Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

‘Swivel switch for the wheels at the back is at lock, parking brake is on.’

‘RadAlt: 50 on the right with a light, 40 on the left with the noise.’

‘Altimeters: 1,016 (that day’s pressure) set; I’ve got 2,920ft on the pilot side, 2,940ft on the co-pilot side, within limits.’

‘Instruments: instruments are all set and correct with no undue flags. Morris, you’ve crosschecked them, putting the director for the GPS live, selecting TACAN (tactical air navigation system) on the HSI needle. You have command of both HSIs.’

‘Light: master on. Normal. We’ve got steady, bright, top red, searchlight is normal, searchlight is coming on and bright star IR is off.’

‘Fuel: we have 2,850. Four on four flow cross feed off.’

‘Radios: we’re on stud one on the ground, we’ll go to stud two for the taxi. VHF is back up 1,221 for the tower on the victor, 51.4s on the Fox Mike.’

There’s one more thing to do before I call the tower for clearance. I address the guys in the back. ‘Right fellas, usual brief. On my cab, it’s first names only. I’m not sir – I’m Alex or Frenchie, this is Morris, you’re Jim and Bob. All clear?’

‘Clear Frenchie.’

‘Okay. If we are engaged, there are two calls. “Tracer” and “Contact”. Tracer is ineffective enemy fire, Contact is effective. My rules are if it’s tracer or contact, call it, identify it and get the guns on it. As soon as either of you identify rounds coming towards the aircraft – that is, we’re under contact – and you can identify firing points, you are clear to engage. You have my authority to engage without reference to me first if we come under fire. Clear?’

‘Clear, Frenchie.’

So long as it’s an aimed shot, I have no problem with that. The responsibility rests with me, but what I don’t want to happen is for us to come under fire and for a crewman to ask me, ‘Am I clear to engage?’ In the three seconds or so that it takes to ask and for me to reply, any aimed rounds could have taken out a critical system, one of us or the entire cab. Equally, in that time, the crewmen could have missed a window to take out the threat. To me, it’s a no-brainer.

I make the call for departure: ‘KAF Tower, Splinter Two Four. Four on board, holding at Mike Ramp. Request taxi to Foxtrot for a westerly, low-level departure.’

‘Good morning Splinter Two Four. Clear taxi to Foxtrot. Visibility is five kilometres, wind two-five-zero at ten knots.’

‘Taxi Foxtrot.’

I ground-taxi and reposition us to Foxtrot, a taxiway that’s parallel to the main runway at KAF, and then make the call for take-off clearance: ‘KAF Tower, Splinter Two Four ready for departure, Sector Hotel Low.’

‘Splinter Two Four, clear take-off.’

I run through the pre-take-off checks:

‘100% torque NR, torques are matched; LCTs are ground, auto; AFCs coming on.’ Morris selects both AFCs ON for me.

‘One good; two good,’ he says.

‘CAP, all clear. Ts and Ps are all looking good. Fuel, we have got 2,750kgs. Brakes, holding on the toes; swivel switch at lock and both whites. Okay, clear to lift?’ I ask.

‘Yep, clear above and behind,’ from the back.

‘Pulling pitch,’ I say as my left hand raises the collective. Feedback comes via two senses; I feel the aircraft shake as sixteen tonnes of metal are lifted skywards, and I hear the note of the two Lycoming engines increase as they respond to my demand for power.

‘We have two good engines, 55% torque, 100% NR maintained, CAP is clear. Ts and Ps are all looking good,’ says Morris.

‘Transitioning,’ I call as I accelerate away. Then, ‘Above the light and noise,’ and I’m finally free to settle into the cruise, flying at 50ft as we head towards Lashkar Gah, our first pick-up point.

And so begins another day in paradise.

The following morning saw me waking up in Camp Bastion for some more tasking on the HRF. Bastion, like KAF, is a work in progress, and while still recognisably the same place that I remembered from last year, it’s significantly bigger. More troops, more tented buildings, more phones provided by Paradigm for us to call home on – conveniently situated in private booths in air-conditioned ISO containers. Work is under way to build an 8,000ft-long concrete runway in place of the dirt landing-strip that existed previously. Sadly, one of the biggest changes is to the simple yet poignant war memorial erected by the Paras in 2006; too many names have been added to the brass plates that adorn its base since my last visit.

It’s a pretty routine day for us – I’m flying the Helmand Triangle with German so we are Eurotrash once again. After lunch, we do a run-up to Kajaki and are routed to Gereshk by Bastion Ops on the way back to pick up a British soldier who’s been shot. He’s categorised T2 and we make contact with the Apache that is in orbit near the HLS, providing ongoing fire support to troops involved in a contact.

‘Ugly Five One, Beefcake Two Five, inbound to recover one T2. Can you confirm the LS is secure and cold?’

‘Beefcake, Ugly. LS is volcano [i.e. hot] at this time, repeat volcano. Hold off until further notice.’

‘What’s our fuel status?’ I ask German.

‘We’ve got about ten minutes playtime before we’re bingo,’ he replies.

I call Bastion and advise them that we may not make it in. It’s a tough call, knowing that a guy’s on the ground and needs us but we can’t get in to lift him and may yet need to bug out. Bastion scrambles the IRT while we fly an orbit about three minutes out from the HLS awaiting clearance. It’s going to be tight. Nine minutes pass; I call up the AH.

‘Ugly, Beefcake. Any change?’ I ask.

‘Beefcake, negative. Maintain hold, will report change.’

‘Ugly, we are bingo fuel, returning to Bastion. IRT en route from Bastion to take over,’ I advise them before dipping the nose and flying us home. About five minutes west, as I’m heading towards the desert east of Bastion, I see the IRT cab pass us on its way to our previous target, crewed by Morris (Mo) and JP. Later that night, we catch up in the crew tent.

‘Boss, Mo, how’d it go with that IRT shout to Gereshk earlier?’ I ask them. I pull up a chair and listen to their account:

‘It was interesting, to say the least,’ says Morris. ‘It’d been fairly quiet; in fact, we hadn’t been scrambled at all until that point. We’d just been taking it easy in the crew tent as we weren’t long back from lunch. JP had his head down and I was reading when the call came in.

‘JP was captain, so he went to the JOC to get the nine-liner while I went to straight to the cab with the crewmen and began start-up. The call came over as a straight T2 – a British soldier who had taken a round through the left side of his torso.

‘I think the firefight must have calmed down just after you left because we were on our approach about ten minutes after we passed you. We had trouble getting comms with the ground call sign but the Apache escorting us said, “You’re cleared in, LS is ice.” The ground units popped green smoke for us and we started our descent.

‘We came in from the south and the HLS was an area that had trees and bushes on three sides. It was going to be an extremely tight squeeze for us but, as you know, there’s nothing unusual in that – just another day in Helmand, right? You know JP though – he’s a pretty unique pilot so he managed to get in there seemingly with no difficulty whatsoever. Christ, the guy makes even the most impossible manoeuvres seem easy.

‘So there we are, landed right on the green smoke. We’re turning and burning, the ground party has gone off the ramp to find the T2, and JP and I were quite happily sat there, scanning the horizon within our respective look-out arcs for any incoming. I happened to look out of my left-hand window and I noticed some Afghan troops there. They were firing and doing that Afghan thing of ducking down in a crouch and firing their AKs above their heads in the general direction of where the enemy might be. You know how it is – it’s like there’s a slight lag between your eyes seeing something and your brain analysing what it is they’re seeing and making sense of it all.