‘You and your big mouth.’ Billy smiled and grabbed his pistol.
‘Wait for me,’ Jon shouted.
Inside one of the huge US-built relaxation facilities was a gaming area, movie area, coffee bar, games area and a 150-feet-square music room jam-packed with instruments. We entered the music room to see the groundies gathered enthusiastically around three six-foot tables, arranged in a triangle.
Half a dozen foot-long Subway sandwiches had been laid end to end in front of each of the competitors.
Airtrooper Howson-Challenger Number One-was your typical prop forward and played rugby at club level for civilian teams as well as the army. He looked as if he could have swallowed every one of his Subways without pausing for breath.
Gifted looked at the contents of his table as if they were a series of incoming Hellfires.
Which just left Tiny, who looked as though he was about to try to eat several times his own body weight.
‘My money’s on Howson,’ Billy said before Jon or I could wage a bet.
I bagged Gifted.
‘Three, two, one, go,’ Taff called.
They all started at a nice slow pace. Facing each other; matching each other bite for bite. Tiny was being advised not to drink anything because he wouldn’t be able to fit a single Sub in.
They had an hour in which to eat their own height in Subs. The winner would be the first to finish, or the one to have consumed the most when the clock chimed. Anyone that barfed would be instantly disqualified, unless he ate what he’d just thrown up. I’d seen a Navy Seal eat seven feet of Subs in thirty minutes in Atlanta.
They were all finishing their third Sub with thirty minutes to go. Everyone had placed their bets. The music room had glass windows and curiosity got the better of everyone who passed them. The place was packed with Brits, Americans, Canadians, Italians, French; you name it, they were there. The banter was ear-splitting, but Gifted, Howson and Tiny continued to match each other munch for munch.
Forty-five minutes in, Gifted was fading, halfway through his fourth Sub.
‘Gifted’s going,’ the opposition shouted.
He grabbed the bucket from under the table and chundered explosively to a chorus of laughter and a flurry of fresh bets. Howson was now the favourite by a country mile.
The two remaining tables were pushed around to face each other as the noise got louder and the contest became ever more gladiatorial.
Five minutes away from the final bell, both reached for their sixth and final Sub. They’d clearly begun to tire.
Tiny threw down his Sub, folded his arms and looked Howson in the eye. Realising he too was unlikely to finish the whole two yards, Howson followed suit and took a slurp of Gatorade. There was uproar; both of them looked as sick as pigs.
‘Two minutes to go,’ Taff shouted.
A sprint finish was now a dead cert.
‘One minute.’
Howson moved his Sub, positioning it for the perfect draw, but Tiny kept his nerve and barely blinked.
‘Forty seconds to go.’
Howson picked up his Sub, almost in slow motion, and held it a foot from his mouth, directly in the path of Tiny’s steely gaze.
‘Thirty seconds.’
They were locked in complex mental calculation. If they started too soon and had to stop, they’d lose the contest.
I knew which way Howson’s pendulum was swinging. He reckoned that he’d easily out-bite Tiny.
The second the prop forward looked up at Taff, Tiny swiped his Sub and went at it like a termite on speed. Howson rammed his down his throat and removed three inches in one go.
The noise was deafening.
‘Ten seconds,’ Taff bellowed.
Howson was doing his best to swallow and Tiny was still going the chomp-swallow-chomp-swallow route.
‘Five…’
Tiny had another eight inches to go.
‘Four…’
Howson swallowed hard and tore off another three inches. His cheeks looked like an overpumped airbed.
‘Three…’
Tiny was seven inches away from glory.
‘Two…’
Tiny grinned and gave Howson a cheeky wink.
As Taff called, ‘One’, Tiny took a huge three-inch bite of his Sub and placed the remainder on the table.
The crowd went crazy.
‘STOP,’ Taff yelled.
Knowing Tiny only had to swallow his last mouthful to win, Howson lost the battle to keep his last couple of Subways down. His head disappeared into his bucket.
A huge roar and a round of multinational applause egged Tiny on to finish and set the new Afghan Subway Challenge record: one hour and six minutes.
‘Gee!’ an American girl shouted. ‘What does he win?’
