Apache (17 page)

‘Did none of you stop to think what day it is today?’

We looked blank.

‘Friday. On Friday at noon, all good Muslims go to
Jumu’ah
.’

‘Jumu’ah
?’

‘Friday Prayers. I could have told you that this morning. Next time you lot get a bright idea, do feel free to ask.’

We weren’t having a great run. It took 42 Commando’s Intelligence Officer to steer us out of our next reconnaissance cul-de-sac a few nights later. That sortie also served to remind us that the Apache’s high-tech gadgetry could only ever be as smart as the human being in charge of it.

We had moved onto the IRT / HRF shift, and got a late night call out from the Kajaki DC. Once we’d got there, the shooting had stopped and we couldn’t see a trace of the enemy. To make the trip worthwhile, we decided to take a covert look from a distance at a compound that 42 Commando, the local battlegroup, had asked us to keep an eye on. They suspected the Taliban might be using it as a training camp.

We stayed three kilometres back, at about 4,000 feet and downwind, so its inhabitants wouldn’t hear us. As we began to circle, five men walked out of one of the buildings. The locals never moved around Helmand at night, so this could only mean one thing. I hit record on the TADS.

They headed in staggered file down a track, a few metres apart, turned slightly outwards with the rear marker checking back, like a well-trained military patrol. The Apache’s thirty-six-times-magnification FLIR thermal imaging camera was so powerful we could pick up a heat source in an open field miles away. Just a short distance closer we could identify a human shape, so we had a grand-stand view of whatever they were about to do. It was like watching a black and white TV show. About fifty metres up the track, the men peeled off right, one by one, into the field alongside it. They moved a safe distance and crouched down, now about ten metres apart.

‘Fuck me,’ Billy said. ‘They’re in extended line; infantry tactics. They’re practising battle drills.’

We couldn’t engage them because they weren’t armed, but 42 Commando’s Int Cell needed to take a look at this.

After a few minutes, the first man got up and walked back to the path. The rest followed at roughly thirty second intervals, and once the whole group was back on the path, they patrolled back to the
compound. We’d found the notorious Taliban training ground 42 Commando were after.

We projected our footage onto the big screen in the JHF. Our Ops Officer was intrigued, and popped next door to fetch his opposite number from 42 Commando. He in turn fetched his Intelligence Officer, and then the 2i/c and CO. We played the tape a third time, beaming with pride.

‘What do you think of that then? Quite a find, eh? But what does it mean?’

The 42 Commando Int Officer was a wise old bird.

‘Right, take it back. Here they go; they walk down the road then break into an extended line. Now, watch carefully. Zoom in on this man … here …’

He surveyed our blank faces.

‘Look, he is crouching, and then he moves away. Do you see his weapon? Look carefully … there …’ He pointed to the patch of ground the man had just left.

‘See? He’s left a heat source. Look at the size of his foot and look at the size of the heat source. Same length. Now if you zoom in on the other men, a fiver says you’ll find they’ve all left similar length heat sources.’

We began to feel more than a little stupid.

‘Gentlemen, you have captured top secret footage of an Afghan communal shit. It’s a tradition; they do it for mutual protection at night. Now I’m going for one too. But don’t worry, you can stay here.’

The Taliban were watching us too.

A company of infantry soldiers was responsible for Camp Bastion’s security, manning the sangers on its perimeter fences, and fanning out to protect the C130 runway when a Hercules came in. The soldiers’ most time-consuming job by far was manning the camp’s most vulnerable point, its front gate.

An almost permanent line of local trucks and lorries queued outside it, delivering a never-ending mountain of supplies to feed and equip the garrison. Most of the vehicles came from Kandahar air base, where the bulk of our supplies arrived in long-range heavy-transport planes like the RAF’s C17s or chartered Russian made Antonovs. The local vehicles were held back 200 metres behind a chicane of Hesco Bastion bollards, the guards’ protection against suicide bombers. They were called forward cautiously, one by one, and searched from tip to toe before being allowed in.

One night, a sharp-eyed sentry spotted a driver climb onto his cab and get on his mobile phone as soon as a pair of Apaches clattered overhead. A covert watch was set up on all the waiting lorries.

We discovered that it wasn’t just one driver. Almost all of them were climbing onto their roofs to get a better mobile phone signal whenever we took off. In Northern Ireland, we used to call it ‘dicking’. At some stage of their journey from Kandahar, the Taliban had got to the drivers and employed – or forced – them to report on our movements.

We’d had a nagging feeling in the weeks prior to the discovery that the enemy seemed to know we were coming. Now we knew why. Once they’d been given the nod from Bastion, they’d set a stopwatch for our reaction times to specific locations, and packed up attacking the marine patrols minutes before we arrived.

Dicking was a threat to both our safety and that of the troops on the ground. Trigger and Billy drew up new drills to try to counter it. From then onwards, Apaches never flew over the main gate, we kept all the lights off at night, and we always set off in a different direction to the one we were really headed. That was a pain too, because flying a few klicks out of our way just to fox the dickers added a minute or two to the time it took us to reach the guys. But it was crucial to try to keep ahead of the Taliban’s learning curve.

