At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Red Unit, this is Red Leader, state your position?’

  State my position? Boy, that got a massive smile out of John.

  I got my fingers on the squelch button and faded the connection as I took the call, and whispered back. ‘Now silent, Red Leader. Stand by.’

  John was laughing – couldn’t help himself. ‘Stand by! Shit, the man gonna love that.’

  Below us another group of terrorists – the shooters who’d been driven back by James and Calvin and the embassy detachment – were coming down the hill from their retreat trajectory. Instead of making straight back for their compound they were joining the fight on the main road from the left flank. We watched them jogging, shooting off their AKMs at the Indonesians, their t-shirt bandanas flowing behind them like manes. The Indonesian soldiers fired back on two fronts – straight down the main road, as well as into the jungle. As I pondered if we had to go down and help the locals, over the ridge came the truck from the embassy and then a really shot-up Chev Suburban.

  ‘Seems fair, now,’ I said to John.

  ‘Go around the town, head for the compound?’

  ‘Copy that,’ I said, and we ran down the lightly forested, almost scrubby rise towards the town. My mantra: skirt the fighting and stay out of it.

  12

  John established a good pace through the undergrowth and dry creeks, and while I was keeping up I certainly wasn’t as fit as I’d once been. Judging by the way I was gasping for air as we circled the village, you wouldn’t have known that twelve years earlier I’d run a boot camp training club at St Kilda Beach in Melbourne. Every morning at 6 am – before work – I’d put the troops through their paces, with beach runs, wet sand push-ups and the basic training drills used by the Navy SEALs. It was gruelling but fun, with lots of boxing and pad work. In those days it wasn’t just my size that made you think ‘front-rower’; back then you’d still see me in a pair of shorts and a singlet and believe I was playing footy. I was very fit. Not so much now.

  We rested and rehydrated as we surveyed the town. The streets had cleared as soon as the fighting had started and I got the impression that the villagers knew the identity of their famous neighbour. We crossed through a backyard, past a pigsty and down an alley between two small houses. John paused at the main street, and while I could see scared faces through the windows and eyes staring at the street, no one was outside. I followed John across the road, scanning with my rifle, the sounds of my footsteps pounding in my ears. I hear everything very loud when the adrenaline pumps. We ran between houses on the other side of the road and followed a back alley north, towards the compound. Chickens scattered and a stray dog (although, you never know in Indonesia) came up for a growl and then a sniff as we jogged past. At the end of the alley, I realised it was quiet again, although I was sure I heard a couple of smaller shots – perhaps handguns – from the compound, which was now to our immediate left. We paused at the alley corner, fashioned from corrugated iron. The driveway to the main buildings was empty and I couldn’t see any action up the top, where the vehicles were parked.

  ‘Ready?’ said John, and I pulled my camera out of my pocket and checked it for charge by switching it on and off.

  ‘We’re good,’ I said, and I keyed the radio by touching my earpiece.

  ‘Red Leader, this is Red Unit, copy.’

  There was a brief pause and then the comms opened and a burst of static hit my eardrum. ‘Red Unit, this is Red Leader – what is your position?’

  ‘Red Leader, carrying out tasking, where are the tangos?’

  ‘Red Unit, locals have eighteen tangos in custody, we’re mopping up the remainder. Chasing estimated ten shooters – EOD being sent up, over.’

  ‘Red Leader, do you have the subject? Over.’

  I waited, sweat running down my face as I focused on the response.

  ‘Negative, Red Unit,’ he said. ‘Subject still at large.’

  I signed off – told him I’d be back pronto. With a bunch of bombers arrested and others on the run, I wanted to be inside that facility before the EOD people arrived and messed with my stuff. We headed up the driveway, which had a few trees down the side of it. Not enough to hide our advance but enough to give us the confidence to move. John swung wide, staying at the end of the compound farthest from where the fighting had been. It was a deliberate tactic, to avoid the crossfire from the hold-outs who I was sure were up there.

