‘They’ve what?’ said the OC.
I gave him a look, as if to say: I know, the bloody lunatics, but it was nowt to do with me.
‘Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine,’ I spoke into my TACSAT. I was wondering how they were going to react to this one. ‘Sitrep: Arrow Two Three and Arrow Two Five are leaving my ROZ, winchestered. They’ve conducted twenty-one strafing runs and fired six Hellfire.’
‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC: say again.’
I repeated the message, and then Damo Martin came up on the air from FOB Price.
‘Shut up, Bommer man, you’re just being a dick. What’s the score with the Apaches?’
‘Mate, both gunships have just left me fucking winchestered.’
There was a moment’s silence, then: ‘Well what the fuck have you been shooting at?’
‘According to the pilots we have minimum thirteen dead in the trees to the south of Golf Bravo Nine Two.’
Neither Damo nor Widow TOC would believe me. Instead, they decided to send a Predator over to check. I was told I’d have Overlord Nine Five above me in four minutes. By now, Sticky’s Brother was also getting noticeably agitated.
‘They’re calling for Commander Hadin to check in!’ he shouted. ‘Over and over and over. Commander Hadin! Commander Hadin! Commander Hadin!’
His enthusiasm was infectious. ‘Let me guess — Commander Hadin’s not answering?’
Sticky’s Bro nodded, gleefully. ‘And there are lots of other commanders they keep calling for, and they don’t answer either.’
No one seemed willing to believe me about the Arrows — not until the Predator operator got it over the attack site. There it found eight bodies lying beside the treeline, all with weapons. The analysts reckoned there were at least five more corpses half hidden in the trees. So that pretty much confirmed what the Apache pilots had said.
A while later I got another call from Damo Martin. Intel had come down from on high with the Americans. The thirteen kills were confirmed, and amongst their number were six enemy leaders — Commander Hadin included. The Taliban top brass had been in the midst of doing a handover with their troops, when the Arrows had hit them.
‘Top bloody job, Bommer, mate,’ Damo kept telling me. ‘Top bloody job.’
‘Mate, I didn’t do owt,’ I tried to object. ‘I did not call a single shot. The Arrows just went lunatic and malleted everything.’
‘Shut up,’ Damo countered. ‘You’re just being bloody modest.’
‘Mate, I did not call one single shot.’
‘Shut up, you tit! I’m having none of it.’
Whatever I tried to say, Damo wouldn’t believe me.
It still wasn’t a top fluffy feeling for me though. Alpha Xray was only a hundred and twenty metres from the attack site, we’d had a foot patrol out on the ground and I’d had no idea what those Apaches were up to. But all was well that ends well.
Later, I’d settled myself down with a Flashman book that my Light Dragoons mate, Spunky, had lent me. I was reading by the light of my head torch. It was just after midnight and I was enjoying the warm afterglow of those Arrow airstrikes. Flashman was a Light Dragoons man, of course, and I couldn’t help but love the bloke. I’d grown a pair of ‘lamb chop’ whiskers, just like him, and it was his tales of derring-do and caddishness that were helping get me through Afghanistan.
There was a call on the TACSAT. It was a covert surveillance aircraft, Bat Zero Two, and I had him for two hours above me. I wasn’t very happy at being torn away from Flashman’s adventures, but I heaved myself out of my cot and into the Vector.
The aircraft picked up a new piece of comms: The heavy weapon is here and ready for pick-up in the desert. I got Sticky to waken Chris who woke the OC. We reported it up the chain, and I got allocated two A-10s — Hog One Two and Hog One Three. The A-10s would be with me in thirty minutes. Meanwhile, Bat Zero Two was picking up all sorts of stuff about the heavy weapon handover. With the Warthogs still twenty minutes out, I feared we’d miss the bloody thing.
As soon as they were in my ROZ I got the A-10s flying recces north-east, scouring the desert. A heavy weapons handover meant vehicles, and that’s what we were looking for. As the Hogs searched all up the desert with their sniper optics on wide-field view I had my eyes glued to my downlink.
