Apache

4. BACK IN THE HOT SEAT

The familiarisation flight was out of the window.

We were tanking it down to Gereshk at maximum speed, 120 knots per hour; we were heavy. It would take forty minutes for the Apache pair on standby at Camp Bastion to launch and get to the marines. We’d be there in a quarter of the time. It was a no-brainer.

I needed to get as much juice out of Ugly Five One as I could; cyclic forward to push the nose down and pick up speed, topping up the collective to keep our height. Cyclic with collective, again and again – my eye constantly on the torque. It edged past 95 per cent.

The Boss got back on the net to talk to the marines directly.

‘Widow Eight Four, this is Ugly Five One. Send sitrep.’

‘Ugly Five One, Widow Eight Four; we are pinned down on the north-western edge of the Green Zone, at grid 41R PQ 5506 2603.’

The boss read back the grid.

‘They’re hitting us with mortars. Rounds are landing in and around us as I speak.’

‘Copied all. Do you have a grid for the mortar team?’

‘Negative. They’re firing from the Green Zone, approximately 200 to 300 metres east-south-east, but we’re struggling to find them at the moment.’

‘Roger. I’ll call in the overhead.’

Our brains crunched the JTAC’s information as we tried to build up a picture of what we could expect. We had to find that mortar team before they put a shell right on top of our guys, but Objective Number One was always to locate the friendlies or we simply couldn’t engage. The last thing we needed was a blue-on-blue, the military term for soldiers killed or wounded by friendly fire.

The Boss tapped the marines’ grid reference into the keyboard and the TADS swivelled in their direction.

‘Okay Mr M, I’m starting to see some thin puffs of smoke on the ridgeline, my line of sight. Confirm you can see them.’

The mortar rounds’ point of impact.

‘Negative, Boss. We’re still eight klicks off.’ I couldn’t see them with my naked eye. ‘I’ve got the smoke on my MPD though.’

‘Okay, keep an eye out for them; I’m going into the Green Zone to see if I can get a bead on the mortar team.’

We were 3,000 feet higher than the rapidly approaching Green Zone, with Billy and Carl 500 feet beneath us, to the left and slightly back. We were leading now because the Boss was back in command.

I pushed the weapons button under my right thumb between ‘M’ for missile and ‘R’ for rocket up to ‘G’ for gun and the cockpit juddered beneath my feet as the cannon followed my line of sight. I flicked up the guard and rested my forefinger lightly on the trigger. The Boss could fire far more accurately with his TADS image, but if I needed to take a snap shot, I was ready.

‘My gun, Boss.’

I thought about what lay ahead. My grip on the controls tightened, my heartbeat quickened; I just adored the sensation of flying into combat. I could taste metal. I did so before every fight, as far back as my dust-ups in the school playground. The taste of adrenalin; my body was physically, chemically and mentally preparing itself for battle.

Four kilometres off I shuffled my arse into a more comfortable position, checked my harness was tight and the extendable bullet-catching Kevlar shield by my right shoulder was completely forward.

Exhilaration coursed through my veins. I could see the smoke plumes with my naked left eye now, just to the right of the Green Zone. They were rising out of a gully that led down into the trees. As we closed on the gully, I saw an empty compound on either side of it, then a couple of camouflage-painted vehicles sheltering behind the nearside compound’s back wall. A Pinzgauer and a WMIK Land Rover. The marines. Two more vehicles stood at the back of the far compound. Eight or nine puffs of smoke spiralled upwards before being carried away by the wind.

Carl set up a circuit over the Green Zone. I headed towards the marines.

‘Got the friendlies in the wadi, Boss. It’s 42 Commando.’

‘Copied. Let me know if they move.’

I wanted the Taliban to know that Big Brother had turned up to help out Little Brother.

The marines’ JTAC came back with a grid for the enemy mortar position: a compound 200 metres in, behind some trees. At the edge of the Green Zone was another line of trees, hiding anyone inside it completely. A good place for an ambush. But it was a false lead.

