Spare (33 page)

To keep my mind off the possibility, I fell to my work, got into the rhythm of the job.

My schedule was helpfully rigid: two days of planned ops, three days of VHR (very high readiness). In other words, sitting around a tent, waiting to be summoned.

The VHR tent had the look and feel of a student room at university. The collegiality, the boredom—the mess. There were several cracked-leather couches, a big Union Jack on the wall, snack foods everywhere. We’d pass the time playing FIFA, drinking gallons of coffee, flipping through lad mags. (
Loaded
was quite popular.) But then the alarm would sound and my student days, along with every other era of my life, would feel a million miles away.

One of the lads said we were glorified firefighters. He wasn’t wrong. Never fully asleep, never fully relaxed, always ready to go. We could be sipping a cup of tea, eating an ice cream, crying about a girl, having a chat about football,
but our senses were always tuned and our muscles were always taut, awaiting that alarm.

The alarm itself was a phone. Red, plain, no buttons, no dial, just a base and handset. Its ringer was antique, consummately British.
Brrrang.
The sound was vaguely familiar; I couldn’t place it at first. Eventually I realized. It was exactly like Granny’s phone at Sandringham on her big desk, in the huge sitting room where she took calls between games of bridge.

There were always four of us in the VHR tent. Two flight crews of two men each, a pilot and a gunner. I was a gunner and my pilot was Dave—tall, lanky, built like a long-distance marathoner, which in fact he was. He had short dark hair and an epic desert tan.

More glaringly, he possessed a deeply enigmatic sense of humor. Several times a day I’d ask myself: Is Dave serious? Is he being sarcastic? I could never tell. It’s going to take me a while to solve this guy, I’d think. But I never did.

Upon hearing the red phone ring, three of us would drop everything, bolt for the Apache, while the fourth would answer the phone and gather details of the op from a voice at the other end. Was it a medevac? (Medical evacuation.) A TIC? (Troops in contact.) If the latter, how far were the troops, how quickly could we get to them?

Once inside the Apache we’d fire up the air-con, strap on harnesses and body armor. I’d click on one of the four radios, get more details on the mission, punch the GPS coordinates into the onboard computer. The first time you ever start an Apache, going through preflight checks takes one hour, if not more. After a few weeks at Bastion, Dave and I had it down to eight minutes. And it still felt like an eternity.

We were always heavy. Brimming with fuel, bristling with a full complement of missiles, plus enough 30-mm rounds to turn a concrete apartment building into Swiss cheese—you could feel all that
stuff
holding you down, tying you to Earth. My first-ever mission, a TIC, I
resented
the feeling, the contrast between our urgency and Earth’s gravity.

I remember clearing Bastion’s sandbag walls with inches to spare, not flinching, not giving that wall a second thought. There was work to do, lives to save. Then, seconds later, a cockpit warning light began flashing.
ENG CHIPS.

Meaning: Land. Now.

Shit. We’re going to have to put down in Taliban territory. I started thinking of Bodmin Moor.

Then I thought…maybe we could just ignore the warning light?

No, Dave was already turning us back to Bastion.

He was the more experienced flier. He’d already done three tours, he knew all about those warning lights. Some you could ignore—they blinked all the time and you pulled out the fuses to make them shut up—but not this one.

I felt cheated. I wanted to go, go, go. I was willing to risk crashing, being taken prisoner—whatever. Ours not to reason why, as Flea’s great-granddad said, or Tennyson. Whoever. The point was: Unto the breach.

I never fully got over
how fast the Apache was.

We’d usually cruise above a target area at a civilized 70 knots. But often, hurrying to the target area, we’d open her up, push her all the way to 145. And since we were barely off the ground, it felt three times faster. What a privilege, I thought, to experience this kind of raw power, and to put it to work for our side.

Flying super low was standard operating procedure. Harder for Taliban fighters to see you coming. Alas, easier for local kids to throw rocks at us. Which they did all the time. Children throwing rocks was about all the Taliban had in the way of anti-aircraft capability, other than a few Russian SAMs.

