Apache (13 page)

If I fancied shooting the breeze, I headed to the ten foot by twelve communal area we’d partitioned off at the end of the JHF tent. It was a less formal place for pilots to work in, with brew making facilities, Sky News showing 24 / 7 on a TV in the corner and an Internet terminal with a time sheet divided into twenty-minute slots. FOG booked about seven of them a day, and he’d stand over us tapping his watch a full five minutes before his next stint was due to begin.

I spent much of my Crew Rest Periods tapping away on my laptop, keeping up with weapons reports, or I phoned home. We got thirty minutes’ call time a week free, but I always paid out for more.

‘Are you okay, sweetie?’ Emily would always begin. ‘You’re taking care aren’t you? Have you still got my angel?’

Some of us called home all the time; others used to do it as little as possible – not because they didn’t love their wives or children, but because they hated not being able to tell them anything about
what we were up to. Sometimes it was better not to talk at all.

Even the Boss had to take rest periods, chivvied out of the JHF by his second in command. He’d plug his headphones into his computer and lie on his cot to watch the first season of
24
. He’d never get more than a few minutes into the first episode before falling asleep. He must have played that opening sequence twenty times over.

The official day ended at around 9pm, after the evening brief. It kicked off after dinner, following the same agenda as the one in the morning. We always started with the weather, the temperature, sunset, sunrise, moon state and light levels. Then came the permanently disappointed Kev Blundell’s ammo report, the fuel stocks, the callsigns and codewords for the radios the next day, the porn star airframe’s service standards, and Alice’s intelligence brief.

The Ops Officer spoke about that day’s missions and firefights, the next day’s tasks, which crews were on what shifts, and what the ground troops were up to. Billy might then say something about flight safety, I’d do a little on weapons and Carl would give an update on the aircraft’s self-defence. Trigger (aka the Boss/Major Christopher James) wrapped it up with a few last points of his own.

It was during Carl’s brief in the second week that Rocco made his first appearance of the tour. Rocco was the longest-serving member of the squadron, and in more ways than one, judging by his picture. He’d been around for years – since the mid-Eighties, by the look of him. So long, in fact, that nobody knew where he’d originally come from. He had more Apache flying hours than Billy and FOG put together.

Rocco was an Italian porn star, with perfectly tousled fair hair, giant pecs and a cock that would have been the envy of a king rhinoceros. FOG looked him up on the Internet once. Rocco had
starred in more than 340 hardcore porn films over his twenty-year career, directed and produced another 200, and written fifty more. That was an awful lot of shagging. Among his back catalogue were the truly classic
Fantastica Moana
(1987),
A Pussy Called Wanda
(1992),
Intercourse with the Vampire
(1994), and
Buttman & Rocco’s
Brazilian Butt Fest Carnival
(1999).

For us, though, Rocco existed only in photographic form – a page torn out of a long lost magazine, glued onto a piece of cardboard and laminated for his own protection. He stood on a bed, stark bollock naked and posing manfully, with his right eyebrow suggestively raised, 007-style. His flexed left arm met his right where his hand covered his pubic thatch, but did little to conceal the launch pad of his very own disconcertingly potent Hellfire missile. The picture bore the dedication, ‘From Rocco, With Love. x.’

Rocco might not be seen for weeks, then make a dramatic reappearance when he was least expected, like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition.

Carl had been talking about a new upgrade to the Defensive Aide Suite. ‘Ewok,’ Geordie piped up, ‘Alice told us yesterday that the Taliban might have a ZU23 anti-aircraft gun in the Garmsir region.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ He should have seen it coming.

‘Well I was just wondering what the ZU23’s effective range is, like? Is it a threat, like?’

‘Yes, it’s a threat. Hang on, I’ve got it here. I’ll look it up.’

Geordie knew it was a statistic Carl couldn’t have known off the top of his head. Darwin had already doubled up, red in the face, desperately trying to suppress his giggles. But, holding the floor now, Carl was feeling too important to spot him. He reached for his Black Brain and turned to face the packed room. He ripped back the Velcro fastener and flicked it open.

There he was.
From Rocco, With Love. x
.

Carl blushed to the roots of his hair, and the JHF erupted.

‘Very f … funny …
VIDAL
.’

‘Ahaa! You’ve been Roccoed!’ Geordie was beside himself with glee.