‘He gets his Subs paid for by the losers,’ I said. ‘And they pay for their own.’
A couple of days later, I found myself on a mission to Camp Bastion. I’d familiarised myself with the area around KAF; an airtest or two had given me glimpses of the mountains and the desert, but the trip to Bastion was my first foray into the Helmand region.
Our tasking was to escort a Chinook, callsign Hardwood Two Two, to Lashkar Gah, where it would drop off some personnel. From there we’d fly directly to Bastion where another Chinook, Hardwood Two One, would lift off and RV with us. All four of us would proceed first to Now Zad, then to Musa Qa’leh, with the Chinooks dropping off and picking up men and materiel along the way. After the round-trip, we’d land at Bastion and remain forward-deployed there for six days. We’d been getting wind of some kind of operation-the reason for calling us forward.
We were two Apaches, callsigns Wildman Five Zero with Simon in the front and Jon in the back, and Wildman Five One, with Billy in the gunner’s seat and me behind him.
‘Wildman Five Zero Flight are two Apaches and one Chinook, ready for departure,’ Simon said as we lined up on Foxtrot taxiway.
‘Wildman Five Zero Flight, you are clear to depart Two Three Foxtrot,’ the American controller replied.
The Chinook lifted off first and we started to roll down the taxiway. I quickly tucked in behind it, our Apache hanging off to the back left, Jon to the back right. All three of us hugged the desert floor till we were away from KAF, then the Chinook shot up to altitude.
I turned to Billy. ‘That’ll change when we get back.’
‘What will?’
‘That procedure: the Chinook going up first.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Billy said after a moment’s thought. ‘That was all wrong, wasn’t it?’
Had someone fired at the Chinook while it was climbing to altitude, our two Apaches, supposedly its escorts, would never have seen the threat-and the Chinook, which had no armour (all Chinooks received their armour later in the tour), would not have withstood the shot.
One of the Apaches should have popped up to altitude first, to maintain a hawk-like vigil for the second Apache’s climb to height. Once we were both up, we could then provide cover for the Chinook’s ascent. The Apaches were built to take small arms fire and they could handle a missile launch; the Chinook couldn’t. And we all knew that the Taliban would have given their eye teeth to shoot down a ‘Cow’-their name for the big, lumbering RAF helicopter.
Well, not on my watch, I swore to myself. We’d need to talk to the Chinook boys and fix that procedure at the first available opportunity.
I looked down. We were crossing into the Red Desert-so named because of the colour of its remarkable three-hundred-feet-high dunes. From the air they looked like rust-coated waves rolling inexorably north from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and threatening to engulf the south-eastern city of Kandahar.
The desert was impassable by foot, almost impossible to cross by vehicle, and was uninhabited except by nomads who only ventured onto its fringes in winter. As far as NATO pilots were concerned, the
Red Desert was a friend; being devoid of people, it was also devoid of threat.
We ploughed on at altitude until a pale strip appeared hazily on the horizon. As I peered at it, the outline of a sprawling city began to emerge.
I checked the navigation page on my MPD. Lashkar Gah: the first stop on my cook’s tour of Afghanistan.
The Chinook’s nose dropped sharply. Jon and I eased our Apaches left and right to take up station above and to each side of it as it swooped low over the desert towards the base nestled in the north-east quadrant of the city.
All the bases in Afghanistan were programmed into our computer and with a punch of a button the crosshairs in my monocle shot away to rest squarely over the one at Lashkar Gah.
The cueing dots directed me to look down and to my right and, as if by magic, there it was in my line of sight: a large compound filled with two-storey buildings surrounded by a fortified wall with sangars built into it as watchtowers.
Except for the dust and the heat haze it didn’t look a whole lot different from some of the set-ups I’d overflown in Northern Ireland.
Even from two miles away, I could see the helicopter landing strip (HLS). The Chinook was bombing towards it at full-throttle.
I checked what Billy could see with the TADS. Bisecting the screen, pointing like an arrow towards the army base, there was a long straight street, one hundred metres wide and a kilometre in length. Leading off it were little alleyways and housing blocks. With the DTV camera in the TADS on zoom, it was as if we were only twenty-five metres away from the teeming throng of people on bikes, women with pots on their heads, kids running about, trucks and mopeds grinding along in low gear, dogs nipping at their wheels. It was all happening in Lashkar Gah.
