At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

‘You are Mike?’ the man asked me. ‘Would you like to meet my father?’

  I followed him into the cockpit, and Amos – a cheery gap-toothed fellow in his early fifties – greeted me with a smile and handshake.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, ‘but I thought it best. Look.’

  I followed his finger and saw through the large windows of the passenger terminal a group of Afghani soldiers, police and plain-clothes officers, rousting travellers and inspecting passports.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s pay you.’

  I took out my laptop, connected it and made the payment – US$45,000, into his account. I showed him the receipt on my screen and also sent it to his email account. Before I shut the screen, his smartphone dinged and he was reading the receipt.

  I was anxious to get moving. I’d been locked up in a few parts of Asia and I didn’t want to add Afghanistan to the list. ‘Bristol, you say?’

  ‘Another seventeen minutes for refuelling, and we’re going.’

  I sat in the jump seat behind the pilot, my nerves totally on edge. The security people could be here to ask about a shootout in a hotel or because they answered to the terrorist forces that had considerable influence in the government. MG came into the cockpit, greeted Amos with an open-palm shake and I noticed they called each other ‘brother’. MG looked through the window and saw the passenger terminal.

  ‘That doesn’t look good,’ he said. ‘By the way, Greg just got a text from his ex-wife. She’s got the kids in a hotel right now. She won’t use phone or internet until we arrive.’

  ‘I was going to send you and Rich, but the kids and the ex-wife make it tricky, so what about Steph?’

  ‘Working with her?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You don’t need me there – I think you and Steph are the right team for this.’

  ‘What’s the gig?’

  ‘Secure the family and accommodation for a week – that’s all I promised Gregory – then he can organise his own security or call the police. I’ll pay you each an extra ten grand, over and above your split of the quote.’

  ‘A week should do it,’ said MG, nodding. ‘If the shooters take longer than that, they probably ain’t coming.’

  With the refuelling done, Amos was joined by his son on the flight deck, and as the sun went down, the cabin lights dimmed and Amos cleared his flight with air traffic control. Then the engine revs came up, we taxied in a big half-circle, and as we swung around I could see the police uniforms now on the apron of the freight hangar. Embarking on the flight in a container didn’t seem so bad when faced with the alternative.

  The plane itself was old but felt reliable, and as we got off the ground and the airframe shook slightly, I marvelled at how this business sometimes went. A team of professionals failed to get anywhere near a cellular network tower, let alone topple it. Yet we all felt elated to be getting the hell out of that exasperating and dangerous country. As we gained altitude, and the landing gear ground and whined its way into the fuselage, I saw a city starting to twinkle in the darkness of early evening and thought about a gang of French mercenaries lying on a hotel room floor – furious but relieved to be alive – and my crew flying out of there – furious at a thwarted mission but relieved to be alive.

  I’m told that the tower is still standing today; it’s operational and is used as a private network, virtually impenetrable by outsiders.

  Much like Afghanistan, really.

  1

  The conversation started off okay, and I thought we were making progress. There’s me and Tom at the table at the Moorabbin RSL, and there’s Pete and Bruce on the other side. It’s a tradie meeting of the type you sometimes have to have. Subbie shit, money crap. Pete and Tom have a dispute about a concrete pour that went wrong and it has set back Tom’s ability to get other things done, which cost him a lot of money with progress payments and then having to dip into the overdraft – something he’d kept high and dry for another job. It was Butterfly Effect stuff.

  Pete is saying that the architect specified the job incorrectly, gave vague gradient information and asked for a certain concrete grade, so the reo and formwork was done in a certain way and the concrete type ordered was the one specified. The pour didn’t take properly and the council inspector wants it fixed. Lots of gnashing of teeth: angry property owner, angry council, angry Tom, angry Pete. A cluster of fucks in tradieland.

  So we’ve had a meal and we’re on our second beers and Bruce and I are the ‘lawyers’ in the dispute, asking the questions, taking notes, getting timelines and financials absolutely nailed down. I’m with Tom; Bruce is Pete’s mate. But we’re not like lawyers, trying to get an argument into court and fleece everyone with fees. We’ll meet in a couple of days – just us two – and come to a decision about where the fault lies in this dispute and who has to give who a handful of money. It’s not looking good for Pete: he may be able to lay the initial blame at the architect’s feet, but he also sent a junior crew and they did the job off the notes rather than re-specify the job and do another quote. I’m known as being a bit picky, myself. Before I give a quote I go on-site, walk the property, take my own measurements, crawl under the house, shine the torch, kick the tyres. That sort of thing. I don’t rely on drawings and this dispute in front of me is living testament to why.

  ‘We good?’ I said to Bruce, who I could tell was going to blame this on his mate Pete and then try to minimise the damages. On behalf of Tom I’d accept a $5000 cash payment and Pete doing the job properly. He’d baulk at that because of the amount of time he’d have to take ripping up the failed pour. But he might say yes so that he could limit the cash component and not end up in the crosshairs of both the owner and the council. My way forward would keep everyone working and reduce council involvement.

