Hellfire

by Ed Macy

  We took off first with Jon and Nick slightly after us.

  We’d caused an almighty dust cloud. Billy screamed at me, ‘Come hard left now.’

  I threw the stick over and banked round, my head shifting to align the crosshairs. Whatever he’d seen had got him very excited very quickly.

  I saw Jon’s tail at about forty feet, disappearing into his own dust cloud. They were headed straight for the camp.

  My stomach lurched. There was a moment’s silence and then I heard Billy’s voice.

  ‘They’ve crashed,’ he said in an I-don’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing kind of way.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said. The dust suddenly became much darker. They must have gone in hard.

  We circled for a few seconds, waiting to see how bad it would be. Both of us knew better than to try to talk to them. They would speak to us if they could. But I wasn’t counting on hearing anything.

  We did two complete orbits before the dust cleared.

  ‘How the fuck did they end up like that?’ Billy asked.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I’d better see if they’re all right,’ Billy said. ‘Wildman Five Zero…Wildman Five One. Are you both okay in there?’

  No answer.

  Then a rather quiet voice came over the ether. ‘Give us a minute,’ Jon said. ‘We’re a bit shook up.’

  No shit.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Wildman Five One has had a bit of a heavy landing,’ Jon said.

  ‘How hard?’ Billy said.

  ‘Not hard enough to stop us from protecting 3 Para,’ Jon replied. ‘Five Zero is lifting’

  We watched them take off, successfully this time.

  On the route out to Now Zad Nick asked us to check the aircraft over. I flew up beside it and dropped slowly back, sliding down their right-hand side. Billy and I were looking for damaged antennas or weapons. I flew around their whole aircraft but couldn’t see a single dent.

  The boys had extracted to the east of the wadi where they were going to be pulled out by Chinooks. The extraction of 3 Para was going without a hitch until a US B1 bomber did a show of strength.

  The CO wanted to warn the Taliban against following them across the wadi and decided to let them see what he had waiting for them if they tried it on. The B1 was a huge aircraft with great big engines, designed to fly at altitude. Down here it would be a SAM magnet for any ManPAD operator.

  Jon and I were on the southern edge of the town. The B1 would fly between our positions and we couldn’t wait to see it up close.

  When it appeared, it flew over the mountains at 5,000 feet and crossed Now Zad from south to north. It passed between us with little drama until it nosed up and exposed its engines to the town. The second it opened them up to climb away I nearly shit myself.

  ‘Missile launch short range left eleven o’clock,’ Bitching Betty screamed at me.

  ‘Missile launch,’ I shouted to Jon over the radio.

  ‘Missile launch too,’ he shouted back. My mouth turned to liquid aluminium and my scrotum shrivelled.

  ‘SAMbush…’

  The second the Bitch said it, I started counting down. Flares were pouring off both sides of my Apache; my eyes were peeled, scanning the sky for streaks of smoke heading towards me.

  Five…

  I knew not to manoeuvre until after five. I could see Billy highlighted in the glow of the flares.

  ‘Widow Seven Two, this is Wildman Five One. Did you see a missile being fired at us?’

  Four…

  I was trusting in the Air Warfare Centre’s reassurance that we’d be okay, but I was fucking shitting it.

  ‘Negative.’

  Three…

  ‘Did you hear a bang over Now Zad that could be a misfired missile?’

  Two…

  ‘Negative.’

  One…

  And with that I flung the Apache onto her left side to change my profile relative to the ManPAD operator.

  Jon and I climbed, looking for smoke trails.

  Nothing.

  The Chinooks appeared on my radar and we went back to what we were supposed to be doing; we concentrated on getting the men out.

  The extraction went like clockwork from this point on, but all four of us remained very spooked.

  We were diverted to pick up a US casualty in the middle of the desert on the way back but other than that the trip was uneventful.

  On our return the lads were eager to hear how many Taliban we’d killed. The honest truth was we didn’t know and never would. I vowed from that point onwards never to count. Killing didn’t bother me; to me it was part of the job. My countrymen voted in a government. That government had sent me here under strict ROE. I complied with these ROE and that meant killing bad people. End of. I got paid at the end of the month and if I was lucky, I might even get home to spend it.

