Apache (14 page)

‘Ugly Five Zero, we’ll be with you in figures eight minutes.’

We divided up the workload.

‘I’ve spent ages up at the Shrine, Boss. If we take that, Billy and Carl can go for Falcon.’

Trigger detailed the tasks to our wingmen.

‘Copied all. Happy with that.’

All we needed to know now was when the Harrier’s bomb would impact. I hoped for the marines’ sake it would be soon.

‘Ugly Five One, Widow Seven Eight. Confirm time on target for Topman.’

Topman replied himself. He was a Brit – RAF – even better news.

‘Time on target … six minutes …’ I could hear him demand oxygen from his facemask every few words. He sounded like a public school version of Darth Vader. We’d be there only a minute or two behind them. Less, if Carl and I could squeeze any more power out of our beasts.

The Boss tapped in the Shrine’s coordinates, and our lenses shot towards it. Billy did the same for Falcon. From that distance we could already make out the shape of the loaf, but we were too far off to see heat sources. Not long now though; maybe only a couple of minutes. Then we’d be amongst it. Bring it on.

‘Topman … Impact one minute …’

Now we were heading north over the Green Zone, with four klicks to run. I could see the Falcon and Arnhem ridgeline clearly now in our one o’clock, as jagged as a dinosaur’s back.

My right eye flicked back and forth from the ridgeline to the clock, keeping count of the seconds. Carl and I had bought us some time. The other Apache was right in behind us, 500 feet lower and to our right. At four klicks a minute we’d be coming level with Falcon almost as the bomb went off. If we got too close we might catch a bit of the blast.

‘Ease up a touch, Carl. Drop to 100 knots – that should do it.’

‘Copied mate. Just what I was thinking.’

The Harrier came on one final time.

‘Topman’s pickled the load … Impact in Two Zero seconds.’

‘I better have a look at this.’ The Boss slewed his TADS across to Falcon. He didn’t want to miss the fireworks, and the Shrine was still some way off.

White light erupted on Falcon’s pinnacle and a crown of orange flame curled up around its epicentre, enveloped a second later by a vast dust cloud that mushroomed high into the sky. At 2,000 metres off, we had a grandstand view.

‘Okay, moving the TADS back to … Wait; hang on, I’ve got a runner …’

I glanced down at my right MPD screen. A Taliban fighter was shifting it down the western side of Falcon, right out in the open, around 150 metres below the crest. He was going like the clappers, leaping from one rock to the next. If Trigger didn’t get him, the hail of stone splinters from the explosion would.

‘I’ve got him in my crosshairs … engaging with cannon.’

Trigger was preparing to go into Top Gun mode. Two bursts, angled seventy-five degrees right of our nose, from no more than
1,500 metres. The runner disappeared in a cloud of dust and flame. The air cleared and he was nowhere to be seen.

‘Wow. Good shooting, Boss.’

‘Tally one dead fighter,’ Billy said. ‘I was lined up ready to engage.’

Too professional to say so overtly, he was clearly pissed off.

‘Topman … Negative playtime remaining … Top shooting, Ugly …’ With that, Darth broke station for Kandahar.

It was Billy’s target, no question. But we were a few hundred metres ahead of our wingmen and there was no escaping Trigger. Now he wanted to pay his respects at the Shrine too.

‘FLIR should pick up the residual heat from the rocket motors. Come on Elton, where are these tunnels I’ve heard so much about? Let’s nail them before they bolt.’

Tracking the Boss’s FLIR image on my MPD, I talked him onto the tunnel entrances at the western edge of the Shrine. One large heat source appeared to the right of the screen – where the rockets must have been launched – then two more melted away down a blowhole nearby.

‘See those heat sources, Boss?’

‘Yeah, visual.’

‘Widow Seven Eight, I have two men at the top of the Shrine, western end, dropping down a shaft. Is that where you were taking fire from?’

‘Affirm. You are cleared to engage.’

Only a weapon with pinpoint accuracy could do the job.

‘Copied. Engaging with Hellfire.’

The AGM-114K SAL Hellfire II missile landed precisely where we pointed the laser beam projected from the TADS on the Apache’s nose. A Hellfire climbed after leaving its rail whilst a
seeker in its head searched for the coded laser energy. Once found, it locked on, lined itself up and screamed down onto the painted target at 475 metres a second. The missile was so accurate we could post it through a letterbox.

