Ed Macy - Apache

‘Buddy, if we’re not going to make it, we’re best just putting down at the gun line aren’t we? We can get a CH47 to fly down the boys with some fuel bollocks.’

‘We can do it.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘We could go to Lash…’

‘We’re not going to Lash; it’s too small. We can make it.’

I realised I was more worried about the embarrassment of requesting fuel if we landed in the middle of the desert than I was of the Taliban.

If anyone knew the Apache AH Mk1, it was Carl. He loved the aircraft so much he even hung out with it in his free time. They almost went on dates together. If he said we’d get back, we’d get back. But it was going to be desperately close. A change in the wind, or any kind of malfunction and we’d shit it.

Billy and Geordie were 400 metres off to our right, and flying just as low. We didn’t want to discuss our fuel state over the net. It would only spook them at Bastion; every man and his dog would get on the net and feed us the sort of advice that we could do without. Best to keep schtum. We texted instead.

Billy began: SEND FUEL STATE

I replied with ours, and he responded: 490

‘Shit, Carl, they’re even lower than us.’

A beep alert signalled another text from Billy. LASH V BSN ?

He must have been reading my mind.

EWOK HAPPY BSN… YOUR CALL

BSN IT IS

Even Billy the chief pilot doffed his cap to Carl the Aircraft King.

SEND AMMO

That was going to be interesting. We had eight Flechette and eight HEISAP rockets still in the tubes, but we were out of Hellfire and only had eighty remaining cannon rounds.

40*30MM, 0*HEISAP, 8*FLECH, 0*HELLF

Wow. Billy was almost out of everything.

Having stayed on station to cover in the Chinook picking up Mathew, 3 Flight were a few minutes behind us. They didn’t need asking.

Beep . ‘Text from Five Two, Ed.’

20*30MM, 4*HEISAP, 0*FLECH, 2*HELLF

But Charlotte and Tony won the prize. Their text just read: WINCHESTER .

‘Winchester’ was the air net code for exhausting all your weaponry: bombs, missiles, cannon rounds, rockets – whatever you had. It dated from World War One: when the string-bag pilots had nothing left to fire, they reached for their trusty Repeater. Going Winchester was heavily frowned on. Ammunition was our lifeblood and had to be carefully rationed; use it all up in one go and you had nothing left to fight with. But there were no other troops in contact at Jugroom; just us. And they’d run dry in the very last seconds of our extraction. They’d executed their fire plan to perfection.

CONGRATS , I replied.

Nobody had gone Winchester before – Charlotte and Tony had just made British Apache history.

Billy sent our ammo requirements to Kev Blundell in Bastion so he could have our uploads ready. Carl punched some numbers into the keyboard.

‘Check this out. We’ve used a total of £1,499,000 of ordnance protecting Mathew Ford.’

And that didn’t count Nick and Charlotte’s earlier mission.

‘Not bad for a couple of hours’ work.’

Seven minutes and thirty-six seconds from the firebase our fuel level dropped below the 400 lb landing limit. I’d lost count of the number of rules we’d broken that morning. Every few minutes, I recalculated the fuel state in case I’d made a mistake. The answer came back just the same – 110 lb on landing.

‘Village twelve o’clock. One klick.’

‘Don’t change course, Carl. We’re too low for them to see us coming.’

Normally we’d keep out of their way. But that meant wasting more fuel we didn’t have. A flash of light shot straight across the windscreen, missing us by no more than a few feet. Carl threw the aircraft into an evasive bank, climb and jink.

‘What the fuck was that? Have we been engaged?’

I shot a glance out my window, spotting for an RPG smoke trail. Instead, I saw a solitary bright yellow kite flying above the village compound.

‘It was a kite, mate…’

It made me think of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner , which Emily had made me read on holiday in Egypt before the tour. The Taliban had banned kite flying. Among other things, we were here to defend the Afghan people’s right to fly kites if they wanted to. But this one had scared the hell out of us. Maybe the Taliban had a point.

I felt for Emily’s angel, but the survival jacket was too tight. It must have shifted position when we were moving Mathew. I desperately wanted to know whether he was alive. There had been no time to check his condition before we left the firebase, and we’d heard nothing over the net. A crash team could have got his heart beating again in an instant, surely…

On another day Carl and I might have put a call into the Ops Room, but they had enough on their plate without our unnecessary questions. We’d find out soon enough.

Ten miles out of Bastion, Billy texted again. SEND FUEL AT BASTION

110. YOU?

90. WE LAND 1ST

Twenty pounds of fuel was eighty seconds more flying time. We didn’t quibble. Unless Geordie kept his aircraft 100 per cent upright, they were now in real danger of crashing. In a few minutes’ time, they’d drop below 100 lb and then the engines could give out on them any second.

We approached the camp side by side. Carl eased off on the power.

‘Don’t slow down too much, buddy!’

‘I’ll formate that close to them you’ll be able to smell Geordie’s arse. Stand by.’

Carl went onto the net. ‘Geordie, land long down the runway, so I can land short at the same time.’ He wasn’t wasting a second more than he had to.

The two pilots kept the same speed all the way in, with us one rotor blade’s distance behind Geordie. As we crossed the tip of the runway, Carl flared the aircraft suddenly and hammered the back wheel down onto the lip, catapulting the front wheels forward and down hard too; it wasn’t the most graceful landing I’d ever experienced, but it was the most grateful. Geordie did the same.

ENG1 FUEL BAR , Geordie texted as we taxied to the refuelling point.

That fuel bar was an emergency warning that pressure was dropping in the port engine and it would cut out automatically in less than five seconds. Geordie shut down the engine then and there on the runway to avoid having to file a lengthier incident signal.

Geordie and Billy took the right fuel point and we took the left, maintaining radio silence. If we were quick about this, we might be able to get away with nobody officially noting our return fuel states. That would save an ear-chewing by a pencil-neck somewhere along the line.

I opened up my canopy and shouted at the boys: ‘Get the fuel in, quick.’

Simon, the Arming and Loading Point Commander, popped his head inside the cockpit as his boys went to work.

‘All right, there, Mr M? How close have you cut it today then, eh? – 400 on the nose, I’ll bet. Sounds like it was quite a morning… fucking HELL …’ His eyes almost popped out when he saw the digital reading: 80 lb.

The next stop was the arming bay. The one and only Kev Blundell was waiting for us, hands on hips, with his usual sardonic expression.

He took a stroll around the aircraft. And for the first time I could remember, he didn’t say a single word. He took his time with the inspection, peering into every rocket hole and having a thoroughly good look at the 30-mm feed chain running to the cannon. He glanced up at Carl or me periodically, then looked right back down again.

Eventually he was finished. He nodded lugubriously as he leaned his gargantuan weight against the aircraft’s wing and plugged in.