Apache

11. READY TO GO NOISY

Nine weeks of tough and dangerous work had gone into it. There had been a few false starts and a fair number of close shaves, but the southern Information Exploitation Battlegroup had stuck it out. By 1 January, Colonel Magowan’s men declared they were ready for Operation Glacier to go noisy.

The Taliban main supply route from Pakistan had been mapped. Not only did the battlegroup know their enemy’s main base locations, but they’d also pinpointed tunnel systems and ammo dumps. They’d discovered that they moved covertly between them disguised as local farmers. Now they were ready to destroy the lot. The marines’ .5-inch calibre Barratt sniper rifle was pointing right at the heart of the Taliban octopus, and they were about to pull the trigger.

They had located five enemy concentration points, each performing a different function in the Taliban’s sophisticated logistics chain: pampering, preparing for and then pushing their warriors into battle. These had been designated as Operation Glacier’s primary targets.

The plan was to prosecute one target at a time, moving steadily northwards. The furthest, more than twenty kilometres south of Garmsir, would be hit first (Operation Glacier 1), and the closest – two kilometres south-east of the Garmsir DC – would go last (Operation Glacier 5).

As each attack proceeded, survivors and forward groups would be funnelled north, and with their command chain broken, the old men in Quetta would have nowhere to send reinforcements. The retreating Taliban would finally be trapped in one killing zone at Garmsir.

They were going to follow the example of the old bull at the top of the hill, one of the marine officers explained. ‘The bull’s young son says to him, “Dad, let’s run down and jump on one of those cows in that field.” “No son,” the old bull replies. “Let’s walk down, and jump on them all.”’

Brigade believed that the destruction of the Taliban’s southern MSR would leave their operations in turmoil across half the province, and that they’d be unable to mobilise enough manpower for anything more than the odd pot shot on the Garmsir DC. Once they were on their knees, the southern battlegroup would make sure they kept them there.

The offensive stage of Operation Glacier would begin on 11 January, and the brigadier wanted all the strikes completed in a month. Our Apaches would be needed on every one of the Glacier attacks. Our combat punch was to be utilised on Operation Glacier 1 as it never had been before. And it coincided with HQ Flight’s turn on the rota for a deliberate tasking.

Alice gathered us for a general intelligence brief nine days before. ‘You’re going,’ she told us. ‘So you’d better know all about it.’ The target was a command post used as a reception area for all new recruits from Pakistan. This was where the Toyota 4x4s hit the Green Zone after their long slog across the desert. On arrival, they were fed, rested, briefed and organised before being sent forward to the next link in the chain. It was the Taliban’s equivalent of Kandahar air base.

The post sat on the east bank of a north–south running canal near the village of Koshtay, twenty kilometres or so south of Garmsir. It consisted of three large rectangular buildings – the living quarters – surrounded by a cluster of huts, a mosque, two courtyards, gardens and an orchard. An imposing place by Helmand’s standards, it used to be the old district governor’s house – but it wasn’t thought to house more than fifty enemy fighters at any one time.

‘The only thing we’re not being told is who initially pinged the place,’ Alice said intriguingly. ‘The battlegroup’s Int Officer says it wasn’t them. Apparently it was “intelligence sources”.’

Alice didn’t need to spell it out. We all knew what that meant. Spooks. What colour, shape or nationality was anyone’s guess. MI6 and GCHQ ran their own operations throughout Afghanistan, as did the CIA and the NSA, France’s DGSE, Pakistan’s ISI and God only knew how many other ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services. The place was crawling with them; always has been. One thing was for sure – we’d never find out.

Glacier’s first target was the most important strategically – the Taliban’s linchpin between Pakistan and Helmand. If the link was well and truly broken, it would take them a lot of time and effort to reconnect. Attacking the site would do the Taliban serious psychological damage too. Foot soldiers and senior leadership alike would know that we knew exactly where they were and what they were up to. Some of their senior commanders were also believed to work out of Koshtay, marshalling their ranks from the rear. Taking them out would be an additional bonus.

The full set of orders for the operation arrived from the battlegroup seven days later, with the classification ‘Secret’. Trigger picked it up from the JOC’s Communications Cell after lunch on Tuesday, 9 January. He gave it a quick flick and came to find us.

‘Guys, I think the four of us had better go into the Tactical Planning Facility right now. Cancel whatever you’ve got on for the rest of the afternoon.’

