Fire Strike 7/9

our limit of exploitation, and we would push no further east. We were targeting an enemy stronghold in the heart of ‘their territory’ — the Green Zone — and I had priority as a JTAC throughout Helmand in terms of air missions.

At 2300 we’d pushed out of the British base at FOB Price in a convoy of Vikings, WMIKs and Snatches, plus our borrowed Vector. I had an intelligence asset flying over the convoy, call sign Dragon Zero Two. No sooner had the gates of FOB Price clanged shut, than the aircraft started picking up some interesting snippets of enemy chatter.

‘The enemy tanks have left their base!’ the Taliban were yelling to each other. They called all our vehicles ‘tanks’, no matter what they were. ‘They’re heading to Adin Zai. Fight them to the death, brothers! Allahu akbar!’

So much for the secrecy of our mission. The enemy seemed to know what we were doing almost before we did. I had air controls all that night as we crept through the open desert. By the time we reached the high ground near Adin Zia, the air cover was reporting women and children fleeing the village to the east. It was a classic combat indicator.

By mid-morning, Adin Zai village was totally deserted, apart from groups of males of fighting age. But this wasn’t going to be any old gunfight at the OK Corral. Under the rules of engagement we had to PID (positively identify) enemy fighters before killing them, and ideally once they’d started shooting at us to prove ‘hostile intent’.

We’d lain up in the open desert during the day, our orders being to launch the attack at first light the following morning. I’d had air platforms stacked up above me, flying recces over the mission objectives.

‘We await the tanks that are parked in the desert!’ the Taliban commanders were calling to each other. ‘Hold firm in your positions, brothers, until they move to attack us!’

I’d had more air that night, and a result I hadn’t slept a wink. Now, as I sucked nicotine into my greedy lungs, I realised how totally and utterly chinstrapped I was. I lay on the dirt longing to close my eyes and get just a few minutes’ kip.

I jerked awake to the sound of a 107mm Chinese rocket screaming over the top of us. I’d dropped off for a second or two, my chin nodding on to my chest. The warhead ploughed into the desert some seventy metres beyond us, throwing out a deafening blast and a cloud of dirt and smoke. What a fucking rude awakening that was.

I heard Sticky’s laugh. ‘Yeah, and no guessing: the next will be short.’

Each 107mm rocket was about the size of a man’s leg. It took two to slide the twenty-kilo warhead into the launch tube. The enemy were using a man-portable tripod launcher, hence the time between each rocket being loaded, re-aimed and fired. So now we had a mortar unit, plus a 107mm launcher team to find and smash from the air.

Not a minute after that first rocket had been fired, a second came screaming down on us. It smacked into the rock of the ridge line less than twenty metres below. It threw up an angry mushroom cloud of black smoke high above our heads.

Sticky let out a crazed cackle. ‘Didn’t I bloody say so!’

‘Right, in the wagon!’ Chris yelled. ‘Let’s get moving.’

I took a last drag on my tab, flicked the butt away and levered myself to my feet. As I turned to clamber aboard the Vector there was a howling, screaming inrush, like a bloody great big dragon was about to breathe fire down our necks. An instant later the ground shook with a sickening, thudding impact right at my very feet.

That third 107mm ploughed into the dirt three metres from where Chris, Sticky and I were standing. This is it, I thought. They got us. We’re fucking dead. I tensed for the explosion, fully expecting to see Sticky and Chris’s brains splattered all over the side of the Vector, an instant before mine joined them.

Instead, a choking cloud of dust and sand engulfed us. I felt like shit, but I sure as hell wasn’t dead. Gradually, the cloud cleared. It revealed a small crater more like a rabbit hole right in the shadow of the Vector. I stared at it, barely daring to breathe. I swallowed hard.

That 107mm rocket had burrowed a hole in the dirt at our very feet, but it hadn’t exploded. It was a dud. It was a fucking dud.

