Читать книгу Apache - Ed Macy - Страница 15

There was an awful lot to be done in the five days before 664 Squadron left. Our handover had to be seamless. It was vital that the quality of Apache support to the guys on the ground wasn’t affected. There were lessons to be learned from their tour; we had to adapt to all the procedural changes and familiarise ourselves with any aircraft issues that might have cropped up after three more months of hard combat.

There were some nervous people in London. An awful lot of money had been spent on the Apache and the last thing they wanted was for us to break one in less than a year of ops. Because it was so new, the procurement pencil-necks back at the MoD watched us like hawks.

The MoD had given us an encyclopaedic document known as the Release to Service which told us what we were and were not allowed to do with the aircraft. If any pilot broke any of the RTS rules – in the air or on the ground – he would be investigated. If he was found to have broken them deliberately, he would be removed from flying duties – permanently.

As Mr Sky Cop, the flying regs were poor old Billy’s bag. I didn’t envy him the responsibility, but it was good wind-up material.

‘I take it looping the Apache is still out this tour is it, Billy?’

‘Don’t even think about it. You’re only an average pilot, remember.’ Then, under his breath but loud enough for us to hear: ‘Unlike me.’

‘I suppose a barrel roll or two is out the question too?’

While Billy exchanged notes with 664’s QHI, I ironed out the weapons systems’ nuances with their Weapons Officer. I also signed for the gun tape laptop, on which recordings of all our weapons releases were stored. The gun tape laptop was kept in a special safe in the Joint Helicopter Force Forward office. A lot of the material on it was highly classified. ‘Kill TV’ could be really damaging to us if it fell into the wrong hands. Something stuck on YouTube under a provocative headline could make us look like war criminals.

You only needed to look at the infamous gun tape of the US Apache slaughtering the ‘Iraqi farmers’. US intelligence intercepted a plan to bring down an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile. The Apache was launched and dispatched every member of the insurgent team. The tape was leaked, cut and restructured to show the brutal servants of the Great Satan routinely wiping out innocent Iraqi farmers. It didn’t show the SAM being drawn from its bag and put in position.

The JHF was the squadron’s nerve centre, right next door to the Joint Operations Cell – a central Ops Room from where the three battlegroups based at Bastion (42 Commando, 45 Commando and the Information Exploitation Battlegroup) were managed.

The JHF and JOC compound consisted of as many tents, flags, masts and antennae as you could cram into fifty square metres. It was encircled by razor wire, and Minimi machine-gun-toting guards manned the only entrance twenty-four hours a day. It was the most secure area in the camp, and everyone who went in and out had to state their official purpose. Traffic was frequent between the JHF and JOC – each had to know what the other was up to at all times if operations were to be smoothly dovetailed.

The JHF was a large air-conditioned and sound-insulated khaki tent, five metres wide and fifteen long. A huge map table stood at its centre, with desks for the Boss, squadron ops officers, watchkeepers and signallers lining the four sides. We and the Chinook pilots planned our missions, gave briefings and ran the sorties from here.

There were eight CH47 Chinooks in theatre by then, upped from the original six in an emergency reinforcement over the summer. There were only ever two emergency response choppers in Bastion at any one time, with the rest of the CH47 force at the Coalition’s giant southern air hub, Kandahar Airfield.

The Chinook’s five-man crews – two pilots and three loadmasters – usually only came into the JHF for briefs. If we needed to make detailed plans with them before they left Kandahar, we’d generally do it over a conference call. Kandahar housed our rear echelon elements as well, and it was where we’d take the Apaches for heavy maintenance or repair. There was neither the spare equipment nor the capacity at Bastion. Thankfully, this handover only involved a changeover of personnel. All the equipment and airframes were staying where they were.

The Apache was a very hungry beast: it chomped through ammunition, fuel and spare parts at an alarming rate. A squadron of eight aircraft needed a massive logistics footprint to support it in the field: eighteen four-ton trucks for parts and ammunition, seven articulated lorries, five fuel tankers, three forklift trucks, two motorcycles, five technician vans, one eight-ton engineers’ lorry and a fire engine.

The machine was hugely labour intensive at the best of times, and Afghanistan was the cruellest place on earth to operate helicopters. It cost £20,000 for every hour in the air and needed thirty-two man hours of maintenance on the ground for every hour flown – and that wasn’t just a couple of hairy-arsed blokes in boiler suits sharing a wrench. Our Apaches needed REME avionics and airframe technicians, armourers, arming and loading teams, drivers, refuellers, signallers, IT specialists, Intelligence officers, clerks and storemen – ninety-eight people in total; more than six of them to every one pilot, and every one of them an expert.

The REME split into two tribal groups, depending on their role. There were the Greenies: the brainboxes, the technicians who worked on the avionics (from the TADS to the defensive aide suite). And there were the Blackies: the grease monkeys, who worked on the airframe – blades, rotors, gearboxes and engines. Each camp considered itself the most vital for the machine, so Greenies and Blackies lived in a state of permanent mutual abuse. ‘What’s the definition of a Blackie?’ was the Greenie refrain. ‘A Greenie, with his brains knocked out.’ In response, the Blackies watched the Greenies crouched in front of their computers, and dismissed them as work-shy, tea-glugging, muscle-dodging skivers.

