We were up at 0115 hours and into Ops for 0130. Kenny, our watchkeeper, briefed us that Widow Seven Six – Sangin’s Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) – would call the codeword Pegasus when the area around the DC was secure and we were cleared to engage.

During our couple of hours of broken sleep there had been another huge firefight. The Taliban had used mortars, Chinese rockets, recoilless rifles, Rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), a plethora of machine guns and small arms. We’d responded with B1 bombers, 105 mm light guns, Javelin anti-tank missiles, 81 mm mortars, .50 cal machine guns, machine guns and small arms.

‘It’s the fucking Alamo out there.’ Kenny was a Lynx pilot and an ex-Para with over thirty years’ experience, and he knew the score.

‘Only bad news from me, I’m afraid,’ Jerry said. Jerry was an RAF Flight Lieutenant, our Intelligence Officer. ‘The threat remains very high and the risk to the CH47s is off the scale. They may not know there will be two, or have the exact time of your arrival, but Taliban intercepts have confirmed that they know we have injured men in Sangin, and they know a cow is coming.

‘They’ve ordered all anti-coalition militia – every man with a weapon – to close in. The Apache is the only weapon that can really hurt them, and intercepts over the last twenty-four hours have been full of talk of bringing one down. More specifically, we have heard them say, Bring in the Stingers and fire when they arrive. The mosquitoes are scared, so don’t be afraid to shoot them down. Their morale is very high after the recent killings and they believe their plan to use up our ammo and force a resupply has worked. Any questions?’

The silence spoke volumes.

‘Then all I can say is good luck…’

The chocolate bars were dished out on the short walk to the aircraft. Jake immediately paid for the privilege of eating into Jon’s private stash.

‘Do you actually know what time it is Dolly?’

Jake had got his nickname during our Apache training, when he shaved the odd hour off our fourteen-hour working days. As often as he could manage it, his family came first.

Jon restrained himself from singing the Parton theme tune to 9 to 5, but he never failed to lift our spirits.

I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t. I heard people talking, but they made no sense. Where were Mainwaring and my mates? Where was I?

‘You okay, mate?’ a bloke said.

‘I think he’s dead…’ A woman’s voice.

‘He fell off his bike in front of that man’s car. He was in the air, upside down, when the car hit him.’

I wanted to tell them that wasn’t what had happened at all. I wanted to tell them I’d been on Salisbury Plain in a live firing exercise against a target drone when the bloody thing decided to go rogue and everything turned to ratshit.

Fuck! The pain…

Someone was trying to move me. I felt like I was being pulled, pushed and prodded. Every time they touched me I wanted to open my mouth and scream, but I couldn’t even whimper.

‘I thought it had taken his head off. It hit him in the back and he was upside down, mate. His head went under the bumper and his feet went through the windscreen. His back must be broken.’

If my back’s broken, why the fuck are you trying to move me? If my back’s broken, how am I going to do SAS Selection?

They’ll pay for this, I thought. A drone goes rogue, hits me in the back and kills all my dreams. My God, I’ll have them…

‘Get the boards. Quick.’ Another woman. Stern, authoritarian.

‘I tell you, he flew off the bonnet and then the guy drove over him…’

‘Drove over his head,’ the first woman said.

‘No, it drove over his shoulder…’

Whatever, I thought. The pain that had threatened to overwhelm me was replaced by a feeling of immeasurable tiredness. I felt myself sliding and falling.

‘Sir, wake up. Can you open your eyes for me?’

I opened my eyes and my confusion deepened as I slowly saw a black woman backlit by a bright orange halo. I thought for a moment that Diana Ross had come to take me away…

‘Can you feel my hand?’

I couldn’t, but all was not lost: I felt something on my face – the rain I could see sparkling in the glow of the street lamp.

‘Can you feel me touching your fingers?’

I was aware of having hands and feet, but I couldn’t feel her touching them.

‘Can you grip my fingers?’

I couldn’t. I couldn’t move a muscle. I tried to shift my head, but it wouldn’t respond. Nothing responded. I couldn’t even speak. I was totally fucked.

The woman unzipped my Barbour jacket. ‘Sweet Jesus, he’s wearing a bin-bag under his coat.’ At best she must be thinking I’m mad and at worst a weirdo pervert.

Leave me alone, I wanted to tell her, because all I want to do is sleep.

I was waiting outside the clothing store for my flying suit when a giant of a man nudged me out of the way with a dismissive, semi-hostile look and threw a pair of tatty old gloves onto the counter. The civvie behind the counter half-jumped to attention, threw the man-mountain a sickly smile and laid out a nice new pair of pristine white chamois-leather gloves in front of him.

‘There you go, Mr Palmer. Your size if I’m not mistaken.’ They must have skinned a whole mountain antelope to make just one pair for him.

Mr Palmer never said a word. He flicked a glance at my maroon beret, leaned into my personal space and stared into my eyes. I figured he either had something against the way I wore my silver-winged cap badge – 2 Para style – round by my left ear, or he just didn’t like Paras, full stop.

He gave me a thin smile, tucked his gloves into his pocket and walked out.

I filed Mr Palmer’s name away. I had other things to worry about right then. The trouble with grading was the fact that none of the instructors – crusty old pilots who had been in the RAF, but were now civvies, well beyond retirement age – gave you any feedback on your chances of success. I had no idea how I was doing.

Captain Tucker called us together in the Chipmunk hangar briefing room. A tall, softly spoken, well-to-do Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers officer, he was a candidate just like us, but because of his rank he was the grading course leader. We were told we needed an average score of fifty for each exercise. There would be twelve exercises altogether, with a final handling assessment tacked on the end.

When they debriefed us, the instructors wrote everything down in blue A4 ring binders that had our names on the spines.

I desperately wanted to know what was in my binder.

Standing outside the hangar with the smokers one day, I could see through the window into the room where the instructors kept them. The folders were in a neat row on the second shelf of a steel cabinet. As I glanced nonchalantly past the smokers, in came Chopper Jennings, one of the instructors, and locked the cabinet. Then he opened the top-right drawer of the desk, lifted out a big orange folder and flung in the key. Jennings took the key to the drawer away with him, but that didn’t bother me. I could pick a drawer lock, no problem. Doors didn’t present an obstacle either.

I asked one of the ground crew what time the hangar opened the following morning. I told him I wanted to practise my checks in peace. Six, he told me, and from that moment my mind was set.

I told my Para mate Chris my plan but he wasn’t getting up early. He didn’t want me to tell him if he was failing; only to let him know if he was passing.

Suit yourself, I told him.

The next morning, I hung around for the ground crew to open the hangar and push out the ‘Chippies’ – our De Havilland Chipmunk T10 training aircraft – into the crisp summer morning light. I crept past them, made my way to the corridor and reached the door to the office. Skills I’d learned from my mates at school for cracking locks and flipping Yales came in very handy. The key for the steel cabinet was where Chopper Jennings had put it. I opened the cabinet and selected the folder with ‘MACY’ on the spine.

I was scoring 54s and 55s. Each piece of airmanship was carefully marked. I studied the details closely. Mr Fulford, my sweet old instructor, had marked me down for not looking out enough. This, he said, could lead to a mid-air collision, and would need to be rectified if I was to become a pilot.

No sooner said than done, Mr Fulford.

I looked at my mate’s folder and he was bombing big-style. Then I looked at some of the other guys to see how they were doing. Only a few were doing okay, the majority were borderline and some were totally losing it.

When I got back, Chris asked how he was getting on and I told him I hadn’t been able to get into the office, but would try again. What else could I say?

The following day, bombing along in my Chippie with Mr Fulford behind me, I made sure that my head never stopped moving as I scanned the Hampshire skies for other aircraft.

When I broke into the office and sneaked a look at my file the following day, I was gratified to see that my situational awareness had improved greatly, but I needed to work on my navigational accuracy.

Your wish, Mr Fulford, is my command.

My eighth sortie was to perform a loop. I went for it, big-time. Approaching the top of the loop the blood drained from my thick skull and my vision became impaired by dark grey spots. By the time I had the red and white bird completely inverted, the spots had grown and merged and I was totally blind.

From the tone of his voice I could tell that it had caught nice Mr Fulford out too.

‘Are… your… wings… level…?’ he gasped.

I didn’t have a clue; I was fighting a losing battle to stay conscious.

I grunted my reply.

I woke to hear the Gypsy Major engine screaming, quickly pulled out of the dive and levelled back off at the altitude I had started my first aerobatic manoeuvre. That’s it, I thought. I must have failed now. But the following morning I’d somehow got away with it.

By the ninth sortie, I’d accumulated enough points to chill out a bit. I stopped sneaking into the office after my tenth flight, knowing I was almost home and dry.

Along the way, I had also learned why they’d given Jennings his nickname. He wasn’t some helicopter ace after all; in fact, he’d never flown choppers. He just marked us so harshly that he chopped more people off the grading course than any other instructor. It was all I needed to justify my early morning sorties. You had to fight fire with fire.

On the day we were due to leave, two weeks and thirteen flying hours after the grading course started, we were lined up outside the Flying Wing Chief Instructor’s office in rank order.

Decision time. I knew pretty much who had passed and who had failed, but there were still a few borderline cases I wasn’t so sure about.

As a corporal I was way down the line, just behind my pal Chris.

A lieutenant was called into the office. I held my breath, knowing he was about to have the carpet pulled from under him. He emerged a moment or two later, punching the air. ‘I’ve passed. I’m a training risk, but I’ve passed.’

I knew that from the files. How on earth did he scrape a pass?

A sergeant came out looking devastated. But from my peeks at his file I knew he was better than the lieutenant.

What the fuck was going on here? My heart sank; it seemed little better than a lottery.

I began to panic. What if I’d blown it in the last few sorties? Had I taken my eye off the ball? That was it, I convinced myself; the lieutenant must have greatly improved in the final few days and the sergeant had let down his guard.

Jesus. How had I done?

Chris slunk in and reappeared with the inevitable news. His grades were awful.

Then it was my turn, the moment of truth. The Flying Wing Chief Instructor, the Chippie Chief Instructor and a high-ranking, big cheese AAC officer were all ranged behind a table in front of me. I came to a halt and saluted. I could see my heart pounding through my shirt. This was it. This was my one shot.

‘Corporal Macy, how do you think you have done?’ the Big Cheese asked.

I wasn’t prepared for a question. Don’t be cocky, don’t be an introvert either, I told myself. The result was jumbled nonsense. ‘Er, I think I could have done better, because I put myself under a lot of pressure and, well, if I was to be given a chance, I—’

‘Passed,’ the Flying Wing Chief Instructor snapped. ‘Congratulations.’

A big grin split my face. ‘Really? You’re sure?’

‘You had the highest score. You’re free to go.’

‘Thank you, sir, sir and sir.’

I gave them a salute that nearly broke my wrist. I spun on my boots, slammed my left heel into the floor, deafening the old codgers, and marched out, quickly dropping my head as I emerged.

Outside, a marine corporal called Sammy was about to go in. I raised my head and said sombrely, ‘Mate, I failed. Good luck…’

His face fell.

Naughty, I knew, but Sammy was a Royal Marine Commando – the time-honoured arch enemy of the paratrooper. He was in on my spying game and had been tracking his performance through my daily updates. He knew he had eight fewer points than me at my last peek.

He’d find out he’d done all right soon enough.

When he reappeared a few moments later I was running around the corridor with my arms outstretched, humming the ‘Dam Busters March’. He chased me out into the summer sunshine.

‘Maroon machine one, cabbage head nil,’ I shouted gleefully.

Later, I went to see Colonel Edgecombe. Colonel Greville Edgecombe was – and still is – an Army Air Corps legend. He explained the AAC’s ethos, how it was all about tapping into the army’s skills base, so that each flying squadron had a resident expert for each task. There were engineers, tankies, infantry, artillery, medics, signals operators, chefs and clerks. I wasn’t sure what skills the clerks would be able to bring to the table – our pay was always getting cocked up – but I was happy to hear that we’d have a few chefs on board. Para food was great and I wanted it to stay that way.

The colonel told me that only four out of the fourteen candidates had passed with flying colours and had been formally accepted for training. My pilots’ course was set for November, four months’ time.

On my way out, I heard that Mr Palmer was in the building. I darted into the bogs until I knew he’d left.

By now, I knew that he wasn’t plain old ‘Mr’ Palmer at all, but Darth Vader, the most feared instructor in the Army Air Corps. Knowing I’d be back in a few months’ time, I couldn’t afford another brush with him.

I had been given a reprieve. I was determined to become a pilot – and not just any pilot. I was going to fly for the SAS, and nobody, not even the Dark Lord of the Universe, was going to stop me.

We took off just after the sun came up and headed out towards the exercise area. The wind dropped; Devon spread out before us in all its glory and the sea twinkled behind us. We slipped under the wires together fourteen klicks from the FRV, barely six feet off the ground, either side of the river, and began nap of the earth flying – at tree-top height, using the low ground for cover, to keep below the radar horizon. With a final klick to run I dropped down to fifteen feet and began to weave between the trees. I could see Mick a tactical bound behind, following me nicely.

We were as stealthy as any helicopter could be both from the ground and the air – small, camouflaged, and very hard to spot at this height unless we had to fly around someone out walking his dog.

The Gazelle wasn’t always quiet. It was difficult to pick up rotor sound from a distance because it was light and had a fenestron tail rotor – thirteen blades housed in a Venturi – but its gears and bearings did emit a high frequency whine when it was in the hover.

The sun had crested the hills to the east of the FRV point. My goldfish bowl of a cockpit was beginning to warm by the time Mick’s lights were finally extinguished, signalling he was ready. I led the way, a few feet off the ground, climbing for fences and gates.

As an ex-Para, I knew the value of terrain-masking ingress and egress within an area of operation – no matter whether you were on foot, in a tank or a helicopter.

I wound us through the belt of trees until we arrived in the OPs. I spotted the road in the distance, uphill through the gaps in the trees – sunlight glinted off a handful of cars threading their way along the dual carriageway towards the Cornish border. The OPs were awesome. The trees cast their shadows across us; even God wouldn’t know we were here. We were nice and early and all we had to do now was sit and observe.

Mr Herbert took over the controls and I grabbed the pistol grip of the Gazelle Observation Aid, a sight like a periscope built into the canopy above the left pilot’s seat. I peered through its rubber browpad and positioned its field of view on the road nearly a mile away. Eventually I spotted the headlights of the first of the four-ton lorries as it crested the hill to our south-east.

For the purposes of the exercise, the four-tonners represented main battle tanks; the Land Rovers that accompanied them were supposed to be armoured personnel carriers (APCs). We had been told roughly when to expect the convoy but not how many vehicles would be in it. After five minutes, I counted five fourtonners and six Land Rovers. Now I just had to wait and see if it was a split convoy or if there were any stragglers. Five minutes passed, then ten. Glancing through the trees to my left, I could almost feel Mick’s frustration. No matter. I was doing this by the book. As a soldier, I knew that battlefields weren’t neat and ordered – that you should always expect the unexpected. I didn’t want to get back to Fremington to be told I was on Strike One because we’d missed a second convoy travelling a few miles behind the first.

Only when we were approaching our fuel ‘bug-out’ point did I decide that it was safe to return. I led Mick back to the FRV and he led us back to the camp. We landed with just enough fuel to have coped with a diversion should we have come face to face with unexpected enemy on our return.

After shutting down the Gazelles we were directed into the improvised briefing room while our instructors checked in with the convoy to see if we’d been spotted.

‘How did you think it went?’ Herbert asked as he closed the door.

I knew that my flying was okay, so the only thing he could fail me for was the mission itself. ‘We achieved our mission, sir,’ I replied. ‘We got there in plenty of time and concealed ourselves before the enemy turned up. We counted the vehicles and I’m confident we didn’t miss any. I’m pretty damn sure we remained undetected throughout, and on the egress. I don’t think it could have gone much better, to be honest.’

Herbert arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

Uh-oh…

‘How do you think it went, Corporal Baxter?’ Bateman said.

Mick took his face out of his hands and glanced at me before replying.

‘We achieved our mission,’ he said without blinking.

Herbert let rip. ‘Your choice of OP was piss poor. You waited far too long and the information you brought back was untimely.’

Mick’s face disappeared into his sweaty palms again and I could feel my blood begin to boil.

‘What you should have done is find an OP further to the east so you could have picked the convoy up sooner,’ he barked. His slightly ruddy face was turning a deeper shade of crimson.

He walked over to the map. ‘If you’d chosen one of these two positions in this area here’ – he indicated the points I’d been advised to use by my peers – ‘you’d have detected the vehicles a lot quicker. Then you could have carried out the task and returned to camp a great deal sooner. But you waited till you were almost out of fuel. You not only endangered two helicopters, Corporal Macy, but you were late in providing valuable tactical information to your commander.’

I looked at him. Fuck, I thought, he’s having a laugh…

I took a deep breath.

‘Well?’ His face looked as though it was about to burst into flames.

I gave him my answer as slowly and calmly as I could manage. ‘With all due respect, sir, I’ve been recceing positions for years. Sat on a bare-arsed, skylined hill like that, we might as well have been flying a banner behind us saying “over here”.’

Mick’s head began to move from side to side. I wasn’t sure whether he was just questioning my approach or looking to escape through a crack in the floorboards.

I continued, undeterred. ‘If the sun, glinting off our bubble cockpit, didn’t give us away first the noise surely would have, because that position is directly upwind. And I didn’t hang around the area for the hell of it. I waited because there was every chance that the first vehicles were just the vanguard of a bigger convoy. I needed to be sure that there weren’t any others.’

They looked at me in disbelief and then at each other.

‘Sir…If I’d left too early and more vehicles had turned up, I’d have brought back the wrong enemy strengths and the commander tasked to destroy them could have found himself getting killed in his own ambush. That convoy was travelling at about twenty miles an hour, allowing us time to plan an ambush – making my information both 100 per cent accurate and very timely.’

Herbert was unimpressed. The marks he gave me said everything: I’d almost failed.

At breakfast with the rest of the students I completely lost it. ‘In a real battle, skylined on that ridgeline like that, we’d have been shot clean out of the sky. Instructors – put ‘em in combats or out in the field, expose them to real tactics and a little rain and they’d fucking melt! Herbert doesn’t have a tactical bone in his fucking body!’

Everybody had stopped eating. My marine buddy Sammy, who I’d spoofed the day we received our grading results, eventually said what everyone was thinking. ‘You’re supposed to pass the course, you tit, not teach the instructors tactics and declare war on the system.’

‘You were a gnat’s cock-hair away from getting us both failed for not using their OPs,’ Mick said. ‘We only scraped a pass because your plan was bombproof. If we’d made one tiny error they’d have fucked us with it till our arses bled. You need to fucking wise up, Para-boy.’

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.

I fired up the Gazelle’s single engine – no problems there – but my first real test came when I needed to check behind me to ensure no one would be decapitated when I engaged the blades. Palmer was so big I couldn’t see past him.

I spoke into my intercom. ‘Can you check left please, sir?’

‘No.’ Palmer continued to look directly in front of him, his visor hiding any expression he may have had.

Parts of me were starting to die. What the fuck was this? ‘Unless I check left, sir, I can’t start the blades. I might chop someone’s head off.’

He squashed me again as he grudgingly looked left. ‘Clear.’

My sense of foreboding deepened. I thought of everything I’d been through – grading, a whole year spent learning how to fly – and it had come to this: cramped in a tiny cockpit with a gargantuan instructor who seemed hell-bent on failing me.

Somehow, as we made our way over the Hampshire countryside, I forced myself to concentrate. I simply had to do my best; I had to hold it together. For most of the rest of the flight I was somehow able to zen out Chopper Palmer’s brooding presence, despite the fact that I remained squashed into my side of the cockpit by the man’s enormous bulk.

Bit by bit we completed the test, until, right at the end, we came to the clincher: Practice Forced Landings. I carried out several PFLs that I thought were pretty good. Then, as we were approaching the airfield with the test minutes from completion, he suddenly said, ‘I have control’, chopped the engine and we plummeted earthwards.

As emergency landings and autorotations went, it was the best I’d ever seen; so expertly done, in fact, that he bled away the last reserves of energy in the Gazelle’s freewheeling blades in a beautiful flared landing that ended in the helicopter’s skids literally kissing the grass.

As we slid to a standstill I was so awestruck by this textbook display that I failed to take on board what he said next. It was only when my mind replayed the instruction that I realised he’d asked me to take off again and given me a grid reference.

I’d missed it.

He’d suckered me, the old bastard. I’d thought the test was over.

I was summoning up the courage to ask him for the grid reference again when he turned to me. ‘Farrar-Hockley’s fallen off a ladder in his greenhouse. He’s got a pitch-fork up his arse. We’ve got to get him to hospital, pronto. I take it you know who I mean by Farrar-Hockley, Corporal Macy…’

‘Farrar the Para,’ I answered as I checked the grid I thought he’d said.

General Farrar-Hockley was a bigwig who’d retired a decade earlier and looking at the grid Chopper bloody Palmer had just given me was apparently living in Harewood Forest, a few minutes’ flight-time away.

What I didn’t know was whether this medical emergency was for real.

I pointed the nose in the direction of the general’s house.

On the way, I checked the map and noticed that the general lived in an area that the instructors used for confined areas – a place that was extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, for a helicopter to land in – though it wasn’t on the cheat-maps.

I flew cautiously around the outside of a clearing that constituted the confined area. Every time I looked down, it looked smaller and smaller. I drew this to the big man’s attention.

‘So get me in there before we run out of fuel,’ he demanded. ‘Farrar’s in a bad way.’

I stared at the tiny gap in the trees, hoping for inspiration. It was touch-and-go. I didn’t know what to do.

‘Are you going in or what?’ Half-drowned by the crackling comms and the scream of the Gazelle, Palmer’s voice still managed to sound like a megaphone.

Make-your-mind-up time, Macy. Palmer wasn’t interested in debates or discussions. He wanted decisiveness and action.

What was the right answer? What was I supposed to do?

I took a deep breath. ‘No sir. I’m not going to make it.’

There was a pause, then: ‘Nor could I. Take me home.’

I breathed a sigh of relief. But Palmer hadn’t finished with me yet. As we approached the airfield, he reached forward and chopped the engine on me.

Suckered again…

I applied my autorotation skills, dumping the collective lever I had in my left hand to store the energy in the blades so I could use it to cushion the landing. We dropped like a stone and the tone of the blades rose an octave as they freewheeled faster and faster.

At about fifty feet I pulled up the nose to slow the speed and as we dropped through twenty-five feet I gave the collective a sharp pull to arrest the rate of descent. The speed was now about thirty knots and we’d dropped to five feet as I levelled her off by pushing forward on the cyclic between my legs and pulling up slowly on the collective, using up the stored energy. I could hear the blades slowing and at the point we would have fallen out of the sky we touched down. We were running fast and bouncing around a bit but I’d got her on the ground before finally skidding to an untidy halt; scraping a slight zigzag in the grass in the process. Engine-off landings were not my strongest point.

With sticky palms, I sat there waiting for Palmer to issue me with fresh instructions. Instead, he pulled on the rotor brake, threw off his straps and opened the door. This time, he really was finished. Just before he unplugged his helmet he said, ‘Do you have any points for me?’

Me? Points for him? I just wanted him to get out before he produced another hoop for me to leap through.

‘I’ll let you into a little secret, Corporal Macy. If you keep that up you might live long enough to fly the Apache. No debrief points. Well done.’

With that he bounced me off my door one last time before gently closing his and taking off across the grass. When he was several strides from the helicopter, it dawned on me that I’d passed.

It was my second tour of Northern Ireland. My first had been in 1993 – not counting the time I had deployed there on the ground as a Para in 1987 – and this time it was a very different ball of wax. In 1993, when I’d been in Belfast as part of City Flight, covering foot patrols in and around Belfast, I’d flown with ex-infanteers, AAC guys who like me had previously been soldiers. They’d all had a natural feel for the tactical picture on the ground and it showed in the way they flew. Somehow or other, this skill had been lost in the four years I’d been away.

My first unit after graduating from Middle Wallop, 664 Squadron, 9 Regiment Army Air Corps, was located at Dishforth in Yorkshire. With it, I’d been on exercises in Belize, Kenya and the United States.

In the five years I’d been an operational pilot I was having the best fun it was possible to have with my clothes on.

As a newly qualified AAC helicopter pilot, there were two platforms I could aspire to: the Gazelle or the Lynx. Most elected for the Lynx because it was armed and as aggressive a flying machine as the army possessed at the time, though that wasn’t saying much. I went for the Gazelle because it formed the heart of the AAC’s covert ‘Special Forces Flight’.

I loved the Gazelle. It was the sports car of the skies while the Lynx was the family saloon. The Gazelle, being a two-seater, could sneak in almost anywhere, which is why the Special Forces liked it. And it had excellent performance; it could get up to 13,000 feet – quite a height for a helicopter – no problem.

Because it was small and made of ‘plastic and Araldite’ it was extremely hard to detect on radar when it was down in the weeds. It was also an extremely useful surveillance platform, because you could hang things off it – Nightsun searchlights and thermal-imaging cameras for starters – and at stand-off ranges, because of its size, it was pretty difficult to detect from the ground.

I’d been doing everything I could to tick the boxes that would get me selected for the Special Forces Flight. I’d done my Aircraft Commander’s Course, which allowed me to fly in the left-hand seat, and I’d racked up as many flying hours as I could. A couple of tours in Northern Ireland couldn’t hurt either, I figured.

The second time I got out there, in December 1996, I’d found the place in a mess.

Someone who’s new in-theatre, who doesn’t know the callsigns or the flying regulations, is usually put through a routine known as ‘supervised duties’ until he or she is proficient with the set-up. Although I didn’t need to sign up to supervised duties because I’d previously been in-theatre, I did so nonetheless, because the place we were flying out of, Bessbrook Mill, was extremely tight – it was the busiest base in the province – and had very strict flying procedures. I wanted to be sure I knew the ropes. I reckoned a stint of supervised duties couldn’t hurt.

I flew out on my first sortie with a qualified commander. Tully sat in the left-hand seat; I sat in the right. We were called out to Crossmaglen to assist in a ‘P-Check’: a multiple on the ground had gone into a staunchly Republican area to haul in a suspect for questioning; we were to provide top-cover for them. We’d barely arrived over the suspect’s house when the radio sparked and I heard the multiple commander’s voice.

‘One Zero Alpha, leaving Crossmaglen now.’

I glanced at Tully. No reaction. I picked up the ‘patrol trace’ – the map that indicated the route the multiple would take. There was nothing marked, no tasking; merely a callsign, the one we’d just heard. When I looked at the image on the TV screen in front of Tully’s knees, I realised that he wasn’t scouting ahead or to the sides of the multiple for possible threats; he’d got the camera trained on the multiple itself.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘I’m filming the multiple. Why?’

‘Filming their deaths more like,’ I said under my breath. I got on the radio. ‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Four. Go firm, go firm.’

I watched on the screen as fifteen men dropped to the ground.

Tully looked horrified. ‘What are you doing?’

I told him and in no uncertain terms. Now we could see where our multiple was, we were at least able to identify who the good guys were.

As I circled above them, I asked One Zero Alpha to point out his VPs for me. He immediately said they were approaching Sniper Alley, a known hot-spot. I spent several good, long moments studying the street for things that shouldn’t have been there: bins, skips, tipper trucks, command wires and suspicious-looking vehicles. I saw nothing that raised my hackles and signalled as much. Afterwards, he thanked me for what I’d done, saying it had been an ‘awesome patrol’. In my book there was nothing awesome about it at all; it was supposed to be routine.

The problem was confirmed, when, over the next week or so, I flew with several other pilots who were every bit as lax as Tully had been in the way they covered multiples on the ground. It wasn’t their fault; they didn’t know any better. Realising I wasn’t going to make myself popular by sticking my nose in, I decided to speak to the RQHI – the regiment’s qualified helicopter instructor, the guy who defined the way we flew. James told me he was aware of the problem and said it was a knowledge-based deficiency; it’s why we had supervised duties. I told him the best, perhaps the only, thing to do was to write a document that standardised air-ground-air procedure. James told me to ‘crack on’.

So I wrote it all down: how a multiple functioned and what it might be called upon to do (P-checks, vehicle checkpoints, ambushes, searches, whatever). I then calibrated the threat it faced in any given situation and put the two together. The final ingredient was what we could supply in our Gazelles – how we could detect and alert them to IRA command wires, dustbin bombs, snipers, ambushes and so on. I then combined the ground and air pictures and came up with a set of procedures – kind of a ‘how to provide multiple support by numbers’ that anybody arriving in-theatre for the first time could pick up, read and follow.

When I’d finished, I ran it past some infanteer mates. They had no idea how much support our helicopters were able to provide them with.

Heartened by their reaction, I took my draft document to the squadron’s 2i/c.

‘Very good,’ he said, flicking through it as I stood in front of his desk. ‘But if you’ll allow me to say so, Sergeant Macy, it needs a bit of a polish-i’s dotted and t’s crossed, that kind of thing. You don’t mind, do you, if I…?’

‘Be my guest,’ I said. I’d written it as a functional document, not a piece of Pulitzer Prize-winning literature. If someone wanted to tart it up for the brass, I was delighted.

A few weeks later, when I was due to go back to the UK, I’d asked the 2i/c if he’d finished tarting it up; he told me he still needed to do some work on it. He’d let me know when it was done.

That was the last I thought about it until we were practising multiple support procedures over Yorkshire a few months later and my co-pilot mentioned that there was an excellent document on the subject he’d read while deployed in Northern Ireland. ‘It covers all this stuff, Ed. I’ll give you a copy.’

As I flicked through it, I was delighted to see that 95 per cent of what I’d written had been left alone – it really had just had its i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Then I saw the 2i/c’s name and signature at the bottom.

I gave a rueful smile. The important thing was that it was out there.

It would have a particular resonance almost ten years later in the dusty wastes of Afghanistan.

Then the UK MoD went and ordered the Apache.

It had won out against its rivals in a massive procurement deal – for a cool £4.13 billion, the Army Air Corps would acquire sixty-seven AgustaWestland-built machines, simulators and equipment to operate them. They’d look the same as their American counterparts, but would be very different on the inside. Instead of the standard General Electric turboshaft engines of the Boeing-built originals, the WAH-64D, as the British variant was known, would be equipped with RTM322s-built by Rolls-Royce – with almost 40 per cent more power. The Apache that Chopper Palmer had organised for me to sit in at the International Air Tattoo, which was impressive enough, had been revamped as a total thoroughbred.

What to do?

The Apache was due in AAC service in 2003, which technically gave me time to deploy with the SAS and still left time to apply for Apache selection. The latter, not surprisingly, had become the hottest ticket in the Air Corps. Every pilot with half an eye on the top rung of the ladder would put his name down for a place on the conversion course. To ensure I got there, I knew I’d need to be way ahead of the curve.

Fortunately, I had a plan.

A week later our two Gazelles were sitting on a hill, awaiting the battle due to kick off in the small hours of the next morning. This was the big one, as real as it got at BATUS, and I wanted to show what our Gazelles were made of.

We were due to mix it with artillery fire, tank rounds, armed recce cars, mounted machine guns, mortars, Milan anti-tank missiles, jets dropping bombs and our own Lynx helicopters. It was what we had all trained for – as close to a real battle as it was possible to be – and I knew we were more than capable of acquitting ourselves well.

Lieutenant Colonel Iain Thomson was here to validate our regiment during the final BATUS exercise. Tommo was the revered CO of 9 Regiment Army Air Corps. He was a legendary leader and knew how to get the best out of his men, but he was a scary bastard too.

He held the power of life or death – he was there to assess whether we were ready for war fighting. I was determined not to let our side down.

We had a BATS box fitted into the rear of the Gazelle, in place of one of the seats. It would transmit our position at all times to Exercise Control. Excon was the hub of the mock battle, where the invigilators watched the conflict play out on a giant screen.

We had been on the prairie for six weeks and after a disastrous beginning had kicked tanky arse in every battle since. I wanted Tommo and the brass to know how good we were, how fast and low we could go, how quickly we could pick up the enemy and how we could shape the battle for the commanding officer. We were the CO’s scouts and wielded more power than our little helicopter looked capable of.

The bloody ‘Red Tops’ were our only problem – Gazelles painted a horrific shade of anti-collision Day-Glo red, flown by range officers whose job was to ensure that we flew within safety limits. They could hand us a yellow card if we flew into the wrong area or in front of somebody else’s weapon system. Worse still, they’d give away our position by hovering over us at a couple of thousand feet. Because we went fast and low, the ‘enemy’ tanks relied on the Red Tops to track our stealthy battle positions.

Following my first protest the Red Tops were told to fly low and behind us, but the bastards still managed to give us away because they never flew low enough. They needed to see the big picture, to ensure safety procedures were being observed. As a result, the tankies brought more artillery down to shoot us out of the sky. I’d been told quite firmly by Excon to wind my neck in; there is no way I was going into this battle without the Red Top escort. End of story.

If there was one man this side of the pond that could get in their way it was Tommo. I couldn’t ask him because he didn’t know me and would probably tell me to wind my neck in as well, so I told Excon that Tommo didn’t want us given away by Red Tops. I reckoned they wouldn’t dare speak to him, so we’d get to fly alone.

Job done. Or so I thought.

Tommo strode over to the four of us like he was going to convert me between the posts.

