Apache. Ed Macy

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СКАЧАТЬ years serving Queen and Country, I was getting out. I had been really looking forward to signing off too. I’d told Billy as much on our ride out of Bastion, precisely eighty-three days ago. ‘Bad luck buddy.’ I’d given him a patronising nudge. ‘I’ll raise a Guinness to you from the bar of my local the day you fly back to this shit hole, eh?’ That’s why he was grinning at me now. I was half expecting him to start raising an imaginary pint at me.

      My dreams of Civvy Street had been postponed for six months, thanks to the army’s shortage of Weapons Officers. Apaches were a brand new business and there had only been time to train up a few of us. Every squadron that deployed had to have one. We were in charge of everything to do with the aircraft’s offensive capabilities. The other Weapons Officers were all posted, leaving the Army Air Corps (AAC) a shortlist of one. After a fair bit of arm twisting, and no small amount of emotional blackmail, I had agreed to do one more tour.

      Newness was also why the whole squadron was coming back so soon. The Westland WAH64 Apache helicopter gunship had only entered operational service with HM Armed Forces in May that year. It was renamed the Apache AH Mk1. The first Apache unit – 656 Squadron – was only passed fully combat ready six days after we deployed in May. By the summer 664 Squadron had come online. They’d relieved us in August and as the only other available squadron we were now relieving them. The Boss, Billy and I had come out to start the handover.

      We heaved our Bergens (army slang for rucksack) over our shoulders just after the aircraft hit the ground. On the loadmaster’s thumbs up, the gunner lowered the tail ramp and we clambered out onto the metal runway, flinching as the heat from the Chinook’s twin turboshaft engines stung the back of our necks.

      Waiting for us fifty metres away was one of the saddest looking army vehicles I had ever seen: a battered old four tonner with the windscreen, canopy, frame and tailgate all entirely missing. A sand-ripped cabin and an empty flatbed was all that was left. It looked like something out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

      Standing in front of it, his hands clasped together in excitement, was John – 664 Squadron’s Second in Command. He was grinning, too, but for a different reason to Billy. John shook all three of us very firmly by the hand.

      ‘It’s great to see you guys – it really is.’

      It was obvious he meant it too. Our arrival signalled the green light for his team to start packing their bags.

      ‘Never mind the bullshit, John. What the fuck do you call that?’ I pointed my rifle at his Mad Max-mobile.

      ‘It’s the missile truck.’

      ‘I know it’s the missile truck. But when we left it with you, it actually looked like the missile truck. It was in good order. You’ve totally trashed it.’

      John chuckled. He was an old mate of mine. We had been warrant officers together before he’d taken his commission.

      ‘Yeah. We’ve been a little busy. There’s a war on – not that you work-shy slackers would have known much about it when you were here.’

      It was the normal banter that rival incoming and outgoing units exchanged. We were actually quietly impressed with the state of the missile truck, but we didn’t want to let on to John.

      I jumped up on the flatbed and let the warm sun dry the sweat on my brow. Late autumn for Helmand province meant bright sunshine and the temperature in the mid-twenties. It was a great relief after the furnace heat of the previous summer, when we slowly boiled in our own blood. One afternoon the thermometer had hit 54 degrees celsius.

      Thankfully, sitting at an altitude of 885 metres above sea level, Camp Bastion was always a lot cooler at night. There was nothing in the surrounding desert to trap the day’s heat. It meant we could sleep – or try to anyway – in between outgoing salvoes of artillery fire and emergency call-outs.

      ‘I’ll ride in the back with you, Mr Macy,’ the Boss said, refusing Billy’s offer of the front seat. ‘I want to get a proper look at this extraordinary place.’

      The Boss was the squadron’s new Officer Commanding, Major Christopher James. Chris had the biggest hands I have ever seen. His fingers were like cows’ udders. He was built like a prop forward, but his blue eyes, chiselled jaw and swept-back hair were pure Dan Dare. His enthusiasm was infectious, and unlike some OCs he was always keen to muck in with the practical jokes.

      Taking over a battle-hardened unit like ours without any combat experience in an Apache was a tough task, but if anyone was up to it, he was. His jumbo pinkies hadn’t stopped him from being one of the best shots in the Corps. He was also the first British pilot ever to fly the new American Apache model, the AH64D, as the first candidate on the US Army’s initial Longbow Conversion Course. While he was in Arizona he’d won the Top Gun shooting prize, beating all the US Apache pilots. That had really pissed off the Americans, but it must have cheered up the Queen – she gave him an MBE.

      A very bright man from a long-standing army family, he always talked with everyone under his command rather than at them – whether you were the best pilot or the most junior rocket loader. It had taken him only a few weeks to become hugely popular with everyone. His job title nickname was always said with affection.

      The Boss marvelled at Camp Bastion as we bumped the 500 metres along a churned up sand track from the flight line to our digs. I wasn’t surprised – I’d done the same in May. It was a military camp like none of us had ever seen: two square kilometres of khaki tents, mess halls and vehicle parks in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

      It wasn’t on any maps, because it had been too dangerous to survey Helmand for decades. But you could find it thirty miles north of Lashkar Gah and two miles south off the A01 highway that links the two ancient Afghan cities of Kandahar, 100 miles to the east of us, and Herat, 300 miles to our north-west.

      Surrounding the camp was one of the most inhospitable landscapes in Afghanistan. It was as flat as a billiard table, without so much as a shrub in sight. Only on clear days would the thin outline of the far-off mountain range to the north break up the monotone horizon. The locals called it the Dasht-e-Margo – the Desert of Death.

      Hairy-arsed veterans frightened first timers at Bastion by telling them about the three different lethal spiders that inhabited the Dasht-e-Margo, including the Black Widow. There were also nocturnal flesh-eating scorpions that injected an anaesthetic into human skin and then munched away to their heart’s content without their victim noticing. And tiny sand flies laid their eggs in any soft tissue within easy reach – that brought on leishmaniasis, a disease that resembled leprosy.

      Apart from the cheap real estate, there were good strategic reasons to be in the middle of nowhere. You could see and hear anyone coming for twenty miles, which meant the camp was very hard to attack. That was no bad thing, since the nearest sizeable Coalition garrison was twelve hours’ drive away, at Kandahar Airfield.

      Bastion was the biggest and most ambitious project the Royal Engineers had attempted since World War Two. Every last spanner and tent pole had had to be driven overland from the Pakistani port of Karachi – a 1,000-mile, three-week journey. Hercules transport planes and Chinooks were too busy flying troops around, and there was no runway for them at that point. The sappers had also had to build a self-generating electricity plant and bore wells for their own water and a waste-disposal system big enough to serve a small town – which was pretty much what it was.

      I was struck by how much it had changed in our absence: more tents, more fences, and proper, flattened track roads. The army was clearly planning to СКАЧАТЬ