‘We’ve just been over that compound,’ Billy reported. ‘Couldn’t see anyone in it.’

It wasn’t the mortar tube we needed to find first anyway. They’d have no direct line of sight onto the marines. We needed to find their controller. Take him out, and the tube men would be firing blind.

The Taliban’s spotters often positioned themselves in trees and reported the necessary corrections back to the tube via walkie-talkie. The Boss searched along the outer treeline, flicking constantly between the Day TV camera and the Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) thermal camera.

Billy beat him to it. ‘I’ve got a man hiding.’

‘Where?’

‘From the marines’ wadi, follow the treeline to its most southerly end.’ He paused to let the Boss follow his talk-on.

‘On the ground, under trees, lone man… Don’t think there are any weapons on him. Looking for a radio.’

A scruffy bloke with a beard, dressed from head to toe in black, walked out into the field, flapping his dishdash as he went to show us he wasn’t armed and didn’t have a single walkie-talkie stuffed down his trousers. With two gunships overhead, cannons pointing directly at him, he’d got the message we were onto him. Cunning sod. He knew we couldn’t engage him. He moved slowly in the direction of Gereshk, still looking up at us and flapping away. I didn’t see his face, but I knew he’d have a grin plastered right across it.

‘Ugly callsigns, Widow Eight Four. We’ve just seen two puffs of smoke east of the previous target grid.’

Were they still engaging? There was no chance of hearing the mortars launch inside our sealed cockpits. But we did hear the first round impacting through the JTAC’s open mike. The rounds were now landing alarmingly close to the marines, fired onto coordinates supplied by the smart arse spotter just before he came out to give us the dishdash dance.

Not all the Taliban were running. The carefully hidden mortar tube team were fighting on with the full knowledge we were swarming above them. That did take brass. We’d surely find them now.

Carl and I tracked east, deeper into the Green Zone from the empty compound. Thirty seconds later, Billy spoke up again. Skill fade from the break in Blighty was firmly behind Billy as he got to grips with the sights. He was having a good afternoon.

‘I’ve got ’em. Three hundred metres east of the compound is a triangular-shaped copse. Men moving inside it.’

‘Request laser spot.’

Billy pointed his crosshairs at the copse and squeezed his trigger. The Boss flicked his TADS onto Laser Spot Tracker mode, and the lens jumped towards the spot where Billy was aiming his laser energy.

‘Where are they in there?’

‘Under the trees. At least three of them on my FLIR, and this lot have got weapons on them.’

The copse was only fifty metres long but its foliage provided dense cover. We were 2,000 metres south-east of it, and all we could see was forty-foot trees. Billy had gone round the opposite side where, for a few metres, the trees were shorter and the bushes less thick; he’d picked up moving bodies through their heat signatures in his FLIR lens. I banked right to circle the northern edge too. To engage, we needed to be sure. The Boss got a perfect view through the window.

‘Look at this heat source, Mr M.’

I looked down to the MPD above my right knee displaying the TADS image in FLIR mode. A long thin rectangle, ten inches wide, chest height and angled in the direction of the marines was practically burning a hole in the camera lens.

‘Yup. That’s definitely a mortar barrel in there.’

It was a good spot by Billy. And he wasn’t going to let them get away.

‘Confirmed as Taliban. Engaging with thirty Mike Mike.’

Mike Mike was military air slang for millimetre. Flame licked out of Billy’s cannon as it spat HEDP rounds at a rate of 600 per minute and an initial muzzle velocity of 805 metres per second from his stand-off position 1,500 metres from the copse. Less than two seconds later, their shaped charge heads exploded with a blinding flash. Then the incendiary charges inside the 87-mm-long projectiles threw out jets of flame large enough to torch a car, igniting everything within a two-metre radius, and the fragment charges blasted out thousands of red hot shards of metal casing. Billy had set his gun to bursts of twenty. Three or four more of those, and the copse would be neutralised. But he’d only pumped off fifteen.

