Apache (2 page)

27 June 2006

08.49

I flicked a glance at the digital clock top right on my control panel.
Shit
. The Paras had been on the ground for almost thirty minutes now, and I was starting to sweat. The longer we stayed in one place, the more time it gave the Taliban to put together an attack.

Maintaining the same gentle pressure on the cyclic stick, I continued our broad right banking turn into the sun. I felt its warmth on my face through the cockpit’s Perspex window. It was going to be another scorching day.

Two thousand feet below us, the Paras were about to finish sweeping the first field. It was twice the size of a football pitch. They had another one as big to do next. Half of them had fanned out across the length of it, weapons at the ready; the rest provided cover from the bushes and undergrowth along the southern edge. The company commander and his signaller followed closely behind the line, moving from west to east.

A crop had been planted, but not long ago. For once, it wasn’t
opium. Much of the field’s surface was bare, dark earth, making the search easier, but the Paras still had to move painfully slowly, looking for the slightest clue as to the whereabouts of the two missing SBS men. Anything could help – a strip of clothing, spent ammunition shells, dried blood.

We’d seen no sign of the KIA or MIA since our arrival. It didn’t bode well.

Our flight had been scrambled at dawn to relieve the pair of Apaches up at Sangin before us. They – the Incident Response Team (IRT) – had been scrambled three hours previously. It had been a long night.

We’d been given a quick update on the ground as we were firing up the aircraft.

In complete secrecy, a small SBS team had lifted four Taliban organisers from a village near the northern Helmand town at 3am. The team were from Force 84, the British contingent of the Joint Special Forces command. They hadn’t notified the local Para garrison in Sangin’s District Centre about the mission – the usual SF drill to ensure total operational security. They were no different when I used to fly them around the Balkans during the 1990s.

The arrest had gone without a hitch. But on the way home the snatch squad was ambushed by a large and very angry Taliban force who wanted their people back. The team’s lead Land Rover was destroyed by the first enemy RPG, kicking off a massive fire-fight and a desperate chase through the fields. The elite SBS team had been pursued by at least seventy Taliban.

They only got out of there three hours later, thanks to a platoon of determined Gurkhas, who fought their way through the Talib lines twice, and close air support from two Apaches, an A10 jet and two Harrier GR7s. The Apaches stuck a Hellfire missile down the
throat of their abandoned Land Rover to deny it to the enemy.

In the chaos, the SBS team lost a couple of their prisoners. More importantly, two team members were separated from the main group: SBS Sergeant Paul Bartlett and Captain David Patten, attached from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Though their whereabouts were unknown, Patten was seen going down hard while sprinting across a field, and was already presumed Killed in Action.

The battle over, our task was to escort a company of paratroopers carried by two Chinooks into the area and help them locate the KIA and MIA. Somehow we had been given a reasonably precise grid reference for the search.

I was flying, and Simon, my Royal Navy co-pilot and gunner, was in the seat six feet in front of me. While the Paras combed the ground, we scanned the immediate landscape for enemy or hidden IEDs. Simon stared into his Target Acquisition and Designation Sight, constantly probing the treelines, bushes and shadows ahead of the Paras with the 127-times-magnification daytime TV camera lens.

An Apache crew always worked as a team, so while Simon controlled the telescopic view I maintained the overall perspective from the back seat. That meant covering the Paras’ rear as well as keeping one eye on the second Apache in our flight. They were responsible for the outer security cordon, keeping their eyes peeled for any new threat coming into the area. Anything already inside the lads’ two square kilometre radius was ours.

I had slaved the 30-mm cannon to my right eye. Its rounds would now zero in on any target in the crosshairs of the monocle over my right eye. All I needed to do was look at the target and squeeze the weapons release trigger on the cyclic with my right
index finger. It left Simon free to scan. He’d be quick to pull his own trigger too if he spotted anything in the TADS’ crosshairs.

We were in close to the Paras on this one, directly overhead. We wanted anyone in the area to know that we were ready to engage in an instant if the Taliban wanted to start something again. It was normally enough to put them off, but not always. They’d stood and fought here once already this morning. That’s why I was keen to speed things up.

‘The boys are about to cross into the second field. You sure that irrigation ditch is clear?’

‘From what I can see it is.’

‘Nothing else of note?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘Okay. I’m just watching the clock a bit, you know?’

‘Sure.’ Simon paused. ‘I’m going deep into the treeline on the far eastern end of the second field now. It’s the only place I haven’t yet been in detail.’

It wasn’t just here. I never felt comfortable anywhere inside the Green Zone. Nobody did, not for a single minute. It should have been called the Red Zone. It was where the Taliban were, and we weren’t – a thin strip of well-irrigated land, no more than ten kilometres wide at its broadest point, on each side of the Helmand River. The great waterway snaked its way down the entire length of the province, through vegetation dense enough to make it a guerrilla fighter’s paradise.

We preferred the desert which covered the rest of Helmand. There was nowhere to hide there, which was why the Taliban fought the battle in here instead. British forces had first entered Helmand and its Green Zone two months earlier. Only now though were we beginning to realise what a massive tough battle it was going to be.

‘I’ve got something,’ Simon said quietly.

I eased the cyclic back a centimetre or so, to reduce our airspeed. That would make it easier for him to hold the image he wanted on the TADS.

‘I think I’ve got a body.’

‘Where, buddy?’

‘North-east corner of the second field. Just under the trees. No thermal off it, but it’s definitely a body. Lasering now for the grid reference.’

I radioed the company commander on the ground, passed on the grid reference and gave him verbal directions as well. It would save them valuable time.

A minute later, Simon spoke again. ‘There’s something to the north of it.’

I knew what was coming.