The problem wasn’t evading the Taliban but finding them. In the four years since my first tour, they’d got much better at escaping. Humans are adaptable, but never more so than in war. The Taliban had worked out exactly how many minutes they had from first contact with our troops until the cavalry came over the horizon, and their internal clocks were finely calibrated: they’d shoot at as many guys as possible, then bolt.

They’d got better at hiding too. They could effortlessly melt into a village, blend into the civilian population, or vaporize into their network of tunnels. They didn’t run away—it was far more diffuse than that, more mystical.

We didn’t give up the search easily. We’d circle, sweep back and forth, sometimes for two hours. (The Apache ran out of fuel after two hours.) Sometimes, at the end of two hours, we’d still be unwilling to give up. So we’d refuel.

One day we refueled three times, spending a total of eight hours in the air.

When we finally returned to base the situation was dire: I’d run out of piss bags.

I was the first
in my squadron to pull the trigger in anger.

I remember the night as well as any in my life. We were in the VHR tent, the red phone rang, we all sprinted to the aircraft. Dave and I raced through preflight checks, I gathered the mission details: One of the control points closest to Bastion had come under small arms fire. We needed to get there, ASAP, and find out where the fire was coming from. We took off, swept over the wall, went vertical, climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Moments later I swung the night sight onto the target area.
There!

Eight hot spots, eight kilometers away. Thermal smudges—walking from where the contact had been.

Dave said:
That’s got to be them!

Yeah—there’s no friendly forces out here on patrol! Especially not at this hour.

Let’s make sure. Confirm no patrols outside the wall.

I called the J-TAC. Confirmed: no patrols.

We flew above the eight hot spots. They quickly broke into two groups of four. Evenly spaced, they went slowly along a track. That was our patrolling technique—were they mimicking us?

Now they hopped on mopeds, some two-up, some one-up. I told Control we were visual on all eight targets, asked for clearance, permission to fire. Permission was a must before engaging, always, unless it was a case of self-defense or imminent danger.

Beneath my seat was a 30-mm cannon, plus two Hellfires on the wing, 50-kg guided missiles that could be fitted with different warheads, one of which was excellent for obliterating high-value targets. Besides Hellfires we had a few unguided air-to-ground rockets, which on our particular Apache were flechette. To shoot the flechette you had to tip the helicopter down at a precise angle; only then would the flechette fly out like a cloud of darts. That’s what the flechette was, in fact, a lethal burst of eighty 5-inch tungsten darts. I remembered in Garmsir hearing about our forces having to pick pieces of Taliban guys out of trees after a direct hit from flechette.

Dave and I were ready to fire that flechette. But permission still hadn’t come.

We waited. And waited. And watched the Taliban speeding off in different directions.

I said to Dave:
If I find out later that one of these guys has injured or killed one of our guys after we let them go…

We stayed with two motorbikes, followed them down a windy road.

Now they separated.

We picked one, followed it.

Finally Control got back to us.

The persons you’re following…what’s their status?

I shook my head and thought:
Most of them are gone, because you’ve been so slow.

I said:
They’ve split up and we’re down to one bike.

Permission to fire.

Dave said to use the Hellfire. I was nervous about using it, however; I shot the 30-mm cannon instead.

Mistake. I hit the motorbike. One man down, presumably dead, but one hopped off and ran into a building.

We circled, called in ground troops.

You were right
, I told Dave.
Should’ve used the Hellfire
.

No worries
, he said.
It was your first time
.

Long after returning to base, I did a sort of mental scan. I’d been in combat before, I’d killed before, but this was my most direct contact with the enemy—ever. Other engagements felt more impersonal. This one was eyes on target, finger on trigger, fire away.

I asked myself how I felt.

Traumatized?

No.

Sad?

No.

Surprised?

No. Prepared in every way. Doing my job. What we’d trained for.

I asked myself if I was callous, perhaps desensitized. I asked myself if my non-reaction was connected to a long-standing ambivalence towards death.