They learned, we learned; then we had to learn again. It was known as the caterpillar – one end moved first, the rest caught up. And the Afghan caterpillar never stopped moving. The longer the Helmand campaign went on, the more complex the battlespace became.

While the diligent reconnaissance for Operation Glacier continued, the huge demand for Apache support elsewhere kept us frantically busy. It came from all over the province. So much so, at least one of the squadron’s flights was now firing in anger in some arena every single day. We were putting stuff down at a phenomenal
rate – far more than we’d ever done before. Whether it was the change in the Rules of Engagement, the increased flying hours, or the enemy’s ever more dogged persistence – or a combination of the three – it was hard to tell. Sometimes, we used our weapons systems as they were originally designed to be used. Others, we just had to improvise – like the day Soggy Arm Field got its name.

We were on a deliberate operation with the marines up in Kajaki one afternoon, covering them as they fought a clearance patrol onto the Shrine and then through the Taliban-held village to its west. The enemy were putting up strong resistance, gritty compound-to-compound stuff.

We trapped six of them out in the open on our arrival and nailed them with cannon. But two of their more dogged companions, firing from the far end of the village, had pinned down a section of marines. A Joint Terminal Attack Controller climbed to the top of Falcon to direct our fire. The JTAC talked us onto the pair’s grid.

We found them by stealth, heading for home and doubling back, coming out of the clouds four kilometres behind them. They were in full white dishdashes, crouched a metre apart at the edge of a track behind someone’s freshly painted white house.

‘That’s them,’ confirmed the JTAC. ‘I’ve had eyes on them since their last engagement. Remove them as soon as possible, by any means.’

They were a challenging target. The village was inhabited; it was crawling with mopeds and animals and we had no idea who was in the house behind them. Rockets and cannon would have peppered its wall and roof, and probably gone straight through them. Due to the Rules of Engagement there was only one option.

‘It’s got to be a Hellfire,’ Trigger said. ‘ROE is simple – but the
proportionality bothers me. You’re my weapons guru; can we really chuck a missile into a civilian village?’

‘Positive ID, ROE and clearance to engage doesn’t give us a choice, Boss, but collateral damage and the family in that lovely house does. We wait till we’re closer and use the gun, or kick off to the right and hit them with the Hellfire so the blast disperses into that field. If we get closer they’ll bolt for the house and the family will have Terry Taliban as lodgers …’

A .5-inch calibre sniper rifle would have been ideal for the job. But Hellfire was the only point weapon system we had. It was proportionate in this instance.

‘Okay, Mr Macy. Set me up.’

‘I’ll set you up all right. Set you up to make Apache history.’

The Boss glanced at me in his mirror, lined the crosshairs up perfectly on the ground between the two fighters, and let rip from six kilometres. The Hellfire had not been used on personnel before. We watched the missile rise, fall to its usual angle and impact right on target. When the smoke cleared, all that was left was a two-metre-wide hole in the ground.

‘Delta Hotel,’ the JTAC reported.

The freshly painted wall got one final coat – toffee brown – but on the flip side, the washing was still clean and the house itself completely untouched. It took an age to figure out the battle damage but the JTAC summed up the situation perfectly. ‘I think your targets may have vaporised.’

That night, after the battle, the marines on Falcon watched as the locals came out to collect their dead. The next time we went up to Kajaki, the JTAC relayed their story.

‘The Taliban had a really good look around the crater area for your two guys, but they couldn’t find a thing. Then one of them
went about thirty metres into the next field and came back holding a soggy arm. That’s why it’s now called “Soggy Arm Field”.’

The Special Boat Service had done a fair bit of work all over southern Afghanistan with the US Apaches co-located with them in Kandahar. But every now and then they came to us. Our first request from the Special Forces Group arrived six weeks into the tour.

The JHF was just told that it was an op in the notorious Panjwayi Valley – a Taliban hotbed west of Kandahar city. We would be briefed on everything else by the SBS themselves in Kandahar on the night. They’d asked for permanent cover as they expected it to go on a bit. So two flights went over that morning: 3 Flight’s Nick, Charlotte, Darwin and FOG, and the four of us.

I’d worked with Special Forces before, so the mythical aura that surrounds them no longer had quite the same effect on me. They’re just normal blokes like you and me, who prefer to stick to the shadows and happen to be particularly bloody good at what they do. It was Nick’s first SF operation, so he had a grin on him like a Cheshire cat from the moment he got up. Bonnie was straining at the leash.

‘It’s exciting isn’t it, Mr M? It really is.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Bless him.

The other thing I knew about Special Forces was that an awful lot of their missions never went down – but I didn’t want to piss on Nick’s bonfire. He wouldn’t have wanted to believe me anyway.

