Apache (29 page)

Rounds continued to zip backwards and forwards above the fort. The 2,000-pounder had done its job to begin with, but the Taliban were now answering back. We’d entered Tracer Central, and screaming in through the middle of it I felt like Han Solo up against the Imperial Fleet.

We were sausage-side big time, and there was no turning back. My tongue tasted like I’d been licking aluminium and I now needed a piss more than anything in the world. We were 200 metres from the wall. One more turn and we would be over the ploughed poppy field in front of it, wheels down.

‘Ten seconds.’

Geordie kicked left and tipped his tail. He began to flare for landing alongside the fort wall. Carl banked and began to flare too, but he had turned in the nick of time.

‘Shit, incoming from below right …’

A muzzle flash, and a long burst of automatic fire from the last of the trees fizzed past Rigg’s face as he spreadeagled himself as tight as he could against the Apache’s skin. It was game on now. They knew we were here.

‘Come on Geordie,’ Carl hollered.

Ahead of us, Geordie wasn’t landing. He wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing. Dust from the poppy field had swirled up around his rapidly slowing Apache. The thing had been ploughed so many times the top soil was as thin as talcum powder. We hadn’t expected that.

‘Jesus, he’s about to brown out …’

A brown-out was the last thing we needed. If we couldn’t see them, we couldn’t land.

‘Don’t go into the dust, mate; we’ll never make it.’

Carl slowed up hard and pulled on the collective to bring us up. To hover there would be the perfect invite for an RPG to climb right up our arse.

It’s going tits up
…

I could feel my heart beat against my chicken plate; things were moving into slow-mo. A huge dust cloud now hung over most of the field, and Billy and Geordie had disappeared inside it. We needed to get wheels down, but neither of us could see shit below. And the Taliban couldn’t be more than 200 metres behind us.

Then Geordie’s Longbow Radar suddenly materialised, followed by his rotor blades. The tail appeared next, swinging ninety degrees to the left and then lifting. His Apache moved forward, passed directly over the bomb crater and straight through the gap in the wall. Carl was as horrified as I was.

‘Where the hell are they going? Through the wall means –’

‘Just get us down, buddy.’

Carl thrust our nose forward for a second and then flared the aircraft. Geordie came on.

‘There isn’t enough space for the two of us in the field. There’s no choice; we’ve got to put down inside the fort.’

I looked right for Billy and Geordie as we went down. All I
caught through the haze was a great burst of flame from the breach of their cannon as it released its steady stream of giant, electrically initiated rounds.

‘Engaging!’ Billy yelled.

Then the dust enveloped us completely and they were gone.

The urge to say or do something was overwhelming me. I grabbed the handles above my head and shut my mouth tight whilst Carl flew the most dangerous and crucial part of the mission. We’d lost the element of surprise, we’d lost all visibility. We’d even managed to lose each other. And we still had to find Mathew.

He slapped us down hard into the space that Geordie had just vacated. We were totally blind. I breathed again. We’d made it.

‘Quick Carl; thumbs up, thumbs up.’

Fraser-Perry whipped past my left window and rounded the aircraft’s nose. Rigg shot off from the right, just ahead of him. They ducked under the thumping rotor blades and disappeared into the dust cloud which had begun to merge with the fallout from the 2,000-pounder and now completely blotted out the sun.

If any Taliban were waiting to nick Mathew, now was the time to strike. I strained to catch sight of him, but there was no chance of that; I could hardly see beyond the ends of the rotors. There was nothing Carl or I could do but sit it out.

We weren’t used to this. Normally we kept to the skies, with an array of cameras so powerful we could see up people’s backsides. Now we were slap in the middle of the enemy’s back garden, and we couldn’t tell shit from Shinola. Every second felt like an hour.

Then, incredibly slowly, the brown mass began to recede. We could see five metres … then eight … then twelve …

‘Where the hell is the wall? Why can’t we see the wall of the fort?’

I screwed up my eyes and grasped for the slightest hint of the
rescue party. I wanted to see four men running towards us, carrying Mathew Ford between them.
Please, please … Where the fuck are
you
?

But they weren’t coming. The clock: 10.39 and twenty-five seconds. A whole minute had gone by on the ground. We only had one left. They should be halfway back now.

