At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  Indonesian intel hadn’t confirmed the identity and the agency that was briefing me had managed to stop the Indonesians storming in there until they could confirm it was Ramdi.

  ‘The mission is to confirm Samson Ramdi’s identity,’ said the major. ‘We are not engaging with Ramdi or his bodyguards.’

  So, there was that word – bodyguard – spoken in the plural. At this point the concept of driving out to a fishing village as a goofy tourist, blending with the life pattern and spending a week getting close enough to confirm it was Ramdi, was looking unlikely.

  I tend to create the style of gig as I hear the details come out of a briefer’s mouth. And as we reached the tail end of the PowerPoint presentation, I was growing increasingly disconcerted. What usually happens is that local assets alert us to the presence of people, and the intelligence agency wants a second set of neutral eyes to confirm. This is usually a covert action, a soft infiltration, and an equally soft departure. On completion, the intelligence masters know who and where, and perhaps we even leave a tracking device on a vehicle or a micro camera in a tree.

  But mention of the bodyguards raised the stakes. The major said the local assets were ‘in place’, waiting for our arrival before taking any further action. Translation: half of Java knew Samson Ramdi was living in that compound, and the villagers who used to be friendly with him were now snitching.

  I didn’t like it. But it got worse. My team would travel with an Indonesian ‘adviser’, not because we needed help with the maps, said the major, but because we had to coordinate with the Indonesian detachment. My eyebrows must have threatened to take off and hit the roof, because the major forced out a quick explanation that included the term EOD – explosive ordnance disposal. So we weren’t going to simply ‘confirm’ – we were going to engage, and then do something about the bomb factory.

  ‘The EODs are usually three or four blokes,’ I said. ‘How many are with the Indonesian detachment?’

  ‘Around twenty, is my understanding,’ said the major. ‘They’re backup.’

  ‘Backup?’ said our special forces captain, down there at the front of the class.

  ‘More like observers,’ said the major. ‘Your backup will be five of our guys from the embassy, in a Humvee.’

  I shifted in my chair and shook my head. They were going to add a military detachment, from a Western country, into a covert assignment in the Javanese bush? It sounded like a circus, not an operation.

  ‘There a problem, Mike?’ asked the major.

  ‘The mission is to confirm Ramdi’s identity,’ I said, trying to stay polite while the fucks clustered. ‘I’d usually go into a gig like this alone, covert, and with the boys backing me up at an OP in the bushes.’

  I thought I saw John nod; Captain James turned and stared at me, like I was stupid.

  ‘Yes,’ said the major, ‘nine times out of ten, that’s how it would play.’

  I stayed calm, and continued. ‘So, we’re driving up there, with our team – four foreigners – and a truckload of Indonesian soldiers, and a Humvee filled with soldiers from this embassy?’

  The major nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘I guess this isn’t a covert reconnaissance,’ I said, still keeping it polite. ‘Can we stand-down the soldiers until we’ve done our job?’

  ‘The detachments will be reinforcement,’ said the major, becoming very formal.

  So there was another landmine of a word. This time it was John who took it up.

  ‘Did you say reinforcement?’ he said, in a deep southern drawl. ‘What sort of numbers are we talking about up there?’

  The major cleared his throat. ‘It’s unreliable intel,’ he said, and reached for a glass of water, ‘but it’s in the tens.’

  ‘Tens?’ said John.

  ‘Ramdi has a guard around him that varies between twenty and fifty,’ said the major. ‘That’s what I mean by reinforcement.’

