A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (8 page)

Within ten minutes of the patrol's leaving the compound, all four corner sangars as well as the Control Tower were in action. It began with tracer fire and a pair of RPGs that whizzed past Sangar 4 from a bombed-out building at the far side of some open ground 200 metres to the north-west. Two minutes later, every doorway and window in a wide arc from the north to the east seemed to be crackling with small-arms fire. Sangars 1, 3 and the Control Tower led the response.

The killing power at the Gurkhas' disposal was not in doubt, but the defenders were still required to put their heads above the parapet to fire their weapons. All the positions had been 'fixed' in advance by the enemy, and the two heavy-calibre machine-guns, the so-called '.50 cals' which weighed nearly forty kilos each and were mounted on tripods, were too large to set up behind the cover of sandbags and had been positioned just to one side. The incoming fire was so intense and accurate that the Gurkhas' best weapon now had temporarily to be abandoned. Rex, crouching in the Control Tower and surrounded by maps and radio equipment, saw sparks as rounds ricocheted off the barrel of the .50 cal there.

Sangar 3, the tallest of the corner towers and the location of the platoon's other .50 cal, was even more heavily engaged. The fiercest fire came from the eastern tree line – the target area of Operation Mutay the previous month – and from a conspicuous two-storey building 200 metres to the north-east that the defenders had nicknamed the 'Smugglers' House'. Rounds were landing inside the sangar, sending up spurts of dust and pinging off the ammunition boxes. As on the Control Tower, the occupants were quite unable to reach their most effective weapon.

The tide was turned by a twenty-year-old recruit called Nabin Rai who volunteered to go to the reinforcement of Sangar 3. Carrying quantities of heavy ammunition, he sprinted for the base of the tower and made his way up the first and then the second rickety ladder that led to the roof. This in itself was a brave thing to do, for the ladders were desperately exposed, but after a climb that must have felt endless, Rifleman Nabin tumbled breathlessly into the sangar, unscathed. His arrival was followed by a slight lull in the incoming fire. Catching his breath, Nabin moved quickly to the .50 cal and began to fire it at the Smugglers' House.

The response was ferocious. Several rounds glanced off Nabin Rai's gun, until one round, passing through the gun sight, struck him in his right cheek. With blood pouring from the wound he crawled back into cover, although the safety of this position was only relative: another Gurkha, Rifleman Kumar, who was suppressing the area with a GPMG – a general-purpose machine-gun, known as a 'Jimpy' – felt a round strike his weapon's bipod from where it ricocheted into the sangar roof. The sangar commander, Lance Corporal Shree, took one look at Nabin and ordered him down to the medic. Nabin, reaching for a field dressing, flatly refused: his injury, he insisted, was not serious. Fifteen minutes later, when Sangar 1 announced that it had at last identified a precise firing point in the Smugglers' House, he was back in action again, this time armed with the Minimi light machine-gun. He could have peeked over the edge of the sandbags, but Nabin chose instead to stand up. 'I couldn't see properly because of all the smoke and dust,' he explained. Lance Corporal Shree saw three rounds thud into the sandbag immediately in front of Nabin, and then a fourth that passed through the bag and struck him in the helmet. Only then did Nabin drop back into cover, where he grinned at his comrades and smoked a cigarette, before returning to his position once again. It was a further two hours before he could be persuaded to come down from the roof.

Despite such bravery, it was not the Gurkhas but air power that repelled the attack that night. Forty minutes after it began, a pair of American A10s arrived on station along with a Predator drone. For twenty minutes the planes made low passes over the town to attack a heavy machine-gun position and two other targets with rockets and 30mm cannon. For the soldiers watching from the sangars – and especially for Sergeant Charlie Aggrey, the joint tactical air controller (or JTAC, pronounced 'jaytack') on secondment from 7 Para Royal Horse Artillery whose job it was to guide them in – this was an anxious time. Although capable of great accuracy, the slow-flying 'tank-busters' were notorious for their involvement in several friendly-fire tragedies in Iraq. 'Beware the A10', according to Aggrey, remains an unofficial rule of thumb among the British JTAC community. Now Zad, he said, was 'the cheekiest thing I've done in the Army'. In one instance, the only way Aggrey was able to get a decent fix on a particularly troublesome target building set back in the town was to hang off the outside wall of a corner tower by one hand.