  We ran through the scrub, around the back of a large steel-clad building that on an Australian farm would be called a drive-shed. It was high and wide and would house tractors, trucks, harvesters and balers. I was pretty sure I knew what was in there. There was only one man-door at the rear of this shed, and a few windows. We came in carefully, from the cover of the scrub and small trees, and stopped behind an old cable-spool about thirty metres from the shed. The sweat was running down my arms under my fatigue shirt. I was sweating from my scalp and my shoulders. It was only twenty-six or twenty-seven degrees out there – not much in the Australian context – but with the humidity and all the running around, I was starting to feel it.

  I’d almost caught my breath, and was about to suggest we move to the door when one of the windows in the shed slid open sideways and an AKM pointed through and opened up at us. The rounds came in fast and before I could duck down behind the wooden spool – which was on its side and the height of a picnic table – a 7.62 round hit the tabletop, showering wood splinters into my face. I instinctively turned away and as I did my foot caught on a rock and I fell over. When I hit the deck I rolled into the lee of the spool, blinking hard and checking my eyesight. I was amazed I didn’t have a splinter in the eyeball.

  I got to one knee and John was already into the open, laying down fire into the window. Glass exploded and he left a Jackson Pollock trail of lead in the dark green Colorbond sheeting on the sides. I clicked the safety to fire and leaned on the top of the spool, firing into the window to cover John. As he got to the door in the rear of the building, another window slid sideways and I aimed and was about to shoot when a broomstick with a white t-shirt tied to the end of it emerged from the window. Whoever was inside that window was waving the t-shirt and yelling something.

  ‘John!’ I yelled. He was flat against the building, wanting me to come forward so we could go through that door together. I pointed down the building’s side to the white t-shirt and John turned, saw it, and keyed his radio.

  ‘Think that’s real? Over.’

  ‘No idea,’ I said, and started running, my M4 trained on the surrender-artiste as I crossed the open ground. By the time I hit the building, John’s 870 was off his back and now the M4 was stowed across his shoulders. He wrapped his forearm through the carry strap and chambered a round with the sliding pump action. We looked at each other, and he nodded at the door. I turned the knob and kicked at it, and it flew inwards, with John chasing the swinging door straight into the building. I followed him, covering with my rifle. To our left lay the shooter who’d fired from the window, writhing and bleeding on the concrete floor. Natural light came in from glass panels in the roof, illuminating several large tables, rolls of wiring and plastic buckets. There were sewing machines and bolts of material. There were a lot of vests in various states of manufacture.

  We swung our weapons to our right, where a man and woman held their hands in the air and made pleading sounds. They looked late twenties and not dangerous. Or, should I say, not armed. I approached them as John tried to clear the area, smiling and holding my hand flat at the floor to indicate they should calm down and it would all be okay, and the guy relaxed and smiled. As I got to him I kicked him in the balls and clouted the woman with the butt of my rifle. They both went down in heaps of meat, and because the bloke’s hands had gone to his groin – a potential trigger point for a vest – I finished him off with a kick to the temple, which knocked him out.

  You think that’s cruel or overkill?
It makes me a nasty person? Ask any Israeli soldier what they can expect when the ‘harmless’ non-combatants are asking for peace and surrender. Ask an Iraqi intelligence operator in Mosul. What they expect is a human bomb, waiting for a group of operators to be in one place and relaxed, before triggering the explosion. Both of my white-flaggers would live, with bad headaches and swollen balls. But now I had a chance to check them for IEDs, and tag them with the nylon zip-ties I carried in a bundle in my back pocket.

  I was exhausted, panting, my sweat pooling on the concrete floor by the time I had them secured. Then, as I looked up, John’s voice changed.

  ‘Mike,’ he said. ‘Dude, you have to see this.’

  13

  Beyond the dying combatant John stood at the doorway of a sub-room of the shed. The sub-room didn’t really have any walls, as such. It was an area about one-eighth of the shed’s floor space, defined by heavy industrial racking of the type on which large hardware stores carry their stock. I trod carefully with John into the area and watched him drop to his knees and look for trip-wires and pressure pads. He’d obviously worked in Afghanistan.

