скачать книгу бесплатно
‘As soon as we’re at the FRV, both our aircraft will point towards each other and we’ll carry out our drills,’ I continued.’Anti-collision strobes, navigation lights and transponders will be switched off. We will not emit at all. A full 360-degree turn will signal that I’m ready to move. I will know you’re happy, Mick, when you turn your nav lights off. I will then depart and you will follow me to our OPs.’
To get to our OPs we would manoeuvre through the trees until we ended up eyes-on the road. We would wait there, masked by the trees and our backdrop, until the convoy appeared. We’d count the vehicles, wait until we were sure we had the lot, then skedaddle back for the debrief.
‘Any questions?’
Baxter still looked like he’d swallowed a yo-yo. The instructors said nothing. Like driving test examiners, Herbert and Bateman would sit silently beside us until we got back to camp. They’d only tell us how we’d done when we were back on the ground.
By way of chit-chat, I asked Herbert what he’d done before joining the Army Air Corps.
ACC, he said, in some place I’d never heard of.
Army Catering Corps. If we fucked this up, at least we could count on a Full English.
We took off just after the sun came up and headed out towards the exercise area. The wind dropped; Devon spread out before us in all its glory and the sea twinkled behind us. We slipped under the wires together fourteen klicks from the FRV, barely six feet off the ground, either side of the river, and began nap of the earth flying-at tree-top height, using the low ground for cover, to keep below the radar horizon. With a final klick to run I dropped down to fifteen feet and began to weave between the trees. I could see Mick a tactical bound behind, following me nicely.
We were as stealthy as any helicopter could be both from the ground and the air-small, camouflaged, and very hard to spot at this height unless we had to fly around someone out walking his dog.
The Gazelle wasn’t always quiet. It was difficult to pick up rotor sound from a distance because it was light and had a fenestron tail rotor-thirteen blades housed in a Venturi-but its gears and bearings did emit a high frequency whine when it was in the hover.
The sun had crested the hills to the east of the FRV point. My goldfish bowl of a cockpit was beginning to warm by the time Mick’s lights were finally extinguished, signalling he was ready. I led the way, a few feet off the ground, climbing for fences and gates.
As an ex-Para, I knew the value of terrain-masking ingress and egress within an area of operation-no matter whether you were on foot, in a tank or a helicopter.
I wound us through the belt of trees until we arrived in the OPs. I spotted the road in the distance, uphill through the gaps in the trees-sunlight glinted off a handful of cars threading their way along the dual carriageway towards the Cornish border. The OPs were awesome. The trees cast their shadows across us; even God wouldn’t know we were here. We were nice and early and all we had to do now was sit and observe.
Mr Herbert took over the controls and I grabbed the pistol grip of the Gazelle Observation Aid, a sight like a periscope built into the canopy above the left pilot’s seat. I peered through its rubber browpad and positioned its field of view on the road nearly a mile away. Eventually I spotted the headlights of the first of the four-ton lorries as it crested the hill to our south-east.
For the purposes of the exercise, the four-tonners represented main battle tanks; the Land Rovers that accompanied them were supposed to be armoured personnel carriers (APCs). We had been told roughly when to expect the convoy but not how many vehicles would be in it. After five minutes, I counted five fourtonners and six Land Rovers. Now I just had to wait and see if it was a split convoy or if there were any stragglers. Five minutes passed, then ten. Glancing through the trees to my left, I could almost feel Mick’s frustration. No matter. I was doing this by the book. As a soldier, I knew that battlefields weren’t neat and ordered-that you should always expect the unexpected. I didn’t want to get back to Fremington to be told I was on Strike One because we’d missed a second convoy travelling a few miles behind the first.
Only when we were approaching our fuel ‘bug-out’ point did I decide that it was safe to return. I led Mick back to the FRV and he led us back to the camp. We landed with just enough fuel to have coped with a diversion should we have come face to face with unexpected enemy on our return.
After shutting down the Gazelles we were directed into the improvised briefing room while our instructors checked in with the convoy to see if we’d been spotted.
‘How did you think it went?’ Herbert asked as he closed the door.
I knew that my flying was okay, so the only thing he could fail me for was the mission itself. ‘We achieved our mission, sir,’ I replied. ‘We got there in plenty of time and concealed ourselves before the enemy turned up. We counted the vehicles and I’m confident we didn’t miss any. I’m pretty damn sure we remained undetected throughout, and on the egress. I don’t think it could have gone much better, to be honest.’
Herbert arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’
Uh-oh…
‘How do you think it went, Corporal Baxter?’ Bateman said.
Mick took his face out of his hands and glanced at me before replying.
‘We achieved our mission,’ he said without blinking.
