Spare

It was really just simple maths. These were bad people doing bad things to our guys. Doing bad things to the world. If this guy I’d just removed from the battlefield hadn’t already killed British soldiers, he soon would. Taking him meant saving British lives, sparing British families. Taking him meant fewer young men and women wrapped like mummies and shipped home on hospital beds, like the lads on my plane four years earlier, or the wounded men and women I’d visited at Selly Oak and other hospitals, or the brave team with whom I’d marched to the North Pole.

And so my main thought that day, my only thought, was that I wished Control had got back to us sooner, had given us permission to fire more quickly, so we’d got the other seven.

And yet, and yet. Much later, speaking about it with a mate, he asked: Did it factor into your feeling that these killers were on motorbikes? The chosen vehicle of paps all over the world? Could I honestly say that, while chasing a pack of motorbikes, not one particle of me was thinking about the pack of motorbikes that chased one Mercedes into a Paris tunnel?

Or the packs of motorbikes that had chased me a thousand times?

I couldn’t say.

54.

One of our drones had been watching the Taliban school its fighters.

Despite popular assumptions, the Taliban had good equipment. Nothing like ours, but good, effective—when used correctly. So they often needed to bring their soldiers up to speed. There were frequent tutorials in the desert, instructors demonstrating the newest gear from Russia and Iran. That was what this lesson captured by the drones seemed to be. A shooting lesson.

The red phone rang. Down went the coffee mugs and PlayStation controls. We ran to the Apaches, flew north at a good clip, twenty-five feet off the ground.

Darkness was starting to fall. We were ordered by controllers to hold off, about eight kilometers.

In the deepening twilight we could barely see the target area. Just shadows moving about.

Bikes leaning against a wall.

Wait, we were told.

We circled and circled.

Wait.

Shallow breaths.

Now came the signal: The shooting lesson is over. Giddyup. Go, go, go.

The instructor, the high-value target, was on a motorbike, one of his students on the back. We screamed towards them, clocked them moving along at 40 k.p.h., one of them carrying a hot-barreled PKM machine gun. I held my thumb over the cursor, watched the screen, waited. There! I pulled one trigger to fire the pointing laser and another to fire the missile.

The thumbstick I fired was remarkably similar to the thumbstick for the PlayStation game I’d just been playing.

The missile hit just short of the motorbike’s spokes. Textbook. Exactly where I’d been taught to aim. Too high, you might send it over the top of his head. Too low, you’d take out nothing but dirt and sand.

Delta Hotel. Direct hit.

I followed up with the 30-mm.

Where the motorbike had been was now a cloud of smoke and flames.

Well done, Dave said.

We swooped back to camp, critiqued the video.

Perfect kill.

We played some more PlayStation.

Turned in early.

55.

It can be hard to be precise with Hellfires. Apaches fly with such tremendous speed that it’s hard to take steady aim. Hard for some anyway. I developed pinpoint accuracy, as if I was throwing darts in a pub.

My targets were moving fast too. The speediest motorbike I shot was going about 50 k.p.h. The driver, a Taliban commander who’d been calling in fire all day on our forces, was hunched over the handlebars, looking back as we gave chase. He was purposely speeding between villages, using civilians for cover. Old people, children, they were mere props to him.

Our windows of opportunity were those one-minute spans when he was between villages.

I remember Dave calling out: You’ve got two hundred meters till it’s a no-go.

Meaning, two hundred meters until this Taliban commander was hiding behind another child.

I heard Dave again: You’ve got trees coming on the left, wall on the right.

Roger.

Dave moved us into the five o’clock position, dropped to six hundred feet. Now—

I took the shot. The Hellfire smacked the motorbike, sent it flying into a small thatch of trees. Dave flew us over the trees, and through plumes of smoke we saw a ball of fire. And the bike. But no body.

I was ready to follow up with the 30-mm, strafe the area, but I couldn’t see anything to strafe.

We circled and circled. I was getting nervous. Did he get away, mate?

There he is!

Fifty feet to the right of the motorbike: body on the ground.

Confirmed.

Away we flew.

56.