  ‘Clear?’ I asked, after he’d prodded at material on the shelving with the muzzle of his shotgun.

  ‘Looks okay,’ said John, and we walked into the kind of storeroom that belongs in hell. There was racking on all four sides of us, with a table in the middle. Perhaps a dispatch desk, as if this were a warehouse. Which it was. I approached the shelving nearest to me: it was stacked with suicide vests, but with no explosives, only empty pouches and number tags. There was another set of racking for a lot of sealed plastic storage boxes. I peeled the lid off one and looked in: the eight fingers of C-4 plastic explosive, each one wired to a central box, stared back at me. Each storage box had its own number, and when I looked back at the vests, the numbers matched. Each finger of plastique would slide into a pouch on the vest. But how did they detonate the bombs?

  That question was answered by the racking that held scores of small detonation systems, some of which carried the old Nokia 3310 phones. Why 3310s? Because they included a function called ‘auto answer’, which means they can be used as a very reliable, remote trigger for the detonator. Some of the detonators had triggers attached to cords, of the type that act as a throttle on snowmobiles. Some of the detonators were attached to spring-loaded pressure plates.

  It was about as ugly and evil as anything I’ve ever seen. Totally depressing to think of so much skill and industry tied up in these death machines.

  I took out the camera and started shooting. I got in close so the spymasters could see all the detail and have a view of the scale of the thing. Having taken the shots, we moved back out into the main shed and I took a series of shots of the trestle tables, the sewing machines and the factory layout. I got close-ups of the dying shooter’s face, and also shots of the people I’d detained. As I was dealing with the man I’d kicked in the balls – who was conscious again and had surprisingly good English – John called from the far end of the building.

  As I made my way down there I could hear diesels revving and men’s voices outside. I wanted to be done before they got here and possibly brought more gun battles. John had found a door, locked.

  ‘You interested?’ he asked.

  I nodded and tried to kick it down. It didn’t budge, so I tried again: same result. John aimed the Remington 870 at the lock mechanism, and I turned away, covering my ears. When I turned back, waving away the cordite fumes, I saw the door hanging open, a hole where the lock and knob used to be.

  John went in first, checking the doors, walls and floor for booby traps. I followed close behind, with my SIG Sauer held in two hands over his shoulder. We were in a facility that looked as though it also produced something, but it was hard to see what. There were three large refrigerators, one with a glass door, which held small white plastic buckets of God knew what. I didn’t want to test our luck by opening the fridges but I took close-ups of the buckets and their labels through the glass door. The room had a work table in the middle of it, and as John walked around the far side of it, he muttered, ‘This our guy?’

  I came around to join him. Lying on the floor, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans with a big white apron over the top and a white hairnet, was Samson Ramdi. He looked as he did in the briefing photos – with that wise face and big white beard – except in this room he had a bleeding hole in the middle of his forehead. I looked around and saw the spray of blood and viscera against a bookcase of textbooks.

  ‘Would a nine-mil do that?’ I asked, pointing at the spray of blood.

  John said, ‘Perhaps, but more likely a .44.’

  ‘Recent?’

  John crouched beside the body of the bombmaker, and touched his neck and felt the skin. Then he dipped his finger in the pond of blood around Ramdi’s head, and dragged it to the edge of the puddle to see how easily the liquid was broken.

  ‘I’d say five minutes ago,’ said John. ‘Perhaps ten.’

  We exchanged a look and John nodded, saying, ‘I’ll take a look around.’

  I whipped off my 5.11 pack and took a quick suck on the water straw. Then I removed the fingerprint pads I’d brought. They look like a makeup case, with four glass panels underneath. I lifted Ramdi’s mangled right hand, pressed the thumb onto the first pane of glass but couldn’t get a good print for the fingers. Then I did the same for the intact left hand, capturing thumb and fingers. With the fingerprint case stowed, I pulled the camera from my pocket again, and as I set up the shot, the soldiers burst into the shed. From their accents I could tell they were with us.