Herbert let rip. ‘Your choice of OP was piss poor. You waited far too long and the information you brought back was untimely.’
Mick’s face disappeared into his sweaty palms again and I could feel my blood begin to boil.
‘What you should have done is find an OP further to the east so you could have picked the convoy up sooner,’ he barked. His slightly ruddy face was turning a deeper shade of crimson.
He walked over to the map. ‘If you’d chosen one of these two positions in this area here’-he indicated the points I’d been advised to use by my peers-‘you’d have detected the vehicles a lot quicker. Then you could have carried out the task and returned to camp a great deal sooner. But you waited till you were almost out of fuel. You not only endangered two helicopters, Corporal Macy, but you were late in providing valuable tactical information to your commander.’
I looked at him. Fuck, I thought, he’s having a laugh…
I took a deep breath.
‘Well?’ His face looked as though it was about to burst into flames.
I gave him my answer as slowly and calmly as I could manage. ‘With all due respect, sir, I’ve been recceing positions for years. Sat on a bare-arsed, skylined hill like that, we might as well have been flying a banner behind us saying “over here”.’
Mick’s head began to move from side to side. I wasn’t sure whether he was just questioning my approach or looking to escape through a crack in the floorboards.
I continued, undeterred. ‘If the sun, glinting off our bubble cockpit, didn’t give us away first the noise surely would have, because that position is directly upwind. And I didn’t hang around the area for the hell of it. I waited because there was every chance that the first vehicles were just the vanguard of a bigger convoy. I needed to be sure that there weren’t any others.’
They looked at me in disbelief and then at each other.
‘Sir…If I’d left too early and more vehicles had turned up, I’d have brought back the wrong enemy strengths and the commander tasked to destroy them could have found himself getting killed in his own ambush. That convoy was travelling at about twenty miles an hour, allowing us time to plan an ambush-making my information both 100 per cent accurate and very timely.’
Herbert was unimpressed. The marks he gave me said everything: I’d almost failed.
At breakfast with the rest of the students I completely lost it. ‘In a real battle, skylined on that ridgeline like that, we’d have been shot clean out of the sky. Instructors-put ‘em in combats or out in the field, expose them to real tactics and a little rain and they’d fucking melt! Herbert doesn’t have a tactical bone in his fucking body!’
Everybody had stopped eating. My marine buddy Sammy, who I’d spoofed the day we received our grading results, eventually said what everyone was thinking. ‘You’re supposed to pass the course, you tit, not teach the instructors tactics and declare war on the system.’
‘You were a gnat’s cock-hair away from getting us both failed for not using their OPs,’ Mick said. ‘We only scraped a pass because your plan was bombproof. If we’d made one tiny error they’d have fucked us with it till our arses bled. You need to fucking wise up, Para-boy.’
After Fremington, I flew with three different instructors. Up until then, I’d had pretty good grades. The new instructors were assigned to find out what had gone wrong with Herbert and me. Fortunately, they put it down to an aberration.
Fremington taught me a lesson every bit as valuable as tactics and tactical awareness. It had taught me coursemanship-when to speak and when to keep my big stupid trap shut. No one liked a smart arse, and in my determination to get into the thick of it, I’d forgotten a crucial ingredient: humility.
CHOPP ER PALMER’ S WINGS (#ulink_30bab73a-05b8-5a12-8e8e-ffc760f260d3)
MAY 1992
Middle Wallop, Hampshire
No one at Middle Wallop wanted to find himself in the cockpit with a ‘chopper’, especially when it came to exams, and, as I’d already discovered, there was no instructor more feared than Darth Vader.
Mr Palmer and I had already crossed swords once and that was enough. I hadn’t forgotten our first encounter: his huge frame filling the doorway as he’d strolled into stores for a new pair of gloves, glaring first at my beret, then at me. Ever since, like everyone else on the course, I’d gone out of my way to avoid him.
Late in the month my luck finally ran out.
After returning from Devon, I had several days more flying to do before my Final Handling Test-make or break day, when I would either earn my wings or get booted off the course. First there was a halt in proceedings beforehand because of the International Air Tattoo, a huge fly-in, normally organised by the RAF but staged this year at Middle Wallop.
IAT (or ‘RIAT’ as it is known today-they’ve added a ‘Royal’ to it) is the biggest air show in Europe. Hundreds of military aircraft take part, from vintage Hurricanes and Spitfires to modern fighter jets and combat helicopters. It’s an organisational nightmare because tens of thousands of spotters descend on the event and traffic has to be diverted around the southern half of England. Marshalling this number of aircraft is a huge job and falls pretty much to the host base to organise; we students were told that we were the ‘work party’-the guys on the ground responsible for ensuring the visiting pilots taxied and parked where they were supposed to. The man in charge was none other than Mr Chopper Palmer.
