Apache (21 page)

We practised the drill every now and then, but no Apache pilot in the world had ever done it on operations; it was fraught with danger for everyone concerned. Putting an aircraft on the ground in a battle made it incredibly vulnerable, which was why the MoD pencil-necks had written into the Release To Service rules that it was only to be used in dire emergencies. If they had it their way, it would have been out of the RTS altogether.

First, of course, we had to survive going down. There were no ejection seats in an Apache; it was dangerous enough standing beneath a turning rotor blade. If our aircraft went down, we went down with it. It concentrated the mind. So much so, that experienced pilots would always subconsciously scope for the safest place to crash-land.

Should the worst happen and we found ourselves on the ground, it was going to be immediately obvious if Trigger and Billy were going to be able to pick us up at Koshtay. If they couldn’t – which was almost inevitable – we’d try to get as far away from the aircraft as possible. The Apache would act like a magnet for the enemy, so we wouldn’t even hang around to destroy its clandestine equipment; someone else with a big bomb would take care of that.

It would be dark, which was a great advantage. Maybe only a handful of Taliban would see us go down. Five minutes later though, the word would have gone round. By daybreak, we’d be the focus of a massive and coordinated hunt.

Once clear of the aircraft, we’d head due north or south and then west as soon as we could. Our best hope of escape would be the GAFA desert, preferably by dawn. We’d either find the BRF there or
get picked up. It was only four klicks away – but we’d have to cross the raging Helmand River and possibly the canal on the way.

We’d move at night and hide in daylight. We’d keep switching on the radios to speak to anyone we could see or hear above us. They’d be up there, waiting for our call. And above all, we had to stick together – two pairs of eyes and ears were always better than one, and one of us might be injured.

After the 8pm brief, we tried to get a few hours’ sleep. The Boss took the cot next to mine so we wouldn’t wake anyone in his tent.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ he said as he climbed into his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to bed now, knowing that when I wake up, I will deliberately go out and kill people.’

The Boss grappled with this idea for a few moments as the opening credits of
24
rolled on the laptop beside him – but only for a couple of minutes. The next time I looked, he was fast asleep, his head tucked into the crook of his arm.

I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just lay on my back in the darkness, going over every eventuality again and again, trying to visualise how I would deal with them. How to get out of the Green Zone if we went down was the challenge that preoccupied me most. There’d be no chance of a rescue. How fast was the current in the Helmand River? Would we reach the GAFA by dawn? If not, where would we lie up? Must remember to keep away from livestock, especially dogs; they’d give us away immediately. What if I was incapacitated and Carl was okay? Carl would have to run. I’d make him. He’d get nowhere trying to carry me. What if he was injured? I’d have a tough time lifting him and all that strawberry cheesecake. But I couldn’t leave him – I’d never be able to live with myself. No; I’d stay and fight to the end – and save the last two rounds for ourselves.

It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one picture out of my head: me standing alongside a burning aircraft with Carl unconscious at my feet and the Taliban swarming towards us … Wouldn’t it just be Sod’s Law if I got it tonight? Emily was four and a half months pregnant … I saw the look on my kids’ faces as they were told that this time their dad wasn’t coming back … And I knew for certain that this
had
to be my last tour.

But would I have ducked out of it there and then, given the choice? Not for all the tea in China.

The alarm clocks went off at 1am. We dressed in silence, pulses racing, and popped into the JHF to pick up our Black Brains and check for any changes in plan. There weren’t any. We walked down to the flight line in the cold night air and fired up the aircraft at 1.55.

There were a few extra start-up procedures to run through in the cockpit before a night flight. Sound was often difficult to place, so keeping the aircraft as dark as possible gave us a much-needed edge. We knew the Taliban had NVGs – probably supplied by Iran – so we didn’t want to make it any easier for them.

Bat wings were sheathed below the left and right windows of the cockpit for us to pull up and shield the glow of our MPD screens – the only light source in the cockpit.

Carl needed a few more minutes to adjust his monocle. At night, he was 100 per cent reliant on it – it was his only window on the world. Other military pilots used NVGs, which magnified ambient light sources 40,000 times. We had Pilot’s Night Vision Sights instead.

The normal flight symbology was projected into the pilot’s monocle, but it was underlaid with the image of the ‘Pin-viss’, a second infrared lens sitting above the TADS bucket.