  During the debrief, it became very clear to us that we had killed whoever had been in the woods. The boss told us that the intelligence hit to the north, the one we had just shot up in the woods, was actually 3 Para’s target. We wondered why he hadn’t told us this at the time. The boss claimed he didn’t want to divert our attention from the primary task of protecting 3 Para.

  I was fuming inside. Had we been armed with that knowledge we could have got Nick to leave the area, fly over the top of 3 Para and use the TADS to observe and ID the guy from a distance. That way 3 Para would have got a bit of protection and we would have been able to report what we saw. We could have ambushed him on the CO 3 Para’s orders, instead of the target sitting in a wood waiting for me to deliver a young Paratrooper into his sights. The thing that made me most angry wasn’t his meddling from a distance; it was his complete lack of trust in our ability to do the right thing.

  We never did find out if a SAM was fired at us. I was comforted to know that Jon shared my faith in the system, even if all four of us admitted to being terrified in those few seconds.

  Billy did have a good reason for sticking with his seat, and he was quick to apologise. He knew it would only take thirty seconds to swap, but couldn’t have lived with the thought of a soldier dying if we arrived even ten seconds later.

  The boss never did thank us for saving the day; not that I expected it. The only thanks I needed was knowing that the guy 3 Para were chasing hasn’t been heard of since. One way or another, he must have ended up dead.

  SCRAMBLE

  SUNDAY, 16 JULY 2006

  Camp Bastion

  0325 hours local

  My watch alarm went off and I forced open my eyes. It felt like only minutes since I’d crashed out.

  I was shagged out, absolutely ball-bagged. We all were. We’d finished Op Augustus a couple of days before, and had been out the whole of yesterday. We hadn’t got more than a couple of hours’ sleep.

  I strapped my head torch round my wrist then pulled on some shorts and a pair of desert boots. My flying suit was at the aircraft.

  I joined the others at the Burco boiler. There wasn’t much chatter. What was there to talk about, except how completely fucked we were? I had my own coffee maker. I threw in some ground coffee Emily had posted to me, poured on boiling water and pushed down the plunger without waiting long enough.

  It was pitch-black outside, but as warm as an English summer’s day. You could wander about in no more than a T-shirt and there was no chill to your skin. The nights were also absolutely, totally still, not a breath of wind.

  We blundered our way to the Ops room, across ditches and berms. The Chinook IRT/HRF pilots and loadies fell in alongside us. Brews in hand, everyone was quiet. We’d got to the point where we didn’t really want to wake up. We were going through the motions, following where our exhausted bodies led.

  Simon and I now flew as one pair and Jake and Jon the other, in what had become the newly constituted 2 Flight. Jake had turned up several weeks earlier following the birth of his first child, a little boy, Finn, at the end of May.

  His arrival had coincid
ed with a squabble over which flights were getting the most action. Dan’s 1 Flight and Pat’s 3 Flight had gone head to head, with 2 Flight-us-left on the sidelines. Some form of organised rotation would have sorted things out in an instant. It was all a bit ridiculous.

  Jake’s response was typically phlegmatic. ‘I don’t care how many hours I fly or how many missions I do or don’t go on,’ he’d said, when we told him the score. ‘I’m not here to indulge in a load of bitching about who gets the plum jobs and which flight is the boss’s favourite. I only care about two things: doing what we’re asked to do, to the best of our ability, and getting home safely. And now I’m ready for a brief.’

  Between then and now the Taliban had seriously raised the stakes.

  We knew they were planning a spectacular; they’d set their hearts on either taking a District Centre or shooting down a helicopter.

  Now Zad, Sangin and Musa Qa’leh were all under increasing levels of Taliban attack. Our lads were barely holding their own, and at considerable cost. The bases were grandly named District Centres-but, in fact, each held no more than a platoon, so the CO 3 Para was constantly forced to shift troops to whichever location was in most imminent danger of being overrun. We were forever chaperoning Chinooks, moving men between one DC and the next.

