At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  She gave me a smile and when she returned a few minutes later, she kicked the door closed behind her and put both mugs of black coffee on the table.

  ‘Sorry about the wait,’ she said, putting out her hand. ‘Chris McCann. You must be Mike?’

  I paused and collected myself pretty quickly, I thought.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said with a genuine smile. ‘Did I surprise you?’

  I relaxed. There was no other way to play it. ‘If you wanted to get me on the wrong foot with the gender confusion, you succeeded,’ I said, laughing. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Gender confusion? Seriously?’ she said, putting her hands on her hips.

  She got me again: Chris was probably in her late thirties, five-foot-nine, and a curvy woman who didn’t dress to hide it. In her black pencil skirt, expensive shoes and tailored white blouse, there wasn’t much room for confusion.

  ‘Okay, guilty, your honour,’ I said, reaching for my mug. ‘Can I have my coffee now?’

  It was a much better meeting than most of these things. For a start, I noticed we were one-on-one, which meant we weren’t going to do the two-onto-one power play that so many security bosses feel the need to do. And I like starting a meeting with a laugh. It loosens up all the parties.

  ‘So, you’re based in Melbourne?’ I asked, taking a seat, knowing that the answer was no.

  ‘We’re in Singapore and Kuwait City,’ she said. ‘I was spending two days here when all this shit broke out and I thought I’d chase up MG’s recommendation.’

  ‘Shit?’ I asked.

  ‘Yemen,’ she said. ‘It’s been bad for a decade but it just got a lot worse.’

  ‘What did MG say?’ I asked.

  ‘A couple of years ago he helped us out of a nasty problem, which was actually caused by one of my people who was supposed to be running the job.’

  ‘Sounds like MG.’

  ‘When it was over he told me that the job had an intelligence element and a military element, and my employee was only expert in one of those.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He said if I ever had a tricky job again, he had an Aussie he could put me onto. So here we are.’

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ I said. ‘You want to do the paperwork?’

  ‘Do you mind?’ she said. She was very confident and I noticed that she looked at me intently when I spoke. Only two professions in the world looked at other humans in that way: the police detective and the spy.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘How do you want to do the engagement?’

  By that I meant, in order to make an NDA binding, firms ‘employed’ me for a day rate or they made an ex gratia payment. You apparently couldn’t make an NDA stick if you didn’t have some sort of master–servant arrangement in place, and the fastest way to do that was to pay a person.

  ‘Day rate for your consulting,’ she said, slipping a sheet of A4 from her manila folder. ‘Five thousand Australian dollars.’

  I looked at the sheet – a simple engagement letter in the name of Mike Daly – and I signed it. Now I was employed, and she slipped the ten-pager across.

  ‘I’m not reading that,’ I said, pointing at the NDA.

  ‘Neither am I,’ she said, and we both laughed.

  I signed it and she witnessed it and I leaned back with my coffee. ‘So what’s going on?’

  4

  Understand how the conversation with Chris worked: no PowerPoints, no laptop, no projector or conference-call box. No phones to fiddle with nervously, no Google breaking up a conversation with meaningless distractions. This was old-school: two intel operators speaking, listening and asking pertinent questions. And joy of joys: not one single muppet screwing around on social media while all the grown-ups talk.

  I made a mental note: if corporate Australia introduced one ‘clean room’ per office site, their productivity would skyrocket. Maybe I could sell that?

  ‘Yemen is not really one country,’ she said. ‘It’s been two, or three and sometimes four separate nations over the years, and last night we got back to four again.’

  ‘With the caliphate?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When you put the Saudis and the Iranians into the mix – and British and US intelligence – it’s a mess.’

  ‘A mess, with oil and al-Qaeda?’

  ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a big surprise – that al-Qaeda group has been trouble for a long time. But they are in the south and most of our client’s problems have been in the central and northern parts of Yemen.’