Calling in air power could be perilous for other reasons, not least the scandalous inadequacy of some British radios. In June, during Operation Mutay, Paul Hollingshead had risked his life to retrieve a set from a Snatch Land Rover which had been ambushed in a Now Zad suburb and temporarily abandoned beyond the cover of a wall. 'It was a Clansman 351, VHF only – an old one from the 1960s sort of thing,' he recalled. His platoon was badly pinned down by a heavy machine-gun position. He and his men had almost no possibility of extracting themselves without support from the air. At this critical juncture, the radio failed. 'We couldn't get a tone. It was dead. Absolutely nothing. I thought it was broken, but then we noticed this piece of white mine-tape that someone had stuck on the top of it that said "Dodgy, But Workable".' Still under fire, Hollingshead and a colleague spent frantic minutes stripping the radio down, thumping it like an old television set and scratching the terminals with a penknife until, thankfully, it was coaxed into life. 'I won't ever forget the feeling of relief,' he said.

The Americans' marksmanship five weeks later was poor. Two A10 rockets aimed at the Smugglers' House missed by a hundred metres, prompting another defiant blast of machine-gun fire at the compound. In Sangar 1, Corporal Kailash Khebang spotted a gunman flit across a window in the second floor of the building. He stood up out of cover and fired the first of two ILAWs – the interim light anti-armour weapon, a modern version of the shoulder-launched World War Two bazooka. None of the Gurkhas had fired an ILAW before, even in training. Kailash's second shot dropped neatly through a window, but it wasn't enough. In a display of tenacity that astonished the crouching Gurkhas, fire continued to pour from the position. Like so much British equipment, the newly introduced ILAW still used technology developed during the Cold War, designed to penetrate Soviet armour on the plains of Europe. As the Gurkhas had just discovered, it was often ineffective against the thick mud walls of Afghan buildings, which could absorb extraordinary amounts of force.

The Gurkhas again resorted to air power. Following the smoke of the ILAW rocket, one of the A10s dropped a 500lb bomb on the Smugglers' House, destroying its south-west corner, while the other A10 blasted the windows on the eastern side with cannon; yet still the attackers fought back. The A10s were low on fuel and peeled off to base, but were immediately replaced by another two. One of these engaged with rockets, but missed by 150 metres. He tried again with his guns, but missed a second time, by fifty metres on this occasion. The sledgehammer was signally failing to deal with this nut. Finally, using the laser-guidance system on the Predator, the fourth A10 at last silenced the Smugglers' House with a direct hit by a second 500lb bomb.

That effectively ended the assault. The Taliban tried throughout the night to renew it, but they reckoned without the $3 million worth of technology aboard the Predator. They could only guess at the capabilities of this all-seeing machine, with its infrared cameras that can pick up a human heat signature from thousands of feet up. The Taliban were spotted creeping along walls, moving between buildings, massing in a compound for another attack. (The Taliban later found a way to hide from the Predators by moving about the town through a system of dried-up watercourses that ran beneath the main streets. They also developed a network of tunnels between the earth-walled buildings – 'mouse holes' the Gurkhas called them – which allowed them to approach the compound without once showing themselves. In lulls between gunfire on quieter nights the sinister sound of digging could be heard from all the corner towers.)

The A10s remained on station throughout the night. Finally, at first light, a third 500-pounder was directed on to a large group of fighters as they clustered around two Toyota Corollas – ammunition resupply cars that had been shuttling back and forth all night. The Gurkhas gave a raucous cheer as the cars soared high into the air.

The exhausted Gurkhas were able to rest with the coming of daylight, although the respite did not last long. As dusk began to fall at six p.m., an unusual amount of traffic was observed moving about to the east and north-east. At 6.30, just after the muezzin cried the end of prayers over the loudspeakers posted across the town, three sniper rounds hit the sandbags of Sangar 1. The Gurkhas stood to once again, for the attacks were already starting to take on a pattern. The marksman, they were sure, had gone straight from the mosque to his firing point, filled with renewed Islamic zeal. Their hunch paid off when Corporal Kailash spotted a group of six men leopard-crawling across a T-junction at the end of an adjacent alleyway, heading for the north side of the compound. The imam's sermon had evidently been an inspiring one that evening. Kailash instantly shot three of the crawlers dead with the GPMG.

