At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, one of them had a suicide vest and walked into the restaurant. People are edgy, man. The Serena was a big hotel for Americans and Europeans and it had real good security, too.’

  Two men in suits carrying walkie-talkies waved the car in front of us into a driveway inside the compound, and the car radio crackled. It echoed in my ear but the command from Eli to ‘close up’ was intended for Hank. We followed the car in, down a short drive and stopped at the small turnaround area beside the house. Behind us the heavy security gate was closing.

  ‘Out,’ said Hank, and we followed his lead, forming a block around the entrance to the house, while Pete opened the rear door of the car ready for the VIPs. I went automatically into PSD mode, and surveilled the ground behind us, and the windows above us. Hank walked to the door with one of the suited men. They spoke, the big front door opened, and a neatly groomed Japanese man in his sixties stepped out and was seized on by Hank, who got his arm behind the man and hurried him to the door Pete was holding open, while Eli did the same with a young Japanese woman in a skirt-suit, all very closed-up – no gaps. I didn’t even think about it: I moved in behind the convoy of people to the lead car, covering our rear and flanks, and when the subjects had the doors closed behind them, Hank, Pete and I were back in the security car and we were peeling out of there.

  We got out of the gate and swung right and accelerated so we were only about three metres off the rear bumper of the lead car. Eli’s voice crackled in my earpiece: he was rolling through the overwatch teams, getting a sitrep on each corner and intersection, and getting in return sharp, concise street intelligence. I was quite impressed with the accuracy and smoothness of it.

  Then Eli announced an ETA for the first drop-off at the airport, and when the comms was over Hank spoke to me without taking his eyes off the road: ‘We’re going hot, Mike,’ he said. ‘Safety off, one in the spout.’

  That meant he wanted me to have the M4 assault rifle across my chest and ready to roll. In a left-hand-drive vehicle this means holding a rifle in a left-handed posture, because with the speed and jerkiness of the driving, you can’t be holding the rifle in an orthodox stance because that would mean pointing the thing at the driver’s right ear.

  ‘You shoot left?’ asked the Oklahoma farm boy, chewing his gum so hard I could see the fillings in his molars.

  ‘Pope shit in the woods?’ I said, and Hank whooped and closed up further on the lead car.

  5

  At this point in my career I’d been involved in many motorcades and PSDs on behalf of governments. I’d been trained by the best and certified in a lot of the higher-level skills of this kind of work. But the first morning of personal security in Kabul was like going back to school. One of the tenets of motorcade security is removing choke points so your adversaries don’t have the opportunity to get close and detonate their bombs and shoot their weapons, or kidnap your subjects. So we close up the vehicles, maintain a constant speed with rapid lane changing and stop for nothing. Not for an accident, not for a vehicle on fire, not for an explosion and certainly not for a local walking onto the road and trying to stop traffic. We already had one way to achieve this: via our network of snipers and overwatch teams up on the rooftops, clearing people who are up to no good. Another way is the security corridor that’s established to take the motorcade through. This is feasible in Sydney or Washington, where there is a law enforcement apparatus and a traffic management system. You can create a green-light corridor from the airport to the White House and the motorcade sails down it, just like in the textbooks: no choke points, no delays, no stopping for a runaway hotdog stand while the bad guys creep up and put a bomb under the car.

  Now for your Kabul reality check. The first thing I noticed was the lack of traffic management of the type we accept as normal in the developed world. In Kabul, as in most Asian cities, the roads are used by every type of vehicle from the donkey cart to the forty-tonne truck. So even with the existence of security corridors and security clearways in Kabul – demarked mostly by barbed wire rolls, road diversions and concrete traffic barriers – it was a case of the locals not having got the memo. I’m not going to divulge details, because there are still people like me in that city trying to keep people safe, but let’s just say that major security routes in that city had (and still have) security status so that they can be cleared for dignitary transport. But in 2008, with just about every government and transnational organisation sending people into Kabul, the corridors became diluted unless a head-of-government was landing at the airport and coming into the city. You can’t enforce the security corridors for every dignitary, all the time, or the city would grind to a halt.

  Of course there were main security routes from the compound to the ISAF buildings and the government buildings, and to the airport. And they were largely secured, cleared and watched over by snipers. But in Kabul, ‘cleared’ didn’t mean no one was on them. It meant there wasn’t any parking – although that didn’t apply to government and military vehicles – and it meant if you had a horse-drawn or child-drawn cart, you had to use alternative routes. But that still left scooter-riding locals, zapping out of the dirt side streets like mosquitos, and the endless small business vehicles, flouting the road rules. It may have been a security route, but it wasn’t a straight ride, let me put it that way.

  By the time we got to the security gates of the airport, I felt seasick from all the swerving. The airport had a public entry–exit and a government one. Both were heavily guarded but you actually couldn’t get anywhere near the government one unless you were in a convoy like ours, and most visitors to Kabul wouldn’t even know how to find it. Our job was to take the Japanese VIPs into the departure lounge and wait with them until they got on the plane. Eli and Hank did that part, and the rest of us stayed with the cars.