  I envisaged Yemen: down on the underside of the Arabian Peninsula, right beside the narrows where the Indian Ocean turns into the Red Sea. ‘Your clients been involved in the fighting?’ I asked.

  ‘Every oil and gas company in Yemen is involved in the fighting, in some way,’ she said, reaching for her coffee. ‘You either pay the militias to stay away or you pay a security contractor to protect you. But there’s no such thing as Switzerland in Yemen – you don’t get to avoid the fighting.’

  ‘Okay, so I’m guessing your company fights the battles for the oil company?’

  ‘Some of them, some of the time.’

  ‘So what do you need me for?’

  She leaned back and looked at a point on the wall behind me. ‘We need an armoury.’

  ‘What were you using before?’

  ‘Our armoury was stolen by one of the militias, about two weeks ago.’

  ‘Just before al-Qaeda broke through in the south?’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t jump to conclusions – we haven’t confirmed where the weapons ended up.’

  I nodded. ‘What was taken?’

  ‘The whole container,’ she said. ‘Rifles, side-arms, RPGs, grenade launchers, protective vests, helmets, comms gear, combat clothing . . .’

  ‘They picked up the whole thing?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Many private security contractors buy or rent an armoury for in-country operations. You pay for the gear you want and the arms dealer transports a twenty-foot shipping container, often with a side window that opens and turns into the dispensary. The armourer stands inside and issues gear, scans the barcodes into his computer, and scans the gear when it comes back in. It’s fairly non-glamorous but a decent-sized armoury is valuable and also crucial for doing the job. It’s not like you can choose to not have one.

  ‘You haven’t ordered another one from the dealer, I gather?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘We sourced that order from a company in India, but the Indian government now won’t give end-user certificates to anyone currently engaged in the Middle East.’

  ‘So you wanted me . . .?’

  ‘To find another solution.’ She paused for three solid seconds and I saw some steel in there. ‘Like the Indian company, the other government-sanctioned players we’d normally source from can’t get end-user certificates for that part of the world either. Too volatile, too tricky.’

  ‘You need an alternative solution.’

  ‘A special solution,’ she said. ‘And fast.’

  5

  By the time I got home, I was working again. Not as a tradie, but for Coastal Resources Group Limited. They needed an armoury to service a paramilitary force of between 50 and 60 operators, and I knew where to get it. And for the consideration they were going to pay me – US$100,000 – I couldn’t really say no, now, could I?

  The only catch was the speed of the thing: they wanted an alternative armoury asap, and before I left the Coastal Resources office, the admin woman had booked my ticket for Singapore, had me down for three nights in the Pan Pacific, and I’d seen evidence of my up-front first-half payment being deposited in my BVI bank account.

  Liz was on the sofa, watching the afternoon news, when I came out of the rain into the warmth of the house. I’d picked up some steaks on the way home and when I tol
d her I’d got the rib eyes from the old butcher, she said that was great, and by the way, I could cook.

  I washed up and started preparing some vegies. ‘I got a new job today,’ I said as I prepped the broccoli.

  ‘Out of the country?’ she asked, trying to be a good sport.

  ‘Yep,’ I said, and as I said that a news item started on the TV: an American ship had been seized and searched in the south of India; thirty-five crew and security guards taken in for questioning; firearms, ammunition and rifle magazines found on the ship, with – according to the Indian special branch investigators – no documentation.

  I walked around and watched the footage, which showed a coastguardish vessel called the MV Seaman Guard Ohio. According to the American reporter it was an anti-piracy maritime security vessel, owned by a Virginia-based private maritime security company called AdvanFort, and registered in Sierra Leone.

  It had steamed into Indian territorial waters in the stretch of ocean between southern India and Sri Lanka – the Gulf of Mannar – and been caught by the Indian Coast Guard off the port of Tuticorin as it attempted to buy diesel, illegally, it was being claimed.

