That night I rang Liz and told her that I wanted to make a go of it, and that I intended to live in Melbourne and go back to my trade. She agreed: I had to be in Melbourne and she’d support me and do what had to be done, to help me transition from my current world and into self-employment.
It took six months to move out of government direct-hire employment and into the private sector. I moved to Melbourne, and started working as a chippie. But without the contacts and word of mouth that builders operate on, I didn’t get much work initially. I’d been in Melbourne for a few months when a professional contact of mine called me from Singapore and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was out of my old gig, on good terms, and he said, ‘I have something for you.’
I was about to put him right, tell him, ‘I’m privately employed – I’m not private contracting,’ but I didn’t have much on so I heard him out.
‘Remember Jim Price?’ he said.
I did. Jim Price was a military intelligence officer who’d served at ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Kabul and then become one of the ADF liaison people with Canberra. ‘Yeah, I know Jim,’ I said.
‘He’s working for a big American security contractor in Afghanistan. He’s hiring and he asked after you. Can I give him your number?’
‘Sure,’ I said, without even thinking.
After I hung up, I immediately felt guilty. I’d heard ‘Jim Price’ and ‘Afghanistan’ and just automatically said yes. It wasn’t what Liz had signed up for. And I worried that our early plans for marriage would be ruined.
Liz was working at the hospital and my worries gnawed away at me for most of the evening. I didn’t sleep very well that night, dreading a call from Jim and fearing that I’d have to watch my relationship unravel if I handled this badly.
Jim called at 10 am, which meant it was eight o’clock in Singers.
‘Hi, Mike,’ he said. ‘Good time?’
‘It’s a good time, Jim,’ I said, and we had a quick catch-up. He was managing Kabul personal security detail (PSD) operations for Black Tower Services, one of the largest security contractors in the world, and one that only recruited from Tier 1 CVs: that means FBI, SAS, Secret Service and all the other acronyms you can think of where the entry bar is set pretty high and the training is excellent.
‘I heard you were out, wondered if you were doing private work?’
‘Depends what the work is,’ I said. ‘I’m private but I’m not taking anything.’
‘Good,’ said Jim. ‘There’s a lot of dignitaries coming into town. There’re already talking about the reconstruction phase, so we’ve got World Bank, IMF, UN, Asia Development Bank – all the international types.’
‘Sounds like a pain,’ I said, chuckling.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said, his northern Queensland twang letting loose. ‘They’re either huddled together in a building – creating a target for the tangos – or they’re being driven around the countryside, looking at dams and highways, and creating a target for the tangos.’
‘What do I wear?’ I asked. ‘A target on my back?’
Now he laughed. ‘We have the best gear – it’s all US military spec, with triple-one four Humvees and up-armoured Suburbans.’
The M1114 Humvee was an armoured version of the Humvee design and the ‘up-armoured’ Suburban was a US-made variant of the famous Chevrolet, which could take a bullet in its side – or an IED in the road – and give the occupants a pretty good chance of surviving.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What do you need me for?’
‘Convoy protection and dignitary protection,’ he said. ‘I can’t just take basic soldiers, or snipers, even though I do use those guys. I need people who also understand the PSD job and can focus on that, regardless of distractions.’
I knew what he was asking. Personal security detail was a series of protocols that an operator was expected to adhere to no matter how many bombs were going off or shots were being fired. You were supposed to stick to the job and believe me, that was easier said than done.
‘Okay, Jim,’ I said. ‘This is where I ask about the money and the insurances.’
‘You do six months, for seventy-five thousand US dollars,’ said Jim. ‘The insurance is Black Tower’s employee package, full medical, medevac and a disability pay-out up to two million max.’
‘The accommodation?’ I asked.
‘Compound living, steel prefabs, American beds,’ he said. That was a big plus. You get a British or Australian bed in those places, and anyone over six foot tall can only dream of sleep.
I told him I’d think about it. ‘Don’t think too long,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve got two slots to fill and eight blokes with their hands up.’
‘So why do you need me?’ I asked.
‘Kabul’s full of shooters,’ he said. ‘It’s thinkers I need more of.’
3
I stalked around the house for most of the day, dreading the conversation with Liz but also wanting to get it over with. She came in from work around 4.30 pm and I made her a cup of tea. I was so nervous I could barely form the words. I didn’t want to ruin this relationship but I also needed to return to work. I hadn’t realised how much I wanted to do these gigs again until Jim had offered me the contract.
‘I got a call from an old colleague,’ I said as we stood around the island. ‘He has a job for me.’
She didn’t say anything, just sipped her tea.
‘It’ll pay seventy-five thousand US dollars, for six months,’ I said, my throat a little dry.
‘Where?’ she said. ‘Iraq? Afghanistan?’
‘Afghanistan,’ I said, trying to be casual.
‘Is it dangerous?’ she asked.
‘It’s Kabul,’ I said. ‘So, um, yeah . . .’
She smiled and then laughed. ‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘You want to go back.’