  A Company 3 Para had moved into Sangin on 21 June, right on the doorstep of what our most secret order believed to be the Taliban’s southern headquarters. They were ordered to hold it at all costs. They were under heavy fire morning, noon and night. The cost was high. Five British soldiers had been killed in nine days.

  Our job had been to pound the few hundred metres around the DCs pretty much 24/7. The troops on the ground were knackered, we were knackered, and the Chinook crews were two steps beyond zombie mode. They were having the toughest time of all.

  Where they’d failed in Now Zad, the Taliban were succeeding in Sangin and Musa Qa’leh. They had good fields of fire onto the DCs and were hitting and killing British troops on a regular basis.

  We were at our most vulnerable when flying casevac sorties, as the enemy well knew. The risk evaluation to the flight and medical crews on board the Chinooks was now so extreme they were only cleared to go into Sangin or Musa Qa’leh if an injured soldier would die unless he got to hospital in an hour. Now Zad was heading in the same direction. Even with the Shrine shielding the LS, we were running out of ways of getting safely in and out. The minute that happened, the troops would go without resupplies-like those holed up in Sangin and Musa Qa’leh.

  In the meantime, intelligence had picked up plenty of Icom chatter between Taliban commanders about taking a helicopter out. There were reports of at least one shoulder-launched missile and possibly an anti-aircraft gun in the area.

  We’d flown supporting missions throughout, even though the air temperature was regularly near 50°. Our operating limit of 44° Celsius was finally increased to 49° on 5 July, so at least we wouldn’t have the book thrown at us if we fucked up while flying beyond the Release To Service (RTS).

  Now Zad, Sangin and Musa Qa’leh had been under sustained Taliban attack for a month solid. Because we’d been flying our aircraft around the clock, we’d been ordered to ‘slow-fly’ them for a week or so-cut the hours right down-but that was easier said than done; it was like the Alamo out there.

  Jake glanced at his watch and groaned. ‘This timetable is killing me.’

  ‘Three and a half hours ahead of the UK?’ I croaked. ‘Where the hell did the half come from?’

  It was common sense that 3 Para were on local time: they worked with the locals. Seven in the morning was 0700 local, and bingo, breakfast was served. Fast air worked differently. A B1 bomber from Diego Garcia, a Nimrod from Lossiemouth, an F15 from a ship in the Arabian Gulf and a pair of Apaches from Bastion could all be working together, so we all worked on GMT. To airborne assets there was no 0700 local; it was 0330 GMT and breakfast arrived in the middle of the night.

  We still had to integrate with ground units, of course, so 0330 local was midnight to us, and that was when the codes changed and all the frequencies flipped over. It was barking mad. The codes changed, we were briefed, and we went back to bed again. It made sense that the changeovers took place at the quietest time; most attacks were during the day, it was heavy on the aircraft, and it was hot. But months passed before some bright spark worked out we could simply change over at the 1900 evening brief and everyone could get a solid night’s sleep.

  However, for now, this was just the way it was.

  The Ops tent was lit up like Wembley Stadium. We stumbled in and gathered round the map table. I was starting to wake up.

  One of the Chinook boys checked the weather computer and came back with the forecast min and max temperatures, wind speed and direction. It was going to be red hot, a ten knot westerly blowing dust.

  Kenny, one of our watchkeepers, told us what had happened in-theatre over the last twenty-four hours. ‘Now Zad’s being fired at again regularly. Half an hour after last light, the rounds started once more.’

  The Taliban waited till it was dark, extracted their weapons from wherever they hid them, set them up, and started firing into the base. Half an hour of mortars and rockets then they’d stop. They knew our reaction times. They’d wait another hour or so then start again. Ken said Now Zad was also receiving accurate fire from a sangar that they were calling the Turret.

  Then came briefs on Kajaki, Musa Qa’leh, Sangin, FOB Robinson and Gereshk. It always followed the same order-clockwise around the DCs and Forward Operating Bases-ending up at Helmand’s HQ in Lashkar Gah. We learned what had been happening to them physically on the ground, the routes, callsigns and timings of any patrols due out.