  Pete immediately fished for a smoke as we stood there, watching the USAF Starlifters and Galaxies being unloaded. Kabul’s foreigner community lived almost entirely on food flown in from the US, Canada, Australia and Indonesia.

  ‘Seen the way the locals look at us?’ said Pete, inhaling.

  ‘No,’ I said, not seeing what he was getting at.

  ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘They don’t look at us. Don’t give a shit, innit?’

  Eli and Hank emerged with bags of sandwiches and cups of coffee.

  ‘Chow time,’ said Eli, putting the coffees on the hood of the Chev. He looked at his watch. ‘Next job arrives in fifteen minutes, so eat up and then bathroom time – we’ll be on the road most of the day.’

  We picked up the British politician and his team and drove Route B to the ISAF precinct. Along the route we were so close to the lead car that we touched a couple of times and Hank didn’t even blink. He saw my reaction. ‘Better to be too close than too far,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it.’

  The ISAF precinct was a walled city within a city, containing about thirty buildings, a barracks, some military training areas, housing and big car parks, spread over – I’m guessing – about eighty acres of Kabul, just north of the Old City. The main entrance to the place was a security post: a tree-lined driveway narrowed by concrete traffic barriers and restricted by an infantry fighting vehicle – a Stryker. You’d know this vehicle if you saw it: eight big tyres, a wedge-shaped front and a turret on the top, usually with a fifty-calibre machine gun. I’m very picky about security, so personally I would have chopped down those trees that hung over the security checkpoint and the main driveway. But the people on the job were US Army and they were very focused. In front of us Eli had to hand over the British delegation’s security pass and his own ID. Then we all had to hand over our IDs which were scanned into the soldiers’ computers. Then every face was matched by the soldiers and finally we were waved through.

  There were driveways and trees through the ISAF compound and we drove for about one minute before we pulled up in front of ISAF head
quarters, a colonial-era building, where we handed over to the internal security. Now the British were off our hands, we were at a loose end until we were reassigned. So we found a place in the car park where we parked alongside armoured personnel carriers, Humvees and lots of Chevs and Land Cruisers. I noticed that they – like our vehicles – had large solid-steel bumper bars on the front and back, about half a metre high. They were spring-loaded, and I asked Hank about them. He said they’d been installed so that when we needed to close up in a convoy, we could really close up without damaging the vehicles. The big spring-loaded bumper bars also gave us an easy way to keep a convoy going even if one of the vehicles broke down or lost a tyre: a vehicle could quickly get in behind and push the stranded vehicle out of the danger zone.

  Once out of the car we walked to a common room area where people like us could get a cup of coffee, make phone calls and buy something to eat. As we walked along a path lined with lawn and trees, I looked around and saw some mud-brick residential buildings with a slight height advantage over us. Many of the windows had been bricked up and I realised that the buildings with any oversight on the ISAF compound had no washing pegged out on their rooftops. I looked closer and could see the slight humps of two men’s heads on that rooftop. The sniper teams, waiting for the action and a chance to snuff it out.

  We took a table in the common area. Around us were a lot of people just like us: military gear dressed up to look civilian, poring over maps, making jokes about the people they were escorting.

  Hank did the coffee run and Eli entered times and places into his logbook. This was before tablets became ubiquitous, and while some arms of the US military had some pretty fancy IT gear, the contractors were still on radios and old-fashioned logbooks.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Eli, as he shut the book. ‘Think you can do six months?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Not a problem.’

  6

  The shift system in Kabul didn’t resemble an Australian one. The day shift started at 8 am and went for twelve hours, and then it turned into the night shift which finished at 8 am. I started on days, where all new road warriors start, and having learned my trade I was put on nights after I’d been in-country for four weeks.

  It suited me in some regards because I could have a meal in the dining area with Hank, who I’d become good friends with, and we’d prep up and get our work plan and our routes sorted, and then head out for work. The nights were not as busy as the days, but they were far more dangerous when there were clients to shift around. Not only was visibility poorer, giving the bad guys an advantage, but Black Tower didn’t run sniper teams at night because of the danger to them. So no one really wanted to do PSD drives at night.

  A lot of visiting dignitaries were in town for a very limited time, and so they’d do dinner meetings and go to drinks and do informal meetings. There was a lot of that, even though all visiting foreigners were told not to go out of the Green Zone at night. But it didn’t always work out that way, and so there was a fair bit of pouring drunk people into the Suburbans and taking them back to their compounds and/or hotels, and that meant rejecting the propositions from female passengers. Not that I was interested, but blokes like Pete or Hank – who were very interested – always said no. Under Black Tower’s list of offences that resulted in immediate termination was ‘fraternising with clients’. That one followed, ‘being in possession of a Black Tower firearm while intoxicated’ – a rule I was very happy with.

  The dangerous side of night work can be illustrated by what happened about ten days into my first stretch of night shifts. Hank and I were in the lead Humvee, with two trucks behind us, followed by the security car – a Humvee containing a New Zealander called Alex (replacing Eli who was temporarily redeployed), Pete and Boss. In each truck cab was also a Black Tower contractor riding shotgun. We were escorting the trucks from the airport to the ISAF security compound, a drive of about half an hour. Most of the route was security-cleared, with a military presence along it. The trip was considered routine, but there was a part of the drive where local traffic entered, and as we went through this zone a small white Nissan sedan pulled out of a side street, and rather than crossing the security route, it turned and seemed to follow us. ‘Here we go,’ said Hank, whose eyes had caught the Nissan in his rear-view mirror.

