Apache (20 page)

‘Right, Mr Macy, only one left.’ Trigger grabbed his camera. ‘I’m going to film you opening it.’

I undid the bow and unwrapped a beautiful little red box. I
thought it would contain cufflinks or something, but there was a tiny Christmas stocking inside it. In the stocking was a tiny card. I couldn’t speak.

‘Come on Mr Macy, what is it? Hey guys look, is that a tear on Macy’s face? Macy’s crying!’

I rediscovered my voice. ‘I’m not crying; my eyes are sweating. And take that camera out my face.’

‘So what’s she written then?’

She’d written four words.
Congratulations. We are pregnant
.

I raced to the telephones. Emily was four months gone. Going back to Afghanistan wasn’t planned, and we never dreamed we’d be this lucky. She kept the whole thing a secret for as long as she could so as not to worry me.

‘Don’t worry about me, I’m just relieved I can tell my family now. Don’t do
anything
stupid; I don’t want to be forced to name him Ed Macy. Especially if he turns out to be a girl.’

‘
Ed Macy
?’

‘Yes, that’s what he’ll be called if you do something stupid. Are you carrying the angel?’

When I got back to the tent, all the others had gone to sleep. I poured myself a whisky from the emergency-only bottle I kept hidden in the bottom of my bag. I was going to be a father for the third time and I was the happiest man in Camp Bastion. That was worth a dram in the dark.

The only downside about Christmas on operations was that it finished. Afterwards, the squadron hit the usual post-big occasion blues. We were halfway through the tour, with another two months to go and no more cans of Christmas beer to look forward to. And fatigue was setting in.

The longer we were out here, the more knackered people looked. Since everything we did was devoted to saving life or taking it, the mental pressure was intense – and not only in the air. One sloppy drill by a young refueller or one of the boys loading weapons on the flight line could be catastrophic. Keeping 100 per cent focused for 100 days without a break was tough, especially if you were eighteen years old.

Everyone’s workload was horrendous because we were still brand new – we were developing and learning lessons on the Apache and changing procedures every single day. Everything had to be evaluated and reported, be it weapons functions for me, aircraft threats for Carl or the flight envelope for Billy.

Afghanistan took its toll physically too. The climate – wind, sand, heat and cold – was relentless. Young guys came back looking like men. Undisturbed sleep, as our Crew Rest Period rules required, was the last thing we got in a sleeping bag on a camp cot with perpetual aircraft noise and people coming and going all night.

Cumulative fatigue was the official name for it – burnout for short. It was hard to spot because we were all weathering at the same rate. As the tour went on, the Boss made a point of policing Crew Rest Period ever more religiously. He had to give direct orders.

‘Geordie, bed,
now!
’

It would be left to his 2i/c to police the Boss, who was the most reluctant of all to leave the JHF. One or two started to get a little fractious, but most were too professional for that. People became quieter, preserving their energy for the job. The senior guys had to make a real effort to keep up the banter and morale.

Little accidents could happen easily. For pilots that might mean
overtorquing an engine; for Groundies, putting rockets in the wrong tubes. Billy dragged all the pilots in for a brief the day after Boxing Day, and warned them to be careful about getting bitten by the aircraft.

‘My advice is, take a little bit longer doing everything you do. You may all think you’re absolutely okay. I promise you, you’re not.’

The constant stream of VIP visits was yet another addition to our workload. It wasn’t just the political party leaders – a constant stream of defence ministers, foreign ministers, shadow defence ministers, shadow foreign ministers, military chiefs and foreign military chiefs passed through Bastion. They thought they were doing us a favour, showing their solidarity with the chaps. We could never tell them they were a pain in the arse. VIPs tied up valuable airtime and resources; they all needed to be choppered about, and of course they all wanted to crawl all over the Apaches. Even Billy started to get bored with his bigwigs speech.

The one VIP we always had time for though was General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff. After years of faceless chiefs burying their heads in the sand and toeing the government’s line, General Dannatt infuriated the Prime Minister by speaking out – questioning policy in Iraq and calling for better soldiers’ pay and housing. A true soldiers’ friend, his honesty made him the most popular chief we’d had in a generation, and perhaps since Monty. He was also Colonel Commandant of the Army Air Corps, so we liked him even more.

General Dannatt’s latest visit coincided with this period. Trigger showed him around the flight line, Billy did his spiel in the aircraft and I went last with a weapons brief. ‘Right sir, this is our Ops Room and this is Mr Macy,’ Trigger said. ‘He’s going to show you some gun footage.’

‘Terrific, I’m looking forward to this. Where do you want me?’

