Ed Macy - Hellfire

I would have to hit him to stop him. And in the process I was going to have to change direction, speed, distance and, worst of all, height.

It had taken me about two seconds since the last burst for me to think it through.

‘Hold on…’

With the collective lever still low, I slammed the cyclic into my right thigh.

‘Here we goooo,’ I yelled.

The disc rolled over to the right and the Apache dropped right wing low, like we were creeping over the top of a giant rollercoaster. If I pulled back and into my left thigh, I could keep the nose up. My speed was down to forty knots. At full power it would keep the height.

I left the lever down.

We headed downwards, gathering speed. I let nature take its course. We dropped faster and faster. Eventually the tail would follow the nose, weather-cocking behind it. I didn’t pull back on the stick or pull in power. I’d need that power later.

The aircraft side-slipped towards the ground until the stab dragged up its sorry arse and pulled down its nose and whipped the tail around behind us. In a few seconds we’d spun through eighty degrees horizontally and ninety vertically. The Fire Control Radar pointed north, the wheels south and the nose straight down into the Green Zone. I wanted to give our gunman a bigger headache than he’d given me – and fucking with his range was a good place to start.

Our speed built up fast. The loudest sound in the air-conditioned cockpit was normally the swish of the gaspers blowing air. But we could now hear the rush of air flowing noisily over missiles, wing tips, even the angles of the windscreen wiper.

The engines weren’t screaming because I had the collective lever down, but their time would come. I was using the energy of the aircraft and the speed and the weight and good old gravity to get it going as fast as I could in the shortest space of time. My head was gyroscopically stable in space, keeping the monocle’s crosshair over the same point on the ground. The Apache was effectively rotating about my static right eye.

When he fired I needed those rounds to pass behind us; that meant achieving a speed he wasn’t expecting or thought we weren’t capable of. Instead of shooting at me high in the sky, I wanted him to try to track me towards the ground. The perfect crossing, dropping, accelerating, distance-changing challenge Captain Mainwaring had caught me out with all those years ago.

In a perverse kind of way I was hoping the gunner would fire, to see if his rounds passed behind me. He had to try to get them ahead of where I was, but I was really starting to motor. He needed to get ahead of his aiming mark – he’d be aiming low and trying to shift. I needed to change angle and keep increasing my speed.

The noise rush grew. I could see 80 in my monocle.

‘Have you been hit?’ Jon shouted.

Then 90…

He’d seen the rounds and thought they’d hit us, and now he was seeing the aircraft fall on its side and dive towards the ground.

‘Not yet!’ I shouted over the inter-aircraft radio.

101…

I started to pull back on the cyclic and applied a little power on the collective to regain full control.

112…

Simon came on: ‘Height, Ed… height, Ed… Pull out! ’

‘I WILL,’ I shouted.

120 became 121…

Jake yelled, ‘Watch your height!’

We were pulling up through seventy-five degrees, nose down and still dropping fast.

I knew my height; Simon did too. He was trying to look out at the world through a TADS camera which may or may not have been slaved to his head. He was targeting, so it probably hadn’t. All he’d be able to see in his monocle was the speed building and the height dropping. It was pitch-black, he was blind and hanging on for dear life.

Jake and Jon could see my aircraft plummeting towards the ground. Because I’d said, ‘Not yet’, Jake was probably thinking, Why the fuck’s he flying towards the ground? A lot of people had crashed in combat simply because they’d been too busy trying to evade fire. Most of them would have survived if they’d just flown the aircraft rather than tried to avoid the fight. But I had no option. This guy was shit-hot. He’d fucking nearly killed us.

131 top left.

1100 on the right. We were only one thousand one hundred feet above the Green Zone and closing fast.

‘Height! Height! ’ Jake’s warnings were becoming more strangulated by the second.

‘I’ve got it!’

If he replied, I didn’t hear him. The low height warners had triggered. Lights blazed above the console and a siren started to wail. I’d bust my limits and the systems were doing their best to get me to stop. It was as if the Apache itself was yelling at me, ‘It’s going to crash, mate!’

140… 141… 142…

I was accelerating at 10 mph per second.

510… 502… 486… I was pulling back on the stick as hard as I could, but we were dropping so fast the four-figure digital height reading couldn’t keep up. Inertia was still winning.

And then, the final nail in the coffin. The 23 mm fired up again. It came straight at me, as straight as straight could be, like someone was aiming a laser straight into my left pupil. The fire came from a bunch of buildings clustered together in the shape of a giant banana.

I wasn’t sure if it was the G force, the tracer coming directly at us, or both, but Simon gave a long, despairing groan over the intercom.

I was transfixed. It was absolutely awesome. For a split second, I could see straight down this luminescent red pencil with my left eye. My right was glued to the thermal world. Then they were superimposed. My crosshair sat over the centre of it. I could make out the banana and another block immediately west of it. The firing came from its roof. I was in no doubt. I knew exactly where this guy was.

I also knew what was about to happen. As half a second turned into one and the tracer rounds looked as if they would cut right through the canopy and into my forehead, the red line bent backwards and up.

I was beginning to level off. The stream of rounds was now well behind us and a couple of hundred feet above.

My crosshair hadn’t moved. I could see an elevated square block on top of the target building.

You fucking dancer, I have you!

I pulled up hard on the collective to top up the power to maximum torque. I knew exactly where he was; I had him at ninety degrees to my left.

‘My gun,’ I shouted.

I pushed my thumb up on the Chinese hat. The gun came straight up. We’d fired the cannon earlier that day, and it was Deadeye Dick. Wherever I put the crosshairs, the rounds were going to land. I was going to put a burst right down both his barrels.

The weapon display gave me 300 rounds and my range was set to 1,500 metres.

He was roughly 1,000 metres away. I was going to have to aim half a reticule down to hit him. I had a warning message.

‘LIMITS’ appeared across the bottom of my monocle.

Bastard…

We were still at ninety degrees and going full pelt. The barrel had reached its left stop and couldn’t point any further back. I’d need to turn towards him a fraction. His tracer rounds were tracking behind us now.

I’d outwitted him, but we were over the Green Zone at 300 feet, a perfect height for small arms to take us down.

What now? My primary role was to defend the aircraft. I could make a break for the wadi – or we could do what it was designed to do: protect the lads out on the ground by hunting and killing their enemies.

I hoped he wouldn’t be able to correct. If we stayed in the same profile he would certainly have another go. I needed to do something different.

I pulled back hard and left on the cyclic. The manoeuvre pulled a loud involuntary groan from both of us. The aircraft had been shifting in excess of 140 mph, and the Apache’s nose came shooting up, tilted to the left, still pulling and topping up the power.