by Ed Macy
As they thumped down onto the ground we would climb and separate, one going right, one left. If they landed bang on plan, twenty minutes after dusk, it would just have become pitch-black.
Plan set. Route set. We programmed it into our equipment. We were ready.
The Chinooks would fly ahead of us, as normal, on Night Vision Goggles. We would remain low too, sitting back about one kilometre so we could react to any ground fire.
No time for dinner again. Jon brought out the chocolate bars and we walked back to our aircraft.
Jon realised it must have been at least an hour since we last took the mickey out of Jake.
‘I hope your new baby boy doesn’t join the Paras, Jake. That would be most unfortunate.’
‘And why might that be, Jon?’ Jake’s grin told us he knew this was the price he had to pay for munching on one of Jon’s choccy bars.
‘He’d be called Paraffin.’
Jon always managed to lighten the mood when things were getting fraught.
We took off exactly forty minutes before last light on a completely silent departure. We wanted to give the Taliban as little to chew on as possible.
THE ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNNER
SUNDAY, 16 JULY 2006
West of Now Zad
Whenever we went back to Kandahar we usually headed directly south into the desert then climbed and eventually turned east. No one would know any different until about an hour later when the Taliban reported us landing in KAF.
Camp Bastion was monitored by the Taliban’s informers and we wanted them to think this sortie was entirely routine. By lifting this early, taking that route, and not turning up at one of the bases at dusk they would assume-we hoped-that we must have gone back to Kandahar.
We approached the ridgeline to the west of Now Zad at very low level, the two Chinooks up front, engines glowing on the PNVS thermal image in my right eye, us two behind. Their tails picked up and their engines glowed brighter as they ramped up the speed round the final corner. Once round, the tails settled and their heat signature dimmed as they dropped the power back, so the blades were coasting, deadening the noise as much as they could on the last two kilometre run-in.
I silently begged the enemy not to fire.
One klick to run
Please don’t fire…please don’t fire…
Both aircraft flared, and then disappeared in a dust cloud of their own making.
At that point, Jon and I pulled up hard and separated. I went right; he went left. As we climbed, we both looked straight down. I had my gun actioned, and knew he would too. My finger was on the trigger. I had my range already set up. All I needed to do was steady, and fire.
My left eye was peeled for a burst of tracer, or a flash on the ground from anywhere around Now Zad, my right hunting for small thermal blobs or heat from a fired weapon so I could warn them of imminent incoming. The JTAC had been warned that we wouldn’t ask for an AOR update or permission to engage. We knew that our men were in the base and there were no friendlies out there. We still didn’t make communication. Even secure radios gave a telltale squelch.
Widow Seven One had been warned of our arrival time, but the information had been kept tight. He would call us once the game had been given away by our arrival. They believed that one of their resident ANP was a Taliban informer. To put them off the scent of an inbound flight over the last few weeks, the boys had periodically jumped into the vehicles, ready to roll. ‘Let’s mount up, let’s go and meet the Chinooks.’ The main gate never opened though and they all burst out laughing as they went back to what they were doing, Even the ANP saw the funny side of it.
Another variation was for Dan Rex, the OC, to have all the men chilling out, not a care in the world. They knew what time they’d be going out, but the policemen didn’t. At exactly three minutes before the go, every man would jump up, whack his body armour on, clamber onto the vehicles, and roar off to meet the helicopters.
They had to do a lot of that stuff to confuse the touts. At that time, nobody trusted the ANP. It was an awful situation. They couldn’t even have guys watching for the helicopters, because their body language would broadcast what they were up to. The commanders could only go by timings or sound. As soon as they heard the aircraft, the men piled out of the base and tanked it to the LS.
The PNVS had an awesome picture tonight; it looked more like a two-tone TV picture than an IR image. I could see the boys coming out in vehicles, under cover of the sangars. I knew they’d be as anxious as I was. There was a lot of ammunition and men to offload, and a Chinook was the biggest target going.
