At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  I threw my