But the shaft entrance was still going to be a hell of a shot. Every Hellfire we had was programmed to hit the target from above because that’s how tank armour was best penetrated. We were 1,500 metres south of the Shrine and 3,000 feet above it. If the Boss banged the Hellfire in from here it would explode on the lip of the shaft, blowing the Taliban’s ear drums and showering them with rock splinters – but if they’d got ten metres or so down from the surface, it probably wouldn’t kill them. The missile’s forte was penetration; its 12.5-lb warhead propelled a molten slug at thirty times the speed of sound through up to three feet of solid steel. It wasn’t the explosion that did the killing, but the pressure wave that followed.

The Taliban were already inside the shaft, and would be burrowing deeper with every passing second.

‘Don’t fire until I say, Boss. We’ll ram it right down the vent.’

I reduced our speed but maintained the height. The closer we got, the lower the TADS was pointing. The only way we’d get the Hellfire into the shaft was to fire it at a sharp angle from the shaft’s entrance so it wouldn’t have time to track down to its normal impact angle.

‘Trust me, Boss. One thousand metres.’ I wanted vertical and didn’t have time to explain. ‘Lase the target now,
but hold fire
.’

Five hundred metres from the target would do it. But we only had ten more seconds before our quarry would be out of harm’s way. The bottom right-hand corner of my MPD told me that the dog had seen the rabbit – our missile had locked onto the laser. The
Boss’s crosshairs were still on the shaft but the TADS could move no further.

‘Mr M, I’m about to break lock – and they’re about to escape.’

‘Seven hundred and fifty metres. Stand by to fire.’

I dumped the collective and thrust the cyclic forward in one fast, smooth movement.

The Apache’s nose dropped and its tail shot up. Within a second it was pointing straight down and hurtling towards the Shrine at 100 knots.

‘Okay, fire Bo –’

‘Firing.’

The Hellfire’s propellant ignited with a bright yellow flash as it slid off its rail and blasted straight towards the target. The cockpit window was filling up with Shrine, and fast – 125 knots … I couldn’t pull up because the Boss would lose lock.

The Boss hunched over his screen, keeping the TADS crosshairs over the shaft entrance and his laser trigger tight. A fraction over two seconds after it left us, the missile followed the beam straight into the blowhole and impacted five metres down the tunnel with five million pounds of pressure upon every square inch of rock it hit.
Yes
…

One hundred and fifty knots … I pulled back hard on the cyclic. Dust and debris shot from the top of the shaft, 100 feet into the air. We were under 1,000 feet. I’d sworn I’d
never
get this low. At 750 feet, still fighting the inertia, I punched off eight flares as the nose came up, just in case a missile decided to lock onto the heat from our now vertical engines.

‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly. That is a Delta Hotel. Repeat, Delta Hotel!’

Direct hit. We could hear whoops of delight over the JTAC’s
mike. We skirted around the back of the Shrine to look for runners while Billy scoured Falcon. Both were as dead as a whore-house on a Sunday morning.

‘I want that Hellfire method taught to everyone, Mr M …
after
you’ve explained it to me
…’

Between us and the Harrier, every threat had been removed in under two minutes. Alice would have been proud of us.

The Boss was delighted with his sharp-shooting. ‘I think that’s what you call catching the enemy with their pants down, isn’t it?’

‘Kind of. They’d barely unbuckled their belts.’

‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly Five One. We have no more targets. Do you have anything else for us?’

‘Negative. But they’ll probably be back the moment you go.’

‘Boss, we’ve got plenty of combat gas,’ Billy said. ‘Let’s pull a trick.’

‘Affirm. Good idea.’

Trigger flipped onto an insecure frequency and told the JTAC we were heading back to Camp Bastion. Instead, we pulled south ten kilometres into the desert, and waited.

It was a ruse we’d used a few times with success. We listened to the Taliban’s radios; they listened to our insecure nets. Each side heard the other loud and clear. But neither knew for certain whether they were being bluffed.

We circled at endurance speed – seventy knots – while the sun dipped over the foothills of the Hindu Kush, painting the sky blood red. There was not a trace of humanity as far as the eye could see; the scene was so primeval that Billy and Carl’s brutally uncompromising helicopter gunship beneath us looked strangely at home.