‘I think I’ve got a second. Ten metres to the north of the first. Tucked under the trees this time; in a ditch, in the shade. No thermals off this one either.’

My heart sank. Unless the second body was a dead Taliban fighter, one KIA and one MIA now sounded very much like two KIAs. We were too late to do anything for either of them.

I radioed the Paras’ commander again. They had begun to protect the area around the first corpse, but one of his men seemed to have spotted the second body already and was moving towards it.

A second crosshair on my monocle told me exactly where Simon was focusing his TADS. He was on the second body, and he hadn’t moved for a good thirty seconds. We couldn’t afford to concentrate on them; we still needed to look out for the boys. The dead weren’t going to be any threat. The threat was elsewhere.

I gave Simon another ten seconds. He still hadn’t pulled out.
Now I was seriously twitchy. A body might be the perfect come-on for another ambush, but we were never going to spot anyone like that. He needed to scan beyond the treeline now.

‘Si, pull out. You’ve been on the bodies far too long, mate. Look out for the boys.’

‘There’s something wrong.’

‘There’s a lot fucking wrong, mate – they’re dead. Just pull out.’

‘No Ed, you don’t understand. There’s something wrong with the bodies.’

I looked down my TADS screen above my right knee for the first time. It replicated Simon’s vision completely. It was hard to make out a huge amount of detail from the black and white TV image, but it was immediately obvious that there was no tonal difference on either of the guys’ body surfaces. It could only mean one thing. They’d been stripped.

‘It’s not just their clothes. Look at the way they’re lying. Does that look right to you?’

Both men were flat out, arms down by their sides. You don’t fall like that if you’ve been hit in combat. As we continued to circle, Simon’s view improved. He zoomed in closer. He was right; there was something wrong with the bodies. A lot wrong. I didn’t want to look any more.

‘You … fucking …
wankers
…’ Simon breathed.

A few seconds later, the Paras’ commander made it official. ‘Wildman Five One, Widow Seven Four. That’s two KIA confirmed. We’re bagging them up now.’

The Taliban would have been monitoring their every move, so the Paras made a swift withdrawal to the helicopter landing site with the bodies and the Chinooks came back in to pick them up; again, under our watchful eye.

On the flight back to Camp Bastion, Simon and I tried to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. If only someone had known about the raid. I understood the procedure, but right now it was incredibly frustrating – a real double-edged sword. Within thirty minutes of the shout coming in, we could have had a couple of Apaches giving them some cover. We might even have kept the two guys alive.

A silence fell between us. I knew what Simon was wondering, because I was wondering it too. Was Patten or Bartlett still alive by the time the Taliban got their hands on them? For their sake, I prayed they weren’t. If they were, the awful terror they must have experienced in the last desperate minutes of their lives was too unbearable to contemplate.

‘You know what, Ed?’ Simon said eventually. ‘If it was me, I know what I’d do. I wouldn’t give those bastards the satisfaction.’

I’d been having exactly the same thought.

That flight back to Camp Bastion was the first time I really understood why aircrew were no longer issued with gold sovereigns. You couldn’t buy your way out of trouble in this place. These people weren’t interested in our money.

Of course, none of us thought the deployment was going to be a walk in the park. We all knew what the Mujahideen had done to the Soviet helicopter gunship pilots they captured; we’d all heard the horror stories. Yes, our Apaches were as mean and powerful as they looked, but that didn’t mean we were untouchable. Our intelligence briefs reminded us daily how determined the Taliban were to take out one of our helicopters. And it was the Apaches they hated the most.

‘Praise be to Allah, I want you to bring down a Mosquito,’ the Taliban commanders could be overheard in radio intercepts
regaling their rank and file. That was their word for us: ‘Mosquitoes’. They called the Chinooks ‘Cows’.

But up until that day, we’d all kidded ourselves that being the good guys would save us. We were on a reconstruction and security mission, not an invasion. If we were shot down, we presumed that we would just somehow get away with it. A bit of a slapping, maybe, like the Tornado boys got from Saddam in the first Gulf War; a few months in a dingy jail, then a traditional prisoner exchange at Checkpoint Charlie.

Now we knew the truth. Reality had bitten. Our enemy in southern Afghanistan couldn’t give a stuff what mandate we’d come under. If they got their hands on us, a quick death would be the very best we could hope for.

I gripped the cyclic resolutely as, then and there, I also decided there was no way those evil bastards were going to get me alive. If I was shot down, I’d keep on running until my heart gave out. If I couldn’t run, I’d fight until my second to last bullet was gone. Then I’d use the last one on myself.

We talked for hours back in the crew tents that night as word spread about what had happened. Every pilot came to the same conclusion. I’d be surprised if all the paratroopers out in the district bases hadn’t followed suit.

We only found out exactly what had happened to the two SBS guys some days later. Patten had been hit in the chest, the bullet exiting from the side of his neck. A rescue attempt for him was out of the question; the sky was raining lead. Now the SBS team was split in two, most in front of Patten and a few – including Bartlett – behind him.

Bartlett was with another SBS lad who’d taken a bullet in the arm. Bartlett stayed with him and found a hiding place in an irri
gation ditch. With Taliban all around them, he then went forward alone, crawling through thick undergrowth to recce a route to safety through the enemy’s positions. It was the last anyone saw of him.

Bartlett was a very brave guy and he didn’t deserve to die like that. Neither of them did.

That wasn’t the worst part. The two men’s colleagues back in Force 84’s secure Ops Room at Kandahar Airfield were forced to sit and watch the whole ghastly show play out as it happened. Patten and Bartlett’s last moments were piped through in real time on a live TV feed from a Predator circling above them. That’s why they had been able to tell us exactly where to look.