It was a fifty-minute flight to Kandahar. Around the halfway mark we passed ten klicks to the south of a remote little town called Maiwand. The Boss pointed it out. ‘We studied it at Sandhurst.’ It was the site of the British Army’s second great Afghan disaster: 969 officers and men were massacred there during the Second Afghan
War in 1880. A massively superior 25,000-strong native force wiped out the 1st Grenadiers and 66th Regiment of Foot, throwing the nation into shock and precipitating a campaign of bloody revenge. ‘A grim lesson,’ Trigger said. ‘They were betrayed by their local allies.’

It was always odd coming back to Kandahar after a week or so at Camp Bastion. Its giant runway and line of helicopters stretched almost as far as the eye could see, dwarfing our tiny sideshow 100 miles away. Dozens of Blackhawks, Chinooks and Apache AH64As jostled for space. Beside the military colossus of the United States, we were a bunch of pygmies. The Special Forces compound was set discreetly to one side of the sprawling base’s main thoroughfare. Its Hesco Bastion walls were ringed with razor wire.

Bob, the SBS officer running the operation that night, waited for us at the front gate with a couple of colleagues. They both introduced themselves as Bob, too. Three Bobs. The normal SF drill. One of the other two Bobs was the operation’s JTAC. We never found out what the third Bob did.

The Bobs walked us swiftly to a nearby building and down a short corridor. Framed photographs of Sergeant Paul Bartlett and Captain David Patten hung from the wall, their names typed neatly beneath their smiling faces.

‘Sorry about your boys,’ I said. ‘We found them the following morning.’

‘Thanks. It was a crying shame.’

We were led into a briefing room completely devoid of furniture and decoration, except for one table and a handful of chairs. A room for visitors like us, sanitised of all useful information. We would only ever know from the Special Forces what they needed us to know. It was how SF always worked. Officer Bob plonked a
laptop and projector down on the table, connected them and began the brief.

The mission was to kill or capture a senior Taliban player called Haji Mullah Sahib. In his mid-fifties, he was the former governor of Helmand province. He was believed to be holed up in Siah Choy, an isolated area of the Panjwayi, in a major Taliban command post. Officer Bob showed us maps of the target area and aerial photographs of the compound. Other Taliban commanders were expected to be joining him that night.

The operation was going to go one of two ways. We’d know which by a certain time that night before we took off. If the right intelligence came in to establish Sahib was definitely in the compound, they would bomb it. There was no point in risking boots on the ground unnecessarily. If the intelligence didn’t come in, a ground assault would be launched.

‘You’ll only be needed for the second option,’ Officer Bob said. ‘But the second option is looking likely at the moment.’

The second option would go like this. A large ground force of SBS would be dropped some distance off, move in and surround the compound, then give it a ‘hard knock’. Nobody expected Sahib to come quietly, so the SBS force had prepared some backup. (JTAC Bob took over, and Officer Bob leaned back against the wall.)

A vast air stack would position itself above them, from a Nimrod MR2 at the very top to an array of fast air in the middle and then us at the bottom. Each aircraft was given its own height parameters so we would all deconflict; ours was from 3,000 feet down to the ground. The assault teams could also call in fire from 81-mm mortars and 155-mm artillery guns if they needed it. I’d never seen so much firepower concentrated on one small place in all my time in Afghanistan.

‘It’s immediate and intimate fire support that we’re looking for from you. We’d like you to hang around to the south of the target area so you’re ready to tip in whenever I call.’

He showed us on a map where he wanted us, asked if we had any questions, and then wrapped up the brief with one final to me, as the lead front-seater on the mission.

‘Can you confirm which close-in fire support card you’re using, mate? Mine might be out of date …’

Billy knew he’d ask me that. It detailed the criteria he needed to give us, so we could bring weapons to bear. I flicked through my Black Brain to the close-in fire support card, and there he was …
From Rocco, With Love. x
.

JTAC Bob saw Rocco immediately. ‘What the fuck’s that?’

‘Er, it’s Rocco. A squadron joke … you see …’ I tried to explain Rocco.

‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, Bob,’ Charlotte said with an utterly straight face. She added haughtily: ‘We’ve never seen that disgusting picture before in our lives.’ The rest of my Apache colleagues took Charlotte’s cue and all solemnly agreed. Silence from all three Bobs. Not even a flicker of a smile from any of them. But Billy grinned at me from ear to ear. He’d pulled off a corker.

We had a few hours to kill before we got our heads down in the Apache crews’ temporary accommodation, so we sampled the R and R delights every mid-sized US base in the region had on offer. They were spread around the four sides of a giant wooden boardwalk square with a thirty-metre-long plastic hockey pitch at its centre.

There was a Burger King trailer; a Pizza Hut stand; a Subway restaurant; a dry cleaner; a local souvenir shop flogging scarves, jewellery and stone carvings; and a PX the size of an average
Sainsbury’s. The Post Exchange flogged everything from giant feather pillows and duvets to video cameras and PlayStation consoles: everything you could possibly want to fight a war in extreme comfort. We settled for Tim Horton’s; an air-conditioned coffee shop that served Charlotte’s favourite, an apple juice with a giant chocolate chip cookie. The Americans were well entrenched in Kandahar.