But it wasn’t long before I knew for sure that we’d missed them. Sometimes, you just sense these things. Then we had it confirmed on the intercepts: The heavy weapon has been successfully delivered. I lost the A-10s and the surveillance platform, it was 0245 and I was alone with Flashman once more. I wondered what it was that they’d sneaked into the Triangle to hit us with. It would not be long before I found out.
After stand-to the OC gathered the lads for a briefing. He told us that the rules of engagement had just been changed, which meant we could only fire on the enemy when they were firing at us.
We were holding the front line in the Green Zone, but we were forbidden from engaging armed enemy fighters unless they were actually in the process of firing at us. In practice this meant the enemy could gather for an assault on one of our bases, and we couldn’t hit them until they opened up on us. It was like fighting with one arm tied behind your back. It felt like a right kick in the knackers, but we tried to shrug it off. The one consolation was that we were nearing the end of our tour: ten more days of the Triangle and we’d be out of there.
After months under siege, the strain was more than starting to show. We all of us had that wide-eyed, mad, glazed stare — the look that comes from day after day of adrenaline-pumping combat. Plus the lack of sleep was really starting to nail us. I guess I was particularly badly hit, as I was always getting allocated air in the middle of the night.
Barely a day had gone by when the enemy hadn’t whacked the base with something — either 81mm mortars, 107mm rockets, RPGs or rounds. It was all mud here at PB Sandford: mud walls, mud floor, mud roofs and mud-filled HESCO barriers. Most of the incoming had smashed apart the mud a little more, but so far we’d been insanely lucky and no one had got splatted. Not yet, anyway. I guess the enemy were getting a bit frustrated at not killing us, and that was why they’d shipped in the mother of all weapons.
It hit us first at 1000 hours, in the midst of a big cricket-off. There was this distant, muffled bang, and then Mikey Wallace was screaming like a mad thing from his bunker.
‘FUCKING INCOMING!’ He hit the air horn: ‘BWAAAAAAAAAARP!’
From Mickey’s tone of voice I guessed this was something different. By now Throp and I had moved into a sandbagged bunker, which we used as our ‘bedroom’. As we dived into the darkness, the howl of the incoming was like a bloody great big spaceship coming down to land on top of us.
Whatever it was slammed into the dirt fifteen metres to the front of PB Sandford. A massive explosion tore across the base. Even down in the bunker it was deafening. I felt the punching wrench of the shockwave tearing over us, the air being ripped out of my lungs, and then this thick cloud of smoke and dust came billowing down the stairway.
I forced myself to do the opposite of what instinct told me, and legged it for the Vector. I could barely see where I was going, but I fought through the burning smog. My TACSAT and all my kit was in the wagon, and I needed to dial up air. Whatever it was that had hit us Mikey would have the grid, and now was the time to find and smash it.
As I dialled up CAS, I could hear the crump of our own mortars firing, as they sent a counter-barrage on to the enemy’s grid. Plus Chris was on the radio, dialling up a barrage from the 105mm howitzers. With the guns thundering away, I was told I had two Harriers — Recoil Four One and Recoil Four Two — inbound ten minutes.
The guns and mortars roared and snorted for five minutes straight, pounding the enemy grid, and then they ceased fire. Thirty seconds later Mikey was yelling again, and thumping his air horn.
‘BWAAAAAAAAAARP!’
A second monster projectile was inbound. No one had a clue what it was yet, but it sounded like
a bloody great thousand-pound JDAM. Throp and I legged it for the bunker, as the incoming screamed through the burning blue right on top of us. It tore across the base, smashing into the desert twenty metres beyond the back wall.
Throp and I locked eyes. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Now they’ve got us bracketed.’
That was one warhead just outside the front wall, and one just over the back. They’d split the difference with the next, and it’d be bang on. We dashed for the Vector, and I dialled up the Harriers. I gave them the grid, and told them to get over it pronto looking for some kind of massive gun or rocket launcher.
The Harrier pilots got overhead the grid but there was nothing moving. There was a pizza slice-shaped stretch of woodland, alongside which was a thin treeline, which corresponded to the grid. I got the Harriers searching up and down that woodstrip, but not a thing was to be found. Where the fuck had they hidden that weapon?