  5

  The next morning we’d be in the bus again and the gig would begin. But I had a day to kill so I went for a walk to the symposium, let Indonesian intel get a good look at me, and then I jumped on a bus that headed north, and I got off at a market that I know and like. It always had interesting t-shirts, tactical flashlights and dual-purpose pens. They had t-shirts on which Barack Obama is drawn like Che Guevara, and posters where Donald Trump’s face was one of the Mount Rushmore presidents. Funny Indonesian stuff – one of the joys of being in that country. I liked poking around in that market when I wanted my mind to switch off. And I had quite a bit to switch off. The briefing had ended more or less benignly, with John and myself a little confused about how to conduct a covert reconnaissance when you drive into a remote village with at least three vehicles, all crammed with soldiers and ready to roll. And in that same room were the other two people in the team: Captain James, who seemed excited about anything the briefer said; and Calvin, who contributed nothing and made no expression at all, positive or negative.

  Me? I’d done many of these things and I didn’t like the way this one was designed. I’m a large white man who has managed to blend in and infiltrate in South-East Asia for many years, with only rudimentary Bahasa. I’ve done it in the big cities and in tiny villages in rural Thailand and Indonesia. That’s not an easy thing to do and I do it by mimicking the pattern of life and the social rhythm. I do it by going with the local flow, not by rocking up with a detachment of soldiers on the back of a truck. Indonesians from the bush tend to notice such happenings on their main street.

  I caught the bus back from the market and I had to get off and walk for five minutes to the hotel, and that meant crossing a bridge over a canal. I saw a person sitting on the guardrail of the bridge, not moving. And my first thought was that the bloke was waiting for me and not in a good way. I kept going, looking for his backup. But as I got closer I saw that he was perched on the rail and was taking a shit into the canal below. This is Jakarta, 3.30 in the afternoon, with traffic whizzing by and the Mandarin Oriental looming over us. And someone is going to the toilet off a bridge.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – and I’m a veteran of Indonesia – but I kept walking, in a bit of a daydream about this city and this country and what the hell that briefing had been about. I was on the main boulevard now and looking straight at my hotel, over the road. And then there was a voice in my ear that I knew very well.

  ‘Stirring the pot again, eh, Mike?’

  I turned and I was face to face with Brandon. I’d been so preoccupied with that bloke taking a shit off the bridge that I’d lost my situational awareness for a couple of minutes and Brandon had just walked up and surprised me.

  Not cool.

  ‘You talking about that cluster that someone labelled a briefing?’ I said, knowing I could relax with Brandon. ‘Jesus wept.’

  Brandon laughed. ‘Can I buy you a beer?’

  ‘Buy me ten. Put me out of my misery.’

  We walked to a bar called the Front Page, where I’d drunk many times before and from which I’d once made an RV – rendezvous – with a person I’d subsequently operated with. I got a cold Tiger in front me, clinked glasses with Brandon, and felt myself relaxing a bit.

  ‘Can only have one of these,’ I said. ‘I’m working tomorrow.’

  ‘Day after,’ said Brandon.

  I gave him a look and he told me the gig had been pushed back by a day.

  Now I just shook my head. Some jobs eat up your nervous energy before you even start.

  ‘I wanted to have a chat,’ said Brandon, both of us checking for people sitting too close to us. ‘I got word that you favoured covert recon – maybe there’s too much cavalry for your liking?’

  ‘Not really about what I favour,’ I said, quite aware of where I stood on the totem pole. ‘But if the gig’s about confirming Ramdi’s identity, we do it covert; if we want to blow up his operation, then w
e head out there with truckloads of soldiers.’

  I pulled myself up. I’d basically solved the puzzle. ‘Shit, Brandon – is this even a recon job?’

  He held my gaze and did what all good intel operators do: he asked me a question. ‘You think the Indonesians are interested in confirming it’s Ramdi?’

  ‘To what extent do we care what the Indonesians think?’

  Brandon smirked. ‘On this one, they delivered the intel from their assets, so we’re almost lucky to be here.’

  ‘So the Indons won’t let us operate without a detachment of their guys?’

  ‘That’s as good a call as any,’ said Brandon.

  ‘And the embassy soldiers?’ I asked. ‘They up there to protect my team, or Ramdi, or the Indonesian soldiers?’