The Chinook suddenly cut into the bottom of the picture. In a remarkable piece of flying, the pilot took it straight down the street. I would have expected the women and the kids and the dogs to have scattered, but none did, used as they were, perhaps, to a generation of machines that had brought conflict to their country.
At the last second, the Chinook pulled up its nose, bled off speed, dropped over the wall and disappeared in a cloud of dust.
We started to wheel over the city, keeping our eyes peeled, but didn’t have to wait long. Less than twenty seconds after it had vanished there was a ‘click-click’ on the radio-the only signal we would receive from the CH47 boys on the Chinook flight-deck, and the Cow suddenly emerged out of the muck. Batting low over the rooftops, it pulled up clear of the small arms belt. We crossed into the Green Zone as soon as it resumed station alongside us.
The strip of fertile land was irrigated by the Helmand River, glistening through the trees below us. Around two kilometres across at its widest point, its lush foliage provided plenty of cover, not just for roaming Taliban units, but for anti-aircraft guns and ManPADS that could shoot us down.
We passed on into the dusty air above a parched, sand-coloured desert that stretched south, west and north as far as I could see.
‘Twelve o’clock, fifteen kilometres, Camp Bastion,’ Billy said.
I peered out of the cockpit and saw nothing except for tyre-tracks criss-crossing the barren wastes below us. Billy still had the TADS set to DTV zoom and I could see Bastion starting to take shape in black and white on the screen. First some tunnel-type tents in the south-east corner of the base, then other features sprang into view: the berm bulldozed up around the perimeter, the sangars with their tin roofs and sandbag fortifications and numer
ous vehicle parks brimming with Land Rovers and various types of APCs. A Chinook sat at the northern edge, blades milling, on one of two square pads that marked out the HLS.
There were two stationary Apaches on the other pad. The HLS was tiny compared to the luxurious concrete-lined complex we’d become used to at KAF. Technically, we were supposed to be able to fit four Apaches at a pinch on one pad, but I wondered, from up here how that would be possible. I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Hardwood Two One, the second Chinook, lifted off its square. When it popped out of its own dust cloud, I could see its underslung load: a bunch of crates in a low-hanging net. The Chinook hugged the ground for several hundred metres then rose to meet us in a zoom climb.
As soon as we RV’d, we set course to the north and our next destination: Now Zad.
The two Chinooks flew in formation about a thousand metres apart. Billy and I took up station above and around two kilometres behind and to the left of them; Jon and Simon did the same to their right.
We could see the Chinooks from our vantage point, and more importantly the ground beneath and behind them. Our primary concern was a SAM launch. Unlike us, the Chinooks didn’t always have an integrated defensive aids suite. If the Taliban did fire on them, they’d have to rely on the good old Mark 1 Eyeball-ours as well as theirs-to spot the launch plume. After that, it would be down to good judgement and their ‘pippers’, hand-held controllers like the ones I’d seen on the C-130 flight from Kabul to KAF, to launch flares to seduce the missile away from the aircraft.
The only place where the threat was deemed at all likely on this segment of our journey was the point at which we crossed Highway Zero One, which looped around most of Afghanistan. You never
quite knew who was going to be on the road as you roared across it-on this occasion we were fortunate; it was empty-and we always treated it with respect.
Shortly afterwards I saw a pockmarked town, smaller than Lashkar Gah. Surrounded by hills and mountains Now Zad sat in a basin, with a rough road running north-south for around 500 metres through its centre.
Houses spread back for 300 metres on either side of this road, with smaller streets and alleyways running east-west. The place looked medieval in its chaos. The houses were ramshackle and built to no discernible pattern, the majority constructed on one or two levels, with access to the flat roofs via a staircase from within. The roofs of the handful of three-storey buildings gave the Taliban some excellent fields of fire direct into the District Centre.
The DC was located to the west of the potholed main street. It had been a police station and its compound had recently come under some very heavy fire. Surrounded by a high wall that was still remarkably intact, it had a big metal gate at the front and a sandbagged watchtower turret at each corner, manned by sentries round the clock.