Everybody groaned.
I knew I hadn’t helped matters by wandering around the place with the maroon machine on my head and sporting a set of Para wings on my arm like they were the only ones that mattered-before I’d realised that all that Para stuff wasn’t necessarily the best way of becoming an AAC pilot.
On the day before the Tattoo I walked over to the air traffic control tower to get a bird’s eye view of the proceedings, to orientate myself before the show started. As I wandered from window to window, getting my bearings, wondering how we’d fit all the aircraft in, I turned to see a petite, middle-aged woman engaged in a meaningful conversation with one of the controllers. I tuned in, because I’d overheard her mention that she had a couple of sons in the Paras.
I didn’t think any more about it until, on her way out, she said her goodbyes and the controller beside me said: ‘Bye, Mrs Palmer.’
‘Mrs Palmer?’ I asked when she had disappeared from view. ‘Chopper’s wife…?’
‘The very same,’ the controller said. ‘Nice, isn’t she?’
She was. Lovely, in fact. Something I found very difficult to square with her enormous husband and his fearsome reputation. But then it began to dawn on me. Maybe, on our first meeting, Palmer hadn’t been psyching me out; maybe I’d misread that stare. If the guy had a couple of sons in the Paras, perhaps it had signalled something else-an affinity, maybe? Jesus. Could it be that Chopper’s reputation was not all it was cracked up to be? Could he be a regular bloke after all? How else could he have ended up with such a charming wife?
Armed with this heretical thought, I left the control tower and headed round the corner for my briefing. My fellow students were already waiting.
I fell into line just before Palmer appeared, looking like thunder. His eyes met mine and they seemed to bore right through me. He gave me that thin smile again and boomed: ‘Right. I need a second in command. Who’s going to be my two-eye-see?’
You could have cut the air with a knife. Nobody said a word. The only thing missing was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme music.
From nowhere, I felt myself stick up my hand. ‘I will, sir,’ I said.
Palmer growled something and stormed off in the direction of the hangars.
‘What did he say?’ I asked Sammy.
‘He said, “Thanks, you knob. You’ve blown any chance you had passing the course. You can go back to being a meat-bomb right now.”’
‘Seriously. What did he really say?’
‘He said, “Para, Para in the sky, living proof that shit can fly.”’
As I made to pelt off after Chopper Palmer, Sammy held me back by my shirt. ‘Are you fucking mad, Macy?’
‘Probably,’ I said, tugging myself free.
In fact, I was feeling happier than I’d felt in ages. My hunch-and it was based on some pretty solid first-hand evidence-said that, a pound to a pinch of shit, Palmer wasn’t quite the chopper he was cracked up to be. And since in the game of roulette that determined which instructors would be assigned to us for our Final Handling Test there was a fair chance I’d be getting Mr Palmer, I figured that-unlike Fremington-time spent in reconnaissance would not be wasted.
Part of me still couldn’t quite believe what I was doing. I felt like a circus performer who was about to put his head in the lion’s mouth.
When I caught up with him, Palmer started to brief me on the admin task. As he did so, he glanced at my beret and told me something I already knew-that one of his boys was in the Parachute Regiment.
‘Is he in White Feathers One or Grungy Three, sir?’ I asked. 2 Para had sent 1 Para white feathers for missing the Falklands and 3 Para, quite frankly, needed to wash.
He smiled. ‘That would make you Bullshit Two, I guess.’ He knew I was 2 Para from the blue lanyard I had wrapped around my shoulder.
I was about to reply when I saw a shadow racing across the ground between the hangars. I looked up. The first aircraft to arrive at the show was a helicopter. I couldn’t tell what kind. I held up my hand and squinted against the sunlight.
As the machine banked on its final approach, I got my first proper look at it. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen-big, dark and angular, it resembled a menacing primeval insect. It came into a slow hover right in front of the tower and hung in the air. Then, nose down, nodding to a crowd of onlookers that had lined up to gawp at it, it crabbed towards a ground handler armed with two orange paddles before finally thumping down onto the ground.
Chopper Palmer swore under his breath. All I caught was something about Yanks.
‘Sir?’
‘Fly like that with me, Macy, and I’ll mince you up through the fenestron of your Gazelle.’
‘What is it, sir?’ I wanted to get off the subject of going anywhere near a helicopter with him.
‘That,’ Chopper Palmer said, with a tinge of admiration in his voice, ‘is a United States Army AH Sixty-Four Alpha. You ought to be able to tell by the unorthodox approach that it isn’t from around here. It’s known as the Apache.’
