Fire Strike 7/9 Read online

  As the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC – pronounced ‘Jaytack’) attached to B Company, 2 MERCIAN, it was my role to call in the warplanes. I was only to use my personal weapon as a last resort. Trouble was, that was all totally counter-intuitive to normal soldiering.

  The natural reaction whenever you were engaged was to put down rounds. To save your life and that of your mates. To kill the enemy. It was what soldiers like Sticky and me had trained to do for years. But as a JTAC I had to force myself to go against all my instincts, and trust the ground troops to defend me.

  Since 0400 that morning I’d been working the air power. First, I’d had a pair of A-10 Thunderbolt ground-attack aircraft on station. They’d been ripped by a Harrier and then another pair of A-10s. I had those A-10s overhead right now. One was searching the Green Zone for the enemy, the other checking the compounds ahead of the 2 MERCIAN’s line of departure.

  There was nothing better to hit that enemy RPG team than those A-10 ‘tank busters’. The A-10 has a nose-mounted, sevenbarrel 30mm Gatling gun that spews out a staggering 3,900 rounds per minute. It provides devastating firepower even against a main battle tank, and would turn those RPG gunners into Taliban purée.

  So powerful was the kickback from the cannon, that it had been known to stall the aircraft’s giant turbofan jet engines. In theory they could be restarted in mid-air. But I didn’t fancy being an A-10 pilot and trying. Either way, the A-10 was fast becoming my aircraft of choice in Afghanistan.

  I scrabbled about in the rear of the wagon for the handset of my TACSAT, a UHF ground-to-air radio. The back of the Vector was my domain. JTAC Central. It might look like total chaos, but it was my chaos. My fingers grabbed the TACSAT handset from under the seat, and I jammed it against my ear.

  ‘Hog Two Two, Widow Seven Nine, do you copy?’

  There was a burst of echoing static in my ear. It was drowned out by a volley of bullets slamming into the compound wall directly behind us, chunks of blasted mud wall hammering off the Vector’s armoured sides. I glanced skywards, cursing for the A-10 to respond.

  From the TACSAT a black cable snaked out of the Vector’s open hatch, connecting to a satellite antenna atop the wagon. From there, the signal beamed skywards to the receiver embedded in the nose cone of the jet. But the TACSAT was a line-of-sight comms system. If the A-10s were out of sight they would miss my call.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, this is Hog Two Two, you’re loud and clear.’

  Yeah! We were on. ‘Sitrep: engaging enemy RPG team in north– south woodline two hundred metres due east of our position. Can you see our tracer?’

  ‘Negative. I don’t see your tracer,’ came the American pilot’s calm drawl.

  I’d already talked the A-10 pilots around our position. I’d given them the layout of the three platoons below us, and their routes of advance into Adin Zai. Using maps compiled from aerial photos by our GeoCell unit, we’d located the three targets of today’s mission – Objectives Silver, Gold and Platinum. The last – Objective Platinum – was a suspected Taliban training school.

  I’d briefed the pilots on the weapons systems Intel reckoned the enemy had in there. Apart from the usual – small arms, machine guns and RPGs – there was a B-10 107mm anti-tank gun, a big and nasty bit of kit.

  The A-10’s one drawback is its speed. Maxed out it only does 420mph, about the same as that achieved by the P-47 Thunderbolt, the Second World War aircraft the A-10 is named after. That left it vulnerable to the kind of fire put up by a 107mm anti-aircraft gun.

  I checked the GeoCell map propped opposite me on some ammo crates, searching for the enemy position. For a second it struck me how it would really chafe if those ammo crates got hit by an RPG. I forced the thought to the back of my mind.

  I ran my finger along the map east from our position, and found the enemy treeline. I took a slug of flat, lukewarm Sprite from an open can, spat out a couple of dead flies, then spoke into the handset.

  ‘Enemy RPG team in treeline running north–south for one hundred metres from ridge line, then dog-legs south-east for fifty, terminating in a dirt track running west–east along riverside. D’you see it?’

  ‘Visual treeline,’ came back the pilot’s reply. ‘This is what I see: L-shaped wood with smoke plumes at north end, just below demarcation line.’

