I could almost feel Billy’s eyebrows disappearing beneath his hairline. ‘High-sap?’
He was right. High Explosive Incendiary Semi-Armour Piercing rockets were not precision weapons. How could I hit a barrel with a rocket? They were free-flight, and since the launchers were haphazardly aligned to the Apache in the first place, they could go anywhere.
‘I know we wouldn’t use them against this target, Ed,’ Billy said. ‘But have you aligned the rockets on this cab?’
‘I can’t guarantee that the launchers haven’t been swapped. They could go anywhere, buddy.’
I’d decided to use HEDP.
‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five-negative. I’ll fire Hedpee as this is likely to initiate any explosives or fuel employed.’
‘Widow Seven Zero, clear hot.’
‘Wildman Five Four, Wildman Five Five-did you copy the last?’
‘Wildman Five Four, A-firm, go ahead.’
‘Where are they, Billy?’ I didn’t want to fire at Jon and Jake, and didn’t want to take my eyes off the target to look for them either.
‘They’re clear, and so is B Company.’
We were still in an orbit and flying clockwise at seventy knots. Billy kept it low and slow.
I dropped to a ten-round burst setting, lined the crosshair up on the centre of the barrels, steadied, and lased the target with my right middle finger. I didn’t use my index finger; some of its muscles were linked to the thumb which controlled the crosshair.
The MPD showed 1,699 metres-a mile away.
‘Firing!’ I called.
I pulled the left trigger and held it until the gun stopped firing. Ten rounds came off, and missed the target completely. They landed low and left-in the middle of the track.
‘Fucking Gun DH!’ I was absolutely threaders with the boss.
‘Thank God we weren’t firing close to troops.’ Billy had been watching on his MPD. My crosshairs were bang over the target and there was no drift. Those rounds should have been spot on.
I aimed up and right the distance I’d missed by, and fired another ten-round burst. A huge cloud of dust enveloped the compound. When it settled there was a little smoke and plenty of hot spots in the barrels, but over half of them hadn’t been touched.
‘Widow Seven Zero, this is Wildman Five Five. Delta Hotel but no IED detonation.’
‘Wildman Five Five-is it safe?’
They’d all been thrown around, but I couldn’t guarantee that one of the barrels at the bottom of the pile didn’t still contain an active initiation device.
‘Negative. Not 100 per cent. A 500-lb bomb would be advisable. Dart Two Four is available.’ According to my sync matrix Dart Two Four was a B1 from Diego Garcia and had been on task for fifteen minutes.
D Company, the CO and his JTAC were still up the slope. They had full view of the entire route, all the way down to B Company’s position just short of the urban area.
Patrols Platoon were covering the high ground and guarding the wadi to the west, where the convoy would emerge.
It had just set off from the spur, and was making its way slowly down the most secure route they could find-the wide, flat, dry river bed. You could see by its colour that it had been flooded during the wet season, so any mines left from the previous defence of Musa Qa’leh would have been washed away, and any fresh ones would have been laid in the last twenty-four hours. The recce cars were working overtime.
B Company were now just above the compounds, ready to go.
It was a tense moment. A Taliban sniper team could have a field day here. B Company would be pinned down in the open, and we’d be the ones who’d have to flush them out. If they’d all fired together and their weapons were nice and dry, it would be like finding a handful of needles in a haystack.
‘Bring them in.’
CO 3 Para wasn’t messing around. He understood the threat all too well. Every single vehicle was going to have to go through the choke point. And he needed B Company out of the potential killing ground asap.
I called Dart Two Four. An attractive-sounding female American voice told me she couldn’t drop without strato clearance. I had no idea what that meant, or if she was the pilot or offensive systems officer. Strategic clearance, maybe? Did she have to get permission from somebody out of theatre?
I called Widow Seven Zero and passed on the message.
Widow Seven Zero contacted Dart Two Four direct. He said he was the commander on the ground. This was extremely high risk, a possible IED; he had men in the open and it must be removed.
