We kept a six-inch-long Maglite torch and an emergency extraction strap with a black karabiner in another small pocket, just next to the zip. A large pouch sewn into the back of the jacket contained a metre-square waterproof, tear-resistant nylon escape map that you could also use to shelter from the sun or rain. Alongside it we kept two litre-sized foil sachets of clean water.
Back up at the JHF we formulated an escape plan for the mission. We had one for every location we went to, and for every pre-planned sortie we flew. If we did go down over Koshtay, we’d all know exactly what to do.
Apache pilots underwent the most intensive escape and evasion training of anyone in the UK military, alongside Harrier pilots and Special Forces personnel. All three worked behind or over enemy lines, so faced the greatest risk. It was a gruelling sixteen-week course, and as the squadron’s Survive, Evade, Resist and Extract Officer, Geordie gave us regular refreshers
The first emergency drill was always the same – talk to your wingman and tell him where you are. He’d know you’d gone down, and would be doing his damnedest to keep you alive. If the threat on the ground allowed it, he’d swoop down, land next to your aircraft and you’d have about three seconds to strap yourself onto a grab handle forward of the engine air intakes with your own strap and karabiner.
We practised the drill every now and then, but no Apache pilot in the world had ever done it on operations; it was fraught with danger for everyone concerned. Putting an aircraft on the ground in a battle made it incredibly vulnerable, which was why the MoD pencil-necks had written into the Release To Service rules that it was only to be used in dire emergencies. If they had it their way, it would have been out of the RTS altogether.
First, of course, we had to survive going down. There were no ejection seats in an Apache; it was dangerous enough standing beneath a turning rotor blade. If our aircraft went down, we went down with it. It concentrated the mind. So much so, that experienced pilots would always subconsciously scope for the safest place to crash-land.
Should the worst happen and we found ourselves on the ground, it was going to be immediately obvious if Trigger and Billy were going to be able to pick us up at Koshtay. If they couldn’t – which was almost inevitable – we’d try to get as far away from the aircraft as possible. The Apache would act like a magnet for the enemy, so we wouldn’t even hang around to destroy its clandestine equipment; someone else with a big bomb would take care of that.
It would be dark, which was a great advantage. Maybe only a handful of Taliban would see us go down. Five minutes later though, the word would have gone round. By daybreak, we’d be the focus of a massive and coordinated hunt.
Once clear of the aircraft, we’d head due north or south and then west as soon as we could. Our best hope of escape would be the GAFA desert, preferably by dawn. We’d either find the BRF there or get picked up. It was only four klicks away – but we’d have to cross the raging Helmand River and possibly the canal on the way.
We’d move at night and hide in daylight. We’d keep switching on the radios to speak to anyone we could see or hear above us. They’d be up there, waiting for our call. And above all, we had to stick together – two pairs of eyes and ears were always better than one, and one of us might be injured.
After the 8pm brief, we tried to get a few hours’ sleep. The Boss took the cot next to mine so we wouldn’t wake anyone in his tent.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ he said as he climbed into his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to bed now, knowing that when I wake up, I will deliberately go out and kill people.’
The Boss grappled with this idea for a few moments as the opening credits of 24 rolled on the laptop beside him – but only for a couple of minutes. The next time I looked, he was fast asleep, his head tucked into the crook of his arm.
I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just lay on my back in the darkness, going over every eventuality again and again, trying to visualise how I would deal with them. How to get out of the Green Zone if we went down was the challenge that preoccupied me most. There’d be no chance of a rescue. How fast was the current in the Helmand River? Would we reach the GAFA by dawn? If not, where would we lie up? Must remember to keep away from livestock, especially dogs; they’d give us away immediately. What if I was incapacitated and Carl was okay? Carl would have to run. I’d make him. He’d get nowhere trying to carry me. What if he was injured? I’d have a tough time lifting him and all that strawberry cheesecake. But I couldn’t leave him – I’d never be able to live with myself. No; I’d stay and fight to the end – and save the last two rounds for ourselves.
It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one picture out of my head: me standing alongside a burning aircraft with Carl unconscious at my feet and the Taliban swarming towards us… Wouldn’t it just be Sod’s Law if I got it tonight? Emily was four and a half months pregnant… I saw the look on my kids’ faces as they were told that this time their dad wasn’t coming back… And I knew for certain that this had to be my last tour.
But would I have ducked out of it there and then, given the choice? Not for all the tea in China.
The alarm clocks went off at 1am. We dressed in silence, pulses racing, and popped into the JHF to pick up our Black Brains and check for any changes in plan. There weren’t any. We walked down to the flight line in the cold night air and fired up the aircraft at 1.55.
There were a few extra start-up procedures to run through in the cockpit before a night flight. Sound was often difficult to place, so keeping the aircraft as dark as possible gave us a much-needed edge. We knew the Taliban had NVGs – probably supplied by Iran – so we didn’t want to make it any easier for them.
Bat wings were sheathed below the left and right windows of the cockpit for us to pull up and shield the glow of our MPD screens – the only light source in the cockpit.
Carl needed a few more minutes to adjust his monocle. At night, he was 100 per cent reliant on it – it was his only window on the world. Other military pilots used NVGs, which magnified ambient light sources 40,000 times. We had Pilot’s Night Vision Sights instead.
The normal flight symbology was projected into the pilot’s monocle, but it was underlaid with the image of the ‘Pin-viss’, a second infrared lens sitting above the TADS bucket.
Through the PNVS thermal picture, we could see landscape in total darkness, as well as anyone moving below us. ‘If it glows, it goes,’ the instructors used to say – though not in the handbook.
Like the cannon, the PNVS lens was slaved to your eye. It followed the direction of your right eye, though a fraction more slowly than the gun, so there was a momentary lapse between desire and action. It was mounted above the TADS on the aircraft’s nose, so the perspective was slightly out of kilter too, as if your eyeball had been stretched twelve feet out of its socket.
Flying on PNVS low level at 140 knots was the hardest thing to master on Apache training; it was like driving down a pitch black motorway with no lights, with a hand clamped over one eye, a twelve-foot-long tube capped with a green lens strapped to the other, and the speedo needle brushing 161 mph…
We learned how to do this by ‘flying in the bag’. Our entire back-seat cockpit was blacked out with panels, while the instructor sat in the open front. It wasn’t a great place for claustrophobics.
‘Please God, just let me get through,’ we’d pray. Fail three test sorties in the bag, and you were out. Passing gave you the world’s greatest high.