Apache (8 page)

The sweat finally began to cool on my brow as the air con won its battle with the sun’s rays. I started testing the systems.

Fifteen minutes to takeoff.

My hands and eyes swept around the cockpit. The Boss and I kept up a constant dialogue as we worked. Our rotor blades thundered menacingly above the eight man arming team. Three … two … one … ten minutes to lift.

‘Ugly Five One on one.’ I flicked to the second radio. ‘On two.’ Flicked to the third. ‘On three.’ Flicked to the last, our data radio, and sent our digital position.

Billy replied, ‘Ugly Five Zero on one … on two … on three.’ An icon appeared on the MPD showing the position of his Apache.

‘Good Data. Ready.’ All four radios and data were working.

Billy replied with a ‘click-click’ over the radio, shorthand for affirmative.

Pushing the APU button again switched it off. ‘APU off; pins, cords and chocks please, Simon.’

His team prepared the aircraft for moving and I opened my door to receive the arming pin. The flares and weapons were now armed and we were ready to go.

‘Have a good trip, sirs.’ Simon disconnected from the right wing and his team moved to the missile and rocket racks. For the first time since we’d arrived, we owned the Apache.

‘Your lead, Billy.’

Another double click.

Two minutes and thirty seconds to takeoff.

My left hand moved down the collective to the flying grip. Looking straight ahead as my right eye focused on the flight symbology projected into the monocle, I gave the flying grip a single twist to the right, removing the collective’s friction lock. The torque – the measurement of engine power output in helicopter flight – indicated 21 per cent. That was the norm while stationary on the ground, rotor blades flat – the minimum angle of pitch.

My feet pressed on the very top of both directional foot pedals at the same time until I heard a light thud.

‘Parking brake off? Tail wheel locked?’

The final two questions on the Boss’s checklist. I did my visual check. ‘The parking brake is off, the handle is in, tail wheel is locked and the light is out.’

My right eye focused on the torque and my left watched Billy and Carl’s aircraft pull out of the loading bay beside us and taxi away. My left hand was poised to pull up the collective, my right wrapped firmly around the cyclic, ready to push forward.

Thirty seconds to takeoff.

With fifty metres between us and Billy, I lifted the collective and depressed my left pedal to increase power to the tail rotor and balance us up against the increased force of the turning rotor blades. Left unchecked, the main blades would try to turn our nose to the right, leaning the Apache dangerously over to one side. The torque climbed to 35 per cent.

With a gentle push of the cyclic control stick away from my body the main blades tipped and pulled the machine slowly forward. A touch on the toe brakes at the top of the pedals to test the brakes then we taxied onto our miniature runway for a running takeoff.

Heat and altitude both reduced the amount of power a helicopter engine could generate. Camp Bastion was long on both. We could lift vertically, but it was a major struggle if we carried a full load of ammunition and fuel. Taking a run at it gave us translational lift, the kind fixed-wing aircraft used.

Fifteen seconds to takeoff.

I pointed our nose straight down the runway, with Billy and Carl still fifty metres ahead of us, and pulled a little more pitch. The machine picked up pace nicely. Once the torque hit 65 per cent, I pushed the trim button to hold the collective and cyclic in place. It was sufficient power to get us up. The speed symbol in my right eye hit twenty knots and continued to climb.

Six seconds to takeoff.

Eighty metres down the runway, the tail wheel lifted off it. At thirty-five knots she wanted to fly, but I held her down with a tiny reduction of power and a shift of the cyclic. It wasn’t time yet.

Two seconds to takeoff.

I was watching Carl’s disc intently … Now … It tipped forward and I raised the collective again and the main wheels left the ground. We lifted in perfect unison. Good. I was pleased I’d got it spot on. If you set the right tone at the start of a mission you’d remain accurate throughout.

‘Your ASE, Boss.’

The Boss armed the aircraft’s Aircraft Survival Equipment (ASE) to protect us against SAMs.

‘Okay, countermeasures set; ASE is on semi-automatic.’

‘Zero Charlie this is Ugly Five Zero and Ugly Five One. Wheels off at your location as fragged, over.’

‘Zero Charlie, Roger. Out.’

