Apache

6. ARNHEM CALLING

The Taliban kept up a permanent bombardment of the new Garmsir DC. The marines had put the boot into their lovingly kept hornets’ nest, and they weren’t going to let them forget it.

But their focus on the four other northern district centres now seemed to ebb and flow. For a week or two, they’d have a concerted crack at Sangin and its defenders would be back at the ramparts. Then, without any apparent reason, they’d tire of Sangin and turn their attention to Now Zad or one of the others.

During the first few weeks of our second tour, they threw all they had against Kajaki, the furthest outpost, ninety-five kilometres north-east of Camp Bastion, right at the top of the Helmand Green Zone. The town itself was not much to shout about – it was barely more than a village. But control of the giant Kajaki Dam was something else again; it stood 100 metres high and 270 metres wide, in front of the biggest lake in Afghanistan.

It had been a Cold War playground, constructed by the Soviets in 1953 as a gesture of comradeship. Then along came the Americans in 1975, wanting to spread their share of love and influence, and built a thirty-three megawatt hydroelectric power station beside it. By the time we arrived, the dam irrigated the entire province, neighbouring Nimruz and a sizeable chunk of Iran, and also provided Helmand with almost all of its electricity.

Hold the dam, and you controlled the livelihoods of half a million Helmandis. To lose it would have been a strategic disaster. If the Taliban destroyed it, they’d wreak havoc, plunge the province into darkness – and blame the atrocity on a US bombing raid.

A 3,000-metre-long ridgeline towered over the south-eastern side of the dam. The tallest of its three peaks had been fortified by the Paras and was occupied by a troop of thirty marines. It was an excellent vantage point from which to spot any approach. It was given the codename Arnhem.

The marines were skirmishing daily as the Taliban probed towards the hydroelectric dam. The marines held them off, but the Taliban had them surrounded – and took out their frustrations by giving them a fair kicking.

HQ Flight took over the IRT / HRF role from 2 Flight at the height of the Taliban’s Kajaki-thon; 2 Flight had gone up there twice. It was a racing certainty we’d follow suit.

‘Ten quid says we’ll have to go all the way up to bleeding Kajaki and back every day of the shift,’ Carl grumbled. The longer flight meant a greater chance of him missing a meal, which alarmed him almost as much as it did FOG. But none of us took his bet.

The IRT / HRF handover always took place after the morning brief. Since the task was all about getting airborne as fast as we could, every aspect of our existence for those three days was tailored to that objective. Two aircraft were on permanent standby to scramble at all times, their pilots’ kit out of the lockers and ours already in them. To ensure someone was always ready to power up, we even went down to the flight line with 2 Flight. While they took their stuff out of the Apaches, we put ours in.

My ammo-bag went beside my seat and my other running clobber went in the boot with my go-bag as usual. Perched on the seat was my helmet, leads plugged in. I left my Flight Reference Cards and gloves on the dash, stowed my carbine in its bracket and hooked my survival vest on top of it – open and ready to slip into.

Carl and I – the two back-seaters again – signed out our aircraft.

‘A very saucy little Lolo Ferrari for you today, Mr Macy, and the one and only Taylor Rain for you, Staff.’ The crew chief just loved his new fleet of sex goddesses. ‘Lolo’s sucking beautifully today – fuel, that is.’

There was no time to load up a specific weapons load on an emergency shout. So the IRT / HRF aircraft were given a routine Load Charlie. Each Apache normally went out with 300 cannon rounds, twenty-four rockets and two Hellfires. We used the rest of the takeoff weight allowance on extra fuel in a specially fitted second tank. It gave us between ninety minutes and two hours more time over the target, depending on where we went.

For the duration of the shift, the flight moved out of our normal accommodation tents and into one set aside for the IRT / HRF by the JOC compound. The emergency Chinook crews slept in another alongside it.

We would be summoned for a call-out on insecure radios we carried everywhere. For the same reason we had tactical callsigns, emergency shouts came to us in code. We didn’t always want the Taliban to know that Big Brother was on his way. The codewords had a theme – pop stars, football teams, literary classics, whatever the Ops officer fancied – and they changed every few weeks.

The IRT / HRF tried to stay together as much as possible during the shift. We ate together, washed together and worked together. There were only two radios, so if one of us had to go for a dump, we’d do so as a pair.

We didn’t lift on every scramble, only on half the shouts that came in. Our commanders were reluctant to throw us up unless they were sure it was necessary. They might need our limited pilot and aircraft hours later. It was a tricky balance.

