At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  Then I’d add Rich, a Liverpudlian and ex-SAS operator who’d also worked in Afghanistan during the war. Rich was a great all-round soldier who had strengths in medic, weapons and comms. He and MG were both based in Dubai so they often worked together.

  To this team I’d add Steph, an Aussie woman who had worked in military intelligence. She’d done a degree in psychology while in the Australian Army and had spent many years rotating in and out of Kabul and Tarin Kowt as part of the intelligence staff. She’d picked up Pashto well enough to have conducted more than six hundred interrogations of locals. Oh, and the thing I really liked about Steph: a good-looking woman with a black belt in something Japanese. You want a broken arm? Try touching her ponytail.

  Doug was sometimes in Melbourne, sometimes in Dubai and increasingly in Moscow. He was ex–Aussie intelligence and a whiz at comms and IT and anything to do with computers and phones. When it came time to remove the systems hardware from the cabinet at the base of the tower, I’d task Doug with it. I’d also try to warn him off Steph: Doug was a very charming, handsome man who had that sort of Jeff Goldblum thing about him . . . and he knew it.

  Finally, I needed someone to ensure that the tower came down when we wanted it to. For this I’d bring along a mate of mine – Timmo – who was former Australian special forces with a specialty in demo and close combat (hand-to-hand). In fact, he’d instructed others in those arts. This would be his first private job since leaving the Australian Army but he had a CV that included combat in Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. He was solid.

  As soon as I’d decided on my team, I started making the calls. The five people I wanted on board were spread around the world, and while they all had something going on, they were all keen and were making room for me. As they should: I was the only contractor I knew of who split the after-expenses money evenly with my crews.

  We were now almost at the end of October and I figured that if we aimed to be in-country for the second half of November, we’d have most of the ducks in a row and we might beat the worst of the northern winter.

  As usual I asked MG to go in early. He’d done a surveying speciality in the US Marines and I suggested he dust that off, source a laser survey kit, and if anyone was asking he’d say he was scouting the agricultural college grounds ahead of the awarding of the contract, and looking into other projects being tendered by the Afghani government. He would say he was working for Sunshine Construction – my building company. I was having his business cards printed in the morning and the box would be couriered to the front desk of the Serena Hotel.

  From MG I wanted two vehicles – which could be rentals – and some basic recon: find the tower, look at the roads and watch for security. Was anyone looking after the tower? Any cameras on it? Any restrictions on the access road, gates or fences? That sort of thing. I’d sort out the explosive and detonators when I got there.

  MG said, ‘Not a problem,’ in his low Texas drawl, and I knew things would be well set up when I arrived.

  With my team, our cover and the equipment firming in my mind, I switched my attention to the exfil. I’d been playing around with the scenario because people still used this analogue cell network, and as soon as it went down, both the Taliban and the Afghani government would be poking around looking for answers. When they found the tower in a tangled mess on the ground, the hunt would begin. So how to do this? The obvious way would be to do the job at night, then run for the airport. But the international flights out of Kabul – usually to places like Dubai, Islamabad and Delhi – stopped running at around 9 pm. So you could blow the tower at 2 am and run to the airport, but you’d have to sit there waiting for the first flight out at 8 am. That looked like a choke point and I didn’t like it.

  We could try driving across the Pakistan border and flying out of Islamabad or Karachi. But that would have to mean a daylight gig with the explosives, because a night crossing of a border – two carloads of fit-looking white folks – would attract attention.

  Another way forward was a blend of the two: blow the tower during daylight, deliver the system hardware to the warehouse and catch afternoon flights out of Afghanistan in a staggered pattern. This would fit better with the airlines’ scheduling and would mean we could use rental cars with no hassles. If we used rental cars to cross the border into Pakistan we’d have the added flag on us of Westerners leaving their rentals in the wrong country. If the Afghani authorities got onto the Pakistanis fast enough, the rentals – and their abandonment near a major Pakistani airport – would be a beacon.

