Apache

19. ESCAPING JUGROOM FORT

The bastards are not getting me alive. I need my pistol.

I glanced back across the field, and there was Geordie, thirty metres away. The Taliban bullets cracked through the air around us.

‘Geordie, put some rounds down!’ Then I saw he didn’t have his carbine with him either.

Got to move Mathew out of the fire. Get him behind the aircraft… The fuselage was only seven metres away; we were very near the blades. My eyes dipped as I grasped Mathew more firmly and tugged my foot free. My pistol poked out from underneath him. I grabbed the grip and spun round on my knees, preparing to return fire towards the muzzle flashes. As I did so, the sound of the Apache’s rotor pitch changed. Oh no…

Carl started to pull power. Dust and grit smacked me in the face as I turned to see the aircraft begin to wobble. The blades coned upwards. I got straight to my feet. I could just make out Carl speaking fast into his microphone and monitoring our every move. He didn’t want to hit us when he took off.

‘No Carl, get down!’

He couldn’t hear me. The suspension struts lightened as he began to lift. I threw both arms out and flapped them vigorously downwards. He finally got the message and powered down. I didn’t know whether he was leaving or just turning to engage the treeline, but I wasn’t having any of it.

The dust cloud he’d thrown up was so thick I couldn’t see my own hands. I stumbled about, trying to regain my bearings.

With an ear-piercing screech, a Hellfire came in to the east of us and exploded with a mighty flash. A quarter of a second later, the pressure wave passed through my clothing. Ten seconds later I heard two deep booms, then the sound of branches splitting and plummeting to the ground. HEISAP rockets. Charlotte and Nick were taking care of the treeline. Thank fuck, they’re onto them. Carl must have called them in.

The brown-out was still all-consuming. But it was now rippling slowly away from the aircraft in concentric rings, leaving us with a few metres of visibility inside it. The enemy gunfire from the eastern treeline had now dwindled. If we couldn’t see the Taliban, they couldn’t see us. Carl’s brown-out and the pounding from Ugly Five Two and Three had bought us a few crucial seconds. Got to move right now. I turned to check how badly hit Rigg was. To my amazement, he was crouching over Mathew and preparing to lift him again. Geordie was with him now.

‘Rigg, you okay?’

‘Yeah. Just tripped. Sorry.’

‘You’re not hit?’

‘Don’t think so. Can’t feel anything.’

I was astonished. They’d missed all of us.

I holstered my pistol and lunged for Mathew too. I grabbed hold of his webbing, Geordie latched onto his right leg, and summoning every last scrap of energy we headed for the aircraft.

Fraser-Perry and Robinson suddenly materialised too; one grasped a sleeve and one Mathew’s other leg. Last to break through the dust cloud was Hearn, his face red as a beetroot.

We were three minutes behind schedule and had been on the ground for over four. Yet suddenly – and I had no idea how – the plan was working.

‘Where the fuck have you lot been?’ I hollered above the engine’s whine.

‘Sorry, bonny lad,’ Geordie yelled. ‘Detour.’

As gently as we could, we lowered Mathew beneath the aircraft, placing his head below the step in front of the right wheel.

‘Anyone got a strap?’

Robinson’s immediately appeared in my hand.

‘Okay, back to your aircraft guys. We can manage from here.’ I turned to Fraser-Perry. ‘You get on, too.’

The marines sprinted off, but Geordie hung around. He needed to see it through.

‘Honestly, Geordie mate, we’re almost there. Last one back to Bastion is Piss Boy, eh?’

‘That’ll be you then.’ He smiled and set off.

Rigg lifted Mathew’s shoulders while I wrapped the strap around his back, under his arms, through his body armour and out by the top of his chest. Bollocks. It wouldn’t quite reach the step. We heaved him forward another six inches. But the strap was as taut as a bowstring and I was worried we would garrotte him in mid-flight.

‘Give me yours.’

I repeated the process with Rigg’s strap and fastened it to the step above his helmet. Now at least he would hang steady and straight.

‘Okay, mate, jump on. And hold tight.’

‘Roger…’

Robinson and Rigg were going to have to follow Fraser-Perry’s example and just cling on. Rigg leapt back onto his Hellfire rail and hauled himself onto the wing as I clambered back into the cockpit.

