At Hell's Gate
Page 1
About At Hell’s Gate
“I deal with heavy, dangerous people. People who can bring a society undone.”
He’s a big unit. He builds houses and drives a ute. But he isn’t your typical tradie.
When a client calls he downs tools and flies into the hot zone in his other guise – as an elite private intelligence contractor.
In four high-octane adventures, The Contractor takes on a counter-surveillance gig in Singapore, a jungle ambush on a bomb-maker in South-East Asia, a cannonball run against the Taliban in Kabul and a gun-deal on a floating armoury in the Indian Ocean.
Will Mike make it back to his BBQ and building site? Or will fate deliver The Contractor At Hell’s Gate?
Contents
Cover
About At Hell’s Gate
Dedication
Author’s Note
CONFIRM
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EPILOGUE
BIRD ON THE WIRE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DEATH SHIP
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
ROAD RAGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
About The Contractor and Mark Abernethy
Also in The Contractor series
Copyright page
In memory of Murray, my father.
My father’s tears and fears were unseen – it was the gentlemanly spirit that he showed the world. Always there to care and protect, teaching me the things I would need to know. He will remain a pillar of strength to me until my very last breath.
– Mike
Author’s Note
The following is a collection of true stories. They describe episodes in the life of an Australian ‘contractor’ who works for foreign and domestic security agencies. ‘Mike’ is an alias, but The Contractor is real. I have used novelisation techniques to protect identities of individuals and organisations, but what you will read is Mike’s voice. Remember: sometimes fact is stranger than fiction . . . and a tradie is not just a tradie.
Mark Abernethy
1
It started with a few shouts in the distance for five or six seconds and then silence. It was just before midnight and I was lazing on the couch, mucking around with Foxtel and ABC 24, watching the breaking news story about the fifteen offenders who had escaped from Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre. They’d gone on a crime spree, bashing women, carjacking, stealing petrol and what have you. The authorities had caught some of them but half of them were still on the run, causing mayhem in Melbourne and in the bush.
My wife Liz was working nights at the hospital in the emergency section. It was a Wednesday night and fairly warm for Melbourne in late January. I had a roof to put on a house renovation, which was gnawing at me slightly because the levels had been wrong in the existing structure; when you take the roof off an established house, a massive weight comes off and the frames try to find a new level. I hadn’t built the original house, but as every chippie knows, you have to put it right or the current owner thinks it was you who screwed up the levels. But mainly I was thinking about the barbecue I had planned for Australia Day, the following afternoon. I was going to barbecue Aussie lamb, but cook it for eight hours on my American smoker, so it was almost ‘pulled lamb’. I was thinking through the steps and the wood and the burn and the marinade. They’re tricky, those smoker barbecues.
The shouts I’d heard a few minutes earlier now returned briefly, accompanied by a couple of whacks – decent ones too. Maybe wood on wood, or wood on metal. I stood and walked to the front door, opened it and stepped onto my front porch. But it was just the Melbourne suburbs, everything quiet. I waited, straining my ears. I’m always a little on edge when Liz works nights. She can take care of herself – she always tells me that – but I’d like to be closer to the hospital, where I can leap in and deal with any shit. When we first got together, I’d do some early morning drive-bys of the hospital, just looking for troublemakers and undesirables, keeping an eye on the joint. But she didn’t like that, so now I just sit at home and worry, and hear things that perhaps I’m not hearing.
I shut the door and decided to hit the hay. As I brushed my teeth the phone went and I picked up. It was a mate of mine from the neighbourhood, Bruce. He’s a firefighter and he was out on a job – another GNE who saves our community when a call comes in for help.
‘Mike,’ he yelled down the phone, and I could tell it was all happening in the background – it was all two-way radio chatter and sirens wailing. ‘Just got a call from Jodie – some idiots are carrying on in our front yard, could you take a look?’
Could I take a look? Fuck, by the time he ended that sentence I was out the door, looking like Fred Flintstone when he yabba dabba doos. I was gone. Jodie was eight months pregnant and now I knew where those faint sounds were coming from – Jodie and Bruce’s property.
I leapt into my Falcon tradie’s ute and backed down the driveway, then floored it and fish-tailed the mighty Falcon up the street, struggling to keep the rear rubber on the road as I coaxed just under 6000 rpm out of that engine. I was pumped.
A left and then a right and I was in front of their house, where I bumped up onto the kerb and slid across the grass verge, the driver’s door open before the Falcon came to rest. I left the lights on and, caught in their glare – like a mob of roos on the Newell Highway at three in the morning – was a group of five louts on Bruce and Jodie’s nature strip and front lawn. I walked towards them and realised one of them was swinging a street sign, which belonged on a lamppost at the end of this street and not in the hands of this shirtless seventeen-year-old.
