As we rolled out of the turn, I gradually moved the cyclic back to the cockpit’s centre. We were flying a direct charge to the copse. The Boss began to aim his TADS where he wanted the Flechettes to go, fixing his crosshairs bang in the centre of the wood. Three thousand five hundred metres to the target. We were gassing it, flat out at 125 knots, and needed to fire in 1,000 metres time. I had to get Billy well out of the way.
‘Five One running in from the south. Confirm direction, Billy.’
‘Breaking east, breaking east.’
I saw his Apache’s nose dip as it powered off to the right.
At 3,000 metres, the Boss was ready.
‘Match and shoot!’
Now the rest was down to me. The Boss would watch the ‘I bar’ come to meet the crosshairs on his TADS screen. I focused on the ‘I bar’. The problem was, I had no ‘I bar’. There was nothing. The monocle in my right eye was completely pink. My mirror had vibrated away from the centre of my pupil during the violent turn. I pushed it back into place. It immediately vibrated away again. Fuck. The screw had come loose. I could still do the shoot from my MPD. The ‘I bar’ would be there too. But the sun was shining into the cockpit from directly behind us, making the MPD impossible to read.
‘Match and shoot, Mr M.’
‘I’m trying …’
I snapped my head from one side to the other to escape the glare on the screen. I unlocked the seat straps so I could lean as far forward as possible. I kept the cyclic forward, the collective up and the foot pedals balanced, and my face just six inches from the screen.
‘Two point five klicks to target.’
I can do this. I took up the pressure on the trigger as I eased the cyclic left, right, left, and then right again. Every time I aligned the ‘I bar’ with the crosshairs it passed straight through to the other side.
‘Two klicks to target. Are you going to shoot today?’
Fuck it. I’d just have to take a snatch at it. As they came together for the third time, I pulled the trigger and my ‘I’ shot off. A rocket tore away from each side of the aircraft. I yanked my head up fast; I knew immediately that I’d arsed it up.
For a second they were two black dots trailing wisps of vapour smoke. Then their cradles exploded and two torrents of Flechette darts impacted into the ground, kicking up 160 pinpricks of dust – all between fifty and 100 metres left of the copse.
‘What was that?’
The Boss was horrified. So was I.
‘Match and shoot again. We’re running out of distance.’
I looked down. Miraculously, the crosshairs were superimposed over the ‘I bar’ so I pulled the trigger immediately. Two more bright orange glows either side of me as the rockets shot away. The first few darts erupted twenty metres short but the vast majority cracked straight into the copse, slicing through branches and vaporising leaves before burying themselves deep into whatever walked or crawled on the ground below them. Anything in there would have been immobilised now, if not by a dart then by falling branches or splintered timber. Thank God for that.
‘Good set, sir.’
‘That time anyway,’ the Boss said drily.
I was the squadron’s Weapons Officer. I taught people how to shoot these things for a living, for Christ’s sake. And I’d missed the target by close on 100 metres. The reason didn’t matter. I was livid with myself.
‘Breaking left into an orbit.’ I pulled the cyclic back, lowered the collective and banked left, decelerating swiftly.
The Boss was keen to finish off any survivors.
‘My gun.’
We circled the copse’s western edge.
‘I can’t see any movement.’
Ten seconds later, we’d reached its northern window.
‘I’ve got something.’
I looked down on the MPD. The Boss was right. There was a flat-shaped heat source moving extremely slowly towards the northern edge of the copse.
‘It’s somebody crawling towards the tube. Engaging.’ The Boss squeezed off a burst of twenty.
An Apache pilot always announced when he was opening up so his co-pilot knew they weren’t taking rounds. An M230 cannon firing less than a metre from your feet sounded and felt like a sledgehammer banging away on the aircraft’s exterior. It bounced the balls of your feet and shook you in your seat.
The cannon pointed down and eighty degrees to the right, and was powerful enough to throw the Apache a few metres to the left as it engaged. The on-board computer compensated for the change in direction.
The cannon ramped itself backwards as the first three rounds flew from the barrel. Now in its optimum position, the remaining seventeen HEDP rounds streaked towards the target. By the time the nineteenth and twentieth rounds were away, the first were tearing through the trees. When the smoke cleared, the heat source had split into two smaller heat sources. But the Boss wasn’t satisfied.
‘There’s got to be a few of them in there. Is that another heat source further back or just the mortar barrel? Better make sure.’
He gave it another burst, then a third and a fourth.
The whole of the copse’s floor glowed on the FLIR screen. The Boss still kept hammering away, only stopping when we’d reached its southern edge again. The soles of my feet were tingling.
He’d pumped seven bursts into the place, 140 rounds in total, leaving a great smoking pile of scorched earth, ripped foliage and charred branches. And enough lead to start a pencil factory. We continued to circle.
‘Do you think there’s anyone left alive in there?’
I laughed. ‘Not a hope in hell, Boss.’
So this was how the OC had won Top Gun in the States. The man was merciless.
‘Widow Eight Four, this is Ugly Five One. Target destroyed. Do you have any further targets for us?’
‘Negative. We’re pulling back into the desert.’
‘Copied. We’ll cover you into it.’
‘Ugly Five One, Ugly Five Zero. My suggestion, we go back to Camp Bastion. You need to rearm and refuel, and I need a new aircraft.’
The engagement had lasted twenty minutes, leaving us with only an hour’s combat gas left. And with a broken gun we wouldn’t be going anywhere near Kajaki or Now Zad. The rest of the famil could wait.
‘Copied, Billy. That is an affirmative. I’ve got a conference call with the CO (Commanding Officer) in Kandahar at 1800, so we’ll finish the famil tomorrow.’
Everyone’s spirits were sky high on the flight home. One sortie down, one–nil to us. We’d just been expecting a routine turn around the houses. The action was a bonus.
Killing the enemy didn’t make me punch the air or whoop with joy. At the same time, I never got beardy about it or started to ponder the meaning of life. We’d helped out the guys on the ground, and some Taliban had gone to meet their maker. Ah well. They shouldn’t have shot at us first. Next target please.
‘Boss,