I moved my harness buckle away from the cyclic so Carl could lift safely. A quick check on Rigg and Fraser-Perry, then I raised both thumbs and screamed above the din: ‘Go, go, go…’

We’d well overstayed our welcome at Jugroom Fort, and Mathew desperately needed a crash team: 10.43 and forty-five seconds. Fuck me, five minutes and ten seconds on the ground. It had seemed like five years…

Carl pulled power and the canal disappeared from in front of us as we whipped the dust into a frenzy. He was flying blind, with only the symbology in his monocle: heading, height, torque and velocity. The hardest flying in the world. We began to wobble.

I fastened my harness, clipped the monocle to my helmet and connected my microphone lead. ‘Five One lifting. Give us cover.’

I took a firm hold of the two grab handles either side of the cockpit roof. Not to brace myself for a crash – it was the only way to suppress the screaming urge to take hold of the flying controls at a time like this. I wished I was in the back. Trust your symbology, buddy.

I felt the Apache move through the seat of my pants, but God only knew where. My monocle told me that we’d swung ninety degrees left, pointing the nose back towards the river. The whine of the engines increased as he pulled more pitch. I checked our height, thirty feet, and torque, 85 per cent. Carl was giving it some serious welly. I checked the airspeed: we were moving forward at five knots. Another five seconds and I looked at the height again, still only thirty feet, same speed and the torque was up to 90 per cent. We’d stopped lifting, and were still not clear of the brown-out. We should have been well away by now. There was a problem.

‘Ed, the power is much higher than it should be. Is Mathew tied to the bloody ground?’

‘Maybe it’s recirculation from the wall…’

‘No way. We should have bags of power. I’m topping out.’

The wobble became an uncomfortable sway. Jesus, we had a fifty-three knot tailwind. That’s what was destroying Carl’s lift. It was blowing away his purchase on clean air.

‘Can’t be right,’ Carl said. ‘It’s been five knots all morning.’

It was up and down like a yoyo. We had a squall on our hands. It could last for minutes. Afghanistan was full of them, but we’d never faced one on takeoff before. At this height the emergency drill was to turn into it, down the aircraft immediately and wait for the squall to pass. We didn’t have that option. Our truckload of luck had finally run out. Our height began to drop.

‘Twenty-five feet, and forty-two knots downwind…’

Carl called up more power, taking the torque to 95 per cent. He was doing all he could to get some translational lift. Increase the speed and you increased the airflow over the blades; then you were up. But we were downwind, so it wasn’t happening.

‘Twenty-one feet and thirty-seven knots downwind…’

We were sinking. Carl pushed the torque all the way to 100 per cent. He had nothing left to pull. The velocity vector was off the scale so we were moving forward fast, but still reversing into the wind. Any more and we’d be in serious danger of trashing our escape plan.

‘Nineteen feet and thirty knots downwind. Watch your torque, Carl. We’re dropping.’

Come on, fly, you bastard. I still couldn’t see a thing.

‘Fifteen feet, twenty-six knots downwind. Mathew’s too close to the ground, mate.’

Carl was going to have to turn back towards the fort to get forward airspeed or we’d ditch in the Helmand River.

‘I’m going over 100…’

With a mighty heave on the collective, he pulled the torque to 115 per cent. It was our last chance. Six seconds at that level and he’d twist the transmission permanently out of shape. The aircraft would be toast.

Fucking come on. Do it NOW…

I felt a small waver in the tail.

‘Eighteen feet, nine knots downwind. The squall’s dropping. Twenty-two feet, eight knots forward.’

‘Got it! Sylvia’s flying!’ Carl dropped the torque to 90 per cent. We were away.

‘Top flying, mate. Thank God for that.’

My guardian angel was looking after my lilywhite arse that morning…

Height and airspeed continued to climb for five more seconds and the torque remained constant.

Then we burst out of the dust, straight into blinding sunshine and a crystal blue sky. It was a beautiful day; I’d forgotten after so long in the Jugroom underworld. It was mind-blowing, unlike anything I’d seen before, or will see again.

As we soared towards the berm, a myriad red and orange light pulses streaked past the cockpit windows. It felt like Han Solo taking the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace. The marines at the firebase had seen our dust cloud, and were giving the Taliban every last bullet they had to cover us out. Thousands and thousands of rounds winged past us. Some of them were frighteningly close, but the marines knew exactly where they were shooting. It was an awesome display of firepower.