You could get Roccoed at any time, day or night, in the air or on the ground. Then it would be your turn to Rocco someone else. Rocco didn’t discriminate between rich or poor, giant or dwarf. Everyone was fair game. We even got our old CO once in the simulator at Dishforth, as he flicked his Black Brain bang in the middle of a particularly challenging Hellfire sortie.

Now he was out and about, there would be a frenzy of Rocco activity for a couple of days. Then, just as quickly, he’d go undercover again.

The Boss stepped forward as the laughter subsided.

‘Okay guys, very funny. I said all I wanted this morning, so nothing from me tonight. Any other points from the floor before we close? Alice?’

Alice had slipped in late. She’d taken a quick call from the brigade’s int cell in Lashkar Gah. She looked uncomfortable.

‘Sorry, not very good timing, but there’s something that’s probably worth mentioning. I’ve just been briefed on an enemy intercept.’

The room fell silent.

‘The Taliban have a new plan for what they’ll do if they capture a Coalition soldier.’

I realised I’d stopped breathing. The TADS image of the two SBS boys filled my head.

‘They intend to set up a webcam for a live Internet broadcast, and then skin him – or her – alive.’

The Taliban kept up a permanent bombardment of the new Garmsir DC. The marines had put the boot into their lovingly kept hornets’ nest, and they weren’t going to let them forget it.

But their focus on the four other northern district centres now seemed to ebb and flow. For a week or two, they’d have a concerted crack at Sangin and its defenders would be back at the ramparts. Then, without any apparent reason, they’d tire of Sangin and turn their attention to Now Zad or one of the others.

During the first few weeks of our second tour, they threw all they had against Kajaki, the furthest outpost, ninety-five kilometres north-east of Camp Bastion, right at the top of the Helmand Green Zone. The town itself was not much to shout about – it was barely more than a village. But control of the giant Kajaki Dam was something else again; it stood 100 metres high and 270 metres wide, in front of the biggest lake in Afghanistan.

It had been a Cold War playground, constructed by the Soviets in 1953 as a gesture of comradeship. Then along came the Americans in 1975, wanting to spread their share of love and influence, and built a thirty-three megawatt hydroelectric power station
beside it. By the time we arrived, the dam irrigated the entire province, neighbouring Nimruz and a sizeable chunk of Iran, and also provided Helmand with almost all of its electricity.

Hold the dam, and you controlled the livelihoods of half a million Helmandis. To lose it would have been a strategic disaster. If the Taliban destroyed it, they’d wreak havoc, plunge the province into darkness – and blame the atrocity on a US bombing raid.

A 3,000-metre-long ridgeline towered over the south-eastern side of the dam. The tallest of its three peaks had been fortified by the Paras and was occupied by a troop of thirty marines. It was an excellent vantage point from which to spot any approach. It was given the codename Arnhem.

The marines were skirmishing daily as the Taliban probed towards the hydroelectric dam. The marines held them off, but the Taliban had them surrounded – and took out their frustrations by giving them a fair kicking.

HQ Flight took over the IRT / HRF role from 2 Flight at the height of the Taliban’s Kajaki-thon; 2 Flight had gone up there twice. It was a racing certainty we’d follow suit.

‘Ten quid says we’ll have to go all the way up to bleeding Kajaki and back every day of the shift,’ Carl grumbled. The longer flight meant a greater chance of him missing a meal, which alarmed him almost as much as it did FOG. But none of us took his bet.

The IRT / HRF handover always took place after the morning brief. Since the task was all about getting airborne as fast as we could, every aspect of our existence for those three days was tailored to that objective. Two aircraft were on permanent standby to scramble at all times, their pilots’ kit out of the lockers and ours already in them. To ensure someone was always ready to power up, we even went down to the flight line with 2 Flight. While they
took their stuff out of the Apaches, we put ours in.

My ammo-bag went beside my seat and my other running clobber went in the boot with my go-bag as usual. Perched on the seat was my helmet, leads plugged in. I left my Flight Reference Cards and gloves on the dash, stowed my carbine in its bracket and hooked my survival vest on top of it – open and ready to slip into.

Carl and I – the two back-seaters again – signed out our aircraft.

‘A very saucy little Lolo Ferrari for you today, Mr Macy, and the one and only Taylor Rain for you, Staff.’ The crew chief just loved his new fleet of sex goddesses. ‘Lolo’s sucking beautifully today – fuel, that is.’