That broke the spell and we talked it over. It turned out she’d always known that I’d go back to my world. Liz said, ‘I’m not with you so I can change everything about you. You’ve been honest about your work and I accept it.’
Liz wanted me to have a hybrid existence: a tradie who took private work. Someone who was in society and part of her world, but who could also do other contracting work. She didn’t want me to stop what I was good at and what I’d been trained for. But she didn’t want a tricky life where she couldn’t have people over for a barbecue and we couldn’t talk about my work.
I was so thankful for her wisdom and strength that I almost cried. Up until that moment, I hadn’t realised how much guilt I’d carried around, especially in my first marriage: never able to give enough to my relationship and always thinking that my strange profession was at odds with everything. When Liz supported me to keep working in my world, it changed my entire life. ‘I’ll do the gig, then I’m taking you on a holiday,’ I said. ‘That’s a promise.’
I rang Jim the next day and he sent me a bunch of paperwork via email. There was the standard employment documentation, but also a tonne of those American waivers: waiving my privacy rights; waiving my right to a civilian trial if I was arraigned on criminal charges; waiving any Australian jurisdiction in matters where I was accused of using excessive force or murder.
These were in the days when there was an Afghan government – under Hamid Karzai – but most of the institutions were either overtly NATO or supported by the United States. I wasn’t judging: you have a broken country, you need to build your institutions from somewhere. But these institutions now had to interact with a lot of foreign military outfits, and I guess companies like Black Tower had their agreements about how to handle disputes.
So I paused, but I signed the damned things and sent them back.
Ten days later I flew to Singapore and stayed overnight in a hotel by the airport, then caught a charter flight to Kabul the next day. There were around 200 people on th
at flight, from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s tempting to think of military contractors as a band of mercenaries or pirates, but a lot of the people rotating into Kabul were employed in all the support trades: truck drivers, chefs, phone technicians, bulldozer operators, electricians. And a lot of them were women.
I sat next to a very funny dude called Blake. He was from Los Angeles and was a Black Tower cook, ‘But not for the little people,’ he laughed. ‘The executive dining room.’
We had a couple of beers and he told me to stay close. ‘I’m the dude who’ll get you the nice cognac and the rib-eyes to go on your barbecue. It’s amazing what doesn’t get used.’
When it came time to line up for Kabul’s airport, it was still daylight and a funny quiet came over the cabin. As we descended on this ancient and dangerous city, I could almost feel the passengers holding their collective breaths. In 2008 this was probably the most dangerous city in the world, outside of Baghdad, and until this point a lot of the chatter around me had been urban myths about how many rockets would be fired at the plane. It was amazing how quickly people shut their mouths when the danger of this airport was no longer just a story about someone else.
After an uneventful landing we taxied to the terminals, and I could see the massive US Air Force Starlifters lined up like huge vultures in front of the US hangars. Through the fence I saw locals with a bedraggled, mangy horse, just staring through the chain link.
The compound I was based in was near the middle of the city and was laid out in a large rectangle, with sandbags and blast-walls propping up the high fencing around the perimeter with barbed wire rolled along the top. Someone said it had previously been a soccer field. Now it was home to around 3000 employees of military contractors, not only from Black Tower Services but other operators too. There was a town square area, one zone for the demountable living quarters and another area for communal buildings such as the kitchen-dining area, administration suites and a rec room. There was a large shower block, but behind my stand of demountables there was also a small shower block.
I had a room to myself and it had a small TV in it, along with a toilet, a bed and a wardrobe that included drawers. There was an information pack on the bed when I walked in, which, along with the orientation material, contained my work roster. I was on deck at 8 am the next day, where I’d be briefed, clothed and armed.
There was no mention of an orientation or a ‘getting to know you’ phase. On my first full day in Afghanistan, they were going to throw me straight in.
4
Jim Price ran the briefing session. He welcomed the newcomers and took us through the basics of the shared compound and how our employment was going to go. I kind of liked the ‘new’ Jim: when I’d known him in another life, he was always in his Australian Army dress uniform. Now he looked like Bear Grylls.
Black Tower divided its PSD operators into basic teams of five, with add-ons and different splits depending on whether we were escorting VIPs or running security on freight trucks. The basic vehicle was a privately owned, up-armoured Humvee, which was used because the 400-cubic-inch turbo-diesel engine and heavy-duty transmission had enough grunt to tow a truck. Since most of the convoys were about protecting trucks, the security detail had to be able to tow them when necessary. For the straight PSD work, Black Tower had armoured Land Cruisers and Chev Suburbans.
In most of the teams, the employer had arranged it so three new people were going to work with two people who’d been doing the job for the previous six months. That’s the way contracting went in this city: six-month gigs, on a rolling basis. If you wanted to sign on for another stint – and Black Tower liked you – then you stayed on, and by default found yourself running the show. Leadership by attrition.
