He assigned our frequency, we made some quick tests, and now we were wired into Captain James. James kept for himself a larger field radio. This one was a ‘Manpack’ design, in a canvas carry bag, with a telephone receiver that clicked on top. We were ready to go. But before Calvin could put the Suburban into ‘Drive’, the major was at the passenger door of our vehicle and James was running down the window. I looked out from my window, also on the passenger side, and saw a local man with the major, early thirties, full head of dark hair and muscular. He looked familiar.
In front of me, Captain James got a little shitty and the major calmed him with words like ‘adviser’ and ‘liaison’ and then the local bloke was pulling open the door and climbing into the back seat. As he sat down between John and I, he reached forward and I watched James – with sneering reluctance – hand his field radio back to the local. As the man took the radio and sat back, I realised who it was: the Indonesian operator on our original conference call.
‘Anwar?’ I said, offering my hand. ‘Mike, and that’s John.’
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding as he took me in. ‘Big Unit, right?’
‘I’ve been called worse.’
We shook hands and then he shook with John, in contrast to the frosty reception Anwar was getting from the front seats. Captain James waved Calvin onwards, and the Suburban rolled forward.
‘This is Anwar,’ said James, twisting in his seat and nodding at our last-minute team member. ‘Anwar is our local adviser – he’ll be liaising with the Indonesian EOD detachment.’
We moved out of the embassy compound, the embassy troop carrier behind us, and turned left onto almost deserted city streets. I sat back and tried to relax but there’s not much relaxing on these trips. Almost as soon as we got on the arterial road that would become National Highway 1 heading east out of Jakarta, Anwar got on the radio and a stream of Bahasa Indonesia poured out with the really serious but musical tone that they use in that country. I watched Captain James stiffen as Anwar went back and forth with the screeching replies from the recipients. Anwar had the receiver volume turned up so that whoever was on the other end echoed into our car like a parrot trapped in a drain. This went on – I’m not kidding – for five solid minutes, at the end of which Captain James’s knuckles were so white from frustration that I thought they’d pop out of his hands.
‘Who was that?’ said James, trying to keep the anger out of his voice and not succeeding.
‘Who?’ said Anwar, now fiddling with his iPhone.
Captain James twisted in his seat and eyeballed the Indonesian. ‘The people on the other end of the radio communication.’
Anwar shrugged. ‘The soldiers.’
James looked at me and I saw murder. ‘You mean, our EOD detachment?’
‘Yeah,’ said Anwar, then his phone rang and he picked up, and the car filled with Bahasa again.
So, here we were, a bunch of contractors doing a job for a foreign government in Indonesia, and our translator and liaison man – Anwar – didn’t seem interested in translating. After just ten minutes into Game Day, the nominal leader was already on the verge of a mental breakdown.
I chuckled a bit, because there was nothing else to do. Anwar was in our team and contracting to the same government that was employing me. But even if he was a little chirpy and annoying for that time of the morning, there was little point in pulling rank and alienating him. Besides, my experience in Indonesia was that honey had more legs than vinegar. I caught John’s eye, and I could see he agreed: James’s stewing and eyeballing wasn’t going to incentivise our local asset. Indonesians don’t operate that way.
Anwar finished his call and I just started a conversation, perhaps playing a bit of Anwar’s ‘vague-game’ back on him. ‘They behind us?’
‘Who?’ he said, looking up from some app on his phone. He had a youthful, middle class look about him, with a slight unshaven goatee. Like many Indonesians of his background, he was probably sponsored through university by the army or intel, and he’d done his time with a big agency. Now he was freelance, like yours truly.
‘The local soldiers, the EOD guys,’ I said. ‘They back there?’
He shook his head. ‘No, up ahead,’ he said. ‘Waiting at the golf.’
I named one golf resort I knew of and he said, ‘No, the Sedana,’ and from that we got talking and it seemed the truckload of Indonesian EOD soldiers would meet us en route. It was almost clear, but I saw Captain James’s head shaking in the front seat, his ears glowing red with rage.
Anwar took another three calls on the radio over the next hour, meeting with big sighs from James and a great deal of mirth from John, who laughed quietly to himself while looking out the window at the Java countryside. There were two American types in the car that morning: uptight control freak and a dude who’d worked out that we were in Indonesia now.
We came over a rise in the highway just before 7 am, and on the other side was a lush vision of golfing heaven: a massive belt of greenery and palm trees wrapped around and through the hotels and country club in the centre of it. Sedana Golf and Country Club. At the big off-ramp to the resort Anwar’s radio squelched and he chattered away, leaning forward from the back seat to show Calvin where to pull over. We slowed onto the shoulder of the road until we were parked alongside a Pantech truck with a dark olive cab and a stainless-steel tray in the back with north-south benches. There was a canvas cover over the tray, which was rolled up on all sides, and around fifteen soldiers were sitting on the padded benches. Some were dressed in black fatigues and had MP5 submachine guns which suggested that while a few of the soldiers were EOD, the rest were counter-terrorism military or police. As the Suburban stopped I noticed one bloke among the Indonesian soldiers: I paused on him because his fatigues carried no insignia and I thought I saw a hair braid emerging from the back of his black cap.
