Apache

‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, Bob,’ Charlotte said with an utterly straight face. She added haughtily: ‘We’ve never seen that disgusting picture before in our lives.’ The rest of my Apache colleagues took Charlotte’s cue and all solemnly agreed. Silence from all three Bobs. Not even a flicker of a smile from any of them. But Billy grinned at me from ear to ear. He’d pulled off a corker.

We had a few hours to kill before we got our heads down in the Apache crews’ temporary accommodation, so we sampled the R and R delights every mid-sized US base in the region had on offer. They were spread around the four sides of a giant wooden boardwalk square with a thirty-metre-long plastic hockey pitch at its centre.

There was a Burger King trailer; a Pizza Hut stand; a Subway restaurant; a dry cleaner; a local souvenir shop flogging scarves, jewellery and stone carvings; and a PX the size of an average Sainsbury’s. The Post Exchange flogged everything from giant feather pillows and duvets to video cameras and PlayStation consoles: everything you could possibly want to fight a war in extreme comfort. We settled for Tim Horton’s; an air-conditioned coffee shop that served Charlotte’s favourite, an apple juice with a giant chocolate chip cookie. The Americans were well entrenched in Kandahar.

The Boss and I moved on to the Joint Helicopter Force HQ’s Ops Room. The call came in from Force 84 bang on the dot, as promised. The intelligence had been good. Sahib was in the compound. So they’d already bombed him to oblivion from 20,000 feet. The jets that had carried out the attack took off from locations in the Middle East. Nobody even had to leave the base. Nick sat in his sleeping bag looking crestfallen when we relayed the news.

‘Bad luck Bonnie,’ the Boss said. ‘You’ll have to be Andy McNab’s bitch another day.’

We weren’t going to be any use to the ground troops if we couldn’t be sure we could stay up in the air. So from time to time we had to come up with a few jobs of our own.

By mid-December, Now Zad had hotted up. It seemed to have taken over from Kajaki as the Taliban’s new focus of attention. The Now Zad DC had started to get pummelled, a twenty-three-year-old Royal Marine from 42 Commando was shot dead on a foot patrol to the north of the town. And they were going for every helicopter within reach.

During the morning and evening briefs, Alice started to feed through some alarming intercepts that had been picked up in the town. ‘We are dug in and ready for the helicopters,’ was one. Another revealed a detailed plan for a helicopter ambush employing small arms, RPGs and possibly even a SAM.

Then Nick and Darwin got shot up during an IRT shout 2,000 feet over the town. A 12.7-mm Dushka round passed through the airframe’s forward left electronics bay, destroying avionics and a systems processor, before hitting a Kevlar plate and smashing into tiny pieces less than two feet from Nick. It set off all the cockpit alarms and Nick suggested they bug out, but Darwin – the aircraft’s pilot – was cool.

‘We’re okay, sir. Is your TADS still working?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then put some fucking fire down there.’

They flew back gingerly, and landed with smoke pouring out of the side. Demonstrating their usual tenderness, the Groundies rushed out to film Nick and Darwin’s approach for their personal tour videos in case they crashed.

It was the second time Darwin had been shot; he’d taken a Dushka round on the first tour, so he then became known as the Bullet Magnet. Then, two days later, a Lynx on a photo recce over Now Zad took a Dushka round too. Two aircraft getting hit in the same location in such a short space of time added up to a Dushka gunner somewhere in Now Zad who knew exactly what he was doing.

We obviously couldn’t continue normal air operations while he was there. A dropped Apache would have been bad enough – but the thought of a Chinook going down with thirty marines aboard was what really gave us sleepless nights. We had to find the Now Zad Dushka gunner and remove him.

‘I’ve got it,’ the Boss said proudly, after a couple of hours of deep thought. ‘We’re going to launch Op Steve-O.’

The night before, the Boss had taken a break from the first episode of 24 and watched a few minutes of Jackass: The Movie instead – just long enough to catch the scene where a bloke called Steve-O had a hook pushed through his cheek and was thrown off a speed boat by his mates so he could be dragged along as shark bait.

‘That’s what we’re going to be, Mr Macy – Dushka bait. You and I will ramble around above Now Zad while 3 Flight hide off to one side. A nice, juicy Apache over his head is bound to lure our man out. Then Charlotte and Darwin will tip in and blow him away.’

‘Right you are, Boss. And how are you going to explain this to my family when it all goes tits up?’

‘Not a problem,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If we go down, I won’t be the one who’ll have to tell them.’