee bar in broad daylight on my first trip to London after getting home, I was asked if I’d like to buy some.
It wasn’t my only rude awakening.
The army was short of Apache Weapons Officers. In fact, they had none. They wanted me to go back for another tour. I guess it wasn’t that surprising. For every soldier or marine accepted as a candidate for pilot selection, eighteen were shown the door. Over 2,000 applicants fell by the wayside just to get one of us through the course and onto operations.
We were lucky. Out of the fourteen on my grading, four went on to become pilots-an attrition rate of three and a half to one instead of the more normal five.
As we prepared ourselves to head out to Afghanistan once more, Scottie, my friend and instructor, decided to move Down Under with his family. He now teaches Attack Aviation to the Aussies. After years of abusing him about his outrageous watch collection, in a moment of madness I bought two of the twenty-five limited edition titanium Breitlings commissioned by the 656 Squadron aircrew to commemorate being the UK’s first Apache attack pilots. They had a dark blue face with a rippling Union Flag at three o’clock and an Apache AH1-complete with our trademark weapons fit-replacing the nine.