Apache

It was a twenty-minute flight to Apocalypse Now Zad, as the marines had christened it. Now Zad was built in the shape of a triangle, with its flat-roofed, mostly single-storey, buildings hemmed in by towering rock faces on all three sides. It was an awesome sight; a geographer’s paradise. The southernmost tip of the Hindu Kush sprang up along its western edge. Its eastern boundary consisted of a series of interwoven ridgelines that ran south to north. And the base of the triangle, to the south, was a stand-alone range, five kilometres long and 400 metres tall at its peak.

We knew the Dushka gunner was in the south-east of the town, so we planned to split up as we approached the southern ridgeline. Charlotte and Darwin would wait on the desert side, nose forward, high enough to get a visual on the town. Trigger and I would bear right through a 300-metre-wide crevasse, bringing us immediately over the gunner’s territory. The Boss would target spot for the Dushka gunner, moving between his monocle and his Night Vision Goggles – and leave the flying to me.

I thought through how I was going to do it on the flight up. It would take the Dushka gunner’s rounds four seconds to reach us, up at 4,000 feet, so he needed to predict where we’d be four seconds after he pulled the trigger. I had a reaction time of perhaps half a second from the moment I saw tracer, or heard the Boss’s or the wingman’s shout. Ugly Five One was a weighty beast and it would take a second to overcome its inertia and change direction. So that gave me two and a half seconds, maximum, to take evasive action. This was going to be a penalty shoot-out, Apache-style – except that I wanted to stay as far as possible from the ball. Two and a half seconds didn’t feel like very long. And all those clever statistics suddenly didn’t add up to a hill of beans. I felt like I was flying an eggshell.

I tried to think through what I’d do if we were hit. We’d lose some systems for sure. I hoped it wouldn’t sever a hydraulic line. Hydraulic fluid was the most flammable thing on the aircraft, and so highly pressurised it would go off like a volcano. The next round would ignite it and we’d turn into one big fireball. Even the heat from the engines could set it off. Jesus, what then?

I realised I was fingering the fire extinguisher buttons top left of the dash. Stop it… I’d disappear up my own arse if I carried on like this. I wrenched myself away from the endless succession of what ifs… Charlotte and Darwin had the lead.

‘Five Three, five klicks from the crevasse now,’ Darwin said. ‘We’ll start to break off left and cover you through the gap. Good luck guys.’

They banked, and the crevasse opened up in front of us. Ninety seconds and we’d be through it. Gripping the cyclic and collective, my hands were so clammy I could feel them sticking to the insides of my gloves. I actioned the gun, moving my head side to side to check it was still slaved to my eye. It was. I flipped the trigger guard and rested my finger on the red button. A breath away from firing.

‘Thirty seconds, Boss.’

I thrust my spine as hard as I could into the Kevlar seat, and buried my arse as deep into the foam pad as it would go. I took a deep breath.

‘Copied. Just keep her belly flat as a pancake…’

It was the fourth time Trigger had said it since we’d launched, but the closer we came to the enemy the more vulnerable we felt. I knew that, and the Boss knew I knew. His palms must have started to sweat as well.

The Taliban mounted a permanent lookout on the crevasse. I hoped he hadn’t nodded off; this time we actually wanted to get dicked. The jagged edges of the rock face reached out at us from the shadows, and it’s fair to say I was shitting Tiffany cufflinks. Jesus. Here we go.

‘Five One, over the target in… five…’

I clicked off the radio. Four was always missed from the countdown. It allowed someone at the other end of the net to jump in at the last second to call everything off.

‘Three…’

Click.

‘Two…’

Click.

‘One…’

Click.

‘Now.’

‘Visual. We’re looking.’ Charlotte did her best to sound reassuring.

I put the Apache into the gentlest anticlockwise sweep I possibly could, banking a fraction to keep us turning. As the aircraft tilted to the left, I leaned my head to the right but peeked over the Kevlar side panel, determined to catch the first tracer round as it began to burn.

In daylight a sniper set the range on his sights, taking gravitational forces into account, and he was guaranteed a hit as long as the wind didn’t blow the round off target. His sights weren’t calibrated to fire nearly ninety degrees upwards, and he’d almost certainly miss with the first round or burst of automatic fire. If he was firing single shot, the tracer would enable him to re-aim for a second- or third-round hit once he’d seen where the first round went; if automatic, he’d keep the trigger pulled and guide the jet of tracer onto the target like a big red laser gun.