Man Down

by Nathan Burrows

  ‘Okay then,’ Davies said, clapping his hands together. ‘Let’s Foxtrot Oscar.’ He jumped down off the icebox and made his way into the front of the cab. Behind him, the two teams both scrambled off to get their equipment.

  Davies settled into the right front seat, clipping himself into the various bits of equipment. He shoved the helmet onto his head and pressed the radio toggle to speak to the Ops Room.

  ‘Ops, this is Sandman 34,’ Davies said as Taff sorted his stuff out in the left-hand co-pilot’s seat.

  ‘Sandman 34, this is Ops. Send,’ he heard the Ops Room reply.

  ‘Ops, Sandman 34 requesting clearance to depart on medevac.’ There was a pause on the other end. Davies figured that there was now a frantic conversation going on between the Ops Officers. After thirty seconds or so, a reply came back.

  ‘Negative, Sandman 34. Wind up and wait out,’ the disembodied voice in his head said. Davies turned to Taff.

  ‘Let’s start up and wait for clearance, Taff,’ he said. Davies looked over his left shoulder and could see the teams in the back were getting back on, loaded down with equipment. Kinkers was standing at the ramp supervising them as they climbed on board. As Davies said ‘helmets’ into the intercom, he saw Kinkers look up towards the cockpit and wave.

  Davies started his pre-flight checks. He checked the inverter, made sure that he had the correct numbers set on the caution advisory panel. He heard the intercom click, and the words ‘Clear power unit’ from Kinkers in the back.

  ‘Roger that,’ Davies replied. He flipped the switch to release fuel into the engines, counting to five under his breath, and hit the button that was helpfully marked ‘start’. Above and behind him, he heard the clicking of the auxiliary power unit closely followed by a reassuring tone in his ears that told him all was well. Davies ran through the rest of the checks as quickly as he could, until within a few minutes both engines were started and they were good to go.

  ‘Ops, this is Sandman 34,’ Davies said into his radio. ‘Permission to go please.’

  ‘Sandman 34, this is Ops. Negative, negative. Wait out.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Davies said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Sandman 34, say again,’ the Ops Room asked.

  ‘Ops, this is Sandman 34, Thanks for clearance. Bad line though, will do a comms check when we’re in the air.’ Davies flexed his fingers on the cyclic between his legs.

  To his left, Taff started laughing before reaching across Davies’s lap and flipping the toggle of the external radio to the ‘OFF’ position.

  ‘I’ll get on the blower and let the chaps on the ground know we’re coming in, will I?’ Taff asked.

  ‘Sounds like a plan to me,’ Davies replied with a grim smile. He settled his hands into their familiar position and pulled the stick back. ‘3-2-1, lifting.’

  Sergeant Hawkins sat in the lead WMIK of the hastily organised convoy that was sitting behind the heavy metal doors at the front of the compound and drummed his fingers on the dashboard. He looked up and watched the Apache gunship lazily circling a few hundred feet above them like a large, very angry wasp.

  A few minutes ago, he’d heard a muffled ‘crump’ as the Apache put a missile into the WMIK that they’d had to leave behind. Just before this, he’d heard a short burst from its machine gun, probably to get the local kids and scallys away from the vehicle before it was ‘denied’ permanently. There was no point in giving the Taliban more weapons.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on, mate?’ Hawkins asked the driver next to him who just shrugged his shoulders in reply. Their mission was fairly straightforward as far as Hawkins was concerned. Get to the LZ, secure it with the help of the Apache, and get the casualties onto the TRT Chinook that was inbound. ‘They are coming, aren’t they?’

  Hawkins jumped as the doors in front of them started to open, and the Land Rover jolted forwards. He grabbed the general-purpose machine gun that was mounted on the front of the vehicle, and from the shadows moving across his peripheral vision he could tell that the soldier manning the fifty-calibre machine gun behind him had done the same thing.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Hawkins muttered. ‘Come and have a fucking go.’

