Ed Macy - Apache

This was it; this was the moment. We were really doing it. The metallic taste of adrenalin began to saturate my mouth. The fight or flight instinct had kicked in. As soon as we were over the ridgeline, I slewed my TV camera towards where Mathew should have been and kept it there in the hope of picking him up. I couldn’t make out much more than the fort’s outer wall through all the shit in the air. The cloud of thick black smoke from the 2,000-pounder was spreading slowly from the village and enveloping the place. Clumps of earth erupted like fountains as our fire poured in, worsening the visibility by the second.

We crossed the river and banked sharp left. Pushing their cyclic levers forward, Carl and Geordie upped the airspeed to eighty knots. It was no place to hang around. To our right was a thick bank of trees – and only Allah knew what joys they concealed.

A quick glance left and right, over my shoulders. Rigg and Fraser-Perry were still hanging on. I looked down at the TV screen, but I still couldn’t see anything. Thick black smoke covered the whole fort now. I couldn’t even make out its walls, let alone Mathew’s body.

Rounds continued to zip backwards and forwards above the fort. The 2,000-pounder had done its job to begin with, but the Taliban were now answering back. We’d entered Tracer Central, and screaming in through the middle of it I felt like Han Solo up against the Imperial Fleet.

We were sausage-side big time, and there was no turning back. My tongue tasted like I’d been licking aluminium and I now needed a piss more than anything in the world. We were 200 metres from the wall. One more turn and we would be over the ploughed poppy field in front of it, wheels down.

‘Ten seconds.’

Geordie kicked left and tipped his tail. He began to flare for landing alongside the fort wall. Carl banked and began to flare too, but he had turned in the nick of time.

‘Shit, incoming from below right…’

A muzzle flash, and a long burst of automatic fire from the last of the trees fizzed past Rigg’s face as he spreadeagled himself as tight as he could against the Apache’s skin. It was game on now. They knew we were here.

‘Come on Geordie,’ Carl hollered.

Ahead of us, Geordie wasn’t landing. He wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing. Dust from the poppy field had swirled up around his rapidly slowing Apache. The thing had been ploughed so many times the top soil was as thin as talcum powder. We hadn’t expected that.

‘Jesus, he’s about to brown out…’

A brown-out was the last thing we needed. If we couldn’t see them, we couldn’t land.

‘Don’t go into the dust, mate; we’ll never make it.’

Carl slowed up hard and pulled on the collective to bring us up. To hover there would be the perfect invite for an RPG to climb right up our arse.

It’s going tits up …

I could feel my heart beat against my chicken plate; things were moving into slow-mo. A huge dust cloud now hung over most of the field, and Billy and Geordie had disappeared inside it. We needed to get wheels down, but neither of us could see shit below. And the Taliban couldn’t be more than 200 metres behind us.

Then Geordie’s Longbow Radar suddenly materialised, followed by his rotor blades. The tail appeared next, swinging ninety degrees to the left and then lifting. His Apache moved forward, passed directly over the bomb crater and straight through the gap in the wall. Carl was as horrified as I was.

‘Where the hell are they going? Through the wall means–’

‘Just get us down, buddy.’

Carl thrust our nose forward for a second and then flared the aircraft. Geordie came on.

‘There isn’t enough space for the two of us in the field. There’s no choice; we’ve got to put down inside the fort.’

I looked right for Billy and Geordie as we went down. All I caught through the haze was a great burst of flame from the breach of their cannon as it released its steady stream of giant, electrically initiated rounds.

‘Engaging!’ Billy yelled.

Then the dust enveloped us completely and they were gone.

The urge to say or do something was overwhelming me. I grabbed the handles above my head and shut my mouth tight whilst Carl flew the most dangerous and crucial part of the mission. We’d lost the element of surprise, we’d lost all visibility. We’d even managed to lose each other. And we still had to find Mathew.

He slapped us down hard into the space that Geordie had just vacated. We were totally blind. I breathed again. We’d made it.

‘Quick Carl; thumbs up, thumbs up.’

Fraser-Perry whipped past my left window and rounded the aircraft’s nose. Rigg shot off from the right, just ahead of him. They ducked under the thumping rotor blades and disappeared into the dust cloud which had begun to merge with the fallout from the 2,000-pounder and now completely blotted out the sun.

If any Taliban were waiting to nick Mathew, now was the time to strike. I strained to catch sight of him, but there was no chance of that; I could hardly see beyond the ends of the rotors. There was nothing Carl or I could do but sit it out.

We weren’t used to this. Normally we kept to the skies, with an array of cameras so powerful we could see up people’s backsides. Now we were slap in the middle of the enemy’s back garden, and we couldn’t tell shit from Shinola. Every second felt like an hour.

Then, incredibly slowly, the brown mass began to recede. We could see five metres… then eight… then twelve…

‘Where the hell is the wall? Why can’t we see the wall of the fort?’

I screwed up my eyes and grasped for the slightest hint of the rescue party. I wanted to see four men running towards us, carrying Mathew Ford between them. Please, please… Where the fuck are you ?

But they weren’t coming. The clock: 10.39 and twenty-five seconds. A whole minute had gone by on the ground. We only had one left. They should be halfway back now.

What was that? A long, horizontal line… The dust cleared further. Could I make out the wall now? Yes… My eyes scanned left, inch by inch. Finally, at least forty-five degrees forward of the aircraft, I could see the hole and the crater. We were a lot further away from it than I had thought. But where the hell were the marines?

I continued scanning left towards the spot I’d last seen Mathew’s prone body. One metre, two metres, three metres…

‘There!’ Carl shouted.

There weren’t four of them, only two. Just Rigg and Fraser-Perry. They were a full fifty metres away. Worse, they’d only managed to move Mathew off the raised bank and down into a bloody great ditch. They weren’t moving; it was as if they were stuck in quicksand. One of us was going to have to get out and help. Or we’d all be dead by eleven o’clock.

‘They’re not going to make it.’

‘I’m going to jump, Carl.’ I started unstrapping my harness.

‘No, I’m going. I’m the aircraft captain.’

Neither of us could get out of the thing fast enough, but Carl was the primary pilot and he knew he had to stay. And it was my briefing that was going haywire.

‘I’ll be back in thirty seconds.’ I threw open the canopy door and leaped from my seat without even touching the side of the Apache. I braced myself for the six-foot drop.

Instead of jarring my feet, I plunged eighteen inches beneath the surface of the field. The earth was thinner than talcum powder. God knows how many times it had been ploughed.

Waves of sound burst across my eardrums. The noise was unbelievable. From the air-conditioned silence of the Apache cockpit, it felt like someone had whacked up the volume to max. Rolls of thunderous gunfire ebbed and flowed around the aircraft, punctuated by the pounding of the blades above my head.