Eighteen-year-old Davey Graham was a Minimi-gunner, and having that drum-fed light machine gun at the cutting edge of the patrol had made perfect sense. Davey had taken point, leading 2 Platoon into the enemy terrain.
The ambush had come from out of nowhere, at five metres’ range. Davey had taken three rounds under the breastplate of his body armour, and as he’d twisted and fallen a fourth had hit him in the backside. The enemy gunman had stepped around a tree to finish Davey off, levelling an AK-47 at his head.
Before he could open fire, the soldier behind Davey had rushed forward and shot the enemy fighter twice, in the face. He’d then grabbed Davey’s body under fire, and dragged him back into the safety of the main body of troops.
Amazingly, Private Graham was still conscious as the medics worked on him. He even asked Andy, the press photographer, to shoot pictures of him as they casevac’d him out of there. Andy had one problem. As the ambush was sprung and Davey had been hit, Andy had dived on to the deck, snapping the lens off his top-notch camera.
He’d flung the broken bit of camera kit at the enemy. Then he and John, his fellow reporter, had hunkered down as the bullets and grenades, and then the 20mm strafes and the big bombs had rained down all around them. Somehow, unbelievably, everyone had got out of there alive.
Sergeant Major Peach popped a green smoke grenade, to mark the landing zone, and I cleared the Chinook in to land. The massive helicopter came swooping in, banking hard and low across the river, the unmistakeable thwoop-thwoop-thwoop of the twin rotors beating out a powerful rhythm on the air.
It took nine men to lift Davey’s makeshift stretcher, with one holding up the drip. They rushed him out to the Chinook, clambering through flooded irrigation ditches and hauling him over treacherous mudbanks. The two other injured lads had nasty shrapnel wounds, but even so they tried to refuse to leave their mates, and the battlefield. The OC had to order them on to the Chinook. He told them that for today at least their war was over. Once they’d been patched up at Camp Bastion, he’d get them straight back out to the Triangle. We got that Chinook in and out without it being hit, and the wounded en route to the best medical care a British field hospital can offer.
With the heavy in the air, I got the call from the F-15s above.
‘Widow Seven Nine, Dude One Three: low fuel, we’re bugging out. Stay safe down there.’
‘Roger. And look fellas, absolutely fucking fantastic. You saved our fat arses today, ’cause we were right in the proverbial. Top job.’
‘That’s what we’re here for, Widow Seven Nine. It’s not us who’s down there taking the hits – we’re just up above y’all.’
‘Aye, and we owe you guys a good few beers.’
‘Affirmative,’ the pilot laughed. ‘Meantime, we’ll drink a few for you at KAF.’
KAF is Kandahar Airfield, where the F-15s were based. And from that day on if ever I had an F-15 check into my ROZ, I’d always have a ‘how’re you doing’ passed down for Widow Seven Nine, from those two pilots who’d fought above us that day. The pilot of Dude One Three was a Captain Tabkurut, or at least that’s what his name sounded like. A lot of the 2 MERCIAN lads – not to mention us lot – owe him and his wing our lives.
An hour later we were back at PB Sandford. Ugly Five Zero had stayed with us all the way up Route Crow, shadowing us in until the gates clanged shut on the last man of the patrol.
I glanced around me. There were lads everywhere slumped against the walls, wiping the sweat and shit and blood off their faces. Every man was a picture of shattered exhaustion. The looks in the eyes said it all: How the hell did we get out of that lot? With the last of their energy, lads struggled out of body armour and helmets. The adrenaline was pissing out of our veins now, to be replaced by a crushing, leaden fatigue. The OC had ordered all men on foot patrols to wear full body armour and helmets: today’s action had proven his decision 100 per cent the right one.
Had the bullets that had hit Davey Graham been an inch or two higher, the breastplate would have saved him. As it was, the enemy gunner had sneaked the rounds in beneath the lower edge, tearing apart Davey’s guts.
The newly-qualified 2 MERCIAN medic had done the emergency first aid on him. But in spite of her best efforts, barely a soldier amongst us doubted that Davey Graham was a dead man.