  Brandon laughed at that. ‘Mike, it doesn’t matter what goes down day after next – I need confirmation that we had Samson Ramdi in that village.’

  ‘Had?’

  ‘You think he’s going to hang around when we roll into town?’

  I couldn’t see how I was going to identify him if the soldiers went nuts.

  ‘Find a way,’ said Brandon.

  ‘What’s the deal with Ramdi?’ I said. ‘Why’s he living so close to Jakarta? Was he protected?’

  Brandon said he didn’t know. He told me Ramdi had been moving around South-East Asia and that he’d disappeared off the radar for a year before turning up in Java. The last time his vests and IEDs were used in the subcontinent, the blast analysis showed traces of chemical detonators – the building blocks of what they called the ‘organo-bomb’. You’d rightly think that bombs have been made of organic substances forever, and that’s true, but the detonators and fuses and timing mechanisms are metallic. Even small-scale circuit boards have metal in them. If investigators were finding no metallic parts in Samson Ramdi’s bombs, it was bad news. Organo-bombs could escape any detection and be disguised as just about anything. As Brandon made mention of this technology, I got a cold crawling sensation all over my skin.

  ‘No one else knows that,’ said Brandon, standing. ‘Keep it that way.’

  6

  On day four we met in the lobby at 4.30 am, grabbed coffees and stepped onto our unmarked shuttle bus. We were driven to the embassy and dropped at the armoury, where we had to sign for what we checked out. I selected a ballistic vest with Kevlar plates, an M4 assault rifle, and a SIG Sauer 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a nylon webbing holster and three extra magazines that slipped into the vest pockets. I picked out a small 5.11 backpack made of camo canvas, asked for a new CamelBak straw, and filled the bladder with clean embassy water.

  I found a coffee dripolator with a fresh cone of grounds in it and as I helped myself, Captain James came up close. Now that I had him less than a metre from me I got more detail on this bloke. I saw leathery skin with a deep tan, making his pale blue eyes look distinctive and scary. He was wearing a generic tactical shirt and pants in a pale olive shade, and with his sleeves rolled up I saw tatts on his forearms that were usually worn in the US Army, perhaps US Rangers. I also saw a man ten years older than I’d previously estimated. Probably late forties. And yeah, I got a flash of a man recently divorced and trying to get his shit together – a well-worn personality type in my profession, I’m afraid.

  ‘You’ve worked in this theatre before, right, Mike?’ he asked. I didn’t like what I took to be an insecure tone, but at least he was acknowledging a disparity in his experience and mine. Well, I thought he was.

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘South-East Asia is my patch.’

  ‘My patch too,’ he said, pale eyes staring into me, wanting a reaction. I have to confess: you get me at sparrows, and I’m sucking on a coffee, that’s not a good time to ask me to put up with your shit. Ask any of the subbies I work with.

  ‘Big enough for everyone,’ I said, looking away and sipping. I thought he was going to ask me for some advice on how to do this – which would have been to sabotage the soldiers’ vehicles and go do this ourselves. Ha ha! Just kidding.

  ‘Mindanao,’ he said, jaw muscles flexing. ‘Fucking Basilan, fucking Moros.’

  I nodded. The Americans who’d found themselves fighting Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines in the early 2000s were famously unimpressed with the experience. Basilan Island had been a defeat for certain American special forces and it was best not to get into it with them. A guy I knew from that campaign had called it ‘one long ambush’.

  And before Captain James could expand on his views, and really annoy me, he was drifting away, trying to corner John.

  Great, I thought as we milled around and the embassy soldier detachment got their act together. I’d be going into the boonies of Java with a man whose opinion of Indonesia was formed by having his arse kicked by the Moros on Basilan fifteen years earlier. Right then, I realised that the last chance of sanity for this gig – that our leadership was at least professional – was not going to pan out. It wasn’t going to go down my way: it was going to look like a bunch of Vikings sailing up to a beach and shaking their swords in the air.