What was that? A long, horizontal line … The dust cleared further. Could I make out the wall now? Yes … My eyes scanned left, inch by inch. Finally, at least forty-five degrees forward of the aircraft, I could see the hole and the crater. We were a lot further away from it than I had thought. But where the hell were the marines?

I continued scanning left towards the spot I’d last seen Mathew’s prone body. One metre, two metres, three metres …

‘There!’ Carl shouted.

There weren’t four of them, only two. Just Rigg and Fraser-Perry. They were a full fifty metres away. Worse, they’d only managed to move Mathew off the raised bank and down into a bloody great ditch. They weren’t moving; it was as if they were stuck in quicksand. One of us was going to have to get out and help. Or we’d all be dead by eleven o’clock.

‘They’re not going to make it.’

‘I’m going to jump, Carl.’ I started unstrapping my harness.

‘No, I’m going. I’m the aircraft captain.’

Neither of us could get out of the thing fast enough, but Carl was the primary pilot and he knew he had to stay. And it was my briefing that was going haywire.

‘I’ll be back in thirty seconds.’ I threw open the canopy door and leaped from my seat without even touching the side of the Apache. I braced myself for the six-foot drop.

Instead of jarring my feet, I plunged eighteen inches beneath the
surface of the field. The earth was thinner than talcum powder. God knows how many times it had been ploughed.

Waves of sound burst across my eardrums. The noise was unbelievable. From the air-conditioned silence of the Apache cockpit, it felt like someone had whacked up the volume to max. Rolls of thunderous gunfire ebbed and flowed around the aircraft, punctuated by the pounding of the blades above my head.

I started for the lads at full sprint, but the ground kept disappearing beneath my feet. My boots sank twelve inches with every step before I got any kind of purchase. My legs pumped at warp speed, but I was going nowhere fast. And I felt them getting hot, painfully hot.

As the whine of our Apache engine and the thud of its rotor blades receded, the sound of total war intensified; the constant crack of rifle rounds, bursts of cannon fire from the gunships, and the ground-shaking crump of artillery shells. The reek of cordite was so strong it seared my nostrils.

I heard an unearthly scream and looked up to see a couple of Taliban RPGs blasting their way towards the ridge. Instead of the familiar whoosh, these things were shrieking like banshees.

To my left, the curtain of smoke from the 2,000-pounder still hung thick and high, obscuring the village and dimming the light, but I could now see the treeline clearly to my right. The dust cloud was clearing fast.

By the time I reached the ditch, my lungs were heaving and the blood was pounding through my head. I jumped down alongside Fraser-Perry, sweat streaming from every pore.

They’d given up trying to lift Mathew and were trying to drag him out instead. That wasn’t working either. He was now lying, face forward, on the side of the ditch furthest from the wall. His head
was level with the field and his legs pushed out to the right. Rigg stood above him, tugging at his webbing, and Fraser-Perry was below, trying to lever him upwards, but the lip of Mathew’s helmet was wedged into the earth, anchoring him firmly.

I yelled at them to stop. The guys released him, close to exhaustion.

‘Fucking hell, he’s heavy …’ Fraser-Perry gasped.

Mathew Ford was a giant of a man, well over six foot and solid as rock. We hadn’t known that. Maybe if we could turn him over, the three of us might be able to lift him. I shoved my right knee into the ditch wall, grabbed Mathew’s shoulder with my left hand and pulled. I slid my right hand beneath his right arm and flipped him around so most of his weight was on my thigh.

As his body turned, Mathew’s head flipped backwards and rested momentarily on the bank. That’s when I first saw his face. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted, and his skin was caked with dust, but he was a handsome giant. He looked like he was fast asleep. The only thing that told me different was the glistening trail of blood that ran from under the lip of his helmet, down his cheek and onto his neck. A few drops had splashed across his shoulder.

Was he still alive? That question had bombarded us the whole morning; the JTAC, his CO on the ground, the Nimrod above us – even the brigadier back at HQ. And I wanted to know myself. If he regained consciousness, I wanted to tell him not to struggle and that everything was going to be okay.

I gripped his right wrist between his cuff and a big watch with my right hand and slammed the fingertips of my left onto his neck. No pulse. I’d trained as a medic in the Paras. If he’d had one, I’d have found it in three seconds.

