Fire Strike 7/9 Read online

  ‘They were?’ I let out a half chuckle. ‘I guess that explains why it was you lot kept getting smashed. How many times did I put up the call — “HQ element surrounded and getting smashed…”’

  The OC grinned. ‘There we were lying in the dirt, and eventually the penny dropped: they’re trying to take out the HQ. That’s how smart they were…’

  For a while I lay on my back half-listening to the OC, and gazing up into the wide expanse of the burning, starlit sky. Then Sticky came to have words.

  ‘Bommer, someone’s trying to raise you on the air.’

  ‘Who, mate?’ I asked. ‘What’s his call sign?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ he shrugged. ‘He won’t tell me. Says he wants the JTAC.’

  I grabbed the TACSAT. ‘This is Widow Seven Nine for any call sign in my ROZ.’

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, good evening, sir,’ came back the unmistakeably American voice. ‘This is Tin Can Alpha.’

  I nearly choked on my brew. ‘Tin Can Alpha!’ I spluttered. ‘Are you winding me up?’

  ‘No, sir. That’s our call sign, sir: Tin Can Alpha.’

  I’d never once heard of the call sign Tin Can Alpha. It had never been mentioned, not even in the briefings I’d received at Kandahar airfield at the start of the tour.

  ‘Well, what kind of platform are you, Tin Can Alpha?’

  ‘You don’t need to know that, sir,’ the voice replied. ‘We’re an American airframe in overwatch your position. Sir, I’m tasked to ensure that you don’t get ambushed down there.’

  I felt a horrible sinking feeling. ‘Erm… right-oh, Tin Can Alpha, how long do I have you for?’

  ‘We have five hours’ playtime, sir.’

  Oh shit. I glanced at my watch. It was 2300 hours. That meant I’d have this wanker until 0400, whilst everyone else was getting their brackets down. I was gutted. Three hours later Tin Can Alpha sounded bored shitless with flying orbits over a deserted patch of desert. But I’d bet my bottom dollar he wasn’t as bored, or as knackered, as I was. I switched from tea to coffee in a desperate effort to stay awake. As a way to kill time the pilot started asking me all about the battle for Adin Zai. In return, I started asking him about the capabilities of his top-secret aircraft, but he wasn’t telling.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t tell you that,’ he kept repeating. ‘It’s classified, sir.’

  It was like he was on permanent replay. I loved the American attack-jet pilots, and I loved the American warplanes — it was just Tin Can Alpha I could have done without. Somehow, we reached 0400 with me still awake, and Tin Can Alpha finally signed off the air.

  ‘You stay safe and happy down there, sir,’ were the pilot’s closing words.

  ‘Aye,’ I replied. ‘I’ll try to, mate.’

  I felt like adding — as long as I don’t get sent any more platforms with idiotic fucking call signs. Instead, I got my head down on the sand and was instantly asleep.

  An hour and a half later someone was shaking me awake. I’d been kipping on the deck, curled up against the wheels of the Vector.

  ‘Bommer. Bommer. You’ve got air.’

  It was Sticky. I was dog-tired, and I didn’t say a word. I grabbed the TACSAT, plus the fresh brew he handed me.

  It was 0530. First light. A sickly-yellow sun was clawing its way above the low mountains to the east. I had a Harrier GR-7 above me, flown by one of the pilots I’d been working with at the start of the previous day’s action.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked, once I’d finished the area of operations update. ‘I hear you’ve been busy down there.’

  I told him I had, and that it was all-good. He stayed with me until 0730, checking out positions around Adin Zai, but nothing much was moving. Then he signed out of my ROZ low on fuel.

  ‘Watch yourselves,’ the pilot told me, ‘and good luck with the rest of the op.’

  I dozed a little, but it was useless. Everyone was awake and making a racket, for the entire company had done stand-to at first light. I gave up and decided to give my teeth a good scrub. Then I went and helped Sticky get the breakfast on.

  At 0800 the OC set off for the Green Zone, to rendezvous with the elders of Adin Zai. His psyops (psychological operations) team had arranged for a shura — an Afghan powwow — with the village chiefs, the aim of which was to explain exactly what yesterday’s shitfight had been all about.