‘Gun jam, gun jam! Your target. Pulling off.’

Our orbit had taken us past the marines again to watch for any leakers while he prosecuted the target. I brought our Apache round to face the copse as another two mortar rounds shot straight out of it. This time I caught a glimpse of their shock wave as they penetrated the treetops. They still weren’t running.

‘Necky little bastards.’

‘These guys are insane,’ the Boss said.

I didn’t disagree. To carry on engaging us after tasting our firepower was suicidal.

The Boss knew exactly what to do. ‘Let’s go in with Flechettes.’

‘Copied. Perfect.’

Cannon was great if you were on top of the target. But we had the distance now to set up for a rocket run.

Nothing beats a Flechette for multiple personnel out in the open. It was designed to burst open 860 metres into its flight, freeing its cargo of eighty five-inch-long Tungsten darts. An explosive charge powered them onto the ground at speeds well over Mach 2 – 2,460 mph – shredding everything within a fifty-metre spread. Each dart’s intense supersonic speed created a huge vacuum behind it. If it hit a man in the chest, that vacuum would suck away everything in its path, and was powerful enough to tear flesh and muscle from a human target if it passed within four inches of one.

The copse was a textbook Flechette target: no civilians anywhere near it. But we had to be quick. ‘Stay in the overhead Billy, and keep them fixed. We’re coming in for a Flechette shoot.’

They’d be unlikely to do a runner with Billy sitting right on top of them.

We needed a four-kilometre run-in for a rocket shoot, so I banked hard right, pulling us away from the target, and thrust the cyclic forward to gain the extra 1,000 metres.

‘Co-op shoot Flechettes. Two rockets.’

‘Copied, Boss.’

Front and back seat worked together on a co-operative shoot. ‘CRKT’ popped up in my monocle; the Boss had just actioned the rockets. I flicked the cyclic’s weapon select button to ‘R’. A vertical letter ‘I’ appeared on the left edge of my monocle; the Boss’s targeting symbol. I had to match my crosshairs onto the Boss’s ‘I bar’ for the rockets to land on target, and then pull the trigger. I was flying the Apache, so I was the only one who could successfully line up a launch. He aimed, I matched, I fired.

‘Coming round hard…’ I slammed the cyclic stick into my left leg at the same time as pulling a huge chunk of power from the collective. The machine flipped onto its left side as we spun on a sixpence. I shot my head back to look at the copse behind us through the canopy roof. All ten tonnes of the fully laden Apache, the Boss and I were rotating 180 degrees around my eyeballs. The G-force pulled down on every sinew in my body, doubling the weight of my helmet, monocle, tight straps, heavy chicken plate and survival jacket. The rotor blades thumped furiously and the engines groaned.

As we rolled out of the turn, I gradually moved the cyclic back to the cockpit’s centre. We were flying a direct charge to the copse. The Boss began to aim his TADS where he wanted the Flechettes to go, fixing his crosshairs bang in the centre of the wood. Three thousand five hundred metres to the target. We were gassing it, flat out at 125 knots, and needed to fire in 1,000 metres time. I had to get Billy well out of the way.

‘Five One running in from the south. Confirm direction, Billy.’

‘Breaking east, breaking east.’

I saw his Apache’s nose dip as it powered off to the right.

At 3,000 metres, the Boss was ready.

‘Match and shoot!’

Now the rest was down to me. The Boss would watch the ‘I bar’ come to meet the crosshairs on his TADS screen. I focused on the ‘I bar’. The problem was, I had no ‘I bar’. There was nothing. The monocle in my right eye was completely pink. My mirror had vibrated away from the centre of my pupil during the violent turn. I pushed it back into place. It immediately vibrated away again. Fuck. The screw had come loose. I could still do the shoot from my MPD. The ‘I bar’ would be there too. But the sun was shining into the cockpit from directly behind us, making the MPD impossible to read.

