Apache

by Ed Macy

  Koshtay was a job for the two most experienced front-seat gunners. Billy took the back seat to fly the Boss, as Ugly Five Zero. Carl would fly for me, Ugly Five One. The Boss was mission commander.

  Word that we were doing a deep raid spread around the squadron like wildfire. Everybody’s blood was up, including the Groundies’ and the Ops Room’s, as every sortie was a massive team effort. We would be making Corps history. The twelve other pilots who weren’t flying it were green with envy. Conspiracy theories were rife.

  ‘Saving the best ones for yourself, eh Boss?’ Nick said. ‘What a coincidence it just happened to be HQ Flight’s turn for a deliberate task.’

  Trigger just smiled knowingly. But Nick’s turn would come.

  At lunchtime on the 10th, the ministerial permission we needed for Op Glacier 1 finally came through. We were hitting the place cold and firing the first shots, which we very seldom did. With all the paperwork in place, the brigade confirmed it as a go.

  The four of us had a kip after lunch, since we weren’t going to get much sleep later. At sunset we went down to the flight line for a final walk around the Apaches and loaded our kit.

  ‘Just double check your LSJs, chaps,’ Trigger said.

  It was a good point. Our survival jackets were vital if we got shot down; they contained everything we might need to keep us alive on the ground apart from our personal weapons. I went through every last pouch.

  To squeeze so much into one man’s waistcoat was a masterpiece of design, and the reason they were so bloody heavy. The deep left front pocket was easiest to grab for a right-handed pilot like me. That’s why it contained the most important piece of kit – a very powerful multi-frequency ground-to-air radio with which we could talk securely to anyone above us or at a distance, through burst transmissions. It was also fitted with a GPS system and a homing beacon that could be picked up by satellite.

  Three pockets were sewn into the front right-hand side of the jacket. The top one contained a signalling pack – an infrared or white light strobe and a signalling mirror. The middle held a survival pack: a matchless fire set – cotton wool and magnesium metal with a saw blade to ignite it (matches ran out and could get wet) – fuel blocks, a nylon fishing line, hooks and flies, a foil blanket, high energy sweets, tablets to purify dirty water, a polythene bag, tampons to soak up water, two Rocco-sized condoms that could each carry a gallon of water, a compass, a candle, parachute cord to rig up shelters, three snares, a wire saw, a needle and thread, camouflage cream and a medium-sized Swiss Army knife. The lowest pocket was packed with the things you hoped you’d never need: antibiotics, morphine-based painkillers, three elastic dressings and adhesives, two standard dressings, a safety pin, Imodium tablets to stop the shits, a razor blade, dextrose high energy tablets, sun block, insect repellent and a pair of forceps.

  We kept a six-inch-long Maglite torch and an emergency extraction strap with a black karabiner in another small pocket, just next to the zip. A large pouch sewn into the back of the jacket contained a metre-square waterproof, tear-resistant nylon escape map that you could also use to shelter from the sun or rain. Alongside it we kept two litre-sized foil sachets of clean water.

  Back up at the JHF we formulated an escape plan for the mission. We had one for every location we went to, and for every pre-planned sortie we flew. If we did go down over Koshtay, we’d all know exactly what to do.

  Apache pilots underwent the most intensive escape and evasion training of anyone in the UK military, alongside Harrier pilots and Special Forces personnel. All three worked behind or over enemy lines, so faced the greatest risk. It was a gruelling sixteen-week course, and as the squadron’s Survive, Evade, Resist and Extract Officer, Geordie gave us regular refreshers

  The first emergency drill was always the same – talk to your wingman and tell him where you are. He’d know you’d gone down, and would be doing his damnedest to keep you alive. If the threat on the ground allowed it, he’d swoop down, land next to your aircraft and you’d have about three seconds to strap yourself onto a grab handle forward of the engine air intakes with your own strap and karabiner.

  We practised the drill every now and then, but no Apache pilot in the world had ever done it on operations; it was fraught with danger for everyone concerned. Putting an aircraft on the ground in a battle made it incredibly vulnerable, which was why the MoD pencil-necks had written into the Release To Service rules that it was only to be used in dire emergencies. If they had it their way, it would have been out of the RTS altogether.

