Hellfire

by Ed Macy

  ‘Fuck…that was close…’ I changed the burst limit to twenty.

  ‘Not close enough for my liking, but I’d still aim off a bit if I were you,’ Simon replied before updating us on the secure radio. ‘Hardwoods are about to cross the river and come into view of the Taliban.’

  I deslaved the TADS from T12, adjusted the sight, lased and fired a twenty-round burst. I felt every one of them through my calf muscles as they poured off the gunship like steel rain.

  I switched to the field south of the LS and ripped up the ground in front of the trees with a series of twenty-round bursts of HEDP bullets.

  ‘They’re over the river,’ Simon called.

  It was getting lighter by the second. I could now see that the south was well and truly blocked from view.

  I switched my fire to the right, next to the canal bank.

  Jake switched his left, further up the tree line.

  We opened up in unison, providing a clear avenue for the Chinooks. Cannon rounds stitched their way along the edge of their approach path as they flared to land. The dust rolled south as the monstrous machines hit the ground. I fired fifty metres to their south-east and Jake did the same to their south-west-far closer than we had considered safe twenty-four hours ago.

  No sooner were they down than they had lifted again.

  We kept on ploughing up the LS until they were over the river and in the sanctuary of the open desert.

  ‘Checkfire,’ Jake ordered.

  I stowed the M230 cannon.

  The entire field was a dustbowl with a lone building in the north-east corner. A succession of Paras made their way over the bridge like ants in the pale dawn light. As the dust cloud drifted further south the last of them crossed into the DC.

  ‘Wildman this is Widow. That’s us all across safely and not a single shot fired.’

  ‘End of firemission. You’re clear back to Bastion. Thanks for the support-and stay on this freq for a Taliban update.’

  We were only a mile from Sangin when he called back to explain what he’d meant. One of his interpreters with a radio scanner had heard a senior Taliban commander asking why they’d failed to shoot down the cows and the mosquitoes.

  Their reply said it all: ‘The mosquitoes were firing at us and we couldn’t shoot…’

  ‘Wildman copied,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll get away with that twice…’

  AIR ATTACK, AIR ATTACK

  OCTOBER 1989

  Aldershot, England

  The echo of voices…

  The whisper of tyres on wet tarmac…

  A burst of blinding sunlight…

  The Royal Artillery (RA) instructor stood with his hands on his hips. A hint of a smile suggested he knew something we didn’t. ‘To be an effective anti-aircraft gunner, you have to be a very good judge of speed and distance.’ He paced up and down in front of us like he was Captain Mainwaring. ‘You cannot afford to waste shots. If you miss first time and adjust quickly, you may, if you’re lucky, get a second chance, but only if the pilot’s below par. If he’s not, if he can fly half decently, like some of the Argies in the Falklands, he’ll manoeuvre unpredictably and then it’s spray-and-pray time. Spray, because that guy’s jinking all over the sky and you’ll never hit him in a month of fucking Sundays; pray, because by now he’s seen your tracer and he knows where you and your little pop-gun are hiding.’

  He tapped one of the four pintle-mounted general purpose machine guns (GPMGs). ‘Now which of you sad, sorry bastards is first up?’ He rubbed his hands and blew on them.

  I pulled myself to my feet and squinted against the cloudless sky. Behind me, my 2 Para mates gave me some low grunts of encouragement. Behind them, I swore I could hear the sniggers of the RA captain’s support team, but I didn’t let that put me off. I expected nothing less. In the eyes of a young Para the British Army was divided between those wearing the coveted red beret and the rest-the crap-hats.

  I’d been given a fifty-round belt of 7.62 and told to fire twenty-to twenty-five-round bursts at the bright red remote-controlled drone that would appear over the frost-bitten ridgeline any second now. Two posts set ten feet away at eleven and one o’clock determined my arc of fire. Outside them, my rounds would land in the nearby village. As a Para marksman, regimental honour weighed heavily on my shoulders, but how difficult could it be? The propellerpowered drone had a wingspan of a metre and a half; at this range it would be the size of a barn door.

