Apache

Not only had 3 Flight lost their presents, they’d also lost their tent. All they had to live with was a wash bag and the few meagre possessions they’d taken down to the IRT tent. We were finding it increasingly difficult to wipe the smiles off our faces.

We’d found three Father Christmas hats and beards and filmed ourselves tiptoeing to the cot, looking furtively left and right, stuffing all the presents into big black bin bags and giving a ‘Ho ho ho’ to the camcorder as we made off with them. We’d locked the presents in a couple of big green weapons cases in our tents at first, then had the bright idea of driving them down to the RMP office and roping them into the plot.

We planned to show our film to Charlotte and the others before triumphantly reuniting them with their gifts on Christmas Day. We were quite proud of it; we even managed to secure a cameo appearance by the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who’d flown out for a few days to cook Christmas lunch for the troops. We approached him in the hangar during a tour of the flight line. He was well up for it.

Looking as mean as he could, he rasped: ‘Hello 3 Flight, and Happy Christmas. Do you know where your fucking presents are yet?’

I also asked him rather sheepishly to sign a recipe for Emily’s mother’s Clootie dumplings, a heavy Scottish cake she made by the truck load.

‘I can tell she’s a Jock,’ he said, handing it back to me. ‘She’s making it with fucking margarine!’

Charlotte grew progressively quieter as Christmas Eve approached. Homelessness, presentlessness and family separation were getting to her. We began to feel guilty enough to bring Darwin in on the plot. He’d told his family not send out any presents; he wanted to celebrate with them on his return – so he had no axe to grind. He’d know whether we should call it off.

‘Don’t worry about Charlotte,’ he assured us. ‘She’s pretty tough; she’ll be good with it.’

So we kept on going – never dreaming that, after a few hours, Darwin would buckle under the pressure of living with our secret. By that night, the weasel blabbed to Charlotte, Nick and FOG. We discovered his treachery after she let it slip to the Boss, and someone overheard.

The drama of the missing presents now gripped the squadron. Trigger finally stepped in on Christmas Eve. He told 3 Flight their presents were safe and sound with the RMPs. 3 Flight tried to pretend they’d never cared about them in the first place. Honours were just about even – though we still had a score to settle with Darwin-the-Rat.

HQ Flight were up early on Christmas Day for a deliberate tasking. We had to escort a Chinook on a series of resupplies to the three most northern district centres. It was tedious stuff and went on for hours. We were in the cockpit – air or ground – for most of the day. It was bitterly cold and the weather was dire: low cloud and drizzling rain. Camp Bastion turned into a quagmire, and we squelched all the way to the flight line.

‘Like Christmas in the World War One trenches,’ Carl moaned. ‘But without the footie.’

Kajaki was furthest away, so it was our first destination. We went the long way round – low through the eastern mountains at 1,000 feet – to avoid SAM traps. We hadn’t seen the mountains in the rain before, and it was an eerie experience. Great slabs of glistening silver-grey rock towered either side of us, punctuated by puffs of marshmallow cloud. It felt like we were on our way to Middle Earth. Everything was deathly quiet; we were on silent drills because of the Chinook’s insecure radios.

Carl could see well enough to fly, but there was no harm in having a backup in shit like this. So for the only time on the tour I flicked to the radar page on my left-hand MPD and switched on the Longbow’s Terrain Profile Mode.

The US Apaches flew without their Longbow Radars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially designed to help destroy armoured columns, the Americans said they were no use for counterinsurgency. They swapped them for more weapons weight. Our Rolls Royce engines were strong enough to carry the Longbow and all the weapons we’d need.

The Longbow’s Ground Target Mode was extremely handy for spotting vehicles at a distance, or well out of the TADS line of sight. It pinged anything moving or static up to eight kilometres away, in any direction. But Terrain Profile Mode was even more useful on a sortie like this. The Longbow mapped out the lie of the land up to two and a half kilometres in front of us. On the MPD, it showed terrain below us as black, terrain within 100 feet of us as grey and terrain above us – terrain that we’d hit – as white. It projected an electronic zigzag graph across our monocle so we could identify the hills and valleys ahead of us. TPM meant we could fly in all weather, day and night, at ultra-low level, at great speed and totally blind. Carl got us through the spooky mountains off his own bat, but it was always nice to know TPM was there if we needed it.