Private Davey Graham was a fresh-faced lad with a ready smile and a pair of piercing blue eyes. He was known as being a bit of a joker. Earlier in the morning I’d seen him holding up his helmet on the end of a stick, in a mock gesture to draw enemy fire. Graham was the kind of bloke you’d have trusted with your life, and he’d more than likely volunteered to take point on the lead platoon. After the shock of fighting so hard to save him, the idea that we could lose him was hitting us all bastard hard.
I loosened my own body armour, and went to heave it over my head. As I did so, I felt a stabbing, jabbing pain deep in my left shoulder. It was only now that I remembered the violent thump to my back that had sent me flying face-first into the ditch.
I craned my head around, and I could just about see this huge spreading purple-red bruise where my left shoulder met my neck. Something big must have hit me, and cannoned off the top of my body armour. I didn’t dwell on it for long, or breathe a word to anyone. I was alive and in one piece: others hadn’t been so lucky.
In any case, there was barely a man amongst us who hadn’t taken a lump of frag here or there, or a blast of flying rock and grit, in their body armour. Until those jets had got to work hitting the enemy with their five-hundred- and eight-hundred-pounders, we’d taken a right malleting.
A couple of the 2 MERCIAN lads came up to me.
‘Nice one, like, Bommer,’ said the one.
‘Yeah, cheers and all that,’ said the other.
‘Cheers for what?’ I asked.
‘For saving us necks out there,’ one said.
‘With the airstrikes and stuff,’ said the other.
‘Aye, well, get the kettle on, will you lads. Time for a brew.’
As they wandered off, I heard one say to the other: ‘We got second place today. Runner-up prize. Bommer’s right – better get the tea on.’
It was 1030 when the OC gathered us together for a chat. I’d seen him giving a couple of the lads a fatherly slap and a hug, and I knew we were all feeling it.
‘I’ve just had word that Davey Graham made it back to Camp Bastion alive,’ the OC announced. ‘He’s been badly shot up, and will be evacuated to the UK just as soon as that is possible. He’s in a very serious condition, and will need to be operated on. But we got him out of a massive enemy ambush, and we got him back to Camp Bastion. And for that, every man amongst you should feel justifiably proud.’
We drifted off, each trying to find our own little patch of personal space. Not easy to do, in a mud-walled compound crammed full of fifty-odd soldiers. In spite of the OC’s words, we knew that we’d been smashed. The enemy had had the upper hand, and it was only the air, and a shedload of good luck, that had saved us.
I grabbed a brew before the rush, and headed for the stairs leading up to JTAC Central. I knew I could get some headspace up there. At the ammo-box staircase I got collared by the OC. He fixed me with a look, and for a second or two he said nothing.
Then: ‘Cheers, Bommer.’
That was all. Butsy was the type of bloke who didn’t give praise easily. But you knew from the expression in his eyes if he was happy or not, and by Christ his eyes had said it all. Cheers Bommer. That was enough for me.
Up on the roof I took a slurp of my brew. I’d ladled in the sugar to give me some energy. All I kept thinking was this: Please do not give me any more air. All I wanted to do was to get on the blower and speak to Nicola. Today was our wedding anniversary, and I’d not been able to wish her a happy anniversary.
Down below I could hear this thick Cockney voice going: ‘Fucking ’ell! Fucking ’ell!’ Over and over the same phrase, in turboclip mode. It was Andy, the press photographer. He and h
is reporter mate kept laughing and laughing. They’d been with 2 Platoon in the heart of the ambush, and they were fried.
‘Fucking ’ell,’ Andy kept repeating. ‘I can’t believe that’s what you guys go through every day. Fucking ’ell.’
‘You’re fucking lucky, lad,’ ‘Mortar’ Jim, 2 Platoon’s mortar-operator replied. ‘That’s the worst we’ve ever had it.’
I finished my brew, came down from the roof, and got on the satphone to Nicola. I wished her a happy wedding anniversary, and asked her what she was doing for the day. She told me she was having a nice meal with the nippers, Harry and Ella.
‘What’s your day been like?’ she asked me.
‘Well, nowt much’s been happening,’ I lied. ‘We’ve had a bit of a boring one.’
‘Paul, what’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘You don’t sound like you normally do. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nowt’s the matter, love. It’s just, I was up at the crack of dawn and I’m well-knackered.’
