At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘So, what did we say?’ she said. ‘One hundred thousand total, we’ve already paid half, so I’m going to pay you the second fifty thousand now.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The receipt is being sent to your email account,’ she said, and turned the screen to me. It was a receipt generated by her company’s accounting system, which said US$50,000 had been credited to my bank account in the British Virgin Islands. She handed me her business card, which I now realised she hadn’t given me in Melbourne. All it contained was the Coastal Resources logo, her name and a telephone number that started with +65 – a Singapore mobile phone.

  No job title, no address, no email or website. After the initial meeting with her, I’d been assigned Joel – who now appeared to be a middle-man, a person who does the all the running but is not really a player. The more I thought about the events, the more it felt like an intel operation. At least now I had the money in the bank and the client was calling time on the job. All that remained for me to do was ensure that Lennie and the floating armoury were not compromised.

  The flight was called for boarding and the passengers stood, stretched and coalesced into the queues. Chris told me to stay in touch, and remember that Yemen might be the next Afghanistan. She winked when she dropped that little one-liner, and then the hostie was taking my boarding pass and I walked through.

  With no Chris McCann.

  I paused at the entrance to the air bridge, and turned. Chris waved at me. ‘I have work to do here,’ she said, and then she walked away.

  I immediately made to push back through the security gate but in front of me was an armed Indonesian security person. I decided to keep a low profile and I followed the passengers onto the Garuda A320 and took my seat in business class, with a spare seat beside me.

  One client was getting rid of me – which meant I could start working for someone else. I fished the burner phone from my pocket and called Lennie. It went to voice mail and I asked him to call me.

  Next, I called MG. ‘Mate, what’s happening?’ I asked.

  ‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I’m sitting on the flight into Singapore. I’ve been paid out, the gig’s over.’

  ‘Okay, so I’m standing down?’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the Toyota, almost into Medan.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Chris McCann didn’t get on my flight.’

  ‘So where is she?’

  ‘My guess is she’ll be joining you.’

  I knew MG was in a car with Joel and Cynthia and I didn’t want to put him in a position. ‘Why don’t you do personal security until Cynthia flies back to her company?’

  ‘She’s already gone,’ said MG. ‘I’m in the car alone.’

  ‘Gone?!’ I asked. ‘Gone where? Where’s Joel?’

  ‘I thought you made this arrangement,’ he said. ‘Joel and Cynthia went to the private area of the airport.’

  I sank back into the seat. Chris was about to join them, and they were flying to the floating armoury.

  ‘Okay, mate,’ I said. ‘Listen very carefully. Please wipe the hotel room and the rental car. All phones dumped. And if you can get into Cynthia’s room, wipe that too.’

  ‘I’m going to Cynthia’s room,’ he said. ‘She gave me the room card. I’m packing her stuff and leaving the suitcase at the private section of the airport. There’s a concierge there, or something.’

  I told him I was paying the full twenty K as soon as I was in a place with wi-fi. ‘Thanks for this, mate,’ I said. ‘But be doubly careful as you exfil. That blonde woman is a surveillance queen – she has eyes everywhere.’

  ‘I’m careful,’ said the Texan. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Call me when you’re home,’ I said, and we signed off.

  I relaxed into the large seat and tried to switch off. There were loose ends in this gig, but none I hadn’t signed onto. If you accept a job where you’re being asked to open up your contact book and make access happen, you lose control of things around the time that the introduced counterparties decide they want to be in business together. What, exactly, that business might be, disappears from your view as soon as you’re paid for your services, and dumped on a Garuda flight. You’re not in it any more – you probably never were.

  As the plane pushed back, I let my mind drift over the events of a very fast three days and decided not to torture myself with the possible consequences. I could tip off Lennie and I could tell MG to get out of there. But I couldn’t stop the arms industry any more than I could stop al-Qaeda advancing in south Yemen, or the oil companies protecting their interests in the north.

  But I could stop myself from taking a gig like this again. My contact book had value, and so did the lives of the people I’d utilised. From that point on, I had a new corporate policy: if you want my contact book, then I control the job.

  Epilogue

  I got out of the Falcon and gave Tom a hand packing up his tools. He’d lost his driver’s licence a couple of weeks earlier and couldn’t get a dispensation for work purposes; he’d used that up on the previous DUI charge and now the court wasn’t buying it any more. He knew what I thought of drink-driving – he knew I wasn’t impressed. But he was my mate and I was helping him out where I could.

  ‘Geez, mate,’ he said, lighting a smoke and putting down the car window as we got going. ‘Wish this rain would piss off – I need to get to handover.’

  Tom had been waiting for ten days for the landscaping contractor to finish so he could hand over to the client, and the rain had delayed it. An agonising wait when you’re a tradie and there’re bills and taxes and accounts with timber yards to be settled.

  I dropped him at home and watched him dawdle up the drive. He’d get through this but for now there wasn’t a lot to celebrate.

  I turned for home and the phone rang. I hit the accept button on my hands-free on the sun visor. It was Lennie, calling from Penang.