Now that the Chinooks were landing and the game was up, the Widow finally called us.
‘Wildman Five Zero this is Widow Seven One. How do you read?’
‘Lima Charlie.’
‘We’ve got patrols going out on the ground right now. Stand by.’
We were looking down. I was visual with Jon, and he would have been with us.
I keyed across to him on the inter-aircraft.
‘We’re visual with the patrols going out. Confirm you’ve got four vehicles.’
‘A-firm, four vehicles coming down to the north of the Shrine.’
Almost immediately, the Chinooks rose out of the dust and pegged it out of there to the south-west.
We’d done it, less than thirty seconds on the ground, a truly amazing feat from the loadies and disembarking soldiers. The Chinooks hadn’t received any fire and were now too far away to come to any harm from Now Zad. It didn’t mean that the boys on the ground were in the clear, but the prize the Taliban really wanted was a big cow.
All we had to do now was provide cover for the patrols while they got everybody back to camp and then home for a rest.
My heart raced as tracer streamed out of the base, aiming north-west. I thought north-west was a safe area. A village extended from Now Zad in that direction, but I didn’t have it down as holding Taliban. Within seconds it was like Star Wars down there.
‘They’re taking fire-I can see tracer,’ Jake shouted.
I clicked the mic. ‘Negative. That’s not incoming.’ All of the tracer was coming from the DC and it was now heading north-west, north, north-east and east.
Widow Seven One jumped in. ‘We’re under attack, we’re under attack. We’re taking heavy fire from the north-east. Can you see a firing point to the north-east?’ The north-east tracer trail had stopped.
‘Wildman Five Zero will cover the patrol,’ Jake said. ‘Wildman Five One, you help Widow Seven One.’
‘Copied, Wildman Five One ready for talk-on.’ We were ready for him to direct us onto the target.
‘All I know right now is the north-east sangar is pinned down from a building 200 metres north-east.’
It must have taken a heavy weight of fire to pin the sangar down. And it meant we couldn’t use their tracer to locate the firing point.
At least we had something to go on. We needed to start looking in the area of the bakery. A long street led east off the main one, a couple of hundred metres north of the DC, then south-east, past a drop-off point for the jingly wagons the locals used as buses, to a wadi we called the M25. The wadi was a main supply route for the Taliban, out of sight of the DC.
We’d had a look round to orientate ourselves a few days earlier, because the ANP and Taliban were fighting over who owned the bakery. We’d picked up the offending building quite easily because it was one of only a handful of three-storey buildings in the place. Actually, it just had a little breeze block and hessian-roofed hut on top, but that qualified as three storeys in this town.
I looked down but couldn’t see movement. It was pitch-black in my left eye and my right was looking at a thermal picture.
I released the gun back to its stowed position.
Simon scanned the streets with his FLIR camera.
‘Five One’s looking but nothing seen. Confirm tracer?’
I still couldn’t see any incoming. Normally there was a lot of tracer fire fr
om the Taliban, but not this time.
‘Negative. He won’t give his position away.’ Bright bloke. There was an aircraft above him. He was going easy on the tracer.
We were now to the east of the town, directly over the Green Zone, heading north and looking west.
The JTAC tried to steer us onto the gunner’s firing position, ‘He’s on the—’
I saw what he was about to describe in horrifying detail with my naked eye before he had time to finish the sentence-a red glow shooting up from the location he was in the process of describing.
My right eye had the thermal picture, but there was no light in it whatsoever.
Fuck, it was tracer. My right eye only saw heat. Tracer burnt, but from the back. You didn’t see tracer on thermal.
The glow in my left eye extended towards us like a long red laser beam. The point it appeared to start from wasn’t the muzzle of the gun. Tracer only begins to burn 110 metres out.
If tracer grew in length, it indicated longer bursts. This was a sustained, continually growing line of red light. The gunman wasn’t in the business of spraying. He was in the business of killing.