I heaved myself into the wagon and grabbed another tab with a hand that was visibly shaking. I sparked it up and clamped it between my teeth to stop the shakes from showing. As I dragged in the smoke, all I kept thinking was this: What were the chances of that happening? What were the chances?

It was a direct hit, and it was a fucking dud. It was the first — and, as it would prove, the last — dud 107mm of our entire Afghan tour. Whoever says that no one is looking after us? Someone was up there, that was for sure. We had an angel on our shoulders.

I glanced furtively at Sticky, Throp and Chris. No one was saying a word. What was there to say, apart from something crass like: Aye, well, that was a close one. Best to crack on. But I knew what they were thinking, ’cause I was thinking it too: it’s time to get the fuck off this ridge line. No one wanted to be the one to say it, to voice the unthinkable. If we left the high ground, we were as good as abandoning the 2 MERCIAN lads in the midst of the battle of their lives.

‘If we get off the bloody ridge we’re next to bloody useless,’ I muttered, into the hands cupped around my fag. ‘I’d rather have a 107mm rammed up me grinner than do that.’

There was a ripple of nervous laughter. ‘Grinner’ is northern slang for backside. The lads were starting to learn a little of my lingo as time went by.

‘Best pray it’s another dud, if you’ve got it up your ass,’ said Sticky. ‘I still ain’t pulling it out though.’

And that was it — nothing more was said about our closest ever encounter with death. No one wanted to stay on this cursed ridge line, that was for certain. But we sure as hell weren’t leaving until the job was done.

Lance Bombardier Ben ‘Sticky’ Stickland was always larking about, no matter what shit we were in. Over the past few weeks he’d become like my mucker. I couldn’t help but love him. Sticky hailed from 29 Commando, and being a Commando gunner he was a top soldier. He was fit as a robber’s dog, and was on the scale of an ultramarathon runner. He had a totally stupid sense of humour, and was the funniest kind of killer you ever could meet. He and I were always messing, and he was almost as much of a practical joker as me.

But it wasn’t this that endeared me most to Sticky. Over the past few weeks he’d become like my shadow. More than anyone, I reckoned Sticky really got it. He could sense the unique beauty of conducting the air war, and he thrilled to the awesome power wielded by the JTAC.

The air war could turn a battle within seconds, and Sticky knew it. No other soldier on the battlefield could bring hundreds of million of dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art war machines to bear, with unrivalled power to crush and smash an attacking enemy. He loved JTAC-ing almost as much as I did.

Throp wrestled the wagon across a patch of rutted terrain, trying to choose a spot on high ground where we hadn’t already been targeted. A dog should never return to its own vomit, but we didn’t have much choice up here. I got on the TACSAT to the F-16 orbiting overhead.

‘Wicked Four One, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: we’re getting targeted by mortars plus 107mm rockets. Push up to twenty-five thousand feet, and search around our forward platoons, now eight hundred metres into the Green Zone.’

‘Roger that,’ came the F-16 pilot’s reply. ‘Climbing to twenty-five thousand.’

I wanted the F-16 high enough so no one could hear him, but low enough to spy on the enemy. Via the high- resolution optics located in the aircraft’s nose cone, the pilot could maintain eyes on the ground even from that altitude. I wanted the enemy to think our air cover had gone, so we could lure them out and smash them.

As the noise of the F-16 faded away to nothing, I levered myself up into the Vector’s turret. No sooner had it gone quiet, than there was another distant boom. The mortar was back in action.

But this time, the flash of the exploding round was down in the Green Zone, somewhere around the forward line of our troops. At about the same moment there were a series of sharp cracks of small arms fire and the crump of exploding RPGs.

‘Arsenic Three Zero’s in contact,’ Sticky yelled across at me. ‘Small arms, RPGs and mortars. They’re pinned down and going nowhere.’

I grabbed Sticky’s radio handset. He carried a specialist bit of comms kit that could talk to the 105mm field guns back at FOB Price, Camp Bastion, the air power and most stations in between. At present he had it tuned in to the company net.