Exhilaration coursed through my veins. I could see the smoke plumes with my naked left eye now, just to the right of the Green Zone. They were rising out of a gully that led down into the trees. As we closed on the gully, I saw an empty compound on either side of it, then a couple of camouflage-painted vehicles sheltering behind the nearside compound’s back wall. A Pinzgauer and a WMIK Land Rover. The marines. Two more vehicles stood at the back of the far compound. Eight or nine puffs of smoke spiralled upwards before being carried away by the wind.
Carl set up a circuit over the Green Zone. I headed towards the marines.
‘Got the friendlies in the wadi, Boss. It’s 42 Commando.’
‘Copied. Let me know if they move.’
I wanted the Taliban to know that Big Brother had turned up to help out Little Brother.
The marines’ JTAC came back with a grid for the enemy mortar position: a compound 200 metres in, behind some trees. At the edge of the Green Zone was another line of trees, hiding anyone inside it completely. A good place for an ambush. But it was a false lead.
‘We’ve just been over that compound,’ Billy reported. ‘Couldn’t see anyone in it.’
It wasn’t the mortar tube we needed to find first anyway. They’d have no direct line of sight onto the marines. We needed to find their controller. Take him out, and the tube men would be firing blind.
The Taliban’s spotters often positioned themselves in trees and reported the necessary corrections back to the tube via walkie-talkie. The Boss searched along the outer treeline, flicking constantly between the Day TV camera and the Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) thermal camera.
Billy beat him to it. ‘I’ve got a man hiding.’
‘Where?’
‘From the marines’ wadi, follow the treeline to its most southerly end.’ He paused to let the Boss follow his talk-on.
‘On the ground, under trees, lone man… Don’t think there are any weapons on him. Looking for a radio.’
A scruffy bloke with a beard, dressed from head to toe in black, walked out into the field, flapping his dishdash as he went to show us he wasn’t armed and didn’t have a single walkie-talkie stuffed down his trousers. With two gunships overhead, cannons pointing directly at him, he’d got the message we were onto him. Cunning sod. He knew we couldn’t engage him. He moved slowly in the direction of Gereshk, still looking up at us and flapping away. I didn’t see his face, but I knew he’d have a grin plastered right across it.
‘Ugly callsigns, Widow Eight Four. We’ve just seen two puffs of smoke east of the previous target grid.’
Were they still engaging? There was no chance of hearing the mortars launch inside our sealed cockpits. But we did hear the first round impacting through the JTAC’s open mike. The rounds were now landing alarmingly close to the marines, fired onto coordinates supplied by the smart arse spotter just before he came out to give us the dishdash dance.
Not all the Taliban were running. The carefully hidden mortar tube team were fighting on with the full knowledge we were swarming above them. That did take brass. We’d surely find them now.
Carl and I tracked east, deeper into the Green Zone from the empty compound. Thirty seconds later, Billy spoke up again. Skill fade from the break in Blighty was firmly behind Billy as he got to grips with the sights. He was having a good afternoon.
‘I’ve got ’em. Three hundred metres east of the compound is a triangular-shaped copse. Men moving inside it.’
‘Request laser spot.’
Billy pointed his crosshairs at the copse and squeezed his trigger. The Boss flicked his TADS onto Laser Spot Tracker mode, and the lens jumped towards the spot where Billy was aiming his laser energy.
‘Where are they in there?’
‘Under the trees. At least three of them on my FLIR, and this lot have got weapons on them.’
The copse was only fifty metres long but its foliage provided dense cover. We were 2,000 metres south-east of it, and all we could see was forty-foot trees. Billy had gone round the opposite side where, for a few metres, the trees were shorter and the bushes less thick; he’d picked up moving bodies through their heat signatures in his FLIR lens. I banked right to circle the northern edge too. To engage, we needed to be sure. The Boss got a perfect view through the window.
‘Look at this heat source, Mr M.’
I looked down to the MPD above my right knee displaying the TADS image in FLIR mode. A long thin rectangle, ten inches wide, chest height and angled in the direction of the marines was practically burning a hole in the camera lens.
‘Yup. That’s definitely a mortar barrel in there.’
It was a good spot by Billy. And he wasn’t going to let them get away.
‘Confirmed as Taliban. Engaging with thirty Mike Mike.’
Mike Mike was military air slang for millimetre. Flame licked out of Billy’s cannon as it spat HEDP rounds at a rate of 600 per minute and an initial muzzle velocity of 805 metres per second from his stand-off position 1,500 metres from the copse. Less than two seconds later, their shaped charge heads exploded with a blinding flash. Then the incendiary charges inside the 87-mm-long projectiles threw out jets of flame large enough to torch a car, igniting everything within a two-metre radius, and the fragment charges blasted out thousands of red hot shards of metal casing. Billy had set his gun to bursts of twenty. Three or four more of those, and the copse would be neutralised. But he’d only pumped off fifteen.
‘Gun jam, gun jam! Your target. Pulling off.’
Our orbit had taken us past the marines again to watch for any leakers while he prosecuted the target. I brought our Apache round to face the copse as another two mortar rounds shot straight out of it. This time I caught a glimpse of their shock wave as they penetrated the treetops. They still weren’t running.
‘Necky little bastards.’
‘These guys are insane,’ the Boss said.
I didn’t disagree. To carry on engaging us after tasting our firepower was suicidal.
The Boss knew exactly what to do. ‘Let’s go in with Flechettes.’
‘Copied. Perfect.’
Cannon was great if you were on top of the target. But we had the distance now to set up for a rocket run.
Nothing beats a Flechette for multiple personnel out in the open. It was designed to burst open 860 metres into its flight, freeing its cargo of eighty five-inch-long Tungsten darts. An explosive charge powered them onto the ground at speeds well over Mach 2 – 2,460 mph – shredding everything within a fifty-metre spread. Each dart’s intense supersonic speed created a huge vacuum behind it. If it hit a man in the chest, that vacuum would suck away everything in its path, and was powerful enough to tear flesh and muscle from a human target if it passed within four inches of one.
The copse was a textbook Flechette target: no civilians anywhere near it. But we had to be quick. ‘Stay in the overhead Billy, and keep them fixed. We’re coming in for a Flechette shoot.’
They’d be unlikely to do a runner with Billy sitting right on top of them.
We needed a four-kilometre run-in for a rocket shoot, so I banked hard right, pulling us away from the target, and thrust the cyclic forward to gain the extra 1,000 metres.
‘Co-op shoot Flechettes. Two rockets.’
‘Copied, Boss.’
Front and back seat worked together on a co-operative shoot. ‘CRKT’ popped up in my monocle; the Boss had just actioned the rockets. I flicked the cyclic’s weapon select button to ‘R’. A vertical letter ‘I’ appeared on the left edge of my monocle; the Boss’s targeting symbol. I had to match my crosshairs onto the Boss’s ‘I bar’ for the rockets to land on target, and then pull the trigger. I was flying the Apache, so I was the only one who could successfully line up a launch. He aimed, I matched, I fired.