At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

‘Halfway to where?’ I said. ‘The MCG?’

  Gregory laughed. ‘We have an office in Singapore and I’m due there on Friday.’

  ‘That’s your halfway?’ I said, not impressed.

  ‘What if we paid your fares and hotel, and you charge us for a week of consulting?’

  That, right there, was actually a reasonable offer. In the financial sense, anyway. The tactical arrangement wasn’t so great. As a rule I don’t encourage counterparties to nominate the ground on which I deal with them, a rule I break for the major government agencies who employ me. If a government contracts me, then it’s their show and I do what I’m told and stand on the spot marked X. That’s the only way I can do what I do, and the government agencies know that. But I have said no to many meetings with people I don’t know. In fact, the last time I emphatically declined to meet a client, it was a Middle Eastern government asking me to land in-country and debrief them on a sensitive matter I happened to have an insight into. I could have gone – perhaps I should have gone – and if it had transpired well, I would have been well paid, probably put on a retainer, and I’d have another government apparatus to call on in my times of need. But the lure of the money and the kudos have to be balanced against the contingency of a job not turning out so well. What if my revelations had led to something that embarrassed this Middle Eastern government? What if a cousin or a nephew in the ruling family was selling arms to a faction that was running an insurgency in Libya? And I probably wouldn’t be aware of this side action, and so just as the penny was about to drop, and my intel was about to make sense, I’d suddenly find myself chained to a sandstone wall in a military prison, tucked away until someone worked out what to do with me. And because it would be the government that was holding me, they could sell any story they liked of the ‘spy’ or ‘mercenary’ variety.

  However, Gregory’s offer was not unreasonable, and given his hesitations in our call, I genuinely believed he had some matters to discuss that were not worth revealing over the air.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said. ‘You can pay me a $7000 deposit and I’ll make my own way to Singapore. Once we’ve met and I’ve done my consulting, you pay me another $7000 for my time, and then we go from there. Okay?’

  Now Gregory had no hesitation. ‘Okay, send me your banking details and an invoice, and I’ll send you a calendar invite for the meeting.’

  ‘Done,’ I said. ‘And Gregory?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Call me Mike.’

  3

  I’m not exactly paranoid, but I am very careful. So, having told Liz that I had to be out of town over the weekend, I rang around a few old buddies and associates: people in Dubai and Rome and London. People like me. My mates in London and Rome didn’t know much about ABC Telecom but MG, a former US Marines Force Recon operator who works for me, had dealt with them in Afghanistan.

  ‘They Limeys?’ he asked in his deep Texas drawl. ‘Had an office in Kabul, maybe eight, nine years back?’

  ‘That could be them,’ I said. ‘They’re based in London.’

  ‘I think I remember there being some shit, in the south,’ he said, meaning southern Afghanistan. ‘Ran the Tango Towers.’

  ‘The what?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, the analogue cell towers. The terrorists use them to detonate IEDs.’

  I’d done many gigs with MG. He was a battle-hardened old-school American who didn’t break his word and didn’t talk shit. ‘So ABC Telecom was like, part of the problem?’

  ‘I don’t recall,’ said MG. ‘Everything okay, Big Unit?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, mate,’ I said. ‘This ABC. They a real phone company? I mean, they’re not a front for our friends, or anything?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said MG. ‘You want me to ask around?’

  ‘Very quietly, brother,’ I said. ‘Watch this space – there could be a gig for you.’

  We signed off and I immediately called Tom. I was going to need someone to look after the two house jobs I had on the go. Tom was accommodating of my travelling lifestyle – he thought I was a security consultant to big companies, in the infrastructure and cybersecurity areas, and sometimes I had to travel for my work. Which was true.

  Then I booked some tickets and a room at the Pan Pacific in Singapore. I was only eighty per cent comfortable with the meeting, but the $7000 deposit from ABC landed in my British Virgin Islands account before midnight my time, so if nothing else I’d make this a short consulting job. The BVI account? I don’t exactly engage in high finance but I need privacy and security in my banking, and you get that in the British Virgin Islands.