  We then went on to the J2; intelligence. Jerry, our IntO, gave us his interpretation of any reports that had come through.

  We were taking over IRT/HRF tonight. Jake and Jon were the IRT, callsign Wildman Five Zero. Simon and I were HRF, Wildman Five One; he and I were qualified in both seats and swapped regularly to keep up our flying and shooting skills. For this duty Simon would be in the front, I’d be in the back.

  Brief over, it was always the same routine on a changeover night. We had to load up the aircraft and check them over. Brew recharged, the four of us wandered down to the aircraft. It was still pitch-black, and there wasn’t a single light out towards the flight line because it fucked with our night vision goggles (NVG).

  The Milky Way arced in front of me, a swathe of cosmic confetti. I stared open-mouthed at Orion’s Belt and every one of the Seven Sisters, stars I’d never seen with the naked eye before. A couple of satellites drifted across the heavens. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

  I suddenly felt achingly lonely, and a long way from home. I’d have given anything at that precise moment to have been lying on my back with Emily and the kids, heads touching, gazing up at the night sky, making up our own star signs from the shapes we could see.

  A stumble on a rock brought me back down to earth, literally. I was on my knees, mouth full of dust, vaguely aware of a tired chortle from Simon, Jon and Jake somewhere nearby.

  A few minutes down a rough track brought us to the hangar. Only the duty technician was awake; all the rest were sound asleep in various odd corners. They worked longer hours than we did, with precious few breaks. They’d only just finished and would be up in a couple of hours, so we crept past them like cat burglars.

  We headed for our F700 books and checked how many flying hours we had available, any new restrictions or limitations, and what faults the Apache was carrying.

  I signed the aircraft out. It was now on my flick.

  I placed my most recent letter from Emily in the drawer of my locker. I sanitised myself, searching every pocket for anything I shouldn’t be carrying. I took out my NVG-compatible torch. It took two runs to get all my kit to the aircraft.

  The HRF aircraft was always in the second bay-Arming Bay Two-but I still checked the tail with my torch to make sure it was ZJ227. T
he IRT cab sat to our left in Arming Bay One; it saved time and confusion on a scramble.

  I took the starboard side and Simon took the port as we walked around the fuselage. The inspection was essentially what Scottie had taught me back at Middle Wallop, but now, instead of just noting there was a gun under the chin of my chariot, I inspected it carefully-that it was clean, it moved okay, the electrical connections were made, and most important of all, that it had big, dark yellow-banded HEDP cannon rounds leading down the feed chute.

  The Hellfire missiles always impressed me. The seeker on the front was a work of art; I could see the precision engineering through the glass I polished with my sweat-rag. ‘AGM-114K’ was stencilled in bright yellow down the side of each. I made sure they were securely latched down before moving on to the rocket launchers, checking that their black noses were securely in place. I shone my torch down each tube. There were twelve HEISAP rockets, with their tiny but unmistakable six-spoked silver tips, and seven Flechettes, which just had a plain nosecone to protect the darts. All the blast paddles were down at the back of the launcher. The rockets were held securely in place, electrical contacts made. The Hellfire’s strakes-that enabled it to climb, turn and dive-all moved freely.

  I lifted the little triangular panel behind the APU to the rear of the starboard engine and checked the pressure. I unclipped the eighteen-inch pipe, stuck it onto the spigot and gave it about fifty pumps, adding more pressure to the accumulator. I wanted the needle deep in the green. Unlike other aircraft, the Apache started on air pressure; it didn’t need an external electrical source. No matter where we were in the world, you could start this aircraft. I replaced the pipe in its bracket and closed the panel.

  I dropped to my knees and opened the bottom hatch, which we called the boot. I always had my kit set in the same order-chest webbing on the bottom, flak jacket next and battle bowler perched on the top-with a bungee stretched over the lot so it stayed exactly where I wanted it. If we crashed behind enemy lines, I’d go straight under the wing, wrench open the boot and cut the bungee. I’d remove my escape jacket, don the helmet, flak jacket, webbing and replace the escape jacket over the top. Then I’d be off.