Charlotte and Tony’s Apache flew right in front of us, 200 feet above the firebase. The moment we emerged, two Hellfires shot off her rails with their arses on fire and buried themselves deep into the eastern treeline.

Nick and FOG had kept their best till last. I caught a glimpse of them in our two o’clock, running into the village from the desert. Then they let rip instantaneously with every single one of the sixteen Flechettes they had left in their launchers. They came out in pairs, the left ahead of the right – left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right – each leaving a vivid jet of flame in their wake. It was the biggest rocket launch I’d ever seen, and at the end of it, angry clouds of propellant vapour shrouded their entire aircraft.

A fraction of a second later, 1,280 Tungsten darts tore into each and every one of the huts, barns and compounds within a 100-metre radius – turning the village into a giant pin cushion.

Geordie lifted thirty seconds behind us. It was perfect timing. With two final cannon bursts he and Billy broke west and then sharp south down the canal. Tony unleashed all his and Charlotte’s Flechettes into the fort and as he pulled hard out of a low-level dive, Nick squeezed off four HEISAPs into the treeline.

I was mesmerised by the sheer ferocity of the attacks. Anyone waiting to ambush us on our way out had been rewarded with a very nasty surprise.

We were over the middle of the river. My excitement vanished and my stomach churned. The straps holding Mathew had never been tested. I looked out for him, but the fuselage blocked my view.

‘Mate, I hope Mathew’s still on. Just keep it nice and slow.’

‘Forty knots. Look right, Ed.’

I looked down through the Perspex and there on the mirrored surface of the water beneath us was the shadow of an Apache helicopter gunship with a man hanging beneath it. A feeling close to euphoria began to pulse through my veins. I felt the tension ease from my shoulder muscles.

‘I can’t believe it, Carl. We’ve made it…’

‘Don’t,’ he grunted as we reached the far bank of the river. ‘We’ve 100 metres to go…’

The hillside rose steeply ahead of us. Five seconds later we crossed the ridge, and the Royal Marines’ firebase was spread out below us. We’d saved ourselves. Now we had to save Mathew.

‘Mate, let’s take him into the desert, to the Casevac LS.’

‘We don’t have the fuel, Ed.’

‘We must have; it’s only a couple of miles.’

‘Trust me, we don’t have the fuel.’ Carl was adamant. ‘We’re putting him down right here.’

He’d already begun to bank right and turn the aircraft 180 degrees into the wind to land. He picked a spot just behind the Light Dragoons’ Scimitars where he could see Viking vehicles and a red cross. There would be medics and basic life support equipment to keep Mathew going until the Chinook arrived. Carl went into a hover as dozens of marines rushed to our impromptu landing site.

‘Keep bringing it left, mate…’

If Carl went down hard, seven tonnes of aircraft was going to squash Mathew flat.

I opened up my door to get a better view; Rigg was already leaning off the side of the aircraft signalling to Carl with his hand. With extraordinary deftness, Carl lowered Mathew gently to the ground, feet first. Next, he eased the aircraft left until Mathew was in a sitting position, and then very gradually laid him down. As his helmet touched the ground, Carl pulled the aircraft back a fraction to ensure that his now prone body was well clear of the wheel as he gently touched down.

‘Right, get him off quick, Ed.’

Rigg and I didn’t need a second invitation. Carl had done a neat job. Mathew was lying on his back, in exactly the position I had left him. I knelt down and pulled hard on the straps to relieve the pressure on the karabiners. As I spun the locking gate, his dust-caked face was a foot from mine. The blood on his right cheek was still damp; perhaps his heart had started to pump again. The slight crow’s feet at the side of eyes made him look as though he was smiling.

I unlocked the second karabiner, then we stepped back and let the marines and medics take over. My hand didn’t feel quite like my own as I offered it to Rigg. We shook quickly and turned to watch Mathew being rushed to the waiting armoured ambulance.

‘Ed, get in,’ Carl shouted. He was flipping a track about the fuel now.

I looked quickly along Sylvia’s bottom to see if she was leaking; she had no holes that I could see. Rigg and I found ourselves still facing each other.

‘Thank you.’

‘No, thank you.’

I jumped back in and the second my door closed Carl pulled power and took off, sand-blasting everyone below us.

‘Check the fuel burn rate,’ Carl snapped, as we left the dust cloud behind. Billy and Geordie had been holding for us over the desert. Now they moved alongside and Carl and Geordie main-lined it back to Camp Bastion by the straightest possible route.