  I was in bed for a few minutes but I couldn’t relax. Something gnawed at me and I knew what I had to do. I walked through to the Control Centre, went through my old address book and found a number for a person I’d once worked with in Indonesia. Back then, Peter had worked in the field for a British intelligence organisation and we’d done some successful jobs in the arms and terror-funding field. Between us – and using some great local assets – we’d stalked a trail that came in on ships from Sri Lanka on the west coast of Sumatra, was driven across Sumatra and then shipped in fishing boats to Kalimantan. We’re talking about AKMs, plastic explosive, RPGs, detonators and fuses. That’s what was going into a nasty terror and piracy cell on the Kalimantan southern coast. Travelling out of Kalimantan and onwards to Australia and New Zealand was tonnes of compressed cannabis.

  That work was broadened by Peter’s agency and they busted a funding and arms-supply business being run out of Sri Lanka that was connected to some very bad people in Africa and the Gulf. It had made a certain Englishman look good, and the last I’d heard Peter was enjoying senior bureaucrat status in London. I didn’t hold an IOU over him, or anything like that, but I thought he could be worth a ring.

  I tried the number and it rang out. No voice mail, no diversions. So I did a search for his organisation, called the switchboard and asked for him by name. The woman wanted to know my name so I said, ‘Charley Farley’ – as a tribute to Ronnie Corbett, who’d just passed away – and she paused for a second and said, ‘Is that your real name?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s your real name?’

  She sighed and said, ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ and I disagreed and said I could sense progress, and she said, ‘Not with me you’re not,’ and I said that as far as I was concerned her calling me ‘sir’ was a step in the right direction.

  Now I could hear her laughing. ‘Look – who are you?’

  ‘Tell Peter it’s the Big Unit,’ I said. ‘If he doesn’t take my call, just hang up and write it down as Charley Farley, from New Zealand.’

  ‘Not from Australia?’

  ‘Call it Tasmania.’

  I heard a short cussing sound and the call went to hold music. About a minute went by and I was about to hang up when an English voice broke over the hold music.

  ‘Mike! Is that you?’

  We yakked about nothing in particular, since it’s really not the done thing to discuss on the phone things that have never really happened, either in Sumatra or not.

  ‘I got a phone call from a bloke who installs cell towers in the Middle East,’ I said, keeping it slightly factual and also vague. ‘Pommy dude – nothing to do with your firm?’

  Peter laughed. ‘Well, Mike, it was nice catching up.’

  ‘It was great,’ I said. ‘So no business ties?’

  Peter growled slightly. ‘Where in the Middle East?’

  ‘Not just there,’ I said, not wanting to name countries that I might yet be operating in. ‘Africa and South-East Asia.’

  He made a humming sound. ‘Mike, I’d assume you’re dealing with a private venture. Okay?’

  ‘Thanks, Peter,’ I said, and we exchanged pleasantries and hung up.

  *

  I flew from Melbourne to Brisbane the next day
. I landed in Brisbane around midday and moved straight to the doors with my backpack over my shoulder. As I pushed out of the Brisbane domestic terminal, onto the apron – and across from where the transfer bus would take passengers to the international terminal – I ducked to my right and leaned against the wall, waiting and pretending to be dealing with a phone call. I counted off sixty seconds and kept my eyes on the doors while I kept my phone to my ear and blocked my other ear with my hand. I’m often like this when I go to work in my other contracting. The way things work is that a watcher in one airport sees their subject get on a plane and notes the destination and the flight number. Then they phone ahead and alert another team to the flight the subject will be landing on.

  Paranoid? Maybe. But when I get phone calls out of the blue – and I don’t know the bloke – I have to accept that hidden scenarios could be at play. You can’t check everything but you can’t say no to every job. I’d had a look through ABC Telecom’s website and triangulated a few of the telecom licences, via some of the government websites where they claimed to be accredited. Seemed kosher on that level, hence the call to Peter to see if the British had a stake in this. Peter wasn’t being cagey, by the way: government security employees don’t confirm or deny much – especially not over the phone – so his suggestion that I assume I’m dealing with a private entity was as good as saying It’s not us.

