Paul Grahame: Fire Strike 7/9

At JTAC school I’d had to concentrate real hard, plus do my homework like a good lad. I’d forced myself to come forward in class and ask questions, and not to care if anyone thought that I was a thick fucker. It was the kind of thing that I should have done at high school, had I not been too busy trying to get into the army instead.

A couple of weeks after getting JTAC combat-ready, I’d deployed to the war in Afghanistan — so I’d not had a chance to try in practice what I’d got in mind. But right now it was the best I could think of. I got Sticky to radio Butsy and ask for the exact, ten-figure grid of his position. Meanwhile, I got on the air to the F-16.

‘ Rammit Six Two , Widow Seven Nine . Sitrep: our HQ element is surrounded and engaged at close quarters in the Green Zone. This is the HQ element’s grid.’ I took the scrap of paper Sticky thrust at me and read the numbers. ‘46673896. Repeat: 46673896. Readback.’

The F-16 pilot read the details back to me.

‘Affirm. I want you to fly an immediate show of force over that grid. I want you to come in lower than a snake’s belly and achieve sonic boom right on top of the HQ position.’

‘Roger. Show of force at seventy-five feet — lower than a snake’s belly.’ I heard the Dutch pilot chuckle. ‘Tipping in.’

It was rock-hard for a pilot to achieve sonic boom on demand. Only the best of the best could do it. He’d have to put the jet into a steep dive and pull up violently, the collision of the jet engine’s thrust and the air creating a massive boom.

I learnt about it at JTAC school, and the sound was like a couple of thousand-pound bombs going off. For good measure I asked the pilot to pop flares, so it looked like he’d fired off a volley of missiles.

‘Radio the OC,’ I yelled at Sticky, who was on my shoulder in the Vector’s turret. ‘Brief him on what I’m doing.’

In one ear I listened to Sticky warning Butsy that the F-16 was preparing to fly a low-level show of force, no ordnance. In the other, I had the F-16 pilot talking me through his actions, as he came around on to target.

As the jet screamed in the enemy would get their heads well down. Or at least that was the plan. At that moment Butsy and the HQ element were going to bug out. It was the best I could think of to get the lads out of the shit.

The pilot banked his aircraft in a screaming turn, the wingtips trailing jets of white. Then the F-16 was tearing in like a thing possessed. The arrow-like streak of the aircraft seemed to touch the very tree tops as it reached the lowest point of its dive. As it pulled up sharply it popped flares, leaving a shower of glowing sparks like a comet it its wake.

I covered my ears and cringed in the turret, waiting for the sonic boom. But none came. Well, I had been asking the earth of the pilot, and it was still a wicked show of force. The ear-splitting scream of the jet engines rattled and shook the Vector, as each flare floated in the air like a tiny, blinding white fire.

I could sense the drop in the intensity of the gunfire, before the dying roar of the jet engines allowed me to hear it. From below me Chris was relaying the radio chat, as I kept my net open with the pilot. If the show of force had failed, I was going to have to dream up something else with that pilot.

‘Major Butt reports contact has gone quiet,’ Chris relayed. ‘Six enemy killed… No more incoming fire… Enemy has withdrawn… Extracting from their positions…’

Phew! We were out of the shit. Time to crack on with the mission.

The F-16 was low on fuel, and it was ripped by a singleton F-18 Hornet, call sign Uproar Two One . The platoons below me were on the advance again. As I talked the pilot around the battlefield, the valley had fallen ominously silent.

I guided the pilot around our position and that of the troops below, plus I gave him a heads-up on their line of advance. Sticky and I glanced across the Green Zone to where the F-18 was circling. For a brief moment we enjoyed the relative quiet that had settled over the battlefield. The calm before the storm.

I reached down and made a grab for my piss bottle through the open turret. It was a golden rule of JTAC-ing: never miss an opportunity to urinate . Nothing was allowed to get in the way of the JTAC-to-air process. It was too far to reach the bottle, so I asked Sticky to pass it me.

‘Thimble bladder strikes again,’ I quipped.

Up through the turret came a nasty-looking 1.5-litre plastic water bottle, with the top cut off. Over the past few weeks I’d learned that trying to pee through the neck of the bottle was a bad idea. So Sticky had taken on the role of chief bottle-cutter.

I did my business and passed it back to Sticky, who threw the contents out of the wagon’s back door. The last thing we needed was someone knocking it over before it was emptied. It was smelly enough in the wagon as it was.

Off to the east there was a faint boom. I jerked my head up and scanned the horizon. About 2.5 clicks due east was a tiny plume of smoke. I glanced at Sticky. He shrugged. I guessed he was right. Whatever it was, it was far distant from the battlefield and hardly a threat.

I got on the net and briefed the F-18 pilot, just in case. As I spoke into the TACSAT I became aware of a faint whistling. For a couple of seconds I mistook it for comms interference, and then the whistle became a piercing scream. An instant later the mortar round slammed into the ridge line.

It impacted seventy-five metres east of the Vector, the blast showering us in rocks and sand. There was another distant boom and a puff of smoke, and a second mortar came howling down. It landed sixty-five metres to the west of the wagon, blasting Sticky and me in shit, and hammering the wagon’s steel sides.

The enemy mortar boys were good. They had to have a dicker somewhere spotting where their rounds were falling. He’d have a mobile phone and be calling in adjustments to their fire. Now they had us bracketed, with a mortar dropped on either side of us. Top joy that was.

Shell number three had our names written all over it. We dived into the wagon, as Throp revved the engine. He floored the accelerator, and the Vector growled and shook itself into motion, the six wheels crunching and spinning backwards away from the drop-off.

Chris was on the radio, warning the OC that we were under mortar fire, and moving south-west along the ridge. It wouldn’t make one hell of a lot of difference to those mortar boys. We’d still be sticking out like a bullet magnet, and well within their range. Either we took out that dicker or the mortar team, or they were going to get us.

There was no time to worry about it. As the third mortar ploughed into the dust-dry earth where the wagon had just been standing, all hell broke lose below. 3 Platoon — call sign Arsenic Three Zero — had been ambushed from sixty metres. It was 0800, and the lads had yet to hit any of the objectives, and they were getting smashed again.

The F-18 Hornet above me packed an array of top-notch weaponry, including a 20mm cannon and Maverick air-to-surface missiles, plus precision-guided JDAM and Paveway ‘smart’ bombs. But the danger-close distance to which any of those could be deployed was measured in hundreds of metres — not the sixty between the lads of 3 Platoon and the enemy.

I put a call through to the pilot. ‘ Uproar Two One, Widow Seven Nine . Sitrep: I have a forward platoon engaged at close quarters. This is the platoon’s grid: 93467235. Readback.’

The pilot confirmed the grid.

‘Affirm. I want you to fly a show of force over the grid. We’re under mortar fire, so how low can you bring your jet without getting hit?’

‘How low d’ya want me?’ came back the American pilot’s reply.