The truth was, each had a healthy respect for the other and they always worked side by side on the airframes in two mixed shifts. They were an excellent and close-knit team, and they needed to be: the aircraft’s maximum flying hours had been upped again, so our second tour was going to be a whole lot harder than the first. We could now spend eleven and a half hours in the air per day; at the start of our first tour, it had only been six. The Chinook and Lynx’s flying hours had also been extended. As an equally limited resource, the pressure on them was also intense.

I only had one question when Billy told me: ‘So who’s agreed to pay for that?’

Aircraft flying hours is a money thing. The more time we spent in the air, the more replacement parts we’d need, and the more our deployment would cost the MoD. And they’d already forked out £4 billion.

‘There’s no new money. They’re cannibalising the aircraft stored at Shawbury for the spares.’

Now it made sense. ‘Excellent.’ I raised an imaginary glass. ‘Here’s to our glorious future.’

‘Tell me about it. The bet is that combat will have decreased in a few years until the spares chain kicks in.’

‘I think I’ll stick with the horses …’

‘What do you care, anyway?’ he grinned. ‘You’ll be raising a real one of those in your local while I’m pulling up the floorboards for rotor blades. Or maybe not …’

Very funny.

It took all five days of the handover to get everyone in and out on the air bridge from Kandahar and Kabul, where the RAF’s Tristars came in from Brize Norton.

The squadron was divided into four flights – 1, 2, 3 and HQ – with two Apaches in each. On Day Three, happy day, Carl caught up with us. He, Billy, the Boss and I made up HQ Flight. A staff sergeant, Carl was the unit’s Electronic Warfare Officer – the resident expert on the aircraft’s self-defence suite.

‘Bloody Tristar broke down, so there was a two-hour delay at Brize. Then I had to wait ages for my Bergen and weapon, then no one came to meet me … And every CrabAir trolley dolly had a spray-on desert flying suit and a spare in her wardrobe, but I can’t get one for love nor money …’

‘Nice to see you too, Carl.’

Carl was an excellent pilot, a very safe pair of hands, and knew the aircraft’s systems better than anyone, but he didn’t half like a moan. He was always bleating on about something or other, and got a fair bit of stick for it. But when it came to how unfair it was that he’d been passed over for promotion – which had happened a few times – I had every sympathy. His front-seater on the last tour had got an MiD whilst Carl got nothing, despite being the Aircraft Captain. He really was Mr Unlucky.

Carl arrived with the four members of 3 Flight, so half our pilots were in and 664’s first two flights could head for home. The Boss shook hands with the outgoing OC on 11 November, Armistice Day, and the handover was complete.

One of the reasons Chris was so popular was his enthusiasm for team bonding. He wanted the squadron to be one big happy family, and did everything he could to make it so.

For starters, he got permission for us to choose our own callsigns. It was what the Americans did, and their aircrew came up with some real screamers: ‘Steel Rain’ and ‘Thumper’ were amongst my favourites, both fittingly employed by AC130 Spectre gunships.

For some reason that I’ve never understood, the British military was far more reserved. Most units took the shockingly dull callsigns they were given, randomly generated by some NATO computer. ‘Opal’ and ‘Torsion’ were two of the worst I’d worked with in Afghanistan.

The Boss put it to the floor. Up until then, the Apaches had been working under the callsign ‘Wildman’ – which wasn’t bad, but a bit of a mouthful if you were in a hurry. After hours of spirited debate over several days, someone came up with ‘Ugly’. It summed up the machine perfectly – how it looked and what it did. From then on, we’d be known as Ugly Five Zero, Ugly Five One, Ugly Five Two, and so on. We’d announce ourselves at contacts over the net with fresh pride.

‘Who are you?’

‘We’re Ugly.’

‘Funny guys; who are you?’

‘We really are Ugly. We’re the Apache boys.’

We weren’t the only troops to be changing over in Helmand. After one hell of a tour, the Paras and airborne gunners of 16 Air Assault Brigade were being replaced by Britain’s other elite infantry formation, the Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade.

The commandos did their best to keep things quiet for their first few weeks, to find their footing. That worked well for us too, allowing us to ease the squadron’s new pilots gently into the scene. As well as the Boss, there were four more new faces on this tour, and there was a vast amount for the three men – and one woman – to take on board.

Every pilot did an initial familiarisation flight. It was important to learn about – or reacquaint ourselves with – the key locations and the general lie of the land over which we were expected to fight. I flew with the Boss (as Ugly Five One), with Carl flying Billy on our wing (Ugly Five Zero). Apache crews nearly always flew in pairs so they could watch out for each other in the air and share the workload on the ground. Double the birds meant double the fire power for the boys beneath us, though we didn’t always get the option. We were due to lift at 1500, so we got changed straight after lunch.

Strict rules dictated every shred of clothing we wore while flying – right down to our underwear: a pair of special socks, long johns and a long-sleeved T-shirt, all fire retardant. One Apache pilot I knew even used to wear a Formula 1 driver’s facemask. Surrounded by 3,000 lb of aircraft fuel, every one of us knew that we were flying a potential fireball.

