Ed Macy - Apache

Then Nick and Darwin got shot up during an IRT shout 2,000 feet over the town. A 12.7-mm Dushka round passed through the airframe’s forward left electronics bay, destroying avionics and a systems processor, before hitting a Kevlar plate and smashing into tiny pieces less than two feet from Nick. It set off all the cockpit alarms and Nick suggested they bug out, but Darwin – the aircraft’s pilot – was cool.

‘We’re okay, sir. Is your TADS still working?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then put some fucking fire down there.’

They flew back gingerly, and landed with smoke pouring out of the side. Demonstrating their usual tenderness, the Groundies rushed out to film Nick and Darwin’s approach for their personal tour videos in case they crashed.

It was the second time Darwin had been shot; he’d taken a Dushka round on the first tour, so he then became known as the Bullet Magnet. Then, two days later, a Lynx on a photo recce over Now Zad took a Dushka round too. Two aircraft getting hit in the same location in such a short space of time added up to a Dushka gunner somewhere in Now Zad who knew exactly what he was doing.

We obviously couldn’t continue normal air operations while he was there. A dropped Apache would have been bad enough – but the thought of a Chinook going down with thirty marines aboard was what really gave us sleepless nights. We had to find the Now Zad Dushka gunner and remove him.

‘I’ve got it,’ the Boss said proudly, after a couple of hours of deep thought. ‘We’re going to launch Op Steve-O.’

The night before, the Boss had taken a break from the first episode of 24 and watched a few minutes of Jackass: The Movie instead – just long enough to catch the scene where a bloke called Steve-O had a hook pushed through his cheek and was thrown off a speed boat by his mates so he could be dragged along as shark bait.

‘That’s what we’re going to be, Mr Macy – Dushka bait. You and I will ramble around above Now Zad while 3 Flight hide off to one side. A nice, juicy Apache over his head is bound to lure our man out. Then Charlotte and Darwin will tip in and blow him away.’

‘Right you are, Boss. And how are you going to explain this to my family when it all goes tits up?’

‘Not a problem,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If we go down, I won’t be the one who’ll have to tell them.’

If any pilot on the squadron was going to attempt something like this, it had to be the Boss. He couldn’t order anyone else into harm’s way without first going there himself. And I was the poor sod who crewed with him. Darwin was coming along with Charlotte as his regular front-seater, for his insight into how the Dushka gunner worked – and hopefully a touch of revenge.

I could have refused to go – but the truth was I wanted to. It was a bold plan, and would guarantee one hell of an adrenalin rush. The Boss knew the aircraft as well as any of us, and he was confident the Apache could take it.

We decided to fly Op Steve-O at night. The Dushka’s muzzle flash and tracer rounds would be seen easily with the naked eye whilst the heat of his barrel in the chill of the night would show up far better on our FLIR camera. And if we went down, we’d have Night Vision Goggles and the cover of darkness.

I would be flying this mission, and Trigger would provide the eyes. The four of us headed down to the flight line after the evening brief. Charlotte and Darwin were small but perfectly formed at the best of times. They were completely dwarfed by the Apache they were checking over. ‘Hey, Umpalumpas,’ I said. ‘Do you want an extra cushion in that beast to help you see over the dash?’

‘You better believe it, Ed.’ Darwin looked up from the cannon. ‘There’ll be that many bells and whistles going off in your cockpit when the sniper sparks up, you’ll be praying we can see enough to nail him before he finishes you off.’

Charlotte carried on polishing the seeker dome of a Hellfire. Maximum effect for minimum effort was more her style. ‘Here’s the deal, Mr Macy. You concentrate on not getting shot and leave the bad guy to me. If I get him first time, you sign off our annual weapons check.’ She treated me to her most Sphinx-like smile. ‘What do you say?’

Trigger chuckled. ‘They’ll do, eh?’

‘Yes, Boss,’ I said with a grin. ‘They’ll do just fine.’

The Apache was built to be shot. If it had been smothered in armour like a flying tank, it would never have got off the ground. It was designed to absorb incoming fire; it practically invited it – a challenging concept to get your head around if you were sitting in the driving seat.

The Apache could withstand a direct hit from a 23-mm high-explosive incendiary round. The airframe’s entire skin, and the drive shaft that ran down its spine to the tail rotor, was constructed from thin alloy, so that a round could pass clean through the body without tearing a bloody great hole in it. Anything crucial to the aircraft’s survival had a backup: it had two engines, two sets of hydraulics and electrics, four computers, two sets of flying controls – and if they broke we could still fly with fly-by-wire sensors. It even had two pilots.

The gunship only had one rotor head and one set of rotor controls, but both were built from electro-slag-remelt, strong enough to stop a round from penetrating. Multiple rounds could pass straight through a rotor blade without impairing its capacity to generate lift.

The fuel tanks were even cleverer. The Apache had three and they all worked independently. They were made from layers of impregnated nylon and uncured rubber. If a bullet punctured the tank, the uncured rubber would react with the fuel to create a fast-hardening foam which would seal any large hole. The main gearbox couldn’t self-seal, but it didn’t need to; it could run dry of all oil and still turn the rotors long enough to get back to Bastion.

By far the most vulnerable bits of the Apache were the two pink, fleshy things in the cockpit – so the floor, the side and front panels and the back and sides of the seats were lined with Kevlar plates. Nothing smaller than an artillery shell would penetrate them. The armour-plated front windscreens could take.50 cal shots head on, but the enemy were armed with more than that now.

Since bullets mostly came from below us, we were only at threat from high mountains or when we turned sharply during a fight. That was when we pushed our backs hard into the Kevlar shell and hoped for the best.

In case the unthinkable did happen, our cockpits were separated by a two-inch-thick glass blast fragmentation shield and had their own air-conditioning systems. If an RPG whipped into the front compartment, it could remove the gunner, all his electronics, his controls and even his seat, and the back-seater could still fly on. He wouldn’t even smell the burning.

But every time we walked out to the aircraft no one needed to remind us of what we called ‘the golden shot’; even the best pilots were not immune to a lucky round, or sheer bad luck. Otherwise, eight highly skilled US Apache crews would not have been shot down over Iraq.

It was a twenty-minute flight to Apocalypse Now Zad, as the marines had christened it. Now Zad was built in the shape of a triangle, with its flat-roofed, mostly single-storey, buildings hemmed in by towering rock faces on all three sides. It was an awesome sight; a geographer’s paradise. The southernmost tip of the Hindu Kush sprang up along its western edge. Its eastern boundary consisted of a series of interwoven ridgelines that ran south to north. And the base of the triangle, to the south, was a stand-alone range, five kilometres long and 400 metres tall at its peak.

We knew the Dushka gunner was in the south-east of the town, so we planned to split up as we approached the southern ridgeline. Charlotte and Darwin would wait on the desert side, nose forward, high enough to get a visual on the town. Trigger and I would bear right through a 300-metre-wide crevasse, bringing us immediately over the gunner’s territory. The Boss would target spot for the Dushka gunner, moving between his monocle and his Night Vision Goggles – and leave the flying to me.