I once sat in a powered-up Apache cockpit for four hours on the flight line while Sangin took a pummelling. They didn’t want us to go up there and risk running out of combat gas only for the real assault on the DC to kick off.

‘You’re our ace card,’ the brigadier had told us. ‘It’s a game of poker with these bastards. And a good poker player hangs on to his aces as long as he can.’

The order for us to launch always came from the brigade air cell at Lashkar Gah. Only they had full sight of the whole battle space, and knew best how to allocate their paper-thin resources. The truth was, they desperately needed more aces. To help them, our Ops Officer listened in to the ground net to get us the earliest heads up he could. He’d often scramble us down to the flight line before the brigade’s call arrived. When it did, all we had to do was pull up the collective.

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long for our first Kajaki shout – five hours and forty-three minutes after the handover, to be precise. We had just eaten lunch. Billy had agreed to stay on in the cookhouse with Carl and one of the radios, so Carl could have a slice of strawberry cheesecake – his favourite. Trigger had gone back into the JHF, and I had popped back to the IRT / HRF tent with the second radio. I wanted to write a quick bluey to my son. Emails and phone calls were great, but nothing beat the post. It was more intimate; the connection between you more tangible. I began to write. In the quiet of the tent, the voice over the radio made me jump.

‘BART, HOMER, SPRINGFIELD, PIZZA.’

It was The Simpsons theme week. The IRT, Trigger and I, were Bart, and Homer was the HRF; all four of us, to the Ops Room, fast.

I grabbed the radio to acknowledge. ‘Bart, Springfield, Pizza.’

Something nasty had obviously kicked off in the Green Zone. Leaving my son’s bluey on my cot, I sprinted out of the tent and up the forty-five degree wooden ladder specially built for us over the waist-high Hesco Bastion wall. My feet stung as I landed on the dust road in front of the JOC. ‘Aircrew,’ I hollered as I nipped past the sentries and into the JHF tent.

The watchkeeper looked up from his radio set. ‘Kajaki is under attack. The Boss is already next door.’

‘Roger.’

I grabbed my Black Brain from the secure steel box as Billy and Carl burst into the tent. The cookhouse was a good 700 metres away. Billy and Carl had taken the IRT Land Rover to lunch, but they were still red in the face from the rush. Not ideal for strawberry cheesecake digestion.

‘It’s Kajaki, guys. Billy, go next door. Come on Carl.’

On a fastball, the front-seaters always popped into the JOC for a quick low-down on the ongoing incident from the ground ops officers, while the back-seaters made a beeline for the aircraft to start firing them up.

Carl wheel-spun the Land Rover away from the JOC compound, turned sharp left down a 200-metre dirt track then left again. The suspension clanked as we sped across the metal bridge over the irrigation ditch and swung right towards the hangar. We drew up hard with a squeal of brakes and ran the last seventy-five metres to the arming bays. Our two Apaches were crawling with Groundies.

Ten minutes later, Trigger and Billy popped up over the berm. They’d taken the off-road route between the JOC and the flight line. I pushed the throttle forward to start the rotors turning the second the Boss slammed his door shut. We were off the deck in twenty-two minutes. Once we’d hit 3,000 feet Trigger caught his breath and gave me the fill.

‘It’s Arnhem. They’re taking heavy incoming from three different firing points: north, north-west and west. Heavy calibre stuff, rockets and a whole load of RPGs. A lad’s already taken a 7.62 to the head – good job he was wearing his helmet. Looks like the Taliban might be trying to take the position.’

‘Copied.’

‘Five Zero, Five One – Buster.’ Buster was the call to press the pedal to the metal.

It was the worst attack on Arnhem yet. And my monocle told me we were still twenty-eight minutes away. I was pulling so much power, the torque was bouncing on and off 100 per cent. The second it dropped into the 90s, it was nose down and collective up again. We were tanking it; a straight line, max chat.

There was no time to test the weapons on the ground during an IRT fastball. So we did them on the way.

‘My gun.’

I looked full left, full right, hard up and straight down. The gun followed my every move. ‘Your gun.’

Trigger did the same.

‘Coming up rockets.’

Actioning the rockets, he made sure their steering cursor came up on his TADS screen and the correct quantity of each showed up on his weapons page.

‘Come co-op.’

I followed the Boss’s ‘I bar’ around my monocle as he moved his TADS.