I looked through my monocle. We had 515 lb of fuel and sixty-two miles to fly. Not good. The minimum legal fuel allowance for landing an Apache was 400 lb. Below that, heavy manoeuvring could cause fuel starvation to the engine and a shut down. Below 200 lb, there was just whatever was left in the pipes and pump; the two fuel tanks were empty. At 100 lb the engines cut out altogether.

Carl was keeping the aircraft at 117 knots, the most economical fuel burn speed, and just thirty-five feet off the desert floor. Any higher and the wind from the north-west would have slowed us down. Every second counted.

I pulled up the engine page on the MPD and tasted acid in my throat. We were burning 900 lb an hour, 15 lb a minute – and it was going to take us twenty-seven minutes to get home. I punched 15*27 into the keyboard, then Enter… 405 lb… We’d have 110 lb of fuel left when we landed. Bloody hell. I gave us 50 / 50 at best.

‘Buddy, if we’re not going to make it, we’re best just putting down at the gun line aren’t we? We can get a CH47 to fly down the boys with some fuel bollocks.’

‘We can do it.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘We could go to Lash…’

‘We’re not going to Lash; it’s too small. We can make it.’

I realised I was more worried about the embarrassment of requesting fuel if we landed in the middle of the desert than I was of the Taliban.

If anyone knew the Apache AH Mk1, it was Carl. He loved the aircraft so much he even hung out with it in his free time. They almost went on dates together. If he said we’d get back, we’d get back. But it was going to be desperately close. A change in the wind, or any kind of malfunction and we’d shit it.

Billy and Geordie were 400 metres off to our right, and flying just as low. We didn’t want to discuss our fuel state over the net. It would only spook them at Bastion; every man and his dog would get on the net and feed us the sort of advice that we could do without. Best to keep schtum. We texted instead.

Billy began: SEND FUEL STATE

I replied with ours, and he responded: 490

‘Shit, Carl, they’re even lower than us.’

A beep alert signalled another text from Billy. LASH V BSN?

He must have been reading my mind.

EWOK HAPPY BSN… YOUR CALL

BSN IT IS

Even Billy the chief pilot doffed his cap to Carl the Aircraft King.

SEND AMMO

That was going to be interesting. We had eight Flechette and eight HEISAP rockets still in the tubes, but we were out of Hellfire and only had eighty remaining cannon rounds.

40*30MM, 0*HEISAP, 8*FLECH, 0*HELLF

Wow. Billy was almost out of everything.

Having stayed on station to cover in the Chinook picking up Mathew, 3 Flight were a few minutes behind us. They didn’t need asking.

Beep. ‘Text from Five Two, Ed.’

20*30MM, 4*HEISAP, 0*FLECH, 2*HELLF

But Charlotte and Tony won the prize. Their text just read: WINCHESTER.

‘Winchester’ was the air net code for exhausting all your weaponry: bombs, missiles, cannon rounds, rockets – whatever you had. It dated from World War One: when the string-bag pilots had nothing left to fire, they reached for their trusty Repeater. Going Winchester was heavily frowned on. Ammunition was our lifeblood and had to be carefully rationed; use it all up in one go and you had nothing left to fight with. But there were no other troops in contact at Jugroom; just us. And they’d run dry in the very last seconds of our extraction. They’d executed their fire plan to perfection.

CONGRATS, I replied.

Nobody had gone Winchester before – Charlotte and Tony had just made British Apache history.

Billy sent our ammo requirements to Kev Blundell in Bastion so he could have our uploads ready. Carl punched some numbers into the keyboard.

‘Check this out. We’ve used a total of £1,499,000 of ordnance protecting Mathew Ford.’

And that didn’t count Nick and Charlotte’s earlier mission.

‘Not bad for a couple of hours’ work.’

Seven minutes and thirty-six seconds from the firebase our fuel level dropped below the 400 lb landing limit. I’d lost count of the number of rules we’d broken that morning. Every few minutes, I recalculated the fuel state in case I’d made a mistake. The answer came back just the same – 110 lb on landing.

‘Village twelve o’clock. One klick.’

‘Don’t change course, Carl. We’re too low for them to see us coming.’

Normally we’d keep out of their way. But that meant wasting more fuel we didn’t have. A flash of light shot straight across the windscreen, missing us by no more than a few feet. Carl threw the aircraft into an evasive bank, climb and jink.