I pulled up the navigation page on the left hand MPD and
selected the pre-planned route heading for Sangin, the first stop on our tour. A glance through the monocle confirmed: ‘Eighteen minutes to arrival.’

We were seventy-five feet above the desert floor and heading north-east, the camp’s perimeter fence two hundred metres behind us. A quick trim with the right thumb and we accelerated to a cruising speed of 120 knots. The Boss selected automatic on the ASE. The Apache would, we hoped, keep us safe from surface-to-air missiles. SAMs were the greatest threat to us at the heights we operated.

Billy and Carl were a safe distance in front of us to avoid collision. Billy came on the radio.

‘Ugly Five One, this is Ugly Five Zero. High-high, five-five and six-zero.’

‘High-high, five-five, six-zero copied.’

Billy wanted us to climb high. Him to 5,500 feet and us to 6,000 feet – always a small difference in height too, for safety. The Boss glanced up through the canopy’s bulletproof window.

‘Clear above.’

‘Copied. Climbing.’

I pulled back on the cyclic and hard on the collective while depressing my left pedal. We lost our stomachs and soared.

Despite its gargantuan combat weight, the Apache’s mighty Rolls Royce engines made it just as agile and manoeuvrable as any chopper the army had ever had. Turning at up to 38,300 rpm, they pumped out an incredible 2,240 shaft horse power – making the Apache twenty-two times more powerful than a Porsche 911.

The Apache could climb in excess of 5,000 feet a minute, including a one-off, ninety-degree, nose-up vertical climb of 1,000 feet. And it could do a 360-degree loop, barrel roll or a wing over nose
dive – every stunt manoeuvre in the book. Not moves I’ve ever carried out, of course; heaven forbid – especially with Sky Cop as my wingman.

Sixty seconds or so later, we were at Billy’s nominated cruising altitude. It was a terrific feeling to be up there again, over that menacingly beautiful landscape, and in that extraordinary machine. Ten minutes into the flight, I felt as confident at the controls as I had on the day I left in August. I was right back in the zone again.

Despite the years of training, it had still taken me a good six weeks of hard fighting on the first tour before I really felt the exhilaration of being at one with the machine.

When you drive a new car, you’re slow and cautious. You need to think about every action, from where the indicators are to how far you are from the gatepost. After you’ve driven it for a while, you don’t have to think; you just end up at home without having thought of driving once.

It was the same with the Apache, but on a grander scale. Halfway through the first tour, whatever I wanted to do in the aircraft, I did. From that moment onwards I didn’t need to think how to fly and shoot because my fingers, arms and legs were already working in perfect harmony with my mind. I was no longer strapped to the Apache; the Apache was strapped to me.

Almost all of the pilots were there by the end of the tour. But none of that meant that we had lost respect for the daunting reality of having so much firepower at our finger tips. Not for one moment, then or since. Nobody in that war had more potential to do as much damage to human life. With that power came an equal amount of responsibility. We were fearful of being seen as gung-ho; US Apache pilots had that reputation and we didn’t want to follow suit. Every single round we put down we put down with good
reason; killing someone was a serious business.

As we flew, I watched the Boss’s head dart from side to side as he fought to take everything in. ‘Amazing …’ he’d murmur every now and then. Occasionally, a swift question. ‘Jeez. What the hell do you call that?’

There were no more inspiring places to fly than in southern Afghanistan. It was unlike anywhere I had ever seen before and I was still captivated by it too. The landscape was both epic and primeval; everything about it was extreme. When it was flat, it was flat as a pancake. When it was hot, it was unbearably so. The rivers were never babbling streams but vast raging torrents, and the mountains climbed straight up to the heavens, often from a standing start.

The plan was to do an anticlockwise circuit of the four northern platoon houses where we’d spent most of the first tour: Sangin first, then Kajaki in the far north-east, Now Zad in the far north-west, and finally Gereshk, twenty kilometres shy of Camp Bastion, on the way back.

We stuck to the safety of the desert on the way up, keeping the Green Zone to our right. Immensely fertile before the Soviet invasion in 1978–79, Helmand province had been known as Afghanistan’s breadbasket. A decade of bitter fighting against the Red Army ended that. Russian bombers smashed much of Helmand’s irrigation system to smithereens. Yet the year-round supply of melted snow off the Hindu Kush was sufficient to keep the river valley’s fields and orchards lush enough for two full crops of opium poppies a year.