But it didn’t mean he was dead. It just meant his heart had
stopped. It could be started again. Yes; only an hour ago, when we were above him, Billy said he’d seen Mathew move. Five seconds. Still no pulse.

I left my hands where they were a few seconds longer. Still no pulse, but Jesus, his body temperature was just the same as mine. It was five degrees celsius that morning; bitterly cold. He’d been lying out here for over three and a half hours. If he’d died as soon as he’d been hit, his hands would have been as cold as ice by now.

Maybe his heart had only just stopped. That would mean we’d have four minutes before his brain followed suit.
We could still save
him
.

I grabbed hold of Mathew’s webbing with both hands. ‘Right, let’s go …’

Rigg grabbed hold of his shoulder straps, Fraser-Perry lifted his legs, and we pushed and heaved and hauled him out of the ditch onto the field. I leapt up onto the bank. My forearms felt like lead. As Fraser-Perry followed, another RPG whooshed over our heads from the fort in the direction of the marines’ firebase.

Christ, the enemy … How close were they now
?

To our south, the tunnel system had been chewed up and blocked by the A10s. Thanks to the lingering pall of black smoke, nothing was going to come out of the western village for a while. Billy and Geordie would cover us from the north. Or would they? The truth was I hadn’t a clue where they were. I hadn’t seen
any
of them yet, but they hadn’t blown up and they hadn’t lifted. So I presumed that’s where they were until told otherwise.

But the east … That’s where the Taliban would come for us, running round the corner of the wall fifty metres away like men possessed. We wouldn’t know about it until they were right on top of us. We had to move fast.

‘Okay, we can’t lift him up, so we’ll just have to drag him. Fraser-Perry, you cover us.’

Fraser-Perry thrust his rifle into his shoulder and gripped it hard. He glanced left and right, left and right, his eyes out on sticks. He wasn’t much more than a kid, and couldn’t see shit through the smoke.

Rigg and I grabbed Mathew under the shoulder straps of his body armour. It was now a straight forty-five metre line to the aircraft, but through all of that appallingly soft earth. We raised his torso and backside to create as little resistance as possible and took up the strain. His neck and chin sank into his body armour. He really was heavy. Jesus, at least twenty stone with all his kit on.

Another roar of 30-mm cannon; at least five hard bursts and a hundred rounds. Tony flew low over my left shoulder whilst Charlotte slapped it all straight into the treeline barely 200 metres to our north-east. It was the closest support fire they’d needed to put down yet.

Keep pulling that trigger, Charlotte
…

I looked up to see Carl, still in the Apache’s back seat, finish saying something into the radio mike. He gave me a thumbs down, then a scooping gesture with a curved hand. He repeated it, quicker, and then pointed vigorously behind him.

Army sign language: thumbs down means the enemy, and scooping means flanking. The enemy was flanking to the east of us. That’s who Charlotte and Tony must have been hosing down. The east; I knew it. And they were obviously closing fast.

‘Guys, the Taliban are trying to get through the trees over there. We’ve got to step on it.’

Rigg and I lurched forwards in unison. I realised how hard it was going to be. We couldn’t run with him; we couldn’t even walk with
him. To get any movement at all, we had to lean hard into each step, and yank Mathew alongside us. As we did so, our leading feet sank deep into the earth, pivoting us off balance. We stopped, took another step and pulled, pulled, pulled again.

The deeper we sank, the higher we had to hold Mathew to stop him from disappearing into the bloody stuff too. We were holding him practically at chest height, but couldn’t keep him there for long because our arms were burning. He slipped back down at the end of every lurching stride. It was totally ball breaking.

I snatched another glance at the aircraft. Carl was pumping his fist up and down, a manic expression on his face. I knew exactly how he felt. We’d moved, but not far, and at this rate it was going to take us all fucking day. It was also getting lighter; the dust was starting to clear. Bad news. We needed all the cover we could get.

We had no choice but to press on. After five more metres or so of chaos, Rigg and I established some semblance of a rhythm. Up, lean, take a step, heave, down. Up, lean, take a step, heave, down. Rivulets of sweat gathered beneath the brow pad of my helmet and rolled down into my eyes. My nostrils stung with the cordite. My arms felt like lead and there were daggers in my thighs. But we were doing it. We had twenty metres to go.