I was alongside Andy Wawn. As an ex-tanky he’d taught me a whole lot of Standard Operating Procedures – how to find his old mates, interpret their intentions and lull them into inescapable ambushes. Andy was a cheeky fucker who loved a confrontation. He cupped his hand around my right ear. ‘You know when I said “we” should bluff Excon?’ he whispered. ‘Well that was like a Royal “we”. I’m just the chauffeur here. Better get your boxing gloves on, Macy.’

‘You lot,’ Tommo announced, hands on hips, ‘will be followed by Red Tops in the morning.’

I heard my flight commander stifle a groan. Dom didn’t know I’d bluffed Excon; he thought we’d been given permission.

Man or mouse time, Macy. I took a step forward.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dom wince as I fronted up to the CO. ‘Sir, every battle we’ve ever been in those Red Tops have given our position away.’

Tommo bristled. ‘And you are?’

‘Staff Sergeant Macy, sir.’

‘Well, Staff, I’ll just get them to fly low level behind you. How about that?’

‘Sir, we’ve tried that and they still give our position away. At dawn we’ll be looking into the sun and won’t be able to see very well, so we’ll be constantly on the move. Having them there is like having the hand of God pointed at us.’ I paused. ‘The tankies spot them every time…’

Tommo looked at me much as he might an insect moments before he crushed it. ‘I don’t see where this conversation is going, Staff Macy, do you? This exercise is fucking dangerous enough.’

My mind was fizzing.

‘I couldn’t agree more, sir. The Red Tops will be blocking our routes out, and won’t see us against the low sun. They’re supposed to be there for safety reasons, but could cause a mid-air collision.’

‘Staff Macy, if you think for one moment I’m allowing you out without a minder, you’re very much fucking mistaken.’

‘Sir, we have a transponder onboard that will track our position perfectly. It’s displayed in Excon on the big map board. We’ve tested it and it works great. And we have our comms if necessary. There should be no need for Red Tops.’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘If you disappear off that board for a second, you’re for it.’ Tommo had clearly had enough of the conversation. He fixed me with a last beady stare. ‘Do I make myself blindingly bloody clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He stormed off, and I turned to find Dom holding his head in his hands. Tommo wasn’t a man to cross and the BATS boxes had been known to be temperamental.

‘Let’s just live with the Red Tops’, Dom said. ‘It’s only an exercise.’

I couldn’t blame him for worrying. He was on attachment from the Scots Dragoon Guards and praying that the AAC would take him on; he had a lot to lose.

‘Don’t worry, Boss. I’ll check ‘em before we take off.’

Meanwhile, my Apache dossier was getting thicker.

I’d discovered something significant. Each Apache squadron was going to need four specialists: a Qualified Helicopter Instructor (QHI), a Weapons Instructor (WI), a Supervisory Forward Air Controller (SupFAC) and an Electronic Warfare Instructor (EWI).

The Apache was more than a gunship; it was one of the most sophisticated EW platforms in the business. Not only was it equipped with radar able to locate and track any threat – ground or air – with a single sweep of its antenna, it also had a highly sophisticated electronic defensive aids system for counteracting enemy missiles. With the Apache just a few years away from delivery, I needed to know about this stuff.

In 1999, I booked myself on an EW foundation course organised and run by the RAF at Cranwell in Lincolnshire. This side of the Atlantic, there was no one better than the crabs at detailing the threat and its countermeasures. The course was chock-solid with all the maths and physics that I’d never bothered about at school. Day One, Lesson One was a ‘101’ on the electromagnetic spectrum.

The threats that primarily concerned us were heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles. In most cases the hottest part of the aircraft was the engine exhaust. A combat jet, which moved at high speed through the air and generated considerable heat friction as it did so, had ‘hot-spots’ on the parts of its frame that were most exposed to the airflow – the nose and leading edges of the wings especially – and these could also be targeted by particularly sophisticated types of infrared missile.

Airframe heating was not an issue for a helicopter and the missile automatically homed in on the engine exhausts, which, to the seeker, glowed against the cold background of the sky. Once an infrared heat-seeker had locked onto you, there was precious little you could do in a helicopter to break the lock. Salvation was at hand, however, if you had some or all of the following kit: a Missile Approach Warning System (MAWS) that automatically alerted you to a surface-to-air missile (SAM) launch (its optics scanned the ground for the flash or plume of a missile motor’s ignition); an infrared jammer that literally blinded the missile seeker; ‘baffles’ that dissipated and rapidly cooled the engine exhaust to a level it couldn’t be seen; and flares, usually triggered by the MAWS, which fired into the sky around the helicopter in the hope the missile would lock onto them instead of us.

The heart of any system for defeating radar-guided SAMs was the RWR. It gave warning – visually and audibly – that you were being acquired, tracked or launched at by a radar system. It would also tell you the radar’s location and type, provided it was recognised by its threat-library.

Because the missile and its radar guidance system had to go through various engagement modes while in the air – all of which involved ‘painting’ the helicopter with radar-energy for ever more precise targeting data as it closed in on us – the RWR maintained a handle on the one piece of news we really needed: how close we were to being blown out of the sky.

With the foundation phase under my belt, I booked myself onto an EW course and then an advanced EW course. This introduced me to other aspects of the electronic battle – how, for example, jamming platforms like the US Navy’s EA-6B Prowler could be employed in a package of attacking aircraft to ‘burn’ a hole through the enemy’s radar coverage. Once this hole had been created – the SAM and air defence operators would see it as impenetrable interference on their radar screens – attacking aircraft, including helicopters, could sneak into enemy airspace and hit their targets without being fired upon.

This was known as a ‘soft kill’ – temporarily blinding the radar rather than destroying it. For a ‘hard kill’, I learned about the capabilities of the US HARM and UK ALARM weapon systems. Launched from their parent aircraft, these missiles would pick out enemy emitters and fly down the beam till they hit the antenna and destroyed it. Both missiles were so sophisticated that even if the radar operator switched off his system, they would have plotted its position by GPS and/or inertial navigation equipment and destroy it anyway.

It wasn’t until the last week of the course that I learned about the Apache’s own EW self-protection capabilities. By now, details of the Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aids System had started to emerge. HIDAS was unlike anything that had ever been fitted to a helicopter before. Four RWR receivers – two either side of the nose and two more behind the engines – provided interlocking arcs of coverage; they covered and plotted any radar, ground or air, that emitted a pulse anywhere in the vicinity of the aircraft.

A highly developed MAWS detected the heat plume of any ground or airborne threats – especially important if the helicopter was to stand any chance of surviving in a threat environment where man-portable, shoulder-launched air defence systems (ManPADS) were present. These weapons had developed rapidly since the US Stinger and the Soviet SA-7 had made their first appearance thirty years before. Shoulder-launched SAMs like the Russian SA-14 were highly adept at ignoring all but the most sophisticated flares punched out by an aircraft and were capable of engagements up to 12,000 feet.

The Apache also had a Laser Warning Receiver System (LWRS) – two detectors above the engines and two on the fuselage sides – that would detect if the aircraft had been targeted by a laser-designator, the prelude to it being hit by a laser-guided missile.

All threat data were processed by a central computer which, having computed the type, range and bearing of the threat, would then decide the best countermeasure to defeat it. There were three switch settings in the cockpit – manual, semi-automatic and automatic – which allowed the pilot to decide what level of autonomy he wanted to confer on the system. We were assured, however, that it worked extremely effectively in automatic mode and that, by and large, it was best to leave the system, not the pilot, to decide what kind of countermeasures to dispense and when.

Like HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HIDAS’s (female) Voice Warning System (VWS) would alert the crew to any given threat. The information would also be displayed on one of the two multi-purpose displays; there were two MPDs in each cockpit – TV screens used to display flight, critical mission data and targeting images. Imminent threats – prioritised at any given moment – were displayed in positions relative to the aircraft.

It was probably inevitable that the VWS had already earned herself a nickname: Bitchin’ Betty.

Before I could ‘graduate’ from the course, I had to take an exam – and it wasn’t your average GCSE. We were to mount a national evacuation operation from an island – whose geography resembled Sicily-embroiled in civil unrest. Some Brits had been taken hostage. I was the commander of a force tasked to fly in, free them and fly them out.

Using the knowledge I’d amassed over the previous few months, I decided to mount an operation using Apaches, EA-6Bs, a B-2 Stealth Bomber and a C-130.

I jammed the island’s surveillance radars with the EA-6Bs and sent in the Apaches to take out the coastal radars. The B-2, so stealthy that it was largely invisible to radar anyway, then dropped a stick of satellite-guided 2,000-lb Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs on the command centres. Amidst the chaos, Special Forces were airdropped in to rescue the hostages. Once they had safely ex-filtrated the danger zone, I sent in the C-130 low level over the sea, chaperoned by Apaches, to airlift them out.

I now had an intuitive feel for how EW could master the battlefield. Although it wasn’t a dedicated EW platform – unlike the EA-6B – the Apache was stuffed with so much electronic wizardry that it would enable the Army Air Corps to do things with helicopters it had never dreamed of before.

Captain Paul Mason started the first day as he meant to go on-grilling us on what we knew. I’d learned shit-loads and was keen to show him. There was no pass mark, thank God; we realised we actually knew jack-shit. I think I got my name right and that was about it.

Paul was the Apache weapons guru. A good-looking lad from the north-east, he wasn’t physically imposing, but boy, did he walk tall. He’d studied weapons, sights and sensors in the USA and decided there and then to rewrite the rulebook. This horrendously complex course was his baby.

It sounded as though it would take us half a lifetime to develop sufficient understanding to even come within reach of the hardware. He left us in no doubt that to become a weapons, sights and sensors instructor on this aircraft we would need a level of knowledge so comprehensive our brains would feel like they were about to explode. I immersed myself totally and quickly discovered what he meant.

The Cold War had fostered a proliferation of single-role platforms-ships, tanks and aircraft that were each designed for one purpose and one purpose only. The Apache was one of the new breed of multi-role ISTAR asset – a relatively new acronym for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance. It could be flown from either seat. The gunner sat up front, the pilot in the rear, but the pilot could activate the weapons and the gunner could fly the aircraft. A series of back-up systems ensured that if a critical piece of kit got hit – or even the pilot – the Apache could still get home.

The helmet-mounted display harmonised man and machine. The helmet itself was connected to the aircraft by two electrical leads: the first for comms, the second for the sensors. As soon as you powered up the aircraft, a pair of surveyors behind each seat transmitted pulsed infrared beams and the four helmet sensors let the system know the position of the pilot’s head relative to the cockpit.

You then stared down the Boresight Reticule Unit (BRU), a tube on top of the coaming which contained a series of concentric circles, through the crosshair within the monocle over your right eye. When your right eye, crosshair and bull’s-eye were perfectly aligned, the aircraft knew precisely where you were looking.

The monocle display could get pretty busy. It showed the direction in which the aircraft was headed, and where both crew members were looking. The pilot would generally have flight symbology – airspeed, altitude and distance to the next waypoint – displayed, and the gunner weapon symbology: to know ‘range to source’ – the distance to whatever target he happened to be scoping. If either of us actioned a weapon, weapon symbology would automatically kick in.

Behind the symbology, we could view whatever was being looked at by the Target Acquisition and Designation Sight (TADS) System or the Pilot’s Night Vision System (PNVS) (known as the ‘Pinvis’). It was like viewing a movie, complete with subtitles, projected on a window, while still being able to see through to the outside world.

The TADS day television – DTV-camera image could also be displayed on the monocle, along with the Pinvis or TADS thermal image.

In thermal mode, vehicle engines and people would glow white, day or night; if it was cold enough, we could even trace footprints. The Apache gunner and pilot were now becoming like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator: hunting for the target in both normal and thermal vision simultaneously. This took multi-tasking to a new level: your right eye viewed targeting symbology and a computer-generated thermal picture of the world one inch away, while your left scanned the outside world in full colour at infinity.

We had two principal means of detecting targets – via the TADS and the Fire Control Radar. The FCR – the heart of the Longbow system of the ‘D’ model Apache – was awesome. Its Air Targeting Mode (air-to-air targeting) and Terrain Profile Mode (enhanced terrain avoidance navigation) were impressive enough, but the Ground Targeting Mode’s ‘RF missile engagement’ capacity blew my mind. In a double sweep of its antenna, lasting just three seconds, the FCR could recognise and detect 1,024 targets. Within the same three seconds, it would automatically prioritise the top 256, accurately locate them, automatically store their coordinates in its computer and then display them to the crew. It would display the top sixteen targets to the crew in priority of threat, selecting which to destroy and in what order.

When flying in squadron formation, the lead aircraft could coordinate with the others via a secure datalink – an unjammable, encrypted, wireless modem – to ensure that no two gunships went for the same target. Two Apaches would watch a flank each and cover the rear while the other six would be the attack aircraft. The gunner could break down the display into six ‘lanes’ on his MPD – the multi-purpose display TV on his instrument panel – selecting sixteen targets per lane. With the push of a button, each attacking Apache would then receive their own share of the targets. A few seconds later ninety-six missiles would navigate towards their individual targets. Once the missiles had impacted at the point of maximum mass, each Apache sent its ‘shot-at’ file to the leader with the push of another button: not bad for one minute’s work.

The TADS turret was situated in the helicopter’s nose, and was the heart of the Apache’s day and night sensor capabilities. The Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) system lay behind a tinted window on the left. The gunner’s FLIR and the pilot’s Pinvis constituted cryogenically cooled optical cameras, highly sensitive to any heat above minus 200°C. They could find a mouse in a wheat field from a thousand metres.

The clear window on the right contained a laser designator, laser range finder, laser spot tracker, the Direct View Optics (DVO) and the DTV camera. The DVO was linked to the Optical Relay Tube (ORT) – the big metal block that jutted out about a foot from the gunner’s cockpit console.

When you placed your forehead on the ORT’s browpad and selected ‘DVO Mode’, you saw a magnified picture of the real world in glorious colour. There were two fields of view: wide and narrow.

The DVO confirmed vital recognition data to a Forward Air Controller (FAC), your crew member or other members of your flight – ‘the target building has yellow window frames…’ – preventing fratricide or collateral damage. The DVO was permanently slaved to the TADS; wherever the TADS led, the DVO followed.

On either side of the gunner’s ORT were what looked like steel PlayStation hand grips, covered in switches and buttons. They controlled sights, sensors and weapons. Each and every button had its own distinct feel and shape – one was smooth and concave, another was serrated and convex; another was shaped like a Chinese hat. You didn’t want to dispatch a missile at your own troops when you really intended to find out their range.

The DTV camera had three fields of view: wide, narrow and zoom. It was called ‘low-light TV’, but it wasn’t really for low light – it worked on a wavelength that allowed it to penetrate ‘battlefield obscurants’, primarily optimised to cut through dust and smoke.

Everything the TADS DTV, FLIR and FCR could see could be viewed in the monocle for quick targeting, on both MPDs for target detail and pinpoint accuracy, and on a small TV on the ORT.

With the flick of a button, the gunner could switch from FLIR to DTV and back again, depending on how much smoke or dust was in the air and the level of heat contrast presented by the target.

When you gripped the controls either side of the ORT, each of your index fingers found a guarded trigger: the right for the laser, the left for missile-release. Once you were lined up on the target, you pulled the right trigger to the first detent to establish range to target. The second detent gave a constant range readout, accurate to a centimetre or two over several kilometres, and painted the target with laser energy.

The missile ‘saw’ the laser energy bouncing off the target. Pressing the left trigger launched it off the rail like a whippet after a rabbit.

Shit… I thought. We really could accidentally demolish our own troops if we got them the wrong way around.

Each helicopter’s laser was ‘coded’ so that missiles didn’t get confused in the air. The TADS housed a laser ‘spot-tracker’ that allowed Apaches to designate for each other – a procedure known as target handover. The laser spot-tracker allowed the TADS to slew instantly to where another Apache within the flight was looking, if you wanted it to do so, at the push of a button. It could also look for targets designated by ground forces. With so much laser energy bouncing around the battlefield, it was a wonder more people hadn’t been blinded in the one memorable conflict that had seen action by Apaches: when AH-64As of the US Army had decimated the tanks of Saddam Hussein’s Medina Brigade on the Basra Road during the 1991 Gulf War.

The course continued to explore the arsenal in the kind of microscopic detail that I thought would only interest the boffins who’d designed it. Little did I know that the lessons Captain Paul Mason taught me would be put into vigorous practice and have me reading more and more just to stay one step ahead of the Taliban.

In March 2003, while I took a break from the Apache to work on temporary assignment in Bosnia for SFOR (Stabilisation Force), George W. Bush and Tony Blair launched their ill-fated assault on Saddam Hussein in response to intelligence, later known to be highly flawed, that Saddam was harbouring weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda insurgents. It was the start of a road that would eventually see us being assigned to the front line of the so-called War on Terror.

Over the next two months, I learned how to tame the beast. One of the hugely innovative things about the Apache was the degree of automation built into it. Early on, I was taught about ‘holds’ – how you could punch a hold button and maintain the aircraft’s position over the ground in the hover, or its heading, or its speed, or height or a particular rate of turn. There were so many things you needed to stay ahead of in the cockpit that being relieved of the necessity to fly at certain times really helped to shoulder the load. Soon, I was climbing, descending, turning and doing climbing and descending turns.

I learned to master the MPDs – the TV screens that obviated the need for the Apache’s cockpit to be littered with the dozens upon dozens of instruments and dials of its forebears. In fact, the only ones that were common to the US AH64A were four tiny standby instruments in case all of the electrics failed; everything else was requested by the pilot as a page on an MPD. Over 5,000 different information pages could be stored on the computer and displayed on the MPD screens. Learning how to navigate our way through them was like grappling with a new Windows-type software program and we had to know it instinctively. It was the same with the knobs, switches and buttons. There were 227 of them in the cockpit, but most had at least three different modes or functionalities, giving us nearly 700 positions and over a thousand permutations to remember.

We also had to master the monocle. As well as targeting and flight information, it could also display FLIR imagery beneath the data to allow the pilot to see at night. This was all well and good. What wasn’t so good was what they called ‘monocular rivalry’ – it was by far the trickiest task I had ever had to learn.

Basically, your right eye stared at a small glass plate less than an inch from your cornea. Your left eye, meanwhile, was looking at the real world – which could stretch from your cockpit instruments to infinity. Bringing either the left or right image into focus was fairly straightforward, but trying to see both clearly at the same time seemed impossible.

Ever tried it? Which one wins?

The fact was: neither did. Each eye fought the other for supremacy in the brain, threatening to split my head apart. But then, one day, the headaches stopped; my eyes and brain had discovered how to work together. Slowly, I was becoming a part of the machine.

I learned how to do field circuits, hovering, navigation, autorotation and running takeoffs and landings. I then found out how the Apache performed on limited power – i.e. with one engine out. I practised manoeuvring in and out of confined areas – much trickier in this big machine than it had been in the Gazelle – and how to land on a slope; again, not easy in a large helicopter that had narrow wheels for an undercarriage rather than skids.

Finally, I was taught quick-stops, wingovers and high-g turns at max power and performance; how to get to height fast, how to get down fast and how to turn hard.

Then, as 2003 became 2004, it was into the part-task trainers and the simulator again to continue learning how to turn our knowledge into practice. The position and function of every switch and button was supposed to be intuitive by now; as natural as drawing breath. The instructors drilled us hard on this point. The simulator had very little light during this phase and we soon found out why. Everything we’d done had just been a prelude to flying ‘in the bag’.

Flying in the bag did not equate to anything I’d ever done before. During my early sorties in the Apache, I’d noticed Velcro strips around the interior of the cockpit. It turned out that they were to hold big black PVC panels over the clear perspex canopy for ‘bag flights’ – flights in which the student pilot was immersed in darkness. With the PVC panels in place no light entered the rear cockpit. Our only reference to the external world would be via the monocle and the feed from the instruments; the FLIR and the PNVS would be turned off. The thought of flying in the bag terrified me.

It didn’t matter what we’d achieved up till then, if we failed the bag, we’d be out.

We were confident that we could now get safely from the desert floor to altitude and back, but could we operate there?

We fired the cannon and rockets on the ranges outside Thumrait with the FACs so they could get used to calling in Apache fire. We practised firing from altitude instead of low level until we became proficient at the new height.

After each session, I viewed every inch of gun tape and debriefed the crews on every rocket and just about every round they fired. I did this in more detail than they’d ever wanted, but it was worth it; our accuracy improved dramatically. It was all a part of my responsibility as the squadron’s Weapons Officer and it was one I took extremely seriously. After two weeks of nothing but cannon and rocket firing we were hitting targets first time, every time.

The main event, however, was yet to come.

One of the principal reasons for coming to the Oman was to launch the Hellfire. There simply wasn’t enough space on any UK proving ground to accommodate the weapon’s danger-area envelope.

I was very proprietorial about the Hellfire. Call me obsessive or compulsive – which some of my mates were starting to – but I saw it as a make or break. We’d fired rockets and cannon for nearly two years to get to this standard, but we had one shot to get the Hellfire right. We’d trained in the simulator for hours but now we would actually fire it for the first time. And since each weapon cost the equivalent of an Aston Martin or a mid-range Ferrari, I wanted us to get it right.

The Air Manoeuvres Training and Advisory Team oversaw our instruction. AMTAT were a bunch of senior instructors with expertise in multiple disciplines who were there to see that the Apache was worked up to its full fighting potential prior to being declared fully operational. They’d been teaching us since we started CTR and now hovered around us like bees around flowers, keen to collect every bit of data they could from the Omani experience.

When it came to weapons training – and the Hellfire, in particular – they were all over us like a rash. They wanted to make sure that we could do our job, and that the missile did what Lockheed Martin had said on the tin.

The AMTAT opted for the lottery approach. They wrote down every conceivable way of firing the Hellfire on a series of cards that we of 656 Squadron then drew.

Each of us had to fire two missiles apiece and because Billy and I were qualified to fly in both seats – front and back – we were told we would have to swap. It was all about getting ticks in boxes. I had to fire from the front seat and so did Billy.

The cards were spread out on a table. The firings would range from the hover to 140 knots, from low altitudes to extremely high. We would fire autonomously and we would fire remotely; we would fire single missiles and two at a time – two in the air at once, from the same aircraft, at two separate targets. We would also fire some in LOBL Mode, and others using LOAL Direct, LOAL Low and LOAL High. We would go through the whole sequence by day; and to cap it off, we’d repeat it all by night.

This was to be the culmination of two and a half years’ training, two of which were spent under the guidance of the UK’s greatest attack pilots. The stakes were high; no one wanted to miss with an £82,862.08 missile. And the coppers on the end weren’t an accounting error; the bean-counters had worked it all out, down to the last penny.

I drew my cards and was given two missiles to fire and three missions in which to destroy three targets.

My first was a maximum range, high-level, autonomous daytime shoot against a small building with the Apache at maximum speed.

My second was to fire a missile by night as a pair of us ran in at 100 knots with an FAC lasing the target.

My third was to gather another crew’s missile in mid-air and kill an armoured personnel carrier at night while maintaining a high altitude hover. This tactic was straight out of Paul Mason’s weapons lecture, to be employed if I was out of missiles and could detect a target equipped with laser warning receivers. By the time the LWRS alerted the APC crew to the threat, the Hellfire would be one second from impact. Goodnight, Vienna.

Becoming increasingly less popular with the crews, I ran through every engagement technique in detail.

The following morning we flew out of Thumrait Airfield for the weapons range, ninety minutes away. A selection of old vehicle hulks and the odd building – our target ‘sets’ for the next few days – were the only notable features in the otherwise barren landscape.

We set up our tents, cooked some food and sat around under a full moon shooting the shit.

‘You’ve something on the bottom of your shoe, Simon,’ Jake said.

Simon lifted his heel and dropped his shoulder and was instantly embarrassed.

‘Ooh, hello sailor,’ we chorused.

Simon was a navy exchange officer. Being the only matelot among us, he was always getting stick – but dished it back with interest.

‘You’ll all get AIDS, you know,’ he said.

‘But only if you mess around,’ Jake waved an admonishing finger.

We rolled around laughing.

‘He means Apache Induced Divorce Syndrome, Jake,’ Billy said. ‘You catch it from being on operations or exercises for the duration of your flying career.’

‘I’ve nothing to worry about; my wife is used to me being away at sea. But you Pongos are prime candidates,’ Simon said. ‘Not that you need any help from the Apache. You seem to be doing a fine job of it all by yourselves. Isn’t that right, Billy?’

Billy had just been on a romantic holiday with his wife. When they got back his car had been nicked. What upset her was that he’d left his house keys and the address in the glove box. Their insurance wouldn’t pay out for any losses.

I was next in the firing line.

‘I think Ed’s a prime candidate, after his performance at the Mess Christmas ball. What do you reckon, Jonny?’

Being officers, Simon and Jake hadn’t yet heard about this. Jon quivered with excitement at the prospect of a fresh audience.

‘Picture me, Billy, Ed and the wives sat around a large table with wine waiters and silver service waitresses pampering to our every whim…’ He was now positively wriggling with pleasure. ‘Ed, ever the gent, pulls back Emily’s chair just as she goes to sit on it. She falls flat on her back; her legs shoot up above the table and she wallops her head on the wall.’

My cheeks burnt bright red as the hilarity increased. She’d looked like she’d been in a car crash – her dress ripped so high she could have auditioned for Spearmint Rhino.

Jon’s eyes sparkled. ‘I reckon Ed is more likely to get AIDS if he stays home than if he disappears for months on end.’

Jake came to my rescue by telling a story about ‘Bus Stop Jonny’. Jon – being ginger – was always being accused of stinking of piss, hence the nickname.

Which, predictably enough, brought the ribbing straight back in Jake’s direction. He was no stranger to this. As a young lad with a wife and his first baby on the way, no one got as much stick as Jake – at least partly because he could take it on the chin and chuck it back in buckets. Jake was from an affluent family and was brought up in Antigua; his relaxed Caribbean outlook sometimes made it hard to believe he was legally allowed to vote, let alone fly an attack helicopter. He got the nickname Floppy at Sandhurst, for being a ‘fucking laidback overseas person’ – and the piss-taking didn’t stop when he was awarded the Sword of Honour.

As dawn broke, we watched our ground crew load four Hellfires onto our aircraft. Billy and I inspected our missiles and gave the machine a thorough walk around before saddling up.

We picked up the FAC’s transmission as we crossed into the range.

‘Apache, Apache, this is Bravo Two Zero. Firemission, over.’

‘Bravo Two Zero, this is Outlaw One. We are a flight of two Apaches – callsigns Outlaw One and Two – with eight Hellfire missiles on board. Ready for Firemission, over.’

The FAC came back loud and clear. ‘Firemission…Target grid: Four Zero Quebec, Charlie Hotel, Seven Zero Eight, Zero One Eight.’

After a brief pause, he continued: ‘Target elevation: Four Five Eight feet…Target Description: Small building.’

Another pause: ‘Friendly forces: Three thousand seven hundred and twenty-five metres south…

‘Laser code: One, One, One, One…’

And his final call: ‘Read back, over.’

I’d punched the grid and altitude data into the computer with the keyboard on my left as he spoke. When he finished I pressed the ‘slave’ button on the ORT. I found myself staring at a ten-foot square building on the TADS.

I read back the Firemission: ‘Firemission; Four Zero Quebec Charlie Hotel, Seven Zero Eight Zero One Eight, Four Five Eight feet; small building; friendlies Three Seven Two Five metres south; Laser One One One One. Over.’

‘Correct. Call when visual. Over.’

Bingo. The guy was good.

I’d done this in the simulator loads of times. I replied to his last message immediately. ‘Outlaw One is visual. The target is a small building to the north-west of an east-west track with one building to the south of it and one building to the north of it.’

‘Correct. Your building is the middle one. Call when ready. Over.’

I’d now identified the FAC’s location – in a trench with about fifteen other guys, south of the target.

‘Ready.’ I’d already locked up the target with the Image Auto-Track (IAT). The missile was spun-up and ready on the rail.

I lased the target and the FAC called: ‘Clear hot.’

Distance was 8,225 metres away and counting down fast. We were at 5,000 feet and Billy was doing nearly 140 knots.

The LOBL box appeared in my monocle and I knew that the missile could now see the laser energy reflecting off the target.

‘Outlaw One firing.’

A second later, the missile slipped off the left rail with a barely perceptible whoosh. Our helmets, the two engines, the slipstream and the environmental control system drowned out all other sound.

The Hellfire climbed into the deep blue sky. I lost sight of it after about two miles. My aim was to hit the target by manually tracking it, so I disengaged the IAT and held the crosshair over the centre of the building.

It looked like some kind of dwelling; the sort of thing I imagined peppering the Afghan hinterland in large numbers.

Our run-in was nice and smooth. The Apache was built to attack and this was about as much fun as we could have with our pants on.

The countdown timer on my symbology clocked the final few seconds and then I saw a black needle – a barely distinct smudge – dropping fast from the top of the screen.

The Hellfire. Two seconds… It was creaming down… One second… It was homing onto the crosshairs-bang on my laser energy spot.

There was a big black cloud. Debris and timber spiralled through the air.

‘Outlaw One, this is Bravo Two Zero,’ the FAC called. ‘Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel. End of Firemission.’

Direct hit.

As the dust cleared, we saw that he wasn’t wrong. The building had disintegrated. A black scar on the ground was the only sign it had ever been there. Scattered around the edge of it were wood splinters and nothing else.

‘Outlaw One, Delta Hotel. Target building destroyed. End of mission.’

The remaining Hellfires did exactly what they were supposed to. I collected the statistics and handed them over to the AMTAT. We’d demonstrated that the Hellfire could be fired by day or night in every conceivable way thought out by those devilishly clever people at Boeing and Lockheed Martin. 656 Squadron Army Air Corps was now ready for war.

There was only one question left. Could we do it for real on what we called a ‘two-way range’ – firing while being fired at?

The name of this range was Afghanistan. In less than eight weeks, we’d be up close and personal in the Desert of Death.

At the squadron, I found out that Jon and I had fallen foul of the rules governing the number of fighting personnel each nation was allowed to have in-country at any given time. The UK had exceeded its quota; even though Jon was the SupFAC and I was the Squadron Weapons Officer we had to wait until some Brits shipped home.

To keep ourselves busy, we flew the simulator and practised our weapons drills; then, when there was still no call to head for Brize Norton, we nipped over to 664 Squadron and asked if we could borrow one of their Apaches so we could stay current. Very obligingly, they said yes.

On 5 May there was still no sign our departure was imminent. I decided to head for Catterick Camp; 664 Squadron were doing their Annual Personal Weapons Test – something everyone in the armed forces had to go through to ensure that we knew the pointy end of a gun from the butt. I decided to take the opportunity to test out an idea I’d been toying with for a while.

We carried a personal weapon in addition to our sidearm in case we were shot down on operations. The short-barrelled SA-80 carbine was the only rifle allowed in an Apache, but because its handle jutted into the cockpit, restricting our escape route in an emergency, we had to remove it and screw it back on if things went pear-shaped. This had always struck me as certifiable. If I were lucky enough to survive a crash, the last thing I’d want to do was fumble around with my carbine handle while the Taliban were launching an action replay of Rorke’s Drift.

My idea was simple – fire the weapon without it. And today was the first chance I’d had to put it to the test.

I arrived at the range and was immediately confronted by a huge staff sergeant with a shaved head, straight out of Central Casting. Listen in, you facking lot! Watch and shoot, watch and shoot! Bring me my facking brew…

I unscrewed the handle of my SA-80 and dropped to the ground, facing the pop-up targets in Lane 6. A long shadow fell across me. I squinted against the sun to see Staff Sergeant Tank, hands on hips, looming over me.

‘You can’t fire your weapon without a handle,’ he boomed for all to hear, adding ‘Sir’ as an afterthought.

Patience, Macy. ‘Staff, this is how I’m going to have to fire in-theatre,’ I replied as courteously as I could manage.

‘The rules clearly state that you are not allowed to fire it without a handle.’

‘I know what the rules say, Tanky, I’m a Skill at Arms Instructor too,’ I said, marginally less diplomatically. ‘Do you know why you’re not allowed to fire it without a handle?’

He looked as if he’d just been asked to solve differential calculus on University Challenge.

He mumbled something incomprehensible.

‘So, you’re telling me not to do something but have no idea why…’

Staff Sergeant Tank stood there grappling for an answer.

‘The reason they insist that you fire this thing with a handle is because it has a short barrel, so, as there’s nothing to grip, you might end up shooting your fingers off. Let me assure you, however, that it’s not going to happen to me. Take a look at this…’

Ten minutes later, I’d done the business. The handle made no difference at all. I’d rested the rifle in the crook of my left arm, taken aim and fired. I tested the method on targets at 50, 100, 200 and 300 metres, in the prone, kneeling and standing positions. I placed the bullets squarely where they were supposed to go and listened for the tannoy.

‘Lane 4. Fail.’

‘Lane 5. Pass.’

‘Lane 6. One Hundred Per Cent Awarded Marksman.’

‘Lane 7. Pass.’

I’d not dropped a single round. Tanky had his back to me now, but I didn’t need to rub it in. The important thing was that I knew I could fly minus the handle and, if the shit did hit the fan, count on taking some of the fuckers down if I found myself in my own private version of Zulu Dawn. I’d broken a few rules, but so what, I figured the rules were supposed to be there to protect me.

A few days later, on 9 May, we got our first message back from the boys via MSN-Messenger. They were still at Kandahar Airfield, which I now knew as KAF.

Bastion isn’t ready. No one is doing any tasking.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Felton stood at the far end of the bird table and sucked thoughtfully on a cigarette. How anyone could smoke in this heat was beyond me, but it was the way the CO did it that cracked me up. He pinched the tab between the very tips of the index and middle fingers of his right hand, keeping it as far as possible from his lips until the moment he seemed to force himself to take a drag, face contorted, as if it was a freshly lit fuse that might detonate at any moment.

