Apache

I jumped back in and the second my door closed Carl pulled power and took off, sand-blasting everyone below us.

‘Check the fuel burn rate,’ Carl snapped, as we left the dust cloud behind. Billy and Geordie had been holding for us over the desert. Now they moved alongside and Carl and Geordie main-lined it back to Camp Bastion by the straightest possible route.

I looked through my monocle. We had 515 lb of fuel and sixty-two miles to fly. Not good. The minimum legal fuel allowance for landing an Apache was 400 lb. Below that, heavy manoeuvring could cause fuel starvation to the engine and a shut down. Below 200 lb, there was just whatever was left in the pipes and pump; the two fuel tanks were empty. At 100 lb the engines cut out altogether.

Carl was keeping the aircraft at 117 knots, the most economical fuel burn speed, and just thirty-five feet off the desert floor. Any higher and the wind from the north-west would have slowed us down. Every second counted.

I pulled up the engine page on the MPD and tasted acid in my throat. We were burning 900 lb an hour, 15 lb a minute – and it was going to take us twenty-seven minutes to get home. I punched 15*27 into the keyboard, then Enter… 405 lb… We’d have 110 lb of fuel left when we landed. Bloody hell. I gave us 50 / 50 at best.

‘Buddy, if we’re not going to make it, we’re best just putting down at the gun line aren’t we? We can get a CH47 to fly down the boys with some fuel bollocks.’

‘We can do it.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘We could go to Lash…’

‘We’re not going to Lash; it’s too small. We can make it.’

I realised I was more worried about the embarrassment of requesting fuel if we landed in the middle of the desert than I was of the Taliban.

If anyone knew the Apache AH Mk1, it was Carl. He loved the aircraft so much he even hung out with it in his free time. They almost went on dates together. If he said we’d get back, we’d get back. But it was going to be desperately close. A change in the wind, or any kind of malfunction and we’d shit it.

Billy and Geordie were 400 metres off to our right, and flying just as low. We didn’t want to discuss our fuel state over the net. It would only spook them at Bastion; every man and his dog would get on the net and feed us the sort of advice that we could do without. Best to keep schtum. We texted instead.

Billy began: SEND FUEL STATE

I replied with ours, and he responded: 490

‘Shit, Carl, they’re even lower than us.’

A beep alert signalled another text from Billy. LASH V BSN?

He must have been reading my mind.

EWOK HAPPY BSN… YOUR CALL

BSN IT IS

Even Billy the chief pilot doffed his cap to Carl the Aircraft King.

SEND AMMO

That was going to be interesting. We had eight Flechette and eight HEISAP rockets still in the tubes, but we were out of Hellfire and only had eighty remaining cannon rounds.

40*30MM, 0*HEISAP, 8*FLECH, 0*HELLF

Wow. Billy was almost out of everything.

Having stayed on station to cover in the Chinook picking up Mathew, 3 Flight were a few minutes behind us. They didn’t need asking.

Beep. ‘Text from Five Two, Ed.’

20*30MM, 4*HEISAP, 0*FLECH, 2*HELLF

But Charlotte and Tony won the prize. Their text just read: WINCHESTER.

‘Winchester’ was the air net code for exhausting all your weaponry: bombs, missiles, cannon rounds, rockets – whatever you had. It dated from World War One: when the string-bag pilots had nothing left to fire, they reached for their trusty Repeater. Going Winchester was heavily frowned on. Ammunition was our lifeblood and had to be carefully rationed; use it all up in one go and you had nothing left to fight with. But there were no other troops in contact at Jugroom; just us. And they’d run dry in the very last seconds of our extraction. They’d executed their fire plan to perfection.

CONGRATS, I replied.

Nobody had gone Winchester before – Charlotte and Tony had just made British Apache history.

Billy sent our ammo requirements to Kev Blundell in Bastion so he could have our uploads ready. Carl punched some numbers into the keyboard.

‘Check this out. We’ve used a total of £1,499,000 of ordnance protecting Mathew Ford.’

And that didn’t count Nick and Charlotte’s earlier mission.

‘Not bad for a couple of hours’ work.’

Seven minutes and thirty-six seconds from the firebase our fuel level dropped below the 400 lb landing limit. I’d lost count of the number of rules we’d broken that morning. Every few minutes, I recalculated the fuel state in case I’d made a mistake. The answer came back just the same – 110 lb on landing.

‘Village twelve o’clock. One klick.’

‘Don’t change course, Carl. We’re too low for them to see us coming.’