Apache

‘And that,’ I told Trigger, ‘should buy me a second or two to save your sorry arse, sir.’

We completed one full orbit. It took two minutes, and felt like a lifetime.

‘Keep the turn tighter, Mr M, or we’ll be too far away from him.’

It was all very well for Trigger. The Kevlar came up to his chest, while the back-seater was exposed from the waist upwards unless we were dead level. Why couldn’t I be a short arse like Darwin?

Six feet in front of me, Trigger was also frantically quartering the ground. The two sets of crosshairs in my monocle whipped backwards and forwards across the same piece of ground, colliding repeatedly and passing through each other as we searched the ghostly green compounds, hedgerows and trees for the glow of a man.

We wouldn’t see the AA gunner on anything other than FLIR, but it picked up heat, not light. We would only spot his rounds with the naked eye. Killing him wasn’t our job, but seeing him so he didn’t kill us was. We completed a second orbit, and then a third. Why isn’t this fucker firing? Any more of this and my heart was going to hammer its way out of my survival jacket.

‘Do you think he can hear us?’

‘Hell, yeah. We’re right over his head.’

Charlotte came on. ‘Five Three, can’t see any movement down there at all.’

‘Neither can we.’

After what must have been at least our tenth orbit, the Boss came up with another brilliant way of getting us shot.

‘Okay, Elton – now’s your chance. Roll the aircraft and slap the blades about a bit.’

‘What do you mean, “slap the blades about a bit”? You’ve got Kevlar up to your tits!’

‘Come on, you pussy. Just give the blades a bit of a slap so he definitely knows we’re here.’

‘Don’t worry, he fucking knows.’

I threw the aircraft ninety degrees onto its right side for a second or two, righted it again, and then chucked it left. Each time the blades clattered away, slapping hard on the air.

‘Now the whole of Now Zad knows.’

We still saw nothing on the ground.

‘Do it again.’

‘At this rate everyone down there is going to try and hose us down for keeping them awake.’

I rolled right and left twice more. Still nothing. Round and round we kept on going; we must have done two dozen circuits.

After thirty minutes over the target area, I started to relax. If the sniper was going to have a go, he would have done so by now. He’d had more than enough time to set up and open fire. Last time around, he’d hit Darwin within ten minutes of his arrival.

‘Do you want me to put the lights on, Boss?’

‘Erm… no, I don’t think we should do that…’ Trigger replied in all seriousness. Jesus… He’d actually considered it…

‘Five Three this is Five One; he’s not down there.’

We were just wasting time and fuel.

‘Five Three, I agree,’ chipped in Darwin. ‘This geezer doesn’t piss about. He’s gone.’

‘All right, we’d better knock it on the head.’ The Boss didn’t bother to hide his disappointment. ‘Let’s RTB.’

I pointed the nose south and pulled power. It still came as an immense relief to pass over Now Zad’s southern ridgeline and into the safety of the desert.

There wasn’t much chat on the way back and no game of Apache Triv either. The Dushka gunner was still out there. We all knew we’d have to keep coming back until we killed him.

The aircraft were tied up for the next two nights on other deliberate taskings so the next Op Steve-O was pencilled in for seventy-two hours later.

Then a Harrier filed a sitrep about a munition drop in south-east Now Zad. He’d been circling high above the town, working to the DC’s JTAC, and had spotted a group of men setting up an antiaircraft gun in the back garden of a compound. He must have been too high for them to have any idea he was there. The JTAC gave the Harrier permission to engage, and he dropped a 500-lb bomb on them. Topman got the Taliban and the AA gun in one go; they got a new swimming pool. And helicopters stopped taking Dushka rounds over Now Zad.

Charlotte and Darwin were even more delighted than we were. Next time, it had been their turn to provide the bait.

10. HAPPY CHRISTMAS

The weather turned in mid-December when the Helmand winter kicked in. The rains arrived and the temperature started to plummet at night; before long it fell below freezing.

The Taliban in the Green Zone were largely on foot, so they hated fighting in bad weather. A diehard few continued to put up a token resistance, but when it got cold most of them retreated to their northern mountain refuges.

We welcomed the brief change in tempo. It allowed us to think about Christmas. Wherever I had been deployed, it was always a big deal, a special occasion that helped lighten the monotony of operational life – even if you did have to work all the way through it. It was also the time we particularly missed our families, so we all did our best to make it a really special occasion.