I was paired off with four people in the briefing after I’d had breakfast at the twenty-four-hour dining room. Eli and Hank were the two American hang-overs from the previous six-month engagement, and Pete, Boss and I were the newbies. Pete was a large and relaxed bloke from England, obviously of Jamaican heritage. He’d been a detective in the Metropolitan Police in London and had also trained in SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics). He wanted a change after his divorce. Boss came from upstate New York, and looked like he’d played a lot of football in his youth. Eli was a beady-eyed gym bunny and ex-LAPD door-kicker. Eli was the oldest and the loudest of the group and he seemed to have assumed command. But he also had a haunted, insecure thing about him which I always find disconcerting in a man. Hank was a former US Marine who’d worked mostly in embassy detachments during his career.
They helped us get kitted out in light beige ‘urban fatigues’, which can be made of the same material as army combat clothing, but look more like the adventure wear made by companies such as Columbia. They also issued us with decent American lace-up boots, and we were assigned SIG Sauer 9mm side-arms and Colt M4 assault rifles. The armourer made us clear the breech when we took physical possession of the weapons, and we had to load our own magazines. The kit included Kevlar ballistic vests (with cup, thank you very much) and helmets, which Hank informed us was part of the insurance conditions but no one wore them.
‘Don’t even get in a car without one of these, though,’ he said, holding the helmet up, ‘because if you get shot the paperwork will have to reflect that in fact you were wearing one – and we can only plausibly lie about that if it’s with you.’
I liked Hank immediately. He had what I call an Australian sensibility, even though he was a Marines lifer. We loaded up and went to our vehicles for the first run of the day, a VIP personal security detail, taking people from the airport to the ISAF headquarters in the Green Zone – a secured zone in the heart of Kabul which was essentially under martial law. We had two silver Suburbans and we were going to operate in a standard two-car formation: the subject or subjects ride in the lead car, with two of our guys, and the security car follows close by, with three guys acting as troubleshooters should anything happen. Black Tower also ran overwatch teams – what the media would call snipers – which were planted on the rooftops and in strategic windows along the roads that were designated as ‘security routes’. The idea was that a team could radio down and warn us that there were tangos setting up an ambush at an intersection, and either suggest another route or take out the bad guys with rifle fire. The people in the cars could radio up and complain that they’d picked up a tail, and the snipers could act on that. But mainly, the snipers were located at the places most likely to turn into choke points, and ensure they didn’t.
Hank said, ‘You’re with me, Mike,’ and we got in the security car, with Pete in the back. Boss and Eli would drive with the subjects.
Hank was thirty-seven years old, not very tall but heavily muscled in a real way rather than being showy. He wore his hair longish on the top and buzzed up the back and sides. And as if to answer my unasked question about his 1960s haircut, he told me he started out as a farm boy from Oklahoma.
‘A redneck, you mean?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Hell, yeah!’
And I laughed, told him I was considered something similar where I was from, and he clipped into his comms and slipped a piece of chewing gum into his mouth – something he’d chew with an open-mouth style for the next six months. Then he found some rock ’n’ roll on the radio, and we drove out of the compound, tailgating the lead car.
We were apparently heading for the main diplomatic compound in Kabul, where we were picking up a World Bank bigwig and his offsider, and taking them to the airport where they were flying out. Then we’d hang around for forty minutes, pick up a politician and his offsider, and take them to the ISAF precinct.
‘You’ll learn this pretty quick,’ said Hank. ‘The Big Dogs don’t do much in this city, ’cept live in the compounds and bounce between ISAF HQ and the airport.’
In the briefing by Jim Price we’d been shown the security routes on a board. There were five main ones, labelled ‘A’ to ‘E’. These were securi
ty routes because they would have sniper support and there would be Coalition and Afghan National Army fire support along them too. We had to learn them because we couldn’t have pieces of paper in the cars with the routes marked on them – just imagine if the bombers got their hands on them?
The roads we sped down were a strange blend of a normal Asian city, with sudden glimpses of scorch marks, bullet pock-holes and entire walls missing; some buildings looked new, some had been built a century ago by the British and others were made of mud bricks and were piled on top of each other, as if a kid with no sense of balance had been let loose with the Lego. Kabul was filled with aimless kids and really focused foreigners like myself. All the wealth was with the foreigners – all the poverty with the locals. In the eleven minutes it took us to get to the compound, I’d decided Kabul was an entirely unsustainable situation.
We were allowed into the gated compound by a group of five heavily armed guards in khaki – they looked like locals but their weapons were Heckler and Koch UMP submachine guns and new-looking American Colt M4s. Their guard house was wrapped in ballistic glass, there was a shiny panel in the road that photographed the underside of our car, and they were using the pop-up bollard system which cannot be busted through by any normal vehicle.
I’d worked quite a bit in Asian cities, and this was about as serious as I’d seen. ‘Everyone’s still freaked out about the Serena,’ said Hank, when he saw my eyes widen at the compound security.
‘What’s the Serena?’ said Pete from the back seat, a heavy Cockney accent coming out stronger now that he was relaxing.
‘The five-star hotel, down by the Presidential Palace,’ said Hank. ‘Bunch of Talibans ran in there, back in January, and shot the place up, threw grenades. You know – all the classy stuff.’
At Hell's Gate Page 22
