Apache

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long for our first Kajaki shout – five hours and forty-three minutes after the handover, to be precise. We had just eaten lunch. Billy had agreed to stay on in the cookhouse with Carl and one of the radios, so Carl could have a slice of strawberry cheesecake – his favourite. Trigger had gone back into the JHF, and I had popped back to the IRT / HRF tent with the second radio. I wanted to write a quick bluey to my son. Emails and phone calls were great, but nothing beat the post. It was more intimate; the connection between you more tangible. I began to write. In the quiet of the tent, the voice over the radio made me jump.

‘BART, HOMER, SPRINGFIELD, PIZZA.’

It was The Simpsons theme week. The IRT, Trigger and I, were Bart, and Homer was the HRF; all four of us, to the Ops Room, fast.

I grabbed the radio to acknowledge. ‘Bart, Springfield, Pizza.’

Something nasty had obviously kicked off in the Green Zone. Leaving my son’s bluey on my cot, I sprinted out of the tent and up the forty-five degree wooden ladder specially built for us over the waist-high Hesco Bastion wall. My feet stung as I landed on the dust road in front of the JOC. ‘Aircrew,’ I hollered as I nipped past the sentries and into the JHF tent.

The watchkeeper looked up from his radio set. ‘Kajaki is under attack. The Boss is already next door.’

‘Roger.’

I grabbed my Black Brain from the secure steel box as Billy and Carl burst into the tent. The cookhouse was a good 700 metres away. Billy and Carl had taken the IRT Land Rover to lunch, but they were still red in the face from the rush. Not ideal for strawberry cheesecake digestion.

‘It’s Kajaki, guys. Billy, go next door. Come on Carl.’

On a fastball, the front-seaters always popped into the JOC for a quick low-down on the ongoing incident from the ground ops officers, while the back-seaters made a beeline for the aircraft to start firing them up.

Carl wheel-spun the Land Rover away from the JOC compound, turned sharp left down a 200-metre dirt track then left again. The suspension clanked as we sped across the metal bridge over the irrigation ditch and swung right towards the hangar. We drew up hard with a squeal of brakes and ran the last seventy-five metres to the arming bays. Our two Apaches were crawling with Groundies.

Ten minutes later, Trigger and Billy popped up over the berm. They’d taken the off-road route between the JOC and the flight line. I pushed the throttle forward to start the rotors turning the second the Boss slammed his door shut. We were off the deck in twenty-two minutes. Once we’d hit 3,000 feet Trigger caught his breath and gave me the fill.

‘It’s Arnhem. They’re taking heavy incoming from three different firing points: north, north-west and west. Heavy calibre stuff, rockets and a whole load of RPGs. A lad’s already taken a 7.62 to the head – good job he was wearing his helmet. Looks like the Taliban might be trying to take the position.’

‘Copied.’

‘Five Zero, Five One – Buster.’ Buster was the call to press the pedal to the metal.

It was the worst attack on Arnhem yet. And my monocle told me we were still twenty-eight minutes away. I was pulling so much power, the torque was bouncing on and off 100 per cent. The second it dropped into the 90s, it was nose down and collective up again. We were tanking it; a straight line, max chat.

There was no time to test the weapons on the ground during an IRT fastball. So we did them on the way.

‘My gun.’

I looked full left, full right, hard up and straight down. The gun followed my every move. ‘Your gun.’

Trigger did the same.

‘Coming up rockets.’

Actioning the rockets, he made sure their steering cursor came up on his TADS screen and the correct quantity of each showed up on his weapons page.

‘Come co-op.’

I followed the Boss’s ‘I bar’ around my monocle as he moved his TADS.

‘Good movement; co-op confirmed, Boss.’

‘Good. My missiles.’

‘CMSL’ popped up in my monocle.

‘Missile locked onto the laser, Mr M. Your missiles.’

I looked down and left; the Hellfire’s seeker followed my eye movement.

I tried to picture the scene up in Kajaki; how we were going to prosecute the targets. The enemy’s favourite hangout was a loaf-shaped hill between two wadis, about two and a half klicks north-west of Arnhem. It was known as the Shrine because some mullah had been buried up there years ago. The site was covered in tatty green, red and white flags; a typical Afghan grave.

The Taliban’s drill was always the same. They set up their weapons, gave our boys on the mountain a good pounding, and escaped like rats up a drainpipe into three or four old tunnels on its western edge as soon as we turned up.

I hoped the marines were getting it from the Shrine because it was safer ground for us to attack: no buildings, so no collateral damage. If the Taliban were on Falcon, too, it would be trickier.