At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  Gregory nodded and leaned back in his chair. ‘This is the loop,’ he said, flicking his finger back and forth between us. ‘There are people who don’t know how this will be resolved, and until it is resolved, you and I only have this conversation with one another.’

  ‘And no one else.’

  Gregory nodded. ‘The tower is outdated – it’s an analogue system.’

  ‘Those old Nokias and Ericssons, right?’

  ‘Yes, it works, but the Afghani government is issuing digital cell network licences, so the tower has to come down.’

  ‘But you can’t get a local contractor to dismantle it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It being Afghanistan, there are parties who may not agree with dismantling it. Do you see?’

  I almost laughed. ABC Telecom figured that the Taliban wouldn’t let the tower be brought down because organisations such as the Taliban used analogue cellular systems – and not only to trigger their bombs. The analogue systems were also much harder to hack into or interfere with than digital.

  So instead of having a construction company bring it down in pieces, they needed a crew to come in and do it quickly, in the middle of the night. Now I knew why there was the need for secrecy. ‘You want the thing blown in place?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gregory. ‘We’ll let you specify the exact method, but I was thinking RDX charges.’

  ‘Where does the government come into this plan?’

  Gregory nodded, as if to say Good question. ‘The US authority’s rules state that any infrastructure built in or imported to Afghanistan must be removed when its owners pull out.’

  ‘Are you pulling out?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, like I might be simple. ‘The US and her allies have been subsidising the cell networks and now that they’re almost at full draw-down, the subsidies are over and we’re out.’

  ‘At which point you have to remove the equipment,’ I said. ‘What does the Afghani government think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, slightly abashed. ‘We never dealt with them about this. The Afghanis are committed to digital but I’ve heard that some people in the government want the towers to stay because a lot of rural folk have analogue phones.’

  ‘And ABC Telecom?’ I asked.

  ‘We want it down because we’re a publicly listed company and we operate in places where terrorism and insurgency are real and can easily take over our networks. We can’t be in the news with our infrastructure associated with those elements.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So, to what extent will the Afghani government tolerate our activities in-country?’

  Gregory smiled. ‘Well, I guess if I’ve gone to Australia to get this done, I’m not anticipating friendly natives – either government or Taliban.’

  ‘Why did you come all the way to Australia?’

  ‘I need someone who works dark, who has an intel background and also knows Afghanistan.’

  He was talking about my experience as a road warrior around Kabul and into the south, including Uruzgan and Helmand provinces.

  ‘You could have recruited out of London or Marseilles,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s just call it fit-for-purpose,’ he said. ‘This has to be dark, with no trail of crumbs, if you see what I mean?’

  ABC Telecom wanted its own cell tower destroyed, flying in the face of what the Taliban wanted. That – right there – was an incredibly dangerous proposition, if not handled properly. I generally operate on the basis that whatever the client asks for, and is willing to pay for, is what the client will get. I’m a private contractor – I’m free to turn down any job if I don’t like the smell of it. But if I say yes, the client has to be satisfied.

  ‘When does it need to be done?’ I asked.

  ‘Before December thirty-first,’ he said. It was currently the last Friday of October.

  ‘And one final thing,’ he said, leaning forward and pointing at me. ‘There’s a cabinet at the base of the tower. All of the routers and switches in that cabinet have to be retrieved – intact – and delivered to a point that we’ll confirm later.’

  ‘What kind of address?’ I asked. I was once asked to drop a requisitioned hard drive at an address in Jakarta, that turned out to be in that city’s China Town, in a hotel owned by a very powerful gangster. It was no way to end a successful gig and these days I ask about the drops.

  ‘A warehouse, in Kabul, probably,’ said Gregory. ‘The boxes in that cabinet are crucial. They can’t fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘Who might want them?’ I asked.

  ‘The boxes carry a record of every phone call and text ever made through that cell tower,’ said Gregory. ‘If someone thinks there’s anything incriminating on there, they’ll create trouble to get hold of it. So an expert in Kabul will destroy it.’

  I thought about this gig and some of the risks: Afghanistan, Taliban and explosives. Sounded dangerous but achievable.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘But not on the cheap.’

  6

  The Doncaster house I was working on looked much the same as it had when I’d left on Thursday. Thanks to some concise conversations with Gregory Crowther in Singapore, I had flown back to Melbourne on the Sunday, rather than spending the whole week up there. Now it was 7.05 am on Monday morning and I was looking over the house renovation site: the extra framing had been nailed into the extension we were building and I reckoned we were one day from putting on the roof trusses that were in a tarped pile at the back of the property.

  So far, so good. I heard a revving sound and then a motorbike scooted up a strip of lawn and the rider parked beside the skip bin – which I noticed needed to be emptied.

  The helmet came off and it was Hoodie, my long-term offsider. I looked at my watch: 7.06 am, not bad for a morning when he thought the boss wouldn’t be around.

  ‘You bring me one of those?’ I said, nodding at the bag of McDonalds that Hoodie pulled out of his backpack.

