Apache

by Ed Macy

  Magowan didn’t just have the use of his own troops. Every asset in the UK inventory had been laid at his battlegroup’s disposal, from SBS teams specialising in close-target reconnaissance to aerial drones and a Nimrod MR2 spy plane. Fitted with a high-tech surveillance suite, the ageing jet followed vehicle and troop movements from 25,000 feet, for many hours and over hundreds of miles, totally unseen. Even the national intelligence agencies, MI6 and GCHQ, were tapped up for any SigInt or HumInt which might be of use.

  ‘The operation has made some good progress so far,’ the Ops Officer told us. ‘They’ve picked up a lot more than they expected to by this stage. They’ve got some valuable int hits on how the Tier Two fighters come in; to be frank – it’s because there are so bloody many of them.’

  Huge numbers were coming through from Pakistan. They passed over the border at Baram Chah, a lawless opium trading town that straddled both countries. From there, they would be split into groups of three or four to avoid detection, put into single Toyota 4x4s, and driven at speed across the desert until they hit the Green Zone. The Helmand River ran from north to south until it bent west sixty klicks south of Garmsir into what we called ‘the fish hook’, and swept on into Nimruz. It was somewhere north of the fish hook that the Toyotas deposited the new combatants and the Green Zone MSR began. The exact location had yet to be pinpointed because the recce units hadn’t got down that far – but the battlegroup was confident it was only a question of time. We were impressed. It was a hell of an operation.

  ‘So where do we come in?’ Billy said. ‘Skip to the chase, sir – the suspense is killing me.’

  ‘Because we’re a bit too noisy to do masses of stand-off recce and we’ve got enough on our plates already, our bit kicks in with Stage Two. It looks like we’re getting written in big time for the kinetic assaults.’

  There were grunts of approval from every attack pilot in the room.

  ‘But there are one or two little tasks they’ve asked for us to help with during Stage One as well …’

  HQ Flight was given an Op Glacier job on our next Deliberate Tasking shift. The Brigade Reconnaissance Force had asked for Apache close air support for a tricky little spot fifteen kilometres south of Garmsir on the eastern edge of the Green Zone. They had some good intelligence that the place was a major Taliban hot spot. But the vegetation was particularly thick there, so they had to go in close to verify and pin down the enemy’s exact location. If it went badly for them and they got smacked, they wanted us to steam in and sort it out.

  We were asked to go down late morning and stand off five klicks into the Red Desert so as not to give the game away. If the Taliban heard us clattering over them, they’d immediately go to ground.

  I’d finally managed to wrestle the front seat back from Trigger, so I was mission commander for the sortie. It was a forty-five minute trip from Bastion, giving us about an hour on station.

  We arrived at our desert spot and I checked in with their JTAC, Knight Rider Five Five. The Brigade Recce Force (BRF) had chosen their own callsign as well: they were clearly Hoff fans. They gave us their grid, and we pinged them 700 metres from the Green Zone, in a convoy of six WMIK Land Rovers and Pinzgauer trucks – a light, manoeuvrable and well-armed force, but without any protection when the rounds started coming in.

  ‘Ugly Five One, Knight Rider Five Five. Here’s the plan. We don’t want to go into the Green Zone because we think we’ll get cut up. We’re going to try and entice the Taliban to take a shot at us by going up on a ridgeline just before the Zone starts.’

  ‘Nightrider Five Five, Ugly. Confirm, you actually want the Taliban to shoot at you?’

  ‘Affirm. It’s the best way to assess their location and strength. That’s when we might need your help. Confirm you can see the ridgeline?’

  ‘Affirm. We have you visual on our optics. We’re due east; can you hear our rotors?’

  ‘Negative Ugly. We can see a couple of black dots through binos, but that’s about it.’

  ‘Good. We’re in dead ground to the Green Zone but we’ll have some fire down for you within thirty seconds of your call. Keep us updated on what you see and pass suspect grids regularly; it will cut down on our response time.’

  ‘Knight Rider Five Five, that’s a copy; stand by for some playtime.’

