authority teeters on out-of-control; get it wrong and the tail breaks away. You’d end up spinning out of control and smashing into terra firma.
Andy flew us up the valley, just below the skyline, fifty feet off the deck and high enough to spin us round and drop the nose without crashing. I held the controls lightly; the light wind from behind us made them slightly sloppy and unresponsive. We both looked anxiously at the bend 500 metres ahead.
We were both expecting the worst. The enemy tanks could be just behind the bend. We’d be so bloody sharp that the boss had refused to come in with us. He was waiting at the mouth of the valley to bring in artillery and fast jets should we get zapped. We’d know if we’d been shot down because the BATUS Asset Tracking System (BATS) box in the back would register a hit and we’d have to land.
With 400 metres to go I craned my neck to the right to see that extra foot around the bend.
I caught a splinter of light to my left, at the periphery of my vision. No sooner had I picked it up than it was gone again.
With 300 metres to go I heard a very light swishing sound. I glanced at Andy. He made more weird noises through his microphone than Darth Vader; it was one of his party tricks.
He glanced back. ‘What?’
‘Look where you’re goi—’
Before I had time to finish the swishing sound turned into a high-pitched screech. By the time I’d turned to see what it was, it had become a blood-curdling banshee wail. I could hear it over the sound of the Gazelle’s whining gearbox and engine, and my helmet’s hearing protection. Whatever it was, it was less than a foot away from me. It was as if the devil himself was running his fingernails down the world’s biggest blackboard…
‘I HAVE CONTROL,’ I yelled, and flicked my head forward again, fast enough to rattle my eyeballs.
I knew then that what was trying to kill us had us so firmly in its grasp that there really was no escape.
We were at thirty knots, with the valley walls pressing in on both sides. The ground was strewn with boulders fifty feet below.
Hundreds of white strands were suspended in the air in front of us, and more were joining them with every passing nanosecond. We were caught in a giant web. The homing aerials on the Gazelle’s nose had been bent back until they were touching the windscreen.
‘SWINGFIRE WIRE,’ I bellowed.
The Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) on the ridge must have fired a wire-guided missile. As these things shoot down range they spew out a thin but incredibly strong metal wire; this one had been left draped across the valley in front of us. Our blades had picked it up and spun it around the Gazelle, winching us in towards the hillside.
I flicked on the radio. ‘Mayday…Mayday…Mayday…’
As I fought to cut back our speed the screeching intensified then was punctuated by a series of high-pitched pings as the tension in the wire increased. I prayed we wouldn’t lose control of the main rotor.
I was barely keeping us airborne. First we’d been netted; now we were being reeled in. It was only a matter of time before the wires would tighten on the exposed tail rotor drive shaft as it spun at over 5,000 rpm; we were about to be garrotted.
I snatched a glance to our right. The hilltop was too far away; I pointed the nose towards the slope, using a rock as a marker, and shoved the cyclic forward.
Prairie grass ten feet in front of us filled the bubble cockpit. We were going in, head on.
Andy went into Pantomime Dame Mode: ‘I’m too young to die…’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ I screamed back.
With an almighty yank back on the cyclic the nose came up forty-five degrees to match the rake of the slope. I kicked us left a little and dumped the collective lever halfway down. The skids hit the hillside hard and for a moment it looked like we’d stuck solid.
Then we began to slide backwards.
‘Nooo…’ Andy yodelled, but before he could draw breath we shuddered to a halt again.
The rock I’d been aiming to use as a chock was stuck behind the left skid and holding us fast.
My right hand shot up to the fuel cut off lever. The engine whine stopped instantly and the screeching began to fade. I pulled the collective up to slow the blades before pulling on the rotor brake.
Silence.
Andy gave me the biggest grin I’d ever seen.
‘Do you have any fucking idea how hard I was working?’ I said. ‘And how close we just came to dying?’
He just kept smiling like a halfwit.
‘Have you got anything to say?’
‘As a matter of fact I have.’ His expression became instantly serious. ‘Can I have a fag in here? Cos my door’s wired closed and I’m gasping…’
He wasn’t wrong. We were trussed like a turkey.
Twenty minutes later our flight commander and the CO came sliding down the hill towards us. After the CO had taken pictures, a technician cut us free so we could assess the damage. The wires had all but severed the tail rotor drive shaft. Steve McQueen would have been proud of us. He’d used the same trick in The Great Escape to snag himself a motorbike.
‘Should have been collected in after firing,’ the CO said. ‘For you two, the war is over.’
I pulled a copy of Low Level Hell from my jacket and waved it at him.
‘The Bible says we need to pick up another bird and get right back out here, sir. The war’s not over yet.’
‘You’d pick a fight with your own shadow, Macy, given half a chance. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.’
A week later our two Gazelles were sitting on a hill, awaiting the battle due to kick off in the small hours of the next morning. This was the big one, as real as it got at BATUS, and I wanted to show what our Gazelles were made of.
We were due to mix it with artillery fire, tank rounds, armed recce cars, mounted machine guns, mortars, Milan anti-tank missiles, jets dropping bombs and our own Lynx helicopters. It was what we had all trained for-as close to a real battle as it was possible to be-and I knew we were more than capable of acquitting ourselves well.
Lieutenant Colonel Iain Thomson was here to validate our regiment during the final BATUS exercise. Tommo was the revered CO of 9 Regiment Army Air Corps. He was a legendary leader and knew how to get the best out of his men, but he was a scary bastard too.
He held the power of life or death-he was there to assess whether we were ready for war fighting. I was determined not to let our side down.
We had a BATS box fitted into the rear of the Gazelle, in place of one of the seats. It would transmit our position at all times to Exercise Control. Excon was the hub of the mock battle, where the invigilators watched the conflict play out on a giant screen.
We had been on the prairie for six weeks and after a disastrous beginning had kicked tanky arse in every battle since. I wanted Tommo and the brass to know how good we were, how fast and low we could go, how quickly we could pick up the enemy and how we could shape the battle for the commanding officer. We were the CO’s scouts and wielded more power than our little helicopter looked capable of.
The bloody ‘Red Tops’ were our only problem-Gazelles painted a horrific shade of anti-collision Day-Glo red, flown by range officers whose job was to ensure that we flew within safety limits. They could hand us a yellow card if we flew into the wrong area or in front of somebody else’s weapon system. Worse still, they’d give away our position by hovering over us at a couple of thousand feet. Because we went fast and low, the ‘enemy’ tanks relied on the Red Tops to track our stealthy battle positions.
Following my first protest the Red Tops were told to