Free A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan by James Fergusson Page A

Now Zad, he said, was 'the cheekiest thing I've done in the Army'. In one instance, the only way Aggrey was able to get a decent fix on a particularly troublesome target building set back in the town was to hang off the outside wall of a corner tower by one hand.
    Calling in air power could be perilous for other reasons, not least the scandalous inadequacy of some British radios. In June, during Operation Mutay, Paul Hollingshead had risked his life to retrieve a set from a Snatch Land Rover which had been ambushed in a Now Zad suburb and temporarily abandoned beyond the cover of a wall. 'It was a Clansman 351, VHF only – an old one from the 1960s sort of thing,' he recalled. His platoon was badly pinned down by a heavy machine-gun position. He and his men had almost no possibility of extracting themselves without support from the air. At this critical juncture, the radio failed. 'We couldn't get a tone. It was dead. Absolutely nothing. I thought it was broken, but then we noticed this piece of white mine-tape that someone had stuck on the top of it that said "Dodgy, But Workable".' Still under fire, Hollingshead and a colleague spent frantic minutes stripping the radio down, thumping it like an old television set and scratching the terminals with a penknife until, thankfully, it was coaxed into life. 'I won't ever forget the feeling of relief,' he said.
    The Americans' marksmanship five weeks later was poor. Two A10 rockets aimed at the Smugglers' House missed by a hundred metres, prompting another defiant blast of machine-gun fire at the compound. In Sangar 1, Corporal Kailash Khebang spotted a gunman flit across a window in the second floor of the building. He stood up out of cover and fired the first of two ILAWs – the interim light anti-armour weapon, a modern version of the shoulder-launched World War Two bazooka. None of the Gurkhas had fired an ILAW before, even in training. Kailash's second shot dropped neatly through a window, but it wasn't enough. In a display of tenacity that astonished the crouching Gurkhas, fire continued to pour from the position. Like so much British equipment, the newly introduced ILAW still used technology developed during the Cold War, designed to penetrate Soviet armour on the plains of Europe. As the Gurkhas had just discovered, it was often ineffective against the thick mud walls of Afghan buildings, which could absorb extraordinary amounts of force.
    The Gurkhas again resorted to air power. Following the smoke of the ILAW rocket, one of the A10s dropped a 500lb bomb on the Smugglers' House, destroying its south-west corner, while the other A10 blasted the windows on the eastern side with cannon; yet still the attackers fought back. The A10s were low on fuel and peeled off to base, but were immediately replaced by another two. One of these engaged with rockets, but missed by 150 metres. He tried again with his guns, but missed a second time, by fifty metres on this occasion. The sledgehammer was signally failing to deal with this nut. Finally, using the laser-guidance system on the Predator, the fourth A10 at last silenced the Smugglers' House with a direct hit by a second 500lb bomb.
    That effectively ended the assault. The Taliban tried throughout the night to renew it, but they reckoned without the $3 million worth of technology aboard the Predator. They could only guess at the capabilities of this all-seeing machine, with its infrared cameras that can pick up a human heat signature from thousands of feet up. The Taliban were spotted creeping along walls, moving between buildings, massing in a compound for another attack. (The Taliban later found a way to hide from the Predators by moving about the town through a system of dried-up watercourses that ran beneath the main streets. They also developed a network of tunnels between the earth-walled buildings – 'mouse holes' the Gurkhas called them – which allowed them to approach the compound without once showing themselves. In