The vast majority of the province’s intensely conservative, desperately impoverished, million-strong, largely Pashtun, population were farmers – or worked the farmers’ land. The majority lived
in single-storey houses fashioned from adobe and stone, often without electricity or piped water. It was an existence that hadn’t changed in a millennium.

The Green Zone only amounted to a tiny central slice of the province. It was bordered by two great deserts. To its west was the Desert of Death and Camp Bastion.

‘Dasht-e-Margo …’ The Boss practised his fledgling Pashtun.

‘Yeah. But aircrew generally call it the GAFA, Boss.’

‘GAFA?’

‘The Great Afghan Fuck All.’

The GAFA was an ancient, rocky seabed with a thick covering of sand as fine as dust. Nomads set up temporary shelters on it in the winter so their goats and camels could feed on the odd bush. In the summer it remained the exclusive preserve of the drug traffickers. They criss-crossed it south to Pakistan, or west to Iran, moving raw opium or freshly processed heroin to their consumers in the Middle East or Europe, leaving an endless mesh of tyre tracks behind them. It was so barren that you couldn’t tell if you were at 100 feet or 10,000.

‘What do you call the desert on the east side of the Green Zone, then?’

‘The Red Desert.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it looks red from up here.’

The Boss peered at our right horizon. ‘It’s actually worse. Makes the GAFA look like Kent.’

The Red Desert stretched all the way to Kandahar: 10,000 square miles of thin, Arabian-style sand, whipped by the wind over thousands of years into an endless succession of dunes. From 5,000 feet up, its surface looked like a sea of rippling red waves. Except by two
well-known routes, the Red Desert was completely impassable, even by tracked vehicles. If you went in there, you didn’t come out again. That’s why nobody ever did. Not even the nomads.

As we moved further north and nearer to Sangin the topography ahead of us began to change. We could see the outlines of great ridges of rock rising from steep valleys to form the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Their peaks were as sharp as knife-blades and coloured seams cut through them as they climbed, indicating the different eras of their evolution. The mountains stretched all the way to Kabul, 300 miles to the north-east. They were almost impassable in the winter snows and boasted only one road flat enough for most vehicles to make the arduous journey during the rest of the year.

Many of the foothills had been tunnelled into, originally for protection from the wind and sandstorms and somewhere to store crops, but then, in the last few thousand years, for war. They provided an excellent defence against invaders since the time of Alexander the Great, and most recently, a haven to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Conventional British forces tried to stay out of the mountains. Our lesson had been learned 164 years before we got there, when General Elphinstone’s 16,000-man garrison was wiped out during the retreat from Kabul in 1842.

‘That’s Sangin ahead of us now, Boss.’

Sangin sat at the confluence of three green zones, and the District Centre was sited at the point the Helmand was joined by another river flowing from the northern hills. The Taliban had three different covered approaches from which to attack it.

It was no coincidence that the SBS team had got so badly whacked here. The town was the scene of the most intense fighting
of our first tour and accounted for half of 16 Air Assault Brigade’s body bags. For years it had been a centre of Taliban activity, as well as the market town where all of the opium grown in the north of the province was traded. The traffickers hadn’t been too happy about the Paras’ arrival either. We dropped down to get a better look.

‘Wheel,’ Billy called. ‘We’ll start east, you start west.’

A wheel was a regular Apache combat manoeuvre over a target. We’d circle on the same axis but at different heights, one clockwise, one anticlockwise. It gave the flight 360-degree visibility at all times. We liked to keep between 1,000 and 4,000 metres away from the target, out of small arms range but well within engagement range of our weapons, and close enough for us to see whatever we needed through our optics.

As I slipped us into the gentle circle, I pointed out areas of interest for the Boss to zoom into with the Day TV TADS camera and examine on his screen. It had three fields of view – narrow, wide and zoom. Zoom offered 127-times magnification. If you looked at a guy in the zoom field while standing off at 2,000 metres, you could tell how many fillings he had. The camera was housed in the nose pod, so we could see up to sixty degrees downwards; as if we were looking straight through the Kevlar shell beneath our feet.