  Result! I glanced at the GPS I had hung from the roof at the front of the wagon, and did a flash of mental arithmetic. ‘Enemy coordinates are 67473628. Nearest friendlies – our position two hundred metres west. Readback.’

  The pilot read the details back to me.

  ‘Affirm,’ I confirmed. ‘I want immediate attack with three-zero mike-mike strafing treeline on a south-to-north attacking run.’

  I checked the GeoCell map one last time. The tiniest fraction of a mistake – one digit wrong on the coordinates – and I would bring down the strafe on to our position, or worse still that of the lads below. I double-checked the A-10’s line of attack: it should keep the 30mm cannon fire well away from us and the 2 MERCIAN lads.

  ‘Tipping in,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Requesting clearance.’

  It’s the JTAC who ‘buys the bomb’ – always. It’s our call to ID and clear a target, to choose the weapons system, and to make sure friendly forces are a safe distance from the strike. Without my final clearance, the A-10 pilot would abort.

  I stuck my head out the top of the wagon and searched the sky to the south-east, the direction the A-10 should be attacking from. As I did so, a barrage of rounds started sparking and whining off the armoured roof of the Vector. I needed that bloody strafing run, and I needed it now. But I couldn’t see the A-10 anywhere.

  I caught the distant flash of sunlight on metal. It was an aircraft, but it wasn’t where it should be. It was coming out of the rising sun directly to the east of us. On that line he’d be hitting the treeline cross-wise, which was no fucking use to anyone. Worse still, we were directly in his line of fire. Those 30mm cannon rounds would make mincemeat out of the Vector.

  I yanked the handset up on its lead. ‘Abort! Abort!’ I yelled. ‘Abort! Fuck off and attack from south to north! Attack line as instructed!’

  ‘Roger, aborting,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘South-to-north attack run. Banking around now.’

  I watched the pilot pull out of his dive, and roll the aircraft into a tight left-hand turn. Thank fuck for that. The squat ugly form hadn’t been nicknamed ‘the Warthog’ for nothing. It was neither graceful nor pretty, but as a ground attack aircraft it has no equal.

  ‘Repositioning,’ the pilot confirmed. He popped the jet, bringing it up in a screaming climb. ‘Visual with enemy pax in the woods,’ the pilot continued. ‘The treeline is twenty metres across, and I can see armed figures running around in there.’

  From the front of the Vector I could hear Chris briefing the OC, Major ‘Butsy’ Butt, on all that I was doing. The OC was a blinding commander, and he had total trust in the air power. Previous contacts had proven what a battle winner it was.

  Still, he was down in the bush of the Green Zone, having gone firm on the start line, and he had to be wondering what the fuck was going on. Before his men had even begun their advance we’d started world war three up here, and there were rounds and RPGs and jets screaming through the air.

  It was Chris’s job to keep the OC informed of all that I was doing. He was monitoring my frequency, which was reserved solely for JTAC-to-air comms, and relaying all to the OC, which left me clear and focused to call in the warplanes.

  The A-10 reached the top of its climb and keeled over, coming nose-down on to the enemy position. The seven-barrel cannon fires wherever the jet is pointing, so the pilot has to dive directly on to target.

  ‘Tipping in,’ came the pilot’s drawl. ‘Requesting clearance.’

  At that moment a third pair of RPGs came howling towards the wagon. I ducked, my head and shoulders buffeted by the powerful shockwave as the rockets howled past the Vector’s open turrets. They were fag-paper cl
ose to us.

  ‘No change friendlies!’ I screamed into the handset. ‘You’re clear hot!’

  ‘In hot,’ came the reply. ‘Engaging.’

  I was oblivious to the enemy gunfire now. I had to see the attack go in. It was crucial for the JTAC to confirm the success of any airstrike. The pilot might report a good hit, but the aircrew didn’t always see everything. To wrongly report a target eliminated and allow your lads to advance could cost many good men’s lives.

  The A-10 seemed almost to stall in mid-air, as the Gatling gun opened fire. There was a long, thunderous ‘brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’, as the roar of the seven-barrel cannon echoed around and around the valley. It sounded like one of those automatic machines that counts tenners at the bank, only magnified a thousand times over.

  The thick, stubby barrel of the Gatling gun was clearly visible spitting fire. For every second the pilot kept his finger on the trigger mechanism, sixty-five 30mm cannon rounds tore into target.