Over our underwear went a desert camouflage shirt and trousers. Our uniforms were designed to look just like normal army Disruptive Pattern Material (DPM), but were also fire retardant. The pockets were double-sealing, so nothing would fall out of them and foul the flying controls in flight.

Flying suits were a big no-no, whatever Billy thought. They were fine for training in the UK, but if we got shot down we wanted to look like regular infantry. Our uniforms carried no unit markings, and I didn’t even wear rank slides. The Taliban would have given their eye teeth to get their hands on a ‘mosquito’ pilot.

We wore fire-retardant shammy leather gloves – in white, green or black – thin enough to give you a good feel of the controls, and flying combat boots with a special sole that didn’t pick up debris on our walk to the aircraft. Anything loose in the cockpit could jam the controls and cause the helicopter to crash

Over our shirts, we wore a Life Support Jacket – a camouflage canvas survival waistcoat packed with the kit we might need to evade capture and keep us alive if we went down. The survival LSJ was tailor-made; it had to fit tightly enough to hold in our innards and help preserve circulating body fluid if we got shot. A few more minutes of consciousness might make the difference between getting to the ground safely and dropping out of the sky.

Clipped to the survival jacket was a triangular-shaped bulletproof Kevlar breastplate that would stop a 7.62-mm round at point-blank range. We tucked it up inside the jacket to cover our heart but called it the Ball Cruncher because if you grabbed your kit in a hurry and threw it over your shoulder as you ran, the plate would coming winging down between your legs.

My 9-mm Browning and a couple of ammunition clips – thirteen rounds in each – were strapped to my right thigh in a black holster with Velcro fastening. Every pilot kept his second personal weapon – an SA80 carbine – in a bracket inside the cockpit. It looked like the normal full length assault rifle but had a very short barrel and an additional grip at the front.

Strapped to my left leg was my Black Brain – a filofax-like notepad, knee board and pencil for any crucial information I needed to jot down for or during the sortie. That meant the day’s codewords, the JTAC callsigns we needed to hook up with on the ground, or grids we were heading for.

I also kept a crib sheet in it containing any detail I might have needed to know about the myriad other offensive coalition aircraft that were working around us. There was quite an array: the UK’s Harrier GR7s, the US’s F16s, A10 Thunderbolts, EA6B Prowlers, B1B Lancer bombers, B52 bombers, AC130 Spectre gunships and AH64 Apaches, the Netherlands’ F16s and AH64s, France’s Mirage 2000s, and Belgium and Norway’s F16s. We needed to recognise all the aircraft callsigns the moment they came on the net, their national Rules of Engagement restrictions, what weapons they carried, and the safety distances we needed to hold to avoid catching any of their impact.

‘Ramit Three Seven, launching a GBU38 in three zero seconds, Ugly Five One acknowledge?’ If the shout came in there was no time to play Twenty Questions; we had to know who Ramit was and what he meant by a 38. A few seconds to discover that a Dutch F16 was about to launch a 500-lb JDAM bomb was usually enough for us to skedaddle to the safe distance.

Each pilot also had their own grab bag, a canvas satchel wedged beside their seats. If we went down, we’d grab them and go. What went in them was entirely down to personal preference. Some of the guys put ammo and rations in theirs; others stuffed them with bottles of water too. Apart from my field dressing and spare morphine vial, mine was crammed full of ammunition. I’d asked our storeman for everything he could spare.

As an ex-infantryman, I knew all about ground fighting. The way I saw it, the more bullets I had, the longer I’d stay alive. I’ve never needed to drink very much and I could kip when I was safe. In my ammo-bag I put four additional magazines of 9-mm, four thirty-round magazines of 5.56-mm for the SA80 carbine, and an extra bandolier of 120 5.56-mm rounds – as much as I could carry.

I’d also slipped in two L2 fragmentation grenades I’d stashed from the first tour and two smoke grenades – one green smoke, one red. Grenades were strictly forbidden inside the aircraft in case they went off, but I knew my weapons and was happy to carry them.

We stowed our fighting gear and ‘go-bags’ in the boot of the Apache, just forward of the tail section. Go-bags contained luxury items for long-term evasion in case we went down in the mountains or had a malfunction and needed to land at a distant firebase: sleeping bags, wash kit, warm clothing, waterproofs, a bivvie, spare food, water and the like. I’d also decided to add a full set of army webbing, body armour and a proper combat helmet. It was a lot to run with, but I didn’t want to leave the one item that could save my life.

The flight line was at the most easterly point of Camp Bastion. There were two north–south runways; ours, a 200-metre length of metallic matting surrounded by rocks to suppress the dust, and a kilometre-long dirt strip for the C130 transporters.

Three hangars ran alongside the western edge of our runway: one for aircraft, a second for the technicians’ workshop, and a third for personnel, shared by pilots and Groundies. Our hangar contained a row of weapons crates, camping cots for the on-duty Groundie shift (they worked in twenty-four hour stints), a basketball hoop and a row of lockers. Each of us had our own, where we’d dump anything in our pockets before walking out to the aircraft.

We never went up with any personal possessions on us; that meant no wallet, no family pictures, no wedding rings and certainly no US dollars – the currency used around camp – which would ID you in an instant. It was imperative to sanitise yourself entirely so as not to give the enemy any ammunition to break you during interrogation. A small crack was all they needed, and they’d prise it open until it was as wide as a house.