‘Match and shoot, Mr M.’

‘I’m trying…’

I snapped my head from one side to the other to escape the glare on the screen. I unlocked the seat straps so I could lean as far forward as possible. I kept the cyclic forward, the collective up and the foot pedals balanced, and my face just six inches from the screen.

‘Two point five klicks to target.’

I can do this. I took up the pressure on the trigger as I eased the cyclic left, right, left, and then right again. Every time I aligned the ‘I bar’ with the crosshairs it passed straight through to the other side.

‘Two klicks to target. Are you going to shoot today?’

Fuck it. I’d just have to take a snatch at it. As they came together for the third time, I pulled the trigger and my ‘I’ shot off. A rocket tore away from each side of the aircraft. I yanked my head up fast; I knew immediately that I’d arsed it up.

For a second they were two black dots trailing wisps of vapour smoke. Then their cradles exploded and two torrents of Flechette darts impacted into the ground, kicking up 160 pinpricks of dust – all between fifty and 100 metres left of the copse.

‘What was that?’

The Boss was horrified. So was I.

‘Match and shoot again. We’re running out of distance.’

I looked down. Miraculously, the crosshairs were superimposed over the ‘I bar’ so I pulled the trigger immediately. Two more bright orange glows either side of me as the rockets shot away. The first few darts erupted twenty metres short but the vast majority cracked straight into the copse, slicing through branches and vaporising leaves before burying themselves deep into whatever walked or crawled on the ground below them. Anything in there would have been immobilised now, if not by a dart then by falling branches or splintered timber. Thank God for that.

‘Good set, sir.’

‘That time anyway,’ the Boss said drily.

I was the squadron’s Weapons Officer. I taught people how to shoot these things for a living, for Christ’s sake. And I’d missed the target by close on 100 metres. The reason didn’t matter. I was livid with myself.

‘Breaking left into an orbit.’ I pulled the cyclic back, lowered the collective and banked left, decelerating swiftly.

The Boss was keen to finish off any survivors.

‘My gun.’

We circled the copse’s western edge.

‘I can’t see any movement.’

Ten seconds later, we’d reached its northern window.

‘I’ve got something.’

I looked down on the MPD. The Boss was right. There was a flat-shaped heat source moving extremely slowly towards the northern edge of the copse.

‘It’s somebody crawling towards the tube. Engaging.’ The Boss squeezed off a burst of twenty.

An Apache pilot always announced when he was opening up so his co-pilot knew they weren’t taking rounds. An M230 cannon firing less than a metre from your feet sounded and felt like a sledgehammer banging away on the aircraft’s exterior. It bounced the balls of your feet and shook you in your seat.

The cannon pointed down and eighty degrees to the right, and was powerful enough to throw the Apache a few metres to the left as it engaged. The on-board computer compensated for the change in direction.

The cannon ramped itself backwards as the first three rounds flew from the barrel. Now in its optimum position, the remaining seventeen HEDP rounds streaked towards the target. By the time the nineteenth and twentieth rounds were away, the first were tearing through the trees. When the smoke cleared, the heat source had split into two smaller heat sources. But the Boss wasn’t satisfied.

‘There’s got to be a few of them in there. Is that another heat source further back or just the mortar barrel? Better make sure.’

He gave it another burst, then a third and a fourth.

The whole of the copse’s floor glowed on the FLIR screen. The Boss still kept hammering away, only stopping when we’d reached its southern edge again. The soles of my feet were tingling.

He’d pumped seven bursts into the place, 140 rounds in total, leaving a great smoking pile of scorched earth, ripped foliage and charred branches. And enough lead to start a pencil factory. We continued to circle.

‘Do you think there’s anyone left alive in there?’

I laughed. ‘Not a hope in hell, Boss.’

