Hellfire (37 page)

I left the lever down.

We headed downwards, gathering speed. I let nature take its course. We dropped faster and faster. Eventually the tail would follow the nose, weather-cocking behind it. I didn’t pull back on the stick or pull in power. I’d need that power later.

The aircraft side-slipped towards the ground until the stab dragged up its sorry arse and pulled down its nose and whipped the tail around behind us. In a few seconds we’d spun through eighty degrees horizontally and ninety vertically. The Fire Control Radar pointed north, the wheels south and the nose straight down into the Green Zone. I wanted to give our gunman a bigger headache than he’d given me-and fucking with his range was a good place to start.

Our speed built up fast. The loudest sound in the air-condi-tioned cockpit was normally the swish of the gaspers blowing air. But we could now hear the rush of air flowing noisily over missiles, wing tips, even the angles of the windscreen wiper.

The engines weren’t screaming because I had the collective lever down, but their time would come. I was using the energy of the aircraft and the speed and the weight and good old gravity to get it going as fast as I could in the shortest space of time. My head was gyroscopically stable in space, keeping the monocle’s crosshair over the same point on the ground. The Apache was effectively rotating about my static right eye.

When he fired I needed those rounds to pass behind us; that meant achieving a speed he wasn’t expecting or thought we weren’t capable of. Instead of shooting at me high in the sky, I wanted him to try to track me towards the ground. The perfect crossing, dropping, accelerating, distance-changing challenge Captain Mainwaring had caught me out with all those years ago.

In a perverse kind of way I was hoping the gunner would fire, to see if his rounds passed behind me. He had to try to get them ahead
of where I was, but I was really starting to motor. He needed to get ahead of his aiming mark-he’d be aiming low and trying to shift. I needed to change angle and keep increasing my speed.

The noise rush grew. I could see 80 in my monocle.

‘Have you been hit?’ Jon shouted.

Then 90…

He’d seen the rounds and thought they’d hit us, and now he was seeing the aircraft fall on its side and dive towards the ground.

‘Not yet!’ I shouted over the inter-aircraft radio.

101…

I started to pull back on the cyclic and applied a little power on the collective to regain full control.

112…

Simon came on: ‘Height, Ed…height, Ed…
Pull out!
’

‘I WILL,’ I shouted.

120 became 121…

Jake yelled, ‘Watch your height!’

We were pulling up through seventy-five degrees, nose down and still dropping fast.

I knew my height; Simon did too. He was trying to look out at the world through a TADS camera which may or may not have been slaved to his head. He was targeting, so it probably hadn’t. All he’d be able to see in his monocle was the speed building and the height dropping. It was pitch-black, he was blind and hanging on for dear life.

Jake and Jon could see my aircraft plummeting towards the ground. Because I’d said, ‘Not yet’, Jake was probably thinking,
Why the fuck’s he flying towards the ground?
A lot of people had crashed in combat simply because they’d been too busy trying to evade fire. Most of them would have survived if they’d just flown the aircraft rather than tried to avoid the fight. But I had no option. This guy was shit-hot. He’d fucking nearly killed us.

131 top left.

1100 on the right. We were only one thousand one hundred feet above the Green Zone and closing fast.

‘Height!
Height!
’ Jake’s warnings were becoming more strangulated by the second.

‘I’ve got it!’

If he replied, I didn’t hear him. The low height warners had triggered. Lights blazed above the console and a siren started to wail. I’d bust my limits and the systems were doing their best to get me to stop. It was as if the Apache itself was yelling at me, ‘It’s going to crash, mate!’

140…141…142…

I was accelerating at 10 mph per second.

510…502…486…I was pulling back on the stick as hard as I could, but we were dropping so fast the four-figure digital height reading couldn’t keep up. Inertia was still winning.

And then, the final nail in the coffin. The 23 mm fired up again. It came straight at me, as straight as straight could be, like someone was aiming a laser straight into my left pupil. The fire came from a bunch of buildings clustered together in the shape of a giant banana.

I wasn’t sure if it was the G force, the tracer coming directly at us, or both, but Simon gave a long, despairing groan over the intercom.

