Apache (32 page)

‘Right, get him off quick, Ed.’

Rigg and I didn’t need a second invitation. Carl had done a neat job. Mathew was lying on his back, in exactly the position I had left him. I knelt down and pulled hard on the straps to relieve the pressure on the karabiners. As I spun the locking gate, his dust-caked face was a foot from mine. The blood on his right cheek was still damp; perhaps his heart had started to pump again. The slight crow’s feet at the side of eyes made him look as though he was smiling.

I unlocked the second karabiner, then we stepped back and let the marines and medics take over. My hand didn’t feel quite like my own as I offered it to Rigg. We shook quickly and turned to watch Mathew being rushed to the waiting armoured ambulance.

‘Ed, get in,’ Carl shouted. He was flipping a track about the fuel now.

I looked quickly along Sylvia’s bottom to see if she was leaking; she had no holes that I could see. Rigg and I found ourselves still facing each other.

‘Thank you.’

‘No, thank
you
.’

I jumped back in and the second my door closed Carl pulled power and took off, sand-blasting everyone below us.

‘Check the fuel burn rate,’ Carl snapped, as we left the dust cloud behind. Billy and Geordie had been holding for us over the desert. Now they moved alongside and Carl and Geordie main-lined it back to Camp Bastion by the straightest possible route.

I looked through my monocle. We had 515 lb of fuel and sixty-two miles to fly. Not good. The minimum legal fuel allowance for landing an Apache was 400 lb. Below that, heavy manoeuvring
could cause fuel starvation to the engine and a shut down. Below 200 lb, there was just whatever was left in the pipes and pump; the two fuel tanks were empty. At 100 lb the engines cut out altogether.

Carl was keeping the aircraft at 117 knots, the most economical fuel burn speed, and just thirty-five feet off the desert floor. Any higher and the wind from the north-west would have slowed us down. Every second counted.

I pulled up the engine page on the MPD and tasted acid in my throat. We were burning 900 lb an hour, 15 lb a minute – and it was going to take us twenty-seven minutes to get home. I punched
15*27
into the keyboard, then
Enter … 405 lb
… We’d have 110 lb of fuel left when we landed.
Bloody hell
. I gave us 50 / 50 at best.

‘Buddy, if we’re not going to make it, we’re best just putting down at the gun line aren’t we? We can get a CH47 to fly down the boys with some fuel bollocks.’

‘We can do it.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘We could go to Lash …’

‘We’re not going to Lash; it’s too small. We can make it.’

I realised I was more worried about the embarrassment of requesting fuel if we landed in the middle of the desert than I was of the Taliban.

If anyone knew the Apache AH Mk1, it was Carl. He loved the aircraft so much he even hung out with it in his free time. They almost went on dates together. If he said we’d get back, we’d get back. But it was going to be desperately close. A change in the wind, or any kind of malfunction and we’d shit it.

Billy and Geordie were 400 metres off to our right, and flying just as low. We didn’t want to discuss our fuel state over the net. It
would only spook them at Bastion; every man and his dog would get on the net and feed us the sort of advice that we could do without. Best to keep schtum. We texted instead.

Billy began:
SEND FUEL STATE

I replied with ours, and he responded: 490

‘Shit, Carl, they’re even lower than us.’

A beep alert signalled another text from Billy.
LASH V BSN
?

He must have been reading my mind.

EWOK HAPPY BSN … YOUR CALL

BSN IT IS

Even Billy the chief pilot doffed his cap to Carl the Aircraft King.

SEND AMMO

That was going to be interesting. We had eight Flechette and eight HEISAP rockets still in the tubes, but we were out of Hellfire and only had eighty remaining cannon rounds.

40*30MM, 0*HEISAP, 8*FLECH, 0*HELLF

Wow. Billy was almost out of everything.

Having stayed on station to cover in the Chinook picking up Mathew, 3 Flight were a few minutes behind us. They didn’t need asking.

Beep
. ‘Text from Five Two, Ed.’

20*30MM, 4*HEISAP, 0*FLECH, 2*HELLF

But Charlotte and Tony won the prize. Their text just read:
WINCHESTER
.