After a ten-minute wait, she confirmed that she had strato clearance to drop. The B1 Lancer had a synthetic aperture radar. She could only see a radar-mapped area of the ground, not the real thing-and Compound Zero One wouldn’t mean anything to her. She mapped the target and was talked onto the southern wall of the compound. She was about to deliver a JDAM-Joint Direct Attack Munition-an inertial and GPS kit strapped to a dumb bomb to guide it with pinpoint accuracy.
‘Ready three zero,’ she called. Time of flight, thirty seconds.
There was an almighty boom and a pillar of black earth blasted 150 feet into the air. When the dust cleared, we could see that it had demolished the southern wall with pinpoint perfection, gouging a hole some ten feet wide and four feet deep in the ground. There wasn’t a single barrel left.
‘Dart Two Four, Wildman Five Five. That’s a Delta Hotel. Nice hole.’
Widow Seven Zero told us the mortars were about to fire. We were instructed to move east to the wadi.
The Green Zone was only a couple of hundred metres thick, but the trees overlapped to form a canopy. I tried to see if there was anything beneath it that might pose a threat to the convoy. I had a sporadic view of the track running through it; there were plenty of potholes, but I couldn’t see any fresh holes or unusual heat shapes.
The trees overhung the point where the buildings came to an end and the Green Zone began. It was the most hazardous area for the convoy because it could be viewed-at ground level-from a distance, and command detonated from cover with deadly accuracy. Once in the Green Zone, the Taliban bomb-makers would have to depend on a pressure pad trigger, which our engineers could find without the threat of a remote detonation.
When the mortars stopped Billy took us low over the western side of the compounds as the boys went firm, ready for the assault.
I noticed a roadblock just past the bomb crater, where the track disappeared into the trees.
‘Widow, Wildman Five Five. I’ve seen what looks like a roadblock at the entrance to the Green Zone. Copy so far.’
‘Widow Copied.’
I continued to describe what I saw. Just under the canopy, the right-hand side of the track was blocked by what looked like two forty-five gallon concrete barrels with a steel pole stretched between them spanning the right side of the track. Any vehicle passing to the left of them would then be forced to swing hard right by another set. It was a tight chicane and not one that you could ram aside at high speed. It was designed to slow traffic to a crawl. There were no ANP checkpoints here, which meant it was down to the Taliban.
Widow acknowledged and informed his search engineers.
As we kicked over to the east, I looked down and saw a man with a gun. On closer inspection I realised it wasn’t a gun and he was very old. Dishdashes and full face beards made it hard to tell the age of some Afghans from this height, but his gait, stoop, pace and the way he held his shoulders earned him pensioner status in my book.
No more than 500 metres north-east of where the bomb had gone off, and north of the track that ran east-west through the Green Zone, he ducked inside a small, door-less dome constructed out of four poles overlaid with grasses. It wasn’t a home, but a place to rest while working the fields, just large enough to lie down in with his feet poking out.
I told Widow Seven Zero he was no threat. I didn’t want one of the lads to pop round a corner and get spooked by a harmless old man with a stick.
A few seconds later, the Widow said B Company was going to start clearing the compounds.
They moved from building to building with incredible speed. It was as much as we could do to stay one step ahead of them. I couldn’t cover everything they were doing. They weren’t grenading. They pairs fire-and-manoeuvred through each doorway. They were treating the place with respect while aggressively clearing compound after compound.
Before we knew it, 3 Flight was back out to do a RIP with us. That was how long it had taken to get in there, clear the IED, and get B Company in.
I was very surprised B Company had got down the slope without a contact. It was a golden opportunity. The Taliban knew that the built-up area had great killing fields. Perhaps the Now Zad experience had made them think twice. We were directly overhead and if they did open up, they would die wherever they fired from. If they made a break for it, they’d just die tired.
They’d wait until the Green Zone to attack. They would ’shwhack 3 Para on their terms, in their backyard.
We had to route back around the north to avoid the gun-to-target line after briefing Pat about the roadblock and the old-timer. As we flew past the three guns, I could see they were no more than twenty metres apart.
Billy and I bypassed Camp Bastion. We went straight onto the range just to the west of the camp and fired fifty rounds to DH my cannon.