Through the PNVS thermal picture, we could see landscape in total darkness, as well as anyone moving below us. ‘If it glows, it goes,’ the instructors used to say – though not in the handbook.

Like the cannon, the PNVS lens was slaved to your eye. It followed the direction of your right eye, though a fraction more slowly than the gun, so there was a momentary lapse between desire and action. It was mounted above the TADS on the aircraft’s nose, so the perspective was slightly out of kilter too, as if your eyeball had been stretched twelve feet out of its socket.

Flying on PNVS low level at 140 knots was the hardest thing to master on Apache training; it was like driving down a pitch black motorway with no lights, with a hand clamped over one eye, a twelve-foot-long tube capped with a green lens strapped to the other, and the speedo needle brushing 161 mph …

We learned how to do this by ‘flying in the bag’. Our entire back-seat cockpit was blacked out with panels, while the instructor sat in the open front. It wasn’t a great place for claustrophobics.

‘Please God, just let me get through,’ we’d pray. Fail three test sorties in the bag, and you were out. Passing gave you the world’s greatest high.

Despite Carl’s whingeing, I knew I was in good hands with him flying me that night. His was the best pair of night hands we had.

We were all set in good time. No need for calls; we just slipped out of the bays with two minutes to takeoff.

We lifted silently at 2.40am. Billy led us a few klicks north to dupe any Taliban dickers then backtracked south-west across the A01 Highway, and hard south once we were into the empty desert, our Hellfire-laden machines invisible against the GAFA’s sky.

It was a thirty-five minute flight to our holding area in the desert. We’d chosen a spot fifteen kilometres due west of the Taliban base at Koshtay, giving us a run-in time onto the target of four minutes and three seconds. Nobody would hear us that far out; we’d do racetrack patterns at seventy knots and fifty feet off the ground until the time came.

Carl and Billy kept the aircraft 200 feet off the ground as we headed south. We would normally have gone lower to prevent detection, but the Dasht-e-Margo lived up to its name and was void of all habitation.

The Boss and Billy were 500 metres to the left and marginally in front of us. The TADS FLIR camera was slaved to my eye; I could see them clearly with my right eye, but in the complete absence of ambient light, my left eye might as well have had a patch over it.

It had been a while since I’d been a gunner on a night flight. I used some of the transit time to re-familiarise myself with the feel of the firing grips. The front seat had exactly the same controls as the back seat, as well as a bloody great targeting console bolted into the middle of the dash, at the centre of which was a three-inch TV
screen providing an additional display for one of the cameras or sensors. I selected the Longbow FCR option. If there was anything remotely threatening in the desert, it was sure to find it and give us a heads up so we could box around it. A large metal PlayStation-like grip sat on either side, with buttons and cursors galore to control the cameras and weapons. Each grip also had a trigger: the right for the laser range finder and designator, the left to kill.

I moved my thumb and fingertips across the buttons, rockers, switches and pads, instantly recognising each different shape and function, and ran through a dozen different combinations until I was completely comfortable. It didn’t take long.

The night was unusually still for January. It made me fidget even more. I needed to keep myself occupied. I tried chatting with Carl but he wanted to concentrate on his flying. I sparked up the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF), a radio navigation system we used to pick up homing beacons in bad weather, and absentmindedly scanned the local stations. I’d already preset the channels with the strongest signals to help counter the boredom of desert flying.

Apache pilots never met any Afghans. Life in the cockpit was remote from the real life of the country; it was the one disadvantage of the job. The nearest we could get was listening to their radio. We all used to do it. Local Pashtun songs were my favourite.

A Pakistani station broadcasting at 900 kilohertz was often the clearest. I tuned into a mullah in mid rant. I had no idea what he was saying, but he sounded pretty angry about something; maybe he didn’t like having to whip up the faithful at ten to three in the morning.

‘Hey Carl, check out the ADF Preset 1. I think they’re onto us. “Come out and kill the mosquito pilots,” they’re saying. “The infidels are nearly here.”’

Carl remained unmoved. ‘I’m not listening to it, Ed.’

‘Okay buddy, suit yourself.’ I turned the volume back up in my helmet.

This was getting more surreal by the minute. The infidel-hater had been replaced by the opening chords of Beethoven’s
Fifth
Symphony
. So there we were, armed to the teeth at the dead of night in The Land That Time Forgot on our way to give a whole load of Taliban a rude awakening, and an insomniac radio producer somewhere in Baluchistan had managed to provide us with the perfect soundtrack.

