Hellfire

by Ed Macy

  We ploughed on at altitude until a pale strip appeared hazily on the horizon. As I peered at it, the outline of a sprawling city began to emerge.

  I checked the navigation page on my MPD. Lashkar Gah: the first stop on my cook’s tour of Afghanistan.

  The Chinook’s nose dropped sharply. Jon and I eased our Apaches left and right to take up station above and to each side of it as it swooped low over the desert towards the base nestled in the north-east quadrant of the city.

  All the bases in Afghanistan were programmed into our computer and with a punch of a button the crosshairs in my monocle shot away to rest squarely over the one at Lashkar Gah.

  The cueing dots directed me to look down and to my right and, as if by magic, there it was in my line of sight: a large compound filled with two-storey buildings surrounded by a fortified wall with sangars built into it as watchtowers.

  Except for the dust and the heat haze it didn’t look a whole lot different from some of the set-ups I’d overflown in Northern Ireland.

  Even from two miles away, I could see the helicopter landing strip (HLS). The Chinook was bombing towards it at full-throttle.

  I checked what Billy could see with the TADS. Bisecting the screen, pointing like an arrow towards the army base, there was a long straight street, one hundred metres wide and a kilometre in length. Leading off it were little alleyways and housing blocks. With the DTV camera in the TADS on zoom, it was as if we were only twenty-five metres away from the teeming throng of people on bikes, women with pots on their heads, kids running about, trucks and mopeds grinding along in low gear, dogs nipping at their wheels. It was all happening in Lashkar Gah.

  The Chinook suddenly cut into the bottom of the picture. In a remarkable piece of flying, the pilot took it straight down the street. I would have expected the women and the kids and the dogs to have scattered, but none did, used as they were, perhaps, to a generation of machines that had brought conflict to their country.

  At the last second, the Chinook pulled up its nose, bled off speed, dropped over the wall and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  We started to wheel over the city, keeping our eyes peeled, but didn’t have to wait long. Less than twenty seconds after it had vanished there was a ‘click-click’ on the radio-the only signal we would receive from the CH47 boys on the Chinook flight-deck, and the Cow suddenly emerged out of the muck. Batting low over the rooftops, it pulled up clear of the small arms belt. We crossed into the Green Zone as soon as it resumed station alongside us.

  The strip of fertile land was irrigated by the Helmand River, glistening through the trees below us. Around two kilometres across at its widest point, its lush foliage provided plenty of cover, not just for roaming Taliban units, but for anti-aircraft guns and ManPADS that could shoot us down.

  We passed on into the dusty air above a parched, sand-coloured desert that stretched south, west and north as far as I could see.

  ‘Twelve o’clock, fifteen kilometres, Camp Bastion,’ Billy said.

  I peered out of the cockpit and saw nothing except for tyre-tracks criss-crossing the barren wastes below us. Billy still had the TADS set to DTV zoom and I could see Bastion starting to take shape in black and white on the screen. First some tunnel-type tents in the south-east corner of the base, then other features sprang into view: the berm bulldozed up around the perimeter, the sangars with their tin roofs and sandbag fortifications and numerous vehicle parks brimming with Land Rovers and various types of APCs. A Chinook sat at the northern edge, blades milling, on one of two square pads that marked out the HLS.

  There were two stationary Apaches on the other pad. The HLS was tiny compared to the luxurious concrete-lined complex we’d become used to at KAF. Technically, we were supposed to be able to fit four Apaches at a pinch on one pad, but I wondered, from up here how that would be possible. I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Hardwood Two One, the second Chinook, lifted off its square. When it popped out of its own dust cloud, I could see its underslung load: a bunch of crates in a low-hanging net. The Chinook hugged the ground for several hundred metres then rose to meet us in a zoom climb.

  As soon as we RV’d, we set course to the north and our next destination: Now Zad.

  The two Chinooks flew in formation about a thousand metres apart. Billy and I took up station above and around two kilometres behind and to the left of them; Jon and Simon did the same to their right.