‘The Rules of Engagement, gentlemen…’ Legs crossed, left hand on his hip, he started to outline, in that soft, well-spoken way of his, exactly what we could and could not do while we were in-theatre. If it wasn’t for the seriousness of the brief and the fact that Felton was one of the youngest, toughest, no-nonsense colonels on the circuit, we’d have been forgiven for thinking we’d walked into a sketch for Comic Relief.

The ROE briefing was always going to be a bitch; I’d need to keep my wits about me. So far, our enemy were armed with little more than small arms and RPGs. But we already knew they weren’t afraid of the Apache, the weapon system that had been billed as a quantum leap in the way the British Army would fight future wars. The Taliban were medieval in their fighting methods – but also in their brutality. The boffins called it asymmetric warfare. All we knew was that with a handful of rudimentary weapons the bad guys had levelled the playing field.

Lieutenant Colonel Felton took a last drag of his cigarette before dropping it into the dregs of his coffee. I checked the battery level on my digital voice-recorder and placed it on the edge of the bird table, next to the map that depicted our area of operations. The temperature in the long metal tube that housed the CO’s HQ was unbelievable. I glanced at the blokes propped around the table. Simon, Billy, Pat, Tony, Carl, Nick and the others seemed to be taking it in their stride. If I was the only one suffering, I didn’t want them to know.

‘I know how much you’ve been looking forward to this,’ Felton said. There was a groan from the floor. ‘There are basically two different scenarios in which the ROE apply. The first is where we’re told to go and destroy a target deliberately – a known Taliban HQ, for example. Deliberate Attacks are covered under a document called the Targeting Directive. It’s for pre-planned targets only and will have been cleared by government, with signatures all the way to the top. So, if the Intelligence community find a Taliban set-up at a particular location and we confirm it’s definitely there, and the authority is given from Whitehall, then that is a legitimate target under the current guidelines. Is that clear?’

Billy nudged me and muttered in my ear: ‘They’re giving with one hand and taking away with the other.’

Yup, I thought. Legitimate, maybe, but once all those checks and balances had been attended to, it wouldn’t be us who’d be inflicting the damage, it would be fast air in their Harriers, B-1Bs and A-10s.

But the fun and games had only just begun.

‘Fast air don’t have it all their own way,’ Felton continued, ‘because the target set also has to conform to the collateral damage matrix. Each of the nations out here has different ideas over what constitutes collateral damage.’

Someone opened the door behind us and a blast of air from the furnace outside blew through the HQ, scattering the ROE sheets across the bird table. Beads of sweat dripped from one lad’s nose. I forced myself to focus on what the CO was saying.

‘The second scenario and the rules that affect you basically fall into two categories: self-defence and when you want to take specific action against a target for a reason other than self-defence.’ The second category was obviously the hot potato.

If, for example, the enemy below was about to lob a mortar round at our boys on the ground – we would be allowed to engage without consulting the chain of command, as long as we had ‘reasonable belief’ that the person in our sights was the enemy.

Somebody next to me made a choking sound. If the CO heard he didn’t show it, but the civilian in the chair behind him clearly did; I saw him glance up sharply from his notepad like an eagle-eyed schoolteacher. We were never told who this individual was, but in his conspicuously smart clothes, God bless him, he might as well have had ‘Whitehall’ stamped across his forehead. He was probably a lawyer of some description; maybe the pen-pusher who’d drafted this nonsense in the first place.

How the hell were we meant to know who had hostile intent when just about every male in Afghanistan carried a weapon. In the middle of the Green Zone a primitive house and a few livestock was all that most could afford, but they were never without an AK47 and a moped. How were we to know the difference between a farmer out patrolling his crop or the Taliban out patrolling? With a distinct lack of uniforms it was impossible to distinguish the enemy from the Afghan Army, Afghan Police, Afghan Security Forces and some other discreet security forces.

An unsettled feeling started to gnaw at my stomach. I stuck up my hand. The man from Whitehall peered at me over his glasses. The CO paused and gave me an encouraging smile.

‘Yes, Mr Macy.’

Lester W. Grau, a CIA analyst who’d studied the tactics of the Mujahideen against the Soviets, had been high on my reading list. As the Squadron Weapons Officer, I was expected to know everything about the Taliban’s capabilities, but I’d also wanted to get inside the heads of these bastards. What I’d learned was simple and frightening. We were up against an astute, resourceful enemy that would never give up. In the 1980s, a handful of armed resistance fighters had gathered the populace and had seen off the mightiest army in the world. And no Soviet general had had to pussyfoot around under a set of unworkable guidelines.

‘How do I demonstrate they have hostile intent?’

‘Very good question, Mr Macy.’ The CO reached for another cigarette. He was clearly in no hurry to answer it.

My hand stayed up. ‘And what happens if they’re still armed, but looking for cover? How do I know they’re not going to continue the fight after we’ve run low on fuel and buggered off? How do I know whether they’re farmers scared out of their wits looking for somewhere to hide, or Taliban looking for defensive positions from which to continue the fight?’

I paused and looked around the bird table at my fellow pilots before turning back to the CO. ‘What then, sir? What do I do?’

The CO lit his cigarette and took the smoke deep into his lungs. He shook his head. ‘Your call, Mr Macy.’

My call?

The existence of hostile intent would be judged on evidence presented via our TADS camera footage and the camera didn’t always see everything.

Jesus…

As I walked back to our billet I thought about the nightmare we now found ourselves in. It wasn’t the CO’s fault; he was just the messenger. This was down to the politicians. They were sending us to fight their war in a bird that cost £46 million a pop; a bird that was on trial every bit as much as we were. We were both expected to perform flawlessly – with our arms now tied behind our backs. And if I put so much as a foot wrong, because I didn’t have crystal balls and couldn’t read the enemy’s mind, I’d find myself court-martialled for not knowing whether the enemy had hostile intent.

No one else was subject to this level of scrutiny.

As they prepared to rain shells on a position ten kilometres away, the artillery boys weren’t asked to file a report stating that their enemy had hostile intent.

Nobody would ask 3 Para to explain themselves.

The fast-jet pilot who dropped a bomb on a grid wasn’t called to task if he made a mistake – his authority came from a guy on the ground.

But we were well and truly in the crosshairs.

If we got it wrong we’d find ourselves in a court of law and the first-ever deployment of the British Army’s Apache weapons system would be judged a complete failure. We’d be crucified by the media, the politicians and the Whitehall bean-counters. The Apache would be branded a white elephant – a £4.13 billion mistake.

The press hadn’t helped by spouting shite about the Apache programme since the outset. Every time the attack helicopter programme came across a hiccup they would wade in and blow it out of all proportion. It was just an excuse to have a go at the politicians for spending more money than ever before on a single piece of hardware, but Joe Public had swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Due to the bad press, it had already failed in their eyes.

When I’d joined the army twenty-two years earlier, this was not how I’d imagined it would be.

But fuck it, I’d come this far, and the people around the bird table were my mates. Some of them – Billy and Geordie, for example – had been with me damn near the whole time I’d been on the path.

One way or another, we had to find a way of making this work. Or else the Taliban, who didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘rules’, would shoot us out of the sky and decorate their caves with our entrails.

For the past seventeen years I’d bent the rules every which way to get to where I wanted: here, on Ops, with the greatest weapons system in the world, in the stinking heat of an Afghan summer.

Why the hell should I stop now?

Later that evening, as the sirens went silent after a rocket attack, the groundies came bursting into my room.

‘Sir, sir, you’ve got to come quickly.’

I dived from my bed thinking we’d lost a man or an aircraft. Then I was told they were about to start the Subway Challenge.

‘You and your big mouth.’ Billy smiled and grabbed his pistol.

‘Wait for me,’ Jon shouted.

Inside one of the huge US-built relaxation facilities was a gaming area, movie area, coffee bar, games area and a 150-feet-square music room jam-packed with instruments. We entered the music room to see the groundies gathered enthusiastically around three six-foot tables, arranged in a triangle.

Half a dozen foot-long Subway sandwiches had been laid end to end in front of each of the competitors.

Airtrooper Howson – Challenger Number One – was your typical prop forward and played rugby at club level for civilian teams as well as the army. He looked as if he could have swallowed every one of his Subways without pausing for breath.

Gifted looked at the contents of his table as if they were a series of incoming Hellfires.

Which just left Tiny, who looked as though he was about to try to eat several times his own body weight.

‘My money’s on Howson,’ Billy said before Jon or I could wage a bet.

I bagged Gifted.

‘Three, two, one, go,’ Taff called.

They all started at a nice slow pace. Facing each other; matching each other bite for bite. Tiny was being advised not to drink anything because he wouldn’t be able to fit a single Sub in.

They had an hour in which to eat their own height in Subs. The winner would be the first to finish, or the one to have consumed the most when the clock chimed. Anyone that barfed would be instantly disqualified, unless he ate what he’d just thrown up. I’d seen a Navy Seal eat seven feet of Subs in thirty minutes in Atlanta.

They were all finishing their third Sub with thirty minutes to go. Everyone had placed their bets. The music room had glass windows and curiosity got the better of everyone who passed them. The place was packed with Brits, Americans, Canadians, Italians, French; you name it, they were there. The banter was ear-splitting, but Gifted, Howson and Tiny continued to match each other munch for munch.

Forty-five minutes in, Gifted was fading, halfway through his fourth Sub.

‘Gifted’s going,’ the opposition shouted.

He grabbed the bucket from under the table and chundered explosively to a chorus of laughter and a flurry of fresh bets. Howson was now the favourite by a country mile.

The two remaining tables were pushed around to face each other as the noise got louder and the contest became ever more gladiatorial.

Five minutes away from the final bell, both reached for their sixth and final Sub. They’d clearly begun to tire.

Tiny threw down his Sub, folded his arms and looked Howson in the eye. Realising he too was unlikely to finish the whole two yards, Howson followed suit and took a slurp of Gatorade. There was uproar; both of them looked as sick as pigs.

‘Two minutes to go,’ Taff shouted.

A sprint finish was now a dead cert.

‘One minute.’

Howson moved his Sub, positioning it for the perfect draw, but Tiny kept his nerve and barely blinked.

‘Forty seconds to go.’

Howson picked up his Sub, almost in slow motion, and held it a foot from his mouth, directly in the path of Tiny’s steely gaze.

‘Thirty seconds.’

They were locked in complex mental calculation. If they started too soon and had to stop, they’d lose the contest.

I knew which way Howson’s pendulum was swinging. He reckoned that he’d easily out-bite Tiny.

The second the prop forward looked up at Taff, Tiny swiped his Sub and went at it like a termite on speed. Howson rammed his down his throat and removed three inches in one go.

The noise was deafening.

‘Ten seconds,’ Taff bellowed.

Howson was doing his best to swallow and Tiny was still going the chomp-swallow-chomp-swallow route.

‘Five…’

Tiny had another eight inches to go.

‘Four…’

Howson swallowed hard and tore off another three inches. His cheeks looked like an overpumped airbed.

‘Three…’

Tiny was seven inches away from glory.

‘Two…’

Tiny grinned and gave Howson a cheeky wink.

As Taff called, ‘One’, Tiny took a huge three-inch bite of his Sub and placed the remainder on the table.

The crowd went crazy.

‘STOP,’ Taff yelled.

Knowing Tiny only had to swallow his last mouthful to win, Howson lost the battle to keep his last couple of Subways down. His head disappeared into his bucket.

A huge roar and a round of multinational applause egged Tiny on to finish and set the new Afghan Subway Challenge record: one hour and six minutes.

‘Gee!’ an American girl shouted. ‘What does he win?’

‘He gets his Subs paid for by the losers,’ I said. ‘And they pay for their own.’

‘Twelve o’clock, fifteen kilometres, Camp Bastion,’ Billy said.

I peered out of the cockpit and saw nothing except for tyre-tracks criss-crossing the barren wastes below us. Billy still had the TADS set to DTV zoom and I could see Bastion starting to take shape in black and white on the screen. First some tunnel-type tents in the south-east corner of the base, then other features sprang into view: the berm bulldozed up around the perimeter, the sangars with their tin roofs and sandbag fortifications and numerous vehicle parks brimming with Land Rovers and various types of APCs. A Chinook sat at the northern edge, blades milling, on one of two square pads that marked out the HLS.

There were two stationary Apaches on the other pad. The HLS was tiny compared to the luxurious concrete-lined complex we’d become used to at KAF. Technically, we were supposed to be able to fit four Apaches at a pinch on one pad, but I wondered, from up here how that would be possible. I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Hardwood Two One, the second Chinook, lifted off its square. When it popped out of its own dust cloud, I could see its underslung load: a bunch of crates in a low-hanging net. The Chinook hugged the ground for several hundred metres then rose to meet us in a zoom climb.

As soon as we RV’d, we set course to the north and our next destination: Now Zad.

The two Chinooks flew in formation about a thousand metres apart. Billy and I took up station above and around two kilometres behind and to the left of them; Jon and Simon did the same to their right.

We could see the Chinooks from our vantage point, and more importantly the ground beneath and behind them. Our primary concern was a SAM launch. Unlike us, the Chinooks didn’t always have an integrated defensive aids suite. If the Taliban did fire on them, they’d have to rely on the good old Mark 1 Eyeball – ours as well as theirs – to spot the launch plume. After that, it would be down to good judgement and their ‘pippers’, hand-held controllers like the ones I’d seen on the C-130 flight from Kabul to KAF, to launch flares to seduce the missile away from the aircraft.

The only place where the threat was deemed at all likely on this segment of our journey was the point at which we crossed Highway Zero One, which looped around most of Afghanistan. You never quite knew who was going to be on the road as you roared across it – on this occasion we were fortunate; it was empty – and we always treated it with respect.

Shortly afterwards I saw a pockmarked town, smaller than Lashkar Gah. Surrounded by hills and mountains Now Zad sat in a basin, with a rough road running north-south for around 500 metres through its centre.

Houses spread back for 300 metres on either side of this road, with smaller streets and alleyways running east-west. The place looked medieval in its chaos. The houses were ramshackle and built to no discernible pattern, the majority constructed on one or two levels, with access to the flat roofs via a staircase from within. The roofs of the handful of three-storey buildings gave the Taliban some excellent fields of fire direct into the District Centre.

The DC was located to the west of the potholed main street. It had been a police station and its compound had recently come under some very heavy fire. Surrounded by a high wall that was still remarkably intact, it had a big metal gate at the front and a sandbagged watchtower turret at each corner, manned by sentries round the clock.

Billy told me that forty-one Paras were stationed there and that the threat level was judged to be so high that they were in ‘lockdown’ – they went nowhere except to collect ammo and provisions from their Chinook replen flights using their quad-bikes and WMIK all-terrain vehicles – stripped down Land Rovers fitted with a Weapons Mounted Installation Kit that allowed a GPMG and a .50 cal to hang from its frame.

All the inhabitants to the west of the road were friendly towards the Brits and had a good relationship with us. Everyone to the east had taken to their heels as the Taliban moved in.

A few hundred metres to the south-west, just outside and a couple of hundred feet above the town perimeter, was a hill, easily identifiable from the air, occupied by the ANP and known to us as ‘the Shrine’ because the slope facing Now Zad was a burial ground, full of fluttering flags and streamers.

If the Shrine went down, Now Zad would too. From here, the ANP and a few British troops kept a watchful eye on the area and directed fire out of the DC onto the Taliban. The DC was too small to accept a Chinook within its compound, so flights landed to the south-west of the Shrine, under its garrison’s protective gaze but out of sight of the town.

The landing site (LS) was approached across flat desert and through a wide opening in the mountains. The town extended for a further 500 metres north-west of the DC, and was occupied mainly by Afghans intent on living a normal life.

‘They bring no bother to this area,’ Billy said, ‘so we try to patrol out that far to reassure them we’re friends.’

The town stopped abruptly at the western edge of the built-up area and turned to desert. Two kilometres further on, steep hills rose to form the edge of the Now Zad basin.

The dodgy area of town stretched a few hundred metres east of the main road before entering a small wadi, used as a route out through the Green Zone, filled with orchards, crop-fields and tree-lined groves and bordered by a huge mountain ridge, only a few hundred metres wide, but climbing a thousand feet above Now Zad and stretching north as far as the eye could see.

The so-called Green Zones were christened by the Russians in the late seventies. Southern Afghanistan was not naturally fertile but the mountains were so high they generated their own microclimates. Clouds often obscured the tops of the ranges and produced rivers that meandered during the summer months and thundered down in winter. The Helmand was the largest of these, stretching for hundreds of miles through the southern deserts.

The Afghans had mastered irrigation, and the river banks were lined by fields that spread back from ten metres to a couple of kilometres on each side.

The Taliban lived in and where possible fought from the Green Zones. They didn’t have the numbers, equipment, weapons, logistics or support with which to do so in the open.

The richly fertile area provided a latticework of concealed approaches and escape routes. It was so dense in some areas that you could barely see thirty metres. They built hides and underground tunnels, disguising the entrances so they couldn’t be seen from the ground or air, and the irrigation system, channelling water from field to field, made their movements virtually impossible to detect. In many places, the only way through was on foot. The soft-earthed labyrinth was often inaccessible to tanks, APCs and vehicles of any description.

The Taliban didn’t want us anywhere near Now Zad, and saw the DC as a big threat. The Paras had come under intense fire, morning, noon and night the entire time they had occupied it. In the recent upsurge of violence the town had been mortared by what the threat-briefers called a ‘hard core’ of Taliban. The Green Zone on the eastern edge of the town was the place to watch; it was where they’d mounted their last attack-principally with rockets and mortars.

Simon’s voice came over the radio. ‘Widow Seven Three, Widow Seven Three, this is Wildman Five Zero, how do you read?’

Widow Seven Three was the JTAC who coordinated all air-to-ground activity in this area.

With no acknowledgement from him, Simon tried again. I suddenly spotted blue smoke below. I checked Billy’s TADS image. It was coming from the grid-reference we’d been given for the LS. Billy increased the zoom and I was able to make out a couple of vehicles at the base of the Shrine – a quad-bike and a WMIK. Blue smoke meant that the LS was secure.

The Chinooks were beating their way across the desert approaches from the south-east. Jon was already wheeling his Apache above the streets just north of the Shrine to allow Simon an unrestricted top-down view of activity in the alleyways and the compounds below. I was doing the same above the area of Green Zone to the east. The danger was a mortar strike on the LS during the few brief seconds that the Chinooks would be on the ground. My responsibility was to keep an eye on them as well as on my wingman.

The Chinook with the underslung load disappeared in a pillar of whirling dust; the second went to land just outside this cloud and promptly disappeared as well.

Seconds later, we heard a double-click on the radio and first one machine then the next reappeared.

The Cows veered away to the south, keeping low, then pulled up to join us at altitude. Within moments we were back over the desert, cruising at a safe height en route to Musa Qa’leh, our last RV before heading back to Bastion.

The Musa Qa’leh drop-off went without incident. We saw one of the Chinooks descend into a wadi to deliver a vital supply item, the identity of which was on a need-to-know basis (which meant we had no need to know), to an American patrol operating in the area, and then we turned for home.

As we flew high over the desert towards Bastion, I thought back to the ROE brief and, for the umpteenth time since I’d heard the CO deliver it, how crazy it was.

What if I went down in this hell-hole? How would I protect myself?

I glanced across at my SA80. I had three magazines with thirty rounds of 5.56 mm each, and an unusually short mag packed with twenty 5.56 mm tracer rounds in case of emergency. It jutted out from my carbine in the seat frame to my right. Strapped to my right thigh, inside an Uncle Mike’s Sidekick holster, was my 9 mm pistol for which I had four magazines, thirteen rounds in each, with one inserted-ready-into the grip.

Three days earlier, I’d visited some Para mates. In exchange for some AAC patches and badges, I’d been given two hand grenades. Needless to say, it was absolutely verboten to fly with grenades – I’d be drummed out of the corps, most likely, if they were discovered in the aircraft. But the way I saw it, they were only dangerous to those unfamiliar with them. They sat in my grab bag to my right-hand side with my spare magazines and two smoke grenades. I was out there flying against the Taliban and the rule-makers weren’t, so the grenades flew with me.

If it ever came to my Black Hawk Down moment, the grenades would allow me to take as many of the bastards down with me as I could – my final two-fingered salute to the ROE.

We cleared Highway Zero One and prepared for our landing at Bastion.

The patrol commander always landed first and I saw Jon’s nose drop as he readied to take us in. I lowered the collective, ensuring that I retained a bit of power to keep the clutch from disengaging, and kept the nose up, bleeding speed. Then I lowered the nose, accelerating and jinking left and right – shades of the lessons I’d learned as a young Para when trying to shoot down drones on the range at Larkhill. I could hear Captain Mainwaring shouting at me now. It was damn difficult to hit an aircraft that was manoeuvring unpredictably…

‘Jon’s going to dust-out massive,’ Billy said. ‘I know it looks like he’s heading for a hardened landing site down there, Ed, but trust me, in a moment he’s going to disappear from view.’ He paused. ‘Do you want me to take this one for you?’

I grinned. ‘I’m going to have to do this at some point. Just follow me on the controls in case I fuck up.’

I’d already been told that landing at Bastion was a nightmare. Helicopters hated hot and high – that had been drummed into us from Lesson Number One. Add dust to the mixture and everything threatened to turn to ratshit.

To get around this problem at Bastion, they were planning on building a hardened aircraft landing strip (HALS); a short runway, in effect, that would allow us to do rolling takeoffs and landings. Rolling takeoffs not only allowed us to get airborne with more ordnance, they also ensured we didn’t get lost in our own sandstorm.

The trouble was, the HALS hadn’t yet been built at Bastion; instead, we had to land on a square pad – there were two of them – a raised area built from builder’s rubble that the Chinook and Apache boys had robbed from the engineers constructing the camp.

The pads had originally been built as a vehicle park. This was all well and good, except that the omnipresent dust settled in among the rubble. Only ‘dust’ didn’t really do this stuff justice – at Bastion, apparently, it was like talcum powder, and it went fucking everywhere. The makeshift landing pad I was heading for, Billy had warned me, was barely safe to use.

Terrific.

‘Billy?’

‘Yes, mate?’

‘You still there?’

‘Following your every move.’

‘Good. Just checking.’

I continued towards the pad. I needed to carry out a ‘zero-zero’ landing. I didn’t want to end up in the hover, because I’d find myself still in the air in a dust-out and that’s where crashes begin; and I didn’t want any forward speed when I hit the ground either or I’d roll into the two Apaches that were already parked ahead of my landing spot. The only way to crack this was to fly forward and down, forward and down, in one steep smooth approach, until we banged onto the pad.

My fears were confirmed when I saw Jon bringing his Apache into land ahead of me. One moment I could see him, the next he just vanished along with the whole pad and the two Apaches already on it. There was no room for error. If I drifted left, I’d collide with Jon and Simon. If I drifted right, we’d hit uneven ground and roll over. If I rolled forward, I’d hit the two stationary aircraft.

Oman had been bad, but at least it had been sand, not dust, and there’d been nothing else to hit.

I continued towards the pad bringing back the speed with the ground 100 feet below. Billy advised me to slow down some more to allow the dust from Jon’s landing to settle.

‘Yeah, copied mate.’ I did as he said. Trouble was, dust was also blowing in from the two Chinooks that had landed a hundred metres or so to the south; a roiling, billowing cloud of dust, 150 feet high and hundreds of metres wide, was blowing across the camp.

I began my zero-zero descent. The world as I knew it immediately disappeared.

‘Fuck me.’

‘Don’t worry, just trust your symbology.’

Suddenly, through the dust, I saw the dim silhouettes of aircraft-two directly in front of me and one forward and to my left. I was bleeding speed off and dropping down towards them, forward and down, forward and down…

‘You’re doing good, doing good,’ Billy said. ‘Trust your symbology…’

If I bottled it and attempted to go around again, I’d hit the aircraft in front of me. I was getting to the point of no return.

I glanced left and saw two faces – Simon’s and Jon’s. You always watched somebody coming in to land because there was every chance it would go wrong. It wasn’t a morbid curiosity, it was just plain dangerous, and they were watching me like a pair of hawks.

Any second now and I’d have to commit.

‘Stand by,’ I said. ‘Three…two…one…committed!’

The aircraft was slowing, the ground still rising to meet me. I fought the instinct to pull power, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. I tweaked some on – just a fraction – and the dust came up. Oh God, I thought, here we go…

‘I’ve got the toe-brakes, mate,’ Billy said.

Thank fuck – one thing less to worry about. Billy would pop the brakes the moment we hit the ground.

We passed through sixty feet and I made the big mistake of glancing down to my left.

The dust was blowing away from me in rivulets – the ground, wherever it was, looked as if it had turned to liquid. I had lost all sense of terra firma below me. Anything and everything that represented solidity had disappeared from view and been replaced by a rippling carpet of liquid mush. This sea of dust moving left made me feel like I was side-slipping right at speed. I fought to trust my symbology.

The Apache on my left began to disappear from my peripheral vision and then, wham, the dust started recirculating down through my rotors, and my peripheral vision disappeared entirely. I was still fifty feet off the ground and totally blind.

‘Forward and down,’ Billy continued. ‘Forward and down…’

I kept my head still, not moving a muscle, as I stared into the monocle. It was in hover mode. The velocity vector line moved ever so slowly back from the top of the monocle towards the centre; I knew I was doing six knots. I had to get the vector back to the centre-zero speed across the ground – at exactly the same time as the height also hit zero.

I didn’t know for sure if I would hit my point on the pad and took a quick peep out of the right-hand window.

Mistake…

The line drifted to the left.

‘No further left!’ Billy yelled.

‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it…’ I shouldn’t have fucking looked. I was concentrating so hard to fight the urge to stop a drift that wasn’t even there.

I brought the stick back to the right to compensate for my error and – smack! – we hit the ground and I felt a reassuring lurch as the struts stroked downwards and the undercarriage took our full weight evenly.

I had no idea if I’d landed where I was supposed to, but was ecstatic that I’d not rolled over or hit anything. I looked to my left. After a few minutes the dust thinned and I caught sight of Jon and Simon, arms above their heads, giving me a slow theatrical handclap. I should have acknowledged with a little bow, but I was too damned drained to do anything. I slumped back in my seat.

I glanced up and saw Billy’s face in his mirror. He gave me a cheeky smile and a thumbs-up.

‘Fucking hell, that was scary,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I did offer…’

Billy and I headed for the duties board with a spring in our step. We’d heard whispers about the upcoming operation over the past few days, and been told we’d be on a deliberate mission.

Sure enough, Op Mutay was up there, lined up for the fourth. But our flight was marked HRF and IRT. We’d be on standby; we’d been taken off the mission.

As Helmand Reaction Force and Incident Response Team we needed to be ready for anything, and that included supporting the Deliberate Ops Apache pair. We’d be the next to fly, responsible for replacing Pat and his crews if needed. How on earth could we do that if we’d been kept in the dark?

Pat told us it was because we weren’t a constituted flight – we hadn’t operated together. The OC had his two flights up and running, under Pat and Dan. He wanted to keep it that way because they’d know what they were doing.

‘Why do you need constituted flights?’ I asked.

Pat shrugged. ‘Flight procedure.’

Billy beat me to it. ‘There’s no such thing.’

He wasn’t wrong. The only flight procedure was that any one of us could jump into any aircraft with any wingman and mesh in seamlessly. Pilots were matched in an aircraft and kept together until they operated as one, but periodic changeovers stopped errors creeping in.

‘Well, our flights are constituted,’ Pat insisted. ‘We’ve practised together.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They’d flown together on a handful of missions in Afghanistan, that was all. We’d trained together for years.

We left, knowing only that Op Mutay would take place around Now Zad. Even the broadest brushstrokes were being kept secret from other aircrew.

The alarm bells kept ringing in my head. I turned to Billy and Jon. ‘What if it goes tits up and the rest of us have to step in?’ We hadn’t been here long and only had four Apaches up and running.

Keeping the circle of knowledge to a minimum was normal and necessary. A lot of locals worked at Camp Bastion. The Taliban could infiltrate their ranks, or intimidate them into handing over information. That was why we only ever discussed a mission in the secure Ops tents and briefing areas.

The OC and Pat – who commanded the only Apache flight designated to the mission – had taken this to extremes. They had attended the preliminary mission orders along with Dickie Bonn, the new Operations Officer, and decided not to allow any other crews into the planning process.

We discovered that confirmatory orders were going to be at 0700 on the morning of the mission – two days’ time – and knew we had to be there.

This was going to be 3 Para’s – but more importantly to us, the British Apaches’ – first ever deliberate operation in Afghanistan. We’d spent over two and a half years training for this, and by hook or by crook, we’d have what it took to make it work.

Back at the tent, 3 Flight’s lights were out. A quick shower and I was into my doss bag on my camp cot. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but then again, I wasn’t in the pissing rain in the middle of Dartmoor in December with a hunter force tracking me down with dogs and dragging me away for interrogation.

When the artillery temporarily eased up my mind still wouldn’t let me sleep. I’d been plagued by the fear of failure or rejection all my life; I didn’t want to be remembered as one of the bumbling idiots that fucked up our very first mission. Worse still, if we left a gap in the support to 3 Para and someone died we’d be dismissed as a shambles and never be trusted again. If the papers got hold of the details the whole Apache programme would be seen as a big white elephant.

1030 hours local

1310 hours local

Still kneeling beside the cockpit, I bellowed, ‘Pylons… stabilator… APU clear?’

We were now officially late. I hoped 3 Flight could push their fuel a bit longer.

Taff checked there was no one near the weapons pylons, the slab-like stabilator, or within range of the hot exhaust gases the Auxiliary Power Unit would be spitting out very shortly.

In his broad Welsh accent he reported back, ‘Pylons, stabilator and APU clear-clear to start the APU.’

The APU was the Apache’s third engine, only used to get all the systems up and running and to provide compressed air with which to start the main engines.

Back in the UK it used to take us about an hour to start an Apache and be ready to taxi. It could take as little as forty-five minutes if you cut corners and all went well. Out here, in a rush, on a good day, with no snags and if the TADS cooled quickly enough, it could be done in as little as twenty minutes, but between thirty and forty was more usual. With the APU running, to all intents and purposes the Apache was ready to go. We could sort out any problems and get the TADS and PNVS ice cold so it could see properly. All we needed to do then was switch on the main engines and pull power – a two-minute job.

Stretching back across the cockpit I lifted a small clear cover and pushed the recessed button beneath it. The APU was startled into life. Within a few seconds the acronym on the button glowed green, and it was soon screaming away at full power.

I flipped my helmet onto my head, making sure my ears weren’t folded, and then buttoned the chinstrap tight. A bent ear now would drive me to distraction later.

I grimaced as the internal harness pushed down on the weeping egg on the top of my head.

I dragged my life-support jacket from my seat and pulled it on. It felt cumbersome and tight as I zipped it up, and became even more uncomfortable when I slipped a triangular armoured plate into the sheath on the front.

The ‘chicken plate’ was designed to shield the vital organs within the chest cavity from bullets and shrapnel. As I pulled up the outer zip holding it in place, it pressed heavily on my bladder, making me even more uncomfortable and irritable than before.

It fitted so tightly that it was impossible to take an extra-deep breath. But if it were slacker it would become a snag hazard if I had to be dragged from the cockpit in an emergency. I tried to look on the bright side: it would stop my organs spilling out if I were shot. The pressure would stem the flow of blood and keep me conscious for a few more valuable seconds.

The heat was getting to me good style; I could actually smell it. The cockpit stank like a workshop. The wiring, glues, resins, metals and a whole host of other materials came under immense temperatures in the glass cocoon.

I took hold of the grab handles above the seat and pulled myself inside, arching my back so I didn’t catch the magazine jutting from my stubby carbine clipped to the right side of the seat.

I adjusted the position of the pistol strapped to my right thigh and began to clip on the five-point harness that would save my life in the event of a crash. You couldn’t help but feel a moment of omnipotence in the rear seat of an Apache on operations-master of a £46 million boy’s toy with everything you needed at your fingertips, elevated above your surroundings, looking down on everyone working their arses off to get you into the air.

1355 hours local

‘Symbology… symbology… symbology…’ I kept repeating it to myself, over and over again, like a tribal mantra to appease the helicopter god.

The heading tape was stationary in my right eye. We weren’t turning or spinning. The velocity vector was centred. We weren’t drifting into Taff’s ammo.

The torque nudged past 96 per cent. I checked our height reading: thirty feet – just enough to be clear of obstacles. Our big problem was that we weren’t climbing any higher.

My arse was telling my brain I was drifting right, towards Taff’s fireworks store, but the symbology was perfect. Trust the symbology…

‘You happy with me transitioning out of this on symbology, Billy? I have no external references, but we’re clear of obstacles and I have her under control.’

Billy came back cautiously: ‘Just don’t over-torque it.’

That was what I wanted to hear. ‘Going for it.’

With no outside references at all, the Apache was being flown solely by the symbology beamed into my right eye. With a gentle push forward and a trim, the velocity vector indicated that we were drifting forwards and not sideways – so far, so good.

Symbology… symbology… symbology…

Suddenly the radar altimeter began to count down. I couldn’t see the desert floor but I knew we were heading towards it. I topped up the power with the collective until we were at maximum torque. I had nothing left to pull and we were still dropping.