‘What the fuck was that? Have we been engaged?’

I shot a glance out my window, spotting for an RPG smoke trail. Instead, I saw a solitary bright yellow kite flying above the village compound.

‘It was a kite, mate…’

It made me think of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, which Emily had made me read on holiday in Egypt before the tour. The Taliban had banned kite flying. Among other things, we were here to defend the Afghan people’s right to fly kites if they wanted to. But this one had scared the hell out of us. Maybe the Taliban had a point.

I felt for Emily’s angel, but the survival jacket was too tight. It must have shifted position when we were moving Mathew. I desperately wanted to know whether he was alive. There had been no time to check his condition before we left the firebase, and we’d heard nothing over the net. A crash team could have got his heart beating again in an instant, surely…

On another day Carl and I might have put a call into the Ops Room, but they had enough on their plate without our unnecessary questions. We’d find out soon enough.

Ten miles out of Bastion, Billy texted again. SEND FUEL AT BASTION

110. YOU?

90. WE LAND 1ST

Twenty pounds of fuel was eighty seconds more flying time. We didn’t quibble. Unless Geordie kept his aircraft 100 per cent upright, they were now in real danger of crashing. In a few minutes’ time, they’d drop below 100 lb and then the engines could give out on them any second.

We approached the camp side by side. Carl eased off on the power.

‘Don’t slow down too much, buddy!’

‘I’ll formate that close to them you’ll be able to smell Geordie’s arse. Stand by.’

Carl went onto the net. ‘Geordie, land long down the runway, so I can land short at the same time.’ He wasn’t wasting a second more than he had to.

The two pilots kept the same speed all the way in, with us one rotor blade’s distance behind Geordie. As we crossed the tip of the runway, Carl flared the aircraft suddenly and hammered the back wheel down onto the lip, catapulting the front wheels forward and down hard too; it wasn’t the most graceful landing I’d ever experienced, but it was the most grateful. Geordie did the same.

ENG1 FUEL BAR, Geordie texted as we taxied to the refuelling point.

That fuel bar was an emergency warning that pressure was dropping in the port engine and it would cut out automatically in less than five seconds. Geordie shut down the engine then and there on the runway to avoid having to file a lengthier incident signal.

Geordie and Billy took the right fuel point and we took the left, maintaining radio silence. If we were quick about this, we might be able to get away with nobody officially noting our return fuel states. That would save an ear-chewing by a pencil-neck somewhere along the line.

I opened up my canopy and shouted at the boys: ‘Get the fuel in, quick.’

Simon, the Arming and Loading Point Commander, popped his head inside the cockpit as his boys went to work.

‘All right, there, Mr M? How close have you cut it today then, eh? – 400 on the nose, I’ll bet. Sounds like it was quite a morning… fucking HELL…’ His eyes almost popped out when he saw the digital reading: 80 lb.

The next stop was the arming bay. The one and only Kev Blundell was waiting for us, hands on hips, with his usual sardonic expression.

He took a stroll around the aircraft. And for the first time I could remember, he didn’t say a single word. He took his time with the inspection, peering into every rocket hole and having a thoroughly good look at the 30-mm feed chain running to the cannon. He glanced up at Carl or me periodically, then looked right back down again.

Eventually he was finished. He nodded lugubriously as he leaned his gargantuan weight against the aircraft’s wing and plugged in.

‘Not bad lads. I’ve got to admit it, not at all bad.’ He broke into a smile. ‘I hear you were put to shame by a bird, though.’

I caught sight of the Boss, walking straight towards us. Thank God we’d got the fuel in…

A Chinook thumped past over his left shoulder, on its way to the hospital landing site. Must have been Mathew. It was odd that the Boss had come down to the flight line to see us, even today. He was too busy for that. His brow was heavily furrowed and he looked like he had the weight of an elephant on each shoulder.

I gave him a smile, but I didn’t get one back. When he saw my hands he stopped short and stared at them. I looked down too and realised they were still stained with Mathew’s blood.

He nodded at them. ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah, it’s not mine.’ I gave him a big thumbs up as reassurance.

Trigger’s expression still didn’t change. His clear blue eyes burned with a peculiar intensity. ‘Look, I just want you to know that I’m backing all four of you – no matter what happens next.’

There was a silence. I was bewildered. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The CO has just got in from Kandahar on a Lynx,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you up top.’

He turned and walked away.