‘Winchester’ was the air net code for exhausting all your weaponry: bombs, missiles, cannon rounds, rockets – whatever you had. It dated from World War One: when the string-bag pilots had nothing left to fire, they reached for their trusty Repeater. Going Winchester was heavily frowned on. Ammunition was our lifeblood and had to be carefully rationed; use it all up in one go and
you had nothing left to fight with. But there were no other troops in contact at Jugroom; just us. And they’d run dry in the very last seconds of our extraction. They’d executed their fire plan to perfection.

CONGRATS
, I replied.

Nobody had gone Winchester before – Charlotte and Tony had just made British Apache history.

Billy sent our ammo requirements to Kev Blundell in Bastion so he could have our uploads ready. Carl punched some numbers into the keyboard.

‘Check this out. We’ve used a total of £1,499,000 of ordnance protecting Mathew Ford.’

And that didn’t count Nick and Charlotte’s earlier mission.

‘Not bad for a couple of hours’ work.’

Seven minutes and thirty-six seconds from the firebase our fuel level dropped below the 400 lb landing limit. I’d lost count of the number of rules we’d broken that morning. Every few minutes, I recalculated the fuel state in case I’d made a mistake. The answer came back just the same – 110 lb on landing.

‘Village twelve o’clock. One klick.’

‘Don’t change course, Carl. We’re too low for them to see us coming.’

Normally we’d keep out of their way. But that meant wasting more fuel we didn’t have. A flash of light shot straight across the windscreen, missing us by no more than a few feet. Carl threw the aircraft into an evasive bank, climb and jink.

‘What the fuck was that? Have we been engaged?’

I shot a glance out my window, spotting for an RPG smoke trail. Instead, I saw a solitary bright yellow kite flying above the village compound.

‘It was a kite, mate …’

It made me think of Khaled Hosseini’s novel,
The Kite Runner
, which Emily had made me read on holiday in Egypt before the tour. The Taliban had banned kite flying. Among other things, we were here to defend the Afghan people’s right to fly kites if they wanted to. But this one had scared the hell out of us. Maybe the Taliban had a point.

I felt for Emily’s angel, but the survival jacket was too tight. It must have shifted position when we were moving Mathew. I desperately wanted to know whether he was alive. There had been no time to check his condition before we left the firebase, and we’d heard nothing over the net. A crash team could have got his heart beating again in an instant, surely …

On another day Carl and I might have put a call into the Ops Room, but they had enough on their plate without our unnecessary questions. We’d find out soon enough.

Ten miles out of Bastion, Billy texted again.
SEND FUEL AT
BASTION

110. YOU
?

90. WE LAND 1ST

Twenty pounds of fuel was eighty seconds more flying time. We didn’t quibble. Unless Geordie kept his aircraft 100 per cent upright, they were now in real danger of crashing. In a few minutes’ time, they’d drop below 100 lb and then the engines could give out on them any second.

We approached the camp side by side. Carl eased off on the power.

‘Don’t slow down too much, buddy!’

‘I’ll formate that close to them you’ll be able to smell Geordie’s arse. Stand by.’

Carl went onto the net. ‘Geordie, land long down the runway, so I can land short at the same time.’ He wasn’t wasting a second more than he had to.

The two pilots kept the same speed all the way in, with us one rotor blade’s distance behind Geordie. As we crossed the tip of the runway, Carl flared the aircraft suddenly and hammered the back wheel down onto the lip, catapulting the front wheels forward and down hard too; it wasn’t the most graceful landing I’d ever experienced, but it was the most grateful. Geordie did the same.

ENG1 FUEL BAR
, Geordie texted as we taxied to the refuelling point.

That fuel bar was an emergency warning that pressure was dropping in the port engine and it would cut out automatically in less than five seconds. Geordie shut down the engine then and there on the runway to avoid having to file a lengthier incident signal.

Geordie and Billy took the right fuel point and we took the left, maintaining radio silence. If we were quick about this, we might be able to get away with nobody officially noting our return fuel states. That would save an ear-chewing by a pencil-neck somewhere along the line.

I opened up my canopy and shouted at the boys: ‘Get the fuel in, quick.’

Simon, the Arming and Loading Point Commander, popped his head inside the cockpit as his boys went to work.

‘All right, there, Mr M? How close have you cut it today then, eh? – 400 on the nose, I’ll bet. Sounds like it was quite a morning …
fucking HELL
…’ His eyes almost popped out when he saw the digital reading: 80 lb.

The next stop was the arming bay. The one and only Kev Blundell was waiting for us, hands on hips, with his usual sardonic expression.

