We didn’t lift on every scramble, only on half the shouts that came in. Our commanders were reluctant to throw us up unless they were sure it was necessary. They might need our limited pilot and aircraft hours later. It was a tricky balance.
I once sat in a powered-up Apache cockpit for four hours on the flight line while Sangin took a pummelling. They didn’t want us to go up there and risk running out of combat gas only for the real assault on the DC to kick off.
‘You’re our ace card,’ the brigadier had told us. ‘It’s a game of poker with these bastards. And a good poker player hangs on to his aces as long as he can.’
The order for us to launch always came from the brigade air cell at Lashkar Gah. Only they had full sight of the whole battle space, and knew best how to allocate their paper-thin resources. The truth was, they desperately needed more aces. To help them, our Ops Officer listened in to the ground net to get us the earliest heads up he could. He’d often scramble us down to the flight line before the brigade’s call arrived. When it did, all we had to do was pull up the collective.
Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long for our first Kajaki shout – five hours and forty-three minutes after the handover, to be precise. We had just eaten lunch. Billy had agreed to stay on in the cookhouse with Carl and one of the radios, so Carl could have a slice of strawberry cheesecake – his favourite. Trigger had gone back into the JHF, and I had popped back to the IRT / HRF tent with the second radio. I wanted to write a quick bluey to my son. Emails and phone calls were great, but nothing beat the post. It was more intimate; the connection between you more tangible. I began to write. In the quiet of the tent, the voice over the radio made me jump.
‘BART, HOMER, SPRINGFIELD, PIZZA.’
It was The Simpsons theme week. The IRT, Trigger and I, were Bart, and Homer was the HRF; all four of us, to the Ops Room, fast.
I grabbed the radio to acknowledge. ‘Bart, Springfield, Pizza.’
Something nasty had obviously kicked off in the Green Zone. Leaving my son’s bluey on my cot, I sprinted out of the tent and up the forty-five degree wooden ladder specially built for us over the waist-high Hesco Bastion wall. My feet stung as I landed on the dust road in front of the JOC. ‘Aircrew,’ I hollered as I nipped past the sentries and into the JHF tent.
The watchkeeper looked up from his radio set. ‘Kajaki is under attack. The Boss is already next door.’
‘Roger.’
I grabbed my Black Brain from the secure steel box as Billy and Carl burst into the tent. The cookhouse was a good 700 metres away. Billy and Carl had taken the IRT Land Rover to lunch, but they were still red in the face from the rush. Not ideal for strawberry cheesecake digestion.
‘It’s Kajaki, guys. Billy, go next door. Come on Carl.’
On a fastball, the front-seaters always popped into the JOC for a quick low-down on the ongoing incident from the ground ops officers, while the back-seaters made a beeline for the aircraft to start firing them up.
Carl wheel-spun the Land Rover away from the JOC compound, turned sharp left down a 200-metre dirt track then left again. The suspension clanked as we sped across the metal bridge over the irrigation ditch and swung right towards the hangar. We drew up hard with a squeal of brakes and ran the last seventy-five metres to the arming bays. Our two Apaches were crawling with Groundies.
Ten minutes later, Trigger and Billy popped up over the berm. They’d taken the off-road route between the JOC and the flight line. I pushed the throttle forward to start the rotors turning the second the Boss slammed his door shut. We were off the deck in twenty-two minutes. Once we’d hit 3,000 feet Trigger caught his breath and gave me the fill.
‘It’s Arnhem. They’re taking heavy incoming from three different firing points: north, north-west and west. Heavy calibre stuff, rockets and a whole load of RPGs. A lad’s already taken a 7.62 to the head – good job he was wearing his helmet. Looks like the Taliban might be trying to take the position.’
‘Copied.’
‘Five Zero, Five One – Buster.’ Buster was the call to press the pedal to the metal.
It was the worst attack on Arnhem yet. And my monocle told me we were still twenty-eight minutes away. I was pulling so much power, the torque was bouncing on and off 100 per cent. The second it dropped into the 90s, it was nose down and collective up again. We were tanking it; a straight line, max chat.
There was no time to test the weapons on the ground during an IRT fastball. So we did them on the way.
‘My gun.’
I looked full left, full right, hard up and straight down. The gun followed my every move. ‘Your gun.’
Trigger did the same.
‘Coming up rockets.’
Actioning the rockets, he made sure their steering cursor came up on his TADS screen and the correct quantity of each showed up on his weapons page.
‘Come co-op.’
I followed the Boss’s ‘I bar’ around my monocle as he moved his TADS.
‘Good movement; co-op confirmed, Boss.’
‘Good. My missiles.’
‘CMSL’ popped up in my monocle.
‘Missile locked onto the laser, Mr M. Your missiles.’
I looked down and left; the Hellfire’s seeker followed my eye movement.
I tried to picture the scene up in Kajaki; how we were going to prosecute the targets. The enemy’s favourite hangout was a loaf-shaped hill between two wadis, about two and a half klicks north-west of Arnhem. It was known as the Shrine because some mullah had been buried up there years ago. The site was covered in tatty green, red and white flags; a typical Afghan grave.
The Taliban’s drill was always the same. They set up their weapons, gave our boys on the mountain a good pounding, and escaped like rats up a drainpipe into three or four old tunnels on its western edge as soon as we turned up.
I hoped the marines were getting it from the Shrine because it was safer ground for us to attack: no buildings, so no collateral damage. If the Taliban were on Falcon, too, it would be trickier.
Falcon was our codename for the peak immediately west of Arnhem, less than 400 metres along the same ridgeline. The enemy used to climb its blind side and our guys would only know they were there when the rounds started tearing up the ground beneath their feet. Unless we got our munitions spot on when engaging Falcon, they’d overshoot and spill onto Arnhem, especially if we were firing from the west.
From the brief sitrep Trigger had received, it sounded like the enemy were on the Shrine and Falcon. It sounded like they were everywhere.
‘Widow Seven Eight, this is Ugly Five One. How do you read me?’ As the mission commander for the sortie, the Boss got on the net to the JTAC at Arnhem.
‘Ugly, Widow Seven Eight. Lima Charlie. You me?’
‘Lima Charlie also. We are two Apaches carrying 600 thirty Mike Mike, forty-eight rockets and four Hellfire. Callsigns Ugly Five Zero, Ugly Five One. Requesting update.’
‘Copied Ugly Five One. We’re taking machine-gun and RPG fire from Falcon. They’re massing there and trying to move across to assault our location. We think they’re going to try to over-run us. Confirm you know that location.’
‘Affirm.’ I’d taken the Boss up to Kajaki on our second attempt at a familiarisation flight.
‘Also, Ugly Five One, be aware I’ve got a Harrier GR7 on station: callsign Topman…’
Good. The marines were getting the heavy artillery as well as the cavalry.
‘He is going to drop a 500-lb bomb on the top of Falcon. I’d like Ugly callsigns to follow up and kill any leakers after Topman drops.’
‘Ugly Five One, copied all. Have you any other further targets for us?’
‘Widow Seven Eight, affirm. Are you familiar with the area of the Shrine?’