After twenty minutes, it was still all quiet at Arnhem. The Taliban
were either all dead or had decided against stepping back into the ring for Round Two, so the JTAC released us.

‘Drop us some fish and chips the next time you’re passing,’ Widow Seven Eight added. ‘The lads are sick to death of ration packs.’

We landed back at base at dusk. The arming teams threw on the same Load Charlie for our next call-out.

‘Stand by, you two,’ Carl warned from the next door arming bay. ‘Kev is on his way over.’

Kev circled the aircraft, his belly leading the way. He peered into our rocket pod tubes and under the Hellfire rails. He plugged into the wing with the inevitable slow shake of his head. ‘Absolutely fooking typical.’ We’d launched one of his precious Hellfires – what more did he want? ‘You launched one all right. But you launched the wrong fooking one, didn’t you?’

Kev pointed to the Hellfire on our right-hand rail. ‘See that? Its serial number’s out of date next week. You were supposed to have fired the fookin’ right ’un, not the left. That one was good for another couple of months. I’ll have to backload her now. Un-fooking-believable.’ He unplugged and stomped off.

As we turned in that night, the four of us popped into the JOC one last time to check on the situation at Kajaki. The District Centre and Arnhem had taken the odd pot shot since we’d left, but on the whole it had remained quiet.

I got into my sleeping bag and hoped we didn’t get an overnight call-out. I didn’t mind them normally, but the whole squadron had to be up early the next morning. The Prime Minister was on his way.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s clandestine visit was the worst kept secret in Camp Bastion. Everyone had known about it for days.

‘Listen, I know you all know who’s coming out,’ the Boss said one night at an evening brief. ‘But from now on,
please
stop talking about it. It’s supposed to be classified.’

Darwin gave Trigger’s knickers an extra twist. ‘Can we ask the PM to sign Rocco, sir?’

‘No we bloody can’t! And please don’t Rocco anyone while they’re talking to him. Seriously guys, I’ll get sacked. In fact, who’s got Rocco? Can you hand him over, please?’

Thirty blank faces stared back at him; twenty-nine genuinely, one not so. Rocco wasn’t coming out that easily. Trigger looked at Carl. His eyes narrowed.

‘I swear I don’t have him, Boss.’

The official order had gone out for maximum attendance at a ‘VVIP visit’ twenty-four hours before. They wanted everyone in the camp apart from those on essential duties to line up for him on the Hercules’s landing strip. He was due to land, have a walkabout and a how-do-you-do and then leave an hour later without even going
into the camp proper. It was fine by us. If we needed to scramble, we were in the right place. And it would give him a good show.

We all had to get up at 6am to be down there by seven for his arrival at eight. It was the military’s usual hurry-up-and-wait scenario – and it put Carl on supermoan mode.

‘Blooming typical. The one night we don’t get an IRT shout, we have to get up at sparrow’s fart anyway.’

There was a frisson around the camp that morning – not because anyone was particularly excited to meet the man, but because it was something different. A welcome break from the daily grind.

We were told he was going to make a speech, which was why I hadn’t dreamt up an essential task for myself instead. I was curious to hear what he was going to say. Maybe he had an announcement to make; perhaps he’d tell us how long we’d be there, or where else we were headed. Whatever it was, I wanted to hear it first-hand.

Blair was on a two-day trip to the region according to a Sky News report I’d caught a glimpse of in the JHF. He’d already met Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf in Lahore. After us, he was going up to Kabul to meet Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

The Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, had already beaten his rival to it; he’d come out to see us in July. Helmand had been a new and sexy war at the time, so the new and sexy politicians were all over it like a rash. They didn’t go to Iraq any more; can’t think why. True to form, Billy had elbowed his way into giving Cameron a tour of the Apache’s cockpit. He’d even strapped on his flying suit especially for the occasion, badges, sidearm and all.

Tragically for the Face, there was no chance of a one-on-one bore-athon with this bigwig. Tony Blair would say a quick hello to all of us and that would be it. Each of the brigade’s sub-units had been instructed to stand in semicircles down one long line, with
samples of our kit on display to give the press photographers a nice backdrop. For most of the boys that just meant rustling up a WMIK Land Rover, a Viking tracked armoured vehicle, an ambulance or a row of sniper rifles. For our unlucky Groundies, it meant having to get up even earlier than us to push an Apache 200 metres from our runway to the Hercules strip. Then they’d have to push it all the way back again.

