what you’re saying around us.’
It was fair enough, and I appreciated the up-front honesty of the bloke. They carried with them blue body armour and helmets, to mark them out as being press. I didn’t think it would make the enemy any the less inclined to kill or capture them. But they had their rules, just like we had ours, and one of theirs was that they wore blue kit when going to war.
At last light I was up on JTAC Central with a pair of F-15s in the overhead. I was determined to find some enemy, if only to show the reporters we really were at war. From up on the roof I could sense they were out there, watching and waiting, ready to strike.
I’d just tasked the Dude call signs to fly search transects the length and breadth of the Green Zone, when they got ripped away to a TIC up at Kajaki, in the far north of Helmand. There was no more air available, so I went to bed none the wiser about where the enemy might be, or what they were planning.
After stand-to the following morning Butsy gave the order to take a foot patrol down to Alpha Xray, and Sticky and me were on it. The main purpose was to show a presence in the Triangle, and to check on the lads down at the Alamo.
Over the past couple of days there’d been a bit of a nasty fright on at AX, with bouts of horrible sickness. The OC had pushed a convoy of WMIKs and Snatches down to the base, and extracted the sickest of the lads, who was airlifted to Camp Bastion. A visit from a foot patrol would cheer their morale. Plus we could give the two journos a look-see around the Triangle.
We set off at 0900, taking Route Buzzard east along the high ground to Monkey One Echo. As soon as we were out of the gates, the radio chatter was buzzing that the enemy were visual with us. From Monkey One Echo we hooked south towards Route Crow, and were sucked into the suffocating humidity of the Green Zone. As we pushed ahead, well spaced in single file, I could feel eyes in the bush to either side of us.
We made Alpha Xray without incident, and filed into the base. I’d been down at AX quite a bit now, and I supposed I’d got used to it. But the reporter’s eyes were out on stalks. If PB Sandford was luxury, then Alpha Xray was the fucking pits. It was a place for fighting, eating, sleeping and defecating, and that was about it. It was the Alamo transported to the wilds of Afghanistan in the midst of a twenty-first-century war.
The entry point into Alpha Xray was a mud bridge over a shallow canal running along Route Crow. The bridge terminated at the main building, a two-storey square structure. Its thick mud walls were pitted with bullet holes and RPG craters, like a bloody great big sieve. Strung around the base of that building were rolls of razor wire, and the one gateway in was barred with coils and coils of the stuff. Inside, there was a rectangular compound, hemmed in by thick mud-brick walls twice the height of your average bloke.
The sandy-floored compound was doss house central for the twenty-odd lads garrisoning AX at any one time. It was threaded across with makeshift washing lines, slung with socks and pants hung out to dry, with heaps of kit stuffed into the thin shadows at the base of the walls. In one corner of the compound a blue Fosters lager sunshade had been erected over a rickety garden table. To either side the rectangular windows in the walls had been filled with sandbags, leaving just a slit of a gun turret through which to put down fire. There was a palpable sense of the siege about the place, and after their four-day stint none of the platoons was loath to leave.
A rank of body armour, backpacks and helmets lined the wall nearest the main building. Leaning carefully against each set of kit was an SA80, GPMG or Minimi Squad Assault Weapon (a drum-fed light machine gun). Belts of ammunition were wrapped carefully around the weapons, to keep the links out of the dirt. A rickety wooden ladder led up to the flat rooftop above. It was from there that the real defending, and the killing, was done.
The rooftop position at Alpha Xray had all-around vision over the surrounding bush. The three sides of the position looking away from the compound were lined with sandbag walls, to give a prone or crouching soldier some cover. A battlement in each corner provided a fire-turret for the GPMGs, and the lone 50-cal on its chunky tripod mount. Comms antennae bristled from radio packs on just about every corner. Piles of spent shell casings littered the roof, testimony to the ferocity of the recent fighting.
Scattered in amongst them were empty plastic water bottles and discarded helmets and crates and crates and crates of ammo. From the rooftop, the nearest treelines and thick cover were spitting-distance close. You could get around eight soldiers up on the roof, and that was the backbone of the defences here at Alpha Xray.
We had a chat with the lads, and all seemed to be bearing up well. Then we set off on the return leg of the patrol. Sticky and I were halfway across the river bridge on Route Crow, when Alan the terp alerted us to an item of radio chatter.
‘They’re saying they can see three figures on the bridge,’ Alan muttered. ‘They’re saying the central one has the stubby black aerial that controls the aeroplanes.’
The OC couldn’t understand it, either. He’d pushed a big looping patrol all through the Green Zone, from the eastern side of Rahim Kalay to the western edge of Adin Zai, yet not a sniff of the enemy. Not a shot had been fired since that Predator’s Hellfire strike.
Where the fuck was the enemy? What were they up to? What were they planning?
The OC gave orders to push out a second foot patrol, for the early hours of the following day. This time, we’d head out from PB Sandford as two full platoons, and at night. And we’d press further eastwards than ever we had before, into real bandit country.
The eastern limit of the patrol was to be an enemy position marked as Golf Bravo Nine Eight on the GeoCell maps. It was a full half-kilometre beyond Alpha Xray, and totally uncharted territory as far as we were concerned. The patrol would consist of both platoons from PB Sandford, so forty-odd men, plus the OC and his HQ element and the full FST. We’d leave only a skeleton crew behind, and we’d link up with more lads at Alpha Xray. Plus we’d take the two journalists, Andy and John, with us. If that didn’t get a rise out of the enemy, then nothing would.
At 0130 I had my first air checking into ROZ Suzy. I had two A-10s,
At 0200 we filed out of PB Sandford in the pitch dark, a long snake of heavily armed fighters on foot, and all on night-vision. Apart from the clink of gunmetal on body armour, and the jet-whine of the A-10s high above, the valley was utterly still and silent. But we knew the enemy were out there somewhere, and we were going hunting.
By 0320 we’d advanced a good four hundred metres past Alpha Xray, and were deep into unknown territory. We were moving ahead at a dead slow. A dozen paces, then the whispered order to halt passed along the line. The entire column would remain motionless for a minute or more, crouching and listening intently in the hollow, ringing silence.
We pushed ahead for a good twenty minutes or so, before a cry rang out in the darkness. It came from the direction of our front, and it sounded like a verbal challenge in Arabic. An instant later, the night exploded all around us, as a barrage of RPG rounds came howling out of the trees and slamming into the bush. I dived for cover, brought up my SA80 and was about to open fire, so strong was the soldier’s instinct to get the rounds down and to fight. Instead, I forced myself to grab Sticky by the arm, as I yelled into his ear.
‘Get the point platoon’s fucking coordinates!’
As Sticky got on his radio, I was hunkered down against a tree trunk and bawling into the TACSAT. Rounds were fizzing through the air above, and all around me our lads were putting down a savage amount of return fire. It was deafening.
‘Hog call signs,
‘Roger. Standing by.’
Sticky had his face in mine, yelling out the grids.
‘
The pilot confirmed the grid.
‘I need a 30mm strafe on enemy treeline, on south-east to north-west attack run, to keep it away from
