Rocco might not be seen for weeks, then make a dramatic reappearance when he was least expected, like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition.
Carl had been talking about a new upgrade to the Defensive Aide Suite. ‘Ewok,’ Geordie piped up, ‘Alice told us yesterday that the Taliban might have a ZU23 anti-aircraft gun in the Garmsir region.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ He should have seen it coming.
‘Well I was just wondering what the ZU23’s effective range is, like? Is it a threat, like?’
‘Yes, it’s a threat. Hang on, I’ve got it here. I’ll look it up.’
Geordie knew it was a statistic Carl couldn’t have known off the top of his head. Darwin had already doubled up, red in the face, desperately trying to suppress his giggles. But, holding the floor now, Carl was feeling too important to spot him. He reached for his Black Brain and turned to face the packed room. He ripped back the Velcro fastener and flicked it open.
There he was. From Rocco, With Love. x.
Carl blushed to the roots of his hair, and the JHF erupted.
‘Very f… funny… VIDAL.’
‘Ahaa! You’ve been Roccoed!’ Geordie was beside himself with glee.
You could get Roccoed at any time, day or night, in the air or on the ground. Then it would be your turn to Rocco someone else. Rocco didn’t discriminate between rich or poor, giant or dwarf. Everyone was fair game. We even got our old CO once in the simulator at Dishforth, as he flicked his Black Brain bang in the middle of a particularly challenging Hellfire sortie.
Now he was out and about, there would be a frenzy of Rocco activity for a couple of days. Then, just as quickly, he’d go undercover again.
The Boss stepped forward as the laughter subsided.
‘Okay guys, very funny. I said all I wanted this morning, so nothing from me tonight. Any other points from the floor before we close? Alice?’
Alice had slipped in late. She’d taken a quick call from the brigade’s int cell in Lashkar Gah. She looked uncomfortable.
‘Sorry, not very good timing, but there’s something that’s probably worth mentioning. I’ve just been briefed on an enemy intercept.’
The room fell silent.
‘The Taliban have a new plan for what they’ll do if they capture a Coalition soldier.’
I realised I’d stopped breathing. The TADS image of the two SBS boys filled my head.
‘They intend to set up a webcam for a live Internet broadcast, and then skin him – or her – alive.’
6. ARNHEM CALLING
The Taliban kept up a permanent bombardment of the new Garmsir DC. The marines had put the boot into their lovingly kept hornets’ nest, and they weren’t going to let them forget it.
But their focus on the four other northern district centres now seemed to ebb and flow. For a week or two, they’d have a concerted crack at Sangin and its defenders would be back at the ramparts. Then, without any apparent reason, they’d tire of Sangin and turn their attention to Now Zad or one of the others.
During the first few weeks of our second tour, they threw all they had against Kajaki, the furthest outpost, ninety-five kilometres north-east of Camp Bastion, right at the top of the Helmand Green Zone. The town itself was not much to shout about – it was barely more than a village. But control of the giant Kajaki Dam was something else again; it stood 100 metres high and 270 metres wide, in front of the biggest lake in Afghanistan.
It had been a Cold War playground, constructed by the Soviets in 1953 as a gesture of comradeship. Then along came the Americans in 1975, wanting to spread their share of love and influence, and built a thirty-three megawatt hydroelectric power station beside it. By the time we arrived, the dam irrigated the entire province, neighbouring Nimruz and a sizeable chunk of Iran, and also provided Helmand with almost all of its electricity.
Hold the dam, and you controlled the livelihoods of half a million Helmandis. To lose it would have been a strategic disaster. If the Taliban destroyed it, they’d wreak havoc, plunge the province into darkness – and blame the atrocity on a US bombing raid.
A 3,000-metre-long ridgeline towered over the south-eastern side of the dam. The tallest of its three peaks had been fortified by the Paras and was occupied by a troop of thirty marines. It was an excellent vantage point from which to spot any approach. It was given the codename Arnhem.
The marines were skirmishing daily as the Taliban probed towards the hydroelectric dam. The marines held them off, but the Taliban had them surrounded – and took out their frustrations by giving them a fair kicking.
HQ Flight took over the IRT / HRF role from 2 Flight at the height of the Taliban’s Kajaki-thon; 2 Flight had gone up there twice. It was a racing certainty we’d follow suit.
‘Ten quid says we’ll have to go all the way up to bleeding Kajaki and back every day of the shift,’ Carl grumbled. The longer flight meant a greater chance of him missing a meal, which alarmed him almost as much as it did FOG. But none of us took his bet.
The IRT / HRF handover always took place after the morning brief. Since the task was all about getting airborne as fast as we could, every aspect of our existence for those three days was tailored to that objective. Two aircraft were on permanent standby to scramble at all times, their pilots’ kit out of the lockers and ours already in them. To ensure someone was always ready to power up, we even went down to the flight line with 2 Flight. While they took their stuff out of the Apaches, we put ours in.
My ammo-bag went beside my seat and my other running clobber went in the boot with my go-bag as usual. Perched on the seat was my helmet, leads plugged in. I left my Flight Reference Cards and gloves on the dash, stowed my carbine in its bracket and hooked my survival vest on top of it – open and ready to slip into.
Carl and I – the two back-seaters again – signed out our aircraft.
‘A very saucy little Lolo Ferrari for you today, Mr Macy, and the one and only Taylor Rain for you, Staff.’ The crew chief just loved his new fleet of sex goddesses. ‘Lolo’s sucking beautifully today – fuel, that is.’
There was no time to load up a specific weapons load on an emergency shout. So the IRT / HRF aircraft were given a routine Load Charlie. Each Apache normally went out with 300 cannon rounds, twenty-four rockets and two Hellfires. We used the rest of the takeoff weight allowance on extra fuel in a specially fitted second tank. It gave us between ninety minutes and two hours more time over the target, depending on where we went.
For the duration of the shift, the flight moved out of our normal accommodation tents and into one set aside for the IRT / HRF by the JOC compound. The emergency Chinook crews slept in another alongside it.
We would be summoned for a call-out on insecure radios we carried everywhere. For the same reason we had tactical callsigns, emergency shouts came to us in code. We didn’t always want the Taliban to know that Big Brother was on his way. The codewords had a theme – pop stars, football teams, literary classics, whatever the Ops officer fancied – and they changed every few weeks.
The IRT / HRF tried to stay together as much as possible during the shift. We ate together, washed together and worked together. There were only two radios, so if one of us had to go for a dump, we’d do so as a pair.