Hellfire

THE PLAN

SUNDAY, 16 JULY 2006

Camp Bastion

I wanted an immediate debrief with our Hi-8 tapes. I gathered Simon, Jon, Jake and the Ops Officer round the little Sony hand-held to go through them and review the rules of engagement. I wanted to make a particular point about our rounds.

Jake and Jon knew by now that we hadn’t fired into the compound, but I still felt it was important to show them exactly what I’d seen.

All weapon engagements seemed to play out in slow motion to me. I’d been watching gun tapes over and over since 2003. I no longer tried to see if rounds were hitting. I looked at where the line of sight was moving, to see if the range was stable. I looked at all the tiny little things that others didn’t take in because they were too focused on the excitement of targets exploding inside the crosshairs.

On the tiny 4x3-inch screen we saw exactly what we had described to the CO. I pressed the slow motion button as soon as I saw the counter change from 300 to 299. Simon had been recording his TADS image and we were looking at what we’d seen in the Apache, only frame by frame. The round eventually struck and exploded. I let it continue frame by frame for all five rounds.

You couldn’t see the individual rounds, just their heat swirls – and then the explosions. They were separated by 1/10th of a second. It took half a second for all five rounds to impact on the building. Not one of them landed inside the compound.

‘Look at the splash here.’ I repeated the film of the rounds hitting the roof. There was a small hole where each of the shaped charges had gone clean through. ‘Hardly anything,’ I said. ‘But look where this one hit the wall. An impressive splash, but it didn’t penetrate the side of the building.’

I pressed fast-forward and there was a wisp of smoke through the holes in the roof, but nothing from the holes in the walls. Smoke billowed from windows and doors nearby.

‘When you fire at something look at the effect it’s having; only then will you know if your weapons are—’

The canvas curtain parted and the Chinook boys rushed into the Ops tent. They’d just had a call out. They came over to join us at the bird table. The flight had been saved from me rewinding once again.

The Ops Officer ran in from next door, shaking his head. Dickie Bonn was normally so cool I wondered whether he had a pulse. But normal had flown out of the window. ‘It’s Now Zad,’ he said.

The Chinook boys stared at him in disbelief. On their last outing, the Taliban had only missed them by a whisker. They didn’t let it show, but they must have been shitting themselves.

‘Is there a time frame?’ one of the pilots asked.

‘We don’t know that yet.’

Nichol Benzie, on a navy exchange with the RAF, looked at us and grinned ruefully. ‘Here we go again.’

We knew them all by name and got on well, but didn’t really socialise. Everyone pretty much kept themselves to themselves. We’d have a bit of banter when we saw them at Ops, but they tended to stay in their tent and we stayed in ours, even though they were right next to each other.

Partly, we were ashamed to invite them over. The Army Air Corps had a TV set with an old PlayStation underneath, a few books and a couple of magazines; they had stereos, a widescreen surround sound TV, Xbox, Playstations and every game going. We had camp cots lashed together; they had a real sofa. We had cots; they had beds. We had a cool box; they had a fridge. When it came to home comforts, the RAF didn’t fuck around.

We occasionally sat together at mealtimes, but not often. Maybe we didn’t want to intrude. They were at the pointy end of the stick. They got shot at and shot up on a daily basis. There was no slack with them. When they chilled out, we left them to it.

Their mission now, Dickie said, was to take two Chinook loads of troops and ammunition into the DC. Ours was to protect them.

The critical question for us both was when? Could we do it at a time of our choosing? If so, how were we going to skin the cat? Was there a way of catching them on the hop?

The question we were asking ourselves was how were we going to protect them? The short answer was that we couldn’t. We bluffed it last time and the mortars had missed them by no more than a minute.

We were now going to have to search every inch of Now Zad for a mortar base plate, a dish just a metre across with a tube sticking out of it. Thermal was no good: the tube wouldn’t be hot until they fired it, and it was too late by then. We were better off zooming in with a camera, but even then, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were just too many warren-like streets and backyards and alleys.

Where was the obvious place for a firing point? It couldn’t be right on top of the Shrine – that was too close. If they took it away into the Green Zone, we had no chance. They could be sitting under a piece of hessian, listening in to our radios. When they heard a crackle, they’d throw off the cover, fire one off, and throw it back over.

We could do prophylactic firing to try to provoke a response, but we weren’t allowed to fire at targets we hadn’t seen threaten us. We could only fire into empty desert or somewhere we knew for sure was safe.

Nichol shrugged. ‘Right, then, how are we going to do this?’

We could dump the guys in the desert a good distance from Now Zad, and let them make their way in. But they’d have to lug tons of ammunition. They could take vehicles out, but in doing so they’d alert the Taliban to their destination. The Taliban would have bags of time to get into the new firing points and hose the lads to pieces when they tried to get back to the DC.

The only viable option was to land close to the DC. And when it came to LSs, the only remaining option was south-west of the base, protected by friendly fire from the Shrine.

The one thing we knew for sure was that we couldn’t go in daylight again. The Taliban had been fed the Chinooks’ exact grid last time round, and only missed them by seconds. We’d even had a close shave at dusk.

We grabbed the Intelligence Officer. Jerry had catalogued every firing position and every time the Taliban had engaged the DC.

‘When exactly does the firing kick off in Now Zad?’

‘About half an hour after total darkness.’

‘If you were the enemy, and you were trying to set up a firing position into the DC, where would you choose?’