The powerful, precision-built Rolls-Royce Turbomeca RTM322 engines were coping easily, but the torque they generated would rip the Apache apart if I demanded more of them.

Billy called out height and speed. ‘Twenty-five feet, four knots… twenty-three feet, five knots… twenty-one feet, eight knots… Watch your torque, Ed.’

‘I am.’

Billy must have been unnerved as we got dangerously close to over-torquing the aircraft. We should have been getting some translational lift by now to stop the descent and reduce the power required to fly.

‘Nineteen feet, still eight knots, Ed.’

‘Come on, come on-fly!’

‘Twelve feet, nine knots.’

We were now below the height of the berm that had been 100 metres in front of us.

The chant continued in my head: Please fly… symbology… symbology… symbology… please fly… please…

There was a small waver in the tail and I knew we were passing translational lift. I had no idea how far from the berm we were. All I knew was we were forward of our takeoff point by some considerable distance.

Billy called, ‘Eleven feet, eleven knots.’

The torque dropped off 5 per cent as the blades caught the cleaner airflow in front of us.

‘Got it, Billy. She’s flying.’

As I topped up the torque back to maximum, Billy called, ‘Fifteen feet, fifteen knots… sixteen feet, eighteen knots… nineteen feet, twenty-two knots…’

With the most gentle of corrections aft on the cyclic, the speed was maintained and the aircraft started to climb.

Just as Billy finished saying, ‘Twenty-nine feet, twenty-eight knots’, we popped out of the front of the dust cloud into a deep azure sky.

‘Well done, Ed. Have you got them? I’m blind.’

‘Not yet… yes, got them – right one o’clock, 250 metres, same level.’

‘Visual.’

‘Your ASE, Billy,’ I prompted.

A touch of the right thumb set the trims in place then I flicked the radio button. ‘Saxon Ops, this is Wildman Five One. Five Zero and Five One wheels off your location now, over.’

‘Saxon Ops, roger, out.’

Ops now knew exactly what time we’d taken off; they could predict what time we might need replacing if we got into a fight, and more importantly what time to start overdue proceedings if we hadn’t called them or landed when we reached our endurance point.

Billy set up the Aircraft Survival Equipment so we were protected against surface-to-air missiles.

‘Okay, Ed, CMDS armed.’

The ASE CMDS indicator lamp shone bright yellow.

‘Armed in the rear,’ I replied. ‘Bring on the SAMS.’

The Apache’s Counter Measures Dispensing System was now armed, its chaff and flares ready to frustrate an incoming missile.

‘CMDS set to semi-automatic, your button pushes,’ Billy said.

‘My button pushes, ignoring everything from the camp, buddy.’

If a missile was launched against us, Bitchin’ Betty would be straight on the case, telling me what it was and where it was coming from. Her voice had supposedly been chosen for its combination of firmness and reassurance, but she sounded to us like a cross between a dominatrix and a vindictive ex-wife.

In this mode, my already-busy right thumb repositioned itself over the recessed button to punch off flares if the Bitch sparked up. I’d elected to ignore the camp because each flare burnt at in excess of 1,200°C, to have her drop a fistful onto a collection of tents and fuel stores wouldn’t have won us any popularity contests. I also didn’t want to use up valuable kit I might need later.

We were now seventy-five feet above the desert floor, in trail with the Apache in front and the perimeter fence of Camp Bastion 200 metres behind and to our right.

‘CMDS now set to automatic, Ed.’

‘CMDS auto-thanks, buddy.’

A quick trim with the right thumb and we were accelerating to 120 knots, offset slightly to the right and about 500 metres behind Wildman Five Zero. If a missile came at us now, the Bitch would both alert me and pump out flares. With a bit of luck and no misfires, the greater heat source would lure it into exploding harmlessly once it had passed through the flare, leaving me free to spin the beast on her heels and take out the foolish man with the launcher on his shoulder.

I accessed the navigation page with three button pushes on my left MPD, then route information and route review. It was set up for Now Zad and my monocle display told me that – at this speed – we had eighteen minutes to arrival.

Nick called Pat to let him know.

Pat was quick to respond that he was breaking off in a few minutes because they were both fuel critical.

A picture paints a thousands words, so a Relief In Place should be conducted over the battleground and include sufficient time for every significant factor of the battle to be described and understood by the replacement crews. Most important of all was to exactly identify the locations of all friendly forces. As one pair of Apaches ceased firing, the relieving pair should be taking over the baton and engaging; a seamless transition maintained the tempo of the battle.

No chance of that now. We just had to get to Now Zad as soon as we possibly could.

Jon transmitted: ‘Wildman Five One, this is Wildman Five Zero, high-high, five-five, and six-zero.’

‘High-high, five-five, six-zero,’ I replied.

The lead aircraft wanted us to climb to 6,000 feet. We should be okay at this height as the Chinooks had returned to base, and having them 500 feet below us should eliminate the risk of air-to-air collisions if we lost a visual lock on each other during a fight.

Billy glanced up from punching grids into the computer. ‘Clear above.’

I hit a button on my left MPD and brought up the weapons page, then selected the pilot’s helmet sight as my acquisition source. I could now command the Longbow Fire Control Radar to search for targets wherever I turned my head.

As we left the general flying environment and entered the battle phase, my left hand moved to the upper part of the collective, the mission grip.

My left thumb selected the FCR as my chosen sensor then switched it into radar mapping mode. The Apache began to climb. I looked to the right and pulled down on a rocker switch.

Eight feet above and four feet behind my head, the Longbow radar suddenly kicked into life. The large, Edam cheese-shaped dome began to sweep back and forth, scanning the ground along the line I was looking, searching for anything unnatural in shape up to eight kilometres away. If it detected any object that was trying to hide or didn’t match the terrain it would classify it, prioritise it, and display it on my MPD and in my eye.

The unusual objects I was interested in were mopeds, cars and trucks.

The average local owned a donkey and, if they were lucky, a tractor. If he owned a car it would be a very old sedan – and he’d have been off his rocker to attempt a crossing.

There weren’t that many all-terrain vehicles in this neck of the woods. To own a 4x4 or a good pick-up required money, of which only drug tsars and the Taliban weren’t short.

A horizontal ticker tape appeared next to my torque reading, warning me I was reaching an engine limitation. I reduced collective power a tad to avoid buggering up the engines before I got a chance to investigate.

I adjusted the collective with my left hand to ensure I didn’t blow up an engine while my right pulled the cyclic towards my groin to initiate a steeper climb. I could see Jon doing the same about 1,500 metres away. The airspeed was washing off; as it passed sixty knots I pulled the cyclic to the left. The Apache banked and changed direction.

Billy didn’t look up. The front seater’s primary job was to fight the aircraft. It was my job to defend it. It was no use being able to kill the enemy if we got shot down in the process.

If there was a gunner out there ready to shoot, he’d be having problems now. It may have been sixteen and a half years ago but Captain Mainwaring’s words of wisdom echoed in my mind. To have any chance of hitting us, he needed to aim in front of the aircraft. If his range was correct and he estimated that his shells would take four seconds to reach us, he needed to be able to predict where we were going to be. Reducing my speed just after he fired should mean they’d pass in front of us. Climbing faster just after he fired should mean them passing below.

I’d increased the rate of ascent but slowed the Apache down. I couldn’t keep slowing without becoming an easier target. He’d only have to lead me fractionally to score a direct hit. The minute I flew a constant speed, rate of climb or in the same direction, we were fucked.

I pushed forward on the stick and eased it to the right. The Apache rolled and accelerated. As the speed increased the rate of ascent decreased, but we were still climbing nicely. The distance between me and any potential gunner should be changing too, sparing me Billy’s wrath as we tumbled to an almost certain conclusion with full military honours.

I swung my head rapidly from left to right, searching for gunners and SAM operators and suspicious vehicles; anyone or anything that might take a shot at us.

I was also keeping my distance from Jon. Too close together and a missile would be spoilt for choice. The Bitch would spring into action, but if the missile was fitted with a proximity fuse, it didn’t even need to hit us; it would explode when it got within its prescribed distance and blow shrapnel into our airframe, blades and cockpits.

As it was, the SAM operator would be able to target only one of us. The other would be able to engage and kill him before he loosed off any more missiles.

That was the theory, anyway.

Though the Apache had a particularly low heat signature and was thus very hard to lock-on, the threat of a SAMbush – two or more operators working together – was always on my mind when we climbed or descended through their threat band.

We levelled off at 6,000 feet. I pulled in what remaining power we had until the Power Margin Indicator (PMI) warned me that I was within 10 per cent of an engine limit.

I selected the engine page on my MPD. The Number One engine on the port side was eating vigorously into its sixty-minute timer at this torque setting and Number Two on the starboard side was taking regular nibbles. Neither could be reset until we landed. Once I’d used up all sixty minutes, that power setting would not be accessible again without damaging the engines.

Did I keep the speed on and have nothing left for later? The decision was fairly straightforward on this sortie; the transit time to Now Zad was now fourteen minutes. Once there, I’d be slowing down and using less than half of what the engines could produce. For the return journey I would be a lot lighter – most of the fuel would have been burnt off – so as long as I saved twenty of my sixty-minute timers I could travel back at max chat. If they needed us somewhere else at short notice, I’d have to think again…

Fuck it. It was a no-brainer. We were going to Now Zad because our lads were being badly shot up. Nothing else in Helmand was going to be a higher priority. Not in the next few hours, anyway.

Watching the engine page like a hawk, I called, ‘Head’s in.’

Billy acknowledged. ‘My head’s out.’

Last thing we wanted was both of us looking in at the same time; that was how mid-air collisions and smacks into terra firma were triggered.

I pulled through gradually until the five-minute timers kicked off.

We couldn’t eat into these without fear of retribution. If we lost an engine, we’d need the five-minute margin to touch down and save the good engine for another day. To use it up now could mean trashing the thing on landing. Not something I fancied explaining to the brass, even in an emergency.

I backed off a fraction on the collective. I was now coaxing this puppy for all it could give without going into the red.

The Apache was cruising at 132 knots fully laden with munitions and fuel at 6,000 feet when Billy called, ‘Twelve minutes to run.’

As we flew through the hills twelve miles to the south of Now Zad, the distinctive bowl around it materialised through the dust and heat haze.

‘Holy smoke, look twelve o’clock, Billy.’

‘Oh my God.’

Columns of black smoke towered into the sky, spreading to the east as they met the winds above the ridgeline. The town was aflame. A fast jet sent out a series of orange flashes, each one higher than the last, as it broke off its attack and pumped out flares as it climbed back to the safety of the ether.

The fight or flight instinct kicked in and the metallic taste of adrenalin flooded my mouth. I fought the urge to urinate. My body was preparing itself for battle. My grip tightened on the controls. This was my first proper mission in an Apache, not just my first in Afghanistan.

Time to rock and roll.

Bring it on.

With Nick’s mission radio down, we had taken the lead. It was not something we’d discussed in the air. It had been briefed during the planning phase and kicked in when necessary.

I was the JTAC in our aircraft, and until Billy got used to FAC speak, I would be the one in communication with the JTAC on the ground.

FAC speak was used to portray the ground, circumstances and type of attack required. Although not coded, it employed vernacular protocols with definitive meanings. Our training in Canada and the Oman had enabled me to get the best out of even the worst JTAC and with a bit of luck I could now show Billy the ropes.

Widow Seven Two, in the main body of the attack, should have been alongside the attacking commander Major Pike and the CO Lieutenant Colonel Tootal. All I could hear between the hoarse breathing and the loud ruffling of the mic were the words, ‘Wait out.’

I switched to Widow Seven Zero. Judging by Pat’s calls, they had been in the thick of it. I couldn’t raise them on the secure radios, but eventually managed to on the insecure CTAF. Now I understood why we’d heard so much earlier. Widow Seven Zero was breathless, too, as he told us they’d called in a US A10. It must have been the one I’d seen climbing away from the battle, coming in now on its next run.

The jet screamed towards the ground, waiting for final clearance. The Taliban were firing out of the woods; despite their proximity, Widow Seven Zero decided to prosecute the target. They ordered the A10 ‘hot’ – the executive command to fire live munitions – turned around and sprinted.

The JTAC still had his mic on; my earpieces filled with the rippling, ground-shaking blast of the wood line exploding behind them. I felt my blood pulsing through my veins and every one of my senses on hyper-alert.

We were still a couple of miles south of Now Zad when Widow Seven Zero finally caught his breath. ‘Wildman Five One, this is Widow Seven Zero, how do you read?’

‘Wildman Five One, Lima Charlie,’ I replied. Lima Charlie was FAC speak for Loud and Clear. I whacked the holds in so I could go hands free and grabbed my pencil.

‘We are receiving heavy fire from our south-east and need you to suppress the buildings at…standby for grid…’ He kept his mic open and I could hear someone reading it out as he relayed it to us. ‘Grid Forty-One-Sierra Papa-Romeo Three-Nine-Six Eight-Five-Two, copy?’

Billy punched the coordinates into his non-qwerty keyboard as I scribbled. ‘Wildman Five One, Forty-One-Sierra Papa-Romeo Three-Nine-Six Eight-Five-Two.’

Widow Seven Zero was asking for us to engage the buildings beside the smoke. I was pretty sure what he meant but Now Zad was now full of the bloody stuff. My training had drilled into me: never assume; assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. I needed more information.

‘We need to positively identify your location. Confirm you’re on the west side of the Green Zone, over.’

I guided the Apache into an orbit over the western edge of the Green Zone and began to search north-west.

We flew through a shaft of incredibly bright sunlight into the shadow of the biggest smoke column. Our world dimmed and I banked too tightly, taking us into absolute darkness. For a moment I felt as though we’d been swallowed whole; then we emerged from the belly of the beast once more, into the blinding sunlight.

The stroboscopic progression of light and shade made it almost impossible to operate the TADS, but within a couple of seconds I found friendly vehicles with the naked eye, about a klick west of the grid.

Billy confirmed and drove the TADS to the tower of smoke east of the vehicles, in an attempt to ID Taliban.

Widow Seven Zero wasn’t with the vehicles – I’d gathered as much from his breathless running – and I couldn’t ID him anywhere near where the A10 had laid down its fire.

The Widow attempted to describe his position but neither of us could identify it. My cueing dots led my gaze back towards the smoke; the acquisition source crosshair hovered over the burning building. Open fields stretched to the north-west; empty fields bathed in sunshine and criss-crossed by irrigation ditches.

I asked if they had a mirror and, if so, to signal to me with it.

A flicker of light immediately glinted in one of the ditches 250 metres away.

‘Visual standby.’

The ditch ran north-south between two fields, one of which was black and smouldering from an earlier fire.

I called, ‘Confirm that you are in a north-south irrigation ditch, in the middle of fields with a triangular compound to your west containing friendly vehicles.’

‘That’s correct. We’re pinned down, taking heavy fire from an area to the south and south-east of us. I need you to fire into a compound to the south-east of me by a couple of hundred metres.’

I was in no doubt that they were in receipt of some heavy fire. I could hear the crack of the bullets flying over their heads on the radio, above the sound of their own fire. I relayed the Widow’s position to Nick and Jon and instructed them to watch out for the troops while we attempted to ID and prosecute the enemy.

I walked the Widow onto the target I thought he meant. ‘Right in front of you I can see a burnt field…’ pause ‘…in the far corner of the burnt field is a compound with a smoking building in it…’ pause ‘…confirm that is the compound you want us to fire into.’

‘Negative. It’s south of there; it’s south by fifty metres.’

The next compound down was the last to have line-of-sight with them before a densely wooded area. Another plume of smoke drifted slowly upwards from one of its buildings.

I was flying an odd orbit just to keep eyes on the area. Jon was flying a much larger elliptical pattern below us, in the opposite direction.

‘Reference the compound just beyond the burnt field… directly on its southern edge… is one row of east-west trees…’ I paused long enough for Widow Seven Zero to get his head up out of the ditch and process my information.

‘To the south of the row of trees is a high-walled compound… it has a raised wall on the northern edge… there’s a building behind it… this building-which may look like a high wall to you-is smoking… confirm that is the target.’

The Widow responded in an instant. ‘Correct.’

‘Where’s the target, Ed?’ Billy wanted to be 100 per cent sure. We were both keen not to fuck up our very first offensive action.

I instinctively placed the crosshair in my right eye over the target building and called, ‘Gunner – Target – HMD – Target building low left.’

Billy had already switched his acquisition source from the previous grid to my Helmet Mounted Display and pressed the slave button. Following every movement of my right eye, the TADS swivelled itself towards where I was focused. Billy scanned the picture the TADS was giving him on his MPD; I couldn’t look away until he was happy.

‘On…’ he said. ‘De-slaved.’

The TADS was back under his control and not slaved to my eye; my gaze could now sweep wherever I wanted. I glanced at my MPD to confirm he had the correct target.

I kept in tight to the target, a trick I’d learned in Northern Ireland. Whenever a helicopter circled directly above anyone who was in the wrong, they assumed the helicopter crews could see everything they were doing. They weren’t always right. The sky had very little in it, so a helicopter was blatantly obvious. The ground, on the other hand, was full of clutter: buildings, trees, walls, bushes, high ground, alleyways, low ground, deep avenues of trees, you name it. It was a huge expanse from our perspective, and pinpointing the enemy was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

‘I’ll increase the radius of the turn to make it easier on the TADS,’ I told Billy. ‘We’ll fire a witness burst into the compound, just as we clear the smoke, starting ninety degrees out from the boys and finishing at the forty-five.’

I was still nervous about this first shot. It was dangerous practice to fire over the heads of your own troops – or even point towards them in case the range information was wrong and the rounds went long or short of their intended target. That was why we were offsetting.

Billy placed his crosshairs on the centre mass of the target building and I confirmed on my MPD that he had the correct target. ‘Widow Seven Zero, Wildman Five One, target identified. Ready with thirty mike mike.’

‘Widow Seven Zero – fire as soon as you can so we can extract to the west, over.’

‘We’ll kick off with a witness burst. I need you to confirm that we have the correct target. If we do, we will cover your extraction.’

He acknowledged.

Billy scoured the target for innocent civilians, but could see no one in the compound at all.

‘Clear to engage, Billy.’

From a standing start to full speed in a quarter of a second, the M230 cannon thundered away beneath our feet.

‘Firing,’ I called. ‘Confirm splash.’ I wanted the JTAC to confirm that the rounds were landing in the right place.

The cannon fired all twenty rounds in two seconds but I could still hear and feel every single one. The sheer brute force of the thing pushed the Apache’s nose to the right and twisted us, ever so slightly, left wing low. She regained her perfect orbit the second she stopped, with me following her on the cyclic.

I called Camp Bastion. ‘Saxon Ops, this is Wildman Five One, engaging compounds with covering fire, out.’

I looked out of my cockpit, low and left. The twenty rounds went straight into the middle of the compound, with no collateral damage. Billy’s firing was absolutely accurate, and more importantly still, so was the gun’s. The rounds kicked up enough dust to obliterate the view inside the compound but the Widow couldn’t see them land behind the wall.

I asked Billy to change to a ten-round burst and go for the building instead.

I transmitted, ‘Stand by for a further witness burst.’

Then to Billy: ‘Clear to engage.’

Billy squeezed the trigger again until the cannon had dispensed its ten rounds.

I transmitted, ‘Firing now.’

The rounds impacted on the target building, ripping holes in its roof and gouging into its sides. Even from this height I could make out slivers of rock and adobe blasting all over the place.

‘Negative, negative.’ Widow Seven Zero shouted. ‘Go fifty metres south-west. The enemy have moved; go fifty metres south-west.’

As we flew over our troops I spotted a square compound with one single single-storey building hidden in the trees fifty metres further south-west.

‘Confirm the very next compound south-west of our fire is the compound you want us to attack.’

‘Yes, yes,’ came his urgent reply.

‘Stand by while we set up.’

I lined up the Apache to the east of the target, heading north, so I could keep an eye on the Widow’s position.

Billy called, ‘Ready.’

He let go with another ten-round burst onto the wall facing the Widow so he could observe the splash they made through the trees.

‘Firing now,’ I informed the Widow.

The Widow shouted, ‘On target, on target’ the second we saw the rounds impact on and around the compound wall.

Billy changed the burst rate back to twenty and unleashed two further onslaughts into the building on the north-western edge of the compound. I watched the boys break from cover then looked at the MPD to see what Billy could see.

The rounds exploded with a ferocity I had never imagined. The training ammo we used was inert; these High Explosive Dual Purpose (HEDP) rounds were the real McCoy. I knew what they claimed to be able to do, but I was completely unprepared for what I saw. They were far more deadly than their name suggested.

I saw the heat haze swirling behind the succession of little black dots that flew up the image and dropped onto the building. Each one produced an almighty flash as the armour piercing punched its way through roof and walls. Once through the building’s skin, the incendiary set the interior alight. Thick black smoke billowed from a small window like steam out of a pressure cooker. I could only guess at the effectiveness of the HEDP’s fragmentation. The blast should have sent red-hot shards of metal winging their way into every corner.

Chunks of rock and adobe flew off the exterior and the courtyard entrance remained empty. Either there was no one at home or the frag was working big time. My money was on the latter; the Patrols Platoon had been able to get the hell out of that field without being engaged again.

I lost my visual lock on them in the plantation to the south for longer than I was comfortable with. I couldn’t raise the Widow. Then I spotted them moving fast into an orchard to the south and south-west of where they’d been pinned down.

The boss should have been extremely thankful that they’d managed to hold out. I wouldn’t have wanted to explain why we hadn’t been ready to Tootal. Without Apache cover they’d been sitting ducks, out in the open, nowhere to go.

When I finally got hold of them they were moving through the orchard 200 metres west of the compound Billy had just annihilated. Widow Seven Zero informed us that they had broken contact and were going to search the area they’d come under fire from. ‘Report any movement in the target compound.’

Saxon Ops at base gave us grid 41S PR 3957 8673. The target was a suspect white pick-up in the north of Now Zad. With the threat brief earlier, this target was deemed to be a direct threat. Billy handed it over to Nick and Jon because they couldn’t speak to the ground troops.

I kept a close eye on Jon as he peeled away to the north.

We couldn’t see anything moving or leaving the compound or the wood alongside it. We covered the lads through what seemed to be a cross between an orchard and open parkland.

They looked like ants from my vantage point, but I could see them employing good FIBUA tactics as they entered the compound. No surprises there; 3 Para were masters at Fighting In a Built-Up Area. Once inside they reported loads of blood and blood trails all over the place, but no human life.

‘They must have dragged the injured and dead into the trees, undercover of the dust and smoke,’ I said.

‘Lesson identified, lesson learned,’ Billy replied. We wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

Base told us intelligence was indicating a target in the north, grid 41S PR 3980 8648. They must have been listening to Taliban transmissions. While I looked out for Patrols Platoon, Billy checked the map. It was only 300 metres from where Nick and Jon had gone to search.

I told Saxon Ops we’d need a RIP in an hour. 3 Flight would be on the APU on thirty minutes’ notice to move. They’d have more than enough time to throw their engine power levers forward, taxi, fly out to us and do a full RIP. We were on an insecure radio, but we’d maintain full Apache cover. Better to risk keeping the Taliban up to speed than to leave 3 Para in the lurch again.

I spoke to all three Widow callsigns to see if they needed assistance. Our covering fire had quietened the Taliban down and our presence was keeping them at bay.

I told Widow Seven Two that base had given me intelligence on a target west of their target compound, because he was with the CO. We couldn’t wander off on our own little mission without confirming with the ground commander; we were here to assist him, after all. Widow Seven Two informed me that they had the same information and 2 Platoon of A Company 3 Para were already routing to the grid from the east.

Nick and Jon were still hunting for the white pick-up. They were over the area of the grid, knowing that this posed a greater threat to the boys on the ground than they perhaps realised. If it knocked us out of the sky, they’d have a helicopter rescue mission on their hands.

With that in mind we moved fractionally north, leaving them to hunt for the pick-up. I still maintained a wide-enough orbit to pass over our lads every couple of minutes; with a bit of luck it would keep the Taliban diving for cover.

Billy looked into the intelligence grid; all we could make out was the edge of a field, a north-south track bordered by a wall, and a compound about fifty metres due east.

We had no other information about the target. The obvious feature was the compound; the only fire we’d encountered in our short brush with the Taliban in Afghanistan was from a compound, and the blood trails must have led somewhere.

The area was totally enclosed, with a double wall on its eastern side bordering a wood which stretched 500 metres to the main wadi-our perimeter. Opposite it was a large white steel gate, the only access point to the compound. What appeared to be five open garages ran along the northern wall. I saw shadow movement in the furthest east, but couldn’t identify it. I needed to tell the CO’s men, and find out where they were.

Widow Seven Two said he had a few hundred metres to go; I requested another flash from his mirror.

The signal was easy to see; they were in a sunlit clearing in the wood, closer to the target than we’d anticipated, tracking directly to the intelligence grid. They’d break out into open fields if they continued. I instructed him to continue west then turn south ten metres short of the wood line and contour the edge of the wood until they reached the double wall. It should give them the element of surprise and afford them whatever cover was available.

Widow Seven Two called when he was at the wall. I talked them round the perimeter until they were on the track just west of the compound. They gathered by the gates and studied their maps.

I saw the JTAC look up.

‘Wildman Five One, this is Widow Seven Two. The grid we have is some fifty metres west, in another compound.’

‘Wildman Five One, there isn’t a compound fifty metres west. The wall you’re looking at isn’t a compound wall; it’s just got a track on the other side of it, and then a field. The field stretches about 100 metres to an orchard and that’s it. No buildings or compounds.’

Billy had called Nick and Jon to join us as the pick-up was nowhere to be seen and there was little else happening. Jon and I flew contra-rotating orbits around the whole area, with us high on the inside and them lower on the outside so we could both fire at the centre point without hitting each other.

I told Widow Seven Two that if they wanted to check out that area they’d have to follow the wall north initially then turn back down the track for fifty metres. From there they could look west and see the empty field for themselves.

We gauged our fuel and reminded Saxon Ops that we would need 3 Flight to leave in the next five minutes. I was pleased with our performance. We hadn’t killed anyone we weren’t supposed to and 3 Para felt safe enough to patrol around Now Zad looking for an intelligence target.

Saxon came back to me a minute or two later.

‘There will be no RIP, I spell, Romeo, India, Papa. On your return to base you are to refuel, rearm and go back to Now Zad immediately.’

Something must have flared up elsewhere in the AOR; 3 Flight must have deployed to support other troops in contact. We let Nick and Jon know. I felt a hollowness in my gut at the prospect of the ground troops being without Intimate Support again.

Nick and Jon hadn’t spotted anything suspicious and nor could we. I took advantage of the lull in activity to inform the CO of our predicament and asked Widow Seven Two if we should break station now and come back asap or wait until we’d reached chicken fuel. He told me to wait out while they asked the CO.

The Paras moved down the wall in single file. Billy scoured the area for Taliban while I maintained over-watch of the troops. I could see the lead soldier; he wasn’t much more than a boy. As he reached the end of the south wall he’d be able to see across open ground towards the orchard.

I heard Widow Seven Two’s microphone click open to reply as the lad and his immediate successor stepped clear of the wall. I saw the wall explode and heard a massive weight of machine-gun fire over the JTAC’s radio.

Dirt, rock and soil erupted from the trail and wall. I saw a figure tumble back towards the wall. A pair of legs shot up out of the dust. I knew it was the young soldier I’d just delivered to the Taliban on a plate.

I yelled across to Nick: ‘Contact. They’ve been contacted.’ I thought for a second. ‘There are no troops further west than the north-south track; watch and shoot.’

Someone shouted from the ground, ‘Contact. Wait Out.’ Someone struggling to make himself heard above the explosions hammering their position.

My mouth was dry. I had the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that comes the second you realise you’ve done something extremely bad. My mind raced. I couldn’t see enough through the dust to know if the boys were still alive.

Was it me?

I could see men taking cover behind the wall as it disintegrated above their heads.

Was it my fault?

No one was moving a muscle down there.

Why did they break cover by walking straight around the corner? I’d lulled my own men into a false sense of security. I couldn’t see any fire coming from the orchard. Where were they being contacted from?

I flicked my attention between the orchard and my fallen soldier. He’d been catapulted backwards at such a rate he must have been badly hit.

I needed to get on with my job or there’d be more blood on my hands.

Billy searched desperately for the enemy firing position.

The wall our boys were behind was still being smashed to smithereens. The fire could only be coming from the orchard, but where?

We could have hosed down the whole wood with rockets and cannon but we were not in the business of indiscriminate fire, and we’d raise such a dust storm we’d not know if we’d actually hit anyone.

‘Widow Seven Two, this is Wildman – can you see the firing point?’

‘Stand by to watch our tracer.’ The mayhem I could hear through my earpieces was outrageous. Why couldn’t we see anyone firing at them?

‘Standing by.’

I told Nick and Jon to watch out for the tracer indication.

I could see a couple of our guys firing through holes in the wall but couldn’t see a hint of tracer. Those that weren’t firing were down on their belt buckles, some in the foetal position.

I suddenly realised why we couldn’t see the tracer. They were less than 100 metres from the orchard. Tracer started to burn at 110.

‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman. I cannot see your tracer or any enemy. Can you see the firing point?’

‘It’s 100 metres to our west.’ The sound of incoming was as ferocious as ever.

The orchard frontage was a few hundred metres long and we were running out of fuel. I still needed a clearer description. If we could pinpoint the Taliban position we could deal with it. If we simply hosed the place down our boys could be targeted again as soon as we broke station.

‘From the bottom of the wall…’ I said, ‘go 100 metres across the field with a couple of bushes in it…there’s a low wall on the forward edge of the wood…where’s the firing point from this wall?’

‘That is the area of the firing point.’

‘Gunner – Target – HMD.’ I brought Billy’s TADS into position.

Billy slaved to the area and quickly identified the wall. It was deep in the shadow of the trees and the enemy could have been hiding behind it. We asked Jon and Nick to keep eyes-on as we fired onto the target.

We were happy with the cannon’s accuracy but really concerned about the proximity of our lads. Any rounds that failed to explode could ricochet from the wall and the frag could also hit them at ninety. We decided to fire from behind our lads’ right and over their heads. All the rounds would be travelling away from them, blowing any frag or rock in the opposite direction. Or so I hoped…

Billy needed to make sure his range was stable and accurate; any miscalculation and our rounds would fall short. We were about to do what I had nixed in the simulator – unless there were absolutely no other options.

Without hesitation, Billy called firing and I broadcast the call.

‘Firing now… confirm splash.’

We were about 1,200 metres away as the cannon ramped itself backwards and the first few rounds pumped from the barrel. From this point onwards it was in its optimum position. The remaining seventeen HEDP rounds exited without pause and streaked towards the wall.

At the bottom of the MPD image by my right knee I could see the wall and our lads hiding behind it. The wall Billy was aiming at was at the centre of the screen; the top half of it covered the sunlit trees. I stopped breathing as the rounds flew in towards the target in an untidy conical pattern, in what looked like slow motion, each maintaining exactly the same distance from the next.

They exploded bang-fucking-on, hurtling rocks and soil twenty metres into the air.

The radio burst into life. ‘One hundred metres north, 100 metres north.’

As we followed the JTAC’s instruction Billy adjusted and opened up at the tree line with another twenty-round burst. The wall had stopped further south.

‘Firing now.’

By the time the nineteenth and twentieth rounds were reverberating through my feet the first were impacting the dry soil and dirt at the edge of the orchard.

A dust cloud mushroomed out of the trees at the edge of the field.

‘Fifty metres further north, fifty metres further north, that’s where the firing point is.’

Jon came up on the radio, the pitch of his voice higher than normal: ‘We’ve picked up the Taliban firing point, just north of your last burst.’

I barked, ‘Put down a burst and I’ll confirm with the Widow that you’re in the right area.’

This was getting better. The Widow and Jon were talking about the same place. I looked down at the boys. They hadn’t moved and the wall was still being blown to bits. Whoever was in this wood wanted protection and had the means to do it.

Billy moved his sight fifty metres further north and Nick and Jon’s rounds impacted right over his crosshair.

‘Good rounds,’ The Widow shouted back. ‘Good rounds.’

‘Wildman Five Zero, Wildman Five One, we’re going to fire into the same area with you.’

I had the fleeting image of two men lying in the shadows behind the shit Nick had just kicked up, then Billy and Nick opened up in a coordinated attack. They took it in turns to pound the target, with no let-up between bursts-one, then the other.

My eyes darted between the devastation and A Company’s 2 Platoon. They weren’t going anywhere fast but I made out some movement between bursts onto the target. I counted four individual movements in the same vicinity before the dust storm closed in; they were either rolling or trying to crawl.

It dawned on me that we hadn’t updated Ops on our mission.

‘Saxon Ops, Wildman Five One. Both callsigns engaging Taliban in tree line as troops withdraw, out.’

After spitting 120 bundles of hell into the tree line, both Billy and Nick stopped when Billy transmitted, ‘Watch and shoot.’

The entire field and wood had disappeared under a dust cloud a hundred feet high. But the lesson we identified earlier was now a lesson learned. No one down there would live to crawl away this time. There would be no rescue party to drag them to safety.

I looked towards the end of the wall, expecting the worst.

‘Look at that!’ I pointed my crosshair at the lads as they got up, brushed off the dust and began to saunter back up the track. I couldn’t make out any stretchers, but I couldn’t see everyone from this angle.

Jon and I kept our orbits tight around the orchard so Nick and Billy could look for leakers – Taliban trying to escape – but we were hampered by low fuel.