Captain James opened his door and got out, saying, ‘No one get out of the car,’ so Anwar clambered across me and got out of the car – he walked straight to one of the Indonesian leaders and got a rousing welcome, leaving James to wait while the bicep slaps came to an end. If you’ve ever seen an overinflated balloon just before it finally pops, that was Captain James when we RV’d with the Indonesians: a vibrating, hopping-mad sigh-machine with his lips peeled back off his teeth.
Beside me, John laughed. ‘Oh man,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘This guy!’
The embassy detachment truck pulled up beside us and we watched its team leader wander forward as well. When James was finally brought into the Indonesians’ conversation he had to turn to Anwar for translation of the two Indonesian officers. The body language showed relaxed locals versus an American wondering what planet he’d landed on. It was excruciating to watch.
James and Anwar came back to the Suburban, and as he slid into his seat, James said – to no one in particular – ‘At least we’re the lead car.’
The Indonesians piled into their truck and fired their diesel, and James slapped Calvin’s arm and told him to hurry up with it. ‘Don’t let them take the lead. For fuck’s sake.’
After three minutes’ driving down the highway, Anwar gave Calvin an instruction and we hooked left, until we were heading north towards the Java Sea. I’d operated in these areas before and I knew them as poor farming districts, populated with lots of small villages connected by roads that were hardly better than cart-tracks in some places. Once you got to the coast, it was all fishing villages. On one level, this is an idyllic, laid-back part of South-East Asia, where backpackers go for an authentic ‘experience’. On another level, it’s an incredibly dangerous place to be fingered as a spy or law enforcement or anything associated with outside authority. It was perfect for pirates, bandits and terror cells, and not so good for a Suburban filled with contractors.
The roads became progressively worse, the trees closing in as the tarmac deteriorated. Calvin slowed the car a
nd we were down to fifty kph, and then the radio fired to life, and Anwar yelled into it. He nodded a lot, obviously engaged with the idea being put to him.
‘Up here,’ he said, leaning between the front seats and pointing at a shady copse on the roadside, just before a bridge.
‘Up where?’ snapped Captain James. ‘What was that communication about?’
‘We have to stop, the boss say so.’
‘The boss?’ said James, his face purple. ‘The fuck is the boss?’
‘Here,’ said Anwar, almost crawling through the space behind the seats. ‘On the grass.’
‘Okay,’ said Calvin, while Captain James ground his teeth.
We pulled over beside a small river, and the other vehicles stopped behind us.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked Anwar, since I was the one getting along with him.
‘Breakfast,’ said Anwar.
I dragged one of the Eskys from the car and as I walked to the sit-down area I saw James still inside the car, grabbing at his face like he wanted to rip it off. I placed the Esky in the grass, opened it and took out a cellophane-wrapped corned beef and Swiss cheese sandwich.
‘They got chicken salad?’ said John, stretching as he approached.
‘The one on the top.’
We ate and grabbed cans of Coke while the Indonesian soldiers laid around eating. We also watched James – through the windscreen – mouthing off at Calvin who nodded a lot and finally got his door open and came over for some tucker.
‘Everything okay?’ said John.
‘He wants to get it done,’ said Calvin, who’s office-worker complexion still looked out of place, although I could now see that while he was of average height and build, he was also quite athletic and could probably handle himself. ‘He thinks they’re wasting the day.’
James alighted from the car and walked to the team leader of the embassy detachment; they talked heatedly and James shrugged with too much eye-rolling before joining us.
‘You’re best buddies with the Indo,’ said James, tearing the top off a Sprite but looking at me. ‘Maybe it’s time to take control, eh, Mike?’
‘Let’s start with Indo,’ I said. ‘Don’t call him that.’
‘Amen,’ said John, and when he said that, this gig fell through the floor as the team officially split in two.
‘Sorry, Mike,’ James said, face twisted with sarcasm. ‘You don’t look like the sensitive type.’
I laughed. ‘Mate, we’re going into a part of the world where you get killed for the gold in your teeth – I wouldn’t get off on the wrong foot with the bloke who can talk us out of the shit.’
‘Well, talk’s about the only thing he does. You’re back there with him, I need you to get the intel out of him.’
I smiled. ‘Doing my best, James, but has it occurred to you that the locals think this is their gig?’
‘That’s about the only thing that’s clear to me after two hours in the car with that . . . that . . .’
He gave up looking for a better word than ‘Indo’, crushed his can and squatted beside the Esky. ‘Any of these got egg in them?’
As our team returned to normalcy I caught one of the Indonesians staring at us. He was the one without the insignia. Now I saw a glint of chrome in his holster.
