At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  I was through my first combat experience in Kabul.

  7

  The rosters were arranged so that we worked ten days on and then had three days off, so I had to wait for two days after this event to go and have a few drinks with the boys. Having an ‘offsite debrief’, as we’d called it in Australia – you know, at the pub, with a few beers – would have to wait, but in the meantime I had the real thing. It was widely known that taking a contract in Kabul went hand in hand with a tonne of paperwork. We’d have to write our own reports for Black Tower, and those who’d fired their weapons would have to count back their rounds to the armourer, write a report, and then be issued more. And they could also be drug- and alcohol-tested, although Pete wasn’t on this occasion.

  Then came the incident-reporting to ISAF, which entailed actual interviews with those involved in the action – in this case Pete and Alex – and more written reports from Hank and myself. Then there was the military reporting system. I was having a Coca-Cola at the compound dining room when a very polite army bloke – Major Collins – turned up and asked if I could debrief on the incident of the prior evening. I went through it and praised the soldiers. ‘They stayed calm, asked us to pull over and give them a clear line of sight, and then they took out the tango,’ I said. ‘It was very professional – I was really impressed.’

  Until this time, my main exposure to foreign military had been with highly trained special forces. I hadn’t fully experienced the real-time, practical competence of general soldiers who are really, really good at what they do, and so that incident made a difference to how I saw the security of Kabul.

  He nodded and kept asking questions, and it became obvious he wanted to know about the car: where had it come from? When did I first notice it? Did I see any of the occupants? Had I seen the car and occupants previously – in other words, had it been casing us?

  It became clear that Major Collins was from the intelligence branch and he must have picked up something. ‘Your background,’ he said. ‘Intel?’

  ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘Then I’d really have to kill ya.’

  He gave me his card and told me that a lot of the attacks in Kabul were now of a mobile nature: either people wearing suicide vests walking into public areas, or cars loaded up with C-4 being driven up to other cars and buses and detonated. A new trend was also the parked truck with a load of plastique in the back, and even the IED disguised as a rock. When a convoy drove past, it was detonated, bringing down half the block. Needless to say, the bombers didn’t care how many locals were killed or made homeless in order to make their point.

  ‘What was in that white Nissan?’ I asked.

  ‘A trunkload of plastique,’ he said, as casually as if he were telling me his favourite football team. ‘Count yourselves lucky. If you see anything when you’re out and about, let me know?’

  I told him I would, and I thought about this for the rest of the morning, wondering about the white Nissan and the mission: had we been targeted? Did they have intel on what was in those trucks? Or had they been driving around looking for a target of opportunity?

  My roster finished on a Friday morning, so I handed in my firearms and watched cable TV for most of the day. At 4.30 pm, I showered and got dressed: I was going for a few drinks, but first I needed to call Liz and do a check-in. This was 2008 and phones weren’t highly sophisticated. But the first iPhones were out and the BlackBerry had become very powerful, and with these internet-connected devices had come a lot of problems with GPS location services and internet cookies and what have you. Simply put, the wrong people were able to locate the good people by hacking into their phones. As a result, in this compound, all mobile phones had been surrendered on the day we checked in. So I went to the rec hall where there was an internet area down the back, and I found a screen, put on the headset and made a Skype call.

  Liz was pleased to hear from me and I told her that it was all routine and not a lot was happening. I told her our truck convoy had been followed but that the Americans had dealt with it, which was the truth. And then she said, ‘Bali,’ and I wasn’t following.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We’re going away when you get back, remember?’ she said. ‘And I’ve found a great package in Kuta. You’re going to love it.’

  I did remember, but right at that moment my head wasn’t really in the holiday space. ‘Have the contract payments been going through?’ I asked her. I’d suggested a joint bank account with Liz as a way of making me seem stable and reliable.