So this was how the OC had won Top Gun in the States. The man was merciless.

‘Widow Eight Four, this is Ugly Five One. Target destroyed. Do you have any further targets for us?’

‘Negative. We’re pulling back into the desert.’

‘Copied. We’ll cover you into it.’

‘Ugly Five One, Ugly Five Zero. My suggestion, we go back to Camp Bastion. You need to rearm and refuel, and I need a new aircraft.’

The engagement had lasted twenty minutes, leaving us with only an hour’s combat gas left. And with a broken gun we wouldn’t be going anywhere near Kajaki or Now Zad. The rest of the famil could wait.

‘Copied, Billy. That is an affirmative. I’ve got a conference call with the CO (Commanding Officer) in Kandahar at 1800, so we’ll finish the famil tomorrow.’

Everyone’s spirits were sky high on the flight home. One sortie down, one–nil to us. We’d just been expecting a routine turn around the houses. The action was a bonus.

Killing the enemy didn’t make me punch the air or whoop with joy. At the same time, I never got beardy about it or started to ponder the meaning of life. We’d helped out the guys on the ground, and some Taliban had gone to meet their maker. Ah well. They shouldn’t have shot at us first. Next target please.

‘Boss, do you fancy doing some flying on the way back?’

‘Thanks, Mr M. Much appreciated.’

I wanted to give him the controls so I could text Billy. And I hoped that if he had something to do he might forget about my shocking performance with the rockets.

U SEE HOW MANY RNDS BOSS STUCK IN THAT PLACE

AWESOME… LIKES A BIT OF 30 MIL ACTION DOESNT HE…

HE’LL FIT IN WELL

IS THAT HIS 1ST KILL

NO EYED DEER

ASK HIM

‘Er, Boss, was that you popping your cherry then?’

‘Sorry?’

‘First successful engagement with a real enemy, sir?’

He was sheepish. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it was.’

‘Congratulations.’

YES… FIRST BLOOD

‘That mortar team needed their heads examining, Mr M. Quite unreal. It was almost as if they were asking for it.’

‘Probably so smacked out they wouldn’t have cared either way, Boss.’

It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed a pointless last stand in Helmand. The Taliban weren’t like any other enemy the modern British Army had come across. Much of their senior leadership was still made up of the people who controlled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Their ‘Emir’, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, was still believed to be top of the pile. He’d started the whole Taliban movement (Taliban meant ‘God’s Students’) in a small village near Kandahar as a reactionary counter to the corruption of the warlords. In those days Mullah Omar had preached simple but strict Islamic ideals. He knew little of the rest of the world, and cared less.

By 2006 the Taliban we were fighting was a very different beast. Its leadership had been infected and taken over by international Islamic extremists. Now it espoused global Islamic domination too.

It was led from Quetta, the hot-blooded Pakistani city sixty miles south-east of Kandahar province, by no more than a dozen ageing men. They sent their senior commanders, all hardbitten ideologues, over the border to do their bidding.

These field commanders were Tier One Taliban; the first of three very diverse groupings, each of which had motives as different as their backgrounds. It was rare to take any Tier One Taliban alive. Many never left home without their suicide belts. Mostly Afghan by blood, the commanders worked closely with the Baluchi drug lords across the Pakistan border, protecting their opium smuggling columns in exchange for money and arms. The Taliban leadership didn’t necessarily approve of the drugs barons, but they shared a common goal – to oust Western troops so they could carry on as before.

Tier Two were the foreign jihadis: central Asians, Arabs, and especially Pakistanis – young idealists, from their early teens to their mid-twenties, products of the madrasas, the strict religious schools of northern and western Pakistan. Many of these madrasas were set up during the 1980s and funded by wealthy Saudis, anxious to be seen to be doing their bit in the war against the godless Soviets. Since then they had taken on a life of their own. Their students came not just from militant hotspots such as Waziristan and Swat, but also from the Punjab, a rich agricultural province, as well as the big cities: Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.