  We could see the Chinooks from our vantage point, and more importantly the ground beneath and behind them. Our primary concern was a SAM launch. Unlike us, the Chinooks didn’t always have an integrated defensive aids suite. If the Taliban did fire on them, they’d have to rely on the good old Mark 1 Eyeball-ours as well as theirs-to spot the launch plume. After that, it would be down to good judgement and their ‘pippers’, hand-held controllers like the ones I’d seen on the C-130 flight from Kabul to KAF, to launch flares to seduce the missile away from the aircraft.

  The only place where the threat was deemed at all likely on this segment of our journey was the point at which we crossed Highway Zero One, which looped around most of Afghanistan. You never quite knew who was going to be on the road as you roared across it-on this occasion we were fortunate; it was empty-and we always treated it with respect.

  Shortly afterwards I saw a pockmarked town, smaller than Lashkar Gah. Surrounded by hills and mountains Now Zad sat in a basin, with a rough road running north-south for around 500 metres through its centre.

  Houses spread back for 300 metres on either side of this road, with smaller streets and alleyways running east-west. The place looked medieval in its chaos. The houses were ramshackle and built to no discernible pattern, the majority constructed on one or two levels, with access to the flat roofs via a staircase from within. The roofs of the handful of three-storey buildings gave the Taliban some excellent fields of fire direct into the District Centre.

  The DC was located to the west of the potholed main street. It had been a police station and its compound had recently come under some very heavy fire. Surrounded by a high wall that was still remarkably intact, it had a big metal gate at the front and a sandbagged watchtower turret at each corner, manned by sentries round the clock.

  Billy told me that forty-one Paras were stationed there and that the threat level was judged to be so high that they were in ‘lockdown’-they went nowhere except to collect ammo and provisions from their Chinook replen flights using their quad-bikes and WMIK all-terrain vehicles-stripped down Land Rovers fitted with a Weapons Mounted Installation Kit that allowed a GPMG and a .50 cal to hang from its frame.

  All the inhabitants to the west of the road were friendly towards the Brits and had a good relationship with us. Everyone to the east had taken to their heels as the Taliban moved in.

  A few hundred metres to the south-west, just outside and a couple of hundred feet above the town perimeter, was a hill, easily identifiable from the air, occupied by the ANP and known to us as ‘the Shrine’ because the slope facing Now Zad was a burial ground, full of fluttering flags and streamers.

  If the Shrine went down, Now Zad would too. From here, the ANP and a few British troops kept a watchful eye on the area and directed fire out of the DC onto the Taliban. The DC was too small to accept a Chinook within its compound, so flights landed to the south-west of the Shrine, under its garrison’s protective gaze but out of sight of the town.

  The landing site (LS) was approached across flat desert and through a wide opening in the mountains. The town extended for a further 500 metres north-west of the DC, and was occupied mainly by Afghans intent on living a normal life.

  ‘They bring no bother to this area,’ Billy said, ‘so we try to patrol out that far to reassure them we’re friends.’

  The town stopped abruptly at the western edge of the built-up area and turned to desert. Two kilometres further on, steep hills rose to form the edge of the Now Zad basin.

  The dodgy area of town stretched a few hundred metres east of th
e main road before entering a small wadi, used as a route out through the Green Zone, filled with orchards, crop-fields and tree-lined groves and bordered by a huge mountain ridge, only a few hundred metres wide, but climbing a thousand feet above Now Zad and stretching north as far as the eye could see.

  The so-called Green Zones were christened by the Russians in the late seventies. Southern Afghanistan was not naturally fertile but the mountains were so high they generated their own microclimates. Clouds often obscured the tops of the ranges and produced rivers that meandered during the summer months and thundered down in winter. The Helmand was the largest of these, stretching for hundreds of miles through the southern deserts.

  The Afghans had mastered irrigation, and the river banks were lined by fields that spread back from ten metres to a couple of kilometres on each side.

  The Taliban lived in and where possible fought from the Green Zones. They didn’t have the numbers, equipment, weapons, logistics or support with which to do so in the open.