After the call, I went and joined Throp and Sticky in the Vector. Sticky was staring ahead with that wired, ‘thousand-yard stare’ look that I guess we all had to have by now. It was the weird, unfocused, shell-shocked look of having been in the fight of your lives for hours and hours on end, not to mention the weeks of combat before.
‘Is it all ever worth it?’ Sticky muttered.
‘Is what ever worth it, mate?’ I asked.
‘Any one of us could’ve got whacked from those bombs you called in.’
I shrugged. ‘Aye. Top bloody present that would’ve been on the wife’s wedding anniversary.’
‘So, is it ever worth it, for eighteen hundred quid a month?’
The only answer was a chorus of Andy’s ‘Fucking ’ells’ that drifted across to the Vector.
TWENTY TWO
BIN LADEN’S
SUMMERHOUSE
At stand-to the following morning I had two Apaches – Ugly Five Zero and Ugly Five One – check in. The pilots were learning that ROZ Suzy was seriously busy. They’d fly at higher altitude in an effort to conserve fuel, so they could offer me a few minutes’ playtime en route back from whatever mission they’d been on.
The Apache pilots were gutted that a major action like yesterday’s could have gone down without Ugly playing a bigger part in it. For once I was glad to have had those jets over us, as opposed to Apache. Only something with the capacity to drop serious ordnance could have beaten off an attack of the ferocity that we had faced.
I got the Apache pilots searching over the positions of the previous day’s battle. But apart from a smoking cooking fire at Golf Bravo Nine One, there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.
A couple of days went by with only sporadic attacks against us. The odd burst of small arms fire and 107mm rocket barrages hit PB Sandford, but there was nothing resembling a full-blown attack.
Alpha Xray got malleted from the woodline at Golf Bravo Nine One. I couldn’t get any air, so Chris called in a barrage from the 105mm howitzers and drove the enemy off. It was like they were probing us all over again, in an effort to test our resolve and our lines of defence.
Golf Bravo Nine One was fast becoming the enemy’s start line for any assault. Their headquarters we reckoned was back at Golf Bravo Nine Eight – the position that our foot patrol had stumbled into. That would explain why they had fought so ferociously, throwing in waves of fighters in an effort to annihilate us.
We pushed a patrol down to Alpha Xray, on foot and with two Snatch Land Rovers. Throp and I went on it, in part to defuse the tension of being cooped up in PB Sandford, and in part ’cause I had air over the convoy. I got the Dude call signs flying recces to the east of AX, around where Davey Graham had been gunned down.
Nothing was seen. Throp and I tabbed back towards PB Sand-ford, along with the platoon from AX that had been relieved. As we did I lost the air. The F-15s were ripped to a TIC somewhere else in Helmand. The radio chatter was going wild that they had eyes on the patrol, but even with the F-15s gone there still wasn’t a sniff from the enemy.
That night I got a pair of A-10s above me. We’d got Intel that the enemy were doing a major resupply by vehicles out in the desert. It was all part of their build-up in the Triangle, the ultimate aim of which was to smash us. Intel reports had eight or nine vehicles involved in the resupply. In due course the A-10 pilots found a desert convoy.
Via my Rover terminal I could see the group of vehicles the Hog call signs had discovered. But as Chris, Throp, Sticky and I studied the images, we couldn’t see anything that resembled ammo or weapons. For all we knew it could be a midnight wedding. We decided we couldn’t hit the convoy, and we let it go on its way.
By morning, the radio chatter was hot about a successful resupply. Enemy units were being ordered to fetch new weapons and ammo. I had a pair of F-15s overhead, and got them flying air recces all across the Triangle. But not a thing was moving down there, not even farmers working their fields. I’d never seen it this quiet. It was weird. Spooky.
In desperation, I got the F-15s to fly search transects over the old Soviet trench system, in the desert four kilometres to the north-east of us. There was more than a kilometre of interlinked earthworks, where you could move from position to position without being seen.
We reckoned those trenches linked into an underground tunnel system, stretching all across the Triangle. How else could the enemy resupply their fighters, without being seen from the air? We’d had reports that the Triangle was honeycombed with hidden caverns and tunnels, and the body of evidence was growing by the day.