  First, of course, we had to survive going down. There were no ejection seats in an Apache; it was dangerous enough standing beneath a turning rotor blade. If our aircraft went down, we went down with it. It concentrated the mind. So much so, that experienced pilots would always subconsciously scope for the safest place to crash-land.

  Should the worst happen and we found ourselves on the ground, it was going to be immediately obvious if Trigger and Billy were going to be able to pick us up at Koshtay. If they couldn’t – which was almost inevitable – we’d try to get as far away from the aircraft as possible. The Apache would act like a magnet for the enemy, so we wouldn’t even hang around to destroy its clandestine equipment; someone else with a big bomb would take care of that.

  It would be dark, which was a great advantage. Maybe only a handful of Taliban would see us go down. Five minutes later though, the word would have gone round. By daybreak, we’d be the focus of a massive and coordinated hunt.

  Once clear of the aircraft, we’d head due north or south and then west as soon as we could. Our best hope of escape would be the GAFA desert, preferably by dawn. We’d either find the BRF there or get picked up. It was only four klicks away – but we’d have to cross the raging Helmand River and possibly the canal on the way.

  We’d move at night and hide in daylight. We’d keep switching on the radios to speak to anyone we could see or hear above us. They’d be up there, waiting for our call. And above all, we had to stick together – two pairs of eyes and ears were always better than one, and one of us might be injured.

  After the 8pm brief, we tried to get a few hours’ sleep. The Boss took the cot next to mine so we wouldn’t wake anyone in his tent.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ he said as he climbed into his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to bed now, knowing that when I wake up, I will deliberately go out and kill people.’

  The Boss grappled with this idea for a few moments as the opening credits of 24 rolled on the laptop beside him – but only for a couple of minutes. The next time I looked, he was fast asleep, his head tucked into the crook of his arm.

  I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just lay on my back in the darkness, going over every eventuality again and again, trying to visualise how I would deal with them. How to get out of the Green Zone if we went down was the challenge that preoccupied me most. There’d be no chance of a rescue. How fast was the current in the Helmand River? Would we reach the GAFA by dawn? If not, where would we lie up? Must remember to keep away from livestock, especially dogs; they’d give us away immediately. What if I was incapacitated and Carl was okay? Carl would have to run. I’d make him. He’d get nowhere trying to carry me. What if he was injured? I’d have a tough time lifting him and all that strawberry cheesecake. But I couldn’t leave him – I’d never be able to live with myself. No; I’d stay and fight to the end – and save the last two rounds for ourselves.

  It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one picture out of my head: me standing alongside a burning aircraft with Carl unconscious at my feet and the Taliban swarming towards us … Wouldn’t it just be Sod’s Law if I got it tonight? Emily was four and a half months pregnant … I saw the look on my kids’ faces as they were told that this time their dad wasn’t coming back … And I knew for certain that this had to be my last tour.

  But would I have ducked out of it there and then, given the choice? Not for all the tea in China.

  The alarm clocks went
off at 1am. We dressed in silence, pulses racing, and popped into the JHF to pick up our Black Brains and check for any changes in plan. There weren’t any. We walked down to the flight line in the cold night air and fired up the aircraft at 1.55.

  There were a few extra start-up procedures to run through in the cockpit before a night flight. Sound was often difficult to place, so keeping the aircraft as dark as possible gave us a much-needed edge. We knew the Taliban had NVGs – probably supplied by Iran – so we didn’t want to make it any easier for them.

  Bat wings were sheathed below the left and right windows of the cockpit for us to pull up and shield the glow of our MPD screens – the only light source in the cockpit.

  Carl needed a few more minutes to adjust his monocle. At night, he was 100 per cent reliant on it – it was his only window on the world. Other military pilots used NVGs, which magnified ambient light sources 40,000 times. We had Pilot’s Night Vision Sights instead.

  The normal flight symbology was projected into the pilot’s monocle, but it was underlaid with the image of the ‘Pin-viss’, a second infrared lens sitting above the TADS bucket.