It was a really nippy morning – overcast, with just the odd ray of sunshine bursting momentarily through the cloud to give us some warmth. Without the sun, first thing in the morning and at that altitude, Bastion wasn’t a great place to be at that time of the year. December – only a few days away – and January were the only months that Helmand saw any proper cloud or rain.

Billy was one of the last down to the flight line.

‘Oh you prize arse,’ Geordie greeted him.

Most of us had turned up in our camouflage smocks – which were clean, uncreased and unfaded as they were seldom used and rarely washed. But not Billy; desperate to show off his wings, he was standing there shivering in his flying suit. In case any passing head of state was in doubt,
he
was an Apache pilot.

It was 7.09am and there we all were – a sizeable chunk of the Helmand Task Force’s firepower – lined up like prunes with nothing to do for the next fifty-one minutes. Only Nick and Charlotte were missing, air testing in Kandahar. It would have been valuable experience for Nick; he would probably
be
Prime Minister one day.

‘Come on Ed.’ Billy gave me a nudge. ‘Let’s check out the croissant tent.’

‘The what?’

‘Over there. I spotted it on my way down.’

A posh-looking marquee had been erected at one end of the
runway. Its front flaps had been pinned open to reveal an urn of piping hot water, tea bags and jugs of filter coffee on a wooden picnic table. On a second table was the biggest tray of croissants I’d ever seen: hundreds of them, with mouth-watering fillings, steaming in the early morning air.

A couple of senior officers stood in the tent’s entrance, so a frontal assault was never going to work. Billy and I tried our luck round the back.

‘Sorry guys,’ said the master chef. ‘Definitely no one allowed in here.’

‘Come on mate, give us a croissant.’

‘I can’t. Nobody’s allowed any until Tony Blair has been in there.’

‘Why, is he going to eat all 300 of them?’

‘Look, it wasn’t my idea … Oi!’

We left him to apprehend a pair of marines trying to sneak in behind him. One was holding up the far corner of the tent while his mate tried to slide underneath it.

Back at the squadron’s place in the line, Geordie and Darwin had opened a book on who could get the longest handshake with the PM. It would mean holding on for as long as you could, even if he tried to tear himself away. They were also challenging the rest of the team to see who could ask him the oddest question and still get an answer.

‘Just make sure it’s all respectful, please. I still want a career in the army.’ The Boss hated every second of this.

‘I’ve got a belter,’ said Darwin. ‘Who’s got a camera?’

A few of the boys had brought one down.

‘Right, here’s what Geordie and I are going to do. We’ll ask Mr Blair if he doesn’t mind a picture. When he says, “Yeah, sure, chaps, where do you want me?” we’ll say, “Just there’s fine thanks, sir,” and
hand him the camera. I bet he’ll be so embarrassed he’ll take the picture anyway.’

The PM’s Hercules arrived a few minutes early and he emerged from the pilot’s door to be greeted by the brigadier. A forty-strong travelling circus of TV cameramen, photographers and reporters poured off the rear ramp and glanced around, looking a little confused. Our desert wilderness wasn’t the Afghanistan of the Tora Bora Mountains you saw on the news.

The entourage of senior brass and clipboard-wielding subordinates led him to the end of the line furthest from us. The PM insisted on stopping and chatting to every group while the TV cameras did their stuff. Finally, he reached the marine mortar team alongside us. A balding bloke in a suit with an A4 pad strolled on ahead.

‘Gentlemen, before the Prime Minister gets to you, I could do with a few details. What do you all do?’

The Boss turned to him. ‘Who are you?’

‘Oh, I’m Bob …’

‘Bob who?’

‘Bob Roberts. From the
Daily Mirror
.’

The revelation provoked all-round merriment; we’d thought the guy was some kind of Downing Street flunky.

‘Fuck off, baldy,’ and ‘Get out the way, will you?’ the Groundies chorused from behind us.

The poor bloke scampered off in the other direction, looking quite hurt.

‘Hi guys.’

And there was Tony Blair, standing right in front of us. We’d been so busy hurling abuse at the man from the
Mirror
that most of us hadn’t seen him approach.

‘Gather round the Prime Minister please,’ the RSM instructed.