  The drone would be flying right to left, straight and level. Bang, bang; I’d collect my prize and we could all go home.

  I heard a sound like a buzz-saw and pulled the butt of the GPMG hard into my shoulder. There. A bright red cross, its bulbous engine glinting in the sunlight, a hundred feet or so off the deck.

  ‘Air Attack, Air Attack,’ Mainwaring screamed at the top of his voice.

  I placed the drone squarely in the centre of the sights.

  Three, two, one…It passed the right-hand post and I gave it a sustained burst. The drone beetled on and disappeared over the ridgeline. I couldn’t believe it. There was a chorus of wolf-whistles from the crap-hats as I breathed in the smell of burnt gun oil. I flushed with embarrassment.

  Captain Mainwaring was in my face quick as a wink. ‘Not so easy is it, son? Trouble is, you can’t actually see where your rounds are going, can you? So this time, we’re going to help you.’

  A RA bombardier gave me a fresh belt of ammo.

  ‘We’re loading you up with 1BIT; now you’ll be able to see where your rounds are going.’

  (1BIT: one standard 7.62 mm ball round for every one tracer round (1Ball1Tracer = 1BIT).)

  I’d be able to adjust my aim and walk the bullets onto the target.

  The drone appeared again, nice and steady. With the belt of ammo draped over my left forearm I tracked it and pulled the trigger, spitting out red streaks the very moment it crossed the right-hand post.

  Every single glowing round passed behind the stupid fucking thing by yards. I was so stunned I was unable to get in a second burst. The drone wobbled off and the catcalls intensified; some of them this time from my mates.

  Mainwaring told me where I was going wrong. I needed to ‘lead’ the aircraft-at this distance, I had to aim a second in front of it and let it fly into the bullets. I should have known about this from the Saturday afternoon war movies I used to watch with my granddad; the ones where the Spitfire pilots talked about ‘deflection shots’-firing at an angle ahead of a crossing enemy aircraft, taking its speed and distance into account.

  Round three. This time, my lead was perfect, but for some reason all my bullets disappeared below the drone.

  Next time, Mainwaring said, be aware of distance, then fire. Cheeky bastards had flown it further away than last time, catching me out. My lead had been good, but because of ‘ballistic drop’, the bullets had fallen well below the target. I’d show him this time!

  Round four. My bullets passed behind it again. The drone-operator had increased its speed. Watch your range, Mainwaring told me, but don’t forget the speed of your target.

  Round five. It came screaming in from the left, jinking up and down as well as accelerating and decelerating. The dodgy bastards were taking the piss. I wasn’t even close.

  The laughter behind me grew to a cacophony.

  ‘Am I right in thinking, Para-boy, that you’re an SAS wannabe?’

  I said nothing. I didn’t like the way this was going.

  ‘Didn’t I warn you,’ Mainwaring shrieked, ‘that if you miss, the enemy aircraft will see your tracer and your position will be compromised? Stand by for incoming—’

  I began to run.

  I ran as fast as I could, legs pounding the rock-hard earth, arms swinging, as I made for the nearest cover, a concrete pillbox around 200 metres away. Over the whistles and catcalls behind me I heard the buzz-saw signature of the drone. The louder it got, the faster I ran. Cary Grant running for his life in North by North-west had nothing on me…

>   The drone swept in behind me, drowning out the laughter.

  I was still thirty metres from the pillbox when it slammed into the small of my back. I hit the ground and the lights went out. I thought I’d been split in two.

  I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t. I heard people talking, but they made no sense. Where were Mainwaring and my mates? Where was I?

  ‘You okay, mate?’ a bloke said.

  ‘I think he’s dead…’ A woman’s voice.

  ‘He fell off his bike in front of that man’s car. He was in the air, upside down, when the car hit him.’

  I wanted to tell them that wasn’t what had happened at all. I wanted to tell them I’d been on Salisbury Plain in a live firing exercise against a target drone when the bloody thing decided to go rogue and everything turned to ratshit.