  ‘Yep, it’s going in,’ she said. This was my first move into private contracting, and at that point I hadn’t taken proper legal and accounting advice and incorporated myself under a foreign banking domicile. For now, those US dollar payments were dropping into a plain old bank account, no taxes from the US government or from Australia. It would be a headache soon enough, and I’d have to make it right with the Tax Office, but right now we could take a holiday anywhere.

  We spoke a bit and she had a few stories from the hospital. But I could tell that the promised holiday was now seriously scheduled and there’d be no backing out. Not that I wanted to – I just couldn’t focus on it yet.

  I signed off and walked out of the rec room feeling a little empty. I had to admit I missed her.

  I banged on Hank’s door. ‘Come on, Sleeping Beauty,’ I yelled. ‘Hand off snaky, feet on the floor!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ came his croaky voice.

  ‘He still sleeping?’ came the East Ender voice, and there was Pete, standing beside me: clean fashion shirt, untucked; flash jeans – the $200 specials – and a pair of white Wild Rhino shoes, which in 2008 were about as cool as it got.

  ‘Well, if it ain’t Pierre Cardin,’ I said, winding him up. ‘If Pierre lived in a brothel.’

  Pete was a big tough bloke, but he laughed at that. ‘You cheeky bugger. My mum give me this aftershave. It’s Hugo Boss ’n all.’

  The door opened and a grizzled face looked out. ‘Ten minutes, y’all,’ said Hank. ‘Meet you in the rec room.’

  We took a seat in the media area and watched some CNN on the big screen. There was a lot of fighting in the south of Afghanistan and not much sense being made of it. Some of the advancing forces were Taliban and some were fighting with ISAF, and the various Coalition forces were making a bigger muddle of it. Words like ‘surge’ and ‘smart bomb’ were being thrown around and I got the sense that the journalists weren’t quite sure themselves.

  ‘Didn’t understand a word of that,’ said Pete, looking around.

  Alex, our Kiwi, came up to us and asked if drinks were still on and Pete said, ‘Like shit on a blanket,’ and Alex looked at me, and I said, ‘You couldn’t beat me off with a stick.’

  Pete had befriended another Cockney-type in the maintenance and engineering department, and he gave the four of us a lift into the city. We found a steel door in the wall, which in another time and place would have led to a brothel or an illegal gambling den, and we knocked. Behind it, a local security guard with an AKM in his hands and a cigarette in his mouth opened up and we walked across a small approach way – past other guards – and through another steel door. Only one person at a time could fit through this door, because on the other side was a third steel door, so you stood in this rat-trap while the owners took a look at you, and then the buzzer sounded and the third door opened. This led into a courtyard–beer garden, which was the social centre of a well-known guesthouse and bar.

  Another security bloke stood in front of us, AKM at the ready, and when Hank told him we wanted to go to the cellar bar–restaurant, he flicked his head and down we went, into a part of the city where the non-Muslim world went to play.

  Afghanistan, in those days, had a two-speed attitude to alcohol. It was against the law for Muslims to drink, and from what I could gather it was also deeply frowned upon to be a Muslim and be in a bar – even if not imbibing. But foreigners
could drink on the understanding that they not do it in public, and not be publicly drunk. It was reminiscent of the laws in Dubai, where foreigners may drink in a private place but they could be arrested for being intoxicated in public. A pretty dicey proposition when you think about it, and one of the reasons that Black Tower had such a thriving business in Kabul: there was really no choice for the boozed foreigner other than to go straight from the pub door into a car or taxi.

  We got a table against the wall, where I like to sit, and ordered in the first drinks. U2 was playing on the sound system and around me was the buzzing sound of expats talking up a storm. I can’t say I was instantly comfortable with the basement concept. I’d heard all about this place, and I’d been looking forward to having a few beers and a laugh. But frankly, after fifteen years in the field as an intelligence officer I was wound a bit too tight for the underground bar, which had no escape route except one flight of stairs. For the first hour down there I kept finding myself staring at the stairs, developing seven scenarios for how to stay alive if some muppet with a vest or an AK stalked down them. I even tried to get an angle on the reflection from the bar mirror when I bought a round of beers, trying to see where they kept the weapons.

