Hellfire (6 page)

IAT (or ‘RIAT’ as it is known today-they’ve added a ‘Royal’ to it) is the biggest air show in Europe. Hundreds of military aircraft take part, from vintage Hurricanes and Spitfires to modern fighter
jets and combat helicopters. It’s an organisational nightmare because tens of thousands of spotters descend on the event and traffic has to be diverted around the southern half of England. Marshalling this number of aircraft is a huge job and falls pretty much to the host base to organise; we students were told that we were the ‘work party’-the guys on the ground responsible for ensuring the visiting pilots taxied and parked where they were supposed to. The man in charge was none other than Mr Chopper Palmer.

Everybody groaned.

I knew I hadn’t helped matters by wandering around the place with the maroon machine on my head and sporting a set of Para wings on my arm like they were the only ones that mattered-before I’d realised that all that Para stuff wasn’t necessarily the best way of becoming an AAC pilot.

On the day before the Tattoo I walked over to the air traffic control tower to get a bird’s eye view of the proceedings, to orientate myself before the show started. As I wandered from window to window, getting my bearings, wondering how we’d fit all the aircraft in, I turned to see a petite, middle-aged woman engaged in a meaningful conversation with one of the controllers. I tuned in, because I’d overheard her mention that she had a couple of sons in the Paras.

I didn’t think any more about it until, on her way out, she said her goodbyes and the controller beside me said: ‘Bye, Mrs Palmer.’

‘Mrs
Palmer
?’ I asked when she had disappeared from view. ‘Chopper’s wife…?’

‘The very same,’ the controller said. ‘Nice, isn’t she?’

She was. Lovely, in fact. Something I found very difficult to square with her enormous husband and his fearsome reputation. But then it began to dawn on me. Maybe, on our first meeting, Palmer hadn’t been psyching me out; maybe I’d misread that stare.
If the guy had a couple of sons in the Paras, perhaps it had signalled something else-an affinity, maybe? Jesus. Could it be that Chopper’s reputation was not all it was cracked up to be? Could he be a regular bloke after all? How else could he have ended up with such a charming wife?

Armed with this heretical thought, I left the control tower and headed round the corner for my briefing. My fellow students were already waiting.

I fell into line just before Palmer appeared, looking like thunder. His eyes met mine and they seemed to bore right through me. He gave me that thin smile again and boomed: ‘Right. I need a second in command. Who’s going to be my two-eye-see?’

You could have cut the air with a knife. Nobody said a word. The only thing missing was
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
theme music.

From nowhere, I felt myself stick up my hand. ‘I will, sir,’ I said.

Palmer growled something and stormed off in the direction of the hangars.

‘What did he say?’ I asked Sammy.

‘He said, “Thanks, you knob. You’ve blown any chance you had passing the course. You can go back to being a meat-bomb right now.”’

‘Seriously. What did he really say?’

‘He said, “Para, Para in the sky, living proof that shit can fly.”’

As I made to pelt off after Chopper Palmer, Sammy held me back by my shirt. ‘Are you fucking mad, Macy?’

‘Probably,’ I said, tugging myself free.

In fact, I was feeling happier than I’d felt in ages. My hunch-and it was based on some pretty solid first-hand evidence-said that, a pound to a pinch of shit, Palmer wasn’t quite the chopper he was cracked up to be. And since in the game of roulette that determined which instructors would be assigned to us for our Final Handling
Test there was a fair chance I’d be getting Mr Palmer, I figured that-unlike Fremington-time spent in reconnaissance would not be wasted.

Part of me still couldn’t quite believe what I was doing. I felt like a circus performer who was about to put his head in the lion’s mouth.

When I caught up with him, Palmer started to brief me on the admin task. As he did so, he glanced at my beret and told me something I already knew-that one of his boys was in the Parachute Regiment.

‘Is he in White Feathers One or Grungy Three, sir?’ I asked. 2 Para had sent 1 Para white feathers for missing the Falklands and 3 Para, quite frankly, needed to wash.

He smiled. ‘That would make you Bullshit Two, I guess.’ He knew I was 2 Para from the blue lanyard I had wrapped around my shoulder.

I was about to reply when I saw a shadow racing across the ground between the hangars. I looked up. The first aircraft to arrive at the show was a helicopter. I couldn’t tell what kind. I held up my hand and squinted against the sunlight.

