As far as I was concerned, the Blair magic began to fade as the Prime Minister and his flying circus trundled down the runway. Despite his well-crafted phrases and emotional expressions, he hadn’t actually told us anything we didn’t already know. There was no big announcement, no addition to the defence budget, no deadline for the end of the conflict, no council tax rebate for our families at home. He’d had nothing new to say. I wondered why he’d bothered to come all that way. Still, the bacon croissant had been nice.
As November became December, Alice’s first situation brief proved increasingly accurate. Not only were the Taliban getting better, they were coming after us.
Close air support had changed the outcome of a lot of battles in our ground troops’ favour, so the Taliban hated all Coalition offensive aircraft – but they still hated Apaches the most.
If you wanted to go after aircraft and had none of your own, you needed surface-to-air missiles. SAMs had been the preserve of the world’s superpowers, but by the 1980s they had become a global phenomenon.
The missiles employed one of three different systems to track and hit moving targets: radar-tracking, heat-seeking, or laser-guided. They varied in quality, but most could detect any aircraft flying in the SAM belt – between 1,000 and 20,000 feet – from about six miles, and engage it from four.
All three types of SAMs were believed to be kicking around Afghanistan. The principal threat came from Man Portable Air Defence Systems – SAMs fired from shoulder launchers that a couple of blokes could carry around on foot. There was no shortage of them. At Dishforth, we had been briefed to expect Russian SA7s and SA14s, Chinese HN15s – and the US Stingers and British Blowpipes that the CIA and MI6 had flooded into the country during the Soviet occupation.
The good news was that although we knew the Taliban had ManPADs, we didn’t believe they had many of them left that actually worked. Their biggest problem – our greatest advantage – was that their battery system decayed. This was especially the case with Stingers, and the Taliban had no means of replacing them. Even the world’s most unscrupulous arms dealers thought twice about dealing with Islamic extremists because of the heat it brought down on them.
‘Working SAMs are a highly prized commodity to the Taliban,’ an Int Corps briefer told us. ‘We reckon that the few they retain will be used only as a last ditch defence for very senior people; they’ll only be fired if a Taliban or al Qaeda leader’s life is under imminent threat.’
No SAMs had been fired at Coalition aircraft in Afghanistan for quite a while, so while we remained cautious, we hadn’t been taking the SAM threat too seriously. Then, four weeks into the tour, they did fire a SAM at us – in Helmand, at a Dutch F16 jet bomber, callsign Ramit.
I was in the JHF at the time, watching some gun tapes on the computer. The news came through on the MIRC. There was a Military Internet Relay Chat in every HQ across the four southern provinces – a giant TV screen / video printer pumping out one line sitreps as they came in about operations ongoing over Regional Command South; a running ticker tape on the whole war.
‘Jesus, have you seen this?’
All eight of us in the tent crowded around the MIRC.
‘KABUL: RAMIT ENGAGED BY SAM. SOUTH SANGIN. SAM DEFEATED…’
‘Bloody hell. What’s going on at Sangin? Are Special Forces lifting some big player we don’t know about?’
They weren’t. A quick call to brigade confirmed there were no arrest operations going down in the Sangin area. In fact, troops weren’t even out on the ground.
The next day, the full report came through. Lookouts in Forward Operating Base Robinson, a support base seven klicks south of the Sangin DC for the marines in the Green Zone, had heard some sporadic shooting from the west. They’d put in a call to the brigade air cell to ask if any passing aircraft might be able to take a quick peek.
The cloud base was fairly low that day. To see through it, the F16 had to drop down below it, to 3,000 feet. The shooting had stopped, so the jet tootled around for a minute or two as a show of force. A corkscrew trail of grey smoke rose from the Green Zone as the missile arced towards the F16. It passed just behind the jet, diverted by a flare, and disappeared into the clouds.
Arcing meant it was guided – a SAM. Corkscrew and grey smoke meant SA7b – a tail chaser that locked onto engine heat. It wasn’t just a pot shot. It took a fair few minutes to set up an SA7. It bore all the hallmarks of a deliberate trap. Ramit had been lucky.
The incident shook the air community. It told us two things. One, the Taliban had SAMs that worked; and two, they were now very happy to attack opportunity targets. We didn’t enjoy hearing either. It was a major break from their previous operating pattern.
Ramit’s SAM escape threw a different perspective on an intelligence hit we’d picked up recently. Some days before the launch, a radio intercept heard a Taliban commander saying, ‘Fetch the rakes and spades to hit the helicopters.’ Initially, the Int cell had assessed rakes and spades meant Chinese rockets and a launcher. Now, we had to assume they meant SAMs.
Alice then delivered a series of different snippets of bad news about SAMs over the next week’s morning and evening briefs.
‘We believe they’re planning to move a Stinger to Sangin or Kajaki.’
‘What do you mean,’ the Boss asked. ‘Where did this information come from?’
‘I can’t tell you sir, sorry.’
That normally meant HumInt; human intelligence – aka: a spy. I and every other pilot in the room mentally crossed our fingers not to get the next IRT call-out to Sangin or Kajaki.
We were told that a specific Taliban commander in the north of the province, had boasted that he could listen in on all our movements. ‘I have a British radio frequency and I know everywhere they go.’
It was certainly possible. Perhaps he’d taken it from the dead SBS pair in June. He couldn’t hear Apaches on it as our radios were secure and codes regularly changed. But the ones in the Chinooks weren’t.
Alice also told us that some bright desk officer had discovered that there were no less than five Stingers in the valley between Sangin and Kajaki.
But a second Taliban radio intercept in Now Zad a couple of days afterwards picked up the most worrying SAM intelligence of all. A commander was overheard saying, ‘When the helicopters arrive, if the professional man brings his thing, fire from a distance.’
A ‘professional man’ and a ‘thing’ weren’t SAM-specific, but ‘fire from a distance’ certainly was. It was good advice, too. It identified the ‘thing’ as a heat-seeking SAM. The longer the missile had in the air, the better its chance of homing in on the aircraft’s engines: as the gap closed, the heat source became clearer to the missile’s seeker. Translation: they were anticipating the arrival of some bloke who knew what he was doing, and then they were going to fire another heat-seeking SAM specifically at one of us.
A huge amount of SAM activity and intelligence had come in over a short period. How much of it was true and how much bluff we had no idea. That was always the problem with the intelligence game; it was a world of smoke and mirrors. All we knew was that the bastards were up to something. The ante had been upped, big time.
The feeling of foreboding with which I’d started the tour had lessened after a few successful enemy contacts. Now it was right back again. I was in no hurry to become the first British Apache pilot to get shot down by a SAM.