‘Except for today, their firing positions have nearly always been from the north through north-east to the east,’ Jerry said. ‘Never too far out; just around the main town, where they know we can’t follow up.’

‘Okay, so if you’re firing from the north or north-east, how and when are you going to do it?’

‘Taking down an aircraft is still their number one goal. They’ll have weapons in place throughout the day. They’ll only move them if they think you’re not coming. I reckon they’ll drop their weapons just after dusk, as they shift their attention back to harassing the boys on the ground.

‘It’s all part of the same agenda. They want to grind them down, in the hope of ramping up the casualty rate. They know that if they succeed, you guys will have to come in, giving them the opportunity to shoot you down.

’They won’t hang around with a weapon system set up,’ Jerry said. ‘They maintain sporadic fire 24/7, but only start hammering the DC after dark. They’re unlikely to move into the town during daylight because they know they’ll be spotted from above, especially with a heavy weapon.’

The penny dropped. They must have assumed that by knocking out six watchtowers – we found out about the other two sangars in the debrief – and lobbing over all those grenades, we must have taken loads of casualties. As it turned out, none of them were serious enough to warrant a casevac.

They’d have been waiting to ambush us all day long, and would expect us again before it got too dark.

The two best times to attack were dawn and dusk. It wasn’t quite day, it wasn’t quite night. Dusk was a great time for a drop off, but also for escaping after an ambush. The eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the darkness so errors in judging distance and recognition were rife. The crews were safer because the Taliban would struggle to pinpoint their exact location when they were at their most vulnerable – the thirty seconds to a minute on the ground. But it was also prime time for an ambush; perfect conditions for having a shot and then melting away because any follow-up would be hampered by darkness. Or so they might think.

We had a FLIR system that didn’t care whether it was day or night. As dusk fell and they moved back from their mortar or gun emplacement to the DC, the Taliban would be our perfect quarry.

Once we failed to show up for our wounded after last light, they’d assume none was critical enough to be flown out. They’d pick up their heavy weapons and carry on smashing away at the DC, as they had the last three nights on the trot.

All the combat indicators over the last few weeks signalled that they were determined to take Now Zad before the infidels changed the rules and brought in reinforcements.

We’d already tried a dusk drop off and now knew that dawn could be too late, so agreed that we’d let last light go then get down on the ground twenty minutes into darkness, when the enemy were most likely to be on the move. We’d get in and out after they’d dismantled their heavy weapons and before they’d set them back up again. A short window of opportunity – but the only one we had.

So we knew when. We just had to decide how.

The Apaches would have to sit back. There was no point in flying ahead of the Chinooks to look for weapons; we might as well use a loud hailer to warn them of their impending arrival. We’d done the arrive-and-cause-a-deception-then-bring-in-the-Chinooks-at-the-last-minute plan; the Taliban weren’t about to fall for it twice. And they knew the Apaches would only be on station a couple of hours. They’d be set, ready to fire the mortar the minute the Chinooks arrived.

Best to let the Chinooks go in first; at least they’d have no warning. The Chinooks needed to be in, drop them off and pull pitch within thirty seconds. The troops would literally have to hit the ground running.

One major worry was that the Taliban had knocked out all the generators in Now Zad; it was deathly quiet. The Chinook was not exactly stealthy, and your hearing is better at night. If they thundered across the desert as they normally did the game would immediately be up. The best way of getting them in quietly was to screen their noise behind the mountains.

The plan was coming together. As the Chinooks crept in from the west and hit the deck twenty minutes after dark, we’d punch up straight and high. Hopefully they’d be in and out before the Taliban clocked on. If they hit a Chinook, we’d lay down fire so the troops and downed crew could extract into the DC. We had to try to bolster the District Centre, whatever it took. There was no alternative. We all agreed it was our best chance of getting in and out alive.

Now we had to push it past the CO 3 Para, Lieutenant Colonel Tootal.

Dickie Bonn was away for the best part of an hour.

‘It wasn’t easy,’ he said. ‘He wants his men in there right now. He’s worried about another attack. But he appreciates our plan, and it’s a Go.’

We aimed to set off forty minutes before last light and take a wide, circuitous route. We’d fly up through the mountains, where we knew there were no occupied villages. We’d go out to the west, up to the north, and approach Now Zad from behind the ridgeline.

Then we’d come in low level, limiting the run-in so the Chinooks could only be heard on the final two klicks. Keeping close to the ground, sheltered by the Shrine, would muffle some of the noise. We reckoned they could be at the LS by the time they were heard. In the meantime, we prayed for a north-easterly wind…

As they thumped down onto the ground we would climb and separate, one going right, one left. If they landed bang on plan, twenty minutes after dusk, it would just have become pitch-black.

Plan set. Route set. We programmed it into our equipment. We were ready.

The Chinooks would fly ahead of us, as normal, on Night Vision Goggles. We would remain low too, sitting back about one kilometre so we could react to any ground fire.

No time for dinner again. Jon brought out the chocolate bars and we walked back to our aircraft.

Jon realised it must have been at least an hour since we last took the mickey out of Jake.

‘I hope your new baby boy doesn’t join the Paras, Jake. That would be most unfortunate.’

‘And why might that be, Jon?’ Jake’s grin told us he knew this was the price he had to pay for munching on one of Jon’s choccy bars.

‘He’d be called Paraffin.’

Jon always managed to lighten the mood when things were getting fraught.

We took off exactly forty minutes before last light on a completely silent departure. We wanted to give the Taliban as little to chew on as possible.