  Finally Hank waved a hand in front of my eyes. ‘Hey, Mike,’ he said. ‘The storeroom has another stairwell in it. The shit starts, and we go through there, okay?’

  Now Pete messed my hair and laughed and we raised our glasses and drank.

  A couple of hours later, when we’d eaten and the music had changed to Credence, I excused myself and headed to the toilet. As I made it to the door, a foot came out from a table, attempting to trip me.

  I looked down at the owner of the foot, and an ugly bastard looked back at me, sneering. Across the table another bloke laughed at me. I knew him as Eli.

  8

  I defused the situation by turning to Eli and making light chat, even as I realised that for him, alcohol was one of those instant-arsehole arrangements. He giggled, he chuckled, and he made no attempt to introduce me to the ugly bastard he was drinking with, whose neck seemed to start at his ears. I continued to the pisser, and when I walked out again I went past the table and saw that another man had joined them. As I passed by, the ugly bastard yelled something at me, but it was loud and he was Russian, and I couldn’t hear him properly.

  I joined my friends and five minutes later, Eli was at our table. He was so pissed he could barely get any words out, and to shut him up I told him to sit down. He sat and he nodded off, and when he came to he was about as interesting as any drunk. I suggested he get a taxi – I’d take him up to the street, make sure he was okay. He agreed, but when he slapped his pockets he had no wallet. ‘It’s gone, my fucking wallet,’ he said, several times over like a scratched record.

  I told him not to worry, and walked over to the Russians, where a wallet was sitting on the table. I pointed at it and said, ‘I think that’s Eli’s,’ and made to take it, and the ugly bastard grabbed my wrist, so I grabbed the back of his head and shoved his face through the table. I wasn’t totally prepared for the local standards of furniture construction, because the table broke into three pieces. The friend he was drinking with stood and came at me, and with one thing and another, a military knife was suddenly in his right hand. So I threw a chair in his face and got hold of his right wrist and twisted it back on itself, producing a scream that I haven’t heard since the time I’d been sitting in an interrogation room in a certain Middle Eastern country, and some poor bastard in the next room had obviously provided the wrong answer.

  The ugly bastard was still conscious, and as I was disengaging from his friend’s renovated wrist, the ugly bastard stood to his full height – a little taller than my six-foot-three – and swung a piece of the broken table into my face. I might have slightly ducked before the chunk of tabletop hit me, so I took the blow on the side of my cheekbone rather than full in the face, but it stunned me and I staggered a bit as my legs went slightly wobbly. The ugly bastard came at me, readying to take another swing with the half-tabletop, and out of the throng of screaming women came what I will forever regard as the Black Flash: Pete, my buddy, right on time and sailing through the air with an enormous right-hand punch into the ugly bastard’s temple, sinking the prick to his knees, where he put his hand up in submission. I panted for air while Pete stood over him with a cocked right hand, the Russian bleeding freely from the face. Pete came out with all that Cockney hard-boy stuff that you don’t realise is authentic until one of them is standing there calling his Russian victim a chutney ferret type.

  The security guards swept in and made straight for the Russians, aided by the Polish barmaid who was shouting at them in her native tongue and then telling the guards – in mangled English – to remove ‘thees Russian scum’. I think she even spat on the floor.

  I looked behind us and there was Hank, facing off with two other soldier types, and I walked to stand beside him. They were Russians, too, and I bridged up and they decided that tonight wasn’t their night.

  Over on our table, Eli was snoring.

  *

  The next morning Pete and I were having breakfast in the dining area when we were visited at our table by Jim Price, who put down his fruit salad and cup of coffee and asked if he could join us.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a black eye,’ said Jim, straight into it. ‘Where’d you get that beauty, Mike?’

  I slurped at my coffee. ‘In town last night,’ I said. ‘Couple of Russian soldiers wanted Eli’s wallet. I had other plans.’

  ‘You read the terms of employment?’ he asked.