  Basically, we’d been in there and smashed the enemy, and it was the gentlemanly thing to make clear why. We’d targeted a known Taliban stronghold, and only fired upon when fired at — and that’s what the OC would explain to the elders. If they understood why we’d been fighting our way through their village, it should help keep them onside.

  Apart from his HQ element of four men, the OC had two platoons with him for security. As he headed to the shura, Major Butt planned to leave men guarding the route out, in case of any foul play. That way, they should be able to fight their way through any ambushes and extract if they needed to.

  Sticky, Throp, Chris and I loaded up the wagon, and set off for our favourite position. Butsy wanted air on hand, as a deterrent to any nonsense at the shura. I had two F-18 Hornets check into my ROZ, call signs Wicked Three Three and Wicked Three Four. Apart from the tractors and trailers which were still at work hauling out the dead, nothing much was seen by the pilots.

  The OC made the rendezvous with the villagers without incident. A crowd of old men with turbans, and younger men with beaded skull caps gathered, whilst the OC stood out front and addressed them via a ‘terp’, or interpreter.

  The elders reported that thirty enemy fighters had been killed. As a result of the battle, the entire Taliban presence had been forced out of Adin Zai. The OC radioed us the good news, and warned us that he was starting his push back towards the laager. Once he’d rejoined us, we would depart for FOB Price the way we’d come in.

  Major Butt had barely left the shura when it kicked off big time. From the Vector’s open turret I could hear the repeated crunch of RPGs and the long bursts of small arms fire. The OC radioed us that his HQ element had been hit in a double-sided ambush. He was hopelessly outnumbered.

  From the west, the men of the platoons were trying to fight their way through to relieve him. The enemy forces were 140 metres north and east of the OC’s position, and closing fast. This was danger-close, but it was nowhere near as tight as some of the air missions I’d done during the previous day’s battle.

  I radioed the F-18s.

  ‘Wicked Three Three, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: I’ve got my HQ element in the Green Zone being hit hard. Friendly coordinates are: 62903781. Readback.’

  The pilot confirmed the details. I explained that I had enemy forces one-four-zero metres to the east and north of the OC’s position, and asked the pilot to smash them.

  ‘I want immediate attack using GBU-38s, on a north-east to south-west run. You’re danger-close to friendlies. Ground commander’s initials are SB.’

  ‘Roger that,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Programming one GBU-38 to drop on each of the enemy positions. Banking around. Call for clearance.’

  I watched the pilot tear about in a screaming turn to bring the F-18 on to my line of attack. I was urging him to get a bloody move on. What a shit state we’d be in if the OC and his lads got killed or captured on the day after the battle — especially as all he’d been doing was having a chat with the locals, to win some hearts and minds.

  Suddenly, the F-18 pilot was back on the air. But all I could hear was the horrible rhythmic wailing of warning alarms blaring away in his cockpit.

  ‘I got big problems up here,’ the pilot yelled above the racket. ‘Breaking off my attack. Returning to base. Wicked Three Four on task and awaiting your call.’

  That was it. He aborted the attack run and signed off the air. It was fair enough. From the sound of those alarms it was like his jet was about to fall out of the sky. I radioed his wing, and repeated the attack instructions. The pilot said he needed a minute to get into a p
osition. I was cursing to myself as I counted down the seconds to clear him in.

  There was a squelch of static and I knew immediately that something was wrong. The pilot was in the midst of a screaming turn, and he couldn’t be calling with any good news.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Wicked Three Four — I’ve got a total weapons computer malfunction. I am unable to attack. Repeat: unable to use any weapons.’

  That was both F-18s out of action, and still the OC was deep in the shit. This was getting desperate. I asked Wicked Three Four to fly a show of force over the enemy positions at fifty metres altitude, firing flares.

  ‘I want repeated shows of force,’ I yelled at the pilot. ‘And as low as you can make them.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ the pilot replied. ‘Starting shows of force now.’

  ‘Wait out.’

  I flipped frequency on my TACSAT, to bring me on to that of Stoneage. Stoneage, based at Kandahar airfield, is the top dog in terms of all air missions in southern Afghanistan. As JTACs we were only ever supposed to call Stoneage in an emergency. With two F-18s out of action and the OC deep in the shit, this was it as far as I was concerned.