Others came from as far afield as Bosnia, Brooklyn and Bradford (though no British Taliban were actually caught in my time). For these radically indoctrinated young men, war was a religious obligation. It was an honour to fight and die for Allah. The chosen few, or the most brainwashed, were hand-picked for martyrdom and became suicide bombers. The madrasas exported their brand of fanaticism not just over the Afghan border, but to the Middle East, Europe and London.

Tier Two fighters seldom ran. ‘This is our moment,’ they announced over their radios before they went to their deaths. ‘This is the moment Allah has chosen for us. Allahu Akbar.’ ‘God is the greatest.’

Tier Three were at the other end of the food chain, and often had no belief in the cause at all. They were the local Afghan guns for hire, the ‘Ten Dollar Taliban’. They were not emotionally committed to fighting the Great Satan, unless a brother or their father was killed by the Coalition and they wanted to finish a blood feud. Ten dollars was good money in a land where few jobs existed. In the poppy growing season from November to May, they were labourers – busy planting, watering and then harvesting the poppy fields. When summer arrived, they fought for cash. It didn’t matter who they fought for, as long as they got paid. Life was cheap, but alternatives were in short supply.

Most of them adopted the Taliban’s trademark black clothing and turban, which made them tough for us to spot in shadow on our black and white Day TV cameras.

Only a few had access to anything heavier than RPGs and AK47s, but we still came up against everything from the mortars we’d seen that morning to Soviet-made DShK heavy machine guns and even surface-to-air missile launchers – so they were not an enemy to be underestimated.

They were physically fit, they knew the landscape, and they knew how to exploit it. Some of their more senior guys had been fighting in Helmand and Kandahar provinces all their lives. Soviet soldiers in the 1980s used to call them the dhuki – the ghosts. They’d arrive without warning, strike hard, and disappear into thin air.

Their tactics were as militarily adept as they were audacious. They were always up for a close-quarter battle; they were a world away from the ‘shoot and scoot’ insurgents of Iraq. Encirclement was their favourite tactic, even when they were outnumbered; they’d trap their enemy in a killing zone and then do their best to wipe them out. They wouldn’t withdraw unless it was absolutely obvious they were beaten – and sometimes not even then.

If you shot a Taliban warrior, one 5.56-mm bullet wouldn’t do. You’d have to put two or three in him. A lot of them were so smacked out they didn’t even feel the rounds. Their commanders kept them well supplied. And they didn’t do helicopter evacuations or trauma theatres on twenty-four-hour standby; they barely did first aid. If their men got shot, they died – so they just kept on coming.

APACHE TRIV… US 1ST… YEAH

‘What’s that, Mr Macy?’

‘Apache Trivia, sir. Their aircraft asks ours a question. You ask them one in return. The first crew to get an answer wrong makes the brews in the JHF.’

The rows over whose turn it was to make the brews had been horrendous before Apache Triv. It had become a bit of a tradition on our homebound flights. We always routed back to Bastion over the desert, where there was no threat to worry about. We could relax a little during the forty-five kilometres from Gereshk.

Carl went first. As the aircraft know-all, it was his favourite game. I always asked the weaponeering questions and Billy generally kept to flying questions, but Carl didn’t limit himself to the defensive aide suite. It was his Apache Triv downfall.

You were allowed to find the answer in your Flight Reference Cards, but the trick was to come up with a question they didn’t cover.

Carl adopted his smuggest tone. ‘Check Data.’

WHATS THE MAX OIL TEMP FOR THE NOSE GEARBOX… CARL

‘Hang on Boss, don’t say a word…’ I knew that one was in the Cards. Carl had screwed up, or was trying to be kind to the Boss. I grabbed them from the dashboard alcove.

134 DEGREES… ED

‘Check Data.’