  ‘We’re good,’ said Bruce, and the four of us shook hands and I made to go but Tom wanted to stay because he had some money on a trots meeting in Adelaide and the TAB screens were humming.

  I leaned back and checked emails on my phone while Tom grabbed two more beers and put some more money across the counter at the TAB. I don’t gamble, myself, but most tradies do, so it doesn’t concern me too much. I put down the phone and noticed one of the TV screens was running CNN and although the sound was down, the ticker along the bottom of the screen said, ‘Al-Qaeda breaks through in southern Yemen – declares caliphate.’

  Yemen was about half a day behind East Coast Australian time, so the footage I was seeing of Yemen seemed to have been taken in their morning: after a night of fighting, the world had inherited another so-called Islamic state. The video footage was depressingly familiar: Toyota Hilux utes with fifty-calibre machine guns bolted on the tray; young men in black headscarves waving AKMs; prerecorded night vision of towns lighting up with rocket strikes and seventeen-year-olds kneeling on a main street and letting off RPGs at apartment buildings and schools; refugee families with their blank stares. Mindless, lethal behaviour that made my skin crawl.

  I’d been keeping a weather eye on Yemen because I knew people who’d done gigs in that place and just shook their heads at it. I’m talking about very tough, very hard veterans of Afghanistan who were unable to chat lightly about the snafu that was Yemen. There was even an attitude in the US military that Somalia was the mature, intelligent version of Yemen. Me? I’d become sick of the sound of my own voice being right: You let terror cells gain a toehold in your country, and the next thing you know, you own them, and then they own you.

  Yemen was a living, breathing example of why Australia had to stop all terror organising at its grass roots. That included mosques, schools and prayer groups. And unfortunately, that included terror-friendly government actions, even if well-meaning. There’d been few examples of terror groups gaining power where an existing government hadn’t first opened the door, even just slightly. For the Middle East and Africa, government collusion in terror – usually with a Cayman Isl
ands bank account and a big deposit for some lucky official – was a sad and depressing fact.

  Tom came back with the beers, and planted a stack of fifty-dollar notes on the table. ‘Got to be in to win,’ he said, making a silly smile.

  ‘And with you it’s – what – you’re in fifty times to win once?’

  He pocketed the dough. ‘There you go again, Mike,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Always seeing the downside.’

  The CNN footage showed corpses in civilian clothes, littering the streets like the rubble around them. ‘I see what’s in front of me,’ I said, sipping my beer. ‘And a lot of it’s bad.’

  *

  The beers went through me like a sieve and so there I was at 2 am, wandering through the house to take a piss. On the way back to very carefully get back into bed – so I just woke up Liz enough to annoy her – I noticed a glow from my office. I’d left my laptop on and there must have been an email alert because the screen had gone from sleep mode to fully awake. I went to shut it down and saw a bunch of emails from buddies and associates. Lots of people in my world were talking about Yemen and the French and the Saudis, and oil being stolen and small mercenary armies roaming around the Horn of Africa. The rise of a really nasty al-Qaeda splinter group in the south was just part of the picture. The oil reserves in the north and the east carried with them a total soap opera of two-timing politicians, Western oil companies operating under false flags and governments of neighbouring countries partaking in the economic and political rape of this failed state. Most of the feeds I was getting emanated from people I knew and had worked with, who were being paid by at least one of the actors in this tragedy.

  I was about to shut down the lappie when a new email binged up. It was from some entity called Coastal Resources Group Limited, and the ‘to’ field contained two words: The Contractor.

  2

  It started raining at sun-up, just as I was finishing my second coffee. By the time I was about to hop in the ute, it was hosing down. I called Hoodie, my offsider. ‘Mate, you could be in luck,’ I said. ‘Can’t work in this.’

  ‘It’s forecast to do this all day,’ he said, and I growled a bit: the Melbourne weather forecasts were next to useless.

  ‘Rain check at ten,’ I said, and then he whooped because he knew he had the day off.

  I padded around a bit, listening to the thump of rain on the iron roof. Liz had an RDO and because she works strange shifts in the emergency department of a major hospital, her RDOs have a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door.

  I primed the coffee machine and turned on the TV. There was little news of Yemen on Australian morning television, except to note it for the record. I didn’t blame them – Yemen was so confusing and volatile that it was almost impossible to get the full context into one fifty-second piece on it. I found CNN and Al Jazeera and there was more detail there, but mostly about what a ‘caliphate’ is. Even then it seemed that every person who opened their mouth to speak had a different view on what ‘caliphate’ actually means.

  I made my coffee and walked into my office, fired up the laptop and focused on my email. The message from Coastal Resources Group was written by a person called Chris McCann. It was very short. It started with a basic corporate greeting and then said, I have been given your details by a trusted friend. We require consulting services on an urgent basis, please let me know your availability.

