Ed Macy - Apache

The Taliban were already inside the shaft, and would be burrowing deeper with every passing second.

‘Don’t fire until I say, Boss. We’ll ram it right down the vent.’

I reduced our speed but maintained the height. The closer we got, the lower the TADS was pointing. The only way we’d get the Hellfire into the shaft was to fire it at a sharp angle from the shaft’s entrance so it wouldn’t have time to track down to its normal impact angle.

‘Trust me, Boss. One thousand metres.’ I wanted vertical and didn’t have time to explain. ‘Lase the target now, but hold fire .’

Five hundred metres from the target would do it. But we only had ten more seconds before our quarry would be out of harm’s way. The bottom right-hand corner of my MPD told me that the dog had seen the rabbit – our missile had locked onto the laser. The Boss’s crosshairs were still on the shaft but the TADS could move no further.

‘Mr M, I’m about to break lock – and they’re about to escape.’

‘Seven hundred and fifty metres. Stand by to fire.’

I dumped the collective and thrust the cyclic forward in one fast, smooth movement.

The Apache’s nose dropped and its tail shot up. Within a second it was pointing straight down and hurtling towards the Shrine at 100 knots.

‘Okay, fire Bo–’

‘Firing.’

The Hellfire’s propellant ignited with a bright yellow flash as it slid off its rail and blasted straight towards the target. The cockpit window was filling up with Shrine, and fast – 125 knots… I couldn’t pull up because the Boss would lose lock.

The Boss hunched over his screen, keeping the TADS crosshairs over the shaft entrance and his laser trigger tight. A fraction over two seconds after it left us, the missile followed the beam straight into the blowhole and impacted five metres down the tunnel with five million pounds of pressure upon every square inch of rock it hit. Yes …

One hundred and fifty knots… I pulled back hard on the cyclic. Dust and debris shot from the top of the shaft, 100 feet into the air. We were under 1,000 feet. I’d sworn I’d never get this low. At 750 feet, still fighting the inertia, I punched off eight flares as the nose came up, just in case a missile decided to lock onto the heat from our now vertical engines.

‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly. That is a Delta Hotel. Repeat, Delta Hotel!’

Direct hit. We could hear whoops of delight over the JTAC’s mike. We skirted around the back of the Shrine to look for runners while Billy scoured Falcon. Both were as dead as a whore-house on a Sunday morning.

‘I want that Hellfire method taught to everyone, Mr M… after you’ve explained it to me …’

Between us and the Harrier, every threat had been removed in under two minutes. Alice would have been proud of us.

The Boss was delighted with his sharp-shooting. ‘I think that’s what you call catching the enemy with their pants down, isn’t it?’

‘Kind of. They’d barely unbuckled their belts.’

‘Widow Seven Eight, Ugly Five One. We have no more targets. Do you have anything else for us?’

‘Negative. But they’ll probably be back the moment you go.’

‘Boss, we’ve got plenty of combat gas,’ Billy said. ‘Let’s pull a trick.’

‘Affirm. Good idea.’

Trigger flipped onto an insecure frequency and told the JTAC we were heading back to Camp Bastion. Instead, we pulled south ten kilometres into the desert, and waited.

It was a ruse we’d used a few times with success. We listened to the Taliban’s radios; they listened to our insecure nets. Each side heard the other loud and clear. But neither knew for certain whether they were being bluffed.

We circled at endurance speed – seventy knots – while the sun dipped over the foothills of the Hindu Kush, painting the sky blood red. There was not a trace of humanity as far as the eye could see; the scene was so primeval that Billy and Carl’s brutally uncompromising helicopter gunship beneath us looked strangely at home.

After twenty minutes, it was still all quiet at Arnhem. The Taliban were either all dead or had decided against stepping back into the ring for Round Two, so the JTAC released us.

‘Drop us some fish and chips the next time you’re passing,’ Widow Seven Eight added. ‘The lads are sick to death of ration packs.’

We landed back at base at dusk. The arming teams threw on the same Load Charlie for our next call-out.

‘Stand by, you two,’ Carl warned from the next door arming bay. ‘Kev is on his way over.’

Kev circled the aircraft, his belly leading the way. He peered into our rocket pod tubes and under the Hellfire rails. He plugged into the wing with the inevitable slow shake of his head. ‘Absolutely fooking typical.’ We’d launched one of his precious Hellfires – what more did he want? ‘You launched one all right. But you launched the wrong fooking one, didn’t you?’

Kev pointed to the Hellfire on our right-hand rail. ‘See that? Its serial number’s out of date next week. You were supposed to have fired the fookin’ right ’un, not the left. That one was good for another couple of months. I’ll have to backload her now. Un-fooking-believable.’ He unplugged and stomped off.

As we turned in that night, the four of us popped into the JOC one last time to check on the situation at Kajaki. The District Centre and Arnhem had taken the odd pot shot since we’d left, but on the whole it had remained quiet.

I got into my sleeping bag and hoped we didn’t get an overnight call-out. I didn’t mind them normally, but the whole squadron had to be up early the next morning. The Prime Minister was on his way.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s clandestine visit was the worst kept secret in Camp Bastion. Everyone had known about it for days.

‘Listen, I know you all know who’s coming out,’ the Boss said one night at an evening brief. ‘But from now on, please stop talking about it. It’s supposed to be classified.’

Darwin gave Trigger’s knickers an extra twist. ‘Can we ask the PM to sign Rocco, sir?’

‘No we bloody can’t! And please don’t Rocco anyone while they’re talking to him. Seriously guys, I’ll get sacked. In fact, who’s got Rocco? Can you hand him over, please?’

Thirty blank faces stared back at him; twenty-nine genuinely, one not so. Rocco wasn’t coming out that easily. Trigger looked at Carl. His eyes narrowed.

‘I swear I don’t have him, Boss.’

The official order had gone out for maximum attendance at a ‘VVIP visit’ twenty-four hours before. They wanted everyone in the camp apart from those on essential duties to line up for him on the Hercules’s landing strip. He was due to land, have a walkabout and a how-do-you-do and then leave an hour later without even going into the camp proper. It was fine by us. If we needed to scramble, we were in the right place. And it would give him a good show.

We all had to get up at 6am to be down there by seven for his arrival at eight. It was the military’s usual hurry-up-and-wait scenario – and it put Carl on supermoan mode.

‘Blooming typical. The one night we don’t get an IRT shout, we have to get up at sparrow’s fart anyway.’

There was a frisson around the camp that morning – not because anyone was particularly excited to meet the man, but because it was something different. A welcome break from the daily grind.

We were told he was going to make a speech, which was why I hadn’t dreamt up an essential task for myself instead. I was curious to hear what he was going to say. Maybe he had an announcement to make; perhaps he’d tell us how long we’d be there, or where else we were headed. Whatever it was, I wanted to hear it first-hand.