One hundred and fifty knots… I pulled back hard on the cyclic. Dust and debris shot from the top of the shaft, 100 feet into the air. We were under 1,000 feet. I’d sworn I’d never get this low. At 750 feet, still fighting the inertia, I punched off eight flares as the nose came up, just in case a missile decided to lock onto the heat from our now vertical engines.
‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly. That is a Delta Hotel. Repeat, Delta Hotel!’
Direct hit. We could hear whoops of delight over the JTAC’s mike. We skirted around the back of the Shrine to look for runners while Billy scoured Falcon. Both were as dead as a whore-house on a Sunday morning.
‘I want that Hellfire method taught to everyone, Mr M… after you’ve explained it to me…’
Between us and the Harrier, every threat had been removed in under two minutes. Alice would have been proud of us.
The Boss was delighted with his sharp-shooting. ‘I think that’s what you call catching the enemy with their pants down, isn’t it?’
‘Kind of. They’d barely unbuckled their belts.’
‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly Five One. We have no more targets. Do you have anything else for us?’
‘Negative. But they’ll probably be back the moment you go.’
‘Boss, we’ve got plenty of combat gas,’ Billy said. ‘Let’s pull a trick.’
‘Affirm. Good idea.’
Trigger flipped onto an insecure frequency and told the JTAC we were heading back to Camp Bastion. Instead, we pulled south ten kilometres into the desert, and waited.
It was a ruse we’d used a few times with success. We listened to the Taliban’s radios; they listened to our insecure nets. Each side heard the other loud and clear. But neither knew for certain whether they were being bluffed.
We circled at endurance speed – seventy knots – while the sun dipped over the foothills of the Hindu Kush, painting the sky blood red. There was not a trace of humanity as far as the eye could see; the scene was so primeval that Billy and Carl’s brutally uncompromising helicopter gunship beneath us looked strangely at home.
After twenty minutes, it was still all quiet at Arnhem. The Taliban were either all dead or had decided against stepping back into the ring for Round Two, so the JTAC released us.
‘Drop us some fish and chips the next time you’re passing,’ Widow Seven Eight added. ‘The lads are sick to death of ration packs.’
We landed back at base at dusk. The arming teams threw on the same Load Charlie for our next call-out.
‘Stand by, you two,’ Carl warned from the next door arming bay. ‘Kev is on his way over.’
Kev circled the aircraft, his belly leading the way. He peered into our rocket pod tubes and under the Hellfire rails. He plugged into the wing with the inevitable slow shake of his head. ‘Absolutely fooking typical.’ We’d launched one of his precious Hellfires – what more did he want? ‘You launched one all right. But you launched the wrong fooking one, didn’t you?’
Kev pointed to the Hellfire on our right-hand rail. ‘See that? Its serial number’s out of date next week. You were supposed to have fired the fookin’ right ’un, not the left. That one was good for another couple of months. I’ll have to backload her now. Un-fooking-believable.’ He unplugged and stomped off.
As we turned in that night, the four of us popped into the JOC one last time to check on the situation at Kajaki. The District Centre and Arnhem had taken the odd pot shot since we’d left, but on the whole it had remained quiet.
I got into my sleeping bag and hoped we didn’t get an overnight call-out. I didn’t mind them normally, but the whole squadron had to be up early the next morning. The Prime Minister was on his way.
7. A MATTER OF TIME
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s clandestine visit was the worst kept secret in Camp Bastion. Everyone had known about it for days.
‘Listen, I know you all know who’s coming out,’ the Boss said one night at an evening brief. ‘But from now on, please stop talking about it. It’s supposed to be classified.’
Darwin gave Trigger’s knickers an extra twist. ‘Can we ask the PM to sign Rocco, sir?’
‘No we bloody can’t! And please don’t Rocco anyone while they’re talking to him. Seriously guys, I’ll get sacked. In fact, who’s got Rocco? Can you hand him over, please?’
Thirty blank faces stared back at him; twenty-nine genuinely, one not so. Rocco wasn’t coming out that easily. Trigger looked at Carl. His eyes narrowed.
‘I swear I don’t have him, Boss.’
The official order had gone out for maximum attendance at a ‘VVIP visit’ twenty-four hours before. They wanted everyone in the camp apart from those on essential duties to line up for him on the Hercules’s landing strip. He was due to land, have a walkabout and a how-do-you-do and then leave an hour later without even going into the camp proper. It was fine by us. If we needed to scramble, we were in the right place. And it would give him a good show.
We all had to get up at 6am to be down there by seven for his arrival at eight. It was the military’s usual hurry-up-and-wait scenario – and it put Carl on supermoan mode.
‘Blooming typical. The one night we don’t get an IRT shout, we have to get up at sparrow’s fart anyway.’
There was a frisson around the camp that morning – not because anyone was particularly excited to meet the man, but because it was something different. A welcome break from the daily grind.
We were told he was going to make a speech, which was why I hadn’t dreamt up an essential task for myself instead. I was curious to hear what he was going to say. Maybe he had an announcement to make; perhaps he’d tell us how long we’d be there, or where else we were headed. Whatever it was, I wanted to hear it first-hand.
Blair was on a two-day trip to the region according to a Sky News report I’d caught a glimpse of in the JHF. He’d already met Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf in Lahore. After us, he was going up to Kabul to meet Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
The Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, had already beaten his rival to it; he’d come out to see us in July. Helmand had been a new and sexy war at the time, so the new and sexy politicians were all over it like a rash. They didn’t go to Iraq any more; can’t think why. True to form, Billy had elbowed his way into giving Cameron a tour of the Apache’s cockpit. He’d even strapped on his flying suit especially for the occasion, badges, sidearm and all.
Tragically for the Face, there was no chance of a one-on-one bore-athon with this bigwig. Tony Blair would say a quick hello to all of us and that would be it. Each of the brigade’s sub-units had been instructed to stand in semicircles down one long line, with samples of our kit on display to give the press photographers a nice backdrop. For most of the boys that just meant rustling up a WMIK Land Rover, a Viking tracked armoured vehicle, an ambulance or a row of sniper rifles. For our unlucky Groundies, it meant having to get up even earlier than us to push an Apache 200 metres from our runway to the Hercules strip. Then they’d have to push it all the way back again.
It was a really nippy morning – overcast, with just the odd ray of sunshine bursting momentarily through the cloud to give us some warmth. Without the sun, first thing in the morning and at that altitude, Bastion wasn’t a great place to be at that time of the year. December – only a few days away – and January were the only months that Helmand saw any proper cloud or rain.
Billy was one of the last down to the flight line.