  Fuck! The pain…

  Someone was trying to move me. I felt like I was being pulled, pushed and prodded. Every time they touched me I wanted to open my mouth and scream, but I couldn’t even whimper.

  ‘I thought it had taken his head off. It hit him in the back and he was upside down, mate. His head went under the bumper and his feet went through the windscreen. His back must be broken.’

  If my back’s broken, why the fuck are you trying to move me? If my back’s broken, how am I going to do SAS Selection?

  They’ll pay for this, I thought. A drone goes rogue, hits me in the back and kills all my dreams. My God, I’ll have them…

  ‘Get the boards. Quick.’ Another woman. Stern, authoritarian.

  ‘I tell you, he flew off the bonnet and then the guy drove over him…’

  ‘Drove over his head,’ the first woman said.

  ‘No, it drove over his shoulder…’

  Whatever, I thought. The pain that had threatened to overwhelm me was replaced by a feeling of immeasurable tiredness. I felt myself sliding and falling.

  ‘Sir, wake up. Can you open your eyes for me?’

  I opened my eyes and my confusion deepened as I slowly saw a black woman backlit by a bright orange halo. I thought for a moment that Diana Ross had come to take me away…

  ‘Can you feel my hand?’

  I couldn’t, but all was not lost: I felt something on my face-the rain I could see sparkling in the glow of the street lamp.

  ‘Can you feel me touching your fingers?’

  I was aware of having hands and feet, but I couldn’t feel her touching them.

  ‘Can you grip my fingers?’

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t move a muscle. I tried to shift my head, but it wouldn’t respond. Nothing responded. I couldn’t even speak. I was totally fucked.

  The woman unzipped my Barbour jacket. ‘Sweet Jesus, he’s wearing a bin-bag under his coat.’ At best she must be thinking I’m mad and at worst a weirdo pervert.

  Leave me alone, I wanted to tell her, because all I want to do is sleep.

  Suddenly and with no warning I felt like I was being hit on the back of the head with a road worker’s mallet every time my heart beat.

  ‘Yeah, he arrested,’ a paramedic yelled. ‘He’s military. Suspected spinal and internal injuries…’

  I couldn’t open my eyes but at least the pain was telling me I wasn’t dead.

  I wanted to go to sleep again, but a voice in the back of my head told me I needed to stay awake.

  And someone seemed to be shoving the end of a broom shank deep into me, just below my rib cage, next to my spine. Every time the ambulance hit the tiniest bump it felt like it was going to burst through my chest. I was John Hurt in my own nightmare version of Alien.

  We hit a pothole and I suddenly found my voice. I screamed-full throat, full belly. It filled the ambulance and blotted out the sound of the siren.

  ‘Fuck me!’ the paramedic said.

  I passed out again.

  ‘Corporal Macy, can you hear me?’

  Of course I can hear you; just give me some bloody morphine…

  Then: closed abdominal injury, mate, the voice at the back of my head said. Fat chance of the love-drug.

  The pain had got worse.

  If I couldn’t put up with this, how would I ever be able to pass Selection? Fuck Selection, I’m tired…

  ‘Corporal Macy, can you hear me?’

  I opened my eyes a crack and found myself blinking against bright, brilliant white. No wonder people said they saw angels in places like this. They were delusional; just like I was now.

  A guy in a green smock leaned over and shone something into my eyes. ‘You’ve been in an accident, mate.’

  Now there’s a surprise.

  My head and back were on fire. I tried to move my feet and legs, but couldn’t. With a supreme effort, I managed to raise my head and shoot a glance down my body.

  I was on a bed wearing a green gown, in an operating theatre with a lamp suspended over me. It was pushed up and switched off. Maybe they’d already given up on me…

  A six-inch square rubber block was strapped tightly to my belly. The strap had some kind of winch attached to it. It was fucking killing me.

  At least I now knew why I was paralysed. My wrists and ankles were cuffed to the bed with more straps.

  ‘Can you tell me where the pain is?’ the guy in green asked.