‘So you’re married are you, soldier? Kids too, I see from the picture in your wallet. You want to see them again? Maybe we’ll pay them a visit. I’ll call my friend at Leeds University to pick them up from school for you. Maybe we’ll slice them up in front of you like fucking salami – unless of course you want to talk to us …’

I carried Emily’s angel everywhere. I thought I might buy time proclaiming my belief in another world beyond our own. No religion at all was scorned by the Taliban. They weren’t to know that it was my family album and every letter I’d received. It was also a symbol of hope that I’d get back alive.

All we carried in the air was an official ID card with the ‘Big Four’ pieces of information that the Geneva Convention obliged us to reveal – name, rank, army number and date of birth. Our dog tags repeated the Big Four; we hung them around our neck alongside a vial of morphine which we could self-inject.

I kept a photo of Emily and my son and daughter in my locker, along with some spare batteries, a softie jacket, a pair of gloves, a cloth, a bottle of glass cleaner, my flying helmet, night vision goggles, survival jacket and a sleeping bag.

As we left the hangar on the fifty-metre walk to the rearming bays where the Apaches were ready to go, two aircraft were landing – 3 Flight completing their familiarisation.

It’s hard to forget your first sight of an Apache in the flesh. It still made me stop and stare. Its huge menacing shape, bristling with weapons and silhouetted against the deep blue sky, growing ever bigger as it closed on us. No single feature of the machine, from its angular and callus-like front profile to its chunky stabilator tail wing, was designed to please the eye. It was lean, purposeful and businesslike. Nothing was superfluous: every single bolt added to its killing power. Ugly, sure; but to me, a picture of perfection. Beauty and the beast wrapped into one.

‘Hey, Boss … Just because you’ve got the front seat today doesn’t mean you’re going to get it on every sortie.’

‘You’re obviously confusing your position as the Weapons Officer with my position as Boss,’ Chris said. ‘Get in and drive.’

It made sense for him to be in the front today so he could concentrate on what was below us while I gave him the guided tour.

Corporal Hambly, the Arming and Loading Point Commander, was waiting for us. He was in charge of the aircraft on the ground. He supervised an eight-man team whose sole job was to get us airborne. Simon Hambly stood by a wing, with an intercom plugged into it so he could speak to us in the cockpit when we started up. Whilst he was plugged in, he owned the Apache – not the Weapons Officer, or even his boss.

‘A Load Charlie for you, isn’t it sir?’

‘Yes thanks, mate. Just sightseeing today.’

Load Alpha was just Hellfire, Load Bravo only rockets. Load Charlie was our default load – a split weapons load on the pylons: two out of the four on the wings held Hellfire rails, the other two rocket pods. What you took depended on the mission. We weren’t going to put any rounds down today, but we never left base without a full complement just in case.

I did a quick walk around to double check that the protective covers had been removed from the weapons, intakes and exhausts.

‘All okay with the aircraft?’

‘She’s gleaming, sir. Cryptos loaded; be nice to her.’

I clambered up the right side of the Apache’s alloy skin, using the grab bars, and lifted up the back-seater’s heavy canopy door. It clicked open and hung there as I contorted myself onto the high, firm, flat seat. The Boss was already in.

Thirty minutes to takeoff.

The rear seat of an Apache was like a throne, high above the worker bees buzzing around below. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as comfortable. The foam pads on the seat and back were really tasty when we first got the Apaches, but after three years of heavily laden arses they had completely flattened. Anything more than a few hours in the cockpit these days and it felt like you were perched on a bag of golf balls. That was when the arse dance began, moving from one cheek to the other to try to alleviate the pain. Some of the guys resorted to half inflated therma-rest pillows.

The cockpit was like a sauna. The Afghan sun had beaten down on it all morning. Beads of sweat swelled up on my brow. A bank of controls and instruments faced me: buttons, switches and knobs of every shape and size – 227 in total, and every one designed to feel different so you could recognise them in the dark. Most of them were dual-or triple-purpose, which gave them a total of 443 different positions. Every action could require a combination of button pushes, so the number of potential combinations ran into the thousands.

One five-inch-square Multi Purpose Display screen sat each side of the control bank. We could bring up anything we liked on them, from the TV images filmed by the TADS lenses, to the digital script and diagrams of whatever we asked of the on-board computers. There were well over 1,500 different pages – engine pages, fuel pages, comms pages, weapons pages and radar pages. To the far left of the control bank was an alphabetical keyboard for typing data into the computers, or texting messages between Apaches.

A pioneering helicopter pilot of the 1930s would still have recognised the pedals, cyclic stick between my legs (controlling speed and direction – gripped by my right hand) and the collective lever below my left elbow (for height and power – gripped by my left). But that would be about it. He’d be mighty confused by the myriad triggers and buttons on both.

Because there were so many systems to test and configurations to set, achieving takeoff from cold required more than 1,000 button pushes. It took thirty minutes without any snags, fifteen at a mad push. Any quicker and we’d be switching things on in mid-air without knowing if they were going to work.

I inserted a key into the master ignition switch on a panel to the left of the collective then twisted the switch from ‘Off ’ to ‘Battery’. A few seconds’ pause as the battery leaked life into the beast, then the distinctive ‘click-click’ of the relays. The Up Front Display (UFD) – a panel top right of the controls showing critical information and faults digitally – lit up. The machine was stirring.