  James and John were approached by a soldier from the embassy detachment, who was carrying a black Cordura bag. He picked one set of tactical field radios from the bag, and James nodded and took the bag. Okay – so Captain James wanted to be wired up and I could accommodate him on that. If the comms was helpful and likely to save my life, I’d opt in. If this was going to be a special forces circle jerk then perhaps I’d switch it off, or maybe slip off the agreed frequency.

  The major from our briefing walked into the armoury, slapped Captain James on the bicep and cast his eyes around until they fell on me. He made for me and led me out of the melee.

  ‘Brandon spoke with you?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  ‘The ID of Ramdi is important, but it’s now our second priority. Take this,’ he said, and handed me a small black object the size of an iPhone. I knew it as a very powerful camera, used by Five Eyes intelligence agencies. It had incredible optics, a massive sensor and sometimes – when recon people were some way off from their target – there was a clip-on zoom lens that could magnify the subject with almost as much quality as a large professional DSLR.

  ‘What’s the first priority?’ I asked, slipping the thing into my top shirt pocket.

  ‘Whatever he’s got in his workshops and rooms,’ said the major. ‘Material, products, documents if he has them. I’m sorry to land this on you at the last minute, but now I guess you see the set-up?’

  He handed me another object, this one a BGAN satellite phone. ‘This is for you only,’ he said, and I hid it in my hand and deposited it in the 5.11 pack. ‘Once you’ve been in the compound, give me a call, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I breathed out through my nose and just stayed calm: the idiots were going to create a drama with their truckloads of soldiers, and through all of the chaos I was supposed to go and do the real job, which was photographing the evidence of an organo-bomb facility.

  ‘And, you’ll have backup,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘John, right?’

  ‘Ha!’ said the major, looking around quickly. ‘Nicely picked. He’s assigned to you. Personal security.’

  At times like this – 5.15 in the morning and you’re barely caffeinated – you can be really tempted to tell someone to get fucked. You can’t take the tradie out of the man. I was just about at that point. But this employer of mine was a country I owed my career to, and Brandon was someone I didn’t want to let down – he was the kind of person who’d treat me like cattle in one respect and then bust me out of serious shit when I needed it. Most of the senior dudes in this business were like that deep down. They’re a get-out-of-jail-free card, but you can’t run the well dry. You have to put in. So I really didn’t appreciate the way this job was developing but I was going to do it like a good little soldier.

/>   Calvin took a cue from Captain James and walked out of the armoury’s wide roller doors. He started the silver Chevrolet Suburban we’d be travelling in, and I watched Captain James get in the front passenger seat beside him. Behind the Suburban, a diesel roared to life – the canvas-back truck that was carrying the embassy soldier detachment.

  ‘Let’s go, big fella,’ said John as he walked past me with an open gear bag containing an assault rifle, a submachine gun and a pump-action shottie.

  So I slung my bag over my shoulder, threw my coffee in the bin, and I got in the damned vehicle. We rolled towards the embassy security post as a faint line of orange formed on the eastern horizon. Time to go to work.

  7

  When you work for this particular government, they do small things right. Giving you an armoury and a weapon selection was always a nice way to start, even if I knew that the staff sergeant was going to count the rounds from the mags when they were checked back in. But the small things were a nice touch: the Eskys in the Suburban that contained sandwiches, tactical nutrition satchels, apples and oranges and bottles of water, cans of Coke, and so on. Whenever I get exasperated about that nation, I think of those food packs.

  Before we headed out, James turned from his position in the front passenger seat and distributed the radios. They consisted of earpieces – held in place with rubberised hooks over the ear – and a mouthpiece that ran against your right jawbone, which was connected to a small battery and transmitter pack that clipped onto your belt or webbing. I had webbing with a pocket for the transmitter pack, so I slotted it in there as James handed out the call signs. We were all ‘Red’: I was Red Unit, John was Red Dog, Calvin was Red Eagle and James was – you guessed it – Red Leader.