I was transfixed. It was absolutely awesome. For a split second, I could see straight down this luminescent red pencil with my left eye. My right was glued to the thermal world. Then they were superimposed. My crosshair sat over the centre of it. I could make out the banana and another block immediately west of it. The firing came from its roof. I was in no doubt. I knew exactly where this guy was.

I also knew what was about to happen. As half a second turned into one and the tracer rounds looked as if they would cut right through the canopy and into my forehead, the red line bent backwards and up.

I was beginning to level off. The stream of rounds was now well behind us and a couple of hundred feet above.

My crosshair hadn’t moved. I could see an elevated square block on top of the target building.

You fucking dancer, I have you!

I pulled up hard on the collective to top up the power to maximum torque. I knew exactly where he was; I had him at ninety degrees to my left.

‘My gun,’ I shouted.

I pushed my thumb up on the Chinese hat. The gun came straight up. We’d fired the cannon earlier that day, and it was Deadeye Dick. Wherever I put the crosshairs, the rounds were going to land. I was going to put a burst right down both his barrels.

The weapon display gave me 300 rounds and my range was set to 1,500 metres.

He was roughly 1,000 metres away. I was going to have to aim half a reticule down to hit him. I had a warning message.

‘LIMITS’ appeared across the bottom of my monocle.

Bastard…

We were still at ninety degrees and going full pelt. The barrel had reached its left stop and couldn’t point any further back. I’d need to turn towards him a fraction. His tracer rounds were tracking behind us now.

I’d outwitted him, but we were over the Green Zone at 300 feet, a perfect height for small arms to take us down.

What now? My primary role was to defend the aircraft. I could make a break for the wadi-or we could do what it was designed to do: protect the lads out on the ground by hunting and killing their enemies.

I hoped he wouldn’t be able to correct. If we stayed in the same profile he would certainly have another go. I needed to do something different.

I pulled back hard and left on the cyclic. The manoeuvre pulled a loud involuntary groan from both of us. The aircraft had been shifting in excess of 140 mph, and the Apache’s nose came shooting up, tilted to the left, still pulling and topping up the power.

The height warners extinguished and then the LIMITS message disappeared. I kept staring down and to my left. I wanted to get to the top of the climb, bump the aircraft over, level it, and pull off a burst. We were screaming straight up. It wasn’t a manoeuvre helicopters were famed for as they soon ran out of speed, so I hoped the gunner hadn’t bargained on it. The power margin indicator came on to warn me I was within 10 per cent of trashing the engines.

Then it started again. The tracer came pouring out. I hadn’t taken my eyes off him since I made that first desperate turn. This time it began low and behind us. I’d changed aspect and was climbing straight up, and he was well behind the curve. I made his position a familiar-looking shelter about thirty to forty metres along the flat roof of the building beside the banana.

Enough was enough. He’d started with the best hand possible, but now I had one or two trump cards of my own.

I ignored his fire and steadied the crosshairs.

I called Jon. ‘Where are you?’

‘South of the town.’

That was all I needed to know; he wasn’t anywhere on my line of sight. I pulled the trigger.

‘Engaging.’

The soles of my feet vibrated as the twenty-round burst of High Explosive Dual Purpose rounds began to pump out of the cannon barrel. I couldn’t see them in flight; I could just feel the airframe shudder. I knew the AA gunner had stopped firing because the jet of red light was now way behind and below us.

The Apache was still climbing, but I hadn’t once moved my crosshairs off the target. I held my aim with my right eye as my left
watched the first HEDP rounds impacting with a series of bright orange flashes. I had to hold a steady aim because the cannon was still disgorging rounds at a speed of 800 metres per second. I lifted my finger from the trigger after it fell silent.

‘Look at the target,’ Simon called.

‘I am.’

‘On,’ he said, allowing me to move my head.

I looked down at the MPD by my right knee. For the first time since we’d been engaged Simon was in a position to use the TADS.

I called Jon: ‘Did you see the firing point I just hit?’

‘Negative, we have men on the ground, and they’re firing tracer all over the place.’

The building lay at forty-five degrees to us then straightened up as I bunted over the top of our rollercoaster arc.