As the machine banked on its final approach, I got my first proper look at it. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen-big, dark and angular, it resembled a menacing primeval insect. It came into a slow hover right in front of the tower and hung in the air. Then, nose down, nodding to a crowd of onlookers that had lined up to gawp at it, it crabbed towards a ground handler armed with two orange paddles before finally thumping down onto the ground.

Chopper Palmer swore under his breath. All I caught was something about Yanks.

‘Sir?’

‘Fly like that with me, Macy, and I’ll mince you up through the fenestron of your Gazelle.’

‘What is it, sir?’ I wanted to get off the subject of going anywhere near a helicopter with him.

‘That,’ Chopper Palmer said, with a tinge of admiration in his voice, ‘is a United States Army AH Sixty-Four Alpha. You ought to be able to tell by the unorthodox approach that it isn’t from around here. It’s known as the Apache.’

It was the first combat helicopter I’d seen up close. The Apache, I knew, was one of four helicopters competing for a UK MoD contract that would see the British Army equipped with a dedicated attack helicopter for the first time in its history.

As things stood, the Army Air Corps was equipped with two kinds of rotary wing aircraft: the Gazelle and the Lynx (not including the special Gazelles and A109s used by the SAS).

The Gazelle was generally employed for training, liaison and reconnaissance, but could be used for emergency casevac and move a couple of lightly kitted-out troops but that was about it-a valuable but limited asset.

The Lynx Mk7 was an anti-tank helicopter armed with missiles on each side. It was seriously underpowered and suffered badly when it came to moving even small amounts of troops. It was also hindered by the fact it needed a door gunner, reducing its load-carrying capacity and restricting the access from one door. The choice was missiles or troops-it couldn’t handle both. And its Tube-launched Optically-tracked Wire-guided-TOW-missiles did not cut the mustard. It was supposed to be our first line of defence against enemy armour, but if it had ever taken on the massed ranks of Soviet T-72s on the West German plains, it would have been massacred. And the lessons of the recent Gulf conflict said that it wouldn’t have fared a whole lot better against some of the lesser equipped armies still out there. Waiting for the TOW missile to be manually tracked all the way to the target, it was a sitting duck.

As a result, the impetus to equip the Army Air Corps with a dedicated attack helicopter, one that had been specifically designed for the role, had gained momentum, and the Apache was the main contender. It was battling for the contract, valued at upwards of £2 billion (and that was just for the airframe, not including the simulators or associated equipment), against three other machines: the German-Franco Eurocopter Tiger, an anglicised version of the US Bell Cobra called the Cobra Venom, and the Rooivalk, an ugly brute from South Africa. The Apache’s presence at the show was a sign that the competition was hotting up.

I’d never seen anything like it. I was totally mesmerised.

Later, I asked Mr Palmer if I could take a look at it up close. He did better than that: he walked straight up and asked if I could sit in it.

The pilot, looking bored in a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans, was only too happy to oblige. Seconds later, I dumped my camera on the grass and was hauling myself into the rear cockpit-the pilot’s position.

Glancing around the cockpit, I could see that it was a world away from the small, flimsy, plastic analogue world of my Gazelle. The Apache was huge, robust and instead of all of the normal instrumentation it had the bulk of its data displayed in the centre of the instrument console.

‘Smile, son.’ I looked out to see Chopper Palmer pointing a camera at me.

I wasn’t sure what had made me happier-sitting in a machine I swore to myself I’d fly one day, or knowing that Chopper Palmer wasn’t the Dark Lord after all.

The gunner’s position in the front was dominated by a big metal block jutting above the MPDs that looked like a cross between an inverted periscope and something you’d find at a coin-operated peep-show. ‘This,’ my tobacco-chewing Texan friend told me, ‘is
something we call the ORT: the Optical Relay Tube. By lowering your eyes to the ORT it allows you to see the enemy using direct viewing optics.’ He showed me a pink lens that covered the right eye, ‘Look through that,’ and then pointed to the MPDs, ‘or at them, and you see what the Apache sees.’ He spat out some tobacco. ‘You can see the radar picture, the image projected by the gunner’s thermal imaging system or his daylight camera, the pilot’s thermal system…well shit, son…any one of ‘em, at any given moment, all at the flick of a switch.’