‘Good movement; co-op confirmed, Boss.’

‘Good. My missiles.’

‘CMSL’ popped up in my monocle.

‘Missile locked onto the laser, Mr M. Your missiles.’

I looked down and left; the Hellfire’s seeker followed my eye movement.

I tried to picture the scene up in Kajaki; how we were going to prosecute the targets. The enemy’s favourite hangout was a loaf-shaped hill between two wadis, about two and a half klicks north-west of Arnhem. It was known as the Shrine because some mullah had been buried up there years ago. The site was covered in tatty green, red and white flags; a typical Afghan grave.

The Taliban’s drill was always the same. They set up their weapons, gave our boys on the mountain a good pounding, and escaped like rats up a drainpipe into three or four old tunnels on its western edge as soon as we turned up.

I hoped the marines were getting it from the Shrine because it was safer ground for us to attack: no buildings, so no collateral damage. If the Taliban were on Falcon, too, it would be trickier.

Falcon was our codename for the peak immediately west of Arnhem, less than 400 metres along the same ridgeline. The enemy used to climb its blind side and our guys would only know they were there when the rounds started tearing up the ground beneath their feet. Unless we got our munitions spot on when engaging Falcon, they’d overshoot and spill onto Arnhem, especially if we were firing from the west.

From the brief sitrep Trigger had received, it sounded like the enemy were on the Shrine and Falcon. It sounded like they were everywhere.

‘Widow Seven Eight, this is Ugly Five One. How do you read me?’ As the mission commander for the sortie, the Boss got on the net to the JTAC at Arnhem.

‘Ugly, Widow Seven Eight. Lima Charlie. You me?’

‘Lima Charlie also. We are two Apaches carrying 600 thirty Mike Mike, forty-eight rockets and four Hellfire. Callsigns Ugly Five Zero, Ugly Five One. Requesting update.’

‘Copied Ugly Five One. We’re taking machine-gun and RPG fire from Falcon. They’re massing there and trying to move across to assault our location. We think they’re going to try to over-run us. Confirm you know that location.’

‘Affirm.’ I’d taken the Boss up to Kajaki on our second attempt at a familiarisation flight.

‘Also, Ugly Five One, be aware I’ve got a Harrier GR7 on station: callsign Topman…’

Good. The marines were getting the heavy artillery as well as the cavalry.

‘He is going to drop a 500-lb bomb on the top of Falcon. I’d like Ugly callsigns to follow up and kill any leakers after Topman drops.’

‘Ugly Five One, copied all. Have you any other further targets for us?’

‘Widow Seven Eight, affirm. Are you familiar with the area of the Shrine?’

‘We are.’

‘The enemy are shooting rockets at us from somewhere near the top of the Shrine. Firing position as yet unidentified. Can you locate and prosecute Taliban there too please?’

‘Affirm.’

‘Roger. One more thing, Ugly: can you give me your time on target?’

A loud burst from a heavy machine gun echoed across the JTAC’s radio microphone and we could also hear curt instructions being issued in the background. Our JTAC was very calm for a man about to be overrun by a highly trained guerrilla force. But they nearly always were. It was a testament to their training, professionalism and, above all, courage.

‘Ugly Five Zero, we’ll be with you in figures eight minutes.’

We divided up the workload.

‘I’ve spent ages up at the Shrine, Boss. If we take that, Billy and Carl can go for Falcon.’

Trigger detailed the tasks to our wingmen.

‘Copied all. Happy with that.’

All we needed to know now was when the Harrier’s bomb would impact. I hoped for the marines’ sake it would be soon.

‘Ugly Five One, Widow Seven Eight. Confirm time on target for Topman.’

Topman replied himself. He was a Brit – RAF – even better news.

‘Time on target… six minutes…’ I could hear him demand oxygen from his facemask every few words. He sounded like a public school version of Darth Vader. We’d be there only a minute or two behind them. Less, if Carl and I could squeeze any more power out of our beasts.

The Boss tapped in the Shrine’s coordinates, and our lenses shot towards it. Billy did the same for Falcon. From that distance we could already make out the shape of the loaf, but we were too far off to see heat sources. Not long now though; maybe only a couple of minutes. Then we’d be amongst it. Bring it on.

‘Topman… Impact one minute…’

Now we were heading north over the Green Zone, with four klicks to run. I could see the Falcon and Arnhem ridgeline clearly now in our one o’clock, as jagged as a dinosaur’s back.