  ‘Stoneage, Widow Seven Nine, d’you copy?’

  As I waited for the reply, I felt like I used to when waiting to see the headmaster after causing trouble at school. But fuck it, this was dire and I had to do something.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, this is Stoneage,’ came the gravel-voiced response.

  ‘Sitrep: I’ve got my HQ element surrounded and at risk of being overrun in a danger-close contact. I have two Wicked call signs out of action with systems failures. I need immediate G-CAS. Repeat: immediate G-CAS.’

  ‘Widow Seven Niner, I have pilots running for the fast jets to launch G-CAS now,’ came the reply. ‘I’ll radio in time-to-target once they’re in the air.’

  G-CAS stands for Ground-launched Close Air Support. It was the quickest emergency air cover available when no other fast jets were free and in the air. The main advantage aircraft like the F-18s, F-16s and F-15s have over the Apache — apart from the heavy ordnance they can carry — is their time from launch to target.

  With a top speed in excess of Mach 2 at altitude, and a rate of climb of some 17,000 metres per minute, an F-18 could reach us in the fraction of the time it would take an Apache gunship. It made them worth every dollar of the $30 million it cost to build one.

  By now Wicked Three Four had flown three shows of force. From the open turret of the Vector, I’d seen the last go in at what looked like twenty-metre altitude. But it was having bugger-all effect on the enemy. Their commanders had obviously learned the lesson from yesterday’s battle: shows of force meant little, and they were to keep attacking.

  The OC reported eight enemy kills, but still he was being hit by a murderous barrage of small arms and RPGs.

  ‘We’re in the dirt, well isolated and it’s not looking good!’ he was yelling on the radio, to Chris. ‘Tell Bommer we need something now!’

  Where the fuck was that G-CAS? As if in answer, there was a squelch of static as the big man came up on the air.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Stoneage. You’ve got two Uproar call signs scrambled, inbound to your position.’

  Just as soon as the pair of F-18s had checked into my ROZ, I passed Uproar Two Three the coordinates of the enemy positions and cleared him in to attack. The F-18 pilot zoomed in his optics to the coordinates, and immediately he was back on the air to me.

  ‘Visual enemy position. Visual ten to twelve pax in the woodstrip, with muzzle flashes.’

  ‘I need immediate attack with an airburst munition on the centre of mass of enemy. Attack line north-east to south-west run.’

  ‘One minute out,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Tipping in. Call for clearance.’

  I cleared the F-18 pilot to attack, and he released a GBU-38 airburst. The explosion ripped apart the air above the enemy position, and tore into the woodland below, hurling branches and chunks of earth high into the air.

  ‘Get in!’ I yelled. ‘I need BDA,’ I radioed the pilot, hoping to god I hadn’t smashed any of our lads.

  ‘BDA: seven pax KIA in the treeline,’ the pilot replied. ‘I can see survivors fleeing their positions, and running away from your forces.’

  There were seven killed in action (KIA) that the pilot could see, and probably a whole lot more that he couldn’t. The enemy were on the run and had been broken. There was no need for a follow-up attack. Butsy and the men of B Company had survived again, and it was time for them to get the hell out of there.

  We regrouped at the laager and the convoy began forming up for departure. But this was when it all went totally warped. Before we could set off, the Mortar Company Commander came to have an urgent word with the OC. He had with him one of the terps, and as we gathered around they related a simply incredible story.

  At the start of the previous day’s action, a young Afghan male of fighting age had blundered in to the Mortar Company’s position. The young man was shouting like a madman, but being a mortar company they had no terp with them. They threw the guy in the back of the ‘greeny wagon’ — the Mortar Company truck — until a terp could be found to talk with him.

  Apparently, that had just happened, and this was the young man’s story. He claimed to be one of ten Afghan policemen who had been stationed at Zumbelay, a town to the east of us across the Helmand River. Six days ago the Taliban had kidnapped him, and nine other policemen, from the local cop shop. The Taliban had taken the ten men to Adin Zai. There they were stripped of their boots and uniforms and held captive in the village mosque. Three days later us lot had pitched up on the desert horizon, massing to attack Adin Zai.