It was the first combat helicopter I’d seen up close. The Apache, I knew, was one of four helicopters competing for a UK MoD contract that would see the British Army equipped with a dedicated attack helicopter for the first time in its history.
As things stood, the Army Air Corps was equipped with two kinds of rotary wing aircraft: the Gazelle and the Lynx (not including the special Gazelles and A109s used by the SAS).
The Gazelle was generally employed for training, liaison and reconnaissance, but could be used for emergency casevac and move a couple of lightly kitted-out troops but that was about it-a valuable but limited asset.
The Lynx Mk7 was an anti-tank helicopter armed with missiles on each side. It was seriously underpowered and suffered badly when it came to moving even small amounts of troops. It was also hindered by the fact it needed a door gunner, reducing its load-carrying capacity and restricting the access from one door. The choice was missiles or troops-it couldn’t handle both. And its Tube-launched Optically-tracked Wire-guided-TOW-missiles did not cut the mustard. It was supposed to be our first line of defence against enemy armour, but if it had ever taken on the massed ranks of Soviet T-72s on the West German plains, it would have been massacred. And the lessons of the recent Gulf conflict said that it wouldn’t have fared a whole lot better against some of the lesser equipped armies still out there. Waiting for the TOW missile to be manually tracked all the way to the target, it was a sitting duck.
As a result, the impetus to equip the Army Air Corps with a dedicated attack helicopter, one that had been specifically designed for the role, had gained momentum, and the Apache was the main contender. It was battling for the contract, valued at upwards of £2 billion (and that was just for the airframe, not including the simulators or associated equipment), against three other machines: the German-Franco Eurocopter Tiger, an anglicised version of the US Bell Cobra called the Cobra Venom, and the Rooivalk, an ugly brute from South Africa. The Apache’s presence at the show was a sign that the competition was hotting up.
I’d never seen anything like it. I was totally mesmerised.
Later, I asked Mr Palmer if I could take a look at it up close. He did better than that: he walked straight up and asked if I could sit in it.
The pilot, looking bored in a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans, was only too happy to oblige. Seconds later, I dumped my camera on the grass and was hauling myself into the rear cockpit-the pilot’s position.
Glancing around the cockpit, I could see that it was a world away from the small, flimsy, plastic analogue world of my Gazelle. The Apache was huge, robust and instead of all of the normal instrumentation it had the bulk of its data displayed in the centre of the instrument console.
‘Smile, son.’ I looked out to see Chopper Palmer pointing a camera at me.
I wasn’t sure what had made me happier-sitting in a machine I swore to myself I’d fly one day, or knowing that Chopper Palmer wasn’t the Dark Lord after all.
The gunner’s position in the front was dominated by a big metal block jutting above the MPDs that looked like a cross between an inverted periscope and something you’d find at a coin-operated peep-show. ‘This,’ my tobacco-chewing Texan friend told me, ‘is something we call the ORT: the Optical Relay Tube. By lowering your eyes to the ORT it allows you to see the enemy using direct viewing optics.’ He showed me a pink lens that covered the right eye, ‘Look through that,’ and then pointed to the MPDs, ‘or at them, and you see what the Apache sees.’ He spat out some tobacco. ‘You can see the radar picture, the image projected by the gunner’s thermal imaging system or his daylight camera, the pilot’s thermal system…well shit, son…any one of ‘em, at any given moment, all at the flick of a switch.’
‘Fun’s over, Corporal Macy,’ Chopper said. ‘We have some marshalling to do.’ He walked off, forcing me to run after him again.
Three days after the show ended, we were back in the classroom again, preparing for our last few sorties before the dreaded Final Handling Test.
Before we knew it, it was late June. WO2 Bateman was putting the flying programme together. He was attempting to avoid pairing particular students with a particular Aviation Standards Officer if they had a good reason for not wanting to fly with him. The floor erupted. ‘Not Chopper Palmer, sir, he hates me…’ ‘Don’t give me Darth Vader, I’ll pay you any money…’
I hadn’t shared my belief that Palmer’s bark was worse than his bite; I knew no one would have believed me. I stuck my hand up and announced that I wanted to fly with Chopper on my Final Handling Test.
The laughter was immediately replaced by a silence you’d only expect to find in libraries and monasteries.
‘That’s good, Corporal Macy,’ Mr Bateman replied, ‘because Mister Palmer has asked to fly with you.’
Catcalls, wolf-whistles and cries of ‘teacher’s pet’ bounced off the four walls and Sammy called me a brown nose.
‘I wouldn’t be so quick, marine,’ Bateman said. ‘You must have been right up Mr Palmer’s arse with your Para mate here, ‘cause he’s asked for you too.’