So far, the solid red line was going to miss us. It was way forward of the aircraft. The radio sparked up: ‘Being engaged.’
No shit, Sherlock…
I hoped the JTAC was about to tell me which building the gunner was in.
Then the red beam started to curve towards the aircraft. I had no time to react. At 1,000 metres per second, it was approaching far too fast.
We were only 1,500 metres away now, and the stream of tracer had aligned itself to us within one and a half seconds of the trigger first being pulled. I lifted my shoulders and buried my neck low, waiting for the impact, eyes narrowed to stop any shit getting in them at that point. The bullets flew straight past my left window, appearing to mesh through the blades. How it failed to smash pieces off them I had no idea.
Fucking hell…
I’d never had tracer fired accurately at me in the air before. The bending phenomenon was a new one on me.
‘That nearly hit us!’ Simon’s voice had risen a couple of octaves. I knew just how he felt.
My mind raced. Our assailant’s range was a fraction too long, which was why it went just over the top, but his lead was perfect. That hadn’t been a bend. Tracer only bends with gravity. He’d been firing straight and I’d been moving forward at 110 mph. He’d anticipated where I was going to be one and a half seconds later and only missed by a whisker.
I flung the stick to the right, pulling back hard on the cyclic to wrench the aircraft round.
The tracer continued to shoot past on my left. Had it gone behind us he would have been using the ambush method: fire in one place and wait for the Apache to fly through it. Not this fucker though. He was tracking me. I had less than a second and a half to move before he dropped his aim slightly and cut us in two.
So far it was only luck that had saved us.
I tipped the blades and threw the Apache right, onto its side. When you turn a helicopter through ninety degrees and pull power the thrust drags you horizontally; you are pulling yourself sideways across the sky. But the weight of the aircraft takes you diagonally downwards.
I didn’t want to go down in the Green Zone.
I pulled back hard, keeping the Apache on its side, the radius of the turn getting tighter and slower as I adjusted the cyclic, moving the thrust arrow up enough to keep me level.
I held the tight, level turn and shot a quick glance vertically upwards over my left shoulder-left eye, tracer; right eye, nothing-then right, vertically down-left eye, black as a witch’s tit; right eye, the Green Zone.
I’d taken about three seconds to roll her halfway around when the tracer stopped. I needed to get eyes back on the gunner, and fast. I didn’t want to lose sight of the next onslaught. My mind flicked back through my Air Combat Tactics Instructor training. The length of burst meant only one thing: this wasn’t anything less than a proper grown-up anti-aircraft gun. We were facing an AA gunner, one-on-one, and he was holding a better hand than I had. I pulled the stick as far back into my left groin as I could. I needed to change the odds.
I’d virtually turned the Apache on a sixpence by slapping its belly into the air. I’d pulled in all the power I could, which had reduced my speed massively. If I’d just flung it around I’d still have been doing the same speed. Instead, I’d spun the aircraft and slammed the brakes on at the same time.
Simon couldn’t help. I’d turned away from the gunner and his TADS was way out of its limits. I’d had no choice.
As we compressed round the final forty-five degrees, I could feel the whole weight of the aircraft push up on me. I was rammed back into my seat. My helmet suddenly weighed a ton and I had to fight to keep my head up. The chinstrap dangled below my chin and the monocle’s heavy metal mount on its right lifted the cup over my left ear clean away. The noise of the aircraft’s engines deafened me. My monocle was the only thing stopping the helmet from tilting further down on the right. It dug deep into my eye socket, cutting into my skin just below the lid.
I began to groan out loud. My jacket and chicken plate were pressing me ever deeper into my seat.
I was terrified he’d get his range right next time and second guess my speed. If he did, he was going to smack his 23 mm shells straight into our flank. And these weren’t AK bullets that would simply bounce off. They were the same kind of exploding cannon rounds that we fired. If they hit us, my misery would come to an abrupt and permanent end.