As we reached the holding area, Trigger put a call into the BRF’s JTAC. I turned off Beethoven as Knight Rider Five Six whispered, slowly and softly. We knew he was in position and perilously close to the enemy before he told us.

‘Ugly Five Zero, Knight Rider. I can’t get hold of Bone One One. Can you try to establish comms with him? We need his time on target.’

The Boss made several calls, each of them unanswered. Sometimes prearranged fast air left their arrival right to the last minute. We’d all just have to wait.

Two fresh icons popped up on the map page on my left MPD. Our Radar Warning Receiver had just pinged two other air assets over the battlespace, tens of thousands of feet above us. Their radar codes identified them as the Nimrod MR2 and a Predator UAV. We hadn’t been told about the Predator. We often weren’t.

Five minutes later, at 3.20am, a southern US drawl broke the silence.

‘Knight Rider Five Six, Knight Rider Five Six. This is Bone One Three. How do you read, sir?’

‘Bone One Three, Knight Rider Five Six, Lima Charlie. We were
expecting to hear from Bone One One.’

‘Affirmative, sir. The pre-planned B1 has gone unserviceable in Diego Garcia. We are a B1 and we have been tasked to you as the airborne alert from the Afghanistan stack. How many targets do you have for us?’

The BRF JTAC whispered his reply. ‘Bone, Knight Rider. I have many targets. How many grids have you been given and how many bombs can you drop in one go?’

He could drop a maximum of ten in a oner and had not been given any of the pre-planned targets. Knight Rider asked him if he could have all ten.

‘That’s an affirmative.’

‘Okay. Stand by to copy …’

The JTAC read over each and every fifteen-digit grid and four-figure altitude in the same strained whisper. It can’t have been easy with Taliban sentries on the prowl and no wind to hide any noise.

‘Target Number One.’

Pause.

‘Priority target.’

Pause.

‘Forty One Romeo … Papa Quebec.’

Pause.

‘One Zero One … Three Two.’

Pause.

‘Two Double Four … Four Zero.’

Pause.

‘Altitude … Two Two Five Seven … Feet.’

Pause.

‘Target Number Two …’

It made for painful listening, and it took for ever. I copied the ten
grids down as well and cross-referenced them on the map. Each of the three accommodation blocks was getting a 2,000-pounder and the middle one was getting two; one in each half. The four highest priority buildings would be on the receiving end of enough 500-pounders to flatten the Pentagon. The B1 could carry a total of twenty-four GBUs or sixteen thermonuclear gravity bombs.

‘Bone, Knight Rider. Read back.’

Bone had to repeat each and every grid and altitude correctly to ensure that he wasn’t going to rain down merry hell on innocent civilians.

There was a pause as the B1’s offensive systems officer tapped in the grids.

‘Bone, Knight Rider. Call Time on Target.’

It was 3.29am.

‘Knight Rider, Bone. TOT in four-zero minutes. I am nine-zero miles to your south.’

Bloody hell. He’s still in Pakistan, about to cross the border.

‘We haven’t got the fuel to wait all night for these jokers,’ Carl grumbled.

They’d slashed the time we’d have over the target by almost half. We’d started off with ninety minutes and now had barely fifty. And that was only if Bone dropped when he said he would. Bone’s problem was that he had to programme each bomb with the coordinates of the starting and finishing points of its journey. To ensure pinpoint accuracy, he also needed to radar map the ground beneath him and then commensurate the grids.

‘Let’s just hope they’re all still fast asleep.’

Many orbits later a third air icon flashed up on the map page, a jet heading towards us from the south. The B1 was now close by. Bone spoke again at 4.05am.

‘All stations, Bone One Three. Time on target in five minutes. Bone is running in.’

It was our cue. Billy and Carl held back for another sixty seconds to ensure we didn’t catch any of the blast, and pointed the aircrafts’ noses hard down for Koshtay. The two Apaches were neck and neck, fifty feet from the ground and going max chat. Trigger and Billy were 500 metres to our left. We’d divided up the workload by splitting the target area in two. They’d take the northern half of the site, working north to south; we’d take the south, working south to north.

‘Ugly callsigns, Knight Rider Five Six. You are cleared hot to engage any leakers on the bombs’ impact.’

I shifted forward and hunched over the gunning grips. The moment that lazy Texas voice told us his bombs were in the air, Carl and Billy would climb hard to our engaging height. We should hear Bone when we had around five klicks to go. We didn’t. Bone came on at the four-kilometre mark instead.