I escorted him to a chair. I’d prepared shots of a missile attack, a rocket attack and a gun attack from a big contact south of Now Zad a few nights previously. Before I ran the tape, I gave him a quick description of the contact’s location with the help of a large-scale map of Helmand province stuck to the white partition wall upon which we projected the gun tapes.

Everyone takes down posters differently. I always remove the bottom blobs of Blu-tack first. And I thanked God that I did that morning.

As my hands moved to peel off the top blobs, my right palm brushed over a laminated surface. Something had been stuck on the partition wall behind the map.

I froze.

‘Something wrong, Mr Macy?’

I flashed Trigger a look, and knew he’d guessed what – or more precisely,
who
– was lurking behind the map.

‘No sir. Blu-tack’s a bit stiff, that’s all. One second.’

In one fluid movement, I managed to slide my right hand underneath the map and Rocco, unpeeled them both and dumped them under a table.

There was a muffled groan from the JHF’s back room.

‘Well done, Mr Macy,’ Trigger said with enormous relief.

General Dannatt looked puzzled. With Rocco subdued I played the tape and the general left looking very pleased with our shooting.

As usual, the culprit never came clean. He denied everything, but I blamed Geordie. Only he would have had the balls, panache and sheer stupidity to have attempted a 24-carat Rocco blinder.

The Boss took longer to get over it.

And from that moment onwards, Rocco mysteriously disappeared.

Just before New Year, we had another bitter reminder of the dangers lurking in the south of the province. A lance bombardier from 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery, was killed when his vehicle drove over a landmine in the Garmsir area. A young lad with him lost his right leg.

Billy stuck a Hellfire and a shed load of 30-mm into it to stop the Taliban getting their hands on it. They later named a forward operating base in the desert after the killed soldier; FOB Dwyer became the permanent 105-mm gun emplacement to support the Garmsir DC.

There were strong suspicions the landmine had been planted by the Taliban – another tactic we were seeing more often. The Mujahideen wrought havoc for the Soviet Army by burying antitank mines in their path.

The New Year did give us something to look forward too, though. By the beginning of January Operation Glacier was ready to go.

Nine weeks of tough and dangerous work had gone into it. There had been a few false starts and a fair number of close shaves, but the southern Information Exploitation Battlegroup had stuck it out. By 1 January, Colonel Magowan’s men declared they were ready for Operation Glacier to go noisy.

The Taliban main supply route from Pakistan had been mapped. Not only did the battlegroup know their enemy’s main base locations, but they’d also pinpointed tunnel systems and ammo dumps. They’d discovered that they moved covertly between them disguised as local farmers. Now they were ready to destroy the lot. The marines’ .5-inch calibre Barratt sniper rifle was pointing right at the heart of the Taliban octopus, and they were about to pull the trigger.

They had located five enemy concentration points, each performing a different function in the Taliban’s sophisticated logistics chain: pampering, preparing for and then pushing their warriors into battle. These had been designated as Operation Glacier’s primary targets.

The plan was to prosecute one target at a time, moving steadily
northwards. The furthest, more than twenty kilometres south of Garmsir, would be hit first (Operation Glacier 1), and the closest – two kilometres south-east of the Garmsir DC – would go last (Operation Glacier 5).

As each attack proceeded, survivors and forward groups would be funnelled north, and with their command chain broken, the old men in Quetta would have nowhere to send reinforcements. The retreating Taliban would finally be trapped in one killing zone at Garmsir.

They were going to follow the example of the old bull at the top of the hill, one of the marine officers explained. ‘The bull’s young son says to him, “Dad, let’s run down and jump on one of those cows in that field.” “No son,” the old bull replies. “Let’s walk down, and jump on them all.”’

Brigade believed that the destruction of the Taliban’s southern MSR would leave their operations in turmoil across half the province, and that they’d be unable to mobilise enough manpower for anything more than the odd pot shot on the Garmsir DC. Once they were on their knees, the southern battlegroup would make sure they kept them there.

The offensive stage of Operation Glacier would begin on 11 January, and the brigadier wanted all the strikes completed in a month. Our Apaches would be needed on every one of the Glacier attacks. Our combat punch was to be utilised on Operation Glacier 1 as it never had been before. And it coincided with HQ Flight’s turn on the rota for a deliberate tasking.

Alice gathered us for a general intelligence brief nine days before. ‘You’re going,’ she told us. ‘So you’d better know all about it.’ The target was a command post used as a reception area for all new recruits from Pakistan. This was where the Toyota 4x4s hit the
Green Zone after their long slog across the desert. On arrival, they were fed, rested, briefed and organised before being sent forward to the next link in the chain. It was the Taliban’s equivalent of Kandahar air base.