  The convoy moved slowly out of the gates of the compound, quickly picking up speed as they got onto the road outside. The Apache had dropped right down to about a hundred feet above them to protect the four vehicles as they made their way to the secondary LZ a few minutes’ drive away. Around him, Hawkins could see young men on mobiles, almost certainly ‘dicking’ them as they left the base. The local Taliban would know that they were on the move.

  The gunship above them moved in front of the convoy to circle above the LZ as the vehicles approached. Hawkins was fairly sure that the Taliban wouldn’t have a pop while the helicopter was overhead. The insurgents weren’t afraid of a scrap, as the casualties in the vehicles behind him knew only too well, but the locals weren’t stupid. Taking on an Apache gunship with a few AK-47s and RPGs was like taking a banana to a gunfight, let alone a knife.

  Hawkins could see the secondary LZ a few hundred metres in front of them, already protected by a Gurkha patrol. With an Apache overhead and a bunch of Gurkhas on the ground, the LZ was about as safe as it could be. His vehicle moved into position, taking up one of the flanks, and Hawkins climbed out of the WMIK to watch as the other vehicles in the convoy took up similar positions to defend the area.

  As they approached the landing site, Davies listened as the Apache pilot spoke with the ground troops — call sign ‘Widow’ — over the secure radio.

  ‘Widow 23, this is Ugly 16,’ the pilot said.

  ‘Ugly 16, this is Widow 23. Send, over,’ was the reply from the ground.

  ‘Widow 23, I’m nearly bingo on fuel. Ugly 19 is en route to take over. I have visual on Sandman 34 to the east. Confirm that the landing site is secure and cold?’

  ‘Ugly 16, I can confirm that the landing site is cold.’ There was a brief pause over the airwaves.

  ‘Sandman 34, did you get that?’ the Apache pilot asked. Davies reached for the switch of his radio and flicked it twice in quick succession to let them know that he had got the message, before toggling back to the internal intercom.

  ‘Right then chaps, we’re a couple of minutes out. We have an Apache overhead, but he’s almost out of juice. There’s another Ugly on the way to replace him, though.’ Davies flicked his eyes left and right, up and down, making sure that his helicopter was where he thought it was in relation to the ground before continuing. ‘The LZ is secure, but we’re not hanging about when we get there. I’m going to have to come in slowly as we’re only on visuals.’ Davies hauled the helicopter in a wide left-hand arc to line them up for the approach. As he did so, the departing Apache flew past on their right-hand side, the pilot raising a hand as he went past. Davies didn’t return the greeting but concentrated instead on getting ready for the landing. Below him, he could see several WMIKs surrounding the landing site and a fair few soldiers on the ground.

  ‘There’s a lot of guys on the ground already. I can’t see the point in getting FP out and down, so if everyone’s happy we’ll just send the medics out to get the casualties. Kinkers, could you confirm with them and let me know?’

  Davies pulled on the collective and cyclic controls, flaring the aircraft to bring the speed down. He levelled the nose so that the helicopter was ready for the landing. ‘In the gate,’ he said.

  ‘Seventy-five feet, twenty-five knots in the gate,’ Taff said from the co-pilot’s seat.

  ‘Medics only, good to go,’ Kinkers barked over the intercom from the rear of the helicopter.

  ‘Fifty feet,’ Taff said. Davies’ hand automatically went to the RADALT to silence the alarm, before he remembered that it wasn’t working.

  ‘Clear below, forty,’ Kinkers said over the intercom. ‘Dust cloud building, thirty, twenty, at the ramp.’ Sweat was pouring down Davies’ forehead, but the last thing he wanted to do was not have both hands on the c
ontrols. He stared at the instrument panels in front of him, even though the most important one wasn’t working as Kinkers’s voice droned in his ears. ‘Front door, four, three, two, one, wheels on.’

  Davies glanced out of the front window to try to get an idea of whether or not he was too high to touch down, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the dust swirling around the Plexiglass screen. With a silent prayer that Kinkers was correct, he touched the helicopter to the ground.

  ‘Ramp down,’ Kinkers said a second later. ‘Nicely done, boss.’

