Fire Strike 7/9

‘Roger that, Overlord. Good strike.’

‘Sir, I have to leave your airspace. Low fuel. I have to leave.’

Eight hours was the maximum air-time for a Predator, and I’d had him for seven-fifty as it was. I guessed the operator was shitting himself that his multi-million-dollar aircraft was going to run out of gas and ditch in the Afghan wildlands.

‘Roger that, Overlord. But keep your pod on the target area as you fly out of my ROZ.’

I wanted eyes on for as long as possible. As I gazed at the image, four figures scurried into view. They laid a blanket on the dirt, and started piling something on to it. As I watched, I realised it was blown-up pieces of human being. It was body parts. It was arms and legs and chunks of human flesh.

It wasn’t very pleasant, but it was either them or us, and this time the fight had gone our way. Three figures came crawling out from the trees. One of them lurched forwards on to the path, then lay completely still. I guess another was dead.

I sent a sitrep to Damo Martin: ‘Widow Eight Two, Widow Seven Nine; one times Hellfire fired and five times KIA Taliban…’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Damo cut in. ‘You’re trying to tell me you’ve killed five enemy with one Hellfire.’

‘Listen, I used the Predator’s Hellfire and I’ve got the footage to prove it.’

I had. It was another great thing about the Rover terminal: it recorded the images of the strike.

Damo came back, ‘Bommer, if what you’re telling me is true, it’s bloody class, mate: I want a copy of that bastard footage by teatime.’

The feed from the Predator was breaking up now.

‘Overlord leaving your ROZ,’ came the pilot’s voice. ‘Thanks very much, sir.’

‘Aye, it was fucking awesome mate.’

‘Yes sir, that it was. It was good working with you, sir. You stay safe down there, Widow Seven Nine.’

‘Aye, I fully intend to, mate.’

I flipped frequency to Damo Martin’s. ‘ROZ cold,’ I told him, signalling that there was nothing more happening in my airspace right now.

The chatter was going wild, as the enemy called for units to check in, but there were few if any answers. The OC was chuffed as nuts with that Hellfire strike. It was the first time the Green Army had ever fired a Hellfire from a UAV. To have done so, and taken out so many of the enemy, was one hell of a strike. The analysts in the US reckoned we’d killed seven outright, six were fatally wounded, and there were a lot more injuries.

At a minimum it was thirteen to that one Hellfire, which wasn’t bad going. We reran the footage on the Rover screen, and more details became clear. The enemy had outlying sentries posted, some of whom were less than fifty metres from Alpha Xray. Even when they’d mustered under the mortar fire, those sentries had remained in their positions.

It looked as if that one Hellfire strike had scuppered a big push on Alpha Xray. At 2000 hours I got a pair of Harriers overhead, and for two hours I had them flying search transects over the Green Zone, but it was deserted. I hit the sack and slept like a dead one until stand-to.

Nineteen GET SNOOPY

Chris kept twisting on about Sticky’s Snoopy key ring. The day after the Hellfire strike, he stuck his head into the back of the wagon. Sticky’s pack was on the seat, and there was the Snoopy dog hanging off the back of it. Chris stared at it for a second or two, then gave Throp and me the look.

‘Lads, I want something to happen to Snoopy,’ he announced. ‘Get fucking rid of it.’

Throp and I looked at each other. Fair enough. Chris was the boss, after all.

‘Leave it with us, mate,’ I assured him.

‘Consider it done, boss,’ Throp added.

We shut the Vector’s door, and I fished out a big black marker pen from my JTAC kit. The two of us proceeded to draw big black knobs all over Snoopy’s white fur. Then Throp unhooked it from the pack and dunked it in my urine bottle. That was it — job done.

Throp hung it back on Sticky’s pack but the wrong way round. You couldn’t see Snoopy’s face any more: all you could see was the dog’s back covered in knobs. A little later Sticky was back with us and fiddling around with his kit. All of a sudden he noticed that his Snoopy dog had been horribly defaced. He threw a track.

‘Who the fuck’s been drawing knobs on my Snoopy?’ he snarled.

I turned away from him trying to hold the laughter in. I grabbed my mug of lukewarm tea, took a slurp and got my eyes on my Rover screen. Throp just stared at Sticky with that look of his: What am I accused of doing this fucking time?

‘It’s fucking Chris, isn’t it?’ Sticky raged. ‘Ever since I got it he’s hated that Snoopy.’

Throp shrugged. ‘Fuck knows. All I know is it wasn’t us.’

Sticky reached out for the toy dog, took it off his pack and put it away carefully in his pocket. He had a right arse on. I’d never seen him so angry.

He glanced at Throp and me. ‘Look, lads, all I want to know is who drew cocks on my dog?’

That was it. I cracked up laughing, spluttering tea all over the wagon. All that morning Sticky kept asking the same question — Who drew knobs on my Snoopy? As he wasn’t getting any answers, he just concluded that it had to be Chris. It was fair enough, really. After all, it was Chris who’d ordered me and Throp to get rid of it.

But it was Jess, not Sticky, who was becoming the real victim of the FST wind-ups. Jess was the newcomer on the team, so I guess it was only natural for him to get picked on. He was a good lad, but he used to bite easily. And there was this weird clash between him and Chris that we reckoned all boiled down to hockey.

Jess had one glaringly obvious shortcoming: he didn’t seem able to grow a proper beard. By now the four of us had manly beard-fungus sprouting all over our faces. We hadn’t shaved since arriving at Monkey One Echo, two weeks earlier. We all had proper monster beards coming on. But for some reason Jess only seemed able to manage a light dusting of fuzz under his chin, with a couple of sprouts to either side of his mouth. Chris had nicknamed him ‘Upside Down Beard’, and Jess bloody hated it.

Sticky and I had got into the habit of tying up Jess’s clothes, whenever he was away at the well. We’d get his trousers, knot them, then each grab a leg and run in opposite directions. Then we’d do the same with his shirt. Jess would come back from the well and try to get his trousers on, only to find a knot in them the size of a boiled egg.

We’d be sat in the back of the wagon, pretending we were seriously busy. Jess would come over twisting. The four of us would look away, trying to pretend it was nowt to do with us, and doing our best not to crack up. How he managed to get those knots undone I will never know. Plus we were always hitting Jess with MRE- bombs.

With that lone Hellfire strike having smashed the enemy, there was nothing doing from their side, so we decided to have a big cricket day. We each kept the score in our heads and no one tried to cheat. If someone kicked off saying the ball hadn’t hit the stumps, and they had twenty of us saying they were out, then they were out. It was a great way to keep fit and to have a laugh, and to get a good suntan.

At 2200 I got allocated air, having two F-15s for three hours on yo-yo from a refuelling tanker. I got them scanning the length and breadth of the Green Zone, but there was zero happening. There wasn’t the slightest hint of an enemy presence anywhere. If you weren’t careful you could forget there was a war on. The total lack of enemy activity was spooky. That one Hellfire strike from the Predator couldn’t have put them all out of action. So where were they? And what were they up to?

The following morning we had two journalists pitch up at PB Sandford. They’d come down on a road move with a big resupply convoy. John Bingham was the writer, and Andy Parsons the photographer. Andy was the younger of the two, around twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and he was a top lad. He turned round to us on that first morning, and said: ‘I’m here to take photos, and John’s here to write stories. So watch what you’re doing and watch