The post sat on the east bank of a north–south running canal near the village of Koshtay, twenty kilometres or so south of Garmsir. It consisted of three large rectangular buildings – the living quarters – surrounded by a cluster of huts, a mosque, two courtyards, gardens and an orchard. An imposing place by Helmand’s standards, it used to be the old district governor’s house – but it wasn’t thought to house more than fifty enemy fighters at any one time.

‘The only thing we’re not being told is who initially pinged the place,’ Alice said intriguingly. ‘The battlegroup’s Int Officer says it wasn’t them. Apparently it was “intelligence sources”.’

Alice didn’t need to spell it out. We all knew what that meant. Spooks. What colour, shape or nationality was anyone’s guess. MI6 and GCHQ ran their own operations throughout Afghanistan, as did the CIA and the NSA, France’s DGSE, Pakistan’s ISI and God only knew how many other ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services. The place was crawling with them; always has been. One thing was for sure – we’d never find out.

Glacier’s first target was the most important strategically – the Taliban’s linchpin between Pakistan and Helmand. If the link was well and truly broken, it would take them a lot of time and effort to reconnect. Attacking the site would do the Taliban serious psychological damage too. Foot soldiers and senior leadership alike would know that we knew exactly where they were and what they were up to. Some of their senior commanders were also believed to work out of Koshtay, marshalling their ranks from the rear. Taking them out would be an additional bonus.

The full set of orders for the operation arrived from the battlegroup seven days later, with the classification ‘Secret’. Trigger picked it up from the JOC’s Communications Cell after lunch on Tuesday, 9 January. He gave it a quick flick and came to find us.

‘Guys, I think the four of us had better go into the Tactical Planning Facility right now. Cancel whatever you’ve got on for the rest of the afternoon.’

We sat down and read through it together. The orders were highly detailed and the timings incredibly precise. They gave us maps, sketches and aerial reconnaissance photographs of the site. It was an extraordinary piece of work. And it told us we were making Army Air Corps history.

‘Fuck me sideways,’ Billy breathed. ‘We’re really going sausage side this time, aren’t we?’

There would be no ground assault. Instead, a B1B Lancer strategic bomber was going to open the show with the mother of all hard knocks. It would drop ten different bombs on the Koshtay site at once – four 2,000-pounders and six 500-pounders. Then it was our turn, to mop up any survivors.

As the bombs were falling, we would begin our run-in on the target from the desert, so when the dust cleared we’d be ready to start shooting. It was made clear to us that no buildings were to be left standing, and no people left alive. With five tonnes of explosives down their necks, all within an area of 150 square metres, we weren’t expecting a huge number.

Koshtay was under the highly covert surveillance of our old friends, the Brigade Reconnaissance Force. It’s what the BRF did best, and many of them went on from it to join the SBS and SAS. Creeping up on the site through bushes, undergrowth and waterways, they had observed a disciplined sentry system. Two guards
patrolled the road that ran in front of it, perpendicular to the canal, while at least two more manned the lookout posts. The sentries changed over every thirty minutes.

The BRF’s JTAC – Knight Rider Five Six – would control the air attack from a vantage point on the ground as close to the target as he could get, 500 metres north-west of the site. We needed eyes on the target at all times during the attack, in case a busload of nuns and schoolchildren were out on a stargazing field trip.

The JTAC and his twenty-four-strong protection team – including two snipers – planned to bag up all their kit and swim the Helmand River two kilometres to the west of the site and then yomp to the vantage point. They would be laid up there from 0300 hours.

A Nimrod MR2 was tasked for the operation, flying at 27,500 feet and feeding a live video link to Colonel Magowan and the Brigade HQ in Lashkar Gah. There was acute interest in Glacier 1; nobody wanted to miss a second of it. Then callsign Bone One One – the B1 from Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean – would drop his bombs from 25,000 feet, impacting precisely thirty minutes later, giving us an H hour of 0330 hours.

For the Apaches, it was a phenomenal task. We would be carrying out the first deep raid the Corps had ever flown. For the first time on a live operation, we’d be on our own over enemy-held territory. So far we’d fought hand in hand with the guys below us. If we went down this time, there would be no ground troops nearby to come and help us out. The BRF was too small and lightly armed; it’d have a job exfiltrating safely itself. A rescue bid would only be launched once brigade was sure we’d evaded capture; until then, we’d just have to fend for ourselves.

It was a whole new ball game. But the extra risk didn’t temper
our excitement – it added to it. We were chomping at the bit.

‘I’ve got butterflies,’ Carl said. ‘Bring it on.’

We finished reading the orders at 4pm. The attack was set for the early hours of 11 January. We had an awful lot to prepare in less than thirty-six hours.

