They took off from KAF at 7.30 a.m. Half an hour later the Chinook carrying the headquarters group settled on what looked like a firm, dry poppy field. The Paras scrambled down the ramp, high on adrenaline and excitement, and immediately sank up to their knees in mud. Next off was a quad bike, used to carry ammunition around the battlefield and extract casualties, which stuck fast in the glutinous soil.
At the same time, the Dutch helicopters were touching down inside Gold compound only 33 metres from the main building. 8 Platoon, the company point men, bundled out of the back door, crouching and levelling their rifles as soon as they hit the ground, bracing for the first gust of AK47 rounds. But if anyone was inside the house they were holding their fire. As the Chinooks lifted off, they advanced cautiously towards the silent, mud-walled building. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Lev Wood, approached the door with an Afghan anti-drugs officer and peered into the dark and stuffy interior. ‘The place was completely bare,’ said Wood later. ‘It was as if it had been stripped of everything.’ They moved on to the outhouses. Several of them were piled to the roof with bundles of dried marijuana, which in an area awash with opium was considered hardly worth mentioning.
The Paras pushed on rapidly to Silver compound, leaving the engineers and military police team to go through the house. At the second location they found about twenty women and children but no fighting-age males. It was the same at Bronze. The adrenaline fizz subsided. The soldiers resigned themselves to a day of combing through the grape storage sheds and numerous mud-wall enclosures that dotted the fields and vineyards, searching for weapons and stores. It was a delicate task. The Canadians, who had been operating in the area since 2006, warned them of the risk of booby traps in the grape houses. They were also on the alert for IEDs laid along the pathways, covered by innocuous-looking cooking pots. The insurgents had developed a technique by which they waited for a patrol to approach then buried a small plastic anti-personnel mine just below the track surface and near the hidden bomb. The pressure of a footfall would set off the mine and detonate the bigger charge.
But just as they were about to begin the search, the Taliban announced their presence. Back at the helicopter landing site (HLS), Company Sergeant Major Andy Schofield was supervising the effort to extract the quad bike from the mud. At 8.45 a.m. their work was abandoned as bullets began to buzz around them. The fire was coming from the fields to the north but no one could see the gunmen. The HQ group and mortar team who had set up near by began shooting back. Corporal Wailutu was caught in the open next to the quad bike when the firefight began. Normally her duties kept her behind a computer in the company administration office in Colchester. She had been sent to Afghanistan for a one-month tour; now she was flat on her stomach in the middle of a soggy poppy field with only the stranded quad for cover while rounds whipped over her head. ‘I’d never been in a contact before,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help feeling that one of the rounds was going to get me. I didn’t want to risk putting my head up to see what was going on. I just lay there with my face down in the mud waiting for it to stop.’ Eventually, when the firing faded, she ran over to the treeline to join the others.
Loden had moved down to Gold compound. He was on the roof of the main building when the shooting started. Amid the flat crack of rifle fire he heard a sound he remembered only too well. The Taliban were engaging with RPGs. ‘It reminded me immediately of Sangin,’ he said. ‘There was the old pop and whizz and this thing went flying over the top. Everyone ducked. We heard the bang behind us and that was that.’
Loden’s initial thought was that the Taliban were preparing to attack. Something was hidden in their base that was so valuable to them they were prepared to launch a full-on assault to recapture it. The pilot of an Apache attack helicopter that had been on station overhead since the start of the operation reported seeing men entering and leaving what appeared to be a bunker system. It was some distance away, however, 1500 metres to the north of Gold compound, and too far to pose an immediate threat.
The shooting began to fade but Loden was concerned that the HQ group and mortar team, who had not yet had time to set up their barrels, might come under attack again. He ordered Lev Wood to stop searching the compounds and to take his men over to the HLS.
More reports were coming in from the Apache. At 9.04, nearly twenty minutes after the initial contact, the pilot picked up further activity around the bunker. Eight men were moving around outside. He described seeing ‘a guy walking away from it, going a certain distance out, putting something in the dirt, coming back’. Loden surmised that he was laying a mine and that the inhabitants of the bunker ‘were preparing themselves for a fight’. Eight minutes later the pilot spotted six men entering the bunker through a hole in the wall. The pilot was eager to engage. Instead of requesting permission from the company commander on the ground, however, he asked for clearance from Kandahar. The killing of innocent civilians by Coalition forces had soured relations between President Karzai, America and ISAF, and the president was insisting greater care be taken, particularly in air attacks. The helicopter had to wait while the request was passed up the chain of command. Eventually the message came back that the pilot was not to engage.
As Loden absorbed this, Kandahar passed on an intelligence alert, stating that the Hobbit was still in the area and was holed up at a location 800 metres to the north. The report gave a rough location. British troops operated with maps taken from aerial photographs on which all the features were numbered. The trouble with the map in Loden’s hands was that the imagery had been captured eighteen months before at the start of the Afghan winter. In the meantime foliage had grown, compounds had been built up and knocked down and the reality in front of him sometimes differed markedly from the representation. Eventually he matched the reference to the landscape and made his next move. It seemed clear that if the Apache was not going to take out the bunker they would have to do so themselves. By pushing forward they were also moving towards where the Hobbit was said to be lying up. Loden decided to order an ‘advance to contact’.
He would need all his men. He called the Canadians and asked them to cross the canal and secure the compounds, freeing up his two platoons to come forward. They gathered for a conference at the HLS. The bunker would have to be dealt with before they could move on to the Hobbit’s supposed location. To reach the bunker meant passing through a straggle of compounds connected by a long alleyway.
The lead section had gone only a few dozen metres when a gunman popped up from behind a compound wall ten metres away and sprayed AK47 fire in their direction. ‘How the hell he missed I have no idea,’ said Loden. ‘He was that close that he really should have hit someone.’ The Paras hit the ground. After a few minutes, Sergeant Shaun Sexton from 2 Platoon took one of his men, raced forward to the door of the compound and flung in a grenade. When the smoke cleared they peered in. The only thing visible was a tethered goat, which looked up calmly from its feed to check out the intruders.
The advance continued. The Paras came to an irrigation canal, part of the web of arteries and capillaries that channelled the waters of the Arghandab into the vineyards and poppy fields. It was too wide to jump. As they waded across, someone noticed a plastic disc glinting on the stream bed. It looked like an antipersonnel mine. Everybody hopped rapidly on to the opposite bank.
The landscape was empty now. The workers who had been dotted about the fields when the helicopters first arrived had all disappeared. Occasionally a head would pop up on a distant rooftop as a Taliban dicker tried to spot the Paras’ movements. Each time he would be scared away by a volley of rifle fire.
The Apache had gone back to KAF to refuel, taking its devastating Hellfire missiles with it. Loden halted the company 400 metres south-west of the bunker. He told Lev Wood to take his platoon forward while the rest provided covering fire.