‘You blokes got somewhere be
tter to be?’ I asked as I got to within ten metres of them. ‘You’re waking the neighbourhood.’
The ‘leader’ – with his street-sign sword and his t-shirt crown – mouthed off a bit and the others advanced. I’d put them at ages sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – big enough to cause some damage but not very smart. At least I’d found some of the possible escapees that the police had missed.
The closest bloke to me was also the biggest. He clenched his fists and was making one of those faces that says, ‘please be scared of me’. Which I wasn’t – his Incredible Hulk act probably worked nicely in boys’ homes but I stand around six-foot-three and I’m over 120 kilograms. And because of my other kind of contracting work, I know genuinely heavy and dangerous people and they didn’t act like this clown.
‘You feeling lucky?’ I said, stepping towards Mr Menace. ‘’Cos you’ll need it, mate.’
He back-pedalled, his face going through a series of contortions. I could see he didn’t know where to go with this now.
‘Mate, don’t let fear hold you back,’ I said, giving him the reaper’s grin.
He rejoined his group and the leader started up again with the swearing and swung the street sign around. It was a big white metal one and although I was respectful of what one of those sharp edges could do, I was more focused on taking it off him and pushing it somewhere painful. The situation was now five-onto-one, with the Five realising that unless they were all committed at once, the One was going to take a decent chunk out of at least two of them. And like all bullies, none of them wanted to be the one who got hit.
‘You don’t want to be here, boys,’ I said, standing in front of this rabble with all their bad language and homemade tattoos. ‘This is my neighbourhood – you don’t belong here.’
A porch light went on two doors down, and that was enough for the leader. He threw the street sign at me, turned and ran along the grass verge, his group of shirtless borstal boys running with him.
I stood there panting, wondering what missteps a man in his mid-forties has made to be chasing young thugs at midnight in the Melbourne suburbs. I didn’t even have my shoes on – I’d left the house so quickly that I was in my thongs. Picking up the street sign, I got into the Falcon and spent an hour circling the streets, trying to figure out where they’d gone. But I didn’t sight them again. I put in an anonymous call to the local coppers, telling them where five of the escapees were operating and what had just gone down. When the desk sergeant asked for my name, I chose not to give it, and instead told him to get some of his officers into the area and onto these idiots. ‘They’re waking the community,’ I said. ‘Time to wrap this up.’
I got to sleep around 3 am and was out of bed at sun-up to get my American smoker lit for the Aussie Day barbecue and make sure the five kilos of lamb was in the right shape. I’d bought a box of American hickory charcoal and was just getting the firebox going in the smoker when my phone trilled with a message. Looking at it, I saw it was from my other phone service. The number you have if it’s not Mike the builder or Mike the neighbour you’re looking for. I dialled in and a voice I’ve known on and off for fifteen years came out of the voice mail: English-speaking but with a foreign accent. The voice belonged to Brandon, and he kept it short and no-names. ‘I need the Contractor.’
2
Foreigners are not to know this, but if you phone an Aussie on Australia Day he’s probably wandering around in bare feet, stuffing around with a barbecue, getting ice into an Esky, making sure the site radio was sorted for music. I was really off the clock. But having taken this voice mail from my other line, I couldn’t un-take it. Liz was still sleeping, the barbecue fire was just taking, and I didn’t want to think about work. But as I put my phone back in my shorts, I was looking at a white street sign, leaning up against my shed. A sign that had been in a prison escapee’s hands a few hours earlier. The sign kind of said it all: I don’t really go off the clock. I’m a certain type of person in a certain kind of world and when the shit starts, I don’t duck.
It was 8.25 am. I slinked inside, grabbed one of my burner phones from the desk drawer in my office, and I phoned Brandon.
‘This better be good, buddy,’ I said as he picked up. ‘It’s Australia Day down here – working’s illegal.’
Brandon laughed, and I added, ‘If it’s got lots of zeros on the end of it, let’s talk. Otherwise I have beers to drink.’
He told me a gig was being conducted in Indonesia to confirm the identity of a much-wanted person. He’d been seen in West Java, in a bush village, and the government that employed Brandon wanted a softly-softly operation.
‘Interested?’ he asked, knowing I was.
‘Sure.’
I told him I wasn’t moving on Australia Day and he gave me a time and place to be the next day.
And then Brandon added: ‘I have you as a direct hire, okay?’
I paused for too long. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want.’
