Apache. Ed Macy

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ If you don’t keep on smashing them hard, you lose.

      On a few occasions we almost did lose. I was on the phone home when we got the Broken Arrow call from Now Zad. Broken Arrow is an emergency call for assistance from any available aircraft. It meant the platoon house was in the process of being overrun. We got up there to find the company of Royal Fusiliers in a grenade fight with the Taliban at their walls.

      Our major weakness was a limited play time. Our fuel and weapons load would always run out eventually, and then we had to go back to base or get relieved by another Apache pair.

      Sometimes all we had to do was turn up. The enemy had learned to fear us. ‘When the Mosquitoes come, stay underground,’ Taliban commanders were overheard telling their men. But most of the time they fought on regardless.

      I must have been in twenty different battles on that first tour; some a few minutes long, others lasting for hours. Yet despite all of that, there I was, sitting on my cot at the start of the second tour pondering my destiny.

      It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying. After twenty-two and a half years of close scrapes all over the world, I’d come close to rolling a number seven several times – not least in Aldershot. And I’d believed for a long time that if your number was up, it was up – there was no point in fussing about it. What I was really bothered about was dying now.

      I’d got away with the first tour, and that was supposed to be it for me. I just couldn’t help thinking that it would be a crying shame if I checked out now, minutes before I was about to leave. I’d been a bad boy in my past, and got away with all of that too. Maybe it was my turn next: fate, karma, Sod’s Law, Murphy’s Law; or just plain old tough shit – call it what you will. All I knew was that one bloke only gets a certain amount of luck in any one life, and my lucky bag should have been nigh on empty.

      I didn’t tell Emily about any of this. Instead, I quietly upped my life insurance to the maximum, updated my will and ensured everything was in order for her and my kids if I didn’t come back.

      But Emily had her own worries. Not long before I left for the second tour, we’d agreed to start a family together. We’d been together for years, she was thirty-four and the time felt right. I hadn’t realised how much the decision had affected her.

      On my last night, Emily made me promise not to do anything stupid. It was a promise that I told her I had every intention of keeping – and I meant it. Then she gave me a tiny little good luck charm, a silver angel the size of a postage stamp.

      ‘Have it on you always, it’ll keep you safe,’ she said.

      I burst out laughing. She burst into tears.

      So I carried it in my top right breast pocket which was double sealed with buttons and Velcro. It went everywhere I went – as much from guilt as superstition … to start with, anyway.

HANDOVER

      There was an awful lot to be done in the five days before 664 Squadron left. Our handover had to be seamless. It was vital that the quality of Apache support to the guys on the ground wasn’t affected. There were lessons to be learned from their tour; we had to adapt to all the procedural changes and familiarise ourselves with any aircraft issues that might have cropped up after three more months of hard combat.

      There were some nervous people in London. An awful lot of money had been spent on the Apache and the last thing they wanted was for us to break one in less than a year of ops. Because it was so new, the procurement pencil-necks back at the MoD watched us like hawks.

      The MoD had given us an encyclopaedic document known as the Release to Service which told us what we were and were not allowed to do with the aircraft. If any pilot broke any of the RTS rules – in the air or on the ground – he would be investigated. If he was found to have broken them deliberately, he would be removed from flying duties – permanently.

      As Mr Sky Cop, the flying regs were poor old Billy’s bag. I didn’t envy him the responsibility, but it was good wind-up material.

      ‘I take it looping the Apache is still out this tour is it, Billy?’

      ‘Don’t even think about it. You’re only an average pilot, remember.’ Then, under his breath but loud enough for us to hear: ‘Unlike me.’

      ‘I suppose a barrel roll or two is out the question too?’

      While Billy exchanged notes with 664’s QHI, I ironed out the weapons systems’ nuances with their Weapons Officer. I also signed for the gun tape laptop, on which recordings of all our weapons releases were stored. The gun tape laptop was kept in a special safe in the Joint Helicopter Force Forward office. A lot of the material on it was highly classified. ‘Kill TV’ could be really damaging to us if it fell into the wrong hands. Something stuck on YouTube under a provocative headline could make us look like war criminals.

      You only needed to look at the infamous gun tape of the US Apache slaughtering the ‘Iraqi farmers’. US intelligence intercepted a plan to bring down an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile. The Apache was launched and dispatched every member of the insurgent team. The tape was leaked, cut and restructured to show the brutal servants of the Great Satan routinely wiping out innocent Iraqi farmers. It didn’t show the SAM being drawn from its bag and put in position.

      The JHF was the squadron’s nerve centre, right next door to the Joint Operations Cell – a central Ops Room from where the three battlegroups based at Bastion (42 Commando, 45 Commando and the Information Exploitation Battlegroup) were managed.

      The JHF and JOC compound consisted of as many tents, flags, masts and antennae as you could cram into fifty square metres. It was encircled by razor wire, and Minimi machine-gun-toting guards manned the only entrance twenty-four hours a day. It was the most secure area in the camp, and everyone who went in and out had to state their official purpose. Traffic was frequent between the JHF and JOC – each had to know what the other was up to at all times if operations were to be smoothly dovetailed.

      The JHF was a large air-conditioned and sound-insulated khaki tent, five metres wide and fifteen long. A huge map table stood at its centre, with desks for the Boss, squadron ops officers, watchkeepers and signallers lining the four sides. We and the Chinook pilots planned our missions, gave briefings and ran the sorties from here.

      There were eight CH47 Chinooks in theatre by then, upped from the original six in an emergency reinforcement over the summer. There were only ever two emergency response choppers in Bastion at any one time, with the rest of the CH47 force at the Coalition’s giant southern air hub, Kandahar Airfield.

      The Chinook’s five-man crews – two pilots and three loadmasters – usually only came into the JHF for briefs. If we needed to make detailed plans with them before they left Kandahar, we’d generally do it over a conference call. Kandahar housed our rear echelon elements as well, and it was where we’d take the Apaches for heavy maintenance or repair. There was neither the spare equipment nor the capacity at Bastion. Thankfully, this handover only involved a changeover of personnel. All the equipment and airframes were staying where they were.

      The Apache was a very hungry beast: it chomped through ammunition, fuel and spare parts at an alarming rate. A squadron of eight aircraft needed a massive logistics footprint СКАЧАТЬ