  Through the PNVS thermal picture, we could see landscape in total darkness, as well as anyone moving below us. ‘If it glows, it goes,’ the instructors used to say – though not in the handbook.

  Like the cannon, the PNVS lens was slaved to your eye. It followed the direction of your right eye, though a fraction more slowly than the gun, so there was a momentary lapse between desire and action. It was mounted above the TADS on the aircraft’s nose, so the perspective was slightly out of kilter too, as if your eyeball had been stretched twelve feet out of its socket.

  Flying on PNVS low level at 140 knots was the hardest thing to master on Apache training; it was like driving down a pitch black motorway with no lights, with a hand clamped over one eye, a twelve-foot-long tube capped with a green lens strapped to the other, and the speedo needle brushing 161 mph …

  We learned how to do this by ‘flying in the bag’. Our entire back-seat cockpit was blacked out with panels, while the instructor sat in the open front. It wasn’t a great place for claustrophobics.

  ‘Please God, just let me get through,’ we’d pray. Fail three test sorties in the bag, and you were out. Passing gave you the world’s greatest high.

  Despite Carl’s whingeing, I knew I was in good hands with him flying me that night. His was the best pair of night hands we had.

  We were all set in good time. No need for calls; we just slipped out of the bays with two minutes to takeoff.

  We lifted silently at 2.40am. Billy led us a few klicks north to dupe any Taliban dickers then backtracked south-west across the A01 Highway, and hard south once we were into the empty desert, our Hellfire-laden machines invisible against the GAFA’s sky.

  OP GLACIER 1: KOSHTAY

  It was a thirty-five minute flight to our holding area in the desert. We’d chosen a spot fifteen kilometres due west of the Taliban base at Koshtay, giving us a run-in time onto the target of four minutes and three seconds. Nobody would hear us that far out; we’d do racetrack patterns at seventy knots and fifty feet off the ground until the time came.

  Carl and Billy kept the aircraft 200 feet off the ground as we headed south. We would normally have gone lower to prevent detection, but the Dasht-e-Margo lived up to its name and was void of all habitation.

  The Boss and Billy were 500 metres to the left and marginally in front of us. The TADS FLIR camera was slaved to my eye; I could see them clearly with my right eye, but in the complete absence of ambient light, my left eye might as well have had a patch over it.

  It had been a while since I’d been a gunner on a night flight. I used some of the transit time to re-familiarise myself with the feel of the firing grips. The front seat had exactly the same controls as the back seat, as well as a bloody great targeting console bolted into the middle of the dash, at the centre of which was a three-inch TV screen providing an additional display for one of the cameras or sensors. I selected the Longbow FCR option. If there was anything remotely threatening in the desert, it was sure to find it and give us a heads up so we could box around it. A large metal PlayStation-like grip sat on either side, with buttons and cursors galore to control the cameras and weapons. Each grip also had a trigger: the right for the laser range finder and designator, the left to kill.

  I moved my thumb and fingertips across the buttons, rockers, switches and pads, instantly recognising each different shape and function, and ran through a dozen different combinations until I was completely comfortable. It didn’t take long.

  The night was unusually still for January. It made me fidget even more. I needed to keep myself occupied. I tried chatting with Carl but he wanted to concentrate on his flying. I sparked up the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF), a radio navigation system we used to pick up homing beacons in bad weather, and absentmindedly scanned the local stations. I’d already preset the channels with the strongest signals to help counter the boredom of desert flying.

  Apache pilots never met any Afghans. Life in the cockpit was remote from the real life of the country; it was the one disadvantage of the job. The nearest we could get was listening to their radio. We all used to do it. Local Pashtun songs were my favourite.

  A Pakistani station broadcasting at 900 kilohertz was often the clearest. I tuned into a mullah in mid rant. I had no idea what he was saying, but he sounded pretty angry about something; maybe he didn’t like having to whip up the faithful at ten to three in the morning.

  ‘Hey Carl, check out the ADF Preset 1. I think they’re onto us. “Come out and kill the mosquito pilots,” they’re saying. “The infidels are nearly here.”’