For forty-five minutes the Harries scoured the grid, but nothing. I was forced to close the TIC and lose the air. A few minutes later Mikey let out a yell, and hit the air horn. We knew then that we had a third projectile inbound, and that we were bang in the centre of its path. As we sprinted for cover, I saw one of the radio operators come haring out of the radio shack with his canvas chair stuck to his sweaty arse. Another of the lads came pelting out of the shitters, with his trousers down around his ankles. It would have been funny, were this monster weapon not so terrifying.
The killer warhead snarled out of the empty sky and slammed into the mortar position at the rear of the base. It erupted in a whirlwind of shock and pain, smashing great chunks out of the HESCO and flattening a steel fence, before the last of the blast ripped into the tented medical centre. It was pure luck that no one was in there and that the mortar team had made it into cover. There would have been nothing left of anyone under that blast. A second round was fired directly after the first, and this one hit fifteen metres from the Vector, tearing the shower block to shreds.
Luckily, the projectile buried itself in the sand, which kept the frag down. But it was as if a thumping great earthquake was tearing the base apart. Even from the bunker, Throp and I heard the jagged chunks of steel whistling through the air. The trajectory of the thing meant it must have missed the Vector’s roof by inches.
Throp and I came out of the bunker giggling crazily — but it was more from fear than good spirits. Fuck, that heavy weapon was horrible. And whatever it was, they had it zeroed in on us now.
If I couldn’t nail it from the air, then it was going to tear us to pieces.
Twenty Seven
199 KILLS
Chris and the OC went for a walk and a quiet chat about what to do about that heavy weapon. They came back with a jagged chunk of metal the size of a dinner plate, which they’d found in the mortar compound. From that they ID’d the weapon: it was a gigantic 120mm mortar.
The lads from our mortar team handed around that chunk of shrapnel, staring at it weirdly. They just kept shaking their heads, and going fucking hell. It was then that I realised what a truly heavy piece of shit it was. The looks on their faces said it all. Everyone was shit scared, and with good reason.
A 120mm mortar is a brute of a thing. The biggest mortar the British Army uses is the 81mm, and most of the lads had never even seen something as big as a 120mm. It fires a round the same calibre as that of a Challenger II main battle tank. It was like having one of those sat outside the gates of PB Sandford and tearing the base apart.
Normally, a 120mm mortar comes mounted on a chassis with car-like wheels, so it can be towed into battle behind a truck. The barrel itself stands taller than the operator, and it can lob its finstabilised rounds over seven kilometres. How the enemy were managing to fire off those monster mortars whilst hiding the launcher from the air was mind-boggling.
Being under that 120mm was hell. Whenever the banshee howl screamed down on us, it was like a lottery with death. It drilled into our heads, everyone running like mad for a bunker. But whatever cover you found, if a 120mm landed on your roof then you were a dead man. All that would be left of you was a shredded, bloodied pulp: that’s if your mates could find anything. And the forty-five seconds the round took to arc through the air, all the while howling like a ghost train, felt like a bloody lifetime.
One of those giant shells landed next to the bunker that Throp and I were sharing. Luckily, neither of us was in there at the time. Jagged chunks of shrapnel ploughed through the roof and slammed into the dirt floor, tearing our mozzie nets to shreds, embedding themselves in the wall where I had a few photos of the family pinned up. Well, that was it. It was personal with that enemy mortar crew now. It was time to even up the score a little. Whatever it took I was going to fix them. I was going to nail those bastards. From then on each time the air horn went off I’d sprint in the opposite direction of any proper cover, and dive into the Vector, closely followed by Mikey Wallace.
The first time we tried to hold the wagon’s hatches shut, as the shell screamed down on us and we mumbled our prayers. Trouble was I couldn’t shut the one hatch, for the TACSAT antenna cable was sticking out of it. For a second I glared at it.
Then I pointed and said to Mikey: ‘What the fuck do we do if it comes through that?’
We started laughing, hysterically. But it didn’t sound very clever as the shell came howling in on us. We stopped smiling, and kafucking-boom, it smashed into the compound, blasted sand and shit slamming against the metal skin of the Vector.