We sat down and read through it together. The orders were highly detailed and the timings incredibly precise. They gave us maps, sketches and aerial reconnaissance photographs of the site. It was an extraordinary piece of work. And it told us we were making Army Air Corps history.

‘Fuck me sideways,’ Billy breathed. ‘We’re really going sausage side this time, aren’t we?’

There would be no ground assault. Instead, a B1B Lancer strategic bomber was going to open the show with the mother of all hard knocks. It would drop ten different bombs on the Koshtay site at once – four 2,000-pounders and six 500-pounders. Then it was our turn, to mop up any survivors.

As the bombs were falling, we would begin our run-in on the target from the desert, so when the dust cleared we’d be ready to start shooting. It was made clear to us that no buildings were to be left standing, and no people left alive. With five tonnes of explosives down their necks, all within an area of 150 square metres, we weren’t expecting a huge number.

Koshtay was under the highly covert surveillance of our old friends, the Brigade Reconnaissance Force. It’s what the BRF did best, and many of them went on from it to join the SBS and SAS. Creeping up on the site through bushes, undergrowth and waterways, they had observed a disciplined sentry system. Two guards patrolled the road that ran in front of it, perpendicular to the canal, while at least two more manned the lookout posts. The sentries changed over every thirty minutes.

The BRF’s JTAC – Knight Rider Five Six – would control the air attack from a vantage point on the ground as close to the target as he could get, 500 metres north-west of the site. We needed eyes on the target at all times during the attack, in case a busload of nuns and schoolchildren were out on a stargazing field trip.

The JTAC and his twenty-four-strong protection team – including two snipers – planned to bag up all their kit and swim the Helmand River two kilometres to the west of the site and then yomp to the vantage point. They would be laid up there from 0300 hours.

A Nimrod MR2 was tasked for the operation, flying at 27,500 feet and feeding a live video link to Colonel Magowan and the Brigade HQ in Lashkar Gah. There was acute interest in Glacier 1; nobody wanted to miss a second of it. Then callsign Bone One One – the B1 from Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean – would drop his bombs from 25,000 feet, impacting precisely thirty minutes later, giving us an H hour of 0330 hours.

For the Apaches, it was a phenomenal task. We would be carrying out the first deep raid the Corps had ever flown. For the first time on a live operation, we’d be on our own over enemy-held territory. So far we’d fought hand in hand with the guys below us. If we went down this time, there would be no ground troops nearby to come and help us out. The BRF was too small and lightly armed; it’d have a job exfiltrating safely itself. A rescue bid would only be launched once brigade was sure we’d evaded capture; until then, we’d just have to fend for ourselves.

It was a whole new ball game. But the extra risk didn’t temper our excitement – it added to it. We were chomping at the bit.

‘I’ve got butterflies,’ Carl said. ‘Bring it on.’

We finished reading the orders at 4pm. The attack was set for the early hours of 11 January. We had an awful lot to prepare in less than thirty-six hours.

It was down to us to seamlessly dovetail our Apaches into the plan. Split second timing was essential. We worked out exactly where we needed to be and when, and went through every eventuality.

Koshtay was 100 kilometres from Camp Bastion as the crow flies, the furthest we’d had to fight so far. Long distance wasn’t a problem though; we could hit a target 250 klicks away on our normal set-up and still have enough fuel to return to base. Slap on the five additional fuel tanks we could carry – in part of the gun magazine and off the four weapons pylons – and we had a strike range of almost 2,000 kilometres without having to touch down; London to Marrakesh, Malta or St Petersburg.

Where we were going, we wanted to take some proper weaponry. So we calculated a fuel / weapons split that gave us ninety minutes over the target, just in case we’d need them. We went for a Load Charlie again, but Hellfire-heavy – giving each aircraft six missiles.

Koshtay was a job for the two most experienced front-seat gunners. Billy took the back seat to fly the Boss, as Ugly Five Zero. Carl would fly for me, Ugly Five One. The Boss was mission commander.

Word that we were doing a deep raid spread around the squadron like wildfire. Everybody’s blood was up, including the Groundies’ and the Ops Room’s, as every sortie was a massive team effort. We would be making Corps history. The twelve other pilots who weren’t flying it were green with envy. Conspiracy theories were rife.

‘Saving the best ones for yourself, eh Boss?’ Nick said. ‘What a coincidence it just happened to be HQ Flight’s turn for a deliberate task.’

Trigger just smiled knowingly. But Nick’s turn would come.

