Apache

We asked discreetly around over the next few days. Nobody in Camp Bastion had heard of the callsign either. We even checked the list of all registered callsigns in theatre and couldn’t find it there either. Maverick Zero Bravo didn’t seem to exist. And yet from somewhere outside Afghanistan, he had access to excellent live optics and intelligence as well as our highly secure net. And he’d been given the authority – presumably by the brigadier – to order instant strikes. That sort of power wasn’t handed over lightly.

There was only one explanation. Whether Maverick was in Vauxhall Cross or Langley, Virginia, there was no real clue. ‘Good arrows’ was an American military phrase, but our JTACs controlled US pilots and picked up their lingo too.

We had already been led to believe that the Koshtay complex’s initial discovery had been made by the spooks. We couldn’t hold it against them if they wanted a ringside seat at its destruction.

The full Battle Damage Assessment for Operation Glacier 1 arrived from Lashkar Gah forty-eight hours later. We knew it had been a good night, but it was even better than anyone could have hoped.

The strike was estimated to have killed between eighty and 130, double the initial projection. The figure was not more precise because nobody knew how many Taliban were asleep inside the barracks when they got frazzled. Three of their senior commanders were among the dead, including a big fish by the name of Mullah Fahir Mohammed. Intercepts from across the Pakistan border in Quetta revealed urgent discussions had begun about the need to restructure their southern command. They were shitting themselves, and they didn’t know where or how hard we’d hit them next. Which was exactly what we wanted.

The BDA also revealed that the complex had housed a jail. Thirteen Afghan prisoners may have died inside it. It was rumoured that the jail had been known about all along and that was the reason it required a Whitehall signature. Sometimes that’s the way it goes with strategic targeting. I’m glad I didn’t know that beforehand.

A brief press release went out to the British media celebrating our brave troops’ ‘capture’ of ‘a Taliban regional headquarters’. It sounded better than saying we had stonked 100 new recruits into blazing oblivion along with their commanders without putting so much as one marine’s boot into the place.

I was pleased to have played my part in stopping the influx of new fighters with the Corps’ first Deep Raid, but the fate of the thirteen prisoners left me empty, and I wasn’t in the mood to celebrate much after that.

Meanwhile, the harsh realities of life on the ground in Helmand continued.

Two days after the Koshtay raid, another twenty-one-year-old marine from 42 Commando was killed during close-quarter fighting in an enemy compound near the Kajaki Dam. Darwin and Charlotte had been out supporting the clearance patrol. I was in the JHF when they came back, waiting to scrutinise their gun tape. They looked pretty shaken up.

‘Everything okay, Tony?’

‘Not really mate. A guy got shot at point blank range right in front of us.’ He’d run round a corner as a Taliban fighter stepped out of a doorway.

That was one of the disadvantages of our powerful surveillance system. Sometimes we saw things in graphic detail that we didn’t want to remember. There was nothing Darwin and Charlotte could have done for the boy. But that didn’t mean his death wasn’t going to haunt them. Unlike gun tapes, memories couldn’t be locked away in a safe.

There were two new arrivals from Dishforth that week. The first was an instruction yet again upping the amount of hours we were allowed to fly the aircraft. We were now up to 415 per month, or fourteen hours a day. The Chinook and Lynx hours had gone up too, but not as steeply as the Apache’s. Needs must; and it was all the Joint Helicopter Command could do to respond to brigade’s ever greater demands on their woefully limited Afghan resources. We knew there was still no new money for the extra spares; as always, someone somewhere would be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Soon, Peter would have to declare bankruptcy.

The second arrival was our new Commanding Officer. Lieutenant Colonel Neil Sexton had taken over the reins of 9 Regiment at the back end of the year. Now he was coming out to command the Joint Helicopter Force in Kandahar. That made him Trigger’s immediate superior in the operational chain of command.

As the new CO, Colonel Sexton was an unknown quantity to most of us. We hadn’t had time to connect with him in the few weeks before we deployed. We knew he was unashamedly ambitious – but that was no bad thing. He wasn’t Apache trained as the previous CO had been. On the other hand, he’d done a lot of time in the simulator so he understood the machine and the demands on its aviators.

I had liked our outgoing CO. He was hugely popular and a great extrovert. I wondered how I’d get on with the new one. It wasn’t long before I found out.