  ‘Lucky I don’t eat the hash browns,’ he said, pulling them out of the paper bag.

  ‘And lucky for me that I do.’

  We went over the site, I thanked Hoodie for getting all the internal framing done and I told him of my plans to get the trusses attached the next day.

  ‘But first, let’s get all the shit cleared out and get that skip picked up.’

  ‘He’s coming today,’ said Hoodie, and I gave him a pat on the back.

  ‘For that, I’ll let you have an extra large coffee,’ I said, and headed for my ute.

  I’d already had a coffee at home but now I was ready for another. ‘Remind me, what does McKenzie drink?’ I asked as I got in the driver’s seat.

  ‘I think it’s a soy latte,’ said Hoodie. ‘Something like that.’

  I didn’t worry about McKenzie too much. He worked off Hoodie and he was always late – whether I was in the country or not. I motored down to a set of high street shops and joined the queue at the café, where I made my order. The girl barista knew my special request and asked her workmate for a milkshake container before I even told her what I wanted. I drink coffee all through the day – it’s my one big indulgence. But when I have my morning coffees, I need volume. So years ago – having explained this caffeine requirement to my neighbourhood café owner – she’d come up with the milkshake container solution, into which she put three long blacks. Then she’d put the milkshake container into two others, to stop my hands burning. And then where do I put it? Well, that – folks – is why I still drive my BF Falcon ute. The cup holders in that model are large, open and sit like a bucket in the centre console: no mucking around with those fiddly spring-out things. In a Falcon it’s a man’s cup holder, for a grown-up’s coffee.

  I put the coffees on the roof as I opened the passenger-side door, and as I reached up for the cups, I noticed a Chinese woman looking in the display wi
ndow of a real estate agency. Someone seemed to be waiting in a car for her. Probably a good buy, I thought to myself, if the Asian market is looking around.

  Back at the site we drank our coffees and got on the tools. We pushed along and when the skip driver turned up I told Hoodie I had something to attend to and gave him his marching orders.

  Back at home I ducked into my office. I’d accepted the job with ABC Telecom and given them a price. I’d use a six-man team and it would cost my client US$720,000. That was cheaper than the alternative, apparently, and I’d noticed that Gregory had steered away from demanding to know exactly how I’d do it. This is what is meant by ‘dark’. The client stipulates what needs to happen, and we come in and do it – without being micromanaged and without being tied to the decision-makers. You wonder what ‘deniable’ means? Look no further.

  Now I needed to assemble the team and put together a plan that would satisfy the client as well as me. That meant I had to find a way to bring down and render useless the cell tower masts in the middle of Taliban territory – which would satisfy my client – and then I had to plan an exfiltration that would get us all safely out of Afghanistan, which would make my guys very happy indeed. I have been doing this work for many years and it’s hard to think of a gig in which the interests of the client and the team are 100 per cent aligned. It doesn’t matter if you’re working for a government or a security contractor or you’re doing private work such as I do; the person sitting in an office is rarely – if ever – as focused on a safe exfil as the operational team. So planning this job would be in two distinct pieces: the tower and the exfil. There’d be an overlap, of course, but the first piece would guarantee me the full fee; and the second piece would ensure that serious professionals would agree to work with me again.

  I sketched it out on a notepad: the choices were pretty clear as far as demolishing the cell tower was concerned. One option was that we slip into Kabul, pretending to be either tourists or consultants of some sort, stay for a couple of weeks, and then make a side trip and blow the cell tower. Or, we’d come in by helicopter one night, blow the cell tower, and then do a runner.

  The second option is the way we’d do it if this was the movies. But as much as I’d like to do it that way – fast, clean, sudden – there were significant problems with the FIFO method. Chief among those problems would be the base of operations. If we came in one night, made a big bang, and then left, where would we be flying to? The site of the cell tower was in the middle of Afghanistan, along the north–south road that connects Kandahar with Farah in a line straight down the middle of the country. So this is the middle of Afghanistan, in the middle of Taliban territory, with the neighbouring countries being Iran to the west and Pakistan to the east. And both of those countries also lay to the south – you can’t fly to a ship, even if you could find a helicopter with that range, because you’d have to fly over Pakistan or Iran and either of them would shoot your chariot out of the sky.

  A helicopter strike team might work if I could guarantee ground support in Iran or Pakistan: but, of course, I couldn’t guarantee support in either of those countries. The Iranians would have me in a basement with a hood over my head so fast that I wouldn’t be able to plead my ignorance. And the Pakistanis? Any attempt to base a helicopter strike out of Quetta – or points closer, perhaps Peshawar – would immediately cut the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and Pakistani military into the action, and then we’d get caught between the warring factions of Pakistan’s security services and all of my money would be blown paying out the bribes. About the only helicopter involvement on this gig would be the emergency or Plan C: if it all went to custard I could probably get the Americans to fly a mercy mission out of Samungli – the Pakistani Air Force base just outside Quetta that contains a partially secret US base. But that would be desperation stuff. Once the Americans realised they’d helped me sabotage crucial public infrastructure, I’d be burned with the Yanks, something I’d never risk. You want to be buddies with the Americans? You protect their reputation or you walk alone.

