Ed Macy - Apache

‘Four rockets. Come co-op, Carl.’

I positioned the crosshairs over the group of five and began to lase.

‘Match and shoot, Carl.’

‘Match and shoot… Stand by.’

‘Ugly Five One. Engaging with rockets.’

Carl steadied the rocket steering cursor on the crosshairs as the fifth man approached the moped.

‘Firing… Good set.’

Four bright orange flashes and four rockets whipped towards the centre of the crosshairs on the MPD. They looked good. Less than a thousand metres out, the white-hot cradles that had held the Flechette darts inside the rocket broke away, twisting and jinking through the air as the darts themselves flew at near hypersonic speed towards the target. Two seconds later 320 searing pinpricks blossomed across the north-eastern corner of the compound and its far wall. The five men hit the deck; we needed to nail them big time before they got busy with the RPG.

‘Smack on, Carl. Don’t break, we’re going for another four. Match and shoot.’

The rules stated that after one volley of rockets we must change heading to avoid colliding with the Flechette cradles. I was utterly mission focused; they were no longer a factor. I’d seen them drop off the screen.

Carl let rip again from 1,500 metres. The second concentration was even tighter – a ten-metre circle, max.

‘Good work, buddy. And another four.’

Carl pulled the final trigger at 1,100 metres.

The second the rockets streaked past our windows I flicked up for gun. Three final bursts from the cannon – slightly offset – would finish the job.

We had flown through the wake of twelve rockets and the environmental control system couldn’t handle the pollutant saturation. The acrid stink of rocket propellant seeped into the cockpit and burned into my nasal membrane. A few seconds later, we were almost over the compound. I zoomed in the FLIR for a thorough battle damage assessment (BDA).

The moped was in pieces, and the RPG launcher broken in two, with its warhead still in place. Where the five men had been, there were heat sources galore across the ground and wall, but none in any recognisable human shape. I found another heat source scanning left, but still standing on four legs and looking okay. The donkey had escaped unscathed, but the five men had been shredded.

‘Good arrows, good arrows,’ Maverick Zero Bravo purred.

‘Ugly Five One, target destroyed.’

‘Ugly Five Zero, target destroyed also.’

Knight Rider had been waiting in line. The Nimrod had pinged enemy movement in two long sheds east of the canal, 500 metres north of our original target. It was a perfect job for Bone, but Bone had a more pressing engagement with an airborne fuel tanker.

I picked up the frustration in the BRF JTAC’s voice. He couldn’t see any of these new targets. He had become a relay station for the eyes of others. At least he no longer had to whisper.

It was our third new target. There were clearly even more Taliban down at Koshtay than the recce had established. They hadn’t just confined themselves to the central complex; they’d spread their tentacles into the adjoining compounds too. The whole kilometre-square neighbourhood was a seething mass of Taliban.

‘Five One is out of Hellfires.’

‘Five Zero. Copied. You check out the original target for movement and I’ll take on this target. All buildings in the chisel have gone. No leakers.’

The Boss and Billy stuck their final two Hellfires into the sheds whilst we surveyed the area of the battle. There were no leakers; the place was finally silent.

I checked the clock: 4.54am. I brought up my Hellfire Shot at page on the MPD. Hellfire 01 struck the target at 23:52:02 Zulu – 4.22am. We’d been fighting solidly for thirty-two minutes. And we were almost out of combat gas.

‘Knight Rider, Ugly Five Zero. Ugly callsigns have five minutes left on station. Is there anything else you want us to do?’

‘Ugly callsigns, Knight Rider. Affirmative. RTB, rearm and refuel. We have more intelligence. Callsign Bone One Three is coming back on station any minute to hit more targets for Higher. We’ll need you back down as soon as you can.’

We’d put down twelve Hellfires, twelve rockets and 360 cannon rounds; an Apache record for one sortie. And still they wanted more. It couldn’t get any better.

We flew a fifty-four-mile straight line back to Camp Bastion, taking us right past the Garmsir District Centre and over huge stretches of the Green Zone. We radioed back a list of what we needed and Kev and his boys were waiting with it all in the arming bays.

It was like a Formula One pit stop: fuel first, then 30-mm, rockets and six Hellfires loaded simultaneously. It was all hands to the pump. At one point I spotted Kev carrying a 100-lb missile on his own; I could have sworn he was smiling. They worked their socks off and got us out of there in twenty-five minutes.

More than three hours in the cockpit normally made me feel as though I was sitting on a bag of golf balls, but tonight I seemed immune from it. Perhaps it was because I’d never sat still; it had been a roller coaster of a ride.

All four of us were on an incredible high during the transit there and back. In his usual modest fashion, Billy texted us his Distinguished Flying Cross citation for the mission – par for the course when he thought a sortie had gone even moderately well.

The secure text messaging system had only four lines of text and 176 character spaces. He used them all:

4 GALLANTRY LEADERSHIP + AMAZIN FLYING SKILL

HEROICS ON AAC 1ST DEEP RAID 4 KEEPING BOSS

CALM WHEN HE GOT TOO EXCITED THE DFC GOES TO

WARRANT OFFICER CLASS 1 WILLIAM SPENCER AAC

We checked in on station over Koshtay at 6.14am and it was as dark then as it had been when we left.

In the eighty minutes we’d been away the geography of the battlefield had changed yet again. Maverick had obviously wanted more work done. Judging by the size of the heat splash on the ground, it looked like the B1 had plonked a 2,000-pounder bang in the middle of it. It must have been a super-quick fuse too. All the buildings in the compound where Maverick had asked me to engage the five Taliban had disappeared. There was nothing left; no heat sources whatsoever.

‘Looks like it was curtains for the donkey, buddy.’

Knight Rider Five Six and his small party from the Brigade Recce Force had withdrawn. They couldn’t risk hanging around in the middle of an enemy-controlled area of the Green Zone in daylight.

Maverick Zero Bravo appeared to have knocked off for the night too, now the back of the Taliban in Koshtay had been broken. The Nimrod MR2 – callsign Wizard – was spotting for targets with his equally powerful cameras instead. It had already directed Bone One Three to drop 2,000-pounders on the Boss’s sheds, but Bone had pulled off station again.

The Boss tried to speak to Wizard and couldn’t get a peep out of him. We knew Lashkar Gah would have the downlink, but we were too far away to establish comms with them. We’d had a satellite phone fitted to our version of the Apache for just such an occasion. Trigger dialled up the JTAC at Brigade HQ in Lashkar Gah, Widow Seven Zero. With no conference facility, Billy relayed the call to Carl and me.

‘Ugly Five One, Five Zero. The Boss has got Widow Seven Zero on the bat-phone in Lash. He has fresh targets from Wizard; stand by for talk on.’

I followed the irrigation ditch south-east from the chisel-shaped compound for 300 metres.

‘Five One has a large compound on the south-west side and two smaller compounds on the north-east side of the ditch, approximately fifty metres beyond the footbridge.’