Mikey had a fix on the mortar launch point. His ten-figure grid was 3.8 kilometres to the north-east of our position. I got allocated a Predator, and I got it to do an overwatch of the mortar firing point, with a live feed to my Rover terminal. After each 120mm round went up I saw half a dozen males of fighting age leaping over a wall and diving into a tiny building. Were they the mortar crew — the bastards I so badly wanted to get? I was pretty certain they were, but I couldn’t actually see the mortar firing, to ‘positively ID’ it. It must have been doing so through the shadow of a roof, or a door, or a window, but they had it too well hidden. I began wondering if they had some kind of automatic, rollable roof, so that as soon as it fired it slid it back into place again. This was more James Bond than Mullah Omer’s Taliban. It was messing with my head.
That evening John Hill, Jase Peach, the OC, Chris and I were talking at the back of Vector. We were saying how fucking horrific that 120mm mortar was, and how we needed to come up with a plan to smash it. Everyone was shit scared of it: when the air horn went off it was the worst feeling possible.
We reckoned they wouldn’t risk firing the thing at night, for then our air could track down the hot tube with infrared scanners. The OC decided to push a fighting patrol out towards the Golf Charlies, on foot and at night. His aim was to show the enemy that we weren’t cowed by their mortar. But there was also the hope they might be tempted to lob a couple of 120mm rounds at us, in which case we could nail the hot tube.
The patrol left PB Sandford at 1900, heading across the high ground to Monkey One Echo. As soon as it was out the intercepts started going wild about the ‘Diamond Special Forces’ being out on foot in the Green Zone.
I had Hog One Five and Hog One Six in the overhead, and for this patrol we’d been granted less restrictive rules of engagement. By 2000 hours the patrol was pushing into the dense bush around Golf Charlie One Seven, and heading in the direction of Bin Laden’s Summerhouse. At this point the lead edge of the platoon spotted three armed figures fifty metres ahead, in ambush positions. I passed the grid to Hog One Five, and told him to hit them. I asked him to attack with his 30mm cannon, on a north-west to southeast run.
‘I want the strafe of all strafes,’ I told him, ‘all along that treeline.’
‘Affirm,’ he replied. ‘Banking around.’
For thirty seconds or so you could hear a pin drop in the stillness of the night, and then the A-10 came screaming in like a thing possessed. When the pilot finally unleashed his seven-barrel Gatling
gun I thought the strafe would never end.
‘Brrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztttttt tttttttttt.’
It was the longest I’d ever heard, the 30mm thundering on and on as it ripped apart the treeline. The BDA was bang on target: two enemy dead, and a third dragging an injured fighter away. I told the A-10 that it was a class strafe, and that the platoon would pull back to Monkey One Echo, as we’d found the enemy’s front line.
At that moment, I got a call sign trying to break into my radio traffic.
‘Break! Break! Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC: on no account are you to engage the enemy with the Hog call signs.’
‘Say again,’ I replied.
The message was repeated.
‘Roger: why not?’ I asked.
‘Your rules of engagement you can only use with British jets.’
‘Well, there’s a couple of Taliban in the Green Zone’ll probably wish you’d sent that message a few seconds earlier.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cause I just killed two, and the third is dragging one of the injured away.’
‘Stand by.’ There were a few moments’ silence, then Widow TOC was back on the air. ‘Widow Seven Nine, there might be a problem with that.’
‘Not for fucking me there’s not,’ I told him. I flipped back to the A-10’s frequency. ‘Hog One Five, seems there’s something wrong with the engagement. I wasn’t meant to fire ’cause of the rules.’
‘What the… why?’
‘Look, it’s nowt to do with you guys. I bought the rounds, so if anyone’s in the shit it’s me. Can you watch over the patrol, while I try and sort this shit out.’
‘Roger that.’
I flipped frequencies back to Widow TOC. ‘Look, 95 per cent of all controls in Helmand are with US platforms. If what you’ve said is right, you should’ve made sure we had Harriers over the patrol.’
The duty guy at Widow TOC ducked the issue. ‘Widow Seven Nine, release the Hog call signs once your patrol is back in base.’
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