Apache

Bat wings were sheathed below the left and right windows of the cockpit for us to pull up and shield the glow of our MPD screens – the only light source in the cockpit.

Carl needed a few more minutes to adjust his monocle. At night, he was 100 per cent reliant on it – it was his only window on the world. Other military pilots used NVGs, which magnified ambient light sources 40,000 times. We had Pilot’s Night Vision Sights instead.

The normal flight symbology was projected into the pilot’s monocle, but it was underlaid with the image of the ‘Pin-viss’, a second infrared lens sitting above the TADS bucket.

Through the PNVS thermal picture, we could see landscape in total darkness, as well as anyone moving below us. ‘If it glows, it goes,’ the instructors used to say – though not in the handbook.

Like the cannon, the PNVS lens was slaved to your eye. It followed the direction of your right eye, though a fraction more slowly than the gun, so there was a momentary lapse between desire and action. It was mounted above the TADS on the aircraft’s nose, so the perspective was slightly out of kilter too, as if your eyeball had been stretched twelve feet out of its socket.

Flying on PNVS low level at 140 knots was the hardest thing to master on Apache training; it was like driving down a pitch black motorway with no lights, with a hand clamped over one eye, a twelve-foot-long tube capped with a green lens strapped to the other, and the speedo needle brushing 161 mph…

We learned how to do this by ‘flying in the bag’. Our entire back-seat cockpit was blacked out with panels, while the instructor sat in the open front. It wasn’t a great place for claustrophobics.

‘Please God, just let me get through,’ we’d pray. Fail three test sorties in the bag, and you were out. Passing gave you the world’s greatest high.

Despite Carl’s whingeing, I knew I was in good hands with him flying me that night. His was the best pair of night hands we had.

We were all set in good time. No need for calls; we just slipped out of the bays with two minutes to takeoff.

We lifted silently at 2.40am. Billy led us a few klicks north to dupe any Taliban dickers then backtracked south-west across the A01 Highway, and hard south once we were into the empty desert, our Hellfire-laden machines invisible against the GAFA’s sky.

12. OP GLACIER 1: KOSHTAY

It was a thirty-five minute flight to our holding area in the desert. We’d chosen a spot fifteen kilometres due west of the Taliban base at Koshtay, giving us a run-in time onto the target of four minutes and three seconds. Nobody would hear us that far out; we’d do racetrack patterns at seventy knots and fifty feet off the ground until the time came.

Carl and Billy kept the aircraft 200 feet off the ground as we headed south. We would normally have gone lower to prevent detection, but the Dasht-e-Margo lived up to its name and was void of all habitation.

The Boss and Billy were 500 metres to the left and marginally in front of us. The TADS FLIR camera was slaved to my eye; I could see them clearly with my right eye, but in the complete absence of ambient light, my left eye might as well have had a patch over it.

It had been a while since I’d been a gunner on a night flight. I used some of the transit time to re-familiarise myself with the feel of the firing grips. The front seat had exactly the same controls as the back seat, as well as a bloody great targeting console bolted into the middle of the dash, at the centre of which was a three-inch TV screen providing an additional display for one of the cameras or sensors. I selected the Longbow FCR option. If there was anything remotely threatening in the desert, it was sure to find it and give us a heads up so we could box around it. A large metal PlayStation-like grip sat on either side, with buttons and cursors galore to control the cameras and weapons. Each grip also had a trigger: the right for the laser range finder and designator, the left to kill.

I moved my thumb and fingertips across the buttons, rockers, switches and pads, instantly recognising each different shape and function, and ran through a dozen different combinations until I was completely comfortable. It didn’t take long.

The night was unusually still for January. It made me fidget even more. I needed to keep myself occupied. I tried chatting with Carl but he wanted to concentrate on his flying. I sparked up the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF), a radio navigation system we used to pick up homing beacons in bad weather, and absentmindedly scanned the local stations. I’d already preset the channels with the strongest signals to help counter the boredom of desert flying.

Apache pilots never met any Afghans. Life in the cockpit was remote from the real life of the country; it was the one disadvantage of the job. The nearest we could get was listening to their radio. We all used to do it. Local Pashtun songs were my favourite.