  I was leaning towards this third scenario: daylight demolition, but I didn’t like the idea of being trapped at the airport and the security people walking in and throwing every Westerner into the interrogation rooms.

  An alternative was to stay in-country for a few days after the demolition, to avoid being tagged as suspicious. But selling that to my crew was not going to be easy, because instead of potentially being trapped like rats at the airport we’d be trapped at the hotel instead. I wouldn’t suggest it unless I knew I could get them all to agree.

  So my Plan A looked as though it would have to entail my favourite transport company, AAA Freight Corp plc., which chartered G5s and Falcon 900s out of Dubai and Singapore. Not the cheapest way to get out of Dodge, but the solution I needed if part of a safe exfil was getting out of Afghanistan as fast as possible post-demolition.

  I picked up the phone and made the call. I knew the AAA chief executive pretty well and I’d used his company a lot. He picked up and I told him what I needed: a one-way trip from Kabul International private jet zone to Dubai, perhaps early in the morning.

  He chuckled softly, said something like, ‘Shit, Mike – Afghanistan?!’

  But when he realised I was serious he asked me to give him an indicative date and he logged that and then I heard his tongue clicking. ‘I thought so,’ he said.

  ‘Thought what?’

  ‘Kabul’s take-off times are basically sunrise to sundown,’ he said. ‘That means 0700 to 2100.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Sun-up is more like six o’clock, isn’t it?’

  ‘I could book take-off for 0600, see what they say,’ he said. ‘What’s the latest you can leave?’

  I fudged that by telling him I’d take the earliest.

  ‘And you don’t need a flight into Kabul, right?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, already annoyed with this gig. ‘Getting in is never the problem in Afghanistan.’

  8

  I received my first text from MG two days later. He thanked me for the business cards – on which I’d named him Operations Manager – and said he was in place. He’d bought two vehicles from a private buyer, in cash that I’d wired to him.

  With that I calmed down a bit. It had been a flurry of action, phone calls and filling out tender documents, and with the roof trusses going on the big renovation in Doncaster, I’d been going flat out. Now I sat on the edge of the bed in my pyjamas and responded to MG’s message. Steph arrival tomorrow. Establish routes.

  By that I meant I wanted MG to connect with Steph and time the hotel–tower, and the tower–warehouse, and the warehouse–airport routes. I knew those roads and their dangers, but I hadn’t been in Kabul for four years and roads change. I wanted a stopwatch on them, and notes – I wanted this thing nailed down.

  I yawned and felt Liz’s hand crawling up my back, under my pyjama top. It felt good and I relaxed a bit more.

  ‘You’re tired,’ she said. ‘Nurse Liz says you have to sleep.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘You coming to bed?’ she asked.

  ‘You only like me for my stress and anxiety,’ I said, and she hit the bedside lamp.

  She was right – I had to sleep. But first things first.

  *

  I spent the entire next day working on the tender, erasing all evidence of Hanso’s work. By the
time I was done, it looked as though Sunshine Construction was the answer to Afghanistan’s construction skills shortage. There were a few sections I had to fudge – such as international liability insurance – but I had a good gallery of previous projects and I was happy with the document. I packaged it up in a PDF that night, after Liz had edited and proofread the whole thing, and we sent it to the Afghanistan Interior Ministry via email.

  The next day I caught an early flight out of Melbourne to Dubai, with a codeshare into Kabul. I travelled with my laptop on this trip because I was no longer the tourist but a person chasing construction business. Laptops are notoriously easy for security personnel to open and investigate, revealing all sorts of information about the owner so I very rarely carry a laptop with me on trips overseas. But I have two laptops in my office – one for each type of contracting. You can buy a decent laptop for $600 these days and it’s worth my while to own two so that my two worlds don’t overlap. I can carry my building contractor’s laptop with me and if a spook wants to have a look through it in my hotel room while I’m enjoying the sights, all he’ll see is endless emails from clients and my accountants, and invoices from Kennards, subbies, my petrol card and the big timber merchants. If I make a mistake and take the wrong laptop with me, then we have a problem, because the other laptop has very little on it. It doesn’t have bookmarks and my laptop wipes internet history as soon as I power off. A laptop that looks like that? I can tell you that if I found a laptop that looked like that, I’d assume the owner was a terrorist, an arms dealer or a spy. So I don’t travel with it.

