Apache

Arcing meant it was guided – a SAM. Corkscrew and grey smoke meant SA7b – a tail chaser that locked onto engine heat. It wasn’t just a pot shot. It took a fair few minutes to set up an SA7. It bore all the hallmarks of a deliberate trap. Ramit had been lucky.

The incident shook the air community. It told us two things. One, the Taliban had SAMs that worked; and two, they were now very happy to attack opportunity targets. We didn’t enjoy hearing either. It was a major break from their previous operating pattern.

Ramit’s SAM escape threw a different perspective on an intelligence hit we’d picked up recently. Some days before the launch, a radio intercept heard a Taliban commander saying, ‘Fetch the rakes and spades to hit the helicopters.’ Initially, the Int cell had assessed rakes and spades meant Chinese rockets and a launcher. Now, we had to assume they meant SAMs.

Alice then delivered a series of different snippets of bad news about SAMs over the next week’s morning and evening briefs.

‘We believe they’re planning to move a Stinger to Sangin or Kajaki.’

‘What do you mean,’ the Boss asked. ‘Where did this information come from?’

‘I can’t tell you sir, sorry.’

That normally meant HumInt; human intelligence – aka: a spy. I and every other pilot in the room mentally crossed our fingers not to get the next IRT call-out to Sangin or Kajaki.

We were told that a specific Taliban commander in the north of the province, had boasted that he could listen in on all our movements. ‘I have a British radio frequency and I know everywhere they go.’

It was certainly possible. Perhaps he’d taken it from the dead SBS pair in June. He couldn’t hear Apaches on it as our radios were secure and codes regularly changed. But the ones in the Chinooks weren’t.

Alice also told us that some bright desk officer had discovered that there were no less than five Stingers in the valley between Sangin and Kajaki.

But a second Taliban radio intercept in Now Zad a couple of days afterwards picked up the most worrying SAM intelligence of all. A commander was overheard saying, ‘When the helicopters arrive, if the professional man brings his thing, fire from a distance.’

A ‘professional man’ and a ‘thing’ weren’t SAM-specific, but ‘fire from a distance’ certainly was. It was good advice, too. It identified the ‘thing’ as a heat-seeking SAM. The longer the missile had in the air, the better its chance of homing in on the aircraft’s engines: as the gap closed, the heat source became clearer to the missile’s seeker. Translation: they were anticipating the arrival of some bloke who knew what he was doing, and then they were going to fire another heat-seeking SAM specifically at one of us.

A huge amount of SAM activity and intelligence had come in over a short period. How much of it was true and how much bluff we had no idea. That was always the problem with the intelligence game; it was a world of smoke and mirrors. All we knew was that the bastards were up to something. The ante had been upped, big time.

The feeling of foreboding with which I’d started the tour had lessened after a few successful enemy contacts. Now it was right back again. I was in no hurry to become the first British Apache pilot to get shot down by a SAM.

I decided to have a quiet chat with Carl the next time I got the chance. He wasn’t just our Electronic Warfare Officer – he was one of the most clued up guys in the Army Air Corps. Only a few people in Britain would have known more about Electronic Warfare with regard to the Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aid System than Carl. The EW manual was his Book at Bedtime, for Christ’s sake. I thought I could do with a few of his reassuring stats.

‘Sure Ed, where do you want to start? HIDAS is a beautiful thing…’

‘Just keep it simple and pretty, please buddy.’

Most of it I already knew, but it was good to hear it again. There was no escape from a SAM in Afghanistan. You couldn’t go and hide behind a tree or a rock, and if you climbed it was worse. Instead, HIDAS took the SAM on. The Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aid System had been painstakingly constructed to defeat all known SAMs. What’s more, it did it automatically.

HIDAS detected every missile threat – any laser beam that tried to track the aircraft, any radar attempting a lock onto it, and any missile that was fired at us – from a huge distance, with a web of sensors that picked up a specific UV plume generated by the missile’s propulsion. Then Bitching Betty, the Apache’s female cockpit warning system, passed on the message. The moment the aircraft came under threat – from air or ground – she gave us the good news, telling us what it was and where it was coming from.