  We orbited in oval-shaped ‘race tracks’ at seventy knots, keeping 100 feet off the desert floor to stay out of view. Either my TADS camera or Billy’s was on the marines at all times. Our downdraughts made wonderful patterns in the thick red sand beneath us.

  ‘Knight Rider, Ugly. We’re moving up onto the ridgeline now. Get ready.’

  We saw their vehicles cautiously ascend the 500 metre slope. I actioned the cannon.

  ‘Knight Rider, Ugly. We’re now presenting the vehicles to the Green Zone. Stand by for contact.’

  The second the guys started taking rounds, the Boss would power up hard and make a beeline for them. I kept my finger over my trigger, and the Boss tensed up on the cyclic. Both Apaches were now pointing towards the BRF, but nothing happened. Ten minutes and as many circuits later – still nothing.

  ‘Knight Rider, Ugly. We’re getting no response. The feeling is the Taliban might think we’re looking a bit too handy in the vehicles with our weapons pointing down on ’em and that’s what’s stopping ’em from engaging. We’re going to debus. Standby for contact. Again.’

  The marines slipped down into firing positions around their vehicles, lying on their belt buckles. Another ten minutes passed. Still no reaction. Billy and Carl had started doing flying exercises, landing in the desert and taking off again.

  ‘Knight Rider, Ugly. Okay, we’re going to stand up and have a bit of a mill around the ridge. Hopefully that’ll do it. Stand by.’

  The figures on the ridge strolled about for five more uncomfortable minutes, cradling their rifles. It looked utterly incongruous. When that didn’t work, they gathered into a group for a pow-wow by the middle Land Rover. The Boss wanted to know what Billy and Carl were up to.

  ‘You never know when you might need to do a dust-out landing. Just keeping our skills up.’

  The BRF strode purposefully back to their vehicles.

  ‘Knight Rider, Ugly. We don’t fucking understand this. Normally when we come down this far, we get shot at. Today they’re not doing a bloody thing. We’ve decided we’re going to get a brew on.’

  ‘Confirm; you’re going to do it up there?’

  ‘Affirmative. The enemy will think we’ve decided they’re definitely not around and, fingers crossed, they’ll open up.’

  The Green Zone was less than 100 metres away. They were either very brave, or clinically insane. Or even more bored than Billy and Carl. The marines separated into small groups, lit their hexamine stoves and brought out their mugs. Then the Mad Hatter’s tea party began.

  ‘This is priceless,’ I said. ‘HM Government is paying 20k an hour for us to watch a load of mad bootnecks have a cuppa in the enemy’s back garden.’

  ‘I hope they’re enjoying themselves. It’s making me thirsty. But we’ve only got about ten minutes of combat gas left before we go chicken. You might want to tell them to get a scoot on.’

  All still quiet on the ridge. I gave Knight Rider our ten-minute warning.

  ‘Knight Rider, Ugly. Copied. Bear with us. We’ve got one final trick up our sleeves.’

  Twenty commandos stripped off their body armour and helmets and stood in line, weapons down and hands on their hips, facing the Green Zone. They might as well have tattooed ‘Shoot Me Quick’ on their foreheads. For all the reaction the marines got, they might as well have been on the Hog’s Back. It was time to draw the charade to a close.

  ‘Knight Rider Five Five, Ugly Five One. We’re bang out of gas. We’re going to have to disappear. The Taliban just aren’t here, mate.’

  ‘Copied. Well, we tried our best. They obviously don’t want to play today. Thanks for coming down.’

  We overflew the susp
ect patch of Green Zone on our way out, but could see nothing either. Back in the JHF Ops Room an hour and a half later, we updated Alice during the quickest sortie debrief ever. She shook her head and smiled.

  ‘Did none of you stop to think what day it is today?’

  We looked blank.

  ‘Friday. On Friday at noon, all good Muslims go to Jumu’ah.’

  ‘Jumu’ah?’

  ‘Friday Prayers. I could have told you that this morning. Next time you lot get a bright idea, do feel free to ask.’

  We weren’t having a great run. It took 42 Commando’s Intelligence Officer to steer us out of our next reconnaissance cul-de-sac a few nights later. That sortie also served to remind us that the Apache’s high-tech gadgetry could only ever be as smart as the human being in charge of it.