  I shook my head but I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘So you saw the part about using violence against any of your workmates?’

  Now my head was swimming. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah, Mike,’ said Jim. ‘Shit is right. They work for Black Tower, and now they can’t work for Black Tower.’

  ‘Um . . .’ I started.

  ‘Boris has a concussion and we have to pay him out, let him go home. And Oleg won’t be using a rifle for maybe a year. The doctors said something about significant ligament damage and a dislocated wrist joint. Very painful, very tricky to heal.’

  I nodded. ‘Sorry, Jim – that Oleg? He actually produced a knife.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, he does that all the time,’ said Jim, hooking a piece of rockmelon. ‘You’re the first person to take it off him.’

  Jim ate and we watched. When he’d swallowed his fruit, he turned to Pete. ‘And you. You a boxer or something?’

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ said Pete. ‘Sorry about that – he was going after Mike with a tabletop. I had to sort it.’

  ‘A tabletop?’

  ‘Half of one,’ said Pete.

  Jim shook his head and looked away. ‘Okay, here’s the problem. I now have ISAF wanting tonnes of paperwork and there were a couple of Pentagon blokes down there last night, saw the whole thing.’

  ‘You firing us?’ asked Pete.

  ‘No, but I’m going to redeploy you. You can’t be in the PSD business for a while. Too much profile.’

  ‘What else is there?’ I asked.

  ‘You can do what Oleg and Boris were doing,’ he said, as he stood. ‘Overwatch teams.’

  9

  Just to clarify, I don’t condone violence. I see it as a last resort. Well, if not a last last resort then certainly down the list, after jokes, charm and harsh language. What I don’t allow is for tough guys – bullies – to gain any momentum. If they want to start with the dominance games, I just get straight into it. The broken table was not planned, but neither was the knife in Oleg’s hand. And it wasn’t some penknife, either: it looked like a KA-BAR combat knife with a seven-inch blade. They’re designed to cause damage, and I wasn’t at all chastened to learn from Jim that it was a well-known party trick of Oleg’s. You want to pull a trick like that? Well, I have a trick too, a
nd at the end of it your wrist looks like Cubist art.

  Pete and I lost our three days off and we were split up. I was led off to the briefing rooms, where I was introduced to a former Aussie SAS sniper, Ken, who I’d place in his early forties. He had grizzled, grey hair, cropped very close, and a bright red beard which he hadn’t tried to tame. I smiled and played nice. I even made a joke about my black, blue and purple eye.

  We danced around a bit and he was intrigued about my background. And when he teased it out, and a couple of names overlapped, he went ‘Oh,’ and then he had a fair idea what I was about.

  ‘You done much shooting?’ he asked.

  ‘Yep,’ I said, but he didn’t have to know my operational background. ‘Grew up in the bush, shot my first pig when I was nine.’

  Ken nodded. ‘You used a Barrett?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said, knowing it was the sniper version of the Browning M2.

  ‘You know what we’ll be looking for?’

  ‘Trucks down to their axles,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck me dead – you’ve done this before,’ he said, and from that point on we were good.

  The role of the overwatch teams was to provide support to the ground security. The PSDs and convoy escorts needed not only fire support from on high, but also the top-down vision that you can’t get when you’re in a rabbit warren like Kabul. My role was spotter: the shooter – Ken – would be the one looking through a telescopic sight and taking his shot, which he would do with his primary weapon, the fifty-calibre Barrett rifle. His secondary weapon was the Remington 700 series, a classic .308 sniper’s rifle which worked well with a suppressor.

  I would be scanning the streets with the binoculars, and also surveilling other buildings. Most of the overwatch teams in Kabul at this time were networked, so we had overlapping fields of fire. In the early days there had been cases of the snipers being taken out by local cutthroats, who would creep up on them, kill them and take their rifles and scopes. The next thing you knew, the bad guys were shooting at us with our own rifles. So they set up a system of overlapping turf, where one team can see if another is being stalked.