I closed the canopy door and flipped my helmet onto my head, making sure that my ears didn’t fold inside it (that would be agony in half an hour) and tightened the chinstrap. I plugged in the communication cord and the ongoing conversations of four different VHF / UHF and FM radio channels burst into life inside my helmet. The four channels were: the Joint Terminal Attack Controller’s net for us to communicate with the guys on the ground who needed us; the Coalition air net in Helmand so we could talk to other aircraft; the net back to the JHF; and the intra-Apache net to talk or send data to our wingmen and other Apaches in the squadron. In addition, there was a permanently open internal intercom for the two pilots to speak to each other. The Boss’s was the fifth voice in my ear. The sixth and seventh voices boomed through. ‘This is right wing; how do you read, sir?’

‘Nice and clear, Si. What about me?’

‘Clear as a bell, sir. Left wing check in.’

‘Loud and clear, Corporal Hambly.’

‘You got him, sir.’

‘I hear the left wing, Si. Let’s rock and roll.’

Luckily, everyone didn’t always speak at once – though they could. A volume control allowed me to turn up the net most relevant to me at any particular moment.

‘Pylons, stabilator, Auxiliary Power Unit; clear, Si?’

‘Pylons, stab and APU all clear. Clear to start, sir.’

I pressed the APU button below the ignition switch. A loud whine as the APU engine turned over, then the distinctive ticking of the igniters. The APU burst into life followed by a rush of air from the four gaspers positioned around the cockpit. The air was hot; no air con yet.

I grabbed the cyclic stick and yelped. I’d taken my gloves off to pull on my helmet and forgotten the stick had been sunbathing all morning. A quick glance confirmed the beginnings of a pale white blister between my thumb and forefinger. Shit; I’d have to fly the whole sortie with pressure against it.

My rage made me think of my daughter; she’d be laughing her head off if she saw me now. My daughter thought it was hilarious when I hurt myself because I was normally such a hard bugger. Me in pain, face contorted, fighting the urge to curse, made her sides split. That’s daughters for you.

It was an even numbered day today.

‘Starting number two, Si?’

We always matched the engine starting sequence to odd and even days. It meant one never worked harder than the other in the long run.

‘Clear to start number two, sir.’

The heat in the cockpit was close to unbearable. All the hot wiring, glues, resins, metals and rubber cosseted inside my glass cocoon exuded their own distinctive scent. I was still sweating like a pig.

I pushed the right hand Engine Power Lever forward to ‘Idle’ and the starboard engine fired up. Then a slow, smooth push on the EPL, fully forward. As the engine pitch grew the tail rotor started up thirty-five feet behind me and the four main rotor blades begun to move above my head, slowly at first, and then ever faster, thudding rhythmically as the blades started to catch the air.

My eyes began to sting as the first droplets of sweat trickled into them from my brow. I wished the air con would hurry up.

‘Starting number one.’

‘Clear to start number one, sir.’

Ten seconds later the thuds were too quick to count and the rotors began a deafening hum.

Twenty-two minutes to takeoff.

I attached my monocle and bore-sighted my helmet. It allowed me to snap shoot at any target on the ground simply by looking at it and pulling the trigger. Tiny infrared sensors positioned around the cockpit detected the exact position of the crosshairs at the centre of my monocle and the computer directed the cannon accordingly. The Apache didn’t even need to be facing the target. It was a neat trick.

The sweat finally began to cool on my brow as the air con won its battle with the sun’s rays. I started testing the systems.

Fifteen minutes to takeoff.

My hands and eyes swept around the cockpit. The Boss and I kept up a constant dialogue as we worked. Our rotor blades thundered menacingly above the eight man arming team. Three … two … one … ten minutes to lift.

‘Ugly Five One on one.’ I flicked to the second radio. ‘On two.’ Flicked to the third. ‘On three.’ Flicked to the last, our data radio, and sent our digital position.

Billy replied, ‘Ugly Five Zero on one … on two … on three.’ An icon appeared on the MPD showing the position of his Apache.

‘Good Data. Ready.’ All four radios and data were working.

Billy replied with a ‘click-click’ over the radio, shorthand for affirmative.

Pushing the APU button again switched it off. ‘APU off; pins, cords and chocks please, Simon.’

His team prepared the aircraft for moving and I opened my door to receive the arming pin. The flares and weapons were now armed and we were ready to go.

‘Have a good trip, sirs.’ Simon disconnected from the right wing and his team moved to the missile and rocket racks. For the first time since we’d arrived, we owned the Apache.

‘Your lead, Billy.’

Another double click.

Two minutes and thirty seconds to takeoff.

My left hand moved down the collective to the flying grip. Looking straight ahead as my right eye focused on the flight symbology projected into the monocle, I gave the flying grip a single twist to the right, removing the collective’s friction lock. The torque – the measurement of engine power output in helicopter flight – indicated 21 per cent. That was the norm while stationary on the ground, rotor blades flat – the minimum angle of pitch.

My feet pressed on the very top of both directional foot pedals at the same time until I heard a light thud.

‘Parking brake off? Tail wheel locked?’