8
I’ve spent thousands of hours training with the elite agencies of foreign governments. At various times in my career, I’ve done specialist courses with the British, the Israelis, the Americans, the Filipinos, the Canadians and of course, the Australian security agencies. They got me sharpened on active small arms, demolitions, IT and telecoms engineering, urban warfare and hostage psychology and interrogation; they taught me the dark arts of tradecraft, surveillance, counter-surveillance and overwatch surveillance. I learned how to hide interrogation inside an interview and make innocent requests for information add up to more than people knew they were giving away. Some of these training modules touched on teams and teamwork but really, when you analyse it, what is there to say? The best training and the best people eventually run into cultural differences, differences of goals or plain old personality differences. The same personal clashes that you get in a law firm or a school faculty are the same clashes you get in my job. Generally, we swallow hard and get on with the job. But sometimes you wonder if that is possible. And on this morning, in this car, I felt like I was living through a job that would one day be a case study in a textbook somewhere. The title of the chapter: Making Oil and Water Work Together for Long Enough to Do the Gig and Get Paid.
This was our problem: we were a carload of highly credentialed people, who – believe me – would not have been brought in by this government if we didn’t have the bare minimum of an excellent track record. I don’t want to brag, but this agency? They can pick and choose. So we all knew what we were doing and we’d all been here before. But in the one vehicle we had the volatile mix of a very tightly wound former special forces American, and a very smart and talkative Indonesian. Whether the American wanted too much info from what he called ‘the communication’, or the Indonesian was withholding, who knows? My Bahasa’s good enough to order a beer or a coffee, and to tell someone not to lie to me. I wasn’t keeping up with Anwar enough to know what he wasn’t telling us.
What I was getting loud and clear was the slow disintegration of Captain James. Life in the field can be tough, especially if perhaps you’re a little rusty – as I suspected James was – and your first big comeback job is out in the sticks of Java with a smart-arse in the back seat. I felt for James, really I did. But I didn’t feel for him so strongly that I was going to suffer for his personality when the crap started. I didn’t have to ask John what he thought because I knew John felt the same way. I was also certain that John would stick with team orders as long as he could, and if any crap started, he’d disarm the American – not the Indonesian. He would do this to keep us alive. As I always say, there is nothing better than a competent American.
By the way, this doesn’t happen very often because it’s rare to have a local asset in the foreigners’ car, taking radio instructions from another commander. However, this was how it was working and I was just hoping that when things came to a head between James and Anwar, John and I would have enough time and space to get clear of it and go do what we had to do. The gig always comes first.
The road became worse, running out of tarmac and turning to dirt about ten minutes after we left. Soon we were bouncing over rutted tracks, low-hanging trees hitting our roof, dodging farmers with carts and kids with goats, and having a merry old Javanese morning. For those who haven’t spent much time in these parts, this is your basic travelling day in rural Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Timor and Indonesia. It’s how you move around, and if you don’t like the odd head-strike on the ceiling and a few sideways lurches into the person beside you, it probably isn’t your bag. If you get carsick? Rural South-East Asia is not for you.
Calvin was a very good driver – I could tell by the way he didn’t freak out at the Indonesian ‘third lane’, which is when a bus driver in a hurry drives straight down the middle of the road and the vehicles on either side have to drive on the shoulder. He didn’t blink. But James? How do I say this? Feet on the dashboard, swearing the paint off the walls, asking what it is with this damned country. That sort of thing.
And not made better by Anwar giggling and nudging me in the ribs every time Captain James flipped out at a wandering motorcyclist or a dog that wouldn’t get off the road. I tried to stop Anwar when he picked up the radio, but short of physically grabbing him, there weren’t many options open to me. Before I knew what was happening, Anwar was very obviously telling the Indonesian officers about the dramas in our car, and the cackling laughter that was echoing back to us was actually embarrassing.
Anwar? He had tears of laughter running down his face. And before the noise
could be switched off, James asked Calvin to pull over, and then he was out of the car and walking around looking for a place to pee, but actually doing his breathing exercises.
I turned to Anwar, who thought me and John were in on the joke. ‘Mate, can we do the comedy after the job? What do you reckon?’
‘Aww, come on, Mike. Look at him!’ said Anwar, really enjoying himself.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, nodding but trying to be serious. ‘He’s got the point – he doesn’t like these roads. Can we have the jokes after the gig?’
Anwar saw that I meant it and also looked at John, who nodded at him.
‘Okay,’ said the Indonesian stirrer. ‘All over. Let’s go.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ came Calvin’s voice from the front, and he hit the horn, and James came slowly back to the car.
We set off again and the next time the excited Bahasa poured out of the radio, Anwar muttered something fast into the mouthpiece and turned the volume right down. No more squelch, no more winding up the white guy.
We drove for an hour with little talk. Then there was a wide left-hand bend, in the cover of trees, and as we went into this area, the radio crackled and Anwar listened and then told us to pull over.
Parking up, everyone got out of their respective vehicles and stretched. James walked over to the embassy detachment team leader and the Indonesian officers joined them. We watched the four of them talking and John lit a smoke.
‘No thanks,’ I said as he offered me one.
Calvin had the hood up and was checking the water and oil and John looked around and said quietly, ‘I think we’re over this hill – when the time’s right, give me the word and I’m all yours.’
At Hell's Gate Page 4