At lunchtime on the 10th, the ministerial permission we needed for Op Glacier 1 finally came through. We were hitting the place cold and firing the first shots, which we very seldom did. With all the paperwork in place, the brigade confirmed it as a go.

The four of us had a kip after lunch, since we weren’t going to get much sleep later. At sunset we went down to the flight line for a final walk around the Apaches and loaded our kit.

‘Just double check your LSJs, chaps,’ Trigger said.

It was a good point. Our survival jackets were vital if we got shot down; they contained everything we might need to keep us alive on the ground apart from our personal weapons. I went through every last pouch.

To squeeze so much into one man’s waistcoat was a masterpiece of design, and the reason they were so bloody heavy. The deep left front pocket was easiest to grab for a right-handed pilot like me. That’s why it contained the most important piece of kit – a very powerful multi-frequency ground-to-air radio with which we could talk securely to anyone above us or at a distance, through burst transmissions. It was also fitted with a GPS system and a homing beacon that could be picked up by satellite.

Three pockets were sewn into the front right-hand side of the jacket. The top one contained a signalling pack – an infrared or white light strobe and a signalling mirror. The middle held a survival pack: a matchless fire set – cotton wool and magnesium metal with a saw blade to ignite it (matches ran out and could get wet) – fuel blocks, a nylon fishing line, hooks and flies, a foil blanket, high energy sweets, tablets to purify dirty water, a polythene bag, tampons to soak up water, two Rocco-sized condoms that could each carry a gallon of water, a compass, a candle, parachute cord to rig up shelters, three snares, a wire saw, a needle and thread, camouflage cream and a medium-sized Swiss Army knife. The lowest pocket was packed with the things you hoped you’d never need: antibiotics, morphine-based painkillers, three elastic dressings and adhesives, two standard dressings, a safety pin, Imodium tablets to stop the shits, a razor blade, dextrose high energy tablets, sun block, insect repellent and a pair of forceps.

We kept a six-inch-long Maglite torch and an emergency extraction strap with a black karabiner in another small pocket, just next to the zip. A large pouch sewn into the back of the jacket contained a metre-square waterproof, tear-resistant nylon escape map that you could also use to shelter from the sun or rain. Alongside it we kept two litre-sized foil sachets of clean water.

Back up at the JHF we formulated an escape plan for the mission. We had one for every location we went to, and for every pre-planned sortie we flew. If we did go down over Koshtay, we’d all know exactly what to do.

Apache pilots underwent the most intensive escape and evasion training of anyone in the UK military, alongside Harrier pilots and Special Forces personnel. All three worked behind or over enemy lines, so faced the greatest risk. It was a gruelling sixteen-week course, and as the squadron’s Survive, Evade, Resist and Extract Officer, Geordie gave us regular refreshers

The first emergency drill was always the same – talk to your wingman and tell him where you are. He’d know you’d gone down, and would be doing his damnedest to keep you alive. If the threat on the ground allowed it, he’d swoop down, land next to your aircraft and you’d have about three seconds to strap yourself onto a grab handle forward of the engine air intakes with your own strap and karabiner.

We practised the drill every now and then, but no Apache pilot in the world had ever done it on operations; it was fraught with danger for everyone concerned. Putting an aircraft on the ground in a battle made it incredibly vulnerable, which was why the MoD pencil-necks had written into the Release To Service rules that it was only to be used in dire emergencies. If they had it their way, it would have been out of the RTS altogether.

First, of course, we had to survive going down. There were no ejection seats in an Apache; it was dangerous enough standing beneath a turning rotor blade. If our aircraft went down, we went down with it. It concentrated the mind. So much so, that experienced pilots would always subconsciously scope for the safest place to crash-land.

Should the worst happen and we found ourselves on the ground, it was going to be immediately obvious if Trigger and Billy were going to be able to pick us up at Koshtay. If they couldn’t – which was almost inevitable – we’d try to get as far away from the aircraft as possible. The Apache would act like a magnet for the enemy, so we wouldn’t even hang around to destroy its clandestine equipment; someone else with a big bomb would take care of that.

It would be dark, which was a great advantage. Maybe only a handful of Taliban would see us go down. Five minutes later though, the word would have gone round. By daybreak, we’d be the focus of a massive and coordinated hunt.

Once clear of the aircraft, we’d head due north or south and then west as soon as we could. Our best hope of escape would be the GAFA desert, preferably by dawn. We’d either find the BRF there or get picked up. It was only four klicks away – but we’d have to cross the raging Helmand River and possibly the canal on the way.