The final two questions on the Boss’s checklist. I did my visual check. ‘The parking brake is off, the handle is in, tail wheel is locked and the light is out.’

My right eye focused on the torque and my left watched Billy and Carl’s aircraft pull out of the loading bay beside us and taxi away. My left hand was poised to pull up the collective, my right wrapped firmly around the cyclic, ready to push forward.

Thirty seconds to takeoff.

With fifty metres between us and Billy, I lifted the collective and depressed my left pedal to increase power to the tail rotor and balance us up against the increased force of the turning rotor blades. Left unchecked, the main blades would try to turn our nose to the right, leaning the Apache dangerously over to one side. The torque climbed to 35 per cent.

With a gentle push of the cyclic control stick away from my body the main blades tipped and pulled the machine slowly forward. A touch on the toe brakes at the top of the pedals to test the brakes then we taxied onto our miniature runway for a running takeoff.

Heat and altitude both reduced the amount of power a helicopter engine could generate. Camp Bastion was long on both. We could lift vertically, but it was a major struggle if we carried a full load of ammunition and fuel. Taking a run at it gave us translational lift, the kind fixed-wing aircraft used.

Fifteen seconds to takeoff.

I pointed our nose straight down the runway, with Billy and Carl still fifty metres ahead of us, and pulled a little more pitch. The machine picked up pace nicely. Once the torque hit 65 per cent, I pushed the trim button to hold the collective and cyclic in place. It was sufficient power to get us up. The speed symbol in my right eye hit twenty knots and continued to climb.

Six seconds to takeoff.

Eighty metres down the runway, the tail wheel lifted off it. At thirty-five knots she wanted to fly, but I held her down with a tiny reduction of power and a shift of the cyclic. It wasn’t time yet.

Two seconds to takeoff.

I was watching Carl’s disc intently … Now … It tipped forward and I raised the collective again and the main wheels left the ground. We lifted in perfect unison. Good. I was pleased I’d got it spot on. If you set the right tone at the start of a mission you’d remain accurate throughout.

‘Your ASE, Boss.’

The Boss armed the aircraft’s Aircraft Survival Equipment (ASE) to protect us against SAMs.

‘Okay, countermeasures set; ASE is on semi-automatic.’

‘Zero Charlie this is Ugly Five Zero and Ugly Five One. Wheels off at your location as fragged, over.’

‘Zero Charlie, Roger. Out.’

I pulled up the navigation page on the left hand MPD and selected the pre-planned route heading for Sangin, the first stop on our tour. A glance through the monocle confirmed: ‘Eighteen minutes to arrival.’

We were seventy-five feet above the desert floor and heading north-east, the camp’s perimeter fence two hundred metres behind us. A quick trim with the right thumb and we accelerated to a cruising speed of 120 knots. The Boss selected automatic on the ASE. The Apache would, we hoped, keep us safe from surface-to-air missiles. SAMs were the greatest threat to us at the heights we operated.

Billy and Carl were a safe distance in front of us to avoid collision. Billy came on the radio.

‘Ugly Five One, this is Ugly Five Zero. High-high, five-five and six-zero.’

‘High-high, five-five, six-zero copied.’

Billy wanted us to climb high. Him to 5,500 feet and us to 6,000 feet – always a small difference in height too, for safety. The Boss glanced up through the canopy’s bulletproof window.

‘Clear above.’

‘Copied. Climbing.’

I pulled back on the cyclic and hard on the collective while depressing my left pedal. We lost our stomachs and soared.

Despite its gargantuan combat weight, the Apache’s mighty Rolls Royce engines made it just as agile and manoeuvrable as any chopper the army had ever had. Turning at up to 38,300 rpm, they pumped out an incredible 2,240 shaft horse power – making the Apache twenty-two times more powerful than a Porsche 911.

The Apache could climb in excess of 5,000 feet a minute, including a one-off, ninety-degree, nose-up vertical climb of 1,000 feet. And it could do a 360-degree loop, barrel roll or a wing over nose dive – every stunt manoeuvre in the book. Not moves I’ve ever carried out, of course; heaven forbid – especially with Sky Cop as my wingman.

Sixty seconds or so later, we were at Billy’s nominated cruising altitude. It was a terrific feeling to be up there again, over that menacingly beautiful landscape, and in that extraordinary machine. Ten minutes into the flight, I felt as confident at the controls as I had on the day I left in August. I was right back in the zone again.

Despite the years of training, it had still taken me a good six weeks of hard fighting on the first tour before I really felt the exhilaration of being at one with the machine.

When you drive a new car, you’re slow and cautious. You need to think about every action, from where the indicators are to how far you are from the gatepost. After you’ve driven it for a while, you don’t have to think; you just end up at home without having thought of driving once.

It was the same with the Apache, but on a grander scale. Halfway through the first tour, whatever I wanted to do in the aircraft, I did. From that moment onwards I didn’t need to think how to fly and shoot because my fingers, arms and legs were already working in perfect harmony with my mind. I was no longer strapped to the Apache; the Apache was strapped to me.

