Ed Macy - Hellfire

I held the tight, level turn and shot a quick glance vertically upwards over my left shoulder – left eye, tracer; right eye, nothing – then right, vertically down – left eye, black as a witch’s tit; right eye, the Green Zone.

I’d taken about three seconds to roll her halfway around when the tracer stopped. I needed to get eyes back on the gunner, and fast. I didn’t want to lose sight of the next onslaught. My mind flicked back through my Air Combat Tactics Instructor training. The length of burst meant only one thing: this wasn’t anything less than a proper grown-up anti-aircraft gun. We were facing an AA gunner, one-on-one, and he was holding a better hand than I had. I pulled the stick as far back into my left groin as I could. I needed to change the odds.

I’d virtually turned the Apache on a sixpence by slapping its belly into the air. I’d pulled in all the power I could, which had reduced my speed massively. If I’d just flung it around I’d still have been doing the same speed. Instead, I’d spun the aircraft and slammed the brakes on at the same time.

Simon couldn’t help. I’d turned away from the gunner and his TADS was way out of its limits. I’d had no choice.

As we compressed round the final forty-five degrees, I could feel the whole weight of the aircraft push up on me. I was rammed back into my seat. My helmet suddenly weighed a ton and I had to fight to keep my head up. The chinstrap dangled below my chin and the monocle’s heavy metal mount on its right lifted the cup over my left ear clean away. The noise of the aircraft’s engines deafened me. My monocle was the only thing stopping the helmet from tilting further down on the right. It dug deep into my eye socket, cutting into my skin just below the lid.

I began to groan out loud. My jacket and chicken plate were pressing me ever deeper into my seat.

I was terrified he’d get his range right next time and second guess my speed. If he did, he was going to smack his 23 mm shells straight into our flank. And these weren’t AK bullets that would simply bounce off. They were the same kind of exploding cannon rounds that we fired. If they hit us, my misery would come to an abrupt and permanent end.

As I approached the 180 degree point I threw us the right way up and dumped the collective lever. I didn’t want to gain any speed. The Apache was a clever bugger, and I was taking full advantage of that. It automatically scheduled the big stabilator on the back to keep the aircraft level. If you threw the stick forward it would begin to nose down, but the stabilator would shift and bring it back up again. As I dumped the lever and pulled back the stick, I was using the stab as a big fuck-off airbrake, the size of a barn door.

We were now facing south, still over the Green Zone, with Now Zad to our right. My eyes were glued to the area where the tracer had been fired. Only eight seconds had elapsed since the first burst, but it felt a lot longer. I knew the gunner was judging my every move, waiting for the right moment, and I was shitting it.

We’d already lost a lot of speed in the turn and it soon dropped through sixty knots with the stab down.

‘Keep your speed on,’ Simon urged. ‘Speed is life.’

Simon was a Qualified Helicopter Tactics Instructor (QHTI). He’d done the RAF’s version of my ACTI course. He knew as well as I did that the faster the aircraft was going, the quicker it would respond. A helicopter isn’t like a jet, where you flip down an aerofoil and instantly shed a shit-load of Gs. If you’re hovering in a helicopter and you throw the stick forward, it takes a while to respond. An Apache could manoeuvre fairly fast at max speed, but not fast enough, as we’d just discovered. The anti-aircraft rounds had appeared from nowhere in the space of a second. The gunship didn’t respond in that short a time. We were at this guy’s mercy.

I said, ‘Not if he gets his range and—’

The AA flared up at us again.

This time, I knew he could get us. His first burst had been a fraction above my line of sight and continued just over the top of us. Not this time though. It began on the line I was looking down. He had his range 100 per cent bang on; the 23 mm wouldn’t go above or below us this time. To make things worse, as the finger of red began to reach up in the first half a second it started to bend sharply towards us. He’d got it right; he’d seen me slowing.

‘MAN STAB,’ I yelled as I flicked the stabilator into manual with my left thumb and rammed it down.

I’d hit the brakes like a full-on emergency stop. I took a sharp breath, and then just held on.

This is it, this is it…

Over the radio: ‘You’re taking incommmming!’

The next voice was Simon’s. ‘ Fuuuuuuck! ’

The line of tracer grew and came forward, arcing ever closer, straight towards the nose of aircraft. It was going to take Simon out first.

I wanted to close my eyes. I was terrified.

The very beginning of the jet of hot metal passed so close in front of the aircraft it lit up the cockpit. Simon held onto the handles above him and I could see the silhouette of his helmet, arms and hands in the ghostly red glow.

I forced myself to look down, to try to follow it to its source and pinpoint the gunner. There was no point in Simon using the TADS. I’d not sat still for more than a second and it would’ve taken a lot longer than that to get it under control.

I thought, ‘I’m going to fly straight into this lot.’ But there was nothing I could do.

I watched the tail end of the burst climbing towards us. It had about a second to go.

There seemed to be about a metre between the rounds lighting up Simon. That was closer than I’d have expected, and they weren’t all following the same line. It had to be a double-barrelled weapon.

The last one’s going to hit…

My mouth flooded with the metallic taste of adrenalin. Fight or flight – and I could do neither.

‘FUCK!’ I screamed. ‘ FUCK! ’

I felt my heart pounding against my chicken plate and pulsing through my thumbs. My teeth clenched so hard I thought my jaw would pop.

Simon still gripped the handles. He was fighting the urge to grab the controls and try to fly us the fuck out of here.

The business end of the red snake whipped past our nose and Simon was plunged into darkness as it rose high and to the left of us.

Thank fuck I’d braked. Ten or twenty knots faster would have put us right in the middle of his fire. Only three or four rounds would have killed us.

The gunner was good, too bloody good.

His range was smack on and his lead was too. The stab had braked us quicker than he could have anticipated. We wouldn’t get away with it a third time.

Something wasn’t right.

He wasn’t just sitting there in a tea towel, keeping his fingers crossed.

‘He’s got NVGs,’ Simon and I called in unison.

If we were going to survive once more I had to do more than change direction and speed and distance again. And we couldn’t just fly off; he’d shoot us up the arse in a heartbeat. I had to change height. It was all I had left.

I didn’t want to lose sight of him, even for a split second. I stared at the area the tracer had come from like a rabbit at a set of oncoming headlights.

Is this my destiny? Is this going to be what happens to me?

It wasn’t philosophy; it was pure fear.

But something inside me decided I wasn’t going to let him get away with it again. I needed to find him. So far I’d been flying for our lives. I wasn’t in a position to fight. I’d have loved to have put a burst straight down, but I didn’t know precisely where he was. I could have fired randomly into Now Zad, but that was against the ROE, and wouldn’t achieve a hell of a lot. The Taliban didn’t do scared. If you missed them, they just kept shooting – and the muzzle flash of our cannon would just give them a clearer target to aim at.