  The mosque was four hundred metres from our line of departure, and it was from there that we’d received the fiercest resistance as our initial assault went in. The enemy had concluded we were trying to rescue the kidnapped policemen. They’d bundled the ten men out of the mosque and driven them into the desert.

  The Taliban had taken them to a sunken wadi, and ordered them to make a run for it. As they’d sprinted for their lives the Taliban came after them in pickups, hunting them down. I guess that was their idea of a bit of sport — gunning down unarmed policemen. In the ensuing mayhem the young man had escaped.

  He’d run across the desert for two hours solid, before blundering into our position. The poor guy’s feet were torn to shreds. What gave his story added credibility was this: we’d heard about the kidnap already. Four days prior to the start of the present mission it had been the main item of interest in the Intel brief at FOB Price.

  The question was — what did we now do about it? The OC put a call through to the Commanding Officer of 2 MERCIAN, Colonel Richard Westley. Butsy and the lads were totally shattered, and looking forward to returning to base. But it wasn’t to be.

  The response that came back from the CO was this: if at all possible we were to go and recover the corpses of the murdered coppers.

  And so we put the young Afghan lad in one of the Vikings, and told him to take us to the bodies.

  Six

  THE SOMME

  We drove for just over a mile across the baking desert until we found the first corpse. The young Afghan lad had led us to the lip of a wadi. We pulled up on a stretch of high ground that seemed to dance and shimmer in the heat. This was where the Taliban had offloaded the ten policemen, he explained, before they started shooting.

  We approached the edge of the dry valley on foot. The young policeman gestured over the edge, and started shouting and wailing and tearing at his hair. I peered over, and some ten metres below was the body. It was a young Afghan lad who looked to be no older than fourteen. He had a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead.

  We followed the distraught Afghan policeman down the slope, at the bottom of which were three more crumpled forms. All of them had been shot in the head at close range. The telltale black burn marks of cordite were visible around the entry wounds, showing how close the gun muzzle had
been when the round was fired.

  One of the captives had been made to pray before the Taliban put a bullet in his brain. He was stone-cold dead and frozen in a gruesome caricature of prayer, still kneeling with his forehead on the dirt. Another had been shot through both his ankles, before taking a bullet in the forehead.

  Three hundred and fifty metres down the wadi we found two further corpses. These guys had made a desperate bid to escape, and their bodies were riddled with bullet holes. The final three were scattered a way further down the wadi’s dry bed, the last mile or so from where the Taliban had set them running. Tyre tracks in the sand showed where the Taliban gunmen must have come screeching after the terrified men, their weapons firing on automatic from the rear of their Toyota trucks. Their death run had been like a classic manhunt, and I guess the Taliban had had their sick ‘fun’.

  A couple of the victims had been crawling on the ground in a desperate effort to escape, when the last of the bullets were pumped into them. The Taliban had chosen to do their torture and murder here, as the walls of the wadi would have shielded the noise of the gunfire from us.

  The smell wasn’t too bad yet, for it had only been a day and a half since the executions. But the palpable evil of what had happened here was sickening. Nine young policemen had been tortured and executed in cold blood. No one doubted the young survivor’s story.

  We returned to the high ground, and radioed a request for a team from the Special Investigations Branch (SIB) of the military police to attend the scene, plus the bomb-disposal boys. We needed the Ammo Technical Officer (ATO) lads to check that the bodies hadn’t been booby-trapped. Prior to that, we couldn’t begin to bag them up or move them.

  We went back to the Vector, parked on the brow of the wadi. There was nothing for it but to get a brew on. Sticky threw some boil-in-the-bag meals in the ammo tin, and we had an early tea. It sounds harsh, but what else were we to do whilst awaiting the arrival of the specialists?

  An hour later I got a call from an Apache gunship. The Ugly call sign was inbound to our position, escorting a Chinook transport helicopter. I got the gunship to fly a couple of recces around us, to check for enemy, as we were only five hundred metres from the Green Zone. Nothing was seen, and the Apache brought the big, twin-rotor helicopter in to land.