  So I was back to my old methods: soft infiltration, posing as tourists or consultants, lying low for at least a week and then one night just getting the job done. Because of my considerable contacts inside Afghanistan I had a very high chance of being able to access military-grade explosives and detonators in-country, and if that didn’t work out I had other ways of getting contraband across the border.

  I also knew how to get really good mapping, and there was a logistics company still in Kabul that would hire me a couple of Land Cruisers or Yukons. So I could get around, I could get demo gear for the gig, and I would put us up at the Serena – a hotel in Kabul with terrible memories, after the Taliban attacked it in 2008. But after the attack its security had been beefed up and besides, it was close to the US embassy and therefore close to the cavalry.

  Now I needed a team, and I needed a reason to be in Kabul. In any other part of the world I pose as a tourist, but Afghanistan doesn’t have tourists. I picked up one of my burner phones and called a construction buddy of mine in Perth.

  ‘Hanso,’ I yelled when he picked up. ‘Up early, mate, you shit the bed?’

  ‘Mike Daly?’ croaked back my old tradie mate. ‘Fuck me – they haven’t killed you yet?’

  We went back and forth for a while. Barry Hanson had been on the building scene in Melbourne a number of years ago. Then his wife had seen a job on an internet site, he’d applied for it, and next thing you know he’s project managing civil and residential rebuilding in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah – I know: we bomb the joint and then make all this money from rebuilding it. But Hanso was a good bloke and I had an idea how he could help me.

  ‘Mate, what kind of contracts are out for tender around Kabul at the moment?’

  Hanso laughed. He’d always had an idea of what I did in my other contracting, but he could never tie me down to it.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘I’m carrying a crew of five or six at the moment and if there’s work in Afghanistan, I’d take a look.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hanso. ‘There’s a lot of schools and local government buildings going up.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you’re doing?’

  ‘Yeah, mate,’ he said. ‘There’s way too much work just for us.’

  ‘Where do I apply?’ I asked.

  While I was on the phone Hanso directed me to a website that was in English, Pashto French and German. It was a listing of all the civil contracts being put to tender by the Afghani government. There were thousands of them.

  ‘Try the link that says “infrastructure building”,’ said Hanso. ‘Now go to page five.’

  I clicked ahead, and there – among all the bridges, highways and sewer works – was a tender notice for ‘Agricultural College outbuildings’. They needed greenhouses, tractor sheds, seed storage sheds, barns and mechanical repair buildings. There was a reference number and a date. The deadline for the tenders was 20 December, and the constructions had to be ready for handover two years after that.

  ‘I need to apply for this,’ I said. ‘What’s the format? You have a template?’

  ‘Fuck, seriously?!’ he yelled. ‘I can’t give you that – I’d be sacked for that.’

  ‘Yeah, mate,’ I said. ‘And I’d be sacked for running a couple of Egyptian thugs out of town.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Hanso. ‘That . . .’

  That was the time Hanso had taken on two Egyptian brothers to help him expand his business, so he could have three sites running at once, not just two. Those Egyptians took over the site with all their gangster buddies; they refused to do any work on it, and freaked out the property owners. When Hanso tried to sack them, they demanded a payout to go. Which was when he called me. I found out they weren’t Egyptians – in the classic sense. They’d been Gaza residents and were strongly associated with an organisation called Hamas. I moved them on
without Hanso having to reach in his pocket, and without me having to bring out the black hood and the flex cuffs. It turned out they were all on false passports, and once I could alert a friend of mine to who they were and where they lived, the Commonwealth of Australia took it from there. Our taxes at work.

  So Hanso owed me.

  ‘Okay, Mike,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you the lot – all you’ll have to do is change a few words, and you’ll have yourself a tender-winning document. But you can’t breathe a word of this – never.’

  ‘Sure, mate. So you’ve done a contract like this?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve done eight agricultural college outbuilding contracts – we’re building nine and ten now.’

  ‘Why not this one?’ I asked, wondering what the catch was.

  ‘That one’s in Logar,’ said Hanso. ‘Taliban alley, mate. I’m not working there.’

  7

  With Hanso’s assistance I’d now have the bona fides for travelling in Afghanistan. Even if I lodged a failed bid for construction work, I’d be in the system and I’d be able to put most of the crew on the payroll as my employees and associates. And with a tender lodged, I’d have paperwork in the form of a receipt that would not give me free passage, as such, but would certainly bolster my credentials for poking about in the Afghan countryside.

  Now I needed a team. I had five people in mind. First on my list and my regular 2IC was MG, who’d done many tours in Afghanistan with the US Marines during the war. He was tough – sure – but I really liked his intelligence and the way he stayed calm when the shit started. He was usually my recon guy and the point man, the one you send in as the advance party.