‘Fun’s over, Corporal Macy,’ Chopper said. ‘We have some marshalling to do.’ He walked off, forcing me to run after him again.

Three days after the show ended, we were back in the classroom again, preparing for our last few sorties before the dreaded Final Handling Test.

Before we knew it, it was late June. WO2 Bateman was putting the flying programme together. He was attempting to avoid pairing particular students with a particular Aviation Standards Officer if they had a good reason for not wanting to fly with him. The floor erupted. ‘Not Chopper Palmer, sir, he hates me…’ ‘Don’t give me Darth Vader, I’ll pay you any money…’

I hadn’t shared my belief that Palmer’s bark was worse than his bite; I knew no one would have believed me. I stuck my hand up and announced that I wanted to fly with Chopper on my Final Handling Test.

The laughter was immediately replaced by a silence you’d only expect to find in libraries and monasteries.

‘That’s good, Corporal Macy,’ Mr Bateman replied, ‘because
Mister
Palmer has asked to fly with you.’

Catcalls, wolf-whistles and cries of ‘teacher’s pet’ bounced off the four walls and Sammy called me a brown nose.

‘I wouldn’t be so quick, marine,’ Bateman said. ‘You must have been right up Mr Palmer’s arse with your Para mate here, ‘cause he’s asked for you too.’

The lads had seen me getting on with Darth Vader, but Sammy hadn’t been within thirty yards of him. Sammy called what he thought was Bateman’s bluff.

Bateman replied, ‘I think Mr Palmer said it was something to do with “Para Para in the sky”…’

I was off like a shot with Sammy hard on my heels, calling me every name in the matelot’s dictionary of profanities.

I walked out to the aircraft nice and early on the day of the test. It was a beautiful summer’s morning. An old Battle of Britain airfield, Middle Wallop had remained the largest grass airfield in the country and was as perfect a setting for an air base as you could imagine. The sun was just poking through the trees on Danebury Ring, the site of an ancient hill fort to the east.

I usually loved this time of day, but I felt troubled. It wasn’t simply that this was the day I’d find out whether I had what it took to become an army helicopter pilot; I was seriously worried that I’d underestimated Palmer. Moments earlier, as I’d been briefing him on the flight, he seemed to have reverted to his old ways. As I’d scribbled away on the whiteboard in the briefing room, recounting what I’d be doing on the sortie, Darth Vader had just stared at me-the laser stare that everybody had been so alarmed by when we’d first arrived. Gone was the genial bloke who’d opened up the Apache for me and taken my picture. In his place was a big, taciturn bear that looked like he was eyeing me up for breakfast.

‘Any questions, sir?’ I’d asked when I’d finished the briefing.

‘No.’

‘I’ll see you at the aircraft then, sir.’

‘You will, Corporal Macy, you will.’

After walking around the aircraft, I clambered into the cockpit and tried to focus on my pre-flight checks. When I’d got all my maps ready, I set about programming my navigation aid. When I’d done that, I went over everything all over again.

Glancing back at the hangar, I spotted Palmer, larger than life, helmet on, visor down, striding across the grass towards me.

His gait, his whole demeanour seemed to be saying: don’t screw with me; don’t even talk to me.

My name’s Chopper Palmer and I’ve got a reputation to protect.

A reputation he’d flexed only yesterday morning when he failed one of our course before they’d even taken off.

You arsehole, I said to myself, you requested this guy-and now he’s going to fail you.

He walked round the aircraft, opened up the flimsy little door and began to position himself in the commander’s left-hand seat. He was so big that he bounced me out of mine, but he didn’t seem to notice. He squashed me against the perspex as he leaned over to put on his straps and he didn’t notice that either. How was I supposed to fly this thing?

As I continued with my checks two things dawned on me.

The first was why he’d been nicknamed Darth Vader. He sat completely immobile, head forward, visor down, and had the scariest breathing I’d ever heard: a long, slow, deep, throaty breath in, a pause too long for a mere mortal to survive, and then a rush of air out.

The second was why he chopped more students than the rest. I was nervous, worried and my hands were visibly shaking. If we were having a fight I’d be in my element, but sitting here in this cramped cockpit knowing that he held the power to end my long quest was becoming unbearable. I was about to fail because I was struggling to hold it together. He was a chopper because students just dissolved in front of him.