A couple of days back I’d had a Predator over the Green Zone. As it had flown its recces, the drone had passed over this small, tower-like building, enclosed on all sides by thick woodland. There were four males visible, one on each corner of the roof. I couldn’t see any weapons, but those guys sure looked like sentries to me.
The building was some 2.5 kilometres east of Alpha Xray, so well into enemy territory. It was way beyond the Golf Bravo codenames, and into the Golf Charlies. I got the Predator to loiter over that grid. I saw a figure leave the building and walk along a path for a minute or so. He reached the middle of a field and completely disappeared. One moment he was there, the next gone.
I watched another male of fighting age leave the building, follow the path to the centre of the field, and puff – he was gone. By the third time, I was convinced I’d found the entrance to a tunnel system. More than likely it had been built during the time of the war against the Soviet Red Army, and would lead all the way back to the Soviet trenches.
The building in the woods was in a perfect defensive position. It sat in a crook of the Helmand River, on a promontory. It was invisible from the ground, being surrounded by thick woodland. It was only by luck that I’d spotted it from the air. I nicknamed it ‘Bin Laden’s Summerhouse’, and the name just stuck. Word spread, and I started having pilots ask me if I’d spotted Bin Laden himself there yet.
I got another Predator in overwatch of the Summerhouse. This time, there were fifteen males sat under the trees, getting briefed by a guy leaning on a motorcycle. Not one of them was showing any weapons, and I’d yet to see a sniff of a gun. But my instinct was screaming at me that this was a major enemy hub.
The guy finished talking, got astride the bike, and was driven off down the track by his ‘driver’. I tracked them for fifteen kilometres moving in the direction of Sangin. En route they kept getting waved through by groups of males of fighting age. Finally, they reached a crossing of the Helmand River and boarded a boat. Whilst on the water the main figure swapped his black turban – the uniform of the Taliban – for a white one. Around about then I lost the Predator. But I’d bet any money that the guy was some Taliban bigwig, and the Summerhouse some high-level enemy base.
Of course, everyone from the OC down wanted to go in and hit the Summerhouse. But it was a good kilometre beyond Golf Bravo Nine Eight, the point at which we’d walked into the Davey Graham ambush. It wo
uld take a lot more blokes, and a lot more firepower, to battle through to there.
I kept the memory sticks of all the material that I’d recorded from the Predator feeds. I passed the lot up to Nick the Stick, and those in command of his group of elite American warriors. It was better to leave it up to those boys to hit the Summerhouse, with maybe a ‘Spooky’ call sign and some Apaches on hand to assist. For now I had my own priorities to deal with. Chief of those was trying to work out where the hell the entire human presence in the Triangle had got to. Maybe the enemy were down in their tunnel systems, sorting out their ammo resupply, and briefing their newly arrived fighters. That would fit with the Intel that was coming in.
We decided to take advantage of the enemy going to ground. We headed out with the Czech Army unit, in their Toyota wagons encased in camo-netting and mock-greenery. Watching from a distance, the Czechs on patrol looked like a line of moving bushes, albeit with long-nosed Dushka heavy machine guns poking out.
We drove past Alpha Xray and pushed on to Golf Bravo Nine One. As there was nothing doing with the enemy, we wrapped a couple of strings of plastic explosive around each of the trees, and blew a long line of them sky-high. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! It wasn’t that we hated trees: we just didn’t like the cover they provided for the enemy. Golf Bravo Nine One was the front line from where they kept hitting Alpha Xray. By blowing the treelines, we deprived them of cover via which to sneak up on our base. Alpha Xray was getting whacked pretty much on a daily basis, and we didn’t want to make it any easier for the bastards.
The following morning Alpha Xray got hit just after first light. Maybe we’d needled the Taliban by blowing up their greenery. Either way, there was a barrage of small arms and RPGs smashing into the base. I couldn’t get any air, so Chris called in fire, pounding the enemy with the 105mm guns and our own 81mm mortars.
But none of this was the big one, and we knew it. Something nasty was brewing. We kept having walk-ins warn us that the enemy were reinforcing and rearming for a big push. They planned to overrun one of our bases, and we guessed it had to be Alpha Xray.
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