I didn’t think so.

It was really just simple maths. These were bad people doing bad things to our guys. Doing bad things to the world. If this guy I’d just removed from the battlefield hadn’t already killed British soldiers, he soon would. Taking him meant saving British lives, sparing British families. Taking him meant fewer young men and women wrapped like mummies and shipped home on hospital beds, like the lads on my plane four years earlier, or the wounded men and
women I’d visited at Selly Oak and other hospitals, or the brave team with whom I’d marched to the North Pole.

And so my main thought that day, my only thought, was that I wished Control had got back to us sooner, had given us permission to fire more quickly, so we’d got the other seven.

And yet, and yet. Much later, speaking about it with a mate, he asked:
Did it factor into your feeling that these killers were on motorbikes? The chosen vehicle of paps all over the world?
Could I honestly say that, while chasing a pack of motorbikes, not one particle of me was thinking about the pack of motorbikes that chased one Mercedes into a Paris tunnel?

Or the packs of motorbikes that had chased me a thousand times?

I couldn’t say.

One of our drones
had been watching the Taliban school its fighters.

Despite popular assumptions, the Taliban had good equipment. Nothing like ours, but good, effective—when used correctly. So they often needed to bring their soldiers up to speed. There were frequent tutorials in the desert, instructors demonstrating the newest gear from Russia and Iran. That was what this lesson captured by the drones seemed to be. A shooting lesson.

The red phone rang. Down went the coffee mugs and PlayStation controls. We ran to the Apaches, flew north at a good clip, twenty-five feet off the ground.

Darkness was starting to fall. We were ordered by controllers to hold off, about eight kilometers.

In the deepening twilight we could barely see the target area. Just shadows moving about.

Bikes leaning against a wall.

Wait, we were told.

We circled and circled.

Wait.

Shallow breaths.

Now came the signal: The shooting lesson is over. Giddyup. Go, go, go.

The instructor, the high-value target, was on a motorbike, one of his students on the back. We screamed towards them, clocked them moving along at 40 k.p.h., one of them carrying a hot-barreled PKM machine gun. I held
my thumb over the cursor, watched the screen, waited.
There!
I pulled one trigger to fire the pointing laser and another to fire the missile.

The thumbstick I fired was remarkably similar to the thumbstick for the PlayStation game I’d just been playing.

The missile hit just short of the motorbike’s spokes. Textbook. Exactly where I’d been taught to aim. Too high, you might send it over the top of his head. Too low, you’d take out nothing but dirt and sand.

Delta Hotel.
Direct hit.

I followed up with the 30-mm.

Where the motorbike had been was now a cloud of smoke and flames.

Well done, Dave said.

We swooped back to camp, critiqued the video.

Perfect kill.

We played some more PlayStation.

Turned in early.

It can be hard to be
precise with Hellfires. Apaches fly with such tremendous speed that it’s hard to take steady aim. Hard for some anyway. I developed pinpoint accuracy, as if I was throwing darts in a pub.

My targets were moving fast too. The speediest motorbike I shot was going about 50 k.p.h. The driver, a Taliban commander who’d been calling in fire all day on our forces, was hunched over the handlebars, looking back as we gave chase. He was purposely speeding between villages, using civilians for cover. Old people, children, they were mere props to him.

Our windows of opportunity were those one-minute spans when he was between villages.

I remember Dave calling out:
You’ve got two hundred meters till it’s a no-go.

Meaning, two hundred meters until this Taliban commander was hiding behind another child.

I heard Dave again:
You’ve got trees coming on the left, wall on the right.

Roger.

Dave moved us into the five o’clock position, dropped to six hundred feet.
Now
—

I took the shot. The Hellfire smacked the motorbike, sent it flying into a
small thatch of trees. Dave flew us over the trees, and through plumes of smoke we saw a ball of fire. And the bike. But no body.

I was ready to follow up with the 30-mm, strafe the area, but I couldn’t see anything to strafe.