  I managed to get some sleep on the Dubai leg of the journey and did some basic surveillance-detection in transit at Dubai. There was nothing conclusive because everyone transiting into Kabul was either military, construction or mining, and we all wore the same clothes and had the same looks about us: jeans and polo shirts; hiking boots and fleecie jumpers; G-shocks and laptop bags over the shoulder, pulling wheelie bags that came with us into the cabin. I got talking with one bloke who was from an Australian mining services company, going into Afghanistan to quote on retooling an old mine, to get it running properly again. He was a nice bloke and we swapped cards, and when he asked me where I was staying I sensed only a fifty per cent chance that he was working for Aussie intelligence. Besides, there are only four hotels that people like us stayed at in Kabul anyway.

  The landing in Kabul was minus the shots from the Taliban – the memorable feature of the last landing I’d done there. That had come after a two-day road warrior trip from Kabul to Kandahar, and on the return helicopter trip to Kabul the shooters had started up at us about five kilometres south of the airport. The sound of a rifle round hitting your aircraft? If that doesn’t focus you on your own mortality, nothing will.

  I caught a taxi to the Serena and checked into my big room. It was a nice hotel with incredible security, and it was hard to believe that Taliban shooters had run through this place two years earlier, gunning down as many Westerners as they could. In the end they killed nine people, including children. That was a week or so before the Afghan elections in April 2014. Strangely, the Serena was still considered the safest non-consular place for Americans to stay, so it was still my pick.

  I cleared emails and checked messages until the dusk was settling. I made for the restaurant, and as I walked in I saw my advance party, MG and Steph, sitting at a table. It was a large, off-white, rendered concrete-and-marble space, draped in Persian artefacts and half-filled that evening with either European, Chinese or Japanese diners. Most of the tables had work spread out over them and folders open and I felt vindicated in the cover we were going under – Kabul was in rebuild mode and we’d slip nicely into that. I joined my guys, doing some basic greetings: I hadn’t seen Steph for maybe three years, not since a retrieval we’d done together in Kuwait City. The remainder of the crew was flying in the next day but for now I was happy with the core group at that table.

  Steph jumped up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She was a brunette, about five-foot-ten, and prone to wearing tight jeans with Western-style cowboy boots. She’d come a long way from her roots in Roma, western Queensland, which I have to admit I felt comfortable with given my origins in the bush.

  ‘Geez, Mike,’ she said, grabbing my left bicep. ‘You been sneaking in a few hours at the gym, have ya?’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ I said, giving the guns a flex. ‘Just genetics – you know how it is.’

  MG and Steph had driven the routes, timed them and taken a few notes. Nothing to have a hernia about. MG had also been out to the tower and done a recce.

  ‘Just under two klicks off the road to Kandahar,’ he said, breaking his bread and rubbing it onto the butter. ‘Unsealed road, not bad condition – give it six outta ten. Tower contained in a chain-link fence – twenty metres by twenty metres and three metres high – with a double gate facing the service road. Padlocked.’

  I nodded. It fit with Gregory’s briefing. ‘What about security?’

  ‘They didn’t present themselves, but there’s people moving around in the area – farmers, shepherds and the like. I’m thinking the place is looked after by spotters.’

  That was one of the weak points in the plan. Afghanistan was riddled with spotters – people who are otherwise moving around, minding their daily business, but are also phoning in what they see to their local Taliban commander. The farming children really have no choice in the matter. If they don’t help out, their family farm is no longer ‘protected’. In this respect, the Taliban is not unlike any Mafia racket.