We’d move at night and hide in daylight. We’d keep switching on the radios to speak to anyone we could see or hear above us. They’d be up there, waiting for our call. And above all, we had to stick together – two pairs of eyes and ears were always better than one, and one of us might be injured.

After the 8pm brief, we tried to get a few hours’ sleep. The Boss took the cot next to mine so we wouldn’t wake anyone in his tent.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ he said as he climbed into his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to bed now, knowing that when I wake up, I will deliberately go out and kill people.’

The Boss grappled with this idea for a few moments as the opening credits of 24 rolled on the laptop beside him – but only for a couple of minutes. The next time I looked, he was fast asleep, his head tucked into the crook of his arm.

I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just lay on my back in the darkness, going over every eventuality again and again, trying to visualise how I would deal with them. How to get out of the Green Zone if we went down was the challenge that preoccupied me most. There’d be no chance of a rescue. How fast was the current in the Helmand River? Would we reach the GAFA by dawn? If not, where would we lie up? Must remember to keep away from livestock, especially dogs; they’d give us away immediately. What if I was incapacitated and Carl was okay? Carl would have to run. I’d make him. He’d get nowhere trying to carry me. What if he was injured? I’d have a tough time lifting him and all that strawberry cheesecake. But I couldn’t leave him – I’d never be able to live with myself. No; I’d stay and fight to the end – and save the last two rounds for ourselves.

It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one picture out of my head: me standing alongside a burning aircraft with Carl unconscious at my feet and the Taliban swarming towards us… Wouldn’t it just be Sod’s Law if I got it tonight? Emily was four and a half months pregnant… I saw the look on my kids’ faces as they were told that this time their dad wasn’t coming back… And I knew for certain that this had to be my last tour.

But would I have ducked out of it there and then, given the choice? Not for all the tea in China.

The alarm clocks went off at 1am. We dressed in silence, pulses racing, and popped into the JHF to pick up our Black Brains and check for any changes in plan. There weren’t any. We walked down to the flight line in the cold night air and fired up the aircraft at 1.55.

There were a few extra start-up procedures to run through in the cockpit before a night flight. Sound was often difficult to place, so keeping the aircraft as dark as possible gave us a much-needed edge. We knew the Taliban had NVGs – probably supplied by Iran – so we didn’t want to make it any easier for them.

Bat wings were sheathed below the left and right windows of the cockpit for us to pull up and shield the glow of our MPD screens – the only light source in the cockpit.

Carl needed a few more minutes to adjust his monocle. At night, he was 100 per cent reliant on it – it was his only window on the world. Other military pilots used NVGs, which magnified ambient light sources 40,000 times. We had Pilot’s Night Vision Sights instead.

The normal flight symbology was projected into the pilot’s monocle, but it was underlaid with the image of the ‘Pin-viss’, a second infrared lens sitting above the TADS bucket.

Through the PNVS thermal picture, we could see landscape in total darkness, as well as anyone moving below us. ‘If it glows, it goes,’ the instructors used to say – though not in the handbook.

Like the cannon, the PNVS lens was slaved to your eye. It followed the direction of your right eye, though a fraction more slowly than the gun, so there was a momentary lapse between desire and action. It was mounted above the TADS on the aircraft’s nose, so the perspective was slightly out of kilter too, as if your eyeball had been stretched twelve feet out of its socket.

Flying on PNVS low level at 140 knots was the hardest thing to master on Apache training; it was like driving down a pitch black motorway with no lights, with a hand clamped over one eye, a twelve-foot-long tube capped with a green lens strapped to the other, and the speedo needle brushing 161 mph…

We learned how to do this by ‘flying in the bag’. Our entire back-seat cockpit was blacked out with panels, while the instructor sat in the open front. It wasn’t a great place for claustrophobics.

‘Please God, just let me get through,’ we’d pray. Fail three test sorties in the bag, and you were out. Passing gave you the world’s greatest high.

Despite Carl’s whingeing, I knew I was in good hands with him flying me that night. His was the best pair of night hands we had.

We were all set in good time. No need for calls; we just slipped out of the bays with two minutes to takeoff.

We lifted silently at 2.40am. Billy led us a few klicks north to dupe any Taliban dickers then backtracked south-west across the A01 Highway, and hard south once we were into the empty desert, our Hellfire-laden machines invisible against the GAFA’s sky.