My right eye flicked back and forth from the ridgeline to the clock, keeping count of the seconds. Carl and I had bought us some time. The other Apache was right in behind us, 500 feet lower and to our right. At four klicks a minute we’d be coming level with Falcon almost as the bomb went off. If we got too close we might catch a bit of the blast.

‘Ease up a touch, Carl. Drop to 100 knots – that should do it.’

‘Copied mate. Just what I was thinking.’

The Harrier came on one final time.

‘Topman’s pickled the load… Impact in Two Zero seconds.’

‘I better have a look at this.’ The Boss slewed his TADS across to Falcon. He didn’t want to miss the fireworks, and the Shrine was still some way off.

White light erupted on Falcon’s pinnacle and a crown of orange flame curled up around its epicentre, enveloped a second later by a vast dust cloud that mushroomed high into the sky. At 2,000 metres off, we had a grandstand view.

‘Okay, moving the TADS back to… Wait; hang on, I’ve got a runner…’

I glanced down at my right MPD screen. A Taliban fighter was shifting it down the western side of Falcon, right out in the open, around 150 metres below the crest. He was going like the clappers, leaping from one rock to the next. If Trigger didn’t get him, the hail of stone splinters from the explosion would.

‘I’ve got him in my crosshairs… engaging with cannon.’

Trigger was preparing to go into Top Gun mode. Two bursts, angled seventy-five degrees right of our nose, from no more than 1,500 metres. The runner disappeared in a cloud of dust and flame. The air cleared and he was nowhere to be seen.

‘Wow. Good shooting, Boss.’

‘Tally one dead fighter,’ Billy said. ‘I was lined up ready to engage.’

Too professional to say so overtly, he was clearly pissed off.

‘Topman… Negative playtime remaining… Top shooting, Ugly…’ With that, Darth broke station for Kandahar.

It was Billy’s target, no question. But we were a few hundred metres ahead of our wingmen and there was no escaping Trigger. Now he wanted to pay his respects at the Shrine too.

‘FLIR should pick up the residual heat from the rocket motors. Come on Elton, where are these tunnels I’ve heard so much about? Let’s nail them before they bolt.’

Tracking the Boss’s FLIR image on my MPD, I talked him onto the tunnel entrances at the western edge of the Shrine. One large heat source appeared to the right of the screen – where the rockets must have been launched – then two more melted away down a blowhole nearby.

‘See those heat sources, Boss?’

‘Yeah, visual.’

‘Widow Seven Eight, I have two men at the top of the Shrine, western end, dropping down a shaft. Is that where you were taking fire from?’

‘Affirm. You are cleared to engage.’

Only a weapon with pinpoint accuracy could do the job.

‘Copied. Engaging with Hellfire.’

The AGM-114K SAL Hellfire II missile landed precisely where we pointed the laser beam projected from the TADS on the Apache’s nose. A Hellfire climbed after leaving its rail whilst a seeker in its head searched for the coded laser energy. Once found, it locked on, lined itself up and screamed down onto the painted target at 475 metres a second. The missile was so accurate we could post it through a letterbox.

But the shaft entrance was still going to be a hell of a shot. Every Hellfire we had was programmed to hit the target from above because that’s how tank armour was best penetrated. We were 1,500 metres south of the Shrine and 3,000 feet above it. If the Boss banged the Hellfire in from here it would explode on the lip of the shaft, blowing the Taliban’s ear drums and showering them with rock splinters – but if they’d got ten metres or so down from the surface, it probably wouldn’t kill them. The missile’s forte was penetration; its 12.5-lb warhead propelled a molten slug at thirty times the speed of sound through up to three feet of solid steel. It wasn’t the explosion that did the killing, but the pressure wave that followed.

The Taliban were already inside the shaft, and would be burrowing deeper with every passing second.

‘Don’t fire until I say, Boss. We’ll ram it right down the vent.’

I reduced our speed but maintained the height. The closer we got, the lower the TADS was pointing. The only way we’d get the Hellfire into the shaft was to fire it at a sharp angle from the shaft’s entrance so it wouldn’t have time to track down to its normal impact angle.

‘Trust me, Boss. One thousand metres.’ I wanted vertical and didn’t have time to explain. ‘Lase the target now, but hold fire.’