  ‘Everywhere,’ I said. ‘Please, morphine…’

  Someone else approached the bed, a stethoscope around his neck. They looked at each other, then at me. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us where it hurts most?’

  He injected my right arm with a clear liquid from a big syringe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pain relief.

  I screamed.

  ‘My back is killing me.’

  ‘Where specifically?’

  ‘The small of my back. Please. You’ve got to give me something for the pain. I’m begging you—’

  He cranked the handle several notches. The clicks were like machine-gun fire. I screamed again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Corporal Macy, really I am.’

  Like fuck, I thought, as another wave of pain crashed through me.

  The lights went out again.

  My torso sprang upwards as soon as they took the tension off the strap. They lifted me onto another bed and finally relieved some of the pain.

  They’d had to pump X-ray dye into my arm to identify the source of my internal bleeding. Then they’d squeezed the blood out of my kidneys. When they released the pressure, the blood had seeped back into them, the rupture clotted and my life had been saved.

  ‘Think of your internal organs as being connected together by pipes.’ The junior doctor’s bloodshot blue eyes were set in a broad, unsmiling face. ‘When you get hit as hard as you did, all your organs get thrown around and the pipes connecting them detach. Then you bleed internally and the bleeding can’t be stemmed. You die from a loss of circulating body fluid. We think you were hit at about 50 mph, a lot faster than is considered survivable. Fortunately, your stomach muscles are so strong and your body so fit that the impact did not rearrange your internal organs as it would have for most people, so all your pipes remained miraculously connected. The force of the collision did, however, rupture your kidneys and damage a number of other organs. Your heart arrested as it fought to keep you alive. You arrested twice, in fact.’

  He smiled. ‘You’re a very lucky man. The surgeon couldn’t operate and didn’t give you more than a 20 per cent chance of pulling through. Thank God you’ve been keeping yourself fit, Corporal Macy. By rights you should be dead.’

  Funny what you dream about when you’re on the point of checking out. Being pursued by a drone across a military firing range must have been on my mind because we’d recently done antiaircraft drills at Larkhill.

  ‘What hit me?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  I’d have shaken my head if I wasn’t in so much pain.

  He told me that a number of witnesses had come forward. I’d been cycling along Queen’s Avenue, close to the barracks. It was dark and it had been raining.r />
  Slowly, it came back to me. I remembered the orange glow of the street lamps and their reflection in the puddles as I’d held my bike’s front wheel between the yellow lines at the edge of the road. I’d followed the same routine for several weeks: two hours in low gear at full pelt with a bin-bag under my clothes to raise my temperature and make me sweat. After that, I’d get off the bike and go for a long run.

  I’d been getting myself fit for SAS Selection.

  Something had hit my right handlebar; I remembered the bang. I’d looked up and seen a Volvo. It had overtaken too close and clipped me with its wing mirror. I’d struggled for balance and my wheel had clipped the kerb and I’d careered into the oncoming lane.

  I remembered headlights very bright in my face, the world turning upside down and then something colliding with me…

  The rest was filled in by the policeman who came to take my RTA victim’s statement.

  When the front wheel of my bike locked at ninety degrees I’d gone over the handlebars and been hit by a car going too fast in the opposite direction. I was totally inverted when it ploughed into me, its radiator grille striking me in the small of the back. My head went under the bumper and my feet went through the windscreen. The driver had slammed on the brakes but not quickly enough to prevent him ploughing over my shoulder. No wonder I was a complete fucking mess.

  I finally summoned the courage to ask the doctors the only question that mattered. SAS Selection. What were my chances?

  A big fat zero, as it turned out. They told me I’d been lucky not to be invalided out of the Paras. The good news was that they were discharging me from hospital; I was heading home-if you could call army accommodation on the edge of Aldershot ‘home’.

  Over the next few months, my mates came in to bathe me because I was in too much pain to move. I had a livid purple bruise from the toes on my right foot-where it had gone through the windscreen-all the way up my leg, across my arse, my back and my shoulder, finally petering out somewhere under my hairline.