  ‘What about you?’ I said to Steph. ‘Any of our friends around?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, meaning she’d been into the city and identified intelligence folks. ‘They’re all using mining and engineering covers. Lots of Land Cruisers with hard hats hanging on those racks in the back.’

  ‘Great minds, hey?’

  A couple sat down at a table on the other side of the room. I lingered on them for two seconds but I didn’t recognise them.

  ‘And guess who I ran into last night, through there, at the pool bar?’ Steph said, pointing. ‘Aaron White.’

  ‘Fucking Whitey,’ I groaned, unable to curb my affection for the American spook. ‘Thought he’d been warned off the grog.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Steph, her giggling quite infectious. ‘I think he’s replaced quality with quantity.’

  I winced. Whitey was a career intelligence man, about my size and age, who had ended up specialising in all matters Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, with no discernible role. Except that as soon as he’d had a few drinks he’d tell you how clever and nasty the Iranians were. I remembered him from my road warrior days – and other gigs up here – and while I noticed how often he was in the bar I also noticed how clear and sharp he was while others were slurring around him.

  ‘You talk?’

  ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Only to say hi.’

  We moved back to MG’s room, which was at the back of the hotel. He had his big Canon camera on charge, and the viewer was attached to the back. I scrolled through his shots, which had obviously been taken from the bushes, during the day. I was tempted to ask MG how he’d got into position and what that had entailed, but there was little point: the force recon guys were the ghosts of the battlefield and experts at stealthing. MG didn’t talk about his trade too much – but boy, did he come up with the goods. The shots I was looking at showed the approach road in to the tower, and I noticed we were in luck on one detail: the road went uphill slightly from the main road; at one klick there was a crest, and the tower was built about 150 metres on the other side of that crest. MG had noticed this too and had lined up shots from the road level, showing that from this vantage point no one could see what activity was going on at the base of the masts.

  ‘A bit of cover to do our thing,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Keep looking, neighbour,’ said the Texan, and I scrolled fu
rther through the shots and saw perspective on the surrounding terrain. Notably, there was a range of hills about a kilometre further back from the Kandahar Road, which had a covering of half scree and half tussock and grass. Shepherds would work in this area, which meant spotters, which meant surveillance by the Taliban.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, without thinking about it. ‘Is there anywhere in this freaking country where people can’t spy on you?’

  Steph laughed. ‘Welcome back, Mike.’

  9

  I was up at 8 am, grabbed a coffee and sat on the sofa, having a think about what to do next. MG was collecting the rest of the crew from the airport and Steph was getting ready to do more rounds of the Interior Ministry, lining up meetings and getting more documentation. Her command of Pashto was going to embed us in the government wheels and ensure that no one was looking at us sideways when we least needed it. But we still had to tread carefully – the three of us had worked in this city in military capacities and I didn’t want anyone to be recognised.

  I also had some basic financials to attend to. ABC Telecom had split the payments into three: the first one-third was a deposit – a good faith payment to get me started; the final payment would be for a successful completion, and that left the second payment which was due to be triggered when my team was ‘in place’ in Kabul, and primed for ‘go’. In order to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of someone tracking an emailed invoice back to my laptop while I was in Kabul, I’d already lodged that second invoice with Gregory before I left Melbourne. That was one less hassle out of my way: now my job was to text Gregory that we were ready, so he would release that payment and I’d feel encouraged to buy the charges and detonators when Timmo hit town. There was also the deposit that AAA Freight wanted so that I could secure a landing window for the charter flight. What with the hotel and flights, I wanted to keep my cash flow ahead of the curve. I usually stagger the money so I always have a buffer – if Plans A and B don’t work out, my Plan C is to throw a bag of money at the problem. So Gregory had to dig deep. He’d told me that there was an eighty per cent chance he’d be in Kabul when we were there, a situation he said he preferred. I had no idea why.