*
How does this work? If you meet me it’s probably because I’m a chippie working on your house, or I’m your neighbour and I’m helping you get the edge trimmer working, or finding the right tool, or giving advice on a DIY project. You’d notice I’m fairly friendly and generous with my time, for people I know and like. I’m from the bush, where being a good neighbour is just part of the landscape. I’m also what my American friends call a Big Unit, which fits my history as a rugby league front-rower and a bodyguard in Kings Cross. Yeah, I can take care of myself, but it’s not the only part of my personality.
What you don’t see is the other type of contracting I do. For twenty years I worked for governments and their agencies, in intelligence, counter-terrorism, retrievals and all sorts of gigs where the job was to find, tail, monitor and apprehend the kind of scumbags you thought only existed in the movies. I’m talking about people who make bombs and manipulate teenagers into wearing them into mosques and souks. I’m talking about people who traffic children and swap weapons for heroin. I’m not talking about a bunch of stupid teenagers swinging around a street sign, confusing fear with respect; I’m talking about people with resources who can bring a society undone.
That kind of work takes its toll, and while I never fell into the problem drinking or antisocial behaviour suffered by some operators, living the life of an intelligence officer cost me my first marriage and also a lot of what I’d call normal socialisation. Some of the people we used to find and track were 24/7 propositions. They were constantly on the move, switching identities, crossing borders, wearing disguises and slipping into patterns of life that would close ranks around them. It was exhausting and all-consuming and made a marriage almost impossible. Many husbands take shit for spending one night on the road when they’ve promised to be home. You try disappearing for six weeks because you’re on the trail of a terror funder in northern Malaysia, and you can only make the most cursory of phone calls with – of course – no details. Wives don’t like it, especially when you’re missing birthdays and anniversaries, and their friends and colleagues are asking questions.
So, after Marriage Number One was over, I decided I’d do it differently: I’d go back to the trade I did as an early school leaver, and throw myself into a job I liked and which gave me some sort of footing in a neighbourhood and a community. I needed to be part of society again – I had to be able to help people in a normal, acknowledged way, not in the clandestine, classified way I was used to.
It was a great idea, and a decision that changed my life for the better. But I soon learned what they don’t tell you in intelligence school: you don’t really leave this world. If you’re smart and effective in certain disciplines, you’ll be tapped for the rest of your life for private contracting gigs. Sometimes the client will be a corporate, often the client is an insurance company, and underpinning all of this private contracting work are governments. Mine is a world of IOUs: the governments that trained me and
gave me skills and a successful CV are the same organisations that come knocking at my door as a private citizen. The IOU doesn’t extinguish because I stopped full-time employment – I’m too far in for that.
Something less publicised is the difference between direct hires and contractors. A contractor is brought on for a distinct period of time, for a defined mission and a specialised skill. It could be a week in Thailand, finding and securing a person; it could be twelve months in Kabul, bodyguarding a high-value asset, what we call a personal security detail. But a direct hire? That’s a trick pulled by some foreign security agencies who have fine print that says once you’ve achieved a certain security clearance, you’re always on their books. Why would they want me to do this gig as a direct hire? Because in the operation team one person might have to know a level of information greater than the other operators, and this agency would only clear that level of indoctrination with a direct hire: their guy, which means chain of command, direct consequences for indiscretions, and so on.
Anyway, this was the point I’d reached as I walked to the entrance of a medium-sized building of professional suites in South Melbourne. The Aussie Day barbecue had gone well and all of the neighbours, friends and family were buzzing about the escapees running around the neighbourhood. I couldn’t really deny my role in the night: the street sign was there, leaning against the shed, which had created curiosity amongst everyone, and when Bruce turned up for a few coldies and thanked me in front of all these people, the game was up. So we turned it into a joke and two of my neighbours – Travis Jones and Brad Martin, both of them former special forces and Special Operations Group – lamented that I hadn’t roused them and taken them with me. A bunch of idiots harassing an eight-months-pregnant woman? To a certain kind of Australian, that’s what you call Just Cause.
I suppose it’s incredible to many Australians that living on the same street as them are former elite soldiers and a former intelligence operator, and we’d all be milling around a barbecue on Australia Day, with Bruce the firefighter and our extended family. But there we were, just a normal Australian community, interested in protecting one another and warding off the bad guys. This perhaps illustrates what I’m about: when I say ‘GNE’ – Good Not Evil – I’m not talking about a motto in a comic book. This is how we roll, in the community-service world. It’s not ironic – we really do have one another’s backs. We certainly have some training that makes us approach danger slightly differently to normal folks, but actually all successful communities work this way: know each other, commit to one another and call-out evil when you see it. A bit of a tall tale? Well, on this particular Australia Day, in my backyard, was a pretty reliable witness – Mark, the writer of this book. He was in Melbourne to interview me and saw firsthand how we do it. He even picked up a new name: Travis labelled him call sign CASPER, in honour of his ghost-writing background.