‘Widow Seven Zero, this is the Wildmen. We’re going to have to RTB to get some gas. We’ll be back as soon as we can to assist in your withdrawal.’ I thought they might want to hang fire until we got back, considering what happened last time the Apaches left.

‘Widow Seven Zero, good shooting. Thanks, but we’re bugging out and look forward to your return.’ Jesus, these men were made of stern stuff.

‘No problem. Were there any casualties from that contact?’

‘No. Thanks to you we all got out okay.’

‘Thanks, we’ll stay on this frequency to relay any messages on our way back and will call you inbound later.’

‘Copied, safe flight.’

I was wondering how on earth the young soldier had survived. He must have been a bloody acrobat; those legs were upside down. Lady Luck must have been on our side.

The Taliban could not have escaped north or south because we would have picked them up. They had not egressed through the orchard. The rear of it was too open and they would have been easy to spot in the light cover. They must have died where they were hit, but we couldn’t wait around long enough to find out.

Our troops were safe.

Billy and I only had 510 pounds of fuel left and needed to get back asap.

We turned for home.

I flicked the MPD onto the performance page: ‘RANGE SPEED 117 KTS’. The computer had calculated the optimum speed to maximise our remaining fuel. I set our speed to 117 knots, put Bastion on the centre of the heading tape, triggered the height and attitude hold and let her fly us back home. As Scottie had taught me on my CCT course, she was a much better pilot than I was.

0325 hours local

My watch alarm went off and I forced open my eyes. It felt like only minutes since I’d crashed out.

I was shagged out, absolutely ball-bagged. We all were. We’d finished Op Augustus a couple of days before, and had been out the whole of yesterday. We hadn’t got more than a couple of hours’ sleep.

I strapped my head torch round my wrist then pulled on some shorts and a pair of desert boots. My flying suit was at the aircraft.

I joined the others at the Burco boiler. There wasn’t much chatter. What was there to talk about, except how completely fucked we were? I had my own coffee maker. I threw in some ground coffee Emily had posted to me, poured on boiling water and pushed down the plunger without waiting long enough.

It was pitch-black outside, but as warm as an English summer’s day. You could wander about in no more than a T-shirt and there was no chill to your skin. The nights were also absolutely, totally still, not a breath of wind.

We blundered our way to the Ops room, across ditches and berms. The Chinook IRT/HRF pilots and loadies fell in alongside us. Brews in hand, everyone was quiet. We’d got to the point where we didn’t really want to wake up. We were going through the motions, following where our exhausted bodies led.

Simon and I now flew as one pair and Jake and Jon the other, in what had become the newly constituted 2 Flight. Jake had turned up several weeks earlier following the birth of his first child, a little boy, Finn, at the end of May.

His arrival had coincided with a squabble over which flights were getting the most action. Dan’s 1 Flight and Pat’s 3 Flight had gone head to head, with 2 Flight-us-left on the sidelines. Some form of organised rotation would have sorted things out in an instant. It was all a bit ridiculous.

Jake’s response was typically phlegmatic. ‘I don’t care how many hours I fly or how many missions I do or don’t go on,’ he’d said, when we told him the score. ‘I’m not here to indulge in a load of bitching about who gets the plum jobs and which flight is the boss’s favourite. I only care about two things: doing what we’re asked to do, to the best of our ability, and getting home safely. And now I’m ready for a brief.’

Between then and now the Taliban had seriously raised the stakes.

We knew they were planning a spectacular; they’d set their hearts on either taking a District Centre or shooting down a helicopter.

Now Zad, Sangin and Musa Qa’leh were all under increasing levels of Taliban attack. Our lads were barely holding their own, and at considerable cost. The bases were grandly named District Centres – but, in fact, each held no more than a platoon, so the CO 3 Para was constantly forced to shift troops to whichever location was in most imminent danger of being overrun. We were forever chaperoning Chinooks, moving men between one DC and the next.

A Company 3 Para had moved into Sangin on 21 June, right on the doorstep of what our most secret order believed to be the Taliban’s southern headquarters. They were ordered to hold it at all costs. They were under heavy fire morning, noon and night. The cost was high. Five British soldiers had been killed in nine days.

Our job had been to pound the few hundred metres around the DCs pretty much 24/7. The troops on the ground were knackered, we were knackered, and the Chinook crews were two steps beyond zombie mode. They were having the toughest time of all.

Where they’d failed in Now Zad, the Taliban were succeeding in Sangin and Musa Qa’leh. They had good fields of fire onto the DCs and were hitting and killing British troops on a regular basis.

We were at our most vulnerable when flying casevac sorties, as the enemy well knew. The risk evaluation to the flight and medical crews on board the Chinooks was now so extreme they were only cleared to go into Sangin or Musa Qa’leh if an injured soldier would die unless he got to hospital in an hour. Now Zad was heading in the same direction. Even with the Shrine shielding the LS, we were running out of ways of getting safely in and out. The minute that happened, the troops would go without resupplies – like those holed up in Sangin and Musa Qa’leh.

In the meantime, intelligence had picked up plenty of Icom chatter between Taliban commanders about taking a helicopter out. There were reports of at least one shoulder-launched missile and possibly an anti-aircraft gun in the area.

We’d flown supporting missions throughout, even though the air temperature was regularly near 50°. Our operating limit of 44° Celsius was finally increased to 49° on 5 July, so at least we wouldn’t have the book thrown at us if we fucked up while flying beyond the Release To Service (RTS).

Now Zad, Sangin and Musa Qa’leh had been under sustained Taliban attack for a month solid. Because we’d been flying our aircraft around the clock, we’d been ordered to ‘slow-fly’ them for a week or so – cut the hours right down – but that was easier said than done; it was like the Alamo out there.

Jake glanced at his watch and groaned. ‘This timetable is killing me.’

‘Three and a half hours ahead of the UK?’ I croaked. ‘Where the hell did the half come from?’

It was common sense that 3 Para were on local time: they worked with the locals. Seven in the morning was 0700 local, and bingo, breakfast was served. Fast air worked differently. A B1 bomber from Diego Garcia, a Nimrod from Lossiemouth, an F15 from a ship in the Arabian Gulf and a pair of Apaches from Bastion could all be working together, so we all worked on GMT. To airborne assets there was no 0700 local; it was 0330 GMT and breakfast arrived in the middle of the night.

We still had to integrate with ground units, of course, so 0330 local was midnight to us, and that was when the codes changed and all the frequencies flipped over. It was barking mad. The codes changed, we were briefed, and we went back to bed again. It made sense that the changeovers took place at the quietest time; most attacks were during the day, it was heavy on the aircraft, and it was hot. But months passed before some bright spark worked out we could simply change over at the 1900 evening brief and everyone could get a solid night’s sleep.

However, for now, this was just the way it was.

The Ops tent was lit up like Wembley Stadium. We stumbled in and gathered round the map table. I was starting to wake up.

One of the Chinook boys checked the weather computer and came back with the forecast min and max temperatures, wind speed and direction. It was going to be red hot, a ten knot westerly blowing dust.

Kenny, one of our watchkeepers, told us what had happened in-theatre over the last twenty-four hours. ‘Now Zad’s being fired at again regularly. Half an hour after last light, the rounds started once more.’

The Taliban waited till it was dark, extracted their weapons from wherever they hid them, set them up, and started firing into the base. Half an hour of mortars and rockets then they’d stop. They knew our reaction times. They’d wait another hour or so then start again. Ken said Now Zad was also receiving accurate fire from a sangar that they were calling the Turret.

Then came briefs on Kajaki, Musa Qa’leh, Sangin, FOB Robinson and Gereshk. It always followed the same order – clockwise around the DCs and Forward Operating Bases – ending up at Helmand’s HQ in Lashkar Gah. We learned what had been happening to them physically on the ground, the routes, callsigns and timings of any patrols due out.

We then went on to the J2; intelligence. Jerry, our IntO, gave us his interpretation of any reports that had come through.

We were taking over IRT/HRF tonight. Jake and Jon were the IRT, callsign Wildman Five Zero. Simon and I were HRF, Wildman Five One; he and I were qualified in both seats and swapped regularly to keep up our flying and shooting skills. For this duty Simon would be in the front, I’d be in the back.

Brief over, it was always the same routine on a changeover night. We had to load up the aircraft and check them over. Brew recharged, the four of us wandered down to the aircraft. It was still pitch-black, and there wasn’t a single light out towards the flight line because it fucked with our night vision goggles (NVG).

The Milky Way arced in front of me, a swathe of cosmic confetti. I stared open-mouthed at Orion’s Belt and every one of the Seven Sisters, stars I’d never seen with the naked eye before. A couple of satellites drifted across the heavens. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

I suddenly felt achingly lonely, and a long way from home. I’d have given anything at that precise moment to have been lying on my back with Emily and the kids, heads touching, gazing up at the night sky, making up our own star signs from the shapes we could see.

A stumble on a rock brought me back down to earth, literally. I was on my knees, mouth full of dust, vaguely aware of a tired chortle from Simon, Jon and Jake somewhere nearby.

A few minutes down a rough track brought us to the hangar. Only the duty technician was awake; all the rest were sound asleep in various odd corners. They worked longer hours than we did, with precious few breaks. They’d only just finished and would be up in a couple of hours, so we crept past them like cat burglars.

We headed for our F700 books and checked how many flying hours we had available, any new restrictions or limitations, and what faults the Apache was carrying.

I signed the aircraft out. It was now on my flick.

I placed my most recent letter from Emily in the drawer of my locker. I sanitised myself, searching every pocket for anything I shouldn’t be carrying. I took out my NVG-compatible torch. It took two runs to get all my kit to the aircraft.

The HRF aircraft was always in the second bay – Arming Bay Two – but I still checked the tail with my torch to make sure it was ZJ227. The IRT cab sat to our left in Arming Bay One; it saved time and confusion on a scramble.

I took the starboard side and Simon took the port as we walked around the fuselage. The inspection was essentially what Scottie had taught me back at Middle Wallop, but now, instead of just noting there was a gun under the chin of my chariot, I inspected it carefully – that it was clean, it moved okay, the electrical connections were made, and most important of all, that it had big, dark yellow-banded HEDP cannon rounds leading down the feed chute.

The Hellfire missiles always impressed me. The seeker on the front was a work of art; I could see the precision engineering through the glass I polished with my sweat-rag. ‘AGM-114K’ was stencilled in bright yellow down the side of each. I made sure they were securely latched down before moving on to the rocket launchers, checking that their black noses were securely in place. I shone my torch down each tube. There were twelve HEISAP rockets, with their tiny but unmistakable six-spoked silver tips, and seven Flechettes, which just had a plain nosecone to protect the darts. All the blast paddles were down at the back of the launcher. The rockets were held securely in place, electrical contacts made. The Hellfire’s strakes – that enabled it to climb, turn and dive – all moved freely.

I lifted the little triangular panel behind the APU to the rear of the starboard engine and checked the pressure. I unclipped the eighteen-inch pipe, stuck it onto the spigot and gave it about fifty pumps, adding more pressure to the accumulator. I wanted the needle deep in the green. Unlike other aircraft, the Apache started on air pressure; it didn’t need an external electrical source. No matter where we were in the world, you could start this aircraft. I replaced the pipe in its bracket and closed the panel.

I dropped to my knees and opened the bottom hatch, which we called the boot. I always had my kit set in the same order – chest webbing on the bottom, flak jacket next and battle bowler perched on the top – with a bungee stretched over the lot so it stayed exactly where I wanted it. If we crashed behind enemy lines, I’d go straight under the wing, wrench open the boot and cut the bungee. I’d remove my escape jacket, don the helmet, flak jacket, webbing and replace the escape jacket over the top. Then I’d be off.

The flare dispenser was packed full; I would have woken the boys up there and then if even one had been missing. Along with the Bitch, these puppies were top of the list of things keeping me alive at altitude.

I walked down the tail, scanning every square inch to make sure it hadn’t been bumped into. I made sure that the tail wheel was locked so the wind – if it ever got up at night – wouldn’t blow her around. The position of the huge horizontal stabilator was even more critical. We always forced the aircraft to leave it in the horizontal position before closing down; if we didn’t, it would drop down at the rear. The Americans had once had a bit of a problem in strong winds. The wind caught them and flipped over a whole row of aircraft.

‘Your side okay, Ed?’ Simon asked.

‘Yep. Just check my cowlings and catches on the way down. I’ll do yours.’ It was easy to leave a panel open so we always checked each other’s work after the inspection.

I opened the cockpit, attached my carbine to the seat bracket and put a magazine of tracer on it. I threw my grab bag – what I referred to as my ammo bag – next to the seat and jumped in. I pushed the Data Transfer Cartridge (DTC) into its housing, pulled on my helmet, and fired up the APU. I made sure the aircraft was set up for night, turning down all the levels so I could barely see a thing. I pulled forward the coaming cover on top of the dash, flipped up the left batwing and Velcroed it to the top of the cowling. No light would leak from the left of the cockpit. I couldn’t do the starboard side right now because I had to climb out of the door.

I uploaded my information from the DTC and checked that the new codes had uploaded into the radios. We couldn’t afford another cock-up like we had on Op Mutay. The Apache’s radios were temperamental and we were learning the hard way.

Jon was the comms guru and reckoned he’d now fixed the radio problems we’d been plagued with since our arrival. I set them up ready for him to put them through their paces.

‘Wildman Five One, Wildman Five Zero,’ he called.’Check on one…

‘On two…’

I followed him through each one, making sure I could hear him. I flipped to radio three.

‘On three…’

I heard the beep confirming that he had sent his aircraft’s position digitally via the Improved Data Modem over the fourth radio.

I looked down. His icon appeared next to mine on the MPD’s Tactical Situational Display (TSD) page, confirming the IDM and fourth radio both worked.

I called, ‘Good data’, meaning I could receive and had his icon, but we were only half done. The system was so complex that hearing and receiving data didn’t mean you could transmit and be heard. And we needed to prove my IDM could send too.

I repeated the procedure in reverse and pushed the Present Position button on my MPD.

‘Good data, closing down.’

Once I was sure we had no snags I set the stabilator to horizontal and powered everything down again. I wedged my Flight Reference Cards between the coaming and its cover, put one of my gloves on the cyclic to remind me not to touch it with a bare hand when it was hot, then put my helmet on the dash. I climbed out, threw my escape jacket back on the seat and closed the door.

Simon and I wandered back up to the Ops room and let them know we were off to bed. Then it was back across the road, kit off, and into our scratchers.

The sky over Now Zad was cobalt blue, a stark contrast with my first view of it during my initiation six weeks ago. There wasn’t any smoke or sign of battle. The place looked like a ghost town.

‘Widow Seven One,’ Jake called, ‘this is Wildman Five Zero and Wildman Five One. We have 600 cannon, seventy-six rockets and four Hellfires. Five minutes to run to the overhead. Confirm all friendly forces are in the DC and the Shrine?’

‘A-firm affirmative; hurry up please.’

Shit. The short hairs rose on the back of my neck. It wasn’t protocol to use ‘please’ in fire control orders, even in the opening calls. Widow Seven One was a top JTAC; for him to say please, the situation must be desperate.

‘Wildman Five Zero,’ Jake said, ‘any civvies in the area?’

He got a nervous laugh. ‘You must be joking. They all moved out long ago.’ I could hear loud bangs in the background but none of the gunfire we were used to when the troops were in contact.

‘Copied,’ Jake replied.

The Shrine momentarily blocked my view. As we closed in I saw the bright white building beside the DC. It looked brand new.

‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. Four minutes to run. Where are they attacking from?’ Jake asked.

‘Widow Seven One. We’re getting smashed to pieces from the north. They’ve tunnelled between the terraced houses and every house on our east is firing at us. Stand by for more…’

I could hear the distinctive cracks and snaps of bullets passing the JTAC and sporadic pops and bangs.

‘…and we think they’re trying to get through the southern wall,’ he continued, ‘but we can’t really tell because the sangars have been taken out.’

Bloody hell, he had no men on lookout. They must be under some horrendous fire.

‘Copied. Three minutes to run,’ Jake said. ‘I can see a white H-shaped building just to your south.’

‘Widow Seven One. A-firm. Hurry up. We’re having a grenade fight over the southern wall.’

The Harriers had been crashed at the same time as us. We were still supposed to hand over to them when they arrived. It was just as well they hadn’t. Harriers with their bombs and rockets can’t shoot anywhere near this close to our own troops; they would have been unable to help them.

Fuck, neither can we really…

My view of the white building was improving. It was orientated side-on to us and shaped like an ‘H’. Just behind it was the base. It looked like they were virtually joined together. I knew they weren’t, because I’d looked down there on a few occasions. There was a tight alleyway.

When the troops came out for a resupply run, they would turn right and then right again to go down the alleyway between the white building and the southern wall of the DC. This was going to be tight.

The Taliban had been changing their tactics ever since we kicked off on Op Mutay. Prior to 4 June they had engaged Apaches in the open and had little respect for them. They rushed around taking potshots at us and then laid their weapons down.

After we’d spanked their arses in Now Zad they’d do anything to attack when Apache cover wasn’t expected. Now they only fought hard from concealed cover. They were tailoring their attacks to our reaction times. Thirty minutes of fighting followed by a break then thirty minutes of fighting, on and on until the early hours. This war of attrition had gone on, day and night, for weeks. It was wearing the troops down.

The Taliban were so wary of us, they’d tunnelled through buildings to get as close to the DC as possible. They’d bluffed us earlier with a half-hearted attack to test Apache cover, and when we didn’t turn up they went for it.

We’d now arrived with the battle raging and we stood a chance of catching the scumbags with their pants down. My only worry was proximity. Too close and we’d either shoot and risk killing our own troops or hold fire and film their deaths instead. I needed a piss badly now.

I looked down at the screen by my knee. Simon’s TADS image gleamed in the midday sun. There was no sign of activity in the main street.

We kicked left of the Shrine by about a kilometre, as if to go round Now Zad. Jon kicked right. We were separated by about a kilometre and getting into combat attacking positions on the DC’s southern flank.

Our sights and sensors zoomed in the white building. Puffs of smoke blossomed along its rooftop.

We tracked west of the town, and came in perpendicular to the alleyway between the DC and the white building; the area of interest. The place was heaving with Taliban, whirling like dervishes as they lobbed grenades over the fifteen-foot wall. Our guys in the DC were flinging back their own.

They had been forced out of their sangars at the south-east and south-west corners of the DC by weight of fire, so had no idea their grenades were exploding ineffectively on the enemy’s roof.

Robed figures moved backwards and forwards between the alleyway and the building, rearming with grenades.

‘Bring me onto them,’ Simon snapped.

I dragged across the cyclic and buried it in the inside of my right thigh, throwing the aircraft into a steep banked turn. I rolled it out again, facing the DC, then leaned us over so we moved crablike until I’d lined us up with the alleyway.

At this point, Jon and Jake were still wheeling round to our left.

I brought them up to speed. ‘We’ve got Taliban in the alleyway to the south of the DC and PIDd them as hostile. Tipping in on a gun run, but it’s danger close so call for clearance quickly.’

‘I’ve seen them, stand by.’ Jon broke off to speak with the JTAC. Positive ID lobbing grenades was sufficient for ROE to engage but the proximity wasn’t. It was scary. Danger close was a major league understatement.

‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. We’ve PID’d them. They are danger close. Repeat, danger close. Confirm you want us to fire.’

Widow dropped his callsign to make the calls quicker. ‘How accurate is your thirty mil?’

‘I can put them through the window if you want,’ Jake replied, ‘but I repeat, they are danger close. Danger close. Get your men under cover with body armour and helmets on if you want us to engage.’

That was brave. He could post them right through the window in theory. In practice, I wasn’t so sure. Neither of us had fired this gun and we didn’t have time to test it either.

I’d pulled the stick back and dropped the collective to slow our approach until we got permission to fire. I could see the Taliban still criss-crossing the five metres between the alleyway and their building.

The JTAC came back to us within thirty seconds.

‘A-firm. Clear hot.’

Jon jumped in: ‘Checkfire! Don’t fire!’

‘Checkfire,’ I called back.

We were running in. I threw the stick left and slowed her right down. Then I crabbed her to the right, hugely reducing our closing speed, so Simon could keep the TADS on the enemy, ready for the call.

Come on! We need to get the shot in here! The Taliban had seen our approach and run for cover.

‘Acknowledge danger close with your initials and your clearance,’ Jon said.

We didn’t have cockpit recorders. If there was a board of inquiry, Jon wanted to be able to say: ‘He knew we were danger close because he said danger close. To confirm it, here are his initials.’ That was what made him one of the best SupFACs around. He was way ahead of the game.

‘A-firm, Charlie Alpha-Charlie Alpha – that’s a danger close, danger close. Clear hot, clear hot. Acknowledge.’

‘Charlie Alpha, danger close. Clear hot,’ Jake copied, cool as cucumber.

‘Running in,’ Simon called to Jake.

I could see everything on the MPD. Simon placed his crosshairs where the roof stopped and the wall facing us began. I turned us head-on to keep his sight as steady as it could be.

‘Only go for ten rounds, buddy.’ I didn’t want to cramp Simon’s style, but I didn’t want things to go horribly wrong.

‘I’ve already set it to ten. And I’m only going to pull a few of them off.’

Good call. He wasn’t going for a normal combat burst of twenty. The longer the burst, the greater was the chance of accidental movement. If you fired a fifty-round burst, it meant five seconds of holding that crosshair absolutely dead still with an aircraft that’s swooping towards the target. I was going to have to hold her steady and point straight at them to give Simon a fighting chance.

‘Do you think it’s accurate enough?’ he said.

The slightest accidental movement of his thumb would shift the TADS and moving at that speed the weapons computer would assume he was tracking the target.

We were flying at thirty knots. The Hughes M230, single-barrel, externally powered 30 mm chain gun had a three-millimetre error. At this distance – 2,000 metres – that equated to six metres.

And the gun wasn’t the only variable. I doubled the figures in my head – make that as much as twelve metres at this range. So some of our rounds could land in the compound. One thousand five hundred metres should bring the fudged error down to about nine metres – clear of the compound – if Simon was a good enough shot. If not, we’d have an authorised blue-on-blue.

‘Mate, this is it. Three mil error, double it to six for the wife and kids. Two thousand metres is twelve mils and that’s inside the compound. We need to be at a maximum of 1,500, which gives us nine. You don’t want to fire before fifteen, buddy.’

I had to hold this thing 100 per cent steady, Simon had to perform flawlessly, and we didn’t even know if the cannon was capable of hitting the target he aimed at. We both knew that if our rounds zapped into the compound, we’d be highly likely to kill or seriously injure our own troops. We would also be putting ourselves right in the Taliban’s engagement zone; we’d be sitting ducks.

Whatever we did, it was going to be a nightmare down there.

We were busting every rule, doing everything our training told us not to do.

But what choice did we have? If the enemy broke through it would be like a knife fight in a bar. We’d be useless.

We had a JTAC under such immediate threat that he was prepared to risk bringing rounds down on his own men to save the majority and hold the base. To them, surrender was not an option; the Taliban would skin every one of them alive.

We had one shot and this was it.

I accelerated to sixty knots so I had speed to manoeuvre if we were shot at.

I called down the range. ‘One point nine…One point eight…’

‘Nice and steady, Simon. Any movement will throw those rounds.’

‘I fucking know that, Ed.’

Of course, he did. But just saying it made me feel better.

I saw figures spilling out into the alleyway again. They moved towards the DC wall with what looked like a wooden cross in their hands.

Simon had his TADS on the same point – he had no choice but to hold it perfectly still – and I was still counting down. Simon had zoomed in to make sure there was no error on trigger pull, and when you zoomed in at that range, the image on the screen was massive.

The figures moved out of the frame and I looked up to see what they were up to. They’d got to the base of the wall.

‘…One point six… one point five…’

A split second before Simon pulled the trigger, they bomb-burst away from the wall and ran back towards the building, dragging the cross with them.

The gun pumped. My feet vibrated. Simon’s crosshairs never moved a millimetre. I saw the counter on the MPD drop quickly from 300 to 295 as the rounds swirled away, but didn’t need to look; I’d heard and felt five distinctive thumps.

After throwing their grenades, the last three Taliban returned to what they thought was the safety of their building, just as the rounds ploughed into the wall and roof. I saw all five rounds impact. Three bored small black holes in the roof and the two that hit the wall head-on made a much bigger splash. To the casual observer it must all have looked pretty insignificant, but to me it meant one thing: the gun was on. It was Deadeye Dick.

I called Delta Hotel – Direct Hit – on the JTAC’s frequency.

My jubilation was swept aside by Widow Seven One. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

I broke hard right with the cyclic and ripped up the collective from the floor, climbing away from the building. We’d descended to 1,000 feet and were now 1,000 metres away from the Taliban. I’d been trying to keep the same aspect all the way, and I didn’t want to change the profile of the aircraft while Simon was fighting to keep his crosshair still.

I flew the death profile, straight into their eyes. If they stood their ground now and decided to fire, they could shoot us just as easily as we could shoot them. I shouldn’t have been doing it. But there was no one looking up at us – the men I’d seen on the street had run back. My only concern was that these rounds had gone into the compound. I’d witnessed the damage they did to buildings and the men hiding within.

‘STOP STOP STOP,’ the JTAC repeated. ‘Your rounds are landing inside the DC. Copy?’

Simon yelled, ‘Fuck!’

‘Wildman has stopped,’ I called back. I craned my head over to the left as the DC came into view. No one was firing up at us; it was just dust billowing in our own courtyard.

Fuck, had Jake blown it and hit the compound? I couldn’t see Wildman Five One. They’d continued round the wheel and would have set themselves up to cover us. I knew Jon would be right behind me in my six o’clock position, with Jake’s cannon at the ready. As we broke off our attack run, Jake would fire straight down to cover our sharp break. Setting up the racetrack, we called it, or setting up a pattern – one shooting, one setting up, then one breaking off, one running in.

Jon came through: ‘Mate, you hit the DC.’

What the fuck was he thinking?

I guess he thought we’d just fired a ten- or twenty-round burst, only saw a few splashes on top of the building and assumed the rest had raked the compound.

I flung the Apache onto its left side as we hit altitude and spotted Jon and Jake off to the west, where we’d begun our attack run.

I flipped onto the inter-aircraft radio and pressed the mic button on the cyclic while Simon scoured the target and DC for enemy and friendly fire. ‘We didn’t. Every round landed on the building. Did you fire to cover our break?’

This wasn’t a bitching contest. I just needed to confirm my theory.

‘Negative,’ Jake said. ‘We did not fire.’

‘I thought not. I’m 100 per cent sure that it wasn’t our thirty mike mike in the DC. They were grenades, not thirty mil. I saw them being thrown from the alleyway just before we fired.’

I switched back to let the JTAC know what had happened.

‘Negative, negative. That’s not us. That’s grenades coming into your compound. We had a Delta Hotel on the building to your south. They’re trying to break into the DC. Copy?’

‘Widow Seven One, copied. Re-attack… Re-attack.’

I thanked God that as the SWO I’d been watching the rounds like a hawk. I’d been studying the effects of weapons on different buildings so I could improve our effectiveness. I’d looked at every single cannon round fired in-theatre to learn how they impacted on different surfaces, and had taught the tactics accordingly.

If you had a man running along a boggy track in the Green Zone and there was a wall behind him, you didn’t aim down at him and the ground. If the rounds missed, they were going to explode harmlessly in the earth. Smack the wall next to him as he was running and the frag would get him first time. You didn’t even have to hit the guy.

‘Wildman Five Zero, running in with ten rounds of thirty mike mike.’

Brilliant – they were on ten rounds as well.

I’d levelled off and turned the aircraft so we were on the opposite side of the target from Jon. The white building was orientated east-west. I’d run in from the west, fired the cannon rounds, kicked off south-east, then climbed, constantly turning the aircraft left so I could keep an eye on the compound. I didn’t want to fly away from it; I wanted to keep it in sight.

Simon was concentrating on his target and I was concentrating on the landscape around it. I looked for leakers so I could call Simon onto them. Exactly the same was happening in the other Apache.

Simon zoomed in to see if there was anyone in the building. He studied doorways and windows.

With a final jink we were now turned head-on. Looking down on the compound from the east, I saw Jon flying directly towards it from the west. He was much closer than us.

We were facing each other and Jake would shoot straight ahead. It wasn’t a problem; I knew the rounds were going downwards. But I had a job to do in a few seconds. There was no chance the enemy would go one-on-one with an Apache, but when we turned tail on them they’d send a heat-seeker up our backside or loose off some RPGs.

We needed to cover each other.

As soon as Jon and Jake had finished their run, I had to be in position for Simon to fire his cannon rounds at the building to cover their break – or if I saw any hostiles outside the building, to shoot them myself. By the time I’d talked Simon onto it, it would have been too late; platform protection was a split second win or lose decision.

I could see Jon tanking in towards the target.

We were 2,500 metres out and closing slowly. We were pointing nose to nose. They were closer and faster. When they turned to get away, Simon would have his crosshairs ready to go and I would be looking through the cockpit window; looking at the alleyway and the main street in front of the building for any leakers or Taliban trying to shoot up Jon’s bird.

Either of us could fire – whoever had control of the gun last. We both had weapon controls. He had the gun up and it was now slaved to his crosshairs. But if I saw something I’d call, ‘My gun’, press ‘Gun’ on the cyclic and it would jump to my eye and be under my control instead.

It was Simon’s job primarily to attack the target; to achieve mission success. He was this aircraft’s mission commander. It was mine to defend the aircraft; to maintain platform protection. If I spotted a threat to my Apache or Jon’s that took higher priority than killing a Taliban any day. It was all about mutual support. That was why we always made sure we could see and defend one another.

Simon had popped his screen out one field of view, expanding the image so he could see the whole of the white building. He could now push the crosshairs onto whatever target he wanted, steady them, and pull the trigger as and when.

I scanned the area for anyone taking a pop at my wingman. The gun wouldn’t do anything until it was slaved to my eyes. But the moment I saw something it would be: ‘My gun!’ – bang – gone. As I made the call, I’d flick up with my thumb and pull the trigger. Within a split second, rounds would pour off the aircraft.

We were running in, but still slowly. Jon was hammering down. When he passed the target he was going to have to climb and turn back as soon as possible to cover our attack run. I was holding back to give him the time to do this; he’d be doing the same on our attack run. We didn’t want two aircraft with their tails towards the target.

‘Firing,’ Jake called.

I saw a grey smudge appear under the nose of their Apache, either side of the barrel, as the cannon’s propellant hit the air after being spat out by the muzzle break. Simon scoured the building for leakers. I was primarily looking out for Jon.

‘Breaking,’ Jon called.

They broke off their run and I watched the rounds impact all along the top of the northern wing. He broke south-west, as we’d done. I watched him climb away and waited until he came up level. Their gun was smack on too. Jake’s shooting was spot on; this was going to be our day.

‘Stand by.’ This time I wasn’t going to dive. I didn’t want to drop my height. With an accurate gun and TADS Simon would cope with deadly precision. I flew level, Simon’s cannon aiming progressively lower.

Again, Simon had his crosshairs on the junction between the roof and the wall.

‘Covering.’ Jon was letting us know they were in a position to attack if we should be fired at.

‘Wildman Five One, running in with twenty rounds of thirty mike mike,’ Simon responded on the JTAC frequency.

I accelerated and as Simon pulled the trigger I called on the inter-aircraft. ‘Wildman Five One, engaging, twenty rounds, thirty mike mike.’

Rounds thumped along the wall and the roof.

Jon came on the inter-aircraft radio: ‘Not sure we’re having much effect on it.’

I said, ‘Small holes on the roof mean they’re penetrating before exploding. It’ll be devastating in there.’

‘Copied.’

The HEDP rounds were exploding against the wall. That was okay, but the frag was on the outside. The ones that hit the roof looked innocuous, but they were penetrating. I wouldn’t have wanted one joining me in the room with a thousand shards of frag and a big flame and shock wave.

‘Breaking!’ I pulled up as hard and fast as I could, flying southwest, straining to find my wingman as I came round. They were all set up.

Wildman Five Zero thundered in once he saw we were ready. He fired all over the roof. There was still nobody out in the street. They must all have been inside.

We turned back in. Simon aimed his crosshairs up a little from where he’d fired last time. As he went to pull the trigger, he called, ‘Engaging!’ and moved his line of sight slowly upwards as he pulled off a twenty-round burst. The thirty mike mike stitched their way along the roof.

No one had left the building yet.

Widow Seven One called: ‘We can hear screaming. Keep it up!’

It would have been Armageddon inside those walls.

Wildman Five Zero said, ‘I’m going for the doors and the windows – you go for the other wing.’

That made sense to me. If I’d been hiding in that first wing, I knew where I’d be trying to run. We’d repeat what we’d just done on the last run, the length of the other roof. Jake had the doors and windows covered in case they were thinking about making a break for it.

Jon and Jake drove in. I didn’t see their rounds as they ripped across the far elevation.

We ran in seconds behind and blasted another twenty-round burst along the second roof.

Smoke curled from the entrance holes and billowed from the doors and windows.

Jon and Jake fired another twenty-round burst into the main elevation of the second wing.

After several of these attack runs we’d stripped both tops and both exposed sides. The only bit we hadn’t engaged was the central, linking span of the H.

Simon said, ‘The final hiding place.’ He aimed his crosshairs at the central section of roof. Below it was a steel door. He pulled the trigger and punched rounds through the roof, the door and down to the base of the building.

Jake said, ‘Watch and shoot and look for leakers. Copy.’

