Paul Grahame - Fire Strike 7/9

G-CAS stands for Ground-launched Close Air Support. It was the quickest emergency air cover available when no other fast jets were free and in the air. The main advantage aircraft like the F-18s, F-16s and F-15s have over the Apache — apart from the heavy ordnance they can carry — is their time from launch to target.

With a top speed in excess of Mach 2 at altitude, and a rate of climb of some 17,000 metres per minute, an F-18 could reach us in the fraction of the time it would take an Apache gunship. It made them worth every dollar of the $30 million it cost to build one.

By now Wicked Three Four had flown three shows of force. From the open turret of the Vector, I’d seen the last go in at what looked like twenty-metre altitude. But it was having bugger-all effect on the enemy. Their commanders had obviously learned the lesson from yesterday’s battle: shows of force meant little, and they were to keep attacking.

The OC reported eight enemy kills, but still he was being hit by a murderous barrage of small arms and RPGs.

‘We’re in the dirt, well isolated and it’s not looking good!’ he was yelling on the radio, to Chris. ‘Tell Bommer we need something now!’

Where the fuck was that G-CAS? As if in answer, there was a squelch of static as the big man came up on the air.

‘ Widow Seven Nine , Stoneage . You’ve got two Uproar call signs scrambled, inbound to your position.’

Just as soon as the pair of F-18s had checked into my ROZ, I passed Uproar Two Three the coordinates of the enemy positions and cleared him in to attack. The F-18 pilot zoomed in his optics to the coordinates, and immediately he was back on the air to me.

‘Visual enemy position. Visual ten to twelve pax in the woodstrip, with muzzle flashes.’

‘I need immediate attack with an airburst munition on the centre of mass of enemy. Attack line north-east to south-west run.’

‘One minute out,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Tipping in. Call for clearance.’

I cleared the F-18 pilot to attack, and he released a GBU-38 airburst. The explosion ripped apart the air above the enemy position, and tore into the woodland below, hurling branches and chunks of earth high into the air.

‘Get in!’ I yelled. ‘I need BDA,’ I radioed the pilot, hoping to god I hadn’t smashed any of our lads.

‘BDA: seven pax KIA in the treeline,’ the pilot replied. ‘I can see survivors fleeing their positions, and running away from your forces.’

There were seven killed in action (KIA) that the pilot could see, and probably a whole lot more that he couldn’t. The enemy were on the run and had been broken. There was no need for a follow-up attack. Butsy and the men of B Company had survived again, and it was time for them to get the hell out of there.

We regrouped at the laager and the convoy began forming up for departure. But this was when it all went totally warped. Before we could set off, the Mortar Company Commander came to have an urgent word with the OC. He had with him one of the terps, and as we gathered around they related a simply incredible story.

At the start of the previous day’s action, a young Afghan male of fighting age had blundered in to the Mortar Company’s position. The young man was shouting like a madman, but being a mortar company they had no terp with them. They threw the guy in the back of the ‘greeny wagon’ — the Mortar Company truck — until a terp could be found to talk with him.

Apparently, that had just happened, and this was the young man’s story. He claimed to be one of ten Afghan policemen who had been stationed at Zumbelay, a town to the east of us across the Helmand River. Six days ago the Taliban had kidnapped him, and nine other policemen, from the local cop shop. The Taliban had taken the ten men to Adin Zai. There they were stripped of their boots and uniforms and held captive in the village mosque. Three days later us lot had pitched up on the desert horizon, massing to attack Adin Zai.

The mosque was four hundred metres from our line of departure, and it was from there that we’d received the fiercest resistance as our initial assault went in. The enemy had concluded we were trying to rescue the kidnapped policemen. They’d bundled the ten men out of the mosque and driven them into the desert.

The Taliban had taken them to a sunken wadi, and ordered them to make a run for it. As they’d sprinted for their lives the Taliban came after them in pickups, hunting them down. I guess that was their idea of a bit of sport — gunning down unarmed policemen. In the ensuing mayhem the young man had escaped.

He’d run across the desert for two hours solid, before blundering into our position. The poor guy’s feet were torn to shreds. What gave his story added credibility was this: we’d heard about the kidnap already. Four days prior to the start of the present mission it had been the main item of interest in the Intel brief at FOB Price.

The question was — what did we now do about it? The OC put a call through to the Commanding Officer of 2 MERCIAN, Colonel Richard Westley. Butsy and the lads were totally shattered, and looking forward to returning to base. But it wasn’t to be.

The response that came back from the CO was this: if at all possible we were to go and recover the corpses of the murdered coppers.

And so we put the young Afghan lad in one of the Vikings, and told him to take us to the bodies.

We drove for just over a mile across the baking desert until we found the first corpse. The young Afghan lad had led us to the lip of a wadi. We pulled up on a stretch of high ground that seemed to dance and shimmer in the heat. This was where the Taliban had offloaded the ten policemen, he explained, before they started shooting.

We approached the edge of the dry valley on foot. The young policeman gestured over the edge, and started shouting and wailing and tearing at his hair. I peered over, and some ten metres below was the body. It was a young Afghan lad who looked to be no older than fourteen. He had a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead.

We followed the distraught Afghan policeman down the slope, at the bottom of which were three more crumpled forms. All of them had been shot in the head at close range. The telltale black burn marks of cordite were visible around the entry wounds, showing how close the gun muzzle had been when the round was fired.

One of the captives had been made to pray before the Taliban put a bullet in his brain. He was stone-cold dead and frozen in a gruesome caricature of prayer, still kneeling with his forehead on the dirt. Another had been shot through both his ankles, before taking a bullet in the forehead.

Three hundred and fifty metres down the wadi we found two further corpses. These guys had made a desperate bid to escape, and their bodies were riddled with bullet holes. The final three were scattered a way further down the wadi’s dry bed, the last mile or so from where the Taliban had set them running. Tyre tracks in the sand showed where the Taliban gunmen must have come screeching after the terrified men, their weapons firing on automatic from the rear of their Toyota trucks. Their death run had been like a classic manhunt, and I guess the Taliban had had their sick ‘fun’.

A couple of the victims had been crawling on the ground in a desperate effort to escape, when the last of the bullets were pumped into them. The Taliban had chosen to do their torture and murder here, as the walls of the wadi would have shielded the noise of the gunfire from us.

The smell wasn’t too bad yet, for it had only been a day and a half since the executions. But the palpable evil of what had happened here was sickening. Nine young policemen had been tortured and executed in cold blood. No one doubted the young survivor’s story.