DEGREES… WHAT…

CENTIGRADE… P**S BOY

CORRECT… JAMMY BUGGER

Our turn.

FLECHETTES… WHAT DISTANCE THEY COME OUT… +/– 50M… ED

The reply was instantaneous.

900M… CARL

Bollocks.

860M ACTUALLY… IN THE BRACKET… ED

Billy asked their second. It was immediate elimination now.

WHAT IS UNDER PANEL L330… BILLY

‘What? Tell me that’s an in-house joke…’

‘Nope. That’s Billy for you, Boss. All I know is “L” means left-hand side.’

‘I had to learn this crap in the States. Whatever it is, it’s 330 inches back from the nose.’

It must have been a panel opening about halfway back.

‘That stinks.’ The Boss was indignant. ‘I bet he looked under some random panel before the sortie just so he could ask a bone question like that.’

It was exactly what Billy did. Regularly. It would be so obscure we’d never guess it.

‘You have control, I know what’s under it, Mr M.’

The Boss pounded his keyboard with his sausage fingers.

UNDER L330 IT SAYS… SCISSORS… PAPER… RANK… YOU LOSE… BOSS

WRONG… WRONG… WRONG… U2R THE P**S BOYS

‘I’ll make the brews Mr M, don’t worry. I’m the new boy.’

We were five minutes off from Camp Bastion.

‘Five Zero, Five One, we will lead you in.’

‘Copied.’

We crossed the A01 Highway at 3,000 feet.

‘Descending.’

Every descent was tactical. We never knew who was watching us or with what. I pushed the cyclic hard forward and lowered the collective, sinking the aircraft to the ground nose first. We dropped like a brick. With 500 feet to go, I pulled the cyclic back hard to throw the nose up against the wind, slamming a massive brake on the aircraft’s speed.

The runway was a thousand metres directly ahead. Camp Bastion stretched away to our right. I pulled up the Aircraft Page on the MPD; the wind was from the south. We could come straight in. We landed into the wind as it gave more lift, so more control.

I flared the aircraft a fraction to take us down to forty knots then lowered it again, timing our gradual descent with the approaching runway: 400 feet, 200, 100, 50… I stuck the nose forward as we crossed the lip at thirty-five knots and all three wheels hit the metal grids simultaneously. A perfect three-point running landing. It was all about timing.

It was a short taxi past the Chinooks’ parking area and the Apaches’ arming bays. Behind them were the hangars, and behind the hangars stretched the rest of Camp Bastion.

First stop was always the refuelling bay, fifty metres down the taxi lane and left again another fifty. A Groundie directed us into Point One and Billy and Carl joined us in Point Two thirty seconds later. Number Two engine first. Pouring nearly 3,000 lb of fuel into an empty set of tanks took six minutes. We began the lengthy process of closing the aircraft down. Off went the PNVS, the TADS, the FCR – the full start-up checklist in reverse.

The second and final stop was the arming bay, where we would shut down completely once the fresh rounds, rockets and missiles had been loaded. Power needed to be running through the aircraft to load the cannon, and only aircrew could do that.

Rearming was a tricky business. It took thirty minutes on average, longer if there was a lot to slap on. A team of eight guys buzzed around below us.

The cannon’s electrics had to be disconnected first, and then the chain disengaged. The side loader equipment had to be attached and the rounds fed through the chain; and so on. In the meantime, there was always some fine tuning to be done. That afternoon, the technicians needed to sort out Billy’s jam.

We tried as hard as we could to look busy, but there was nothing we could do to escape the attention of Sergeant Kev Blundell. Kev was the squadron’s Ammunition Sergeant. The arming bays and everything that went into them were his kingdom; and he ruled over it like Idi Amin.

King Kev was a giant of a man, as broad as he was tall, and he ate all visiting pilots for breakfast. A gruff Yorkshireman, he took no shit from anyone – up or down the entire chain of command. He had a sinister frown and the demeanour of the world’s most sardonic policeman, and as far as he was concerned, everyone could ‘just fook off’.