  The reporter said Indian investigators had found thirty-five firearms, 102 magazines and 5682 pieces of ammunition. And then he called it a ‘huge arms cache’, and I laughed. Couldn’t help myself.

  ‘What’s funny?’ asked Liz.

  ‘You see thirty-five guns stacked in one place and it may seem like a large haul,’ I said. ‘But it’s not huge. It arms one platoon and a half – no one’s going to war with thirty-five rifles. I bet you the crime is the wrong paperwork.’

  The news ended and I walked back to the kitchen island.

  ‘So?’ she said expectantly.

  ‘A week, ten days at the outside,’ I said. ‘And it’s not dangerous, love – just meetings.’

  We had a good meal that night: steaks, mushrooms, red wine, and then we went to bed. I always need it to be like that before I fly out. A few good times and some togetherness before I go into the shit.

  When I was convinced she was asleep, I got up and sat in front of my laptop in the office. Out of habit I checked my bank account in the Caribbean and saw the US$50,000 sitting nicely. Then I scrolled through my email, seeing lots of memos and briefs from my intel networks, talking about the Seaman Guard Ohio. Many of the comments and observations were about the location of the ship. The owner – AdvanFort – ran mercenary crews in these ships as escorts for shipping on the Horn of Africa. This was shipping that came up from southern Africa along the east coast and tried to turn west into the Red Sea and the Suez Canal; or shipping coming across the Indian Ocean from South-East Asia, aiming for the same narrow waterway that would connect them to Europe. They all had to sail close to Somalia, Yemen and Eritrea to get into the Red Sea. Shipping companies paid AdvanFort for armed escorts, but what was an AdvanFort ship doing in the straits between India and Sri Lanka? Where was its client ship? And as most of my global gossipers were asking, why travel into sovereign waters with no documentation for your weapons? People like me? It’s very rare that we take firearms into another country. The amount of hoo-ha and rigmarole is so great that you either have the whole thing legalled to the back teeth – usually with another government as the sponsor – or you just source firearms in-country.

  To each their own. Everyone has a different way of doing gigs. I know people in my business who regularly travel on false passports because they think it’s safer and that it keeps bad people away from their family. But I try to do every gig on my own passport because it takes a layer of complexity and criminality out of the mix.

  So I wasn’t in step with some of the comments on the feed. Every operator has a rationale behind their set-up and it doesn’t pay to judge until you know all the circumstances.

  I thought about threats and opportunities in my current operation. The opportunity was clear: to be an introduction service between Coastal Resources and an armoury outfit. A nice earner and one where – for once – I wouldn’t necessarily be the fall guy. I’d have to be careful, sure, but I wasn’t seeing this job as requiring six people, radio comms and weapons.

  The threats? You can end up like the crew and soldiers on the Seaman Guard Ohio. Very easily, actually. In just about all countries, firearms and ammunition are tracked by the authorities, and you have to show documentation to own or trade in them. Now multiply that state control by twenty when the weapons in question are assault weapons – the tools of combat. And lots of them. If the documentation isn’t legit on your crates of M4s and rocket-propelled grenades, you’ll be locked up. Then they’ll start asking questions. Legit paperwork usually means having end-user certificates (EUCs) – issued by one government to vouch for their ultimate ownership and use – with each EUC applying to a specific weapon serial number and actual place of use. If you don’t have exhaustive EUCs, some countries won’t recognise them and they’ll treat you as a spy, insurgent or an enemy of the state.

  Once you have kosher end-user certificates, you need absolutely accurate bills of lading that verify what you’re carrying in your ship, aircraft or truck convoy. Every item listed in the bills of lading has to be in those crates when they are inspected. Not one item extra, and certainly not a single bullet short.

  And then you need the papers that grant you and your crew the right to transit through sovereign territories. Reading between the lines, I got the sense that the Seaman Guard Ohio troubles centred on paperwork.