  Carl remained unmoved. ‘I’m not listening to it, Ed.’

  ‘Okay buddy, suit yourself.’ I turned the volume back up in my helmet.

  This was getting more surreal by the minute. The infidel-hater had been replaced by the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So there we were, armed to the teeth at the dead of night in The Land That Time Forgot on our way to give a whole load of Taliban a rude awakening, and an insomniac radio producer somewhere in Baluchistan had managed to provide us with the perfect soundtrack.

  As we reached the holding area, Trigger put a call into the BRF’s JTAC. I turned off Beethoven as Knight Rider Five Six whispered, slowly and softly. We knew he was in position and perilously close to the enemy before he told us.

  ‘Ugly Five Zero, Knight Rider. I can’t get hold of Bone One One. Can you try to establish comms with him? We need his time on target.’

  The Boss made several calls, each of them unanswered. Sometimes prearranged fast air left their arrival right to the last minute. We’d all just have to wait.

  Two fresh icons popped up on the map page on my left MPD. Our Radar Warning Receiver had just pinged two other air assets over the battlespace, tens of thousands of feet above us. Their radar codes identified them as the Nimrod MR2 and a Predator UAV. We hadn’t been told about the Predator. We often weren’t.

  Five minutes later, at 3.20am, a southern US drawl broke the silence.

  ‘Knight Rider Five Six, Knight Rider Five Six. This is Bone One Three. How do you read, sir?’

  ‘Bone One Three, Knight Rider Five Six, Lima Charlie. We were expecting to hear from Bone One One.’

  ‘Affirmative, sir. The pre-planned B1 has gone unserviceable in Diego Garcia. We are a B1 and we have been tasked to you as the airborne alert from the Afghanistan stack. How many targets do you have for us?’

  The BRF JTAC whispered his reply. ‘Bone, Knight Rider. I have many targets. How many grids have you been given and how many bombs can you drop in one go?’

  He could drop a maximum of ten in a oner and had not been given any of the pre-planned targets. Knight Rider asked him if he could have all ten.

  ‘That’s an affirmative.’

  ‘Okay. Stand by to copy …’

  The JTAC read over each and every fifteen-digit grid an
d four-figure altitude in the same strained whisper. It can’t have been easy with Taliban sentries on the prowl and no wind to hide any noise.

  ‘Target Number One.’

  Pause.

  ‘Priority target.’

  Pause.

  ‘Forty One Romeo … Papa Quebec.’

  Pause.

  ‘One Zero One … Three Two.’

  Pause.

  ‘Two Double Four … Four Zero.’

  Pause.

  ‘Altitude … Two Two Five Seven … Feet.’

  Pause.

  ‘Target Number Two …’

  It made for painful listening, and it took for ever. I copied the ten grids down as well and cross-referenced them on the map. Each of the three accommodation blocks was getting a 2,000-pounder and the middle one was getting two; one in each half. The four highest priority buildings would be on the receiving end of enough 500-pounders to flatten the Pentagon. The B1 could carry a total of twenty-four GBUs or sixteen thermonuclear gravity bombs.

  ‘Bone, Knight Rider. Read back.’

  Bone had to repeat each and every grid and altitude correctly to ensure that he wasn’t going to rain down merry hell on innocent civilians.

  There was a pause as the B1’s offensive systems officer tapped in the grids.

  ‘Bone, Knight Rider. Call Time on Target.’

  It was 3.29am.

  ‘Knight Rider, Bone. TOT in four-zero minutes. I am nine-zero miles to your south.’

  Bloody hell. He’s still in Pakistan, about to cross the border.

  ‘We haven’t got the fuel to wait all night for these jokers,’ Carl grumbled.

  They’d slashed the time we’d have over the target by almost half. We’d started off with ninety minutes and now had barely fifty. And that was only if Bone dropped when he said he would. Bone’s problem was that he had to programme each bomb with the coordinates of the starting and finishing points of its journey. To ensure pinpoint accuracy, he also needed to radar map the ground beneath him and then commensurate the grids.