‘Nowt’s the matter, love. It’s just, I was up at the crack of dawn and I’m well-knackered.’
After the call, I went and joined Throp and Sticky in the Vector. Sticky was staring ahead with that wired, ‘thousand-yard stare’ look that I guess we all had to have by now. It was the weird, unfocused, shell-shocked look of having been in the fight of your lives for hours and hours on end, not to mention the weeks of combat before.
‘Is it all ever worth it?’ Sticky muttered.
‘Is what ever worth it, mate?’ I asked.
‘Any one of us could’ve got whacked from those bombs you called in.’
I shrugged. ‘Aye. Top bloody present that would’ve been on the wife’s wedding anniversary.’
‘So, is it ever worth it, for eighteen hundred quid a month?’
The only answer was a chorus of Andy’s ‘Fucking ’ells’ that drifted across to the Vector.
Twenty Two
BIN LADEN’S SUMMERHOUSE
At stand-to the following morning I had two Apaches —
The Apache pilots were gutted that a major action like yesterday’s could have gone down without Ugly playing a bigger part in it. For once I was glad to have had those jets over us, as opposed to Apache. Only something with the capacity to drop serious ordnance could have beaten off an attack of the ferocity that we had faced.
I got the Apache pilots searching over the positions of the previous day’s battle. But apart from a smoking cooking fire at Golf Bravo Nine One, there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.
A couple of days went by with only sporadic attacks against us. The odd burst of small arms fire and 107mm rocket barrages hit PB Sandford, but there was nothing resembling a full-blown attack.
Alpha Xray got malleted from the woodline at Golf Bravo Nine One. I couldn’t get any air, so Chris called in a barrage from the 105mm howitzers and drove the enemy off. It was like they were probing us all over again, in an effort to test our resolve and our lines of defence.
Golf Bravo Nine One was fast becoming the enemy’s start line for any assault. Their headquarters we reckoned was back at Golf Bravo Nine Eight — the position that our foot patrol had stumbled into. That would explain why they had fought so ferociously, throwing in waves of fighters in an effort to annihilate us.
We pushed a patrol down to Alpha Xray, on foot and with two Snatch Land Rovers. Throp and I went on it, in part to defuse the tension of being cooped up in PB Sandford, and in part ’cause I had air over the convoy. I got the Dude call signs flying recces to the east of AX, around where Davey Graham had been gunned down.
Nothing was seen. Throp and I tabbed back towards PB Sand-ford, along with the platoon from AX that had been relieved. As we did I lost the air. The F-15s were ripped to a TIC somewhere else in Helmand. The radio chatter was going wild that they had eyes on the patrol, but even with the F-15s gone there still wasn’t a sniff from the enemy.
That night I got a pair of A-10s above me. We’d got Intel that the enemy were doing a major resupply by vehicles out in the desert. It was all part of their build-up in the Triangle, the ultimate aim of which was to smash us. Intel reports had eight or nine vehicles involved in the resupply. In due course the A-10 pilots found a desert convoy.
Via my Rover terminal I could see the group of vehicles the Hog call signs had discovered. But as Chris, Throp, Sticky and I studied the images, we couldn’t see anything that resembled ammo or weapons. For all we knew it could be a midnight wedding. We decided we couldn’t hit the convoy, and we let it go on its way.
By morning, the radio chatter was hot about a successful resupply. Enemy units were being ordered to fetch new weapons and ammo. I had a pair of F-15s overhead, and got them flying air recces all across the Triangle. But not a thing was moving down there, not even farmers working their fields. I’d never seen it this quiet. It was weird. Spooky.
In desperation, I got the F-15s to fly search transects over the old Soviet trench system, in the desert four kilometres to the north-east of us. There was more than a kilometre of interlinked earthworks, where you could move from position to position without being seen.
We reckoned those trenches linked into an underground tunnel system, stretching all across the Triangle. How else could the enemy resupply their fighters, without being seen from the air? We’d had reports that the Triangle was honeycombed with hidden caverns and tunnels, and the body of evidence was growing by the day.
A couple of days back I’d had a Predator over the Green Zone. As it had flown its recces, the drone had passed over this small, tower-like building, enclosed on all sides by thick woodland. There were four males visible, one on each corner of the roof. I couldn’t see any weapons, but those guys sure looked like sentries to me.
The building was some 2.5 kilometres east of Alpha Xray, so well into enemy territory. It was way beyond the Golf Bravo codenames, and into the Golf Charlies. I got the Predator to loiter over that grid. I saw a figure leave the building and walk along a path for a minute or so. He reached the middle of a field and completely disappeared. One moment he was there, the next gone.
I watched another male of fighting age leave the building, follow the path to the centre of the field, and puff — he was gone. By the third time, I was convinced I’d found the entrance to a tunnel system. More than likely it had been built during the time of the war against the Soviet Red Army, and would lead all the way back to the Soviet trenches.
The building in the woods was in a perfect defensive position. It sat in a crook of the Helmand River, on a promontory. It was invisible from the ground, being surrounded by thick woodland. It was only by luck that I’d spotted it from the air. I nicknamed it ‘Bin Laden’s Summerhouse’, and the name just stuck. Word spread, and I started having pilots ask me if I’d spotted Bin Laden himself there yet.
I got another Predator in overwatch of the Summerhouse. This time, there were fifteen males sat under the trees, getting briefed by a guy leaning on a motorcycle. Not one of them was showing any weapons, and I’d yet to see a sniff of a gun. But my instinct was screaming at me that this was a major enemy hub.
The guy finished talking, got astride the bike, and was driven off down the track by his ‘driver’. I tracked them for fifteen kilometres moving in the direction of Sangin. En route they kept getting waved through by groups of males of fighting age. Finally, they reached a crossing of the Helmand River and boarded a boat. Whilst on the water the main figure swapped his black turban — the uniform of the Taliban — for a white one. Around about then I lost the Predator. But I’d bet any money that the guy was some Taliban bigwig, and the Summerhouse some high- level enemy base.
Of course, everyone from the OC down wanted to go in and hit the Summerhouse. But it was a good kilometre beyond Golf Bravo Nine Eight, the point at which we’d walked into the Davey Graham ambush. It would take a lot more blokes, and a lot more firepower, to battle through to there.
I kept the memory sticks of all the material that I’d recorded from the Predator feeds. I passed the lot up to Nick the Stick, and those in command of his group of elite American warriors. It was better to leave it up to those boys to hit the Summerhouse, with maybe a ‘Spooky’ call sign and some Apaches on hand to assist. For now I had my own priorities to deal with. Chief of those was trying to work out where the hell the entire human presence in the Triangle had got to. Maybe the enemy were down in their tunnel systems, sorting out their ammo resupply, and briefing their newly arrived fighters. That would fit with the Intel that was coming in.
We decided to take advantage of the enemy going to ground. We headed out with the Czech Army unit, in their Toyota wagons encased in camo-netting and mock-greenery. Watching from a distance, the Czechs on patrol looked like a line of moving bushes, albeit with long-nosed Dushka heavy machine guns poking out.
We drove past Alpha Xray and pushed on to Golf Bravo Nine One. As there was nothing doing with the enemy, we wrapped a couple of strings of plastic explosive around each of the trees, and blew a long line of them sky-high. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! It wasn’t that we hated trees: we just didn’t like the cover they provided for