  Shredded branches and jagged chunks of tree trunk spewed out of the woodline, along with god-only-knew what. It was like Farmer Giles was getting to work in there with some massive, ghostly hedgecutter. By the time the pilot had bottomed out the Warthog’s dive, he’d raked the entire woodland from end to end.

  ‘Hog Two Two, that was a class strafe,’ I radioed. ‘Fucking class.’

  I checked with his wing aircraft, Hog One One, but he was busy at the refuelling tanker. I had the pair of them for two hours on ‘yoyo’, meaning they were flying a relay, taking on avgas at a refuelling aircraft so as to return to the battlefield.

  I radioed the first pilot. ‘Hog Two Two, I want immediate reattack, the woodline spraying on same line of attack.’

  ‘Roger that. Banking around now. Tipping in.’

  The pilot put his aircraft into a tight climb, the jet engines screaming away like a pair of overworked giant hairdryers. As he reached the apex and threw the aircraft into a steep dive, I cleared him in.

  The stubby muzzle on the A-10’s nose spat fire. The pilot did a second, even longer and more devastating strafe.

  ‘Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzztt.’

  As the last echoes of the cannon fire faded away, it suddenly all went very quiet. Our own 50-cals and Gimpys had ceased firing. And for the first time since that opening RPG volley, we weren’t being pounded by bullets and warheads any more.

  For now at least, the valley of Adin Zai had fallen into an eerie silence.

  TWO

  CARNAGE

  It was barely 0700 and the 2 MERCIAN lads had yet to set foot into bandit country. But my heart was beating as fast as an A-10’s Gatling gun, my pulse booming in my ears. The boiling Afghan heat was yet to hit us, but I was already sweating like a pig.

  I glanced at Sticky beside me in the wagon’s turret, then Chris below up front. Everyone’s eyes were like saucers.

  ‘Fookin’ hell,’ I muttered, doing my best Redcar accent. ‘Fookin’ fookin’ fookin’ ’ell.’

  I’m from the north-east of England, and everyone mistakes me for a Geordie. I was forever playing up to it with the three southerners who made up our FST.

  Sticky smiled. ‘You took your time to hit ’em, mate.’

  ‘Result,’ Chris added.

  ‘Sorted,’ I confirmed.

  ‘You have to, mate?’ Throp grunted, from where his bulk was halfhidden, hunched over the Vector’s wheel. ‘I was enjoying the scrap.’

  It was typical Throp. Like Chris, Lance Bombardier Martin Hemmingfield was a Royal Artillery lad. He was a six-foot-two hunk of muscle and bone, with the breaking strain of a KitKat. He was also completely fearless. You could put him in front of ten meatheads in a street brawl, and stand back as he took them all on.

  I loved having Throp on the team, but I never got to the bottom of why everyone called him ‘Throp’. He claimed it was something about ‘Hemmingfield’ sounding like Hetty Wainthropp off Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, some BBC series about a pensioner solving minor crimes. Wainthropp had been shortened to Throp, and that became his name. Or something. Anyhow, who would want to argue with Throp about why he was called Throp?

  There was a noisy upsurge in radio traffic. Reports were coming in of the enemy chatter thick and fast. There were increasingly desperate calls for ‘Hamid’ to check in with the Taliban commander. Each call was met with an echoing void of static. If Hamid was still alive he certainly wasn’t answering.

  With the enemy guns having fallen silent, Major Butt ordered his men up and into the advance. Twenty minutes later the three platoons had pushed five hundred metres into the Green Zone on foot, with not a shot having been fired. If it carried on like this we’d be back at base in time to get the kettle on for breakfast.

  The two WMIKs left us and moved up to what remained of the RPG-gunners’ position. They radioed in reports of blood-spattered undergrowth, but no bodies. The enemy were good at collecting their dead. In an effort to show that we came not to kill but to fight when attacked, we’d leave them to do so unhindered. It seemed wrong not to.

  The A-10s were ripped by a lone Dutch F-16, call sign Rammit Six Two. I was halfway through giving the pilot an Area of Operations (AO) update, when it all went bloody bananas. The Company HQ had been ambushed at close quarters. Major Butt and his men were deep in the Green Zone on foot, and getting smashed in there.