He took a stroll around the aircraft. And for the first time I could remember, he didn’t say a single word. He took his time with the inspection, peering into every rocket hole and having a thoroughly good look at the 30-mm feed chain running to the cannon. He glanced up at Carl or me periodically, then looked right back down again.

Eventually he was finished. He nodded lugubriously as he leaned his gargantuan weight against the aircraft’s wing and plugged in.

‘Not bad lads. I’ve got to admit it, not at all bad.’ He broke into a smile. ‘I hear you were put to shame by a bird, though.’

I caught sight of the Boss, walking straight towards us.
Thank
God we’d got the fuel in
…

A Chinook thumped past over his left shoulder, on its way to the hospital landing site. Must have been Mathew. It was odd that the Boss had come down to the flight line to see us, even today. He was too busy for that. His brow was heavily furrowed and he looked like he had the weight of an elephant on each shoulder.

I gave him a smile, but I didn’t get one back. When he saw my hands he stopped short and stared at them. I looked down too and realised they were still stained with Mathew’s blood.

He nodded at them. ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah, it’s not mine.’ I gave him a big thumbs up as reassurance.

Trigger’s expression still didn’t change. His clear blue eyes burned with a peculiar intensity. ‘Look, I just want you to know that I’m backing all four of you – no matter what happens next.’

There was a silence. I was bewildered. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The CO has just got in from Kandahar on a Lynx,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you up top.’

He turned and walked away.

Carl signed in the aircraft while I went to wash Mathew’s blood off my hands.

I sat on the lid of a missile box in the bright sun and poured water from a jerrycan. I couldn’t bring myself to use the Portaloo handscrub.

I tried to fathom what the hell was going on. It couldn’t have been about our fuel levels – Trigger would have understood, given the circumstances. I had never seen him that bothered before. And we weren’t expecting the CO in Bastion today …

I joined Carl inside the Groundies’ hangar. We’d been delayed on the flight line while a technician examined my broken FLIR camera, so the others had gone ahead. We were both locked in thought. Okay, we’d broken a few rules that day. But anything we’d done wrong had been whilst trying to do something right. Our problem was that the road to hell was paved with good intentions.

The downside of the rescue didn’t bear thinking about. If both Apaches had gone down on the way out of the fort, we’d have been close to double figures dead. The very thought of that would have seriously scared a lot of important people, and the four of us had
pushed hardest for the mission throughout. After twenty-two years in the army I knew only too well that a little hindsight could be a very dangerous thing. The more I thought about it, the more I understood what Trigger must have meant. Our actions were now going to be judged in the cold light of day, and it could go either way.

I swung open the door of my locker. The word ‘angel’ was still scrawled across the inside of it in black marker as a reminder not to leave home without her. Carl was absorbed in his own little ritual: he pulled a letter from his wife out of a drawer and gave it a kiss. My angel deserved one too, after this morning. I tore open the Velcro seal of my right breast pocket and dug in my hand. I could only feel my war ID card.

‘Mate, take a look in here and see if you can find my angel, will you?’

He peered in and shook his head. We scanned the smooth concrete floor beneath our feet, but there was no sign of her there either. My throat went dry. How would I tell Emily? She’d think it was an omen; that I’d die on my very next flight.

‘This is no joking matter,’ Carl said. ‘We might need her when the CO gets hold of us …’

He put a hand on my shoulder. His expression told me that he knew this was no time to piss about. ‘Shoot a basket for the brews?’

I hesitated for a moment, re-checking my pocket. Still nothing.

‘Let’s do it,’ I replied.

It was another of our sacred post-mission rituals, and nobody was going to stop us doing it. Carl won.

He drove us up to the JHF Ops tent in the Land Rover he had parked by the hangar five hours earlier. Billy and Geordie were
already there, and neither could bring themselves to meet my eye. So they’d picked up the vibe too. Nobody in the room was saying much.

Trigger walked in. The look on his face was completely impenetrable. I had a bad feeling about this. ‘Can you four go through to the back, please? I’ll be in with the CO shortly.’

We made our way out of the tent and into the secure Tactical Planning Facility.

‘Make us that brew, Piss Boy,’ Carl said, in a bid to break the tension.

‘Yeah, make that a double, Piss Boy,’ Geordie chipped in. ‘You were also last back from the fort.’