  ‘Hey, Mike,’ he said. ‘You might be interested in a story that just broke, about our friends on a ship?’

  We had a chat and he tipped me to a story in a well-known, British-based publication. ‘You want to know what was really going on, have a read.’

  We signed off and I headed for my local newsagent, Danny, who was open till 6 pm and carried the magazine. Danny was sort of my community intel guy around the neighbourhood.

  I parked around the corner from the newsagent, and bought one of the last copies on the stand. In the Falcon, I flipped through, looking for the story Lennie was talking about. Given that I didn’t know the corporate name of the floating armoury – or even the name of the ship – I wasn’t exactly scanning for names in headlines.

  I couldn’t see anything, but when I looked again I found a story called ‘The Booming Economy of Failedstate-istan’. It was written by ‘a staff writer’ and told the story of British, American and Russian arms dealers making billions from supplying to groups in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and various parts of North Africa, including Libya, Tunisia and Somalia. The writer said there was a disturbing trend of Wall Street and City of London money being invested in fund managers who essentially underwrote arms dealers and providers of mercenary armies. Then the writer listed a number of deals where privateers had been bought out by big money, and the first example he gave was of Coastal Resources Group Limited buying out a company called Conifer Partners. Conifer Partners’ assets were listed as several ships and a booming business in lend-lease arrangements for armaments, from their floating armoury in the Indian Ocean. There was a photograph of one of their ships, and it looked like the one I’d landed on. It was named as MV Walrus by the magazine.

  The writer said: The floating armoury industry was thrown into disarray six months ago when the Indian government seized MV Seaman Guard Ohio in its southern coastal waters and cha
rged six British former soldiers, found on board, with weapons offences.

  Coastal Resources has bought three floating armoury operations in the last year, and has a fleet of nine armament ships in the Indian Ocean. Industry insiders have hinted that Coastal Resources has signed an agreement with the Pakistani government and is now based out of Karachi.

  I threw the magazine on the passenger seat, fired up the ute, and headed home to my wife. Shit – I’d been part of a corporate acquisition strategy. There’s a first time for everything.

  1

  It was 2007 and I was in Melbourne, doing intel work on a cell of scumbags who were planning something big for Anzac Day. We knew about them because they’d been on their various communication channels, telling their handlers that they wanted more money and resources. They used an Arabic code word to describe what they needed, and when the signals intelligence people had crawled all over it, the consensus was that they were asking for more plastic explosive; the ‘good stuff’, they said, which meant European Semtex or the US military packs of C-4, the M112.

  So there were a few teams around Melbourne, trying to wind up this cell and get them to the interrogation rooms. Sometimes the public gets impatient and wonders why terror suspects can’t just be picked up and incarcerated as they are identified. The answer is that if you go too early, and only pick up half of the cell, the rest of them go to ground, dispose of their computers and phones, and stop visiting their post office boxes and their money-transfer buddies. Even amateurish terror cells have escape and evade protocols. If you catch one or two of them, and the rest scatter, you only have the stupid half of the cell – certainly not the planners, the funders or managers. And those smart ones who get away go and do their debriefs and they track back to find the leak, fix that problem, and then the cells are harder to find the next time. Perhaps impossible.

  So I’m sitting in a car, in a suburban street, waiting for the university student son of Pakistani immigrants to leave and visit his friends. He lives in a converted garage under the main house, and when he leaves, my job is to invite myself into his flat and have a look through his computer, upload some surveillance code, look at his online gaming logs and search for pieces of paper with funny names or numbers scrawled on them. Most terrorists are trained not to do this, but the smart ones know that if they have to rely on naïve university students to do their dirty work, there’ll be leaks. These ‘soldiers’ – the inexperienced terrorists – are meticulously separated from the professionals, so that if a cell is blown, the professionals are untouched and can move on to another batch of youngsters. So while I was waiting for the uni student to leave, another car was waiting for my call, up the road; they would get on his tail, follow him and try to find connections to the higher levels of the cell.

  It was April in Melbourne so it got dark around 6 pm. As I waited for our student, I noticed movement behind me. I turned in the driver’s seat and saw a woman – about thirty, well dressed, quite good-looking – who’d got out of a car that had just pulled up behind me. She was cursing and waving her arms around. Then there was the hands on the hips, and the telltale sign of a woman looking around for a man. That’s when I realised it was a flat tyre, and as much as I wanted to get out and help her, I had other things to do. I mean, flat tyre? That’s what boyfriends and brothers are for.

  I slid down in my seat, reducing my ‘able-bodied male’ profile, and adjusted the rear-view mirror. Now she was opening the boot, and there was a jack and a tyre iron. Those who’d been surveilling this student knew that if he was going to leave his parents’ house, and drive to his friends two suburbs away, he would do it sometime between 6.30 pm and 6.45. We were coming up to 6.30 and I had my binoculars up. I could see activity in the downstairs flat. It looked like he was getting ready to go, which meant I was going to have to prepare myself to go in there without alerting the parents.

