Paul Grahame: Fire Strike 7/9

It looked deceptively peaceful. But this was bandit country, stuffed full of six hundred battle-hardened Chechen and Pakistani insurgents, or so the Intel boys had told us. It was 0630, and directly below us one hundred lads from B Company 2 MERCIAN were about to advance on foot into the jungle and the enemy guns. They were outnumbered six to one, and relying on us to even up the odds a little.

Stuck up here on this desert ridge we were the proverbial bullet magnet, devoid of any cover. But this was the place to get eyes on the battlefield, and call in air power to smash the enemy. We were pushing into their stronghold. Kicking the hornets’ nest. The odds were stacked against us. Air power was about all we had to even things up a little.

I eyed that treeline again. ‘Sticky, what d’you reckon…’

I didn’t get to finish the sentence. There was a violent burst of orange-yellow from within the darkened woods. It was like a mortar flash, only horizontal, and aimed right at us. It was followed instantly by another, the flame of the second weapon firing lighting up the billowing cloud of exhaust smoke hanging beneath the trees.

Two black streaks each the size and shape of a bowling pin on its side wobbled and skitted their way towards us. One seemed aimed at Sticky’s head, the other at mine. In they came. Time seemed to freeze.

Sticky and I dived for cover at the same moment, a Royal Marine and a Light Dragoon doing what had been drilled into us over the years and years of training. As we hit the dirt, the two warheads screamed through the air where we’d just been standing.

The exhaust from the rocket-propelled grenades’ sustainer motors enveloped us in a choking fog. The smell was like Guy Fawkes night, only these weren’t fireworks. These rockets were designed to shred flesh, and pierce and pulverise armoured vehicles far tougher than our lightly protected Vector.

I swivelled my head to yell a warning. A dirty blue-white trail of smoke lay to either side of the Vector. The RPGs had missed it by inches. Fucking hell. The opening salvo of the battle for Adin Zai had been fired, and no guessing who the enemy were targeting. It was us — that ‘enemy tank’ stuck out on the ridge line.

‘RPGs!’ I yelled. ‘Fucking RPG team in the woodline!’

I turned back to the fight and tugged the angular butt of my SA80 into my shoulder. I jammed my right eye against the smooth metal of my stubby SUSAT sight. Its four-times magnification pulled the enemy position into instant close-up focus, the smoke from the RPG double-tap still hanging in the air beneath the branches.

I placed the diamond-sharp tip of the pointer on the heart of the smoke, and opened fire, pumping round after round into the enemy position. With each squeeze of the trigger a gleaming brass case spewed from the assault rifle’s ejector, spinning on to the bone-white rock and dirt beside me. With each I imagined a bullet tearing into an RPG-gunner’s skull.

Two more warheads fired out of the woodline. Again, they did the wobble-streak towards us, threading grey smoke across the valley. But this time their aim was a fraction off, the rockets screaming past a few metres above us. From the muzzle flashes I could see that the enemy had moved position a metre or two along the trees. The canny fuckers.

‘Watch our tracer!’ I yelled to the lads in the Fire Support Group. ‘Watch our tracer!’

The FSG’s two WMIKs were parked to the side of our wagon. Together they had a pair of 50-cals and two GPMG — ‘Gimpy’ — machine guns mounted on the open-topped Land Rovers. It should be more than enough firepower to silence those fuckers in the woods. They could follow the glowing threads of our tracer rounds directly on to target.

The crack of mine and Sticky’s assault rifles was drowned out by the murderous roar as the Gimpys opened up, followed closely by the awesome thump-thump-thump of the 50-cals. It was deafening, and it felt good.

The RPG teams would keep moving, for their muzzle flashes were a dead giveaway. But the lads on the big machine guns knew their stuff. They were malleting either end of the treeline, trapping the enemy in their positions.

There was a whump from beside me, as Sticky loosed off a grenade. Being a rufty-tufty Marine he had the chunkier version of the SA80, with underslung grenade launcher attached. For an instant I caught his eye, to let him know I liked what he was doing.

As I did so, there was a violent kick to my right elbow and an angry high-pitched whine, sand and rocks flying from where the bullet had hit. It left a tiny, smoking scoop in the dirt a couple of inches from my right arm. I rolled to one side, and a second round kicked up the shit where I’d just been lying.

I yelled a warning to Sticky that the enemy had a bead on us. As I did so, I heard a voice screaming from behind me.

‘Sticky! Bommer! What the fuck’re you doing? Bommer — get in the fucking wagon and get the A-10s on that treeline! NOW! And Sticky, cue up the fucking guns.’

‘Bommer’ was my nickname from The Light Dragoons. Chris was dead right. Sticky and I had just sacked our stations, getting fire on to the treeline when we should have been doing our proper jobs. I grabbed my rifle and made a mad dash for the rear of the Vector.

‘Aye-aye, Johnny Bravo,’ I panted, as I dived inside. ‘I’m on it.’

Captain Chris Lane, from 19 Regiment Royal Artillery, was commanding our Fire Support Team (FST). He’d earned the nickname ‘Johnny Bravo’, just as soon as we’d clapped eyes on his shock of blond hair and rippling, chiselled torso. JB had us bang to rights for fucking off from our proper jobs.

As the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC — pronounced ‘Jaytack’) attached to B Company, 2 MERCIAN, it was my role to call in the warplanes. I was only to use my personal weapon as a last resort. Trouble was, that was all totally counter-intuitive to normal soldiering.

The natural reaction whenever you were engaged was to put down rounds. To save your life and that of your mates. To kill the enemy. It was what soldiers like Sticky and me had trained to do for years. But as a JTAC I had to force myself to go against all my instincts, and trust the ground troops to defend me.

Since 0400 that morning I’d been working the air power. First, I’d had a pair of A-10 Thunderbolt ground-attack aircraft on station. They’d been ripped by a Harrier and then another pair of A-10s. I had those A-10s overhead right now. One was searching the Green Zone for the enemy, the other checking the compounds ahead of the 2 MERCIAN’s line of departure.

There was nothing better to hit that enemy RPG team than those A-10 ‘tank busters’. The A-10 has a nose-mounted, sevenbarrel 30mm Gatling gun that spews out a staggering 3,900 rounds per minute. It provides devastating firepower even against a main battle tank, and would turn those RPG gunners into Taliban purée.

So powerful was the kickback from the cannon, that it had been known to stall the aircraft’s giant turbofan jet engines. In theory they could be restarted in mid-air. But I didn’t fancy being an A-10 pilot and trying. Either way, the A-10 was fast becoming my aircraft of choice in Afghanistan.

I scrabbled about in the rear of the wagon for the handset of my TACSAT, a UHF ground-to-air radio. The back of the Vector was my domain. JTAC Central. It might look like total chaos, but it was my chaos. My fingers grabbed the TACSAT handset from under the seat, and I jammed it against my ear.

‘ Hog Two Two, Widow Seven Nine , do you copy?’

There was a burst of echoing static in my ear. It was drowned out by a volley of bullets slamming into the compound wall directly behind us, chunks of blasted mud wall hammering off the Vector’s armoured sides. I glanced skywards, cursing for the A-10 to respond.