We were heading west, within 1,000 metres of each other. We wheeled around, looking for movement. The only thing coming out of that building was smoke.

‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. How are things now?’

‘Widow Seven One, the grenades and shooting stopped when you started attacking. And the screaming’s stopped. Did anyone escape?’

After a brief pause Jon clicked his mic. ‘Did you see anyone?’

I said over the intercom, ‘Simon, you see anything, buddy?’

‘Negative. Not a soul.’

‘One hundred per cent no from this aircraft.’

Jake replied, ‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero – that’s 100 per cent negative. We’ll stay around for as long as we can.’

We didn’t want to leave them. If anyone had survived, they were going to have to run out of this building at some point, and when they did, we were going to nail them. Either that or they would choke to death.

We swarmed and waited for a breakout. They would have to run across the main road or head for the Shrine.

‘Widow Seven One has now got our men in the sangars again.’ The watchtowers could now see and kill any leakers themselves.

A Harrier turned up, callsign Topman, and we spoke to the Widow.

‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. With Topman on station, we’re sorry, but we’ve got to break off.’ We were under orders to save aircraft hours.

‘Thank you very much. I’ll see you tonight.’ He sounded 100 per cent more cheerful than he had when we’d turned up.

‘If it was down to us, we’d be here every night. Good luck,’ Jake replied and he meant it too.

‘Wildman Five Zero…this is Topman…You got anything for me?’

‘Negative, the place looks quiet. Speak to Widow Seven One for AOR update,’ Jake said. ‘We’re breaking for homeplate.’

We couldn’t tell Topman any more. All we’d done was turn up and hammer the white building, and we were now about to clear off. We didn’t really know anything else.

After the JTAC read out the AOR brief – what had happened and what the threat was – we headed back to base.

We fuelled up and taxied into the bays. After shutting down the engines, the lads went to work replenishing the 30 mm and the techs checked the aircraft.

We were loaded up and ready to close down before Jon and Jake so I got on the radio.

‘Saxon this is Wildman Five One, permission to close down?’

‘Saxon. Close down.’ This was a good sign. It meant that Now Zad had calmed down for the time being. Otherwise we would have been told to stay on the APU ready to take over from Topman.

Jake’s grin stretched from ear to ear as we walked into the Ops room. ‘Hey, guys! How you doin’?’ He was quite proud of his Joey impression.

Everyone looked up. There were no smiles.

‘Oh look, it’s the murderer.’ Chris shook his head.

Jake was always having the piss taken out of him royally, but not this time. This time, something was badly wrong.

‘President Karzai wants to know why we’ve slaughtered innocent Afghan nationals.’ The OC glared. ‘You do know what that building was, don’t you?’

Jake looked worried.

‘Did it look nice?’

‘Well…Yes…’

‘Nice white building? Didn’t see any red crosses on it, did you?’

‘What?’

I trawled my memory at warp speed. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable.

‘You shot up the fucking hospital.’

‘No!’ Jake went white as a sheet and glanced anxiously at the rest of us – his flight.

‘It’s called The Clinic. It’s a hospital.’

Our jaws dropped.

Jake leaned forward and pressed his hands on the Ops table to steady himself. The room remained deathly quiet.

I piped up to give him a bit of support. ‘You complied with ROE, mate. I saw Taliban running out with mousehole charges too.’

Chris burst out laughing, followed quickly by everyone else.

‘It is a clinic,’ he said. ‘But everyone left ages ago.’

We had a quick brew after the debrief, in place of the lunch we’d missed. We seemed to have lost our appetites.

‘Do you know what was worrying me most when they told me it was a clinic?’ Jon said. ‘They heard loads of screaming.’

I nodded.

‘I pictured little kids and all sorts,’ Jon said.

‘My stomach did a Fosbury Flop,’ I said.

The Taliban went to town before we’d even got our wheels back on the ground. They sent a message to Kabul to say that the Apaches had shot up a clinic and killed scores of sick and injured people. Karzai had swallowed it.

We passed the clearance issue straight to Widow Tactical Operations Cell. The JTAC said he had no choice, and that we’d done what he’d asked. Everyone who’d been to the Now Zad DC knew the building was empty and that it posed a threat to them but it didn’t stop the shit from Kabul.

There was a big debate. It went back to the ROE.

Could he see the target? Yes he could. Was that it in his sphere of influence? Yes it was. Could he have stopped the attack using a much softer approach by escalating the level of force to match the attack? No he couldn’t; they were about to go Broken Arrow. Our Charlie Alpha JTAC was off the hook, but the buck didn’t stop with him.

Kabul still wanted answers and that meant sending the tapes to the CO in Kandahar so he could judge for himself before answering up the chain of command.

With the UK government breathing down his neck, Lieutenant Colonel Felton needed some answers and fast. He rang up and made it perfectly clear that he trusted us, and if something was amiss he would still defend us when the time came. He wanted to know if we had seen anything that could have prevented the attack on the clinic, and did we use proportionality?

We saw everything and it was perfectly clear that the Taliban were using the building as a vantage point to attack the DC. They were not afraid to continue their assault in full view of us and used the building as a refuge between attacks. If we hadn’t fired and ended up leaving Now Zad after running low on fuel, they would have continued their attack.

Any fast air on call could not have dealt with a target this close to the DC. Our men there had a one-shot chance of survival. Their final chance was an Apache attack – no other airframe would have worked – to destroy all of the Taliban in the adjacent building before they either broke into the DC or we ran out of fuel.

The CO thanked us and the tapes were to be dispatched by Lynx to Kandahar for him to look at later on.

For weeks afterwards, Jake still shuddered when people walked up to him and muttered the word clinic. And many did.

I wanted an immediate debrief with our Hi-8 tapes. I gathered Simon, Jon, Jake and the Ops Officer round the little Sony hand-held to go through them and review the rules of engagement. I wanted to make a particular point about our rounds.

Jake and Jon knew by now that we hadn’t fired into the compound, but I still felt it was important to show them exactly what I’d seen.

All weapon engagements seemed to play out in slow motion to me. I’d been watching gun tapes over and over since 2003. I no longer tried to see if rounds were hitting. I looked at where the line of sight was moving, to see if the range was stable. I looked at all the tiny little things that others didn’t take in because they were too focused on the excitement of targets exploding inside the crosshairs.

On the tiny 4x3-inch screen we saw exactly what we had described to the CO. I pressed the slow motion button as soon as I saw the counter change from 300 to 299. Simon had been recording his TADS image and we were looking at what we’d seen in the Apache, only frame by frame. The round eventually struck and exploded. I let it continue frame by frame for all five rounds.

You couldn’t see the individual rounds, just their heat swirls – and then the explosions. They were separated by 1/10th of a second. It took half a second for all five rounds to impact on the building. Not one of them landed inside the compound.

‘Look at the splash here.’ I repeated the film of the rounds hitting the roof. There was a small hole where each of the shaped charges had gone clean through. ‘Hardly anything,’ I said. ‘But look where this one hit the wall. An impressive splash, but it didn’t penetrate the side of the building.’

I pressed fast-forward and there was a wisp of smoke through the holes in the roof, but nothing from the holes in the walls. Smoke billowed from windows and doors nearby.

‘When you fire at something look at the effect it’s having; only then will you know if your weapons are—’

The canvas curtain parted and the Chinook boys rushed into the Ops tent. They’d just had a call out. They came over to join us at the bird table. The flight had been saved from me rewinding once again.

The Ops Officer ran in from next door, shaking his head. Dickie Bonn was normally so cool I wondered whether he had a pulse. But normal had flown out of the window. ‘It’s Now Zad,’ he said.

The Chinook boys stared at him in disbelief. On their last outing, the Taliban had only missed them by a whisker. They didn’t let it show, but they must have been shitting themselves.

‘Is there a time frame?’ one of the pilots asked.

‘We don’t know that yet.’

Nichol Benzie, on a navy exchange with the RAF, looked at us and grinned ruefully. ‘Here we go again.’

We knew them all by name and got on well, but didn’t really socialise. Everyone pretty much kept themselves to themselves. We’d have a bit of banter when we saw them at Ops, but they tended to stay in their tent and we stayed in ours, even though they were right next to each other.

Partly, we were ashamed to invite them over. The Army Air Corps had a TV set with an old PlayStation underneath, a few books and a couple of magazines; they had stereos, a widescreen surround sound TV, Xbox, Playstations and every game going. We had camp cots lashed together; they had a real sofa. We had cots; they had beds. We had a cool box; they had a fridge. When it came to home comforts, the RAF didn’t fuck around.

We occasionally sat together at mealtimes, but not often. Maybe we didn’t want to intrude. They were at the pointy end of the stick. They got shot at and shot up on a daily basis. There was no slack with them. When they chilled out, we left them to it.

Their mission now, Dickie said, was to take two Chinook loads of troops and ammunition into the DC. Ours was to protect them.

The critical question for us both was when? Could we do it at a time of our choosing? If so, how were we going to skin the cat? Was there a way of catching them on the hop?

The question we were asking ourselves was how were we going to protect them? The short answer was that we couldn’t. We bluffed it last time and the mortars had missed them by no more than a minute.

We were now going to have to search every inch of Now Zad for a mortar base plate, a dish just a metre across with a tube sticking out of it. Thermal was no good: the tube wouldn’t be hot until they fired it, and it was too late by then. We were better off zooming in with a camera, but even then, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were just too many warren-like streets and backyards and alleys.

Where was the obvious place for a firing point? It couldn’t be right on top of the Shrine – that was too close. If they took it away into the Green Zone, we had no chance. They could be sitting under a piece of hessian, listening in to our radios. When they heard a crackle, they’d throw off the cover, fire one off, and throw it back over.

We could do prophylactic firing to try to provoke a response, but we weren’t allowed to fire at targets we hadn’t seen threaten us. We could only fire into empty desert or somewhere we knew for sure was safe.

Nichol shrugged. ‘Right, then, how are we going to do this?’

We could dump the guys in the desert a good distance from Now Zad, and let them make their way in. But they’d have to lug tons of ammunition. They could take vehicles out, but in doing so they’d alert the Taliban to their destination. The Taliban would have bags of time to get into the new firing points and hose the lads to pieces when they tried to get back to the DC.

The only viable option was to land close to the DC. And when it came to LSs, the only remaining option was south-west of the base, protected by friendly fire from the Shrine.

The one thing we knew for sure was that we couldn’t go in daylight again. The Taliban had been fed the Chinooks’ exact grid last time round, and only missed them by seconds. We’d even had a close shave at dusk.

We grabbed the Intelligence Officer. Jerry had catalogued every firing position and every time the Taliban had engaged the DC.

‘When exactly does the firing kick off in Now Zad?’

‘About half an hour after total darkness.’

‘If you were the enemy, and you were trying to set up a firing position into the DC, where would you choose?’

‘Except for today, their firing positions have nearly always been from the north through north-east to the east,’ Jerry said. ‘Never too far out; just around the main town, where they know we can’t follow up.’

‘Okay, so if you’re firing from the north or north-east, how and when are you going to do it?’

‘Taking down an aircraft is still their number one goal. They’ll have weapons in place throughout the day. They’ll only move them if they think you’re not coming. I reckon they’ll drop their weapons just after dusk, as they shift their attention back to harassing the boys on the ground.

‘It’s all part of the same agenda. They want to grind them down, in the hope of ramping up the casualty rate. They know that if they succeed, you guys will have to come in, giving them the opportunity to shoot you down.

’They won’t hang around with a weapon system set up,’ Jerry said. ‘They maintain sporadic fire 24/7, but only start hammering the DC after dark. They’re unlikely to move into the town during daylight because they know they’ll be spotted from above, especially with a heavy weapon.’

The penny dropped. They must have assumed that by knocking out six watchtowers – we found out about the other two sangars in the debrief – and lobbing over all those grenades, we must have taken loads of casualties. As it turned out, none of them were serious enough to warrant a casevac.

They’d have been waiting to ambush us all day long, and would expect us again before it got too dark.

The two best times to attack were dawn and dusk. It wasn’t quite day, it wasn’t quite night. Dusk was a great time for a drop off, but also for escaping after an ambush. The eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the darkness so errors in judging distance and recognition were rife. The crews were safer because the Taliban would struggle to pinpoint their exact location when they were at their most vulnerable – the thirty seconds to a minute on the ground. But it was also prime time for an ambush; perfect conditions for having a shot and then melting away because any follow-up would be hampered by darkness. Or so they might think.

We had a FLIR system that didn’t care whether it was day or night. As dusk fell and they moved back from their mortar or gun emplacement to the DC, the Taliban would be our perfect quarry.

Once we failed to show up for our wounded after last light, they’d assume none was critical enough to be flown out. They’d pick up their heavy weapons and carry on smashing away at the DC, as they had the last three nights on the trot.

All the combat indicators over the last few weeks signalled that they were determined to take Now Zad before the infidels changed the rules and brought in reinforcements.

We’d already tried a dusk drop off and now knew that dawn could be too late, so agreed that we’d let last light go then get down on the ground twenty minutes into darkness, when the enemy were most likely to be on the move. We’d get in and out after they’d dismantled their heavy weapons and before they’d set them back up again. A short window of opportunity – but the only one we had.

So we knew when. We just had to decide how.

The Apaches would have to sit back. There was no point in flying ahead of the Chinooks to look for weapons; we might as well use a loud hailer to warn them of their impending arrival. We’d done the arrive-and-cause-a-deception-then-bring-in-the-Chinooks-at-the-last-minute plan; the Taliban weren’t about to fall for it twice. And they knew the Apaches would only be on station a couple of hours. They’d be set, ready to fire the mortar the minute the Chinooks arrived.

Best to let the Chinooks go in first; at least they’d have no warning. The Chinooks needed to be in, drop them off and pull pitch within thirty seconds. The troops would literally have to hit the ground running.

One major worry was that the Taliban had knocked out all the generators in Now Zad; it was deathly quiet. The Chinook was not exactly stealthy, and your hearing is better at night. If they thundered across the desert as they normally did the game would immediately be up. The best way of getting them in quietly was to screen their noise behind the mountains.

The plan was coming together. As the Chinooks crept in from the west and hit the deck twenty minutes after dark, we’d punch up straight and high. Hopefully they’d be in and out before the Taliban clocked on. If they hit a Chinook, we’d lay down fire so the troops and downed crew could extract into the DC. We had to try to bolster the District Centre, whatever it took. There was no alternative. We all agreed it was our best chance of getting in and out alive.

Now we had to push it past the CO 3 Para, Lieutenant Colonel Tootal.

Dickie Bonn was away for the best part of an hour.

‘It wasn’t easy,’ he said. ‘He wants his men in there right now. He’s worried about another attack. But he appreciates our plan, and it’s a Go.’

We aimed to set off forty minutes before last light and take a wide, circuitous route. We’d fly up through the mountains, where we knew there were no occupied villages. We’d go out to the west, up to the north, and approach Now Zad from behind the ridgeline.

Then we’d come in low level, limiting the run-in so the Chinooks could only be heard on the final two klicks. Keeping close to the ground, sheltered by the Shrine, would muffle some of the noise. We reckoned they could be at the LS by the time they were heard. In the meantime, we prayed for a north-easterly wind…

As they thumped down onto the ground we would climb and separate, one going right, one left. If they landed bang on plan, twenty minutes after dusk, it would just have become pitch-black.

Plan set. Route set. We programmed it into our equipment. We were ready.

The Chinooks would fly ahead of us, as normal, on Night Vision Goggles. We would remain low too, sitting back about one kilometre so we could react to any ground fire.

No time for dinner again. Jon brought out the chocolate bars and we walked back to our aircraft.

Jon realised it must have been at least an hour since we last took the mickey out of Jake.

‘I hope your new baby boy doesn’t join the Paras, Jake. That would be most unfortunate.’

‘And why might that be, Jon?’ Jake’s grin told us he knew this was the price he had to pay for munching on one of Jon’s choccy bars.

‘He’d be called Paraffin.’

Jon always managed to lighten the mood when things were getting fraught.

We took off exactly forty minutes before last light on a completely silent departure. We wanted to give the Taliban as little to chew on as possible.

Whenever we went back to Kandahar we usually headed directly south into the desert then climbed and eventually turned east. No one would know any different until about an hour later when the Taliban reported us landing in KAF.

Camp Bastion was monitored by the Taliban’s informers and we wanted them to think this sortie was entirely routine. By lifting this early, taking that route, and not turning up at one of the bases at dusk they would assume – we hoped – that we must have gone back to Kandahar.

We approached the ridgeline to the west of Now Zad at very low level, the two Chinooks up front, engines glowing on the PNVS thermal image in my right eye, us two behind. Their tails picked up and their engines glowed brighter as they ramped up the speed round the final corner. Once round, the tails settled and their heat signature dimmed as they dropped the power back, so the blades were coasting, deadening the noise as much as they could on the last two kilometre run-in.

I silently begged the enemy not to fire.

One klick to run

Please don’t fire… please don’t fire…

Both aircraft flared, and then disappeared in a dust cloud of their own making.

At that point, Jon and I pulled up hard and separated. I went right; he went left. As we climbed, we both looked straight down. I had my gun actioned, and knew he would too. My finger was on the trigger. I had my range already set up. All I needed to do was steady, and fire.

My left eye was peeled for a burst of tracer, or a flash on the ground from anywhere around Now Zad, my right hunting for small thermal blobs or heat from a fired weapon so I could warn them of imminent incoming. The JTAC had been warned that we wouldn’t ask for an AOR update or permission to engage. We knew that our men were in the base and there were no friendlies out there. We still didn’t make communication. Even secure radios gave a telltale squelch.

Widow Seven One had been warned of our arrival time, but the information had been kept tight. He would call us once the game had been given away by our arrival. They believed that one of their resident ANP was a Taliban informer. To put them off the scent of an inbound flight over the last few weeks, the boys had periodically jumped into the vehicles, ready to roll. ‘Let’s mount up, let’s go and meet the Chinooks.’ The main gate never opened though and they all burst out laughing as they went back to what they were doing, Even the ANP saw the funny side of it.

Another variation was for Dan Rex, the OC, to have all the men chilling out, not a care in the world. They knew what time they’d be going out, but the policemen didn’t. At exactly three minutes before the go, every man would jump up, whack his body armour on, clamber onto the vehicles, and roar off to meet the helicopters.

They had to do a lot of that stuff to confuse the touts. At that time, nobody trusted the ANP. It was an awful situation. They couldn’t even have guys watching for the helicopters, because their body language would broadcast what they were up to. The commanders could only go by timings or sound. As soon as they heard the aircraft, the men piled out of the base and tanked it to the LS.

The PNVS had an awesome picture tonight; it looked more like a two-tone TV picture than an IR image. I could see the boys coming out in vehicles, under cover of the sangars. I knew they’d be as anxious as I was. There was a lot of ammunition and men to offload, and a Chinook was the biggest target going.

Now that the Chinooks were landing and the game was up, the Widow finally called us.

‘Wildman Five Zero this is Widow Seven One. How do you read?’

‘Lima Charlie.’

‘We’ve got patrols going out on the ground right now. Stand by.’

We were looking down. I was visual with Jon, and he would have been with us.

I keyed across to him on the inter-aircraft.

‘We’re visual with the patrols going out. Confirm you’ve got four vehicles.’

‘A-firm, four vehicles coming down to the north of the Shrine.’

Almost immediately, the Chinooks rose out of the dust and pegged it out of there to the south-west.

We’d done it, less than thirty seconds on the ground, a truly amazing feat from the loadies and disembarking soldiers. The Chinooks hadn’t received any fire and were now too far away to come to any harm from Now Zad. It didn’t mean that the boys on the ground were in the clear, but the prize the Taliban really wanted was a big cow.

All we had to do now was provide cover for the patrols while they got everybody back to camp and then home for a rest.

My heart raced as tracer streamed out of the base, aiming north-west. I thought north-west was a safe area. A village extended from Now Zad in that direction, but I didn’t have it down as holding Taliban. Within seconds it was like Star Wars down there.

‘They’re taking fire – I can see tracer,’ Jake shouted.

I clicked the mic. ‘Negative. That’s not incoming.’ All of the tracer was coming from the DC and it was now heading north-west, north, north-east and east.

Widow Seven One jumped in. ‘We’re under attack, we’re under attack. We’re taking heavy fire from the north-east. Can you see a firing point to the north-east?’ The north-east tracer trail had stopped.

‘Wildman Five Zero will cover the patrol,’ Jake said. ‘Wildman Five One, you help Widow Seven One.’

‘Copied, Wildman Five One ready for talk-on.’ We were ready for him to direct us onto the target.

‘All I know right now is the north-east sangar is pinned down from a building 200 metres north-east.’

It must have taken a heavy weight of fire to pin the sangar down. And it meant we couldn’t use their tracer to locate the firing point.

At least we had something to go on. We needed to start looking in the area of the bakery. A long street led east off the main one, a couple of hundred metres north of the DC, then south-east, past a drop-off point for the jingly wagons the locals used as buses, to a wadi we called the M25. The wadi was a main supply route for the Taliban, out of sight of the DC.

We’d had a look round to orientate ourselves a few days earlier, because the ANP and Taliban were fighting over who owned the bakery. We’d picked up the offending building quite easily because it was one of only a handful of three-storey buildings in the place. Actually, it just had a little breeze block and hessian-roofed hut on top, but that qualified as three storeys in this town.

I looked down but couldn’t see movement. It was pitch-black in my left eye and my right was looking at a thermal picture.

I released the gun back to its stowed position.

Simon scanned the streets with his FLIR camera.

‘Five One’s looking but nothing seen. Confirm tracer?’

I still couldn’t see any incoming. Normally there was a lot of tracer fire from the Taliban, but not this time.

‘Negative. He won’t give his position away.’ Bright bloke. There was an aircraft above him. He was going easy on the tracer.

We were now to the east of the town, directly over the Green Zone, heading north and looking west.

The JTAC tried to steer us onto the gunner’s firing position, ‘He’s on the—’

I saw what he was about to describe in horrifying detail with my naked eye before he had time to finish the sentence – a red glow shooting up from the location he was in the process of describing.

My right eye had the thermal picture, but there was no light in it whatsoever.

Fuck, it was tracer. My right eye only saw heat. Tracer burnt, but from the back. You didn’t see tracer on thermal.

The glow in my left eye extended towards us like a long red laser beam. The point it appeared to start from wasn’t the muzzle of the gun. Tracer only begins to burn 110 metres out.

If tracer grew in length, it indicated longer bursts. This was a sustained, continually growing line of red light. The gunman wasn’t in the business of spraying. He was in the business of killing.

So far, the solid red line was going to miss us. It was way forward of the aircraft. The radio sparked up: ‘Being engaged.’

No shit, Sherlock…

I hoped the JTAC was about to tell me which building the gunner was in.

Then the red beam started to curve towards the aircraft. I had no time to react. At 1,000 metres per second, it was approaching far too fast.

We were only 1,500 metres away now, and the stream of tracer had aligned itself to us within one and a half seconds of the trigger first being pulled. I lifted my shoulders and buried my neck low, waiting for the impact, eyes narrowed to stop any shit getting in them at that point. The bullets flew straight past my left window, appearing to mesh through the blades. How it failed to smash pieces off them I had no idea.

Fucking hell…

I’d never had tracer fired accurately at me in the air before. The bending phenomenon was a new one on me.

‘That nearly hit us!’ Simon’s voice had risen a couple of octaves. I knew just how he felt.

My mind raced. Our assailant’s range was a fraction too long, which was why it went just over the top, but his lead was perfect. That hadn’t been a bend. Tracer only bends with gravity. He’d been firing straight and I’d been moving forward at 110 mph. He’d anticipated where I was going to be one and a half seconds later and only missed by a whisker.

I flung the stick to the right, pulling back hard on the cyclic to wrench the aircraft round.

The tracer continued to shoot past on my left. Had it gone behind us he would have been using the ambush method: fire in one place and wait for the Apache to fly through it. Not this fucker though. He was tracking me. I had less than a second and a half to move before he dropped his aim slightly and cut us in two.

So far it was only luck that had saved us.

I tipped the blades and threw the Apache right, onto its side. When you turn a helicopter through ninety degrees and pull power the thrust drags you horizontally; you are pulling yourself sideways across the sky. But the weight of the aircraft takes you diagonally downwards.

I didn’t want to go down in the Green Zone.

I pulled back hard, keeping the Apache on its side, the radius of the turn getting tighter and slower as I adjusted the cyclic, moving the thrust arrow up enough to keep me level.

I held the tight, level turn and shot a quick glance vertically upwards over my left shoulder – left eye, tracer; right eye, nothing – then right, vertically down – left eye, black as a witch’s tit; right eye, the Green Zone.

I’d taken about three seconds to roll her halfway around when the tracer stopped. I needed to get eyes back on the gunner, and fast. I didn’t want to lose sight of the next onslaught. My mind flicked back through my Air Combat Tactics Instructor training. The length of burst meant only one thing: this wasn’t anything less than a proper grown-up anti-aircraft gun. We were facing an AA gunner, one-on-one, and he was holding a better hand than I had. I pulled the stick as far back into my left groin as I could. I needed to change the odds.

I’d virtually turned the Apache on a sixpence by slapping its belly into the air. I’d pulled in all the power I could, which had reduced my speed massively. If I’d just flung it around I’d still have been doing the same speed. Instead, I’d spun the aircraft and slammed the brakes on at the same time.

Simon couldn’t help. I’d turned away from the gunner and his TADS was way out of its limits. I’d had no choice.

As we compressed round the final forty-five degrees, I could feel the whole weight of the aircraft push up on me. I was rammed back into my seat. My helmet suddenly weighed a ton and I had to fight to keep my head up. The chinstrap dangled below my chin and the monocle’s heavy metal mount on its right lifted the cup over my left ear clean away. The noise of the aircraft’s engines deafened me. My monocle was the only thing stopping the helmet from tilting further down on the right. It dug deep into my eye socket, cutting into my skin just below the lid.

I began to groan out loud. My jacket and chicken plate were pressing me ever deeper into my seat.

I was terrified he’d get his range right next time and second guess my speed. If he did, he was going to smack his 23 mm shells straight into our flank. And these weren’t AK bullets that would simply bounce off. They were the same kind of exploding cannon rounds that we fired. If they hit us, my misery would come to an abrupt and permanent end.

As I approached the 180 degree point I threw us the right way up and dumped the collective lever. I didn’t want to gain any speed. The Apache was a clever bugger, and I was taking full advantage of that. It automatically scheduled the big stabilator on the back to keep the aircraft level. If you threw the stick forward it would begin to nose down, but the stabilator would shift and bring it back up again. As I dumped the lever and pulled back the stick, I was using the stab as a big fuck-off airbrake, the size of a barn door.

We were now facing south, still over the Green Zone, with Now Zad to our right. My eyes were glued to the area where the tracer had been fired. Only eight seconds had elapsed since the first burst, but it felt a lot longer. I knew the gunner was judging my every move, waiting for the right moment, and I was shitting it.

We’d already lost a lot of speed in the turn and it soon dropped through sixty knots with the stab down.

‘Keep your speed on,’ Simon urged. ‘Speed is life.’

Simon was a Qualified Helicopter Tactics Instructor (QHTI). He’d done the RAF’s version of my ACTI course. He knew as well as I did that the faster the aircraft was going, the quicker it would respond. A helicopter isn’t like a jet, where you flip down an aerofoil and instantly shed a shit-load of Gs. If you’re hovering in a helicopter and you throw the stick forward, it takes a while to respond. An Apache could manoeuvre fairly fast at max speed, but not fast enough, as we’d just discovered. The anti-aircraft rounds had appeared from nowhere in the space of a second. The gunship didn’t respond in that short a time. We were at this guy’s mercy.

I said, ‘Not if he gets his range and—’

The AA flared up at us again.

This time, I knew he could get us. His first burst had been a fraction above my line of sight and continued just over the top of us. Not this time though. It began on the line I was looking down. He had his range 100 per cent bang on; the 23 mm wouldn’t go above or below us this time. To make things worse, as the finger of red began to reach up in the first half a second it started to bend sharply towards us. He’d got it right; he’d seen me slowing.

‘MAN STAB,’ I yelled as I flicked the stabilator into manual with my left thumb and rammed it down.

I’d hit the brakes like a full-on emergency stop. I took a sharp breath, and then just held on.

This is it, this is it…

Over the radio: ‘You’re taking incommmming!’

The next voice was Simon’s. ‘Fuuuuuuck!’

The line of tracer grew and came forward, arcing ever closer, straight towards the nose of aircraft. It was going to take Simon out first.

I wanted to close my eyes. I was terrified.

The very beginning of the jet of hot metal passed so close in front of the aircraft it lit up the cockpit. Simon held onto the handles above him and I could see the silhouette of his helmet, arms and hands in the ghostly red glow.

I forced myself to look down, to try to follow it to its source and pinpoint the gunner. There was no point in Simon using the TADS. I’d not sat still for more than a second and it would’ve taken a lot longer than that to get it under control.

I thought, ‘I’m going to fly straight into this lot.’ But there was nothing I could do.

I watched the tail end of the burst climbing towards us. It had about a second to go.

There seemed to be about a metre between the rounds lighting up Simon. That was closer than I’d have expected, and they weren’t all following the same line. It had to be a double-barrelled weapon.

The last one’s going to hit…

My mouth flooded with the metallic taste of adrenalin. Fight or flight – and I could do neither.

‘FUCK!’ I screamed. ‘FUCK!’

I felt my heart pounding against my chicken plate and pulsing through my thumbs. My teeth clenched so hard I thought my jaw would pop.

Simon still gripped the handles. He was fighting the urge to grab the controls and try to fly us the fuck out of here.

The business end of the red snake whipped past our nose and Simon was plunged into darkness as it rose high and to the left of us.

Thank fuck I’d braked. Ten or twenty knots faster would have put us right in the middle of his fire. Only three or four rounds would have killed us.

The gunner was good, too bloody good.

His range was smack on and his lead was too. The stab had braked us quicker than he could have anticipated. We wouldn’t get away with it a third time.

Something wasn’t right.

He wasn’t just sitting there in a tea towel, keeping his fingers crossed.

‘He’s got NVGs,’ Simon and I called in unison.

If we were going to survive once more I had to do more than change direction and speed and distance again. And we couldn’t just fly off; he’d shoot us up the arse in a heartbeat. I had to change height. It was all I had left.

I didn’t want to lose sight of him, even for a split second. I stared at the area the tracer had come from like a rabbit at a set of oncoming headlights.

Is this my destiny? Is this going to be what happens to me?

It wasn’t philosophy; it was pure fear.

But something inside me decided I wasn’t going to let him get away with it again. I needed to find him. So far I’d been flying for our lives. I wasn’t in a position to fight. I’d have loved to have put a burst straight down, but I didn’t know precisely where he was. I could have fired randomly into Now Zad, but that was against the ROE, and wouldn’t achieve a hell of a lot. The Taliban didn’t do scared. If you missed them, they just kept shooting – and the muzzle flash of our cannon would just give them a clearer target to aim at.

I would have to hit him to stop him. And in the process I was going to have to change direction, speed, distance and, worst of all, height.

It had taken me about two seconds since the last burst for me to think it through.

‘Hold on…’

With the collective lever still low, I slammed the cyclic into my right thigh.

‘Here we goooo,’ I yelled.

The disc rolled over to the right and the Apache dropped right wing low, like we were creeping over the top of a giant rollercoaster. If I pulled back and into my left thigh, I could keep the nose up. My speed was down to forty knots. At full power it would keep the height.

I left the lever down.

We headed downwards, gathering speed. I let nature take its course. We dropped faster and faster. Eventually the tail would follow the nose, weather-cocking behind it. I didn’t pull back on the stick or pull in power. I’d need that power later.

The aircraft side-slipped towards the ground until the stab dragged up its sorry arse and pulled down its nose and whipped the tail around behind us. In a few seconds we’d spun through eighty degrees horizontally and ninety vertically. The Fire Control Radar pointed north, the wheels south and the nose straight down into the Green Zone. I wanted to give our gunman a bigger headache than he’d given me – and fucking with his range was a good place to start.

Our speed built up fast. The loudest sound in the air-conditioned cockpit was normally the swish of the gaspers blowing air. But we could now hear the rush of air flowing noisily over missiles, wing tips, even the angles of the windscreen wiper.

The engines weren’t screaming because I had the collective lever down, but their time would come. I was using the energy of the aircraft and the speed and the weight and good old gravity to get it going as fast as I could in the shortest space of time. My head was gyroscopically stable in space, keeping the monocle’s crosshair over the same point on the ground. The Apache was effectively rotating about my static right eye.

When he fired I needed those rounds to pass behind us; that meant achieving a speed he wasn’t expecting or thought we weren’t capable of. Instead of shooting at me high in the sky, I wanted him to try to track me towards the ground. The perfect crossing, dropping, accelerating, distance-changing challenge Captain Mainwaring had caught me out with all those years ago.

In a perverse kind of way I was hoping the gunner would fire, to see if his rounds passed behind me. He had to try to get them ahead of where I was, but I was really starting to motor. He needed to get ahead of his aiming mark – he’d be aiming low and trying to shift. I needed to change angle and keep increasing my speed.

The noise rush grew. I could see 80 in my monocle.

‘Have you been hit?’ Jon shouted.

Then 90…

He’d seen the rounds and thought they’d hit us, and now he was seeing the aircraft fall on its side and dive towards the ground.

‘Not yet!’ I shouted over the inter-aircraft radio.

101…

I started to pull back on the cyclic and applied a little power on the collective to regain full control.

112…

Simon came on: ‘Height, Ed… height, Ed… Pull out!’

