Apache (19 page)

‘Do you think he can hear us?’

‘Hell, yeah. We’re right over his head.’

Charlotte came on. ‘Five Three, can’t see any movement down there at all.’

‘Neither can we.’

After what must have been at least our tenth orbit, the Boss
came up with another brilliant way of getting us shot.

‘Okay, Elton – now’s your chance. Roll the aircraft and slap the blades about a bit.’

‘What do you mean, “slap the blades about a bit”? You’ve got Kevlar up to your tits!’

‘Come on, you pussy. Just give the blades a bit of a slap so he definitely knows we’re here.’

‘Don’t worry, he fucking knows.’

I threw the aircraft ninety degrees onto its right side for a second or two, righted it again, and then chucked it left. Each time the blades clattered away, slapping hard on the air.

‘Now the whole of Now Zad knows.’

We still saw nothing on the ground.

‘Do it again.’

‘At this rate everyone down there is going to try and hose us down for keeping them awake.’

I rolled right and left twice more. Still nothing. Round and round we kept on going; we must have done two dozen circuits.

After thirty minutes over the target area, I started to relax. If the sniper was going to have a go, he would have done so by now. He’d had more than enough time to set up and open fire. Last time around, he’d hit Darwin within ten minutes of his arrival.

‘Do you want me to put the lights on, Boss?’

‘Erm … no, I don’t think we should do that …’ Trigger replied in all seriousness. Jesus … He’d actually considered it …

‘Five Three this is Five One; he’s not down there.’

We were just wasting time and fuel.

‘Five Three, I agree,’ chipped in Darwin. ‘This geezer doesn’t piss about. He’s gone.’

‘All right, we’d better knock it on the head.’ The Boss didn’t
bother to hide his disappointment. ‘Let’s RTB.’

I pointed the nose south and pulled power. It still came as an immense relief to pass over Now Zad’s southern ridgeline and into the safety of the desert.

There wasn’t much chat on the way back and no game of Apache Triv either. The Dushka gunner was still out there. We all knew we’d have to keep coming back until we killed him.

The aircraft were tied up for the next two nights on other deliberate taskings so the next Op Steve-O was pencilled in for seventy-two hours later.

Then a Harrier filed a sitrep about a munition drop in south-east Now Zad. He’d been circling high above the town, working to the DC’s JTAC, and had spotted a group of men setting up an antiaircraft gun in the back garden of a compound. He must have been too high for them to have any idea he was there. The JTAC gave the Harrier permission to engage, and he dropped a 500-lb bomb on them. Topman got the Taliban and the AA gun in one go; they got a new swimming pool. And helicopters stopped taking Dushka rounds over Now Zad.

Charlotte and Darwin were even more delighted than we were. Next time, it had been their turn to provide the bait.

The weather turned in mid-December when the Helmand winter kicked in. The rains arrived and the temperature started to plummet at night; before long it fell below freezing.

The Taliban in the Green Zone were largely on foot, so they hated fighting in bad weather. A diehard few continued to put up a token resistance, but when it got cold most of them retreated to their northern mountain refuges.

We welcomed the brief change in tempo. It allowed us to think about Christmas. Wherever I had been deployed, it was always a big deal, a special occasion that helped lighten the monotony of operational life – even if you did have to work all the way through it. It was also the time we particularly missed our families, so we all did our best to make it a really special occasion.

The Groundies got into the festive mood early. A few of them decided to introduce a bit of extra cheer by writing a letter to the GMTV presenter and
Daily Mirror
columnist Fiona Phillips, signed with a nom de plume. The letter was forgotten about almost as soon as it was posted. Nobody expected to see it published – but it was, immediately. Fiona even penned her own reply.

A week or so later, the first bag of mail arrived. The next day there were two bags. And two more the day after. Soon, hundreds and hundreds of letters were pouring into the JHF; so many that nobody knew what to do with them all.

People from all walks of life had replied, from Royal British Legion members and nice old ladies to mums and dads with serving sons and daughters. Most of them just wanted to wish us a Happy Christmas; some fancied a flirt, and one or two took the trouble to explain precisely what they’d like to do to a nice man in a uniform while their husbands were out at work.

One young refueller peeled open a crimson envelope containing a photograph of a gorgeous brunette posing in nothing more than a bra, knickers and suspender belt, attached to a handwritten note:
Al – if you want to see more, write more …

The boy couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Whoa! Look at this, lads!’ He sprinted down to the flight line, photo in hand.

That was it. The dam broke. The Groundies invaded the JHF en masse. They even brought up the missile truck, determined to pinch as many of the mailbags as they could get their hands on. Billy and I watched them cluster around the bird table like sniffer dogs, in search of the most promising offer.