  Sergeant Hawkins watched as the large Chinook landed a few hundred yards in front of him. Two figures leapt from the ramp at the back, one of them with a stretcher, and looked frantically around through the dust cloud. He stood up in the front of the WMIK and waved his arms at them, noticing at the same time that the soldier in the driver’s seat was flashing the headlights. Both medics started running towards them, hampered by the large rucksacks they both had on their backs.

  Hawkins climbed out of the WMIK and went to the back of the vehicle where Private Mitchell was lying on a stretcher, his wounds hastily patched up by the platoon house medic. Hawkins reached into the Land Rover and squeezed Mitchell’s shoulder.

  ‘TRT’s here, mate,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’ Private Mitchell opened his eyes and looked at Hawkins with bloodshot eyes. The large ‘M’ on his forehead told Hawkins that the medic had dosed him up with some morphine, and although he was no expert, Hawkins thought that from the state of Mitchell’s eyes the medic had been quite generous with it. Fair play to the medic, Hawkins thought as he looked at the other two casualties sitting in the back of the Land Rover. They both looked back at him with looks of relief on their faces. Hawkins gave them both a brief smile before he turned away and walked back to the front of the vehicle. He didn’t bother going to the WMIK behind them. The only person in it was Lance Corporal Ruffles and he didn’t need any reassurance inside his body bag.

  Reaching into the passenger seat footwell, Hawkins grabbed his rifle and started towards the helicopter. There was an irrigation ditch in front of them which was the main reason why the vehicle couldn’t take the casualties any closer to the landing site — it was the secondary landing site for many reasons, and the ditches surrounding it were one of them. Looking over at the medics, who were still running despite the heat, he saw with horror a spiralling column of smoke emerge from some trees behind the Chinook and head straight towards it.

  25

  In the front of the helicopter, Davies saw the same column of smoke as Hawkins. It was preceded by a flash to the right, which is what had caught Davies’s attention in the first place.

  ‘RPG right, RPG, fuck!’ he shouted as he snatched at the collective and pulled it towards his groin as hard as he could. The engines screamed in complaint but did their job as the aircraft jolted upwards and into the air. The second that they were off the ground he shoved the collective hard over to his right with his left hand, sending the helicopter into a hard bank. At the same time, he pushed both throttles forward with his other hand to give the absolute maximum amount of power to both engines. The helicopter jarred itself over to the right-hand side, almost reaching ninety degrees while both rotor blades spun only feet from the ground before he corrected the bank and adjusted the cyclic to push them upwards into the sky.

  ‘Smoke trail below,’ Davies heard Kinkers on the intercom. ‘Fuck me, that was close,’ the loadie continued.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ Davies breathed deeply a couple of times before looking across at his co-pilot, Taff. ‘Fucking hell. Bastards. Fucking bastards.’ Davies took another deep breath before blowing it through his cheeks.

  ‘Well, it’s a good job I’m not offended by bad language, Davies,’ Taff replied in a laconic voice as the helicopter climbed rapidly to the safety of the sky.

  Lizzie was running across the landing site to the vehicle with the casualties, closely followed by Adams, when they were enveloped by a dust cloud. She turned and looked over her shoulder as the helicopter lifted off and banked sharply. For a second, she thought it was going to carry on banking until gravity took over and it all went horribly wrong, but at the last minute, the Chinook corrected and started climbing.

  ‘Where the hell are they going?’ Lizzie shouted over the noise of the helicopter, slowing down to a walk. She looked at Adams, who had a face like a beetroot from trying to run over the rough ground in the heat. He slowed down as he reached her, breathing hard.

  ‘Keep. Fucking. Going,’ Adams gasped, pushing Lizzie in the chest. ‘RPG. Trees.’ Any reticence that Lizzie had soon disappeared as she heard sharp cracks of gunfire from somewhere close by. She broke into a run and started sprinting towards the vehicles at the edge of the landing site.

  ‘Ditch!’ she heard Adams shout behind her. ‘Get in the fucking ditch.’ Looking ahead, she could see a shallow ditch in front of the vehicle they were headed towards. There were soldiers in the Land Rover, one of them swinging the machine gun on the back around to face towards them.