There was no time to load up a specific weapons load on an emergency shout. So the IRT / HRF aircraft were given a routine Load Charlie. Each Apache normally went out with 300 cannon rounds, twenty-four rockets and two Hellfires. We used the rest of the takeoff weight allowance on extra fuel in a specially fitted second tank. It gave us between ninety minutes and two hours more time over the target, depending on where we went.

For the duration of the shift, the flight moved out of our normal accommodation tents and into one set aside for the IRT / HRF by the JOC compound. The emergency Chinook crews slept in another alongside it.

We would be summoned for a call-out on insecure radios we carried everywhere. For the same reason we had tactical callsigns, emergency shouts came to us in code. We didn’t always want the Taliban to know that Big Brother was on his way. The codewords had a theme – pop stars, football teams, literary classics, whatever the Ops officer fancied – and they changed every few weeks.

The IRT / HRF tried to stay together as much as possible during the shift. We ate together, washed together and worked together.
There were only two radios, so if one of us had to go for a dump, we’d do so as a pair.

We didn’t lift on every scramble, only on half the shouts that came in. Our commanders were reluctant to throw us up unless they were sure it was necessary. They might need our limited pilot and aircraft hours later. It was a tricky balance.

I once sat in a powered-up Apache cockpit for four hours on the flight line while Sangin took a pummelling. They didn’t want us to go up there and risk running out of combat gas only for the real assault on the DC to kick off.

‘You’re our ace card,’ the brigadier had told us. ‘It’s a game of poker with these bastards. And a good poker player hangs on to his aces as long as he can.’

The order for us to launch always came from the brigade air cell at Lashkar Gah. Only they had full sight of the whole battle space, and knew best how to allocate their paper-thin resources. The truth was, they desperately needed more aces. To help them, our Ops Officer listened in to the ground net to get us the earliest heads up he could. He’d often scramble us down to the flight line before the brigade’s call arrived. When it did, all we had to do was pull up the collective.

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long for our first Kajaki shout – five hours and forty-three minutes after the handover, to be precise. We had just eaten lunch. Billy had agreed to stay on in the cookhouse with Carl and one of the radios, so Carl could have a slice of strawberry cheesecake – his favourite. Trigger had gone back into the JHF, and I had popped back to the IRT / HRF tent with the second radio. I wanted to write a quick bluey to my son. Emails and phone calls were great, but nothing beat the post. It was more intimate; the connection between you more tangible. I began
to write. In the quiet of the tent, the voice over the radio made me jump.

‘BART, HOMER, SPRINGFIELD, PIZZA.’

It was
The Simpsons
theme week. The IRT, Trigger and I, were Bart, and Homer was the HRF; all four of us, to the Ops Room, fast.

I grabbed the radio to acknowledge. ‘Bart, Springfield, Pizza.’

Something nasty had obviously kicked off in the Green Zone. Leaving my son’s bluey on my cot, I sprinted out of the tent and up the forty-five degree wooden ladder specially built for us over the waist-high Hesco Bastion wall. My feet stung as I landed on the dust road in front of the JOC. ‘Aircrew,’ I hollered as I nipped past the sentries and into the JHF tent.

The watchkeeper looked up from his radio set. ‘Kajaki is under attack. The Boss is already next door.’

‘Roger.’

I grabbed my Black Brain from the secure steel box as Billy and Carl burst into the tent. The cookhouse was a good 700 metres away. Billy and Carl had taken the IRT Land Rover to lunch, but they were still red in the face from the rush. Not ideal for strawberry cheesecake digestion.

‘It’s Kajaki, guys. Billy, go next door. Come on Carl.’

On a fastball, the front-seaters always popped into the JOC for a quick low-down on the ongoing incident from the ground ops officers, while the back-seaters made a beeline for the aircraft to start firing them up.

Carl wheel-spun the Land Rover away from the JOC compound, turned sharp left down a 200-metre dirt track then left again. The suspension clanked as we sped across the metal bridge over the irrigation ditch and swung right towards the hangar. We drew up hard with a squeal of brakes and ran the last seventy-five metres to
the arming bays. Our two Apaches were crawling with Groundies.

Ten minutes later, Trigger and Billy popped up over the berm. They’d taken the off-road route between the JOC and the flight line. I pushed the throttle forward to start the rotors turning the second the Boss slammed his door shut. We were off the deck in twenty-two minutes. Once we’d hit 3,000 feet Trigger caught his breath and gave me the fill.

