Ed Macy - Hellfire

That was brave. He could post them right through the window in theory. In practice, I wasn’t so sure. Neither of us had fired this gun and we didn’t have time to test it either.

I’d pulled the stick back and dropped the collective to slow our approach until we got permission to fire. I could see the Taliban still criss-crossing the five metres between the alleyway and their building.

The JTAC came back to us within thirty seconds.

‘A-firm. Clear hot.’

Jon jumped in: ‘Checkfire! Don’t fire!’

‘Checkfire,’ I called back.

We were running in. I threw the stick left and slowed her right down. Then I crabbed her to the right, hugely reducing our closing speed, so Simon could keep the TADS on the enemy, ready for the call.

Come on! We need to get the shot in here! The Taliban had seen our approach and run for cover.

‘Acknowledge danger close with your initials and your clearance,’ Jon said.

We didn’t have cockpit recorders. If there was a board of inquiry, Jon wanted to be able to say: ‘He knew we were danger close because he said danger close. To confirm it, here are his initials.’ That was what made him one of the best SupFACs around. He was way ahead of the game.

‘A-firm, Charlie Alpha-Charlie Alpha – that’s a danger close, danger close. Clear hot, clear hot. Acknowledge.’

‘Charlie Alpha, danger close. Clear hot,’ Jake copied, cool as cucumber.

‘Running in,’ Simon called to Jake.

I could see everything on the MPD. Simon placed his crosshairs where the roof stopped and the wall facing us began. I turned us head-on to keep his sight as steady as it could be.

‘Only go for ten rounds, buddy.’ I didn’t want to cramp Simon’s style, but I didn’t want things to go horribly wrong.

‘I’ve already set it to ten. And I’m only going to pull a few of them off.’

Good call. He wasn’t going for a normal combat burst of twenty. The longer the burst, the greater was the chance of accidental movement. If you fired a fifty-round burst, it meant five seconds of holding that crosshair absolutely dead still with an aircraft that’s swooping towards the target. I was going to have to hold her steady and point straight at them to give Simon a fighting chance.

‘Do you think it’s accurate enough?’ he said.

The slightest accidental movement of his thumb would shift the TADS and moving at that speed the weapons computer would assume he was tracking the target.

We were flying at thirty knots. The Hughes M230, single-barrel, externally powered 30 mm chain gun had a three-millimetre error. At this distance – 2,000 metres – that equated to six metres.

And the gun wasn’t the only variable. I doubled the figures in my head – make that as much as twelve metres at this range. So some of our rounds could land in the compound. One thousand five hundred metres should bring the fudged error down to about nine metres – clear of the compound – if Simon was a good enough shot. If not, we’d have an authorised blue-on-blue.

‘Mate, this is it. Three mil error, double it to six for the wife and kids. Two thousand metres is twelve mils and that’s inside the compound. We need to be at a maximum of 1,500, which gives us nine. You don’t want to fire before fifteen, buddy.’

I had to hold this thing 100 per cent steady, Simon had to perform flawlessly, and we didn’t even know if the cannon was capable of hitting the target he aimed at. We both knew that if our rounds zapped into the compound, we’d be highly likely to kill or seriously injure our own troops. We would also be putting ourselves right in the Taliban’s engagement zone; we’d be sitting ducks.

Whatever we did, it was going to be a nightmare down there.

We were busting every rule, doing everything our training told us not to do.

But what choice did we have? If the enemy broke through it would be like a knife fight in a bar. We’d be useless.

We had a JTAC under such immediate threat that he was prepared to risk bringing rounds down on his own men to save the majority and hold the base. To them, surrender was not an option; the Taliban would skin every one of them alive.

We had one shot and this was it.

I accelerated to sixty knots so I had speed to manoeuvre if we were shot at.

I called down the range. ‘One point nine…One point eight…’

‘Nice and steady, Simon. Any movement will throw those rounds.’

‘I fucking know that, Ed.’

Of course, he did. But just saying it made me feel better.

I saw figures spilling out into the alleyway again. They moved towards the DC wall with what looked like a wooden cross in their hands.

Simon had his TADS on the same point – he had no choice but to hold it perfectly still – and I was still counting down. Simon had zoomed in to make sure there was no error on trigger pull, and when you zoomed in at that range, the image on the screen was massive.

The figures moved out of the frame and I looked up to see what they were up to. They’d got to the base of the wall.

‘…One point six… one point five…’

A split second before Simon pulled the trigger, they bomb-burst away from the wall and ran back towards the building, dragging the cross with them.

The gun pumped. My feet vibrated. Simon’s crosshairs never moved a millimetre. I saw the counter on the MPD drop quickly from 300 to 295 as the rounds swirled away, but didn’t need to look; I’d heard and felt five distinctive thumps.

After throwing their grenades, the last three Taliban returned to what they thought was the safety of their building, just as the rounds ploughed into the wall and roof. I saw all five rounds impact. Three bored small black holes in the roof and the two that hit the wall head-on made a much bigger splash. To the casual observer it must all have looked pretty insignificant, but to me it meant one thing: the gun was on. It was Deadeye Dick.

I called Delta Hotel – Direct Hit – on the JTAC’s frequency.

My jubilation was swept aside by Widow Seven One. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

I broke hard right with the cyclic and ripped up the collective from the floor, climbing away from the building. We’d descended to 1,000 feet and were now 1,000 metres away from the Taliban. I’d been trying to keep the same aspect all the way, and I didn’t want to change the profile of the aircraft while Simon was fighting to keep his crosshair still.

I flew the death profile, straight into their eyes. If they stood their ground now and decided to fire, they could shoot us just as easily as we could shoot them. I shouldn’t have been doing it. But there was no one looking up at us – the men I’d seen on the street had run back. My only concern was that these rounds had gone into the compound. I’d witnessed the damage they did to buildings and the men hiding within.

‘STOP STOP STOP,’ the JTAC repeated. ‘Your rounds are landing inside the DC. Copy?’

Simon yelled, ‘Fuck!’

‘Wildman has stopped,’ I called back. I craned my head over to the left as the DC came into view. No one was firing up at us; it was just dust billowing in our own courtyard.

Fuck, had Jake blown it and hit the compound? I couldn’t see Wildman Five One. They’d continued round the wheel and would have set themselves up to cover us. I knew Jon would be right behind me in my six o’clock position, with Jake’s cannon at the ready. As we broke off our attack run, Jake would fire straight down to cover our sharp break. Setting up the racetrack, we called it, or setting up a pattern – one shooting, one setting up, then one breaking off, one running in.

Jon came through: ‘Mate, you hit the DC.’

What the fuck was he thinking?

I guess he thought we’d just fired a ten- or twenty-round burst, only saw a few splashes on top of the building and assumed the rest had raked the compound.