As I approached the 180 degree point I threw us the right way up and dumped the collective lever. I didn’t want to gain any speed. The Apache was a clever bugger, and I was taking full advantage of that. It automatically scheduled the big stabilator on the back to keep the aircraft level. If you threw the stick forward it would begin to nose down, but the stabilator would shift and bring it back up again. As I dumped the lever and pulled back the stick, I was using the stab as a big fuck-off airbrake, the size of a barn door.
We were now facing south, still over the Green Zone, with Now Zad to our right. My eyes were glued to the area where the tracer had been fired. Only eight seconds had elapsed since the first burst, but it felt a lot longer. I knew the gunner was judging my every move, waiting for the right moment, and I was shitting it.
We’d already lost a lot of speed in the turn and it soon dropped through sixty knots with the stab down.
‘Keep your speed on,’ Simon urged. ‘Speed is life.’
Simon was a Qualified Helicopter Tactics Instructor (QHTI). He’d done the RAF’s version of my ACTI course. He knew as well as I did that the faster the aircraft was going, the quicker it would respond. A helicopter isn’t like a jet, where you flip down an aerofoil and instantly shed a shit-load of Gs. If you’re hovering in a helicopter and you throw the stick forward, it takes a while to respond. An Apache could manoeuvre fairly fast at max speed, but not fast enough, as we’d just discovered. The anti-aircraft rounds had appeared from nowhere in the space of a second. The gunship didn’t respond in that short a time. We were at this guy’s mercy.
I said, ‘Not if he gets his range and—’
The AA flared up at us again.
This time, I knew he could get us. His first burst had been a fraction above my line of sight and continued just over the top of us. Not this time though. It began on the line I was looking down. He had his range 100 per cent bang on; the 23 mm wouldn’t go above or below us this time. To make things worse, as the finger of red began to reach up in the first half a second it started to bend sharply towards us. He’d got it right; he’d seen me slowing.
‘MAN STAB,’ I yelled as I flicked the stabilator into manual with my left thumb and rammed it down.
I’d hit the brakes like a full-on emergency stop. I took a sharp breath, and then just held on.
This is it, this is it…
Over the radio: ‘You’re taking incommmming!’
The next voice
was Simon’s. ‘Fuuuuuuck!’
The line of tracer grew and came forward, arcing ever closer, straight towards the nose of aircraft. It was going to take Simon out first.
I wanted to close my eyes. I was terrified.
The very beginning of the jet of hot metal passed so close in front of the aircraft it lit up the cockpit. Simon held onto the handles above him and I could see the silhouette of his helmet, arms and hands in the ghostly red glow.
I forced myself to look down, to try to follow it to its source and pinpoint the gunner. There was no point in Simon using the TADS. I’d not sat still for more than a second and it would’ve taken a lot longer than that to get it under control.
I thought, ‘I’m going to fly straight into this lot.’ But there was nothing I could do.
I watched the tail end of the burst climbing towards us. It had about a second to go.
There seemed to be about a metre between the rounds lighting up Simon. That was closer than I’d have expected, and they weren’t all following the same line. It had to be a double-barrelled weapon.
The last one’s going to hit…
My mouth flooded with the metallic taste of adrenalin. Fight or flight-and I could do neither.
‘FUCK!’ I screamed. ‘FUCK!’
I felt my heart pounding against my chicken plate and pulsing through my thumbs. My teeth clenched so hard I thought my jaw would pop.
Simon still gripped the handles. He was fighting the urge to grab the controls and try to fly us the fuck out of here.
The business end of the red snake whipped past our nose and Simon was plunged into darkness as it rose high and to the left of us.
Thank fuck I’d braked. Ten or twenty knots faster would have put us right in the middle of his fire. Only three or four rounds would have killed us.
The gunner was good, too bloody good.
His range was smack on and his lead was too. The stab had braked us quicker than he could have anticipated. We wouldn’t get away with it a third time.