  We had moved onto the IRT / HRF shift, and got a late night call out from the Kajaki DC. Once we’d got there, the shooting had stopped and we couldn’t see a trace of the enemy. To make the trip worthwhile, we decided to take a covert look from a distance at a compound that 42 Commando, the local battlegroup, had asked us to keep an eye on. They suspected the Taliban might be using it as a training camp.

  We stayed three kilometres back, at about 4,000 feet and downwind, so its inhabitants wouldn’t hear us. As we began to circle, five men walked out of one of the buildings. The locals never moved around Helmand at night, so this could only mean one thing. I hit record on the TADS.

  They headed in staggered file down a track, a few metres apart, turned slightly outwards with the rear marker checking back, like a well-trained military patrol. The Apache’s thirty-six-times-magnification FLIR thermal imaging camera was so powerful we could pick up a heat source in an open field miles away. Just a short distance closer we could identify a human shape, so we had a grand-stand view of whatever they were about to do. It was like watching a black and white TV show. About fifty metres up the track, the men peeled off right, one by one, into the field alongside it. They moved a safe distance and crouched down, now about ten metres apart.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Billy said. ‘They’re in extended line; infantry tactics. They’re practising battle drills.’

  We couldn’t engage them because they weren’t armed, but 42 Commando’s Int Cell needed to take a look at this.

  After a few minutes, the first man got up and walked back to the path. The rest followed at roughly thirty second intervals, and once the whole group was back on the path, they patrolled back to the compound. We’d found the notorious Taliban training ground 42 Commando were after.

  We projected our footage onto the big screen in the JHF. Our Ops Officer was intrigued, and popped next door to fetch his opposite number from 42 Commando. He in turn fetched his Intelligence Officer, and then the 2i/c and CO. We played the tape a third time, beaming with pride.

  ‘What do you think of that then? Quite a find, eh? But what does it mean?’

  The 42 Commando Int Officer was a wise old bird.

  ‘Right, take it back. Here they go; they walk down the road then break into an extended line. Now, watch carefully. Zoom in on this man … here …’

  He surveyed our blank faces.

  ‘Look, he is crouching, and then he moves away. Do you see his weapon? Look carefully … there …’ He pointed to the patch of ground the man had just left.

  ‘See? He’s left a heat source. Look at the size of his foot and look at the size of the heat source. Same length. Now if you zoom in on the other men, a fiver says you’ll find they’ve all left similar length heat sources.’

  We began to feel more than a little stupid.

  ‘Gentlemen, you have captured top secret footage of an Afghan communal shit. It’s a tradition; they do it for mutual protection at night. Now I’m going for one too. But don’t worry, you can stay here.’

  THE BOBS AND STEVE-O

  The Taliban were watching us too.

  A company of infantry soldiers was responsible for Camp Bastion’s security, manning the sangers on its perimeter fences, and fanning out to protect the C130 runway when a Hercules came in. The soldiers’ most time-consuming job by far was manning the camp’s most vulnerable point, its front gate.

  An almost permanent line of local trucks and lorries queued outside it, delivering a never-ending mountain of supplies to feed and equip the garrison. Most of the vehicles came from Kandahar air base, where the bulk of our supplies arrived in long-range heavy-transport planes like the RAF’s C17s or chartered Russian made Antonovs. The local vehicles were held back 200 metres behind a chicane of Hesco Bastion bollards, the guards’ protection against suicide bombers. They were called forward cautiously, one by one, and searched from tip to toe before being allowed in.

  One night, a sharp-eyed sentry spotted a driver climb onto his cab and get on his mobile phone as soon as a pair of Apaches clattered overhead. A covert watch was set up on all the waiting lorries.

  We discovered that it wasn’t just one driver. Almost all of them were climbing onto their roofs to get a better mobile phone signal whenever we took off. In Northern Ireland, we used to call it ‘dicking’. At some stage of their journey from Kandahar, the Taliban had got to the drivers and employed – or forced – them to report on our movements.