‘Bone is off. No drop, repeat no drop. Resetting.’

Fucking hell.

‘Steady tu –’ Billy began.

‘Slow turn,’ Carl unintentionally interrupted.

God only knew why Bone didn’t drop. It could have been for any one of a dozen reasons. It wasn’t the time to ask. We needed to reset immediately. We were less than 4,000 metres from the target. Any closer and they’d hear our rotors. A gentle 180-degree turn was crucial to stop the blades chattering and why both pilots made the same call: we could blow this big style.

‘Ugly, Knight Rider. I can hear you. Move back, move back.’

We cruised back towards our holding area.
Shit
. More time down the drain. It would take Bone at least five minutes to reset, and
another five to run in. We were down to forty minutes of combat gas. One more delay and we’d have to go home. It was already agonising, and about to become humiliating. We’d have to tell Knight Rider that he’d have to drop with no follow-up, or delay ninety minutes so we could gas up back at Bastion.

The next time there was no mistake; Bone was early.

‘Bone One Three is off hot. Twenty-six seconds to impact.’

I hit record on the left grip; I didn’t want the rest of the squadron to miss this. But we were still six kilometres out. ‘Climb, climb, climb!’

Keeping their speed up, both pilots heaved on their collectives to max torque and began a rapid climb. We soared up to 2,500 feet and I slaved my TADS straight onto the Taliban camp. I made out the line of seven tall, bushy trees directly in front of the complex, then the canal in front of the trees. No movement from what I could see. That was good. It was still pitch dark.

‘BUSTER,’ the Boss ordered. Our nose tipped forward momentarily before the big stabilator wing on the back of the Apache levelled us out again. We couldn’t risk any delay between the bombs’ impact and our arrival over the target.

But where were the bombs? My clock: they’d been in the air twenty seconds, but it felt like an eternity. I looked out of a side window and my left eye made out flicks of tree below. My right confirmed the desert was ending and the Green Zone about to begin. Jesus, we only had a few klicks left to run. I looked back at my MPD. A pattern of tiny pinpricks of heat fell towards the earth, angled towards the seven trees.

At 4.13 on the dot, all ten of the B1’s GBUs exploded directly in front of us. A series of stroboscopic flashes melted into one blindingly bright light, followed a split second later by cylinders of angry
orange flame. The biggest explosion I had ever seen played out in total silence; we still couldn’t hear a thing in the cockpit. The whole complex had turned white on my FLIR.

‘Did you see that?’ Billy was beside himself.

‘Awesome.’ So was Carl.

‘And then some!’

‘Kick right, Carl.’

We couldn’t make it out in the dark and the FLIR would see right through it, but it would be there – the fallout from the blast site: earth, brick and humanity, all vaporised.

‘Ugly Five Zero is looking for the northern sentry,’ Trigger said, as Billy banked their Apache away from us. Then: ‘I’ve got him, he’s still there. Engaging now.’

The sentry must have been sheltered within the mosque’s safety distance. Trigger opened up with his cannon, but his quarry had slipped into the small, roofless outbuilding through a doorway on its northern side. ‘He’s taking cover in the sentry post … Engaging …’

He squeezed off two further bursts. The second threw the sentry around like a rag doll until he finally slumped motionless against a wall. The smoke and dust was starting to clear at ground level, though it still hung high above us. As we circled I scoured the complex for any sign of movement.

It was like the B1 had dropped a nuclear bomb. The trees were stripped of their branches and star-shaped scorch marks covered the earth. There wasn’t a single crater. The living quarters on the southern edge of the target and the L-shaped building had totally disappeared. Not a single brick remained. The B1 Lancer had set all the fuses to super-quick. The bombs had blown apart the buildings – and everyone inside them – before they’d even landed. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t see any runners, but one long single-storey
affair remained standing by the edge of the canal.

‘Knight Rider Five Six, Ugly Five One. I have one building still intact. It’s on the southern side of the target. Confirm you want it destroyed.’

‘Ugly Five One, that’s an A-ffirmative. Engage all remaining target buildings with Hellfire. Leave nothing standing.’

Carl banked hard right, taking us back the way we had come. There was enough heat from the place to indicate it was still inhabited but too much around it to allow me to lock it up. I’d need a straight line of sight to it all the way in.

‘Ugly Five One. Running in from the west with Hellfire.’