  The richly fertile area provided a latticework of concealed approaches and escape routes. It was so dense in some areas that you could barely see thirty metres. They built hides and underground tunnels, disguising the entrances so they couldn’t be seen from the ground or air, and the irrigation system, channelling water from field to field, made their movements virtually impossible to detect. In many places, the only way through was on foot. The soft-earthed labyrinth was often inaccessible to tanks, APCs and vehicles of any description.

  The Taliban didn’t want us anywhere near Now Zad, and saw the DC as a big threat. The Paras had come under intense fire, morning, noon and night the entire time they had occupied it. In the recent upsurge of violence the town had been mortared by what the threat-briefers called a ‘hard core’ of Taliban. The Green Zone on the eastern edge of the town was the place to watch; it was where they’d mounted their last attack-principally with rockets and mortars.

  Simon’s voice came over the radio. ‘Widow Seven Three, Widow Seven Three, this is Wildman Five Zero, how do you read?’

  Widow Seven Three was the JTAC who coordinated all air-to-ground activity in this area.

  With no acknowledgement from him, Simon tried again. I suddenly spotted blue smoke below. I checked Billy’s TADS image. It was coming from the grid-reference we’d been given for the LS. Billy increased the zoom and I was able to make out a couple of vehicles at the base of the Shrine-a quad-bike and a WMIK. Blue smoke meant that the LS was secure.

  The Chinooks were beating their way across the desert approaches from the south-east. Jon was already wheeling his Apache above the streets just north of the Shrine to allow Simon an unrestricted top-down view of activity in the alleyways and the compounds below. I was doing the same above the area of Green Zone to the east. The danger was a mortar strike on the LS during the few brief seconds that the Chinooks would be on the ground. My responsibility was to keep an eye on them as well as on my wingman.

  The Chinook with the underslung load disappeared in a pillar of whirling dust; the second went to land just outside this cloud and promptly disappeared as well.

  Seconds later, we heard a double-click on the radio and first one machine then the next reappeared.

  The Cows veered away to the south, keeping low, then pulled up to join us at altitude. Within moments we were back over the desert, cruising at a safe height en route to Musa Qa’leh, our last RV before heading back to Bastion.

  The Musa Qa’leh drop-off went without incident. We saw one of the Chinooks descend into a wadi to deliver a vital supply item, the identity of which was on a need-to-know basis (which meant we had no need to know), to an American patrol operating in the area, and then we turned for home.

  As we flew high over the desert towards Bastion, I thought back to the ROE brief and, for the umpteenth time since I’d heard the CO deliver it, how crazy it was.

  What if I went down in this hell-hole? How would I protect myself?

  I glanced across at my SA80. I had three magazines with thirty rounds of 5.56 mm each, and an unusually short mag packed with twenty 5.56 mm tracer rounds in case of emergency. It jutted out from my carbine in the seat frame to my right. Strapped to my right thigh, inside an Uncle Mike’s Sidekick holster, was my 9 mm pistol for which I had four magazines, thirteen rounds in each, with one inserted-ready-into the grip.

  Three days earlier, I’d visited some Para mates. In exchange for some AAC patches and badges, I’d been given two hand grenades. Needless to say, it was absolutely verboten to fly with grenades-I’d be drummed out of the corps, most likely, if they were discovered in the aircraft. But the way I saw it, they were only dangerous to those unfamiliar with them. They sat in my grab bag to my right-hand side with my spare magazines and two smoke grenades. I was out there flying against the Taliban and the rule-makers weren’t, so the grenades flew with me.

  If it ever came to my Black Hawk Down moment, the grenades would allow me to take as many of the bastards down with me as I could-my final two-fingered salute to the ROE.

  We cleared Highway Zero One and prepared for our landing at Bastion.