The attack this time came more from the north than the east, and earlier than on the previous night. The Taliban knew now that they had a window of about forty minutes before supporting air power could arrive on station. Their solution was to hit the compound harder and faster than the night before, hoping for a breach. And this time, rather than small-arms fire, they concentrated on using RPGs. 'The attack on the thirteenth is the one most etched on my mind,' said Rex. 'It was probably the nearest we came to being overrun. If we'd taken serious casualties, requiring others to extract them, or if they'd managed to take out a sangar or even get inside the compound . . . then I think we could have been in serious trouble.'

Back at Bastion, even after Operation Mutay, there had been much scoffing at the fighting capabilities of the enemy. It was often said that the Taliban's foot soldiers were brave but foolhardy, a disorganized collection of amateurs and have-a-go heroes. In a set-piece fight they were held to be no match for the professionals of the British Army. The assault on the 13th strongly suggested otherwise. In fact the tactics and organization displayed by the enemy were disconcertingly recognizable. 'They were good soldiers,' said Rex. 'They used the cover well and they moved about very fast. They had sections of eight or twelve men, and a pyramid command structure just like ours. They don't wear badges of rank on their shoulders but that doesn't mean they aren't a proper army.'

By eight o'clock a full moon had risen, negating the British advantage of night vision goggles. For ten long minutes the fire directed against the north side of the compound was so intense that it was again impossible to bring the .50 cals to bear. The assault, Rex estimated, was 'akin to a company-sized ambush' – about a hundred men. 'I was sure we'd lost two of our positions, just from the weight of fire. I was staggered they survived.' Two RPGs hit the wall just below Sangar 6, to the north-west; two others smashed into the front and rear of Sangar 1 to the north-east; several more overshot their targets and exploded in the air above the compound. Every one of these represented a disaster narrowly averted, for the warhead even on the standard model, the RPG-7, is capable of penetrating armour plating. A direct hit on any sangar could easily have killed everyone inside. 'It was their bad shooting that saved us,' Rex said. 'Either that, or the Taliban were just plain unlucky.'

Rifleman Gaj, Rifleman Nagen and the other young soldiers lying flat in Sangar 1 thought that it was all over for them. They were steadied by Kailash, their corporal, who had just shot the three leopard-crawlers. The men looked up to Kailash, whom they addressed as
guruji
, or teacher. As a senior corporal, he had exercised his right to choose which sangar to position himself in. I spent an hour with Kailash at Folkestone and found it difficult to imagine him in killer mode. He was twenty-six with a kind, open face beneath neatly parted hair, and he spoke English with an eager, scholarly precision. He had, in fact, been top of all his school classes back in Nepal. He was the only son of a motorcycle dealer from a village so far up the Himalayas that it had a view of Everest.

'They were trying to break into my position,' Kailash recalled. 'The fire was just too much, and so close. We could barely defend ourselves. The boys there said, "Guruji! Guruji! We are all going to die!" I tried to calm them. I knew that such intense shooting couldn't last long, so I gave them tasks for when it slowed and we could shoot back. I also thought we would be killed, but I couldn't say that.'

The Taliban moved up for another close assault under the covering fire. Popping above the parapet for a second, Kailash saw about fifty fighters massing one block to his north. He reported this to the Control Tower but there was little Rex could do about it. The weight of fire was still too great for reinforcements to move to any of the sangars from the centre. Charlie Aggrey had already radioed for air support. Rex now urged him back on to the net to find out when the planes would arrive. The timing was going to be critical for the attackers were now fewer than twenty metres away, blasting Sangar 1 with machine-gun fire from the shop buildings across the street.

It was Kailash, once again, who checked them. He reached for a weapon no Gurkha had used in anger for forty years: a hand-held L109 fragmentation grenade. It was the first of twenty-one grenades the Gurkhas were to throw during their time at Now Zad. He pulled the pins on two of them and lobbed them into the open shop fronts below. The moment of detonation was the signal for two of Kailash's men to get back on the GPMG and start suppressing the street below. The weight of incoming fire immediately subsided, although the Gurkhas were still taking sniper rounds from further out. Kailash requested reinforcements, and two men, one of them armed with an underslung grenade launcher, were now able to join them. A flare was fired to help them spot their targets. The extra firepower was just enough to hold on to the initiative.