Almost all of the pilots were there by the end of the tour. But none of that meant that we had lost respect for the daunting reality of having so much firepower at our finger tips. Not for one moment, then or since. Nobody in that war had more potential to do as much damage to human life. With that power came an equal amount of responsibility. We were fearful of being seen as gung-ho; US Apache pilots had that reputation and we didn’t want to follow suit. Every single round we put down we put down with good reason; killing someone was a serious business.

As we flew, I watched the Boss’s head dart from side to side as he fought to take everything in. ‘Amazing …’ he’d murmur every now and then. Occasionally, a swift question. ‘Jeez. What the hell do you call that?’

There were no more inspiring places to fly than in southern Afghanistan. It was unlike anywhere I had ever seen before and I was still captivated by it too. The landscape was both epic and primeval; everything about it was extreme. When it was flat, it was flat as a pancake. When it was hot, it was unbearably so. The rivers were never babbling streams but vast raging torrents, and the mountains climbed straight up to the heavens, often from a standing start.

The plan was to do an anticlockwise circuit of the four northern platoon houses where we’d spent most of the first tour: Sangin first, then Kajaki in the far north-east, Now Zad in the far north-west, and finally Gereshk, twenty kilometres shy of Camp Bastion, on the way back.

We stuck to the safety of the desert on the way up, keeping the Green Zone to our right. Immensely fertile before the Soviet invasion in 1978–79, Helmand province had been known as Afghanistan’s breadbasket. A decade of bitter fighting against the Red Army ended that. Russian bombers smashed much of Helmand’s irrigation system to smithereens. Yet the year-round supply of melted snow off the Hindu Kush was sufficient to keep the river valley’s fields and orchards lush enough for two full crops of opium poppies a year.

The vast majority of the province’s intensely conservative, desperately impoverished, million-strong, largely Pashtun, population were farmers – or worked the farmers’ land. The majority lived in single-storey houses fashioned from adobe and stone, often without electricity or piped water. It was an existence that hadn’t changed in a millennium.

The Green Zone only amounted to a tiny central slice of the province. It was bordered by two great deserts. To its west was the Desert of Death and Camp Bastion.

‘Dasht-e-Margo …’ The Boss practised his fledgling Pashtun.

‘Yeah. But aircrew generally call it the GAFA, Boss.’

‘GAFA?’

‘The Great Afghan Fuck All.’

The GAFA was an ancient, rocky seabed with a thick covering of sand as fine as dust. Nomads set up temporary shelters on it in the winter so their goats and camels could feed on the odd bush. In the summer it remained the exclusive preserve of the drug traffickers. They criss-crossed it south to Pakistan, or west to Iran, moving raw opium or freshly processed heroin to their consumers in the Middle East or Europe, leaving an endless mesh of tyre tracks behind them. It was so barren that you couldn’t tell if you were at 100 feet or 10,000.

‘What do you call the desert on the east side of the Green Zone, then?’

‘The Red Desert.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it looks red from up here.’

The Boss peered at our right horizon. ‘It’s actually worse. Makes the GAFA look like Kent.’

The Red Desert stretched all the way to Kandahar: 10,000 square miles of thin, Arabian-style sand, whipped by the wind over thousands of years into an endless succession of dunes. From 5,000 feet up, its surface looked like a sea of rippling red waves. Except by two well-known routes, the Red Desert was completely impassable, even by tracked vehicles. If you went in there, you didn’t come out again. That’s why nobody ever did. Not even the nomads.

As we moved further north and nearer to Sangin the topography ahead of us began to change. We could see the outlines of great ridges of rock rising from steep valleys to form the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Their peaks were as sharp as knife-blades and coloured seams cut through them as they climbed, indicating the different eras of their evolution. The mountains stretched all the way to Kabul, 300 miles to the north-east. They were almost impassable in the winter snows and boasted only one road flat enough for most vehicles to make the arduous journey during the rest of the year.

Many of the foothills had been tunnelled into, originally for protection from the wind and sandstorms and somewhere to store crops, but then, in the last few thousand years, for war. They provided an excellent defence against invaders since the time of Alexander the Great, and most recently, a haven to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Conventional British forces tried to stay out of the mountains. Our lesson had been learned 164 years before we got there, when General Elphinstone’s 16,000-man garrison was wiped out during the retreat from Kabul in 1842.

‘That’s Sangin ahead of us now, Boss.’

Sangin sat at the confluence of three green zones, and the District Centre was sited at the point the Helmand was joined by another river flowing from the northern hills. The Taliban had three different covered approaches from which to attack it.

It was no coincidence that the SBS team had got so badly whacked here. The town was the scene of the most intense fighting of our first tour and accounted for half of 16 Air Assault Brigade’s body bags. For years it had been a centre of Taliban activity, as well as the market town where all of the opium grown in the north of the province was traded. The traffickers hadn’t been too happy about the Paras’ arrival either. We dropped down to get a better look.

‘Wheel,’ Billy called. ‘We’ll start east, you start west.’

A wheel was a regular Apache combat manoeuvre over a target. We’d circle on the same axis but at different heights, one clockwise, one anticlockwise. It gave the flight 360-degree visibility at all times. We liked to keep between 1,000 and 4,000 metres away from the target, out of small arms range but well within engagement range of our weapons, and close enough for us to see whatever we needed through our optics.