  I could hear John dealing with them and expected to be interrupted at any moment. So for now I took shots of Ramdi’s face, his gunshot wound, his mangled right hand and some wider-angle shots that put him in context in this room. It seemed like a lot of drama just to achieve the rather mundane work that was my ultimate goal. Someone, somewhere, needed 100 per cent confirmation of Ramdi’s identity, and as a bonus wanted him placed in a facility that had something to do with IEDs and suicide vests. I’d nailed my first two jobs – Ramdi ID and the IED factory – and now I was looking around and wondering if I was surrounded by the third object of the recon job: the organo-bomb. I had a closer look at what was on the shelves of the refrigerator. There were peroxide variants and labels that suggested nitroglycerine. I didn’t know much about organic bombmaking except that the goal was to remove metal from the IED so it couldn’t be detected by most security systems. I also knew that while it was straightforward to use a non-metallic main charge, the detonator was the main problem because they typically used wires and connectors. In order to keep the detonator small, stable and reliable, detonators contained small charges of metallic explosive to create ignition on the main charge. Some organic detonators used a combination of liquid chemicals but they were unstable, difficult to make and tricky to transport. Most of the IEDs being used around Asia and the Middle East were made by professionals in one location and shipped to the terrorist organisations. You needed main charges, triggers and detonators that could spend a month being transported around Indonesia or the Indian Ocean, and still be in working order when the teenager was sent to the souk to do the work of the devil.

  I wanted to see inside the conventional fridges. So I checked around the seals on the doors and looked behind and under them, looking for IEDs. It looked clear so I gently opened the larger of the two fridges. There were no shelves in this one. But there was a body, sitting on the floor of the fridge in the foetal position, two gunshot wounds to the chest. Male, early thirties, Indonesian, and dressed in the same white garb as Ramdi. Blood poured out of the fridge and onto the floor. I took out the camera and took shots of the person and then shut the door.

  Someone had come through here just before us, and if they were bad guys, they would have made off with the sort of material we didn’t want circulating. I took a collection of manuals and chemicals and
dropped them in my pack. There was a computer at a desk in the corner, and I knelt, tore off the top of the ‘tower’ server, and quickly unclipped the hard drive. I pulled it out and carefully placed it in an empty pouch on my vest, and secured it with the velcro flap.

  I heard footfalls and John walked into the room, James on his heels.

  ‘We done?’ said the captain, his M4 pointing at the ground. ‘Got what you need?’

  ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘The EOD here?’

  ‘Just outside,’ he said, looking around. ‘What the fuck is this place?’

  ‘Bombmakers’ paradise,’ I said.

  I made to go and as I did, Captain James could now clearly see Ramdi lying on the ground. ‘That the bombmaker?’

  I looked back and nodded and he asked me who had killed him.

  I shrugged. ‘Beats me.’

  ‘We find him,’ said James, ‘he gets a medal.’

  14

  The EOD teams were all over the bomb factory when I walked out. It looked like the Indonesians had brought in more trucks, because there were now people in that shed who I hadn’t seen on the EOD truck; people with clipboards and forensic sample boxes.

  A small commotion was going on to my right, where the people who had surrendered to us were being worked over by the Indonesian soldiers, most of whom hated terrorists with a passion.

  I almost ran into Anwar, who wanted a debrief so he could tell the Indonesian EOD officers. I told him I was not at liberty to say and brushed past, before stopping. ‘By the way,’ I said. ‘You might want to pull your guys off the prisoners. They’re going to give you a bird’s eye account of what was going on in here.’

  Anwar nodded, and I kept moving. It was now the middle of the day, and as I walked outside into the bright sunshine I saw the shot-up Suburban and realised how hungry and tired I was. John walked with me to the car and I had a chance to talk to him before James joined us.