Ed Macy - Hellfire

Billy dropped our height to take a closer look.

‘Widow Seven Zero, Wildman Five Five – I can see no command wires.’

‘Wildman Five Five, this is Widow Seven Zero. I want you to destroy that target with high-sap.’

I could almost feel Billy’s eyebrows disappearing beneath his hairline. ‘High-sap?’

He was right. High Explosive Incendiary Semi-Armour Piercing rockets were not precision weapons. How could I hit a barrel with a rocket? They were free-flight, and since the launchers were haphazardly aligned to the Apache in the first place, they could go anywhere.

‘I know we wouldn’t use them against this target, Ed,’ Billy said. ‘But have you aligned the rockets on this cab?’

‘I can’t guarantee that the launchers haven’t been swapped. They could go anywhere, buddy.’

I’d decided to use HEDP.

‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five – negative. I’ll fire Hedpee as this is likely to initiate any explosives or fuel employed.’

‘Widow Seven Zero, clear hot.’

‘Wildman Five Four, Wildman Five Five – did you copy the last?’

‘Wildman Five Four, A-firm, go ahead.’

‘Where are they, Billy?’ I didn’t want to fire at Jon and Jake, and didn’t want to take my eyes off the target to look for them either.

‘They’re clear, and so is B Company.’

We were still in an orbit and flying clockwise at seventy knots. Billy kept it low and slow.

I dropped to a ten-round burst setting, lined the crosshair up on the centre of the barrels, steadied, and lased the target with my right middle finger. I didn’t use my index finger; some of its muscles were linked to the thumb which controlled the crosshair.

The MPD showed 1,699 metres – a mile away.

‘Firing!’ I called.

I pulled the left trigger and held it until the gun stopped firing. Ten rounds came off, and missed the target completely. They landed low and left – in the middle of the track.

‘Fucking Gun DH!’ I was absolutely threaders with the boss.

‘Thank God we weren’t firing close to troops.’ Billy had been watching on his MPD. My crosshairs were bang over the target and there was no drift. Those rounds should have been spot on.

I aimed up and right the distance I’d missed by, and fired another ten-round burst. A huge cloud of dust enveloped the compound. When it settled there was a little smoke and plenty of hot spots in the barrels, but over half of them hadn’t been touched.

‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five. Delta Hotel but no IED detonation.’

‘Wildman Five Five – is it safe?’

They’d all been thrown around, but I couldn’t guarantee that one of the barrels at the bottom of the pile didn’t still contain an active initiation device.

‘Negative. Not 100 per cent. A 500-lb bomb would be advisable. Dart Two Four is available.’ According to my sync matrix Dart Two Four was a B1 from Diego Garcia and had been on task for fifteen minutes.

D Company, the CO and his JTAC were still up the slope. They had full view of the entire route, all the way down to B Company’s position just short of the urban area.

Patrols Platoon were covering the high ground and guarding the wadi to the west, where the convoy would emerge.

It had just set off from the spur, and was making its way slowly down the most secure route they could find – the wide, flat, dry river bed. You could see by its colour that it had been flooded during the wet season, so any mines left from the previous defence of Musa Qa’leh would have been washed away, and any fresh ones would have been laid in the last twenty – four hours. The recce cars were working overtime.

B Company were now just above the compounds, ready to go.

It was a tense moment. A Taliban sniper team could have a field day here. B Company would be pinned down in the open, and we’d be the ones who’d have to flush them out. If they’d all fired together and their weapons were nice and dry, it would be like finding a handful of needles in a haystack.

‘Bring them in.’

CO 3 Para wasn’t messing around. He understood the threat all too well. Every single vehicle was going to have to go through the choke point. And he needed B Company out of the potential killing ground asap.

I called Dart Two Four. An attractive-sounding female American voice told me she couldn’t drop without strato clearance. I had no idea what that meant, or if she was the pilot or offensive systems officer. Strategic clearance, maybe? Did she have to get permission from somebody out of theatre?

I called Widow Seven Zero and passed on the message.

Widow Seven Zero contacted Dart Two Four direct. He said he was the commander on the ground. This was extremely high risk, a possible IED; he had men in the open and it must be removed.

After a ten-minute wait, she confirmed that she had strato clearance to drop. The B1 Lancer had a synthetic aperture radar. She could only see a radar-mapped area of the ground, not the real thing – and Compound Zero One wouldn’t mean anything to her. She mapped the target and was talked onto the southern wall of the compound. She was about to deliver a JDAM – Joint Direct Attack Munition – an inertial and GPS kit strapped to a dumb bomb to guide it with pinpoint accuracy.

‘Ready three zero,’ she called. Time of flight, thirty seconds.

There was an almighty boom and a pillar of black earth blasted 150 feet into the air. When the dust cleared, we could see that it had demolished the southern wall with pinpoint perfection, gouging a hole some ten feet wide and four feet deep in the ground. There wasn’t a single barrel left.

‘Dart Two Four, Wildman Five Five. That’s a Delta Hotel. Nice hole.’

Widow Seven Zero told us the mortars were about to fire. We were instructed to move east to the wadi.

The Green Zone was only a couple of hundred metres thick, but the trees overlapped to form a canopy. I tried to see if there was anything beneath it that might pose a threat to the convoy. I had a sporadic view of the track running through it; there were plenty of potholes, but I couldn’t see any fresh holes or unusual heat shapes.

The trees overhung the point where the buildings came to an end and the Green Zone began. It was the most hazardous area for the convoy because it could be viewed – at ground level – from a distance, and command detonated from cover with deadly accuracy. Once in the Green Zone, the Taliban bomb-makers would have to depend on a pressure pad trigger, which our engineers could find without the threat of a remote detonation.

When the mortars stopped Billy took us low over the western side of the compounds as the boys went firm, ready for the assault.

I noticed a roadblock just past the bomb crater, where the track disappeared into the trees.

‘Widow, Wildman Five Five. I’ve seen what looks like a roadblock at the entrance to the Green Zone. Copy so far.’

‘Widow Copied.’

I continued to describe what I saw. Just under the canopy, the right-hand side of the track was blocked by what looked like two forty-five gallon concrete barrels with a steel pole stretched between them spanning the right side of the track. Any vehicle passing to the left of them would then be forced to swing hard right by another set. It was a tight chicane and not one that you could ram aside at high speed. It was designed to slow traffic to a crawl. There were no ANP checkpoints here, which meant it was down to the Taliban.

Widow acknowledged and informed his search engineers.

As we kicked over to the east, I looked down and saw a man with a gun. On closer inspection I realised it wasn’t a gun and he was very old. Dishdashes and full face beards made it hard to tell the age of some Afghans from this height, but his gait, stoop, pace and the way he held his shoulders earned him pensioner status in my book.