It was down to us to seamlessly dovetail our Apaches into the plan. Split second timing was essential. We worked out exactly where we needed to be and when, and went through every eventuality.

Koshtay was 100 kilometres from Camp Bastion as the crow flies, the furthest we’d had to fight so far. Long distance wasn’t a problem though; we could hit a target 250 klicks away on our normal set-up and still have enough fuel to return to base. Slap on the five additional fuel tanks we could carry – in part of the gun magazine and off the four weapons pylons – and we had a strike range of almost 2,000 kilometres without having to touch down; London to Marrakesh, Malta or St Petersburg.

Where we were going, we wanted to take some proper weaponry. So we calculated a fuel / weapons split that gave us ninety minutes over the target, just in case we’d need them. We went for a Load Charlie again, but Hellfire-heavy – giving each aircraft six missiles.

Koshtay was a job for the two most experienced front-seat gunners. Billy took the back seat to fly the Boss, as Ugly Five Zero. Carl would fly for me, Ugly Five One. The Boss was mission commander.

Word that we were doing a deep raid spread around the squadron like wildfire. Everybody’s blood was up, including the Groundies’ and the Ops Room’s, as every sortie was a massive team effort. We would be making Corps history. The twelve other pilots who weren’t flying it were green with envy. Conspiracy theories were rife.

‘Saving the best ones for yourself, eh Boss?’ Nick said. ‘What a coincidence it just happened to be HQ Flight’s turn for a deliberate task.’

Trigger just smiled knowingly. But Nick’s turn would come.

At lunchtime on the 10th, the ministerial permission we needed for Op Glacier 1 finally came through. We were hitting the place cold and firing the first shots, which we very seldom did. With all the paperwork in place, the brigade confirmed it as a go.

The four of us had a kip after lunch, since we weren’t going to get much sleep later. At sunset we went down to the flight line for a final walk around the Apaches and loaded our kit.

‘Just double check your LSJs, chaps,’ Trigger said.

It was a good point. Our survival jackets were vital if we got shot down; they contained everything we might need to keep us alive on the ground apart from our personal weapons. I went through every last pouch.

To squeeze so much into one man’s waistcoat was a masterpiece of design, and the reason they were so bloody heavy. The deep left front pocket was easiest to grab for a right-handed pilot like me. That’s why it contained the most important piece of kit – a very powerful multi-frequency ground-to-air radio with which we could talk securely to anyone above us or at a distance, through burst transmissions. It was also fitted with a GPS system and a homing beacon that could be picked up by satellite.

Three pockets were sewn into the front right-hand side of the jacket. The top one contained a signalling pack – an infrared or white light strobe and a signalling mirror. The middle held a survival pack: a matchless fire set – cotton wool and magnesium metal with a saw blade to ignite it (matches ran out and could get wet) – fuel blocks, a nylon fishing line, hooks and flies, a foil blanket, high
energy sweets, tablets to purify dirty water, a polythene bag, tampons to soak up water, two Rocco-sized condoms that could each carry a gallon of water, a compass, a candle, parachute cord to rig up shelters, three snares, a wire saw, a needle and thread, camouflage cream and a medium-sized Swiss Army knife. The lowest pocket was packed with the things you hoped you’d never need: antibiotics, morphine-based painkillers, three elastic dressings and adhesives, two standard dressings, a safety pin, Imodium tablets to stop the shits, a razor blade, dextrose high energy tablets, sun block, insect repellent and a pair of forceps.

We kept a six-inch-long Maglite torch and an emergency extraction strap with a black karabiner in another small pocket, just next to the zip. A large pouch sewn into the back of the jacket contained a metre-square waterproof, tear-resistant nylon escape map that you could also use to shelter from the sun or rain. Alongside it we kept two litre-sized foil sachets of clean water.

Back up at the JHF we formulated an escape plan for the mission. We had one for every location we went to, and for every pre-planned sortie we flew. If we did go down over Koshtay, we’d all know exactly what to do.

Apache pilots underwent the most intensive escape and evasion training of anyone in the UK military, alongside Harrier pilots and Special Forces personnel. All three worked behind or over enemy lines, so faced the greatest risk. It was a gruelling sixteen-week course, and as the squadron’s Survive, Evade, Resist and Extract Officer, Geordie gave us regular refreshers

The first emergency drill was always the same – talk to your wingman and tell him where you are. He’d know you’d gone down, and would be doing his damnedest to keep you alive. If the threat on the ground allowed it, he’d swoop down, land next to your
aircraft and you’d have about three seconds to strap yourself onto a grab handle forward of the engine air intakes with your own strap and karabiner.