  Now I watched the people filing out of the Brisbane airport terminal and making for the transfer bus, which was moving towards the bus stop. I kept one eye on the exit door onto the apron while the other eye wandered along the apron to see if there were any gentlemen sitting in cars, waiting where they shouldn’t be. I stuck to my post for five minutes, pretending to talk on the phone. And then I slipped into a group of people making for the waiting transfer bus, and got on.

  In just under three hours I’d be taking off for Singapore. No guarantees but also no tails. Yet.

  4

  My room at the Pan Pacific looked south, past the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and into the marina, with all its restaurants and boats. If I pressed my face to the glass and looked to my left, there was the Singapore Flyer – a large Ferris wheel on the waterfront, not unlike the one in London. I was on the sixth floor, sipping on a coffee I’d made with the machine in my room. The 2.30 afternoon flight from Brisbane had landed just before 9 pm and now it was 8.15 am and I was expected to make a 10 am meeting. Not exhausted or jet-lagged – just a little crusty.

  I took the elevator down to the restaurant and grabbed breakfast. I always travel as an Aussie tourist because I find it the easiest story to blend in with, especially when I travel with a large DSLR camera. So I was wearing my jeans and a polo shirt and carried a black baseball cap and a burner phone I’d bought at Changi.

  I took my time and had a good look around me but I couldn’t see anything untoward – mainly it was business travellers obsessed with their smartphones. If anything was gnawing at me, it was the very thing I couldn’t really check against: that the ABC Telecom approach was a ruse by an intelligence organisation to get me out of my country and into a vulnerable position. Why would this happen? Any number of reasons, but primarily to have a chat about a place I’d been or a person I might have spoken to or an organisation I may have infiltrated. In other words, I might be walking around with something in my head that an intel operation needed. A bunch of people who could simply call me or come and see me on a building site, instead sit around in a meeting room in a capital city and convince themselves that I’ll have to be threatened, cajoled, blackmailed and perhaps even incarcerated in order to have a conversation with me. No, I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories – at least none you’re privy to (ha ha!). But once you’ve been the person sitting in the meeting room, and heard all the second-guessing, you appreciate that there are people who think the best way to start a conversation is to throw a hood over your head and bundle you into the back of a van.

  I left the hotel and made west on Raffles Boulevard, taking my time and having a good look at slow-moving cars and men with tourist maps. I was unarmed and the embassies I could avail myself of if everything went haywire – the Australian, the British and the US – were all grouped near the Botanic Gardens, a fair drive out of downtown. I was wary.

  The meeting was set for an office that lay one block west of the Raffles City Shopping Centre. I walked the distance, looking in windows. The weather was warm – around twenty-five degrees – but without the famous humidity. I walked in the main doors of Raffles City and through the marble-lined atrium, with the mezzanine looking down. There was a jewellery store on my left and I paused in front of the display window. It was wide enough that I could stand in one place and let my eyes scan back and forth across all the watches, while also giving me a pretty good look at the people in the well-lit atrium. I thought I saw something, and let my eyes turn to my left. A European man, early forties, in a blue windbreaker and jeans, walked to a clothes store. He didn’t look like a tourist and he didn’t look like the kind of person who’d walk so purposefully towards a women’s clothing store. I couldn’t see his face but I noticed that his sandy hair was quite long for a forty-something. A local woman walked out of the store, and they greeted one another. Just an impatient dude waiting for wifey to finish with the browsing.

  I breathed out – I was worrying too much.