‘I WILL,’ I shouted.

120 became 121…

Jake yelled, ‘Watch your height!’

We were pulling up through seventy-five degrees, nose down and still dropping fast.

I knew my height; Simon did too. He was trying to look out at the world through a TADS camera which may or may not have been slaved to his head. He was targeting, so it probably hadn’t. All he’d be able to see in his monocle was the speed building and the height dropping. It was pitch-black, he was blind and hanging on for dear life.

Jake and Jon could see my aircraft plummeting towards the ground. Because I’d said, ‘Not yet’, Jake was probably thinking, Why the fuck’s he flying towards the ground? A lot of people had crashed in combat simply because they’d been too busy trying to evade fire. Most of them would have survived if they’d just flown the aircraft rather than tried to avoid the fight. But I had no option. This guy was shit-hot. He’d fucking nearly killed us.

131 top left.

1100 on the right. We were only one thousand one hundred feet above the Green Zone and closing fast.

‘Height! Height!’ Jake’s warnings were becoming more strangulated by the second.

‘I’ve got it!’

If he replied, I didn’t hear him. The low height warners had triggered. Lights blazed above the console and a siren started to wail. I’d bust my limits and the systems were doing their best to get me to stop. It was as if the Apache itself was yelling at me, ‘It’s going to crash, mate!’

140… 141… 142…

I was accelerating at 10 mph per second.

510… 502… 486… I was pulling back on the stick as hard as I could, but we were dropping so fast the four-figure digital height reading couldn’t keep up. Inertia was still winning.

And then, the final nail in the coffin. The 23 mm fired up again. It came straight at me, as straight as straight could be, like someone was aiming a laser straight into my left pupil. The fire came from a bunch of buildings clustered together in the shape of a giant banana.

I wasn’t sure if it was the G force, the tracer coming directly at us, or both, but Simon gave a long, despairing groan over the intercom.

I was transfixed. It was absolutely awesome. For a split second, I could see straight down this luminescent red pencil with my left eye. My right was glued to the thermal world. Then they were superimposed. My crosshair sat over the centre of it. I could make out the banana and another block immediately west of it. The firing came from its roof. I was in no doubt. I knew exactly where this guy was.

I also knew what was about to happen. As half a second turned into one and the tracer rounds looked as if they would cut right through the canopy and into my forehead, the red line bent backwards and up.

I was beginning to level off. The stream of rounds was now well behind us and a couple of hundred feet above.

My crosshair hadn’t moved. I could see an elevated square block on top of the target building.

You fucking dancer, I have you!

I pulled up hard on the collective to top up the power to maximum torque. I knew exactly where he was; I had him at ninety degrees to my left.

‘My gun,’ I shouted.

I pushed my thumb up on the Chinese hat. The gun came straight up. We’d fired the cannon earlier that day, and it was Deadeye Dick. Wherever I put the crosshairs, the rounds were going to land. I was going to put a burst right down both his barrels.

The weapon display gave me 300 rounds and my range was set to 1,500 metres.

He was roughly 1,000 metres away. I was going to have to aim half a reticule down to hit him. I had a warning message.

‘LIMITS’ appeared across the bottom of my monocle.

Bastard…

We were still at ninety degrees and going full pelt. The barrel had reached its left stop and couldn’t point any further back. I’d need to turn towards him a fraction. His tracer rounds were tracking behind us now.

I’d outwitted him, but we were over the Green Zone at 300 feet, a perfect height for small arms to take us down.

What now? My primary role was to defend the aircraft. I could make a break for the wadi – or we could do what it was designed to do: protect the lads out on the ground by hunting and killing their enemies.

I hoped he wouldn’t be able to correct. If we stayed in the same profile he would certainly have another go. I needed to do something different.

I pulled back hard and left on the cyclic. The manoeuvre pulled a loud involuntary groan from both of us. The aircraft had been shifting in excess of 140 mph, and the Apache’s nose came shooting up, tilted to the left, still pulling and topping up the power.

The height warners extinguished and then the LIMITS message disappeared. I kept staring down and to my left. I wanted to get to the top of the climb, bump the aircraft over, level it, and pull off a burst. We were screaming straight up. It wasn’t a manoeuvre helicopters were famed for as they soon ran out of speed, so I hoped the gunner hadn’t bargained on it. The power margin indicator came on to warn me I was within 10 per cent of trashing the engines.

Then it started again. The tracer came pouring out. I hadn’t taken my eyes off him since I made that first desperate turn. This time it began low and behind us. I’d changed aspect and was climbing straight up, and he was well behind the curve. I made his position a familiar-looking shelter about thirty to forty metres along the flat roof of the building beside the banana.

Enough was enough. He’d started with the best hand possible, but now I had one or two trump cards of my own.

I ignored his fire and steadied the crosshairs.

I called Jon. ‘Where are you?’

‘South of the town.’

That was all I needed to know; he wasn’t anywhere on my line of sight. I pulled the trigger.

‘Engaging.’

The soles of my feet vibrated as the twenty-round burst of High Explosive Dual Purpose rounds began to pump out of the cannon barrel. I couldn’t see them in flight; I could just feel the airframe shudder. I knew the AA gunner had stopped firing because the jet of red light was now way behind and below us.

The Apache was still climbing, but I hadn’t once moved my crosshairs off the target. I held my aim with my right eye as my left watched the first HEDP rounds impacting with a series of bright orange flashes. I had to hold a steady aim because the cannon was still disgorging rounds at a speed of 800 metres per second. I lifted my finger from the trigger after it fell silent.

‘Look at the target,’ Simon called.

‘I am.’

‘On,’ he said, allowing me to move my head.

I looked down at the MPD by my right knee. For the first time since we’d been engaged Simon was in a position to use the TADS.

I called Jon: ‘Did you see the firing point I just hit?’

‘Negative, we have men on the ground, and they’re firing tracer all over the place.’

The building lay at forty-five degrees to us then straightened up as I bunted over the top of our rollercoaster arc.

Simon zoomed in. There were splashes of heat all along the rooftop where my cannon rounds had exploded but the box-shaped, brown-topped structure I was aiming to destroy remained untouched. At first glance, it looked as though it covered the staircase leading to the top of the building, but I was now sure it concealed something much more sinister.

I levelled off pretty much where we’d been when we were first engaged.

Jon had been keeping an eye on us while Jake watched the troops on the ground. The tracer fire could be a distraction tactic.

‘Wildman Five One, this is Widow Seven One – my north-east sangar confirmed that was a Delta Hotel on the Turret. Re-engage.’

The fucking Turret… Of course. It was the thing we’d seen on top of the bakery a few days before.

‘My gun,’ Simon called.

‘Is that raised block the firing point,’ he said. His crosshair was bang over the Turret.

‘A-firm.’ I never got to say anything else; the roar of the M230 thundering up my legs and into my arse told me everything I needed to know.

‘Engaging,’ he called.

I looked closely at the TADS FLIR image. The cannon was chewing great chunks off the Turret and scattering them across the surrounding area. But I wasn’t sure it was doing a good enough job.

I was pretty much convinced now that we were up against a ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft mount. The Russians left plenty behind when they threw in the towel. It was the smallest and simplest twinbarrelled AA gun the Taliban could get their hands on. They mounted them on pick-ups and flatbeds – and on top of buildings.

Until we destroyed it, they’d continue to pound the life out of the DC.

We needed to finish it off good and proper – and there was only one weapon to do that.

‘Let’s stick a Hellfire into it, Simon,’ I said.

We both studied the target carefully. We could see heat sources around its three-metre-square perimeter. Small objects, not human beings: empty shell casings. They couldn’t have been ours; our cannon rounds exploded when they hit and the spent casings would have fallen into the Green Zone a klick to the east. They were still hot enough for us to know they were the remains of the tracer that had nearly knocked us out of the sky.

The ZU-23-2 – if that’s what it was – must have been hidden under what I could now confirm was not a roof but a hessian cover. The gunner must have hammered it good style, then disappeared back under the hessian. That’s why we hadn’t seen any points of impact. Our rounds had gone clean through the loosely woven material.

‘Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel,’ Widow Seven One called after watching Simon’s rounds pummel the Turret. ‘Destroy the building.’

‘I agree, Ed. It’s got to be a bomb or a Hellfire – and there are no jets here.’

The Widow continued to build the picture. ‘We’ve been under attack from there for the last three days.’

‘Wildman Five One, copied. We’ll put a Hellfire into it.’

‘We’re close to chicken, so expedite – the men are now in the base.’ Jake confirmed and authorised on the JTAC’s frequency.

‘Widow, copied.’ He knew we were off after this.

‘Five One, copied,’ Simon said.

We were now to the north-east. We could see the Turret quite easily.

The Hellfire missile had a double-shaped charge. If we fired from the north-east, it would direct its energy towards our troops. The blast would throw debris their way, and if we had a malfunction, the Hellfire could carry on and land anywhere along the line of aim, depending on its reserves of propellant. And if it had a potted coil failure it would nose dive into Now Zad.

Our boys were to the south-west; I wanted to keep them at ninety degrees.

‘We’re going to run in west to east,’ I told Jake and Jon on the inter-aircraft radio.

That way we had a clear view of the street in front of the building. If the gunner legged it we could adjust the crosshair and whack him in the street.

‘Copied-expedite,’ Jon said. They wanted us to get our skates on.

We kicked out to the west and I brought the aircraft round. We lined back up with the target. Now all we needed was clearance from the JTAC.

Simon zoomed in with the TADS.

‘Widow Seven One, Wildman Five One. Confirm clear to engage with Hellfire.’

The Widow shouted: ‘Stop, stop, stop. My men need to get under hard cover.’

What?

We were three klicks out. I turned ninety degrees left so Simon could maintain eyes on the Turret and the street. We didn’t want to orbit back over the town. I weaved between north and south, always keeping the target in view.

Jake and Jon were silent. I used the Longbow radar to keep tabs on them to the south of the Shrine.

After a few minutes we were pretty sure our boys would be under cover; they were used to being mortared and it never took them long.

We started our attack run again. Simon identified the banana, then the bakery.

‘Wildman Five One. Confirm we are clear hot on that target?’

‘Widow Seven One. My ground commander wants to know the safety distance.’

I cringed.

I carried the safety distances for bombs on a small card in my black brain, but there was nothing for Apache munitions.

Simon muttered, ‘We don’t have one, do we?’

‘No. Stand by, buddy.’

I switched radios. ‘Widow Seven Zero, Wildman Five One – there isn’t one. Just get your north-east sangar to wear a helmet; it’s not that spectacular.’

‘Stand by.’

We were still running in, but I was slowing up. I needed his green light.

Come on, let us go!

Jake came on the inter-aircraft: ‘We’re chicken and they’re not happy. Don’t fire without clearance. Break off.’

‘Does he really think I’m going to fire without clearance?’ I snapped.

‘He’s just doing his job, mate,’ Simon said quietly.

The JTAC finally came back to us.

‘We’re less than 200 metres from the target and more than a little bit concerned about the safety distance.’

‘You sure they’ll be okay?’ Jake asked on the inter-aircraft frequency.

My frustration bubbled over again. ‘For crying out loud, mate, I’m the army’s Hellfire guru!’

‘And he’s the patrol commander,’ Simon replied.

I got a grip on myself. ‘Yeah, I know.’

I switched radios.

‘Wildman Five Zero and Widow Seven One this is Wildman Five One breaking off.’

I leaned the stick and we flew a graceful arc that would take us back over the DC on the way south.

Simon said, ‘It’s the right call, mate. It doesn’t look as though they want this to go down.’

‘It’s going to have to happen some time, buddy.’

Jon and Jake were circling to the south. I picked up their heat source in my monocle.

‘Wildman Five Zero, roger. Widow Seven One, we’re out of gas and we’re RTB.’

Widow Seven One came back on, his tone urgent: ‘My commander wants that firing point destroyed.’

There was an overly long silence. No one knew what to do. They didn’t want a Hellfire and we had nothing else that could do the job. Jon was critical on fuel and we were running out fast. We were just passing south of the Shrine and needed to decide if we stayed or ran.

‘This is becoming farcical,’ I said to Jon and Jake on the inter-aircraft radio.

‘What’s the risk to them?’ Jake asked.

‘There isn’t any risk.’

‘Go for it then, but be quick.’

‘Widow Seven One, Wildman Five One. Trust me, you’ll be fine. If you’re worried, get your men under cover. I will attack south to north, so the blast is away from you. Do you want it destroyed?’

In other words, make your bloody mind up: you either want it taken out or you don’t.

‘Widow Seven One. A-firm, clear hot.’

Fucking brilliant!

I turned the aircraft hard round and rolled it out. We were running in. We were pointing straight at Now Zad’s centre. The DC was low and left of us on my thermal picture. We were going to fire the missile long of the base.

I glanced down at my MPD. I wanted Simon to fire from as far away as he could and that meant as soon as possible. We had to turn 180 degrees after firing to begin the journey home. We’d already hit chicken fuel and every minute in this direction was an extra minute getting back.

Simon said, ‘I can’t ID it.’

I nodded at the screen. ‘It’s about thirty metres along the top of the building.’

Then I realised: Simon hadn’t been with us when we orientated to find the bakery the other day.

‘Keep coming right, keep coming right – ON!’

The Turret looked completely different from this angle because it was sited at the front of the roof. The thermal contrast on it was very poor too. From the east or west it stood proud of the roofline; from here it merged with the buildings behind it.

‘Are you sure, Ed?’

‘One hundred per cent. I can see the bakery and the banana to its right. It’s the only three-storey set-up here.’

Simon tried to lock it up with the Image Auto-Track (IAT) but was struggling to capture the image against the backdrop.

We were getting closer and closer.

‘Break off and run in again, Ed. I’m not doing this manually,’ Simon said. ‘I need this locked up. He’s freaking about it as it is. If we miss we’ll never get permission to use a Hellfire again.’

‘Okay, mate. No problem.’

I didn’t blame him for wanting to lock the target up properly. Neither of us had ever fired a Hellfire out of training. We already had people shitting themselves on the ground. So if we were going to make this happen, it had to go like clockwork, no matter what the fuel gauge read.

I broke off right to come round again.

The IAT was an awesome TADS tool which grabbed the target and held it. You looked for a thermal contrast and centred the crosshair on the brighter or darker constituent. When you engaged the IAT’s gates they closed in on the contrasting shape and centred the crosshair on it. From then on, no matter what you did with the Apache, the gates would hold that target dead centre.

You could fire the missile without locking up the target by holding the crosshair over it with your right thumb, pulling the laser with your right index finger and squeezing the trigger with your left, keeping the crosshair and laser in place throughout the missile’s flight. But if something momentarily interrupted your aim, you’d have to fight to get the crosshair back on what was already a difficult target to ID. And this wasn’t a stationary vehicle or a remote outpost in the middle of nowhere that we had all the time in the world to hit – and no worries about where the missile might go if we fucked up. This was a hard target to ID, close to troops, in the middle of a town, at night. And we were rapidly running out of fuel.

It was also going to be the first Hellfire that had ever been fired in anger – but nothing angered me more right now than the AA gun sitting in the Turret.

I broke off and set up. Jake came on the radio as we turned. ‘We need to RTB now; we’re short of gas.’

‘One more run…Setting up…’ I didn’t quite know whether I was asking him or telling him.

No answer; he wants us to fire

I banged it around. ‘We’re running in.’

I begged he wouldn’t say stop.

We were a lot further out this time and Simon needed every available second to ID the target.

The thermal contrast on the Turret was poor. The gates wouldn’t hold the centre of it. Simon moved his crosshair to the left, where the edge was dark enough to engage the IAT. The gates grabbed on and the crosshair centred itself on the left extreme.

Simon flicked the offset button which gave him a certain amount of authority over his crosshair when it was held by the IAT. We were closing fast and virtually running on air. I kept quiet. Simon was doing a brilliant job. As he applied pressure to a thumb-force-controller the crosshair moved to the centre of the Turret while the gates still held the lock to the left. He’d done it.

‘It’s the right-hand missile,’ I said, ‘and I’ve stepped on it so it doesn’t break your lock.’ The nose was pointing slightly right so the Hellfire wouldn’t fly across his TADS image.

‘Confirm we’re still hot,’ he barked. He was right to call it one more time. Everyone was jumpy as hell. He wanted to make sure the Widow hadn’t changed his mind.

‘Wildman Five One,’ I said over the radio, ‘confirm we’re cleared hot.’ Simon couldn’t change frequency; he was using every finger and thumb to hold his aim. I bet he hadn’t blinked either.

‘Clear hot.’

‘Fire, Simon!’ I yelled.

And then he must have pressed the trigger.

I heard the whoosh from the right-hand side of the aircraft, and the missile glowed as it shot off the launcher, clearing the aircraft without cutting through Simon’s line of sight.

‘Climbing.’ My job was to build Simon’s mental image of what was happening every step of the way. If something odd happened – like a woman or child suddenly appearing beside the target – he needed to know where the missile was, not just how much time remained before impact.

‘Climbing… Levelling… And dropping.’ I glanced down. Simon still had his crosshair smack in the middle of the target. I looked back up.

‘Dropping,’ I confirmed. I watched the glow of its heat source shrink to a pinpoint as it sped towards Now Zad.

‘Three… Two… One… Impact…’

The whole MPD screen went white and Simon’s IAT gates lost their lock in the blossoming explosion.

Simon immediately zoomed the FLIR picture out to the widest field of view. All I could see was 500 metres of Now Zad town and this big ball of heat in front of it. A second later everything was black again.

I looked through the front of my window and saw an orange glow give way to darkness.

‘Breaking off,’ I called to Jake and the JTAC on the Mission Net. I threw the aircraft onto its right side and brought it round hard.

‘Wildman Five Zero and Wildman Five One are RTB, send BDA.’ Jake was all over it like a rash. He was keen to get out of there.

I could see Simon manually tracking the target for as long as he could to get the Battle Damage Assessment himself. As we passed 120 degrees, his TADS hit its left stop. He couldn’t get any further back. We’d lost it. The last image was of intense heat and a devastated building.

‘Widow Seven One – stand by.’

We were running back and once again the Apache told me exactly what speed to fly at to maximise our distance. Jon was forward and right of us by about four klicks. He’d set off before the impact so I could only guess he was on fumes.

‘Widow Seven One – Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel, firing point destroyed.’

I tried hard not to give out a whoop.

Jake asked: ‘Wildman Five Zero – was there any collateral to you?’

‘Widow Seven One – negative, just a bang.’

‘Wildman Five Zero – pass that information onto the rest of the JTACs and copy.’ He wanted tonight’s lessons identified to be lessons learned.

‘Copied – and I hope not to see you again tonight.’

Jake, ever the cool guy, replied: ‘Don’t hesitate if it kicks off again.’

We headed south over the desert and past the mountains. I felt fantastic. We’d fired our first Hellfire. But I also felt drained. We couldn’t go through this nightmare again. I resolved to go and debrief the Widow Tactical Operations Cell when we got back. We had to be clear about this on future sorties. The guys on the ground could say what effect they wanted: I want that man killed. I want that building destroyed. I want that area suppressed. But how any of those things were achieved had to be up to us. We were the only ones qualified to know which weapon matched the target. I didn’t ever want to go down this route again. We called it the long screwdriver; someone else, detached from us, tinkering with what we were doing in the cockpit, fine-tuning our attack.

We knew the risk to the troops on the ground and we’d tell the JTAC if it wasn’t safe to fire. Normally it was the JTAC’s responsibility to make sure there was separation and distance, but he worked with fast jets that dropped bombs. They had all the distances worked out – Apaches didn’t. We’d been firing just ten metres from our own troops this morning and we’d swapped initials, so surely they must know that if we were prepared to do that, we weren’t talking danger close?

I could understand this ground commander’s concerns. He’d never seen a Hellfire go off before.

I could understand the Widow’s concern too. Charlie Alpha had been out in Oman with us, staying miles away from the target in case something went wrong. Now all of a sudden he was just 200 metres from it, shitting himself.

The dropping of a bomb is a fine art. JTACs work with the expectation of a hit, so they have all the safety distances worked out. With an Apache, it was more fluid. We’d bring it as close as we needed to without killing our own troops. And we’d always let them know how bad it was going to get.

This was another evolution in the rules of engagement, in how we employed our weapons and integrated with the ground force with intimate fires. We could get in close, like we had in the run-in earlier, to narrow down our arcs. If need be, we’d fire 100 metres from them. We’d do whatever we could to help them, but they had to understand they couldn’t tell us which weapon to fire. They just had to tell us what the target was, what effect they wanted, and we would do the rest.

We were not Close Air Support. We were Intimate Support.

On our return to Bastion we flew relentlessly every single day and I was feeling physically and emotionally drained.

Colonel Wild came out to visit us and was shocked by what he saw. I’d flown for him when he was a major in charge of AAC’s Special Forces Squadron. We knew each other well and he couldn’t get over how haggard and old I looked.

He made direct references to the fact we were killing – within the ROE – without blinking an eye, and treated death and destruction as a part of daily life. What shocked him most was the level of stress we were experiencing, from ROE to shooting far too close to our own troops to being shot at and shot up. ‘At times you have to play God,’ he said – a very poignant statement from a dedicated practising Christian.

This leap into attack aviation took a lot of the top brass by surprise. I don’t know what they thought Apaches did, but Billy’s account of his introduction to the US Apache course should have been shared with the army’s high rankers: ‘If anyone here doesn’t think they can look a man in the eye and kill him stone cold dead, then he’d better get up and leave. This course is for attack pilots.’

Wild had come out to explain the factors that were causing more and more battlefield helicopters to crash every year. He went home with a brand new agenda: to brief the AAC, JHC and MoD on how kinetic, fluid, ferocious and tiring being an Apache pilot was in the Helmand.

It didn’t pay to think about the sleepless nights, or being crashed out to platoon house after platoon house, or the stifling heat of the tents. I was never one for counting down the days; that only made the tour seem longer. I threw myself into paperwork and kept myself busy unless there was something more interesting to do, like a good old knees-up.

WEDNESDAY, 2 AUGUST 2006

Camp Bastion

We held a ceremony to claim ownership of the flight lines. We christened it Chinthe Lines after the squadron symbol on our flying badges, the lion-like creature that often guarded the entrance to holy places in South-east Asia. In local mythology, chinthes almost always travelled in pairs, and served to protect the pagoda or temple.

After curry, poppadums and soft drinks, the youngest air trooper in the squadron, Emily Leggett, was to unveil the sign. All the boys sang the theme to The Stripper as she unwrapped the plaque in a fit of giggles.

Lieutenant Colonel Tootal, the guest of honour, was presented with a flechette rocket mounted on a board. A rocket had misfired in one of the tubes so the lads had got the Ammunition Technical Officer (ATO) to remove the explosives and pull the flechettes out as trophies. Tootal gave us a few words.

He said he’d been an outspoken critic when the MoD first bought the Apache, and didn’t mind who knew that he thought it was a waste of money. We should have bought something cheaper and we should have bought a hell of a lot more of them. The Apache was too role-specific and wouldn’t have the flexibility needed for modern warfare. He’d had no idea how he was going to employ it in this theatre, and had been totally in favour of buying armed Black Hawks instead.

He was now converted, and made a point of telling every visiting military and parliamentary dignitary. He described the Apache and the crews who support and fly them as valuable assets that he couldn’t do without. They’d saved his men’s lives on many occasions. His men were always confident when the Apaches were above them. He also congratulated us on our jointery; the fact that we were purple air-joint service – and worked seamlessly together.

It could easily have been mistaken for a sweetener for the nightmare to come, but he was much too genuine to play games. We would be going back into Musa Qa’leh in three days, and this time the Taliban wouldn’t stop us.

We had our squadron, flight and aircrew photos taken, and then got stuck into a game of floodlit volleyball. The Apache crews opened up a can of Whoop-ass on their Chinook counterparts.

FRIDAY, 4 AUGUST 2006

The day started with bad news.

Our IntO interrupted a briefing for a Special Forces job. A walk-in source had tipped them off that the Taliban were ready to bring down a helicopter with an anti-aircraft gun at Musa Qa’leh.

The ANP in Musa Qa’leh had gone out on patrol in the Green Zone and came back unscathed. They should have been under fire within 100 metres of the gate. It didn’t add up; they were traitors in the eyes of the Taliban.

The Pathfinders reported Icom chatter suggesting the Taliban had been reinforced to twice their original strength, and the newcomers had brought forty more 107 mm rockets with them.

The penny began to drop; they were being tipped off. The Taliban now knew that Musa Qa’leh was off-limits to helicopters and that the men were so desperate they had taken to drinking goats’ milk. They knew they had to be resupplied at some point, and it would have to be by road. They knew vehicles were an easy target in Musa Qa’leh because of their limited movement, and had had great success against us three days ago. They were preparing to defend Musa Qa’leh.

Taliban morale was very high.

SATURDAY, 5 AUGUST 2006

0730 hours local

Straight after breakfast, all aircrew were summoned to the briefing tent.

The mission orders would be slick and make a point of everyone knowing what everyone else’s part would be. The tent was jam-packed. However, as big as it was, there still wasn’t room for all the participants, so only the head sheds appeared; for us that now meant all of the aircrew on the mission and everyone likely to support it on IRT/HRF.

A lectern had been set up at the front, next to the usual briefing boards containing satellite images and the all-important scheme of manoeuvre – every individual’s part in the mission at any given time.

We went and sat at the back with the Chinook boys. In front of us were the Mortar Platoon and Patrols Platoon commanders, a couple of company commanders, their platoon commanders, platoon sergeants – anybody, in fact, who had some control and could affect what was going to happen on the day. There was a buzz in the air. Everyone knew this was our last chance at getting into the DC at Musa Qa’leh. If this failed, we would have run out of options.

‘Yes, we’re going to attempt a resupply of Musa Qa’leh.’ Lieutenant Colonel Tootal nodded at the sea of expectant faces. ‘It will be codenamed Operation Snakebite. We have tried to get in there before, and failed. We must make this work at all costs.’

He described the enemy. There were two distinct groups of Taliban, he said, with forty to fifty men in each, operating either side of the wadi on the approach to the town. Many of them were Arab fundamentalists who’d infiltrated through Pakistan. With these well-trained fighters there would be an untold number of additional fighters. We could expect a hard fight.

Everyone would have his or her part to play. We had to push a convoy through so they could get in thirty DoS-Days of Supply – ammunition, fuel and food; enough to withstand any onslaught the Taliban could muster. We would pull the Pathfinders out and put in two platoons of Royal Irish. They would be backed up by more ANA and ANP, who were going to form the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF).

The Danes were going to stay in place. They would be responsible for securing the LS and providing the additional firepower.

Tootal sat down. The Ops Officer of 3 Para got up and stood by the maps.

‘These are the orders for Operation Snakebite. It’s a resupply convoy mission into and back out of Musa Qa’leh on Sunday, 6 August. Tomorrow.’ He pointed at the map. ‘This is Musa Qa’leh town…’

On its western edge was a huge north-south wadi. We’d need to cross it to get into the town. The wadi was wide open and we’d be very vulnerable crossing it.

Bordering the western edge of the wadi was a north-south strip of Green Zone, about 200 metres wide, where the Taliban moved freely, fought and hid. We’d need to fight through this to reach the wadi.

Just to the west of this Green Zone was an urban area about a hundred metres wide, where the Taliban would be waiting for us. We’d need to clear it before we could get into the Green Zone.

To the west of the urban area was a long, forward-facing slope up to a plateau. The Taliban would have good fields of fire across it from the urban area, and we needed to advance down it.

On top of the plateau was an empty desert and except for one wadi it spread as far west as the eye could see. This area was heavily mined during the Soviet invasion. We lost a vehicle when it drove over a mine in this piece of desert only four days ago during the first attempt at getting into Musa Qa’leh.

‘This is where we will start the operation,’ he said.

You could have heard a pin drop.

‘Today, the Patrols Platoon and the mortars, with callsign Widow Seven Zero as their JTAC, will move out and overnight in the middle of this desert to the west of Musa Qa’leh, in preparation for the following day. At the same time, India Battery with their three 105 mm guns, and the convoy with the resupply, will move out into the desert too, and they will occupy their lay-up position.

‘Early doors Sunday the sixth, tomorrow morning, the convoy will leave the gun position and route to a safe area north-west in the desert, in preparation for being called forward to pass through a safe passage.

‘The Patrols Platoon and the mortars will move forward simultaneously through the known minefield, to find, clear, prepare and secure an area for the LS. It will be as close to the plateau as possible and capable of receiving all the Chinooks.

‘There will be three levels of support. We will have indirect support from the guns and the mortars. There will be Close Air Support from nine airborne CAS sorties, giving us a seamless supply of fast air. Finally, there will be Intimate Support from British Apaches. There will be a permanent flight of Apaches over-head from insertion and these will be under the control of Widow Seven Zero, as will all CAS.’

‘On L Hour – the set time when the first Chinook touches down – four Chinooks containing B Company 3 Para and CO 3 Para’s tactical headquarters will land at the LS cleared by Patrols Platoon.’

‘On landing, the guns and the mortars will set up and register so they are accurate and ready to provide support,’ he continued. ‘This will also cause a slight diversion but we do not need the element of surprise. We’re not going to hide from the enemy or pretend we don’t have artillery. We’re going to let them know what we have and that we’re coming whether they want to fight or not.’ Guns and mortars within range would be a show of force.

‘On landing, B Company will get out of those Chinooks, and they will go to ground.’

The Chinooks would scoot back to Camp Bastion and pick up D Company then wait at Bastion until called forward.

‘With everybody on the ground, the convoy hidden so the Taliban don’t know where it is, the guns and mortars zeroed in, Apaches above us and CAS above them, B and D Company will prepare to move.’

Both fighting companies would move to the edge of the forward slope and take up positions ready for the advance to contact.

He indicated the map with a long stick.

There was a track leading from the ridge at the edge of the desert, east down the slope, through the urban area and through the Green Zone to the wadi.

‘Everything north of the track belongs to B Company, everything south, D Company.’

D Company would stay firm with their weapons trained on the urban area as B Company advanced to contact down the slope in a 500-metre extended line, oriented north to south. The track would be their southern border.

If they came under contact, D Company would fire into the urban area at all targets to cover B Company. Widow would call the Apaches to hit the enemy hard and fast from above, tracking any survivors. They would use artillery to suppress them wherever they were then smash them with CAS.

‘B Company will then systematically clear or assault every compound from east to west 100 metres up to the edge of the Green Zone, then south to the track, capturing or killing any Taliban that want to fight. They will refer to this list of building numbers.’

We all had a satellite image showing the outline of every compound 300 metres north and south of where the track ran through the urban area and into the Green Zone. Each compound had a designated number.

‘The numbers will cut down on the time it takes to get the Apaches to fire and will negate any errors induced by incorrect grids.’

This was a far cry from the escorting role we’d played during Op Mutay.

Once all the compounds had been cleared, D Company would do exactly the same on the southern half. As they cleared these areas a small force would be left behind, covering arcs, to maintain the security and integrity of the convoy route.

B and D Companies would then move the 200 metres through the Green Zone, west to east, systematically clearing 300 metres north and south of the track, fighting any Taliban that got in their way. They would keep one foot on the ground and move slowly to ensure the line was watertight until they reached the wadi.

‘In this area,’ the Ops Officer said, pointing at the wadi and the Green Zone surrounding the crossing point, ’we will refer to spots from the Op Snakebite Spot Map.

A spot map had been produced as a one-off for this mission, dotted with coloured numbered spots for quick identification to speed up fire control commands from the Widow.

They would go firm at the wadi with a long string of men left behind, covering north and south.

‘During the move to the wadi, the engineers will be clearing the track to ensure there are no mines or IEDs waiting for the convoy.’

With the area sanitised and interlinking arcs all the way back to the plateau there would be no way any Taliban could get access to RPG or IED the convoy. The Taliban had buried a triple mine in the road a week ago and remotely detonated it under a Spartan. Then they RPGed the Scimitar trapped ahead of it. The occupants had had an almighty firefight to get out alive and then back in again to save their horrifically injured comrade. The IED killed three of them outright and left two burnt-out vehicles behind.

‘Once B and D are firm on the other side of the wadi, the Pathfinders and Danes will exit the DC on foot and in their vehicles. They will patrol the 350 metres west along the Bazaar road to the edge of the town where it meets the wadi. They will fan out and take up defensive positions. So now we have both sides of the wadi covered. If anybody tries to attack the convoy, they will have troops on either side ready to attack them.’

The convoy in the desert would be told to move out if they hadn’t moved forward already. They would make their way to the plateau, follow the route cleared down the slope by the engineers, through the urban area, through the Green Zone. The final push would involve darting across the wadi, the most dangerous part of their mission. The track across the wadi kicked left forty-five degrees when it left the Green Zone and cut across the wadi at this angle for 700 metres before kicking right forty-five degrees onto the Bazaar road leading to the Musa Qa’leh DC.

This angle meant that they were still vulnerable from the north and south, either side of the wadi, but it afforded them the best protection 3 Para could provide.

‘Once secure in the DC they will unload thirty DoS, deposit the men and then start to make their way back out of Musa Qa’leh the same way they came in. Patrols Platoon will jump into those vehicles, leaving the Danes, the Royal Irish and the newly formed ANSF behind.’

They would then do the dirty-dash back across the 700-metre wide wadi, under the protection of the Danes on the east, D Company and B Company on the west, until they reached the Green Zone.

‘From there they will backtrack through until they are safely back inside the desert; the mined desert.’