  Butsy radioed in that four enemy had been killed, but that fighters kept coming. From the turret of the wagon I couldn’t make out a bloody thing. I could hear the crack and thump of battle, and see the odd flash of desert camo as our lads tried to get into position to fight. But I couldn’t see how I could drop any bombs or strafe. The contact was beyond danger-close. Plus I couldn’t ID the enemy to hit them.

  It was a classic Taliban ambush. Their favourite tactic was to let a force advance, whilst outflanking them. Then they’d capture or kill the lot. There was no way I was going to let that happen to our lads. Most of the 2 MERCIANS were late teenagers or in their early twenties. They were fresh-faced and only a few weeks out of the UK.

  Many had never left home before, but they were in the British Army and they were under orders. They’d come thousands of miles to soldier on behalf of the Afghan people and their fellow countrymen back in the UK. They were brave and tough, despite their youth, and they’d fight to the very last for their brothers in arms.

  They weren’t my regiment, but that didn’t matter. JTAC-ing is a highly specialist role. There’s never more than a couple of hundred qualified JTACs in the entire British Army. In theatre we’d get embedded with whatever unit needs us. Pretty much from the start of their tour I’d been with B Company, 2 MERCIAN. I’d bonded with those young lads, just as I’d bonded with my FST. I was their JTAC. And as far as I was concerned they were my boys, and I felt responsible for every last one of them.

  Those 2 MERCIAN lads were some of the best infantrymen around – England’s finest. I wasn’t about to let them get injured, or fall into the hands of the enemy if I could help it. A few days back we’d been told a story about some elite French commandos on some hush-hush mission. Somehow, eleven of them had got themselves captured by Taliban, or more likely Al Qaeda elements. None of the French captives had made it out of enemy captivity alive, and I shudder to think what had happened to them before they were killed.

  We knew what the enemy were capable of, and now we had B Company’s HQ element about to be overrun in Adin Zai. In a way I wasn’t surprised. I knew what Major Butt was like. You couldn’t wish for a better OC. Butsy was always taking himself and his HQ element into the heart of the action.

  Major Butt led from the very front. Always. The OC was always to be found in the thick of it, with just the four men of his HQ element as security. Butsy was a legend, and no way was the OC getting captured and tortured or killed on our watch. The question was, what the fuck were me and Rammit Six Two going to do about it?

  Butsy’s signaller was giving a running commentary on t
he firefight over the net. From the open turret of the wagon the noise of battle was deafening. In part the signaller was hoping that our fourman FST would hear him, and find a way to get them out of the shit. No one else had a hope of doing so, that was for certain.

  Trouble was, a lot of the firepower at our disposal was a pretty blunt instrument. We had a battery of 105mm howitzers that Sticky, Throp and Chris could call on to target, plus we had the mortar teams. But with the HQ element surrounded, we risked shelling our own men.

  Air power was the precision killing machine. But not even the state-of-the-art F-16 Fighting Falcon I had above me could do much right now. Our lads were tens of metres away from an invisible enemy. No JTAC would risk calling in ordnance in such danger-close conditions.

  An idea came to me. It was something I’d learned about in JTAC school, back in the UK. The JTAC course is far from easy, especially for someone like me. I’d left school at sixteen, and I’m the first to admit I’m no Einstein. The course has a high dropout rate, and I was hardly your ideal candidate. But my CO at The Light Dragoons had backed me all the way.

  At JTAC school I’d had to concentrate real hard, plus do my homework like a good lad. I’d forced myself to come forward in class and ask questions, and not to care if anyone thought that I was a thick fucker. It was the kind of thing that I should have done at high school, had I not been too busy trying to get into the army instead.

  A couple of weeks after getting JTAC combat-ready, I’d deployed to the war in Afghanistan – so I’d not had a chance to try in practice what I’d got in mind. But right now it was the best I could think of. I got Sticky to radio Butsy and ask for the exact, ten-figure grid of his position. Meanwhile, I got on the air to the F-16.

  ‘Rammit Six Two, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: our HQ element is surrounded and engaged at close quarters in the Green Zone. This is the HQ element’s grid.’ I took the scrap of paper Sticky thrust at me and read the numbers. ‘46673896. Repeat: 46673896. Readback.’