Simon zoomed in. There were splashes of heat all along the rooftop where my cannon rounds had exploded but the box-shaped, brown-topped structure I was aiming to destroy remained untouched. At first glance, it looked as though it covered the staircase leading to the top of the building, but I was now sure it concealed something much more sinister.

I levelled off pretty much where we’d been when we were first engaged.

Jon had been keeping an eye on us while Jake watched the troops on the ground. The tracer fire could be a distraction tactic.

‘Wildman Five One, this is Widow Seven One-my north-east sangar confirmed that was a Delta Hotel on the Turret. Re-engage.’

The fucking Turret…
Of course.
It was the thing we’d seen on top of the bakery a few days before.

‘My gun,’ Simon called.

‘Is that raised block the firing point,’ he said. His crosshair was bang over the Turret.

‘A-firm.’ I never got to say anything else; the roar of the M230 thundering up my legs and into my arse told me everything I needed to know.

‘Engaging,’ he called.

I looked closely at the TADS FLIR image. The cannon was chewing great chunks off the Turret and scattering them across the surrounding area. But I wasn’t sure it was doing a good enough job.

I was pretty much convinced now that we were up against a ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft mount. The Russians left plenty behind when they threw in the towel. It was the smallest and simplest twinbarrelled AA gun the Taliban could get their hands on. They mounted them on pick-ups and flatbeds-and on top of buildings.

Until we destroyed it, they’d continue to pound the life out of the DC.

We needed to finish it off good and proper-and there was only one weapon to do that.

‘Let’s stick a Hellfire into it, Simon,’ I said.

HELLFIRE

SUNDAY, 16 JULY 2006

Now Zad

We both studied the target carefully. We could see heat sources around its three-metre-square perimeter. Small objects, not human beings: empty shell casings. They couldn’t have been ours; our cannon rounds exploded when they hit and the spent casings would have fallen into the Green Zone a klick to the east. They were still hot enough for us to know they were the remains of the tracer that had nearly knocked us out of the sky.

The ZU-23-2-if that’s what it was-must have been hidden under what I could now confirm was not a roof but a hessian cover. The gunner must have hammered it good style, then disappeared back under the hessian. That’s why we hadn’t seen any points of impact. Our rounds had gone clean through the loosely woven material.

‘Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel,’ Widow Seven One called after watching Simon’s rounds pummel the Turret. ‘Destroy the building.’

‘I agree, Ed. It’s got to be a bomb or a Hellfire-and there are no jets here.’

The Widow continued to build the picture. ‘We’ve been under attack from there for the last three days.’

‘Wildman Five One, copied. We’ll put a Hellfire into it.’

‘We’re close to chicken, so expedite-the men are now in the base.’ Jake confirmed and authorised on the JTAC’s frequency.

‘Widow, copied.’ He knew we were off after this.

‘Five One, copied,’ Simon said.

We were now to the north-east. We could see the Turret quite easily.

The Hellfire missile had a double-shaped charge. If we fired from the north-east, it would direct its energy towards our troops. The blast would throw debris their way, and if we had a malfunction, the Hellfire could carry on and land anywhere along the line of aim, depending on its reserves of propellant. And if it had a potted coil failure it would nose dive into Now Zad.

Our boys were to the south-west; I wanted to keep them at ninety degrees.

‘We’re going to run in west to east,’ I told Jake and Jon on the inter-aircraft radio.

That way we had a clear view of the street in front of the building. If the gunner legged it we could adjust the crosshair and whack him in the street.

‘Copied-expedite,’ Jon said. They wanted us to get our skates on.

We kicked out to the west and I brought the aircraft round. We lined back up with the target. Now all we needed was clearance from the JTAC.

Simon zoomed in with the TADS.

‘Widow Seven One, Wildman Five One. Confirm clear to engage with Hellfire.’

The Widow shouted: ‘Stop, stop, stop. My men need to get under hard cover.’

What?

We were three klicks out. I turned ninety degrees left so Simon could maintain eyes on the Turret and the street. We didn’t want to
orbit back over the town. I weaved between north and south, always keeping the target in view.