B Company and D Company would then fall back through the Green Zone to the urban area. D Company would move back to secure the high ground with B Company covering them until they finally moved up themselves.

‘The Chinooks will be called forward and everyone will fly back to Camp Bastion with the Apaches escorting the Chinooks. Job done. That’s the format and you all know your piece. Any questions?’

All of the what ifs, questions and answers had already been hammered out. We knew that we were Intimate Support, 3 Flight would go in first, and we would RIP them. We also knew the extent of the threat to us: anti-aircraft guns, RPGs, small arms, SAMs, snipers, even mortars. You name it; the Taliban had it. Our two trump cards this time round were artillery to keep the enemy’s head down, and a relatively small area to work in, just a couple of hundred metres wide.

All that remained was the Rehearsal of Concept (RoC) drill. The tent emptied and we went to the side of the secure area where 3 Para had set up a fifty metre by fifty metre scale model of the whole operation. The ground was scattered with minetape – a two-inch white or orange plastic ribbon used to cordon off mined areas – sandbags, rocks, cardboard and empty Coke cans.

Bastion and the LS were Coke cans, the white minetape tracked down the slope – and they’d made a slope too – through the urban area with compounds made of cardboard. It stretched through a sandbag Green Zone to an orange minetaped wadi into a rocky Musa Qa’leh and ended up at the DC Coke can. The convoy’s lay up point (LUP) was marked too.

‘Okay, Patrols Platoon and the mortars are going to be leaving shortly with Widow Seven Zero…so the commanders will go along here, and Widow Seven Zero will be with them…’

The three guys playing their parts moved and stood together.

‘And then the Battery Commander and the convoy leader will be in position here overnight.’ The BC and another guy I’d never met before sat down.

‘At whatever time it is, minus L hour – and I don’t know how long it’ll take them to move – the convoy will then depart the gun position.’

The convoy guy moved round to the north-west.

‘At the same time, Patrols Platoon and the mortars, with Widow Seven Zero, are going to move forwards to secure the LS.’

They moved forward on the sand map to the site of the intended LS.

The 3 Para Ops Officer said, ‘Right, what’s the next thing we’re going to hear?’

The Patrols Platoon Commander put his hand up. ‘LS secure.’

‘Right, the LS is secure – that means we can go ahead with it. At that point, we’re going to send out the Chinooks with B Company and the CO’s JTAC. With them will be the first wave of Apaches.’

As four Chinook guys, four passengers, Pat and Chris walked to the LS, the BC said, ‘At this point we’ll be registering – we’ll be firing into this area, to make sure our guns are ready.’

The Mortar Platoon Commander said, ‘And at this point, I’m going to be firing too.’

The aircrew could see where the gun line was, where the mortar line was, how they were going to get in, how they were going to get out and the location of the gun-to-target line they needed to stay out of. The four Chinook pilots headed back to the Bastion Coke can where we stood.

The CO, 2i/c and Ops Officer of 3 Para threw in a constant stream of questions.

‘What happens if that compound fires at you now?’ the CO asked.

‘I would call you and D Company, sir. D Company would put fire down and your JTAC would get those two Apaches onto it.’

The whole rehearsal was done at speed but relative to the time-frame so everyone knew where everyone else was, what they would be doing or saying at any point along the line. We walked out and replaced Pat and Chris and the rotations continued until everyone at the RoC drill was standing back at the Bastion Coke can.

The rehearsal ended, a host of questions answered.

Later, we talked through the brief again within our squadron. We ironed out how we would RIP at any given moment because even on the day we wouldn’t know how slowly or quickly each phase of the Op would take.

There was still one nagging doubt in my mind.

I knew I had to voice it.

I had to address our operational effectiveness with the boss again. It had degraded to the point that we rarely hit our targets with a first burst. The main reason was the gun Dynamic Harmonisation (DH).

‘We RIP’d with Dan the last time we tried to get into Musa Qa’leh,’ I said. ‘Dan had fired 250 rounds at the Taliban and we still don’t know if they got a hit.’

Major Black tried to laugh it off. ‘Maybe his shooting’s not very good.’

I took a deep breath.

‘His firing was good. In fact, it was brilliant. He would have hit first time if the gun had been on. Pat had exactly the same problem on Op Mutay. He couldn’t even fire in zoom field of view because his rounds landed outside of what he could see.’

The boss hadn’t known because he’d only fired forty cannon rounds and a Hellfire, but the current policy between crews was to test fire into the desert on the way to a scramble. If they didn’t hit they would register in which direction the gun was off and aim off accordingly. It was ridiculously costly in time and munitions, dangerous to the point of a blue-on-blue, and a serious degradation in combat effectiveness.

‘If the gun fails to hit first time, the Taliban get a clear warning and the crews end up chasing their tails, not knowing where to aim to get a kill. And a whole lot of Taliban are living to fight another day.’

He wasn’t having it. He said he didn’t have enough flying hours to let us DH the guns.

I tried to keep the red mist at bay.

‘The Apache is an attack helicopter, sir. Its primary role is to fire weapons at the target. If the weapons aren’t accurate we’re not doing our job properly. If we fire at a target and it dies, we’ve succeeded. So we either waste time at the target or we use the time profitably by DHing the guns beforehand. The flying hours are the same, but the success rate is hugely better.’

‘I said no, Mr Macy.’

I felt like banging my head against the wall again. Our sister squadron, 664, had just landed at Kandahar and was coming up to replace us soon after this operation. What would they think when they saw our gun tapes? As the SWO I felt deeply embarrassed that we hadn’t completed an essential procedural task.

‘I will be briefing the next squadron commander on what I think we’ve failed to do, sir.’

Major Black returned my glare. His jaw clenched then he turned on his heel and walked away.

0213 hours local

The neon strip lights that hung above our cots burst into life. I shielded my eyes and scrutinised my right wrist.

‘Time to get up, freaks,’ Jon said.

‘Wanker,’ someone shouted.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and peeled off my light-weight-but still clammy-sleeping bag liner. Jon lifted the tent’s door flap and disappeared while Pat, Chris, Tony, Carl, Jake, Billy and I slowly came round. The scratching of arses, stretches and chorus of yawns would have done a bunch of gibbons proud.

I arrived in the Ops tent smack on 2.30 a.m. We’d been in earlier but Patrols Platoon had wanted more time to get through the minefield on the ridge, and to ensure the LS was clear before securing and marking it. Getting an hour’s kip here and an hour’s kip there was not conducive to flight safety, but we didn’t have much choice when it was this busy.

Things were looking good. 3 Flight were told to be ready to take off at 0440 hours. L hour had slipped to 0500 and would most likely slip again, but they’d lift regardless. We completed a final brief at 0300 hours with a strong black coffee and walked to the aircraft half an hour later. I knew that today was going to be a long operation even if the bloody Taliban didn’t turn up. And I was already knackered.

We’d be RIPing with Pat’s flight, but stayed on the APU instead of taking an extra two and a half hours’ rest. We had come a long way since Op Mutay. 3 Flight had taken the first Deliberate Ops callsigns, Wildman Five Two and Wildman Five Three, and needed to make their takeoff time. We’d have our aircraft running at the same time, so if either of theirs started with a fault, they could whack their kit into one of ours and leave us to sort out the shagged one with the technicians.

Jake would command 2 Flight from the front seat of Wildman Five Four with Jon flying; I’d command Wildman Five Five from the front with Billy flying. Simon was back at KAF, briefing the new squadron commander and his 2i/c.

3 Flight were in bays 3 and 4, Jon and Jake were in 5 and we had 6. The techs looked like zombies these days, but still had six aircraft lined up and ready to go. The boys were chirpy as ever as they stood around our four Apaches, but they were no oil paintings either. The whole squadron was feeling the strain. Even Billy was looking a bit rumpled.

Billy sparked up our aircraft. We tested the weapons, the sights, the sensors, defensive aids suite, video; checked that the data transfer cartridge had uploaded the mission correctly, that the comms came up in the right order and that the IDM – Improved Data Modem – had configured Pat’s patrol with ours so we could communicate with each other digitally.

Our Apache woke up in a good mood but Jake was experiencing comms problems again. I checked in with Pat’s patrol to make sure mine were working. They were. I kept the door open. Normally you’d close it to keep the cab air-conditioned, but there was a strong breeze from the east, making it an unusually cool morning on the flight line.

3 Flight lifted on time while Jake and Jon got their comms sorted. We sat on the APU. There was no way we would close down now. If something happened en route to the drop-off point or they had a problem we would need to get there asap.

We led the taxi out five minutes early, turning left to the top of the HALS. We lined up on the right; Jon and Jake forward left. We started to roll. Exactly two hours and thirty minutes after 3 Flight departed our wheels lifted off the metal runway. We took off south this time because of the wind.

‘Saxon Ops. Wildman Five Four and Five Five…airborne…’ I called. ‘Zero Seven One Zero hours. Out.’

We took a left and climbed to 5,500 feet. Jon and Jake went up to 6,000. The visibility wasn’t anything to shout about, but it’d do. It wasn’t a particularly long flight to Musa Qa’leh, but we knew our kit was working so we could relax for a moment or two. On our IRT/HRF stint we’d been setting stuff up on the way, so things had been more fraught.

Flying north-east across the desert, we needed to establish the gun line. We knew our guns were south-west of the town. If they were operating, we didn’t want to fly through them. We didn’t want to restrict their fire or end up with a shell up our arse.

My MPD had the gun icon marked on the TSD – Tactical Situational Display – page, and a line from the guns to the point where the convoy track went through the Green Zone. That was roughly where the guns should be firing. I flipped the radar from air to air to ground targeting mode.

The radar immediately identified the guns so I flipped onto the TADS. Exactly where they said they’d be.

We now needed to locate 3 Flight. We didn’t want to route north of the guns to find out they were south of the gun-to-target line. That would mean backtracking west, turning south around the guns and back to the east to do a RIP.

‘Wildman Five Two, this is Wildman Five Four-routing in, five minutes to run, send sitrep.’

‘Wildman Five Two. The gun line is active. Guns are registering. The LS has changed to grid Forty-One-Sierra, Papa-Romeo, Six-Four-Six-Zero, Eight-One-Two-Nine and active.’

Jake read the grid back to confirm.

‘Stand by,’ Pat said. ‘Come north of the gun line. We’ve got people fleeing north. Come to my position and maintain overwatch.’ Pat and Tony were north of the gun-to-target line.

As we headed north-east past the guns Chris and Carl’s Apache should have been operating at the same height and hopefully in the same area. The Longbow radar picked them up and confirmed their position from five miles away. We climbed to 6,500 feet. If they were in a battle we didn’t want to be below them. Visibility was still hazy, but TADS was on the case.

There was no action yet or they would have given us a target. The boys were on the ground and the LS was active. The second wave had just landed and the new LS was a mile north-west of the choke point where the track entered the Green Zone. Our concerns were for Taliban moving into the area, and combat indicators of people moving out of it.

‘Wildman Five Five, this is Wildman Five Four,’ Jake called. ‘Five Four will concentrate on the immediate area where the troops are. Can you check out those movements to the north and let me know as soon as you know the convoy’s position, and that it’s still safe?’

‘Wildman Five Five, copied.’ Jake always thought of the big picture and never got bogged down in detail that didn’t concern him.

Jon kept tight in to the gun line. We moved steadily further north, away from them. Billy had the radar spinning to detect the convoy. I set up my acquisition source for the FCR ready for when he found them. They were supposed to be north-west, so we would have to pass them at some point.

‘Gunner – Target – FCR – Tracked and wheeled vehicles – Stationary – Range five point nine klicks,’ Billy reported. No sooner said than done.

I hit slave on the ORT and before Billy had finished reading out what the FCR had detected I was looking at a group of LAVs, Scimitars and trucks. They’d formed a big corral for all round defence, just like the wagons in the Wild West movies I used to watch on a Saturday with my granddad.

They were on the western side of a south-pointing spur between two huge adjacent wadis that joined to form a Y. This was a great place to hide and gave them access to the major wadi system leading down to 3 Para and the choke point between the urban area and the Green Zone three klicks south-east. I offset the laser to prevent any eye damage and lased their position.

Up flashed 41S PR 6332 8226.

I sent it to Jake over the IDM, giving him details of the convoy’s set-up.

We had a good look around the main wadi leading north from Musa Qa’leh to make sure no one was heading west to intercept it. Several groups of women and children were heading north up the wadi, but no males. They were 2.5 klicks north of the choke point already. All the combat indicators I’d learned in Northern Ireland were telling me that something was going down and the locals knew it.

I spotted our first three males – two in dark robes, one in white – heading south. They seemed to be ignoring everyone rushing to escape on donkeys and on foot, clutching their bags and possessions. They didn’t seem to be carrying weapons and I couldn’t see any unusual bulges in their dishdashes.

Saxon called. The boss had intelligence that Taliban were to the north.

‘Wildman Five Four, this is Saxon Ops. We’ve got an intelligence grid. Grid, Forty-One-Sierra, Papa-Romeo, Six-Three-Eight-Seven, Eight-Triple-Three. Read back.’

Jake read it back and I checked that what I’d punched into my keyboard was correct then hit Enter. I’d stored it as a red icon – so it came up on my MPD as enemy.

‘Correct. Taliban are in that area. Zero Alpha would like you to look.’ Zero Alpha was Major Black, back at base.

‘Wildman Five Five, Wildman Five Four. That’s to the north. It’s your area. Can you investigate?’

‘A-firm,’ I said. ‘Stand by.’

Jake was in the south over the LS. The grid was just over a klick and a half north-west of me but – alarmingly – just a fraction over a klick north-east of the convoy.

We didn’t need to move and we weren’t about to advertise to the Taliban that we knew where they were, so we stayed over the fleeing civilians. Billy was watching for anyone heading south and I slewed the camera to the intelligence grid with a push of a button. It was a small cut-out in the ridge on top of a wadi wall, but there was nothing there. It was a great vantage point to look south-west towards our convoy, but they were on the reverse slope of the spur and out of sight.

A hundred metres north-west, however, was a house and a compound; a little farmstead. Just north-west of that were four large tents, with cooking pots still over a fire pit. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside.

These tents were huge, not at all your traditional nomadic arrangement. Nomads kept all their shit in one sock. These things were black tarpaulin palaces, about five metres by eight, held up by poles and pegged down by lengthy guy ropes. The place seemed deserted. The fire was still smoking, but it looked like someone had just dropped the pan and run. I shifted the radar down to see if I could pick up any vehicles. There were none hiding under cover and the radar would know. All I could see in the entire area was the convoy.

We moved overhead. It looked well set up, but there was no perimeter fence. These guys were either genuine nomads, or the Taliban. Nomads were curious tribesmen that were always fascinated by our helicopters. I didn’t see why they would have done a runner; they knew they had nothing to fear. If they had left the camp, they would be around the top with goats. There were no goats in the area, no indicators telling me this was friendly. But nor was there anything to suggest otherwise; no big vehicle tracks, nothing. We could have dropped to ten feet and flown an arc around them, peeping under their tarpaulin, but that wasn’t our job. We were there to protect the convoy and the ground troops. If there were Taliban hiding here, their day would have to wait.

‘Wildman Five Four, Wildman Five Five,’ I reported back to Jake. ‘Looked into that area. All I can see is a deserted camp 1,200 metres north-north-east of our convoy. I can’t see if it’s enemy or not. I’m going to search the convoy route.’

The first thing we did was over-fly the route our convoy would take, looking for any likely IEDs or mined areas, in case the Taliban, indicated by intelligence had left.

‘Wildman Five Four, Wildman Five Five and Top Man. Both guns and mortars finished and the troops are shortly going to move off. Stand by.’

‘Wildman Five Four, acknowledged.’

‘Wildman Five Five, acknowledged.’

‘Top Man, acknowledged.’ I looked at my black brain for the sync-matrix. The British Harrier would soon be replaced by a US B1 bomber.

The boys were about to face their first real threat, about to stand up and move down a forward-facing slope into what could be an enemy position.

My pulse started to race. The pressure was up. If something was going to go bang, this was the time and place. I imagined the enemy looking up the long slope to their west, hidden behind little portholes they’d poked through walls. For them, it was about to become a target-rich environment. A swarm of Paratroopers was about to walk towards them in extended line.

If the Taliban had been told to fight, they were going to start hitting our boys early. I had visions of World War One squaddies being mercilessly mowed down by the most technologically advanced weapon of the day, the machine gun. If they hadn’t been told to fight, then they would be legging it backwards. Either way, our job was to find them – and then to nail them. We couldn’t have them reappearing from around another corner later that day.

We were over the Green Zone now and I was looking at the urban area north of the east-west track the convoy would take through the choke point. It was from here that the community lived and farmed the Green Zone.

There were three long tracks running north-south between compound walls fifteen feet high and, in places, four feet wide. The main tracks all paralleled the Green Zone; the right-hand one separated the Green Zone and the first row of compounds.

Each compound was a walled garden that backed onto the next without break. They all ran into each other as they sprawled northwards from the choke point. Seven compounds north there was a break: an east-west alleyway connecting the right-hand and centre tracks. The alleyways between them were just wide enough to take a small vehicle.

On the left of the centre track was another set of sprawling compounds. Each walled garden bordered the next, with the odd alleyway connecting to the final north-south track.

Each compound had been given a number on the satellite imagery. When the troops were moving through, they could tell their commanding officer which had been cleared. The guys were going to have to enter each and every one of them. Ideally, it would be completely methodical, one compound after the other. But CO 3 Para didn’t have the time; he instructed them to get through there at warp speed. This was a close-quarter-battle area, he said, and they’d have to clear them as fast as they could.

Tootal had taken the brave and unusual decision to tell his men they didn’t have to wear body armour. He’d suffered more injuries through heat exhaustion than he had from bullets and shrapnel. A lot of the lads decided to risk it, because it was roasting out there and they were going to be doing this for hours.

We divided up the compounds between us. I’d take everything from the choke point next to Compound 1 northwards to Compound 35, and Jake from 36 to 70. Billy and Jon would maintain a watchful eye on the advancing troops and on each other.

My blood pressure had risen; I could feel my temples pumping against my helmet. Something was about to go horribly wrong. I knew I could take out anyone that fired at them and smash their hideaways, but if they did open up I was only going to be killing the killers who’d just killed a fuck lot of Paratroopers.

I was tired and needed to stay focused.

I started searching the western side of the built-up area first, the side facing the slope, compound by compound. There was no one hiding behind any of the walls, just livestock.

‘B Company are up, Ed,’ Billy said. ‘They’re beginning to move east towards the compounds. They’re not hanging around. Mind you, neither would I in the wide open.’

I flicked in and out of FLIR to look for heat sources. All I could see were cows, goats, chickens and more cows, goats and chickens. Most of the compounds contained between three and five terraced buildings, mostly against the northern wall, opposite the compound entrance, where the meagre sunlight could still warm them in winter. They usually had one or two in another corner for the livestock, and a low square shelter in the centre where the locals kept their chickens and the Taliban hid their weapons. This was quite an affluent area. They had solid roofs.

We normally expected to see civilians. The men would be in the Green Zone tending their crops, the women around the cooking pot and the children playing. There were no schools. The Taliban had destroyed them all.

There were no men today, and no women, children or cooking pots. The whole place looked deserted. It gave me the heebiejeebies. Had they fled? Or were they in there, too afraid to come out?

You didn’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure it out. The residual heat from the fire pits and fire places should have been white hot on FLIR. They hadn’t had a sudden attack of the collywobbles. They’d been tipped off nice and early; that was why the place was stone cold dead, and why there were relatively few civilians still fleeing north. They must even have known it was going to be a one day op, because they’d left all their livestock behind.

We’d seen men walking back towards the area. We hadn’t seen any of fighting age leaving. I was feeling more uncomfortable by the minute.

Jake was covering the northern part of B Company’s urban area. I worked my way south through the village until I got to the buildings by the choke point.

I spotted thirty or so barrels stacked against the southern wall of Compound 1, where the track the convoy would take was at its narrowest.

I flicked on the radio. ‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five – I’ve got a potential IED at Compound Zero One.’

‘Stand by.’

He’d be telling the CO.

‘Widow Seven Zero, copied.’

‘It’s at the narrowest part of the choke point, on the northern side of the track. Copy so far?’ I pictured Tootal sitting in the dirt, his finger tracing the relevant section of the map.

‘Copied.’

‘I can see about thirty barrels neatly stacked against the southern wall of this compound, right next to the track. It’s the perfect IED spot. If you had to hit the convoy as it passed through the built up area, this would be the place to do it.’

‘Stand by.’

Billy dropped our height to take a closer look.

‘Widow Seven Zero, Wildman Five Five – I can see no command wires.’

‘Wildman Five Five, this is Widow Seven Zero. I want you to destroy that target with high-sap.’

I could almost feel Billy’s eyebrows disappearing beneath his hairline. ‘High-sap?’

He was right. High Explosive Incendiary Semi-Armour Piercing rockets were not precision weapons. How could I hit a barrel with a rocket? They were free-flight, and since the launchers were haphazardly aligned to the Apache in the first place, they could go anywhere.

‘I know we wouldn’t use them against this target, Ed,’ Billy said. ‘But have you aligned the rockets on this cab?’

‘I can’t guarantee that the launchers haven’t been swapped. They could go anywhere, buddy.’

I’d decided to use HEDP.

‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five – negative. I’ll fire Hedpee as this is likely to initiate any explosives or fuel employed.’

‘Widow Seven Zero, clear hot.’

‘Wildman Five Four, Wildman Five Five – did you copy the last?’

‘Wildman Five Four, A-firm, go ahead.’

‘Where are they, Billy?’ I didn’t want to fire at Jon and Jake, and didn’t want to take my eyes off the target to look for them either.

‘They’re clear, and so is B Company.’

We were still in an orbit and flying clockwise at seventy knots. Billy kept it low and slow.

I dropped to a ten-round burst setting, lined the crosshair up on the centre of the barrels, steadied, and lased the target with my right middle finger. I didn’t use my index finger; some of its muscles were linked to the thumb which controlled the crosshair.

The MPD showed 1,699 metres – a mile away.

‘Firing!’ I called.

I pulled the left trigger and held it until the gun stopped firing. Ten rounds came off, and missed the target completely. They landed low and left – in the middle of the track.

‘Fucking Gun DH!’ I was absolutely threaders with the boss.

‘Thank God we weren’t firing close to troops.’ Billy had been watching on his MPD. My crosshairs were bang over the target and there was no drift. Those rounds should have been spot on.

I aimed up and right the distance I’d missed by, and fired another ten-round burst. A huge cloud of dust enveloped the compound. When it settled there was a little smoke and plenty of hot spots in the barrels, but over half of them hadn’t been touched.

‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five. Delta Hotel but no IED detonation.’

‘Wildman Five Five – is it safe?’

They’d all been thrown around, but I couldn’t guarantee that one of the barrels at the bottom of the pile didn’t still contain an active initiation device.

‘Negative. Not 100 per cent. A 500-lb bomb would be advisable. Dart Two Four is available.’ According to my sync matrix Dart Two Four was a B1 from Diego Garcia and had been on task for fifteen minutes.

D Company, the CO and his JTAC were still up the slope. They had full view of the entire route, all the way down to B Company’s position just short of the urban area.

Patrols Platoon were covering the high ground and guarding the wadi to the west, where the convoy would emerge.

It had just set off from the spur, and was making its way slowly down the most secure route they could find – the wide, flat, dry river bed. You could see by its colour that it had been flooded during the wet season, so any mines left from the previous defence of Musa Qa’leh would have been washed away, and any fresh ones would have been laid in the last twenty – four hours. The recce cars were working overtime.

B Company were now just above the compounds, ready to go.

It was a tense moment. A Taliban sniper team could have a field day here. B Company would be pinned down in the open, and we’d be the ones who’d have to flush them out. If they’d all fired together and their weapons were nice and dry, it would be like finding a handful of needles in a haystack.

‘Bring them in.’

CO 3 Para wasn’t messing around. He understood the threat all too well. Every single vehicle was going to have to go through the choke point. And he needed B Company out of the potential killing ground asap.

I called Dart Two Four. An attractive-sounding female American voice told me she couldn’t drop without strato clearance. I had no idea what that meant, or if she was the pilot or offensive systems officer. Strategic clearance, maybe? Did she have to get permission from somebody out of theatre?

I called Widow Seven Zero and passed on the message.

Widow Seven Zero contacted Dart Two Four direct. He said he was the commander on the ground. This was extremely high risk, a possible IED; he had men in the open and it must be removed.

After a ten-minute wait, she confirmed that she had strato clearance to drop. The B1 Lancer had a synthetic aperture radar. She could only see a radar-mapped area of the ground, not the real thing – and Compound Zero One wouldn’t mean anything to her. She mapped the target and was talked onto the southern wall of the compound. She was about to deliver a JDAM – Joint Direct Attack Munition – an inertial and GPS kit strapped to a dumb bomb to guide it with pinpoint accuracy.

‘Ready three zero,’ she called. Time of flight, thirty seconds.

There was an almighty boom and a pillar of black earth blasted 150 feet into the air. When the dust cleared, we could see that it had demolished the southern wall with pinpoint perfection, gouging a hole some ten feet wide and four feet deep in the ground. There wasn’t a single barrel left.

‘Dart Two Four, Wildman Five Five. That’s a Delta Hotel. Nice hole.’

Widow Seven Zero told us the mortars were about to fire. We were instructed to move east to the wadi.

Brigadier Ed Butler, Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, was now hailing the Apache as ‘mission essential’, and we certainly felt we’d done our bit to bring it centre stage. Whitehall was ecstatic. The visits programme was now crammed full with Members of Parliament, random dignitaries and anyone they could usher from the corridors of power in front of a fully tooled-up Apache gunship.

During 664 Squadron’s tour immediately after ours, the mangled remains of an AA gun mount were discovered in the alleyway behind the building we Hellfired in Now Zad. I heard a rumour that the gunner had been Iranian-trained and brought in to deal with the ‘mosquitoes’. Whether or not that’s true, we’d come a long way since taking pot shots at the drone on Salisbury Plain.

But as we prepared to land at Brize Norton and I gazed out at the startlingly green Oxfordshire countryside, I couldn’t help wondering what we’d really achieved. We’d been sent on a reconstruction mission to a patch of desert no bigger than 150 square miles and one government minister thought we might return without having fired a single shot. We ended up covering an area ten times that size, found ourselves constantly under siege and unable to patrol far from any of our bases without our ground troops being at significant risk, and fired off more ammunition than even Taff cared to think about.

We were also told that our mission had nothing to do with the Taliban or the narcotics trade. But during the three sweat-soaked months we spent with 3 Para in Helmand we were in contact with the Taliban every single day and found ourselves fighting for survival in villages that grew vast quantities of raw opium that ended up as heroin on the streets of the UK.

Sitting in the window of a coffee bar in broad daylight on my first trip to London after getting home, I was asked if I’d like to buy some.

It wasn’t my only rude awakening.

The army was short of Apache Weapons Officers. In fact, they had none. They wanted me to go back for another tour. I guess it wasn’t that surprising. For every soldier or marine accepted as a candidate for pilot selection, eighteen were shown the door. Over 2,000 applicants fell by the wayside just to get one of us through the course and onto operations.

We were lucky. Out of the fourteen on my grading, four went on to become pilots – an attrition rate of three and a half to one instead of the more normal five.

ABFAC (Airborne Forward Air Controller) 68-71

Afghan National Army (ANA) 145, 146, 168, 333

Afghan National Police (ANP) 145, 146, 168, 179, 188, 201, 299-300, 301, 333, 338, 339, 363

Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) 168, 339, 344

Afghanistan:

British Army bases in see under individual base name

British Army objectives in 145-7

British Army operations in see under individual operation name

climate 157, 165-6, 211, 214, 215, 357

map of xiii

narcotics trade within 146, 147, 227, 333, 392

reconstruction of 145-6, 147, 154, 392

smell of 157, 158, 159

see also under individual area and place name

air support 200, 233, 341

A-10 166, 234, 236

Apache see Apache WAH-64D

B1B 4, 154, 166, 253, 254, 260, 355, 360, 362

B-2 95

C-17 161, 162

C-130 95, 156, 177

Chinook, CH-47 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 97, 129, 130, 132, 147, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 194, 195, 196-7, 199, 200, 202, 203, 212, 226, 253, 255, 258, 259, 260, 265, 290, 292, 293, 295, 296, 298, 299, 300, 330, 333, 338, 340, 341, 345, 346

Close Air Support (CAS) 324, 341, 342

Gazelle 33, 36, 37, 38, 46, 47, 51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62-3, 64, 65, 68, 70, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 85, 89, 90, 91, 97, 118, 120, 147

Harrier 166, 269, 286, 355

Intimate Support 325, 341, 370

Lockheed T-33 Shooting Stars 69, 70, 71-2, 73, 74

Lynx 4, 46, 62, 79, 83, 84, 86-7, 89, 90, 91, 96, 130, 198, 289

Aliu Za’I 201

Al-Qaeda 104, 146

Al-Sadr, Muqtada 128

anti-aircraft guns/gunners xx, 13-16, 90, 91, 132-3, 184, 298-31, 337, 392

Apache AH64A 46-8, 89, 103-4, 119

Apache AH64D 89

Apache WAH-64D:

air-conditioning 106, 197, 202, 218, 309, 351, 366, 381

auxiliary power unit (APU) 115, 116, 197, 198, 201, 212, 213, 242, 263, 264, 268, 270, 286, 350, 351

‘bag’ flying in 117, 120-5, 136, 190

Boresight Reticule Unit (BRU) 100, 116

cannon, 30mm Hughes M230

Automatic Chain gun 10, 11, 12, 106-7, 162, 203, 218, 238, 239, 240, 248, 277, 278, 281-2, 283, 312, 315, 325, 360, 364, 385

Counter Measures Dispensing System (CMDS) 224-5, 228

CRV7 rocket 107, 109, 162

Data Transfer Cartridge (DTC) 264

Direct View Optics (DVO) 102

DTV camera 102, 103, 112, 177, 178, 378, 379, 380

‘dynamic harmonisation’ 162, 163-4, 266, 346, 364

effect on role of helicopters in British Army 88-9

EM first launches 137-43

engines, Rolls-Royce 66, 114, 116, 163, 223

EW self-protection capabilities 94-6, 224-5, 228

Fire Control Radar (FCR) 8, 101, 103, 106, 116, 226-7, 231, 309, 353

flares 92, 254, 263

Flechette 107, 108-9, 111, 263, 266, 337, 380-1, 386

Flight Reference Cards 265

Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) system 102, 103, 112, 119-20, 121, 268, 294, 302, 323, 357, 358, 378, 379, 380

fuel load 212, 217, 219, 225, 229, 230, 232, 250, 251-2, 327, 371, 388

Head-Mounted Display (HMD) 248, 377

HEDP rounds 106-7, 240, 248, 359, 383, 388

Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aids Systems (HIDAS) 94, 95, 132, 364

High Explosive Incendiary Semi-Armour Piercing (HEISAP) 107, 108, 111, 263, 382, 383, 386, 388

Hellfire missile see Hellfire missile

IDM – Improved Data Modem 350, 353, 369

Image Auto-Track (IAT) 142, 320, 321, 322

Improved Extended Forward Avionics Bay (IEFAB) 269

inspection of, pre-flight 114-15

ISTAR 100

Laser Warning Receiver System (LWRS) 94-5

lift off 219-21

loading/starting 209-11, 212-19

Longbow radar 89, 101, 109, 163, 226, 231, 269, 317

M261 rocket launchers 107

MAWS 94

MOD buy 46, 47, 66

monocle display 100, 115, 116, 119-20, 121, 126, 220, 225, 231, 305, 310, 329, 377, 384

Multi-Purpose Display (MPD) 7, 9, 47, 48, 95, 101, 103, 112, 119, 125, 126, 177, 225, 226, 227, 229, 231, 237, 238, 240, 244, 248, 265, 268, 276, 278, 314, 320, 351, 354, 360, 379, 381

Multi-Purpose-Sub-Munition (MPSM) 107-8, 111

ORT (Optical Relay Tube) 47-8, 102, 103, 106, 112, 127, 141, 353, 389, 390

Pilot’s Night Vision System (PNVS) 100, 121, 124, 134, 213, 298, 300, 379, 386

Pinvis (TADS thermal image) 101, 102, 121

port view xxiv-xxv

Power Margin Indicator 230

preliminary flight checks 115

press and 171

Qualified Helicopter Instructor (QHI) 92

radios 215-16, 217, 264, 265, 269, 299, 366, 372

RWR receivers 94

secure datalink 101

simulator 120, 125-7, 128

size of 114

stabilator 264, 305

starboard view xxvi-xxvii

survivability of 127

tail wheel 263-4

Target Acquisition and Designation Sight (TADS) 7, 9, 10, 11, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 109, 112, 141, 152, 169, 175, 176, 180, 213, 235, 237, 238, 248, 255, 268, 274, 276, 277, 278, 283, 290, 304, 306-7, 310, 314, 315, 316, 320, 322, 323, 328, 352, 368, 369, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 387, 394

torque 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 227

training course, British Army 98-130

UFD (Up Front Display) 211, 220

Area of Responsibility (AOR) xv, 131, 187, 199, 286, 299

Arming and Loading Point Commander 209

armoured vehicles:

armoured personnel carriers (APCs) 38

light armoured vehicles (LAVs) 353

Pinzgauer 201, 332

Scimitar 332, 353

Spartan 332

Striker armoured fighting vehicle 75

WMIKs 178, 180, 195, 201, 332, 366

Augustus, Operation 257