  So let’s start with the message. Only certain people, and types of people, know about this email address. It was set up by a Russian associate of mine, with the goal of ensuring that any communication enacted on it is effectively untraceable, either geographically or in terms of ownership. So the fact that someone from this company is reaching out via email, means they are somehow part of my world. Secondly, the language itself. Identifying me as ‘The Contractor’ was significant, because in my world an initial approach has to be no names, and if you’re calling me the Contractor, you’re essentially using my call sign. The use of ‘friend’ is code, too: it means someone from the intel-military community, and ‘trusted’ typically means someone who either I or Chris McCann had actually worked alongside. ‘Consulting services’ referred to dark operations – since that’s what I do – and ‘urgent basis’ meant there was corporate or government money behind this and it would be worth my while to pick up the phone and move my schedule around.

  So this Chris McCann was in the zone. He’d done it this way to signal that he wasn’t a muppet, and that’s why I’d slept on it, and taken a second look when I was sober.

  Now came the third stage: who, exactly, was contacting me?

  I started with Google and had a good half-hour look at Coastal Resources and Chris McCann. The only listing for Coastal Resources Group was a Jersey-incorporated entity which was described as a ‘diversified services provider’ to the oil and gas sector. The shareholders were nominees, the company secretary was a Jersey accountant, and the sole director’s name was not disclosed.

  Elsewhere in my searches, Coastal wasn’t described in a way that gave me details. So I picked up the phone and made a call to a buddy of mine, Al, in Hawaii. He had a commercial diving business that was constantly bidding for work in the oil and gas sector, and I wondered what he knew of Coastal Resources.

  We small-talked – it had been a while. ‘You heard of a mob called Coastal Resources?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ he said. ‘Where they from?’

  ‘Says Jersey incorporation, no other address,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, probably British or French,’ he said. ‘What do they claim to do?’

  I told him about the ‘diversified services’ and he laughed. ‘Okay, Big Unit,’ he said. ‘That’s usually the security side of the industry. All the rest of us just say exactly who we are.’

  ‘What about Chris McCann?’ I asked. ‘You worked with him? Heard of that name?’

  ‘Who?’ he said. ‘Never heard of him, but if he needs a dive operation, give him my number.’

  Thanking him, I signed off. Now I had a look for Chris McCann and was overwhelmed with responses. If I ever wanted to hide myself in Facebook, I’d become Chris McCann and just blend in. There was something there for everyone: cocktail parties, football games, dogs, cats, Himalayan foothills and a waterskiing video I’d be proud to star in.

  That wasn’t working, so I changed tack, thinking that if he was doing security in oil and gas – and the company was Jersey-incorporated – I might have a look at the British Army. There were several Chris McCanns in there, and quite a few in the Royal Navy. But nothing conclusive. I was about to look in the oil and gas industry but then decided against it. The general search suggested to me that Chris McCann was probably a nom de guerre. I wasn’t going to waste more time with it. I was either going to respond to him, or I wasn’t.

  I sank the coffee in one hit, and responded to the email by saying availability depended on the gig and the remuneration, and that I needed more to go on.

  I stood from the desk, thinking about breakfast and then a shower. The rain was hammering down even harder – no building site today.

  As I turned away, the email system binged. I looked down and saw a response from Coastal Resources Group Limited. That surprised me: I’m used to dealing with London- and Washington-based clients, who are asleep or socialising when I’m up and about. Most email hangs in limbo until one of the parties starts the workday.

  I clicked it open and read: Could we meet today?

  He apologised for the secrecy and urgency, and named an office suite of a building in the CBD. Fuck, I mused. He’s in Melbourne.

  His reply went further: The discussion is private and I’m sure you’d prefer to be in a place where it will stay that way?

  I laughed to myself. I liked the bloke already. In a world where people would occasionally find my private number and leave the most self-incriminating voice mails, I lik
ed the person who not only valued discretion, but knew I would too.

  I emailed back immediately, saying I was broadly available to meet but I wanted to know more about his company. The email came back in thirty seconds: Security services to big oil and gas companies, and also to some telcos and power companies, it said. But I guess you discovered that already.

  I was interested. Fast, concise replies were usually the sign of an honest communicator. I have interrogated many people in my career, and while a speedy response doesn’t guarantee veracity, it’s a damn good first filter.

  I only needed one more piece of information to confirm that I would be meeting Mr Chris McCann: Who referred me?

  There are so many shades of language and meaning in my world that it is very easy for a muppet to get it wrong if they are imposting. This was the final test, and the email came back in ten seconds. It simply said, MG.

  Okay, Mr McCann, I thought to myself. You get an hour of my time – let’s hear what you got.

  3

  The view from the room looked down on the Docklands area of Melbourne. Through the sheets of rain I could see the Star Observation Ferris wheel, which on this afternoon had its lights on, such was the gloom. The meeting room was normal-looking but I could see that the internal window was double-glazed to soundproof it and there was no art or fixtures on the walls, so nowhere to attach listening devices. I’d already walked through a metal detector, been patted down by a security guard and made to relinquish all radio-frequency devices, which these days doesn’t just cover a phone but car keys as well.

  I stood at the window, pretending to look out but really watching the reflection: the door was open and I could see into the reception area. A pretty blonde woman poked her head in and I turned. She asked me if I wanted a tea or coffee and I said, ‘Coffee, thanks, love. Black, one sugar.’