  I was on comms in the lead car, so I radioed: ‘Tower Two, this is Tower One. We identify a local vehicle at your six, please confirm, over.’

  The radio response came back fast, from Alex – an experienced operator who I didn’t know. ‘Roger that, Tower One,’ he said. ‘Unidentified vehicle, closing on our position.’

  In these situations the convoy leader makes a call, which generally comes down to either: speed up and lose the unwanted escort, or slow down and deal with them.

  The first response is always to speed up and lose the other vehicle. The problem with slowing down is that you lose control of your convoy – if you’re relinquishing the speed you travel at, someone else is controlling your movements.

  So we immediately started speeding up, not wanting to talk too much. For a start, you have clients driving these trucks and nothing is achieved by making them panic. Secondly, in a place like Kabul – in 2008 – there are organised non-state actors such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who often have access to top-quality technology thanks to their friendships with certain Pakistani agencies. So you get on the radio to make a tactical call, and that idiot in the white Nissan? He could be listening to every word. So we leaned on the throttle, but the twenty-tonne trucks behind us only had so much speed in them.

  The route we were on was a four-lane main road, bordered by concrete road barriers in many parts, and we knew that five blocks up the road was a military checkpoint at a major intersection. They had an Interim Armoured Vehicle at this checkpoint, also known as a Stryker, with its turret-mounted machine gun. That Stryker is a hell of a thing if they know what’s coming, but there’d been many examples in Kabul and Baghdad of locals coming in fast and zapping past the Stryker, carrying on unimpeded. Well, only unimpeded if they quickly ducked down a side street – those Browning M2 machine guns may have been old technology, but they could still chop a car to pieces if it got in their sights.

  Our protocol was to put a coded call to the checkpoint – I won’t divulge what it was, but let’s say it’s ‘Jackal’ for the situation, and ‘Red’ for the direction we were coming in from.

  ‘Roger that, Tower One,’ came back the soldier’s reply to my Jackal call, and now Hank looked in his mirrors and said, ‘Oh shit,’ and that’s when I really knew I was in Kabul. He accelerated and swerved, and I twisted in my seat and looked through the rear window where – in the meagre streetlighting – I could see the Nissan trying to come alongside the driver’s side of our security car, and the blue streaks of the tracer fire from Pete’s M4 spewing out of the rear driver’s side sliding window. The Nissan backed off but it was still driveable, and it wasn’t stopping.

  I looked back to the front screen and Hank put a call through to Tower Two, words to the effect: ‘Escape and evade, repeat, escape and evade, please copy, over.’

  The Humvee had kicked down a gear and was now screaming, its 6.5-litre V8 diesel engine taking us over seventy mph as we hurtled through the night towards the checkpoint. I was in the passenger seat with my leftie hold on the M4, wondering if I could find some earplugs at the compound store for my next job – that Humvee was loud.

  ‘Copy that,’ came Alex’s reply. ‘On your tail now, Tower One.’

  This is one of the more dangerous parts of a PSD – when you move from convoy cruise to evasion. We were still going over seventy mph by the time we came into sight of the Stryker vehicle parked under streetlights, on the edge of the intersection, and I could see a soldier up in the turret, swinging towards us. I looked back and could only see the two trucks. Before I could make radio contact with Alex, the checkpoint came on th
e net and asked us to drive down the right of the street, and as Hank did that, and the trucks did the same, I turned back and I could see the white Nissan clearly still in pursuit, now coming down the centre of the road. And then the fifty-cal on the Stryker started up and a stream of red tracer was spewing past us down the street and the radio was alive with raised voices.

  The Nissan looked like spare parts were jumping off it, and then it swerved left, onto the wrong side of the street, and struck the concrete traffic barrier front-on, at around sixty mph. It hit so hard that the whole car went airborne before collapsing down on the tarmac and bouncing a couple of times, the passenger-side rear door popping open as it came to rest.

  Hank slowed the Suburban, back to around forty mph. A military Humvee screamed past us, going the other way towards the Nissan, massive spotlights lighting up the street like an operating theatre.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Alex’s voice over the net, and an American voice came back loud and clear. ‘You’re welcome, gentlemen – have a nice night.’

  And that in many respects was my baptism into the joys of Afghanistan. Not exactly successful, in the textbook sense of it. And certainly not glamorous. But that night gave me a basic grounding in why the security routes had been set up the way they had, and why it was important to be in constant contact with the military. Whatever else I did in Afghanistan from that point on, I always stayed on the net and established comms with whoever was around. Mostly, I’d been given a front-row experience of the enduring power of a machine gun that first saw service in the 1920s and is still an effective way to take back control of a situation. That burst of fire from the M2 on the Stryker would have lasted no more than three or four seconds, yet it completely changed the momentum of the situation.