It didn’t take them long to discover that the kind of invitations
they were looking for were in pretty short supply – but they were swiftly consoled by the extraordinary number of thoroughly decent people who cared enough about the sacrifices they were making to have taken the trouble to wish them a Happy Christmas. And before long, with a little encouragement from the vets, a stream of thank you letters was making its way back home.

For some of the youngsters of the squadron, it was their first Christmas away from home; a daunting experience for anyone. Charlotte had told us it was the only part of the deployment she was dreading – but her friends and family back home were clearly doing their best to cheer her up. I popped into 3 Flight’s tent to see if anyone fancied a brew and was confronted by the biggest pile of presents I’d ever seen, beautifully wrapped and carefully piled on a spare camp cot: six feet long, three feet wide and four feet high.

There were a few for Nick, one or two for FOG, none for Darwin; at least 80 per cent of them belonged to Charlotte.

‘Hang on lads,’ one of the guys said. ‘I’ve got a great idea …’

Charlotte burst into the JHF a few hours later, her face white with shock. ‘I can’t believe it! Somebody’s stolen our presents.’

‘
What?
’ We did our best to sound suitably horrified.

‘They were all laid out on a bed, ready for Christmas, and someone has stolen them. I can’t believe it. Who would be so mean?’

Always the perfect gentleman, Nick sprang to her support. ‘I can’t believe someone would actually
steal
Christmas presents. What a low down, rotten thing to do.’

FOG was more philosophical. ‘No guys, we should have known better.’

‘Quick,’ I suggested helpfully. ‘Go and report it to the police. They’ll seal the main gate and then search the camp –’ Charlotte charged across to the RMP office before I’d even finished speaking.

The coppers didn’t let us down. The two SIB sergeants escorted her straight back to her tent, but as she was about to lead them in, one of them blocked her path.

‘Sorry ma’am, you can’t go in there,’ he said gravely. ‘It’s a crime scene.’ And his partner slapped two strips of blue and white police tape across the entrance.

‘But all my stuff is in there! When can I go back in?’

‘Well, we’ll need to dust the place down for prints. That’ll mean getting someone down from Kabul, which will take a few days, I’m afraid. And at this time of year … ooh, you’re looking at after Christmas now. Sorry.’

Not only had 3 Flight lost their presents, they’d also lost their tent. All they had to live with was a wash bag and the few meagre possessions they’d taken down to the IRT tent. We were finding it increasingly difficult to wipe the smiles off our faces.

We’d found three Father Christmas hats and beards and filmed ourselves tiptoeing to the cot, looking furtively left and right, stuffing all the presents into big black bin bags and giving a ‘Ho ho ho’ to the camcorder as we made off with them. We’d locked the presents in a couple of big green weapons cases in our tents at first, then had the bright idea of driving them down to the RMP office and roping them into the plot.

We planned to show our film to Charlotte and the others before triumphantly reuniting them with their gifts on Christmas Day. We were quite proud of it; we even managed to secure a cameo appearance by the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who’d flown out for a few days to cook Christmas lunch for the troops. We approached him in the hangar during a tour of the flight line. He was well up for it.

Looking as mean as he could, he rasped: ‘Hello 3 Flight, and
Happy Christmas. Do you know where your fucking presents are yet?’

I also asked him rather sheepishly to sign a recipe for Emily’s mother’s Clootie dumplings, a heavy Scottish cake she made by the truck load.

‘I can tell she’s a Jock,’ he said, handing it back to me. ‘She’s making it with fucking margarine!’

Charlotte grew progressively quieter as Christmas Eve approached. Homelessness, presentlessness and family separation were getting to her. We began to feel guilty enough to bring Darwin in on the plot. He’d told his family not send out any presents; he wanted to celebrate with them on his return – so he had no axe to grind. He’d know whether we should call it off.

‘Don’t worry about Charlotte,’ he assured us. ‘She’s pretty tough; she’ll be good with it.’

So we kept on going – never dreaming that, after a few hours, Darwin would buckle under the pressure of living with our secret. By that night, the weasel blabbed to Charlotte, Nick and FOG. We discovered his treachery after she let it slip to the Boss, and someone overheard.

The drama of the missing presents now gripped the squadron. Trigger finally stepped in on Christmas Eve. He told 3 Flight their presents were safe and sound with the RMPs. 3 Flight tried to pretend they’d never cared about them in the first place. Honours were just about even – though we still had a score to settle with Darwin-the-Rat.