  How do I know so much about this? Let’s just say that I’ve had clients who have had to shift armouries from time to time, and I have also been asked to relocate operators who had been incarcerated by foreign governments following large misunderstandings. The misunderstandings are always created by incorrect, inaccurate or missing paperwork. The arms industry is run by lawyers and accountants – remember that the next time you have to shift a lot of armaments.

  At least the Indians had an open legal system and the public scrutiny of courts: you try shipping a boatload of assault rifles through Russian or Chinese waters and you’d probably never be heard of again. And I speak as someone who has done a lot of work in South-East Asia, and up around the Sulu Sea and the Philippines. Even some of the meanest Filipino pirates and smugglers have a northern demarcation for operating in the South China Sea. Once you can sight Hainan Island, and you’re carrying contraband, you could be in for a long afternoon.

  I was wary of the threats in this gig, but I saw them as mostly under my control. The part I didn’t like so much was the arrangement that Chris McCann had insisted on for the introduction. I was to meet up with a Coastal Resources operator in Singapore, and basically take him along for the ride. I was being forced to work with an unknown third party, and I didn’t like it.

  6

  I caught the morning flight from Melbourne into Singapore and I was in my room in the Pan Pac by mid-afternoon local time. I travelled under my own name, as a tourist – as usual, my cover of choice.

  I grabbed a sparkling water from the minibar and thought about my next moves. I had to meet a person called Joel the following morning. That hand-off was originally supposed to have been at the Coastal Resources offices in Singapore, an arrangement I’d changed because I didn’t want to start the entire job with verifiable ties to Coastal. I didn’t know the exact reasons for their missing or stolen armoury, so I had no idea who might be following this Joel bloke. I’d told Chris to have her man take a seat in the dining room of the Pan Pac at 8.50 am and I’d join him.

  She’d fought me on it but I hadn’t budged: she’d already crossed boundaries by foisting Joel on me and I at least reserved the right to get some operational security around the meeting.

  I also needed something to sell to Coastal. And to get it I had to go through at least one intermediary. I knew three people who could theoretically get me in front of an armoury provider, but the person I wanted to deal with wor
ked just up the peninsula from Singapore, at Penang.

  Using the burner phone I’d picked up at the airport, I dialled in to Malaysian directory assistance and was put through to Penang Port. The switchboard person reverted to English immediately and I asked her to put me through to Peter Lennox, in security. I’m sometimes embarrassed that South-East Asian locals can speak English so readily, while people like me can’t speak the Bahasa. It’s fairly impressive the way they switch languages so quickly, but it stands to reason, because English is a handy conversion language for so many dialects. Maybe the Indonesian and Cambodian can’t understand one another – but they can both understand English.

  The woman put me through, and another polite woman picked up. She told me Peter was on the water and was expected back at four. Looking at my watch, I asked if she could get him to call me when he got in.

  I had fifteen minutes to kill, so I turned on the TV and flipped through to CNBC Asia news and watched a parade of stories about billionaires and rubbish heap kids, North Korean missile tests and ridiculous Japanese teenage pop stars.

  I returned to reality when my burner phone started ringing. It was Peter.

  ‘Lennie, you old tart,’ I said, ‘they let you out on the water?’

  ‘Mike, you crazy bastard,’ he said with a deep chortle. ‘Don’t tell me: you’re locked up somewhere and you need a jailbreak?’

  ‘Ha! You wish,’ I said, remembering some of the joint-agency operations I’d done with Lennie over the years. He had operated in the secret security apparatus of the Australian government during the time I’d worked for governments. He had a similar background to me – intelligence with a lot of fieldwork.

  ‘Actually, mate,’ I said. ‘I wanted lunch.’

  ‘Lunch?’ he said, taking the piss. ‘Okay, Mike. Where and when?’

  ‘The night market, what’s it called?’

  ‘Red Garden?’ he said. ‘Fucking fair go mate – haven’t seen you for four years and you’re taking me to the Red Garden?’