Apache. Ed Macy

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СКАЧАТЬ I slipped us into the gentle circle, I pointed out areas of interest for the Boss to zoom into with the Day TV TADS camera and examine on his screen. It had three fields of view – narrow, wide and zoom. Zoom offered 127-times magnification. If you looked at a guy in the zoom field while standing off at 2,000 metres, you could tell how many fillings he had. The camera was housed in the nose pod, so we could see up to sixty degrees downwards; as if we were looking straight through the Kevlar shell beneath our feet.

      Sangin was a maze of mainly single-storey brown and beige buildings connected by dust tracks. I centred my monocle crosshairs on the wadi.

      ‘My line of sight. The wadi.’

      ‘Looking.’ The Boss zoomed in.

      The second set of crosshairs in his monocle told him where I was focusing. All he needed to do was line up his with mine and slave the TADS to his eye.

      ‘Seen.’

      ‘Come due east from it and the first building is the District Centre.’

      ‘Okay. Hang on a minute, let me have a look at the map. Yup, I’ve got it.’

      I glanced down at my right-hand MPD, which I’d set on the TADS image, relaying everything the Boss was seeing.

      ‘Bloody hell, they’ve built the place up a bit.’

      The three-storey adobe-clad structure had been vigorously reinforced. A massive Hesco Bastion wall now ran all the way around the building, and the Paras had added wooden planks, sandbags and junk – anything they could lay their hands on – to the rooftop defences. A 300- by 200-metre field alongside it had also been ringed by Hesco Bastion, giving them a permanently protected helicopter landing site. It was a proper fort now, and a fine feat of engineering.

      ‘How they managed to stay alive long enough to build that, I’ve no idea …’

      I’d heard the dit from 664 Squadron. The DC’s complement of Royal Engineers had affectionately renamed it Sangin Built Under Fire. Every man, bar one, had fired his weapon on the job; the only engineer who hadn’t was their sergeant major, who’d been too busy lobbing ammunition to the rest of the guys.

      ‘My line of sight – that’s the market place.’

      The souk was 700 metres east of the DC. On the TADS screen, I could see broken wooden frames hanging off its stalls and shredded curtains flapping in the wind. It had been heavily shot up over the summer, but never stopped being a hive of activity. There was money to be made in the opium business.

      Old rice sacks were piled high outside several stalls – the favoured receptacle for opium poppy sap – and dozens of locals crowded around them under the watchful gaze of the marines in the DC. Busting the drugs industry wasn’t their job. We’d get to that later, once the Taliban had been defeated. Otherwise, we’d be banging up 80 per cent of the local population.

      ‘My line of sight now – that’s Wombat Wood.’ I was looking a kilometre north of the DC. ‘The Taliban use it regularly to shell the guys.’

      A wombat was a Weapon Of Magnesium Battalion Anti Tank; the generic slang the army gave to recoilless rifles. They were around eight feet long and fired shells up to a diameter of 120 mm. Nasty.

      ‘Wombats aren’t the only sinister things lurking in that wood, Boss. They fire 107-millimetre Chinese rockets from there too.’

      A 107-mm Chinese rocket had killed two signallers in a blockhouse that covered the stairwell to the roof of the Sangin DC in July. Corporal Peter Thorpe died alongside his comrade Jabron Hashmi – the first British Army Muslim killed fighting the Taliban.

      ‘Okay, let’s show you Macy House.’

      A few months before, I’d found a building 200 metres to the south which the Taliban had occupied, giving them good arcs of fire onto the DC. They’d knocked a series of firing ports into its walls. The Apache crews had named it after me as a way of identifying it to each other. I searched for it in vain.

      ‘Forget it, it’s gone.’

      Where Macy House once stood, there was now nothing. It had obviously been bombed to oblivion while we’d been away. I looked at the clock.

      ‘We’d better be moving on, Boss.’

      We wanted to get in all four DCs, so we only had time for a whistle stop tour. Four minutes in Sangin was enough.

      ‘Okay. Billy, let’s move on to Kajaki.’

      ‘Copied, Boss.’

      We broke out of the wheel, slipped east of the Green Zone and pointed our noses north-east again. Kajaki was thirty-eight kilometres further up the Green Zone. My monocle said we’d be there in ten minutes.

      Two minutes into the flight, an urgent message was broadcast over the JTAC net for Widow TOC – the JTACs’ central hub in Camp Bastion’s JOC Ops Room.

      ‘Stand by.’ The Boss cut across my chat with Billy about the fate of Macy House.

      ‘Widow TOC, this is Widow Eight Four. We are north-east of Gereshk; we have come under sniper and mortar fire. Requesting immediate air support. Repeat, requesting immediate air support.’

      Gereshk was only forty klicks south-west of us. The Boss stepped on the pressel by his left foot to fire up his radio mike.

      ‘Widow TOC, Widow TOC; this is Ugly Five One. We are two Apaches; we have just left Sangin on a familiarisation flight and we’ve got plenty of gas. We’re available for tasking if required.’

      I pushed the cyclic forward and right, throwing the Apache into a tight bank.

      ‘Ugly Five One, Widow TOC. Copied. Stand by.’

      Widow TOC needed a senior officer’s authority from the JHF to deploy us.

      ‘Wait Widow TOC, I am Zero Alpha of all Ugly callsigns. I am authorising if you want us to do it.’

      ‘Widow TOC, Roger. It’s yours.’

      ‘Eight minutes, Boss.’

      ‘Ugly Five One, affirm. Widow Eight Four, we’ll be with you in eight minutes; stand by.’

BACK IN THE HOT SEAT

      The familiarisation flight was out of the window.

      We were tanking it down to Gereshk at maximum speed, 120 knots per hour; we were heavy. It would take forty minutes for the Apache pair on standby at Camp Bastion to launch and get to the marines. We’d be there in a quarter of the time. It was a no-brainer.

      I needed to get as much juice out of Ugly Five One as I could; cyclic forward to push the nose down and pick up speed, topping up the collective to keep our height. Cyclic with collective, again and again – СКАЧАТЬ