  At 6.31, the rain started. And I mean, it did a Melbourne: sudden, intense rainfall that drops the air temperature by ten degrees and makes everyone shiver. I heard the shrieking behind me, and when I turned I couldn’t see the woman tyre-changer because the rain was bouncing off the boot of my car so high that I had almost no visibility.

  Dammit, I thought. I grabbed my umbrella from the back seat and got out of the car. The cold and wet hit me like a slap, and as I came around the back of my car, and extended the umbrella, the woman – in a real state – was flailing at the door handle of her car, trying to get the door open, while the car was still up on its jack.

  ‘Maybe not a great idea,’ I said, offering her my umbrella. She looked like a drowned rat and her hands were covered in grease, and I really felt for her. But I had no idea how good she was with car jacks and I thought the situation was safer if she stayed on solid ground.

  ‘Tell you what, hold this and I’ll do the tyre.’

  So I got on my knees in the hammering rain, and got to work on the tyre iron while the rain thudded on the black umbrella material. A couple of the nuts came off easily and then I hit the one that wouldn’t budge. I really gave it some curry and the iron turned – but not the nut. I looked down at the tyre iron and saw it was rounded.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, standing. ‘This way,’ I said to the woman and I hit the boot release button on my keys and reached for the false bottom of my boot, careful not to open the black sports bag that contained a few tools of my profession. I grabbed my own tyre iron and we went back to her car, and I knelt down in the pounding rain and turned the remaining nuts. As I pulled off the wheel, a car flew past us, covering both of us in road water. It ran down my back and into my pants like an icy waterfall.

  I stood up quickly, gasping, in time to see the university student’s car accelerating away from us.

  ‘Just a second, love,’ I said to the woman, whose teeth were now chattering. I pulled out my phone, called Team Two up the road, and said, ‘On the way, now.’

  The voice on the other end said, ‘White Corolla?’

  And I said, ‘Yep, with you very shortly.’

  Then I took the flat tyre wheel to the boot of the woman’s car, swapped it for the spare, and bolted the replacement on as fast as I could. As I let down the jack, the car kept sagging, and sagging. The spare was flat too!

  We were both drenched and she looked in a bad way. ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Caulfield,’ she said, which was about fifteen minutes away.

  ‘Get in,’ I said, gesturing at my car. She hesitated.

  ‘Well, I’m getting in,’ I said. ‘I’m late for my axe-murderer’s meeting.’

  She lunged for the passenger door and I kept the umbrella over her, and then I got in and drove her to Caulfield. Her name was Debbie, she worked at a bank and she’d had it with that fricking car. We had a laugh about it and when I pulled up, she said, ‘You have to come in and meet my family.’

  I said, ‘No I don’t – I told you, I have that meeting to go to.’

  ‘You can dry off and have one drink – come on, you wuss.’

  I got out of the car and held the umbrella over Debbie and I took her to the house. There were two other women in the place, with dinner cooking: one was a friend and the other was her sister. Her name was Liz.

  With some people you just hit it off. Which is what happened to me and Liz. I sipped on a half-glass of red wine, but my clock was ticking. I had a small slot in which to get into the uni student’s flat, and then get out.

  So I said, ‘I have to go now, but do you want to go to a movie or something?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said with a big smile. So I dashed back into the rain, did my job, and we established that the uni student wasn’t really tied up in anything. He was part of an idealistic humanitarian group that sought to find Australian immigration status for people in displaced persons’ camps. He was religious – sure – but not in the way we read about most.

  And Liz? I married her about
eighteen months later.

  2

  That’s how it went for me. One moment I was running around like a mad thing – totally saturated in the intensity and exhaustion of my chosen profession. And the next thing you know, I was organising a controlled exit from government employment, and into a place where I could be a private contractor.

  Blame it on love, blame it on burnout, blame it on Liz. I don’t care what you call it: I met a woman who reminded me that life wasn’t a part of work – it was the other way around.

  As the movies turned into romantic dinners and then sleepovers turned into weekends away, I had a light bulb moment one afternoon. I was still based in Sydney at this time – with gigs in Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin – and I was sitting in a car and it suddenly occurred to me that all the mistakes I’d made in my first marriage could easily be repeated with Liz. I’m not a cheat or a liar and I don’t have anger problems with women. My previous mistake had been to become too enmeshed in my work, giving all available energy to the security requirements of this country and her allies, and having virtually nothing left to give on the home front. This is not just my problem, by the way, or a problem only for men. Across the military, law enforcement and intelligence sections of government, operators routinely find their gigs stretched from one week to ten days, and then to two weeks. And before you know it you’ve been in the field for a month, with barely any contact with your loved ones. Inevitably, because of the work, your thinking processes become more focused and the ‘need-to-know’ circle shrinks to immediate colleagues and immediate superiors. You even keep things from your workmates and people you might have a drink with once a week. You put up walls to retain the indoctrination rules and you slowly isolate yourself socially and, perhaps, alienate yourself mentally. It’s a gradual process and few people in my world can see it until they’ve lost a spouse, or they forget which school year their kids are in, or they’re sitting in front of either a shrink or an AA group, wondering where the last decade went. I’d had my wake-up call with my first marriage. I couldn’t make the same mistake again.