‘It’s Arnhem. They’re taking heavy incoming from three different firing points: north, north-west and west. Heavy calibre stuff, rockets and a whole load of RPGs. A lad’s already taken a 7.62 to the head – good job he was wearing his helmet. Looks like the Taliban might be trying to take the position.’

‘Copied.’

‘Five Zero, Five One – Buster.’ Buster was the call to press the pedal to the metal.

It was the worst attack on Arnhem yet. And my monocle told me we were still twenty-eight minutes away. I was pulling so much power, the torque was bouncing on and off 100 per cent. The second it dropped into the 90s, it was nose down and collective up again. We were tanking it; a straight line, max chat.

There was no time to test the weapons on the ground during an IRT fastball. So we did them on the way.

‘My gun.’

I looked full left, full right, hard up and straight down. The gun followed my every move. ‘Your gun.’

Trigger did the same.

‘Coming up rockets.’

Actioning the rockets, he made sure their steering cursor came up on his TADS screen and the correct quantity of each showed up on his weapons page.

‘Come co-op.’

I followed the Boss’s ‘I bar’ around my monocle as he moved his TADS.

‘Good movement; co-op confirmed, Boss.’

‘Good. My missiles.’

‘CMSL’ popped up in my monocle.

‘Missile locked onto the laser, Mr M. Your missiles.’

I looked down and left; the Hellfire’s seeker followed my eye movement.

I tried to picture the scene up in Kajaki; how we were going to prosecute the targets. The enemy’s favourite hangout was a loaf-shaped hill between two wadis, about two and a half klicks north-west of Arnhem. It was known as the Shrine because some mullah had been buried up there years ago. The site was covered in tatty green, red and white flags; a typical Afghan grave.

The Taliban’s drill was always the same. They set up their weapons, gave our boys on the mountain a good pounding, and escaped like rats up a drainpipe into three or four old tunnels on its western edge as soon as we turned up.

I hoped the marines were getting it from the Shrine because it was safer ground for us to attack: no buildings, so no collateral damage. If the Taliban were on Falcon, too, it would be trickier.

Falcon was our codename for the peak immediately west of Arnhem, less than 400 metres along the same ridgeline. The enemy used to climb its blind side and our guys would only know they were there when the rounds started tearing up the ground beneath their feet. Unless we got our munitions spot on when engaging Falcon, they’d overshoot and spill onto Arnhem, especially if we were firing from the west.

From the brief sitrep Trigger had received, it sounded like the
enemy were on the Shrine
and
Falcon. It sounded like they were everywhere.

‘Widow Seven Eight, this is Ugly Five One. How do you read me?’ As the mission commander for the sortie, the Boss got on the net to the JTAC at Arnhem.

‘Ugly, Widow Seven Eight. Lima Charlie. You me?’

‘Lima Charlie also. We are two Apaches carrying 600 thirty Mike Mike, forty-eight rockets and four Hellfire. Callsigns Ugly Five Zero, Ugly Five One. Requesting update.’

‘Copied Ugly Five One. We’re taking machine-gun and RPG fire from Falcon. They’re massing there and trying to move across to assault our location. We think they’re going to try to over-run us. Confirm you know that location.’

‘Affirm.’ I’d taken the Boss up to Kajaki on our second attempt at a familiarisation flight.

‘Also, Ugly Five One, be aware I’ve got a Harrier GR7 on station: callsign Topman …’

Good. The marines were getting the heavy artillery as well as the cavalry.

‘He is going to drop a 500-lb bomb on the top of Falcon. I’d like Ugly callsigns to follow up and kill any leakers after Topman drops.’

‘Ugly Five One, copied all. Have you any other further targets for us?’

‘Widow Seven Eight, affirm. Are you familiar with the area of the Shrine?’

‘We are.’

‘The enemy are shooting rockets at us from somewhere near the top of the Shrine. Firing position as yet unidentified. Can you locate and prosecute Taliban there too please?’

‘Affirm.’

‘Roger. One more thing, Ugly: can you give me your time on target?’

A loud burst from a heavy machine gun echoed across the JTAC’s radio microphone and we could also hear curt instructions being issued in the background. Our JTAC was very calm for a man about to be overrun by a highly trained guerrilla force. But they nearly always were. It was a testament to their training, professionalism and, above all, courage.