But that was the end of the banter. I made four coffees in silence. Trigger reappeared as I handed them round, followed by the Commanding Officer. Trigger closed the door behind them. It was the first time I’d seen Colonel Sexton since his arrival in Afghanistan two weeks earlier.

‘Welcome to Bastion, sir.’

The temperature in the room dropped by ten degrees.

‘It’s the
second
time I’ve been here.’

The four of us sat in a row on the comfy seats. Trigger pulled up a couple of hard plastic chairs and he and Colonel Sexton took their places opposite us. As always, the Colonel looked freshly scrubbed. His dark, perfectly parted hair gleamed under the neon lights.

‘Right, gentlemen …’

He paused to eyeball each of us individually. I suddenly knew how those poor bloody apprentices must feel when Sir Alan Sugar was about to tell them: ‘You’re fired …’

‘What the
FUCK
were you doing?’

We stared at him in stunned silence.

‘You have advertised to the wider army a capability we do not have. People are now going to expect that this is a service we offer …’

He slowed right down, making every word sound like a threat.

‘I’m not sure that you are aware of the gravity of your actions. People are going to come down on us from a great height. The JHC and the Directorate are going to want some answers.’

Hindsight was kicking in.
Shit
. It was going to go against us.

‘You decided that you would break the RTS, which clearly states what you can and can’t do. Tell me, where in the RTS does it say that untrained troops can use this procedure? It is an emergency procedure, for aircrew only.’

This went against every principle I have ever stood for. How could we have one rule for us, and one for everyone else?

‘You decided that you would ignore the RTS. Who here has done this for real? Who here has
trained
for this? Those marines were not trained for this. They were just hanging off the side.’

Billy was the first to tiptoe across this minefield. ‘They were strapped on sir. Well, they were o –’

‘
HOW
were they strapped on?’

I kept my voice as even as possible. ‘I showed each one of them the correct method, sir.’

He ignored me.

‘So, without any training and with a total disregard for the RTS, you decided to strap men to an aircraft. What would have happened if one of them had fallen off?’

His dark, slightly hooded eyes flashed dangerously. No one answered. We were starting to realise that there would be no ‘well done’.

‘You flew into an enemy stronghold! What would have happened
if one of your aircraft had been shot down? Do you realise the implications of the Taliban parading round with an Apache?’

You could have cut the silence that followed with a knife. But the Colonel still hadn’t finished.

‘I simply cannot believe you put two £40-million helicopters in harm’s way, in a vain attempt to save someone that was already dead.’

I felt as though I’d been poleaxed. We all did.

‘We didn’t know, Colonel,’ Billy said quietly. ‘We didn’t know he was dead.’

My mouth fell open. So, it had all been for nothing. A wave of sadness washed over me. The expression on the Colonel’s face changed from steely determination to surprise. He obviously had no idea that we hadn’t already been told.

‘Excuse me, sir.’ Billy got to his feet and walked out of the room.

Good on you Billy. You’re not going to sit here and take this
.

There was another silence as the CO waited for Billy to return.

If only
… If only we’d got to him faster, we might have saved him. If only we’d been quicker getting out of the fort. If only, if only, if only …

Hope had made me believe in the impossible. Now the book was closed. We had failed, and were getting a good kicking for daring not to. What a shit day.

But it wasn’t anger that had propelled Billy from the room. After a few seconds, the silence was interrupted by the sound of him throwing up outside. He came back in, white but expressionless, and dropped a tissue into the bin. We all knew how he felt. The CO gave us a few more seconds for the news to sink in. Our reaction had clearly thrown him.

‘Why didn’t you wait for the Chinook IRT plan?’

My eyes narrowed. Carl looked as dumbstruck as I was. Geordie shrugged his shoulders. Billy was staring at the CO throughout, trying to make head or tail of what he was saying.

‘The IRT plan was to take effect twenty minutes later with a Chinook.’

‘As far as we knew sir, there was no Chinook IRT plan,’ Billy said.

The Colonel fell silent again. We didn’t know about his plan. He rested his hands on his thighs as if he was about to stand up, then changed his mind and turned to Trigger.

‘We are going to need to decide how we report this.’ He paused. ‘We must ensure that we were in the decision process and knew what was happening at all times. At the moment it looks as though four NCOs have gone and done whatever they pleased, without our authority.’