  The patrol commander always landed first and I saw Jon’s nose drop as he readied to take us in. I lowered the collective, ensuring that I retained a bit of power to keep the clutch from disengaging, and kept the nose up, bleeding speed. Then I lowered the nose, accelerating and jinking left and right-shades of the lessons I’d learned as a young Para when trying to shoot down drones on the range at Larkhill. I could hear Captain Mainwaring shouting at me now. It was damn difficult to hit an aircraft that was manoeuvring unpredictably…

  ‘Jon’s going to dust-out massive,’ Billy said. ‘I know it looks like he’s heading for a hardened landing site down there, Ed, but trust me, in a moment he’s going to disappear from view.’ He paused. ‘Do you want me to take this one for you?’

  I grinned. ‘I’m going to have to do this at some point. Just follow me on the controls in case I fuck up.’

  I’d already been told that landing at Bastion was a nightmare. Helicopters hated hot and high-that had been drummed into us from Lesson Number One. Add dust to the mixture and everything threatened to turn to ratshit.

  To get around this problem at Bastion, they were planning on building a hardened aircraft landing strip (HALS); a short runway, in effect, that would allow us to do rolling takeoffs and landings. Rolling takeoffs not only allowed us to get airborne with more ordnance, they also ensured we didn’t get lost in our own sandstorm.

  The trouble was, the HALS hadn’t yet been built at Bastion; instead, we had to land on a square pad-there were two of them-a raised area built from builder’s rubble that the Chinook and Apache boys had robbed from the engineers constructing the camp.

  The pads had originally been built as a vehicle park. This was all well and good, except that the omnipresent dust settled in among the rubble. Only ‘dust’ didn’t really do this stuff justice-at Bastion, apparently, it was like talcum powder, and it went fucking everywhere. The makeshift landing pad I was heading for, Billy had warned me, was barely safe to use.

  Terrific.

  ‘Billy?’

  ‘Yes, mate?’

  ‘You still there?’

  ‘Following your every move.’

  ‘Good. Just checking.’

  I continued towards the pad. I needed to carry out a ‘zero-zero’ landing. I didn’t want to end up in the hover, because I’d find myself still in the air in a dust-out and that’s where crashes begin; and I didn’t want any forward speed when I hit the ground either or I’d roll into the two Apaches that were already parked ahead of my landing spot. The only way to crack this was to fly forward and down, forward and down, in one steep smooth approach, until we banged onto the pad.

  My fears were confirmed when I saw Jon bringing his Apache into land ahead of me. One moment I could see him, the next he just vanished along with the whole pad and the two Apaches already on it. There was no room for error. If I drifted left,
I’d collide with Jon and Simon. If I drifted right, we’d hit uneven ground and roll over. If I rolled forward, I’d hit the two stationary aircraft.

  Oman had been bad, but at least it had been sand, not dust, and there’d been nothing else to hit.

  I continued towards the pad bringing back the speed with the ground 100 feet below. Billy advised me to slow down some more to allow the dust from Jon’s landing to settle.

  ‘Yeah, copied mate.’ I did as he said. Trouble was, dust was also blowing in from the two Chinooks that had landed a hundred metres or so to the south; a roiling, billowing cloud of dust, 150 feet high and hundreds of metres wide, was blowing across the camp.

  I began my zero-zero descent. The world as I knew it immediately disappeared.

  ‘Fuck me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, just trust your symbology.’

  Suddenly, through the dust, I saw the dim silhouettes of aircraft-two directly in front of me and one forward and to my left. I was bleeding speed off and dropping down towards them, forward and down, forward and down…

  ‘You’re doing good, doing good,’ Billy said. ‘Trust your symbology…’

  If I bottled it and attempted to go around again, I’d hit the aircraft in front of me. I was getting to the point of no return.

  I glanced left and saw two faces-Simon’s and Jon’s. You always watched somebody coming in to land because there was every chance it would go wrong. It wasn’t a morbid curiosity, it was just plain dangerous, and they were watching me like a pair of hawks.

  Any second now and I’d have to commit.

  ‘Stand by,’ I said. ‘Three…two…one…committed!’

  The aircraft was slowing, the ground still rising to meet me. I fought the instinct to pull power, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. I tweaked some on-just a fraction-and the dust came up. Oh God, I thought, here we go…