  We’d had a nagging feeling in the weeks prior to the discovery that the enemy seemed to know we were coming. Now we knew why. Once they’d been given the nod from Bastion, they’d set a stopwatch for our reaction times to specific locations, and packed up attacking the marine patrols minutes before we arrived.

  Dicking was a threat to both our safety and that of the troops on the ground. Trigger and Billy drew up new drills to try to counter it. From then onwards, Apaches never flew over the main gate, we kept all the lights off at night, and we always set off in a different direction to the one we were really headed. That was a pain too, because flying a few klicks out of our way just to fox the dickers added a minute or two to the time it took us to reach the guys. But it was crucial to try to keep ahead of the Taliban’s learning curve.

  They learned, we learned; then we had to learn again. It was known as the caterpillar – one end moved first, the rest caught up. And the Afghan caterpillar never stopped moving. The longer the Helmand campaign went on, the more complex the battlespace became.

  While the diligent reconnaissance for Operation Glacier continued, the huge demand for Apache support elsewhere kept us frantically busy. It came from all over the province. So much so, at least one of the squadron’s flights was now firing in anger in some arena every single day. We were putting stuff down at a phenomenal rate – far more than we’d ever done before. Whether it was the change in the Rules of Engagement, the increased flying hours, or the enemy’s ever more dogged persistence – or a combination of the three – it was hard to tell. Sometimes, we used our weapons systems as they were originally designed to be used. Others, we just had to improvise – like the day Soggy Arm Field got its name.

  We were on a deliberate operation with the marines up in Kajaki one afternoon, covering them as they fought a clearance patrol onto the Shrine and then through the Taliban-held village to its west. The enemy were putting up strong resistance, gritty compound-to-compound stuff.

  We trapped six of them out in the open on our arrival and nailed them with cannon. But two of their more dogged companions, firing from the far end of the village, had pinned down a section of marines. A Joint Terminal Attack Controller climbed to the top of Falcon to direct our fire. The JTAC talked us onto the pair’s grid.

  We found them by stealth, heading for home and doubling back, coming out of the clouds four kilometres behind them. They were in full white dishdashes, crouched a metre apart at the edge of a track behind someone’s freshly painted white house.

  ‘That’s them,’ confirmed the JTAC. ‘I’ve had eyes on them since their last engagement. Remove them as soon as possible, by any means.’

  They were a challenging target. The village was inhabited; it was crawling with mopeds and a
nimals and we had no idea who was in the house behind them. Rockets and cannon would have peppered its wall and roof, and probably gone straight through them. Due to the Rules of Engagement there was only one option.

  ‘It’s got to be a Hellfire,’ Trigger said. ‘ROE is simple – but the proportionality bothers me. You’re my weapons guru; can we really chuck a missile into a civilian village?’

  ‘Positive ID, ROE and clearance to engage doesn’t give us a choice, Boss, but collateral damage and the family in that lovely house does. We wait till we’re closer and use the gun, or kick off to the right and hit them with the Hellfire so the blast disperses into that field. If we get closer they’ll bolt for the house and the family will have Terry Taliban as lodgers …’

  A .5-inch calibre sniper rifle would have been ideal for the job. But Hellfire was the only point weapon system we had. It was proportionate in this instance.

  ‘Okay, Mr Macy. Set me up.’

  ‘I’ll set you up all right. Set you up to make Apache history.’

  The Boss glanced at me in his mirror, lined the crosshairs up perfectly on the ground between the two fighters, and let rip from six kilometres. The Hellfire had not been used on personnel before. We watched the missile rise, fall to its usual angle and impact right on target. When the smoke cleared, all that was left was a two-metre-wide hole in the ground.

  ‘Delta Hotel,’ the JTAC reported.

  The freshly painted wall got one final coat – toffee brown – but on the flip side, the washing was still clean and the house itself completely untouched. It took an age to figure out the battle damage but the JTAC summed up the situation perfectly. ‘I think your targets may have vaporised.’

  That night, after the battle, the marines on Falcon watched as the locals came out to collect their dead. The next time we went up to Kajaki, the JTAC relayed their story.