Apache

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.