Hellfire Read online

  We were now on the ‘Advanced Rotary Wing’ or ‘tactical’ phase of our training: learning not only how to fly a helicopter, but how to fight in it.

  Tim, a 2 Para mate on the course ahead of mine, had introduced me to the ‘cheat-sheet’ routine. Ground school involved exams on fourteen different subjects, from basic flight principles to meteorology and navigation. As there were only ever three different papers set for each subject, the drill was for students to acquire these papers-and the answers-from students on earlier courses. No one ever failed a ground-school exam; the challenge was not to get 100 per cent and give the game away.

  Tim’s pal Billy was the only bloke anyone knew of who didn’t do this and since he looked like a dark-haired version of Dan Dare and I was impressed by the way he applied himself to flying, I decided to follow his example. In the Air Corps, I had glimpsed the life I wanted. I would have to touch every base if I was to become an SAS pilot.

  Rejecting the cheat-sheets paid off when the instructors decided to set a new paper on every subject for our intake. Blind panic ensued and more guys fell by the wayside.

  I listened cautiously, therefore, to those who recommended cheat-maps for the advanced tactical course: recce positions that had been highly marked during previous exercises. When we got to Fremington and were briefed on our ‘mission’-to identify an ‘enemy’ vehicle convoy heading from the east on the B3042 towards the A377-I took one look at the cheat-positions and decided to formulate my own plan.

  I walked into the ad hoc planning room-little more than a broom cupboard-and studied the three faces gazing expectantly at me.

  Herbert and Bateman, the two instructors, looked like they wanted to eat me for the breakfast none of us had had yet-and wouldn’t get until we returned from the sortie. The other guy, a fellow student called Mick Baxter, was peering at me so intently I thought his eyes might explode.

  ‘Right,’ I began, trying to sound authoritative, ‘for the purposes of this exercise, I am the patrol commander and I am going to lead us out. I am flying with Mr Herbert and you, Corporal Baxter, will be flying with Mr Bateman.’

  Mick’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Warrant Officers Herbert and Bateman were already busy with their clipboards.

  Today’s exercise was about reconnaissance: finding and observing enemy convoys while maintaining tactical superiority; seeing and reporting without being seen.

  After briefing the met, air traffic and timings I proceeded to the execution of the mission. ‘When we leave here, we’re going to follow this valley south-east.’ I pointed to a black line on the map behind me. ‘We will conduct an under-wires crossing here, where the pylon line crosses the River Taw.’ It was the lowest point of the pylons just south-east of Chapelton.

  ‘There are no roads and no villages nearby, so there’s every chance we won’t be seen. We’ll continue to fly the marked route until we reach the confluence of the two rivers at Copy Lake, our Final Rendezvous point. Then we’ll continue up to the OPs, catching the vehicles at the very end of their route, here…’

  The two instructors scribbled away furiously. This was my big departure from the routine suggested by the cheat-maps. The instructors’ preferred Observation Positions for viewing convoys moving through this area were a few miles to the east, on a wooded ridgeline with an unrestricted view of the B3042. In my book, they also allowed unrestricted views of our helicopters. We would be skylined while the enemy blended in with their surroundings-absolutely the opposite of what I felt we needed to achieve. The eye is drawn to movement and I knew that positioning our Gazelles on top of a ridgeline in combat would be suicide-an open invitation for an artillery barrage. And if the convoy stopped we would be heard; the wind would carry the noise of our aircraft directly towards it. They were shit positions.

  I’d done a thorough map-study (something they called ‘intervisibility’ in the Paras) and had found a spot at the bottom of a valley with an equally good field of view. We could see the convoy easily, and wouldn’t miss them since they’d be at the end of their route. I could pop myself and Mick between the trees beside the river, and a huge hill behind us would provide a stealthy backdrop; our green recce helicopters would blend perfectly with our surroundings. In the unlikely event we were seen, we had a fantastic escape route that would allow us to melt away in a heartbeat. Bonzer.

  ‘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

  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 disappea
red 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.