Five hundred metres from the target would do it. But we only had ten more seconds before our quarry would be out of harm’s way. The bottom right-hand corner of my MPD told me that the dog had seen the rabbit – our missile had locked onto the laser. The Boss’s crosshairs were still on the shaft but the TADS could move no further.

‘Mr M, I’m about to break lock – and they’re about to escape.’

‘Seven hundred and fifty metres. Stand by to fire.’

I dumped the collective and thrust the cyclic forward in one fast, smooth movement.

The Apache’s nose dropped and its tail shot up. Within a second it was pointing straight down and hurtling towards the Shrine at 100 knots.

‘Okay, fire Bo–’

‘Firing.’

The Hellfire’s propellant ignited with a bright yellow flash as it slid off its rail and blasted straight towards the target. The cockpit window was filling up with Shrine, and fast – 125 knots… I couldn’t pull up because the Boss would lose lock.

The Boss hunched over his screen, keeping the TADS crosshairs over the shaft entrance and his laser trigger tight. A fraction over two seconds after it left us, the missile followed the beam straight into the blowhole and impacted five metres down the tunnel with five million pounds of pressure upon every square inch of rock it hit. Yes…

One hundred and fifty knots… I pulled back hard on the cyclic. Dust and debris shot from the top of the shaft, 100 feet into the air. We were under 1,000 feet. I’d sworn I’d never get this low. At 750 feet, still fighting the inertia, I punched off eight flares as the nose came up, just in case a missile decided to lock onto the heat from our now vertical engines.

‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly. That is a Delta Hotel. Repeat, Delta Hotel!’

Direct hit. We could hear whoops of delight over the JTAC’s mike. We skirted around the back of the Shrine to look for runners while Billy scoured Falcon. Both were as dead as a whore-house on a Sunday morning.

‘I want that Hellfire method taught to everyone, Mr M… after you’ve explained it to me…’

Between us and the Harrier, every threat had been removed in under two minutes. Alice would have been proud of us.

The Boss was delighted with his sharp-shooting. ‘I think that’s what you call catching the enemy with their pants down, isn’t it?’

‘Kind of. They’d barely unbuckled their belts.’

‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly Five One. We have no more targets. Do you have anything else for us?’

‘Negative. But they’ll probably be back the moment you go.’

‘Boss, we’ve got plenty of combat gas,’ Billy said. ‘Let’s pull a trick.’

‘Affirm. Good idea.’

Trigger flipped onto an insecure frequency and told the JTAC we were heading back to Camp Bastion. Instead, we pulled south ten kilometres into the desert, and waited.

It was a ruse we’d used a few times with success. We listened to the Taliban’s radios; they listened to our insecure nets. Each side heard the other loud and clear. But neither knew for certain whether they were being bluffed.

We circled at endurance speed – seventy knots – while the sun dipped over the foothills of the Hindu Kush, painting the sky blood red. There was not a trace of humanity as far as the eye could see; the scene was so primeval that Billy and Carl’s brutally uncompromising helicopter gunship beneath us looked strangely at home.

After twenty minutes, it was still all quiet at Arnhem. The Taliban were either all dead or had decided against stepping back into the ring for Round Two, so the JTAC released us.

‘Drop us some fish and chips the next time you’re passing,’ Widow Seven Eight added. ‘The lads are sick to death of ration packs.’

We landed back at base at dusk. The arming teams threw on the same Load Charlie for our next call-out.

‘Stand by, you two,’ Carl warned from the next door arming bay. ‘Kev is on his way over.’

Kev circled the aircraft, his belly leading the way. He peered into our rocket pod tubes and under the Hellfire rails. He plugged into the wing with the inevitable slow shake of his head. ‘Absolutely fooking typical.’ We’d launched one of his precious Hellfires – what more did he want? ‘You launched one all right. But you launched the wrong fooking one, didn’t you?’

Kev pointed to the Hellfire on our right-hand rail. ‘See that? Its serial number’s out of date next week. You were supposed to have fired the fookin’ right ’un, not the left. That one was good for another couple of months. I’ll have to backload her now. Un-fooking-believable.’ He unplugged and stomped off.

As we turned in that night, the four of us popped into the JOC one last time to check on the situation at Kajaki. The District Centre and Arnhem had taken the odd pot shot since we’d left, but on the whole it had remained quiet.

I got into my sleeping bag and hoped we didn’t get an overnight call-out. I didn’t mind them normally, but the whole squadron had to be up early the next morning. The Prime Minister was on his way.