Fortunately, I had a plan.
11 SEPTEMBER 2000
British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS), Alberta, Canada
My Gazelle was parked in the middle of the Canadian prairie. The sun was high and the sky was clear blue. Somewhere above me I could hear a lone bird calling. Lying on my back, I scanned the heavens, trying in vain to locate it. No matter. I popped another piece of straw between my teeth, closed my eyes and tried to doze, but I was out of luck there too.
Fuck me, I thought, didn’t these Pathfinders ever put a sock in it?
Next to me was a Special Forces Land Rover filled with three lads from the Pathfinder Platoon-a small unit designed and trained to fight behind enemy lines; 16 Air Assault Brigade’s equivalent of the SAS.
They were swapping stories about how they’d have solved the previous year’s Kosovo conflict. It was full of harmless machismo-but it went on endlessly. Two of the guys favoured covertly parachuting behind the lines; the third was adamant that an ‘infil’ by land was better. Both ended with a bloody assault on Slobodan Milosevic’s heavily armed Belgrade headquarters. The outcome, needless to say, was a foregone conclusion: Brits one, Serbs nil.
I was in 3 Regiment now, on a two-month exercise fighting a tank battalion, day in day out to get ourselves onto a war footing.
My flight commander, co-pilot and co-ABFAC, Dom, groaned beside me. ‘Can’t they just shut the fuck up for a moment? Some of us didn’t get much sleep last night.’
‘Paras,’ I told him. ‘A gobbier breed you couldn’t hope to meet. I used to be one.’
‘Don’t I know it, Staff?’ Dom said. ‘And your gob is going to get us into trouble one of these days.’ He rolled over and blocked his ears.
Dom was a captain and I was a staff sergeant, the 2i/c of our flight. Dom was public school, vertically challenged and took no shit from anyone, not even me. He was a soldiers’ officer and always considered his men before himself. He wasn’t the most gifted pilot, but he more than made up for that in the brains department.
We were having a break from kicking tanky arse and were concentrating instead on the fine art of Forward Air Controlling-FACing, as it was politely known in the trade. The Pathfinders were FACs-Forward Air Controllers. Dom and I were Airborne FACs or ABFACs. We did exactly what they did, but from the comfort of our Gazelles. The Pathfinders thought we were a couple of soft pussies, but I’d done the stripped-down Land Rover routine before my accident and knew where I’d rather be.
The radio sparked into life. ‘Any callsign, any callsign, this is Starburst Two Four. How do you read?’ The accent was Canadian. The ‘how’ came out sounding like ‘hoe’.
The Pathfinders’ game of Belgrade-or-bust ground to a halt before they could inflict further damage on any other rogue states.
‘Okay, who’s up first?’ one of them yelled in our direction.
I offered it to them. In a six-month period, a FAC needed to control a certain number of jets and hit the target to remain qualified. In the past two months alone, I’d notched up more than twenty ‘controls’-easily enough to remain in business. It was only polite to let them have a go.
Dom and I listened as they contacted Starburst Two Four and brought it in for a practice bombing run. Aiming for the only man-made edifice on a plain the size of Kent was hardly Krypton Factor material. The second Pathfinder directed a further T-33 at a tank hulk approximately 200 hundred metres from the building.
Dom started to snigger.
One of the Pathfinders, a little lad with a Freddie Mercury moustache, asked us what was so fucking amusing.
‘Nothing, mate,’ Dom said. ‘Really. Excellent work. Bravo.’ He gave him a slow handclap.
Freddie dropped over the side of the vehicle and looked like he wanted to do to Dom and me what he and his mates had talked about doing to Slobodan Milosevic. I jumped to my feet. Dom, the chicken, retreated behind me.
‘Looks like you guys need to get some more “controls” under your belt,’ I said, trying to sound helpful.
Well done, Macy; that came out beautifully.
‘Funny guy,’ Freddie said. ‘Dodge, put this arsehole out of his misery will you?’
His mate picked up the handset. ‘Your target,’ he said to the inbound jet, ‘is a helicopter…’
‘He’d have to be half blind to miss my little green sports car on the top of this hill,’ I said.
The T-33 was built under licence by the Canadians and renamed the CT-133 Silver Star but the name never stuck. It looked like something from Thunderbirds as it flew in towards us. The big, cigar-shaped body and huge fuel tanks perched on the tips of two thin wings lined up on the hill. We heard a beep over the radio as it roared overhead-the sound that indicated he’d pickled off a simulated bomb.
The Pathfinder grinned as he spoke to the T-33 pilot. ‘Roger. That’s a Delta Hotel. The chopper is a goner. I’ll be sure to tell its proud owner.’
‘Delta Hotel’ meant direct hit.
They all rolled around laughing and high-fiving.
‘Playtime’s over,’ I said. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to hide. Then I’m coming for you.’
Silence returned to the prairie.
‘Fuck off,’ Freddie said. ‘You…?’
‘I bet you tossers a night out in Medicine Hat that I can hit you and you won’t even know where I am,’ I told him. ‘If you can find me and send an accurate grid reference to me before I bomb you, you win. Otherwise you buy the beers.’
‘Game on, crap-hat.’ This was intended as the ultimate insult; they knew I was an ex-Para.
They mounted up and prepared to set off. The next jet was due in twenty minutes. I put my hands over my eyes and started to count, hide-and-seek style: ‘One, two, three…’
‘Hey,’ one of them shouted, ‘we’re not ready yet!’
‘…seven, eight, nine…’
They roared off in a cloud of dust.
As promised, I gave them a twenty-minute start. Then I took off and headed south. It wasn’t long before I spotted their dust trail. I followed them with my optics from a decent stand-off range of about eight kilometres, until I saw them stop on the edge of a depression. It was a good position, but I knew they would move the minute I sent their coordinates to the T-33; we were sharing the same frequency. As soon as I opened my mouth they’d be off like rats up an aqueduct, and it’d turn into a rolling goat-fuck trying to hit the bastards on the move.
It was time to get sneaky.
FACing is a finer art than most people think. A low level jet couldn’t find its own targets. When you were a few hundred feet over enemy territory approaching Mach 1, it was nearly impossible to tell the location of the enemy and, even more importantly, of your own forces. That’s when you needed a FAC, or, as they were sometimes also referred to in-theatre, a ‘Jaytac’-a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (the same thing but theatre specific). FACs and JTACs did the same thing.
As fast jet pilots generally didn’t have any time or inclination to loiter over hostile territory in the