  As Lizzie got to within a couple of feet of the ditch, which was deeper than it had looked from a few feet away, she felt Adams shove her hard in the small of her back. Losing her footing, she stumbled, but just before she got to the edge of the ditch the rucksack on her back was violently jolted to one side. Adams must have grabbed it so that he could yank her into cover.

  Lizzie landed face first in the tepid water at the bottom of the ditch and was then nearly crushed by Adams flying over the top of the lip, knocking the wind out of her. Just above them, she could hear the fifty-calibre machine gun on the back of the WMIK delivering the good news to someone, hopefully the bad guys. Lizzie and Adams untangled themselves from each other until they were sitting on either side of the ditch, spent casings from the machine gun above them raining down and fizzing as they hit the water in the bottom of the ditch.

  She watched as Adams struggled with the straps of his rucksack and kick out at the stretcher that had somehow followed them into the ditch. He racked back the slide on his rifle to push a round into the chamber, and with his thumb checked to make sure the safety catch was still on. The last thing he needed was a negligent discharge.

  ‘Mate,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘I think we’re in the shit here.’

  ‘No kidding, you fat bastard,’ she replied over the noise of the machine gun above them. ‘They never bloody mentioned this in the Careers Office.’

  As soon as Ronald heard Davies shouting ‘RPG’, the medic grabbed the metal back of the seat with both hands. The helicopter jolted upwards and started climbing, and he could feel the rotor blades thrashing at the air. Looking towards the back of the cabin, he could see over the open ramp that the horizon was tilting as the helicopter went into a hard bank. Seconds later, a spiralling smoke trail shot across the piece of sky that he could see through the open rear of the Chinook. The helicopter kept tilting over, further than he’d ever known it do before, and for one terrifying second, Ronald thought it was going to keep banking until it was upside down.

  Sitting next to Ronald, Colonel Nick didn’t have the advantage of a headset connected to the internal radio channel. Ronald watched as the Colonel was thrown out of his seat and catapulted onto the other side of the helicopter. Ronald had a split second where he could have grabbed the Colonel’s uniform to try to stop him sliding across the floor, but if he had let go of the back of the seat, he didn’t think he would be able to hold on himself.

  Ronald’s heart pounded in his chest as he tightened his grip on the stanchion at the back of the seat, his knuckles turning white with the effort. All around him, soldiers and equipment were sliding around inside the helicopter. He hung on — helpless — until the helicopter gradually started to right itself and he felt himself starting to be pressed back into his seat as it gained altitude.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Ronald said, releasing his grip on the stanchion and flexing his fingers a couple of times to get the blood back into them. The helicopter w
as pretty much level and climbing hard now, so he jumped out of his seat and went across to where Colonel Nick was folded underneath the seats on the opposite side.

  ‘Are you okay, sir?’ Ronald shouted over the noise of the rotor blades. Colonel Nick looked up at Ronald with a dazed expression on his face. ‘Sir?’ Ronald shouted again. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘My leg,’ Colonel Nick replied. ‘I think my knee’s fucked.’ Ronald helped the doctor extricate himself from underneath the seats and watched him as he gingerly ran his hands over his left knee. A few seconds later, Colonel Nick had got to his feet. He was grimacing as he did so, but if he could stand then there was nothing broken.

  Ronald could hear the frantic conversation between the pilots in the front and the Ops Room back at Camp Bastion through his headset. They were trying to get information back to Bastion about what had just happened, but at the same time, the troops from the FOB were calling in a contact on the ground. The confusion in the voices of the Ops Officers as they tried to process the information was obvious

  Turning from Colonel Nick, Ronald surveyed the interior of the helicopter. Strewn across the floor were soldiers, equipment, weapons, and bottles of water. He unclipped the cable that linked him to the comms system and walked back down through the helicopter towards the ramp, examining the soldiers as he did so to see if there were any other injuries. As he got close to the ramp at the back of the helicopter, he saw Kinkers sitting in one of the canvas seats with a dazed expression on his face. A thin trickle of blood ran down the side of his forehead. Ronald reached out his hand and shook the loadie’s shoulder. Kinkers looked up at him, seeming to be confused for a second before he grinned and shouted at Ronald.