We took a suck of gas and a 30 mil ammo upload then taxied back out onto the runway just fifteen minutes later. With the gun DH, the refuel and upload we only had nineteen minutes on the end of the HALS before we roared off again.
I flicked semi-automatic onto automatic on the HIDAS and Billy power-climbed into the haze.
The artillery were firing straight in. We went north of the guns and waited for an opportunity to call Pat.
I spoke to the patrol ahead. Pat said the troops had cleared the roadblock. It
was
a Taliban checkpoint. We were to clear them immediately due east, and watch the boys move through the Green Zone.
We’d left them not too far short of it. They’d taken so long to get past the Taliban checkpoint they’d hardly moved. The engineers had needed to go forward first to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped.
The old man’s crops had been immaculate when we left. They were now trampled in snaking lines. It did look as if the Taliban had been waiting in ambush.
There were also 2,000-lb bomb craters by the road and in the fields. They’d been dropped as pre-emptive strikes.
The old-timer was still taking refuge in his hut. I saw his head poke out every now and again.
The boys began their clearance of the Green Zone. Two Paras ran forward through an open field and put a wooden frame against a solid wall and ran back again. Mouse-hole charges. After the explosion they ran back to the wall with half of their group; the other half had their weapons up, ready to fire. They went through the freshly blown hole in pairs, then down on their belt buckles. The whole process was repeated over and over again, field after field. They weren’t prepared to go through doorways. One patrol even head butted their way through one of the flimsier walls.
We did another RIP when they were halfway through the Green Zone. That was how long this mission was taking.
The Taliban still hadn’t kicked off. They weren’t ones for shying away from a fight in the Green Zone, no matter how outnumbered they were. So they had to be biding their time. They knew about the convoy. They were deliberately avoiding any confrontation with 3 Para. They wanted the convoy: an easy target that couldn’t fight back.
If it wasn’t an IED or an ambush, what could they have planned? Whatever it was, I prayed that our boys would all still be alive and unscathed when we returned.
We parked up when we got back. We had thirty minutes or so to spare this time because we didn’t need to go on the range. While Billy sorted out the aircraft, Jon and I borrowed the lads’ ‘Mimic’-it looked like a WMIK, but without any weapons or weapon mounts-and we drove like men possessed to the 3 Para cookhouse. It was closed. We should have guessed; every swinging dick was at Musa Qa’leh. We begged for some grub. They handed us a doggie bag of turkey mash sandwiches and wedges of cheesecake and we belted back.
Jon glanced over his shoulder and began to laugh. ‘The fuzz are after us.’ A wagonload of Royal Military Police (RMP) with flashing blue light and siren blaring were in hot pursuit because we were speeding. Still wearing our Apache helmets with visors down-helmets were mandatory in convertibles and this one didn’t have a windscreen-I kept my foot to the floor. They weren’t allowed inside the flight line, so had to stop at our barrier.
We were ravenous, but had no time to eat before we jumped in the aircraft, so we stuffed our faces as we sat waiting to taxi.
Taff plugged in and told me the RMPs were going to charge the driver of the Land Rover and his name was on the work ticket.
‘Tell them it was me and there’s a fucking war going on out there,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Thank you, sir.’
I was chinstrapped. We’d been strapped into the Apache for nearly eleven hours and they hadn’t even got into the DC yet. I immediately felt guilty. At least I was fighting from an air-condi-tioned seat, while 3 Para were out there on the ground.
The radio transmissions came through sporadically as Billy threw the engine power levers forward, ready to move out again.
The vehicles were crossing the wadi and Chris had found the Taliban.
I’d spoken too soon.
SUNDAY, 6 AUGUST 2006
Musa Qa’leh
We rolled out onto the runway, took off and climbed away from the sun. It was a welcome release. My eyes burnt through lack of sleep and staring into the TADS for days on end. I felt like I needed a regular supply of ice cubes down my trousers to keep me awake.
Must focus, I kept telling myself. Must focus…
Pat and Chris were tracking Taliban so we didn’t interrupt them. We skirted north of the guns. All three fired in unison as we passed. Dust billowed around them, carried by the radial shockwave.