As the Weapons Officer, I was the pilot who worked closest with him; which meant I copped the very worst of his abuse.

While his guys beavered away, Kev would zero in on the Apache. He’d do a slow walk round the aircraft, arms folded, head shaking. Finally, he’d plug into the wing.

‘Fired fook all again, I see. You’re supposed to be fooking attack pilots.’

Kev’s greatest hatred in life – and he had many to choose from – was having to box up out-of-date weaponry and send it back to the UK. Hellfires and rockets could only take so much vibration on the wing before they became unstable, and all of them had a limited flight life. Backloading them all the way for inspection and maintenance was a bureaucratic nightmare, so any ammunition that came back from a sortie guaranteed us a mouthful.

‘Fooking useless, like normal.’

‘What do you mean? It’s not that bad, Kev. We were only supposed to be on a famil, and we still got 160 rounds off, plus four Flechettes.’

‘But no fooking Hellfire. You big jessies. Mind you, could be worse. You could be Mr Fly-Boy-Sky-Cop-Tom-fooking-Cruise in Point Two next to you. He only managed fifteen cannon rounds before he went and broke his gun! Makes you wonder why we fooking bother…’

‘What a twat… You won’t believe this Boss.’

I let him drag his webbing and fighting helmet from the boot and closed the panel securely. Stencilling across the door hatch in black was L330. Billy grinned down at us from ear to ear.

The Boss and I managed to escape in twenty-five minutes. Billy’s broken gun meant he had Kev breathing down his neck for almost an hour. We dumped our flight clobber in the lockers and picked up our wallets.

We’d often shoot a quick basket in the JHF. It was a handy way of resolving any residual disputes about the winner of Apache Triv and confirming that sortie’s Piss Boy. ‘Double or quits,’ Billy would offer if he’d lost. But there was no dispute that afternoon. Billy’s deviousness had triumphed again. Carl and I signed the aircraft back in with the crew chief and returned the start-up keys. Then the four of us trooped up to the JHF.

The Boss had forgotten his generous offer, so I ended up making the brews.

‘Hey Piss Boy, one coffee Whoopie Goldberg and Carl would like a tea Julie Andrews.’ Army slang: black nun and white nun.

We filed into the briefing room. Every engagement was debriefed thoroughly for fresh enemy intelligence and to learn lessons from our own combat skills. We played the relevant moment from the gun tapes from each Apache that opened fire.

The Boss, the Chief of Staff or the Operations Officer sat in on every debrief to confirm each kill was lawful. Every round we put down was recorded. We could never get away with a cover-up so we had to be super sure about what we were doing. It also provided closure on the sortie for the crew if it had been a bloody one.

Nobody else was normally allowed into the debriefs because we didn’t do Kill TV. Occasionally we’d invite the Groundies up to view some non-gory sequences as a morale booster. It really worked. ‘Yes!’ one of them would call out gleefully. ‘I loaded that Hellfire!’

Later on, I would watch the gun tapes on the computer to analyse shooting standards and the weapons’ performances. We reached the point the Boss and I began our rocket run-in on the copse. I was dreading what came next.

‘Just one second – pause it there…’

The Boss ducked out of the room. Twenty seconds later, he burst back in, followed by every single member of the squadron he could find in the JHF or the JOC – about twenty-three of them in total.

‘Right. The Weapons Officer would like to show you exactly how to fire a pair of Flechette rockets. Play the tape please.’

There was no point in trying to explain. None of them would have believed me. I tried diversion tactics. ‘What about the Boss? He went through 160 cannon rounds to get his target!’

It was too late. The room erupted with laughter. None of them listened to a word I said.

‘Play Mr Macy’s rockets again, play Mr Macy’s rockets again,’ they hollered.

Excruciating. I just had to man up and take it on the chin.