  *

  The office block was a mirror-glass affair, maybe fifteen years old. I checked the tenant board and ABC Telecom was listed on the fourth floor – right where Gregory had said it would be. I caught the elevator and came out in a shared foyer space. To my right was a series of frosted glass security doors and panels with the name ‘Alpha Financial’ stamped in black lettering on the door glass. No sign of life. On my left was ABC Telecom, with clear glass swinging doors, giving me a view of a reception desk. I walked into ABC Telecom, noticing swipe-card locks on the swinging doors and security cameras mounted in a black glass dome behind the reception desk.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to the woman. ‘I’m here to meet Gregory.’

  She scrolled down and as she did, the side door clicked open and a man who looked like an English accountant was standing in front of me.

  ‘Is that Mike?’ he asked, holding out his hand as he approached. ‘Gregory Crowther.’

  We greeted and I saw an honest, narrow face, and a trim physique to go with his corporate face shot. He was younger than I’d first estimated – early forties rather than late. He wore a suit with no tie, which could mean a lot of things but in my world often indicates someone with a military background, usually an officer.

  I followed. First impressions? Open, friendly, dry handshake.

  We entered a small boardroom, with a half-view of a stand of banyan trees on what I took to be Stamford Road. There was a flat screen on a wall and a whiteboard in the corner. Gregory asked me for my coffee order and yelled it from the doorway, before closing the door and joining me.

  There were two blue folders under his arm. As he sat opposite he shot one across the table, and as I stopped it moving I saw a white label with the words ‘Operation Lombardy’ printed on it in sans serif.

  Okay, I thought to myself as I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. ABC Telecom has a military aspect to it, and that’s not such a bad thing.

  5

  The receptionist delivered the coffees and Gregory handed me an NDA document – non-disclosure agreement – which was like the hundreds I’ve signed before. It committed me to acknowledging my civil and criminal liabilities and the fact that I’d pay all of ABC Telecom’s legal costs as well as all losses and damages, if I ever spoke of anything discussed between myself and the company. I signed, knowing that ABC Telecom had my own NDA sailing their way when and if we committed to doing this thing.

  We spread out our files to get a sense of the thing. Gregory’s company had a twin-mast cell phone tower on a hill in central Afghanistan, about eighty kilometres south-we
st of Kabul, just off the road to Kandahar. In front of me were three colour photographs in 8x10 format, showing the twin masts from different angles. Each mast was about thirty metres high and made of criss-crossing steel girders, like a large Meccano set. The masts were held together by high-tensile wires and there were two white discs on the top of the tower, back to back. The pictures showed a steel shed-like structure at the base of the masts, with thick cables leading into it from above. The third picture was an aerial shot of the district. A red circle had been superimposed over the location of the cell tower, and I could see there was a smallish town about three kilometres away, and a main road close to the tower. At the top of the photograph someone had drawn a red arrow on the road, with the words ‘Kabul 80 km’ beside it.

  Judging by the clarity of the information and the fact that he made no accommodation for someone interrupting, I decided Gregory was definitely ex–British Army, probably a major.

  ‘Okay, that’s the tower,’ I said. ‘What do you want done?’

  ‘We want it destroyed,’ said Gregory, looking me in the eye.

  ‘You mean, dismantled?’

  ‘No,’ said Gregory. ‘I mean brought down, rendered useless.’

  I thought about it. ‘Useless, to whom?’

  ‘Anybody,’ said Gregory, a little too quickly.

  ‘Destroying the tower,’ I said, ‘suggests urgency.’

  ‘That’s a fair assessment,’ said Gregory.

  We stared at each other and we both smirked. In my world we have to decide who’s in the loop, and who isn’t. At which point we can drop the coyness and talk about the actual thing for what it really is. It’s called indoctrination – if you’re not indoctrinated in a particular gig, you’d have no idea what was going on.

  Gregory was assessing me. That’s why I was meeting him in Singapore. The NDA was just window dressing – an official loop constructed by lawyers and accountants. But being able to work dark, in conjunction with people you don’t know, requires more of a bond. The Americans are very good at this: a certain type of American who works for the government will telegraph the rules of indoctrination, and once you’ve shaken hands, that’s it. There’s no going back and no one gets to pike or snitch.