As I slipped us into the gentle circle, I pointed out areas of interest for the Boss to zoom into with the Day TV TADS camera and examine on his screen. It had three fields of view – narrow, wide and zoom. Zoom offered 127-times magnification. If you looked at a guy in the zoom field while standing off at 2,000 metres, you could tell how many fillings he had. The camera was housed in the nose pod, so we could see up to sixty degrees downwards; as if we were looking straight through the Kevlar shell beneath our feet.

Sangin was a maze of mainly single-storey brown and beige buildings connected by dust tracks. I centred my monocle crosshairs on the wadi.

‘My line of sight. The wadi.’

‘Looking.’ The Boss zoomed in.

The second set of crosshairs in his monocle told him where I was focusing. All he needed to do was line up his with mine and slave the TADS to his eye.

‘Seen.’

‘Come due east from it and the first building is the District Centre.’

‘Okay. Hang on a minute, let me have a look at the map. Yup, I’ve got it.’

I glanced down at my right-hand MPD, which I’d set on the TADS image, relaying everything the Boss was seeing.

‘Bloody hell, they’ve built the place up a bit.’

The three-storey adobe-clad structure had been vigorously reinforced. A massive Hesco Bastion wall now ran all the way around the building, and the Paras had added wooden planks, sandbags and junk – anything they could lay their hands on – to the rooftop defences. A 300- by 200-metre field alongside it had also been ringed by Hesco Bastion, giving them a permanently protected helicopter landing site. It was a proper fort now, and a fine feat of engineering.

‘How they managed to stay alive long enough to build that, I’ve no idea …’

I’d heard the dit from 664 Squadron. The DC’s complement of Royal Engineers had affectionately renamed it Sangin Built Under Fire. Every man, bar one, had fired his weapon on the job; the only engineer who hadn’t was their sergeant major, who’d been too busy lobbing ammunition to the rest of the guys.

‘My line of sight – that’s the market place.’

The souk was 700 metres east of the DC. On the TADS screen, I could see broken wooden frames hanging off its stalls and shredded curtains flapping in the wind. It had been heavily shot up over the summer, but never stopped being a hive of activity. There was money to be made in the opium business.

Old rice sacks were piled high outside several stalls – the favoured receptacle for opium poppy sap – and dozens of locals crowded around them under the watchful gaze of the marines in the DC. Busting the drugs industry wasn’t their job. We’d get to that later, once the Taliban had been defeated. Otherwise, we’d be banging up 80 per cent of the local population.

‘My line of sight now – that’s Wombat Wood.’ I was looking a kilometre north of the DC. ‘The Taliban use it regularly to shell the guys.’

A wombat was a Weapon Of Magnesium Battalion Anti Tank; the generic slang the army gave to recoilless rifles. They were around eight feet long and fired shells up to a diameter of 120 mm. Nasty.

‘Wombats aren’t the only sinister things lurking in that wood, Boss. They fire 107-millimetre Chinese rockets from there too.’

A 107-mm Chinese rocket had killed two signallers in a blockhouse that covered the stairwell to the roof of the Sangin DC in July. Corporal Peter Thorpe died alongside his comrade Jabron Hashmi – the first British Army Muslim killed fighting the Taliban.

‘Okay, let’s show you Macy House.’

A few months before, I’d found a building 200 metres to the south which the Taliban had occupied, giving them good arcs of fire onto the DC. They’d knocked a series of firing ports into its walls. The Apache crews had named it after me as a way of identifying it to each other. I searched for it in vain.

‘Forget it, it’s gone.’

Where Macy House once stood, there was now nothing. It had obviously been bombed to oblivion while we’d been away. I looked at the clock.

‘We’d better be moving on, Boss.’

We wanted to get in all four DCs, so we only had time for a whistle stop tour. Four minutes in Sangin was enough.

‘Okay. Billy, let’s move on to Kajaki.’

‘Copied, Boss.’

We broke out of the wheel, slipped east of the Green Zone and pointed our noses north-east again. Kajaki was thirty-eight kilometres further up the Green Zone. My monocle said we’d be there in ten minutes.

Two minutes into the flight, an urgent message was broadcast over the JTAC net for Widow TOC – the JTACs’ central hub in Camp Bastion’s JOC Ops Room.

‘Stand by.’ The Boss cut across my chat with Billy about the fate of Macy House.

‘Widow TOC, this is Widow Eight Four. We are north-east of Gereshk; we have come under sniper and mortar fire. Requesting immediate air support. Repeat, requesting immediate air support.’

Gereshk was only forty klicks south-west of us. The Boss stepped on the pressel by his left foot to fire up his radio mike.

‘Widow TOC, Widow TOC; this is Ugly Five One. We are two Apaches; we have just left Sangin on a familiarisation flight and we’ve got plenty of gas. We’re available for tasking if required.’

I pushed the cyclic forward and right, throwing the Apache into a tight bank.

‘Ugly Five One, Widow TOC. Copied. Stand by.’

Widow TOC needed a senior officer’s authority from the JHF to deploy us.

‘Wait Widow TOC, I am Zero Alpha of all Ugly callsigns. I am authorising if you want us to do it.’

‘Widow TOC, Roger. It’s yours.’

‘Eight minutes, Boss.’

‘Ugly Five One, affirm. Widow Eight Four, we’ll be with you in eight minutes; stand by.’