Ed Macy - Apache

I thought through how I was going to do it on the flight up. It would take the Dushka gunner’s rounds four seconds to reach us, up at 4,000 feet, so he needed to predict where we’d be four seconds after he pulled the trigger. I had a reaction time of perhaps half a second from the moment I saw tracer, or heard the Boss’s or the wingman’s shout. Ugly Five One was a weighty beast and it would take a second to overcome its inertia and change direction. So that gave me two and a half seconds, maximum, to take evasive action. This was going to be a penalty shoot-out, Apache-style – except that I wanted to stay as far as possible from the ball. Two and a half seconds didn’t feel like very long. And all those clever statistics suddenly didn’t add up to a hill of beans. I felt like I was flying an eggshell.

I tried to think through what I’d do if we were hit. We’d lose some systems for sure. I hoped it wouldn’t sever a hydraulic line. Hydraulic fluid was the most flammable thing on the aircraft, and so highly pressurised it would go off like a volcano. The next round would ignite it and we’d turn into one big fireball. Even the heat from the engines could set it off. Jesus, what then?

I realised I was fingering the fire extinguisher buttons top left of the dash. Stop it … I’d disappear up my own arse if I carried on like this. I wrenched myself away from the endless succession of what ifs… Charlotte and Darwin had the lead.

‘Five Three, five klicks from the crevasse now,’ Darwin said. ‘We’ll start to break off left and cover you through the gap. Good luck guys.’

They banked, and the crevasse opened up in front of us. Ninety seconds and we’d be through it. Gripping the cyclic and collective, my hands were so clammy I could feel them sticking to the insides of my gloves. I actioned the gun, moving my head side to side to check it was still slaved to my eye. It was. I flipped the trigger guard and rested my finger on the red button. A breath away from firing.

‘Thirty seconds, Boss.’

I thrust my spine as hard as I could into the Kevlar seat, and buried my arse as deep into the foam pad as it would go. I took a deep breath.

‘Copied. Just keep her belly flat as a pancake…’

It was the fourth time Trigger had said it since we’d launched, but the closer we came to the enemy the more vulnerable we felt. I knew that, and the Boss knew I knew. His palms must have started to sweat as well.

The Taliban mounted a permanent lookout on the crevasse. I hoped he hadn’t nodded off; this time we actually wanted to get dicked. The jagged edges of the rock face reached out at us from the shadows, and it’s fair to say I was shitting Tiffany cufflinks. Jesus . Here we go .

‘Five One, over the target in… five…’

I clicked off the radio. Four was always missed from the countdown. It allowed someone at the other end of the net to jump in at the last second to call everything off.

‘Three…’

Click.

‘Two…’

Click.

‘One…’

Click.

‘Now.’

‘Visual. We’re looking.’ Charlotte did her best to sound reassuring.

I put the Apache into the gentlest anticlockwise sweep I possibly could, banking a fraction to keep us turning. As the aircraft tilted to the left, I leaned my head to the right but peeked over the Kevlar side panel, determined to catch the first tracer round as it began to burn.

In daylight a sniper set the range on his sights, taking gravitational forces into account, and he was guaranteed a hit as long as the wind didn’t blow the round off target. His sights weren’t calibrated to fire nearly ninety degrees upwards, and he’d almost certainly miss with the first round or burst of automatic fire. If he was firing single shot, the tracer would enable him to re-aim for a second- or third-round hit once he’d seen where the first round went; if automatic, he’d keep the trigger pulled and guide the jet of tracer onto the target like a big red laser gun.

‘And that,’ I told Trigger, ‘should buy me a second or two to save your sorry arse, sir.’

We completed one full orbit. It took two minutes, and felt like a lifetime.

‘Keep the turn tighter, Mr M, or we’ll be too far away from him.’

It was all very well for Trigger. The Kevlar came up to his chest, while the back-seater was exposed from the waist upwards unless we were dead level. Why couldn’t I be a short arse like Darwin?

Six feet in front of me, Trigger was also frantically quartering the ground. The two sets of crosshairs in my monocle whipped backwards and forwards across the same piece of ground, colliding repeatedly and passing through each other as we searched the ghostly green compounds, hedgerows and trees for the glow of a man.

We wouldn’t see the AA gunner on anything other than FLIR, but it picked up heat, not light. We would only spot his rounds with the naked eye. Killing him wasn’t our job, but seeing him so he didn’t kill us was. We completed a second orbit, and then a third. Why isn’t this fucker firing? Any more of this and my heart was going to hammer its way out of my survival jacket.

‘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.