So that was it.
Stay calm, Macy; stay very calm
.

‘Sir …’

He looked at me.

Stay calm, Macy
.

‘I’m not an NCO,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I am a fucking Warrant Officer.’

Well done, Macy …
really
calm …

He glared at me.

Which was preferable: the Taliban videoing a downed Apache or a British soldier skinned alive on Al Jazeera? Who was going to be more upset, the Chancellor losing forty million quid or a family not being able to sleep at night? His mother wouldn’t even have been able to bury him.

A long time ago the red mist would have arrived good and proper at that point; the red mist that got me into fights as a kid and in the Paras. It wasn’t there now, but I was deep down fucking angry. I knew
I should probably just sit on my hands, but I couldn’t help myself.

‘I haven’t said anything yet, sir.’ I leaned forward. ‘But I’d like to make three points.’

I looked him straight in the eye.

‘First, I don’t care how much a helicopter costs; it was a calculated decision.’

‘It’s not just the helicopters, Mr Macy,’ the Colonel replied. ‘It’s the four marines with you. The risk to them –’

‘We asked for volunteers, sir,’ I said. ‘We asked for volunteers, and I described the plan in detail to Colonel Magowan.’

The CO just looked at me.

‘Second, I don’t, can’t and won’t ever see the difference between any British soldier, aircrew or otherwise. And finally …’ I paused, because I really wanted him to hear this loud and clear, ‘… do you
really
believe for one moment, sir, that we thought you were not in the decision-making loop?’

He looked completely blank.

‘I expected both you and Major James to be in the loop, and to have followed the whole thing on a Nimrod feed. You could have turned this off any time. Sir …’

‘I tried to, Mr Macy. And the brigadier went against me.’

That explained the shenanigans over the radio when we arrived at Magowan’s command post.

‘I didn’t know that, sir.’

He now understood that we hadn’t a clue about the Chinook IRT; that we had not disobeyed any direct orders, and believed that he knew of – and endorsed – the rescue.

But he also knew that we had thrown the rulebook out the window. The crucial question was: did he think the result was worth the risk?

It was decision time. A decision that would affect the careers of everyone in the room – not least his. Was he going to take a punt and institute a disciplinary investigation against us, or play it safe and wait for someone else to? Would he back us, or throw us to the dogs?

The CO turned to Trigger and took a deep breath.

‘Chris, if you were in the flight down there, what would you have done?’

It was a hospital pass if ever I’d seen one. As one of his squadron commanders, the Boss answered to Colonel Sexton; he was duty bound to back him up. Trigger had been given the casting vote. He didn’t hesitate for a second.

‘Given the same circumstances, Colonel, I would have done exactly the same as my men.’

Fucking good man
.

The Colonel’s mouth opened and closed, and he looked around the room, as if for inspiration.

Finally, he said, ‘We need to talk, Chris.’ And with that they got up and walked swiftly to the door.

Billy, Geordie, Carl and I looked at each other.

‘Fuck me,’ Geordie said. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’

‘Me neither,’ Carl said. ‘You okay, Billy?’

‘Yeah.’ Billy was still reeling.

I fished my notebook out of my trouser pocket.

‘Okay, boys, I’m getting all of that down verbatim. We’ll need it for the board of inquiry. Right, can you remember who said what?’

Geordie stood up.

‘Great idea, Ed, but can we do it outside? I’m in serious need of some fresh air.’

We spent the next hour grouped around a bench in the sun. I
jotted down every word while Geordie and Carl bitched like hell. For once, Carl had a genuine reason to do so, and we weren’t going to deny him.

Writing it down helped us revisit our actions and the thought processes behind them. It also took the lid off the pressure cooker after the incredible tension of the morning.

Billy rubbed the palm of his hand slowly over his stubble as we finished. Of all of us, Billy had taken it the worst. He was the mission commander. It wasn’t just the shock of Mathew’s death that had made him puke. Flying meant everything to him; it was his life. He was going for an officer’s commission. The least he could expect if we got done was to lose his wings. As the Sky Police, Billy knew that better than anyone. He was looking over the abyss.

Billy wasn’t alone. Geordie was the Rescue Police, Carl the Electronic Warfare Police, and I was the Weapons Police. We kept the rulebook: the same book that was about to be thrown at us – and probably all the harder because it was ours. Billy looked at each of us in turn.