Tony Blair was in official Prime Ministerial war zone kit: blue slacks, a navy blazer and a dark blue shirt, open at the neck. He looked tired and old. The famous blue eyes still twinkled, but huge crow’s feet spread from each corner of them and his hair was more salt than pepper. He was a different man to the one I remembered walking into Downing Street nine years before.

The squadron wags had gone quiet now; everyone was a little bit star-struck. Trigger must have breathed a sigh of relief; it was immediately obvious that all the big talk wasn’t going to come to anything.

Blair thrust his hand forward to each of us. There was no chance of holding onto it, even if someone did have the balls. We were given a quick, forceful shake, up and down, a momentary fix of the eyeballs and then it was onto the next bloke. Two seconds each, max. He moved incredibly quickly, clearly well drilled in how to avoid the ‘I’m going to hold onto his hand the longest’ game. No surprises there; he’d been shaking squaddies by the hand for years.

‘Prime Minister, this is 656 Squadron, Army Air Corps. They operate the Apache AH Mk1.’

‘Ah yes.’ The trademark grin stretched from ear to ear. ‘So you must work with the locals.’

None of us knew how to answer that, so none of us did. That kind of killed the conversation.

Someone did ask for a photograph, but instead of pulling Darwin’s cheeky prank we all gathered sheepishly round Blair instead – Darwin included. The most rebellious we got was slipping the odd thumbs-up to the camera behind Blair’s back as we posed up for the group snaps.

Then, just as quickly as he’d arrived, he was ushered away to the medics, the next group in line.

Billy couldn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘I thought he might ask us
one
question about the aircraft. He did buy the bloody thing, after all.’

Geordie was still as confused as the rest of us.

‘Hang on, did you hear what he said to us, like? “So you must work with the locals.” What the
fuck
does that mean?’

It was obvious Blair had no real idea of who we were or what we did. Sadly, scaring the locals half to death was about the closest we ever got to working with them. Since we spent most of our lives 3,000 feet up, he couldn’t have been further from the mark. Maybe he’d offered everyone down the line the same catch-all remark. I suppose it saved having to think of twenty different ones.

The procession finished and, 200-odd hands shaken, Blair was whisked across to the croissant tent. A dais had been erected at the opposite end of it, with a loud speaker on either side. After Blair had downed his coffee, we were ordered to gather round for his speech.

A bank of raised platforms had been thrown up for the travelling media. They offered the best view, so Billy and I jumped up on one of them. It earned us an evil look from its occupier, a man with thick black glasses later identified to me as the BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson. He didn’t seem totally thrilled about sharing his platform with us. Billy and I gave him a grin.

‘Here, in this extraordinary piece of desert, is where the future of the world’s security is going to be played out … The only way we can ensure security is being prepared to fight for it … We will beat the Taliban by having the determination and courage to stand up to them … You defeat them not just on behalf of the people here in
Afghanistan but in Britain, and the wider world … People back home are very proud of the work you do, whatever they think of the politicians who sent you …’

He went on for about fifteen minutes, and finished with ‘a huge debt of thanks from a humbled nation’. For that, he got a spontaneous cheer and a generous round of applause as he was swiftly channelled back to the waiting Hercules. It was an upbeat, crowd-pleasing performance and went down very well with the younger soldiers. Pride, support, courage; he knew all the buzz words twenty-year-old squaddies wanted to hear.

As far as I was concerned, the Blair magic began to fade as the Prime Minister and his flying circus trundled down the runway. Despite his well-crafted phrases and emotional expressions, he hadn’t actually told us anything we didn’t already know. There was no big announcement, no addition to the defence budget, no deadline for the end of the conflict, no council tax rebate for our families at home. He’d had nothing new to say. I wondered why he’d bothered to come all that way. Still, the bacon croissant had been nice.

As November became December, Alice’s first situation brief proved increasingly accurate. Not only were the Taliban getting better, they were coming after us.

Close air support had changed the outcome of a lot of battles in our ground troops’ favour, so the Taliban hated all Coalition offensive aircraft – but they still hated Apaches the most.

If you wanted to go after aircraft and had none of your own, you needed surface-to-air missiles. SAMs had been the preserve of the world’s superpowers, but by the 1980s they had become a global phenomenon.

The missiles employed one of three different systems to track
and hit moving targets: radar-tracking, heat-seeking, or laser-guided. They varied in quality, but most could detect any aircraft flying in the SAM belt – between 1,000 and 20,000 feet – from about six miles, and engage it from four.