HQ Flight were up early on Christmas Day for a deliberate tasking. We had to escort a Chinook on a series of resupplies to the three most northern district centres. It was tedious stuff and went on for hours. We were in the cockpit – air or ground – for most of
the day. It was bitterly cold and the weather was dire: low cloud and drizzling rain. Camp Bastion turned into a quagmire, and we squelched all the way to the flight line.

‘Like Christmas in the World War One trenches,’ Carl moaned. ‘But without the footie.’

Kajaki was furthest away, so it was our first destination. We went the long way round – low through the eastern mountains at 1,000 feet – to avoid SAM traps. We hadn’t seen the mountains in the rain before, and it was an eerie experience. Great slabs of glistening silver-grey rock towered either side of us, punctuated by puffs of marshmallow cloud. It felt like we were on our way to Middle Earth. Everything was deathly quiet; we were on silent drills because of the Chinook’s insecure radios.

Carl could see well enough to fly, but there was no harm in having a backup in shit like this. So for the only time on the tour I flicked to the radar page on my left-hand MPD and switched on the Longbow’s Terrain Profile Mode.

The US Apaches flew without their Longbow Radars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially designed to help destroy armoured columns, the Americans said they were no use for counterinsurgency. They swapped them for more weapons weight. Our Rolls Royce engines were strong enough to carry the Longbow and all the weapons we’d need.

The Longbow’s Ground Target Mode was extremely handy for spotting vehicles at a distance, or well out of the TADS line of sight. It pinged anything moving or static up to eight kilometres away, in any direction. But Terrain Profile Mode was even more useful on a sortie like this. The Longbow mapped out the lie of the land up to two and a half kilometres in front of us. On the MPD, it showed terrain below us as black, terrain within 100 feet of us as grey and
terrain above us – terrain that we’d hit – as white. It projected an electronic zigzag graph across our monocle so we could identify the hills and valleys ahead of us. TPM meant we could fly in all weather, day and night, at ultra-low level, at great speed and totally blind. Carl got us through the spooky mountains off his own bat, but it was always nice to know TPM was there if we needed it.

After Kajaki, we hit Now Zad, then back to Camp Bastion, south down to Lashkar Gah where the Chinook had passengers to pick up, Bastion again, and finally back up to Forward Operating Base Robinson near Sangin.

The clouds finally began to clear on our last leg over the desert, treating us to a perfect blood orange sunset.

‘
I can see clearly now the rain has gone
…’ I started to sing.

There was never going to be a better moment.

‘Five Zero, Five One; there’s something rattling by my door. Check the nearside of my aircraft with your TADS, will you?’

Billy pulled level with us and Trigger swung his Day TV camera onto our cockpit.

‘Ho, ho, ho!’

I’d taken off my helmet for a few seconds and pulled on a red and white Father Christmas hat to give them a wave. For the first time since we’d got up it began to feel like Christmas Day.

We were back too late for turkey and stuffing in the cookhouse, so we scrubbed up and joined the squadron party. It was being held in our newly acquired recreation tent. A stage and makeshift bar were set up, the place was rigged out with tinsel and a sparkly silver tree, and we all piled in to enjoy a rare drink.

Alcohol was banned for all British troops across Helmand. On Christmas night a special exception was made and everyone was allowed two cans of beer. Only the four IRT / HRF pilots had to stay
dry. They went to the party in full flying rig ready for the call-out if it came. Luckily, it didn’t.

Every section performed a sketch, taking the mickey out of all the squadron characters. These could go on for hours, but the good ones were comic genius. Instead of a sketch, 2 Flight played us a film they’d spent countless hours crafting, a pastiche of
Top Gun
with footage from the movie edited in.

The highlight of the evening was Darwin’s Kangaroo Court; all the better because he had no idea it was coming. As soon as the entertainment finished, he was held firmly by both arms and tried then and there. The charge: ‘Wilful betrayal of the Warrant Officers and Sergeants’ Mess by forming a secret alliance with the officers – namely, by telling them who had their Christmas presents.’ The jury agreed it was a most heinous offence. There was a prosecution, a defence and the Boss was the judge.

‘Right, bring in the guilty bastard.’ Trigger opened the proceedings. The evidence was presented with all the venom of a Stalin show trial. Darwin was left with little choice but to plead guilty.

‘Guilty is the correct plea,’ Trigger decreed. ‘You have been convicted and I hereby sentence you to wearing your flying suit and helmet throughout the whole of your next evening meal in the cookhouse.’

We sat on our cots at the end of the evening and opened our presents. The Boss joined us, and set up his camcorder so he could send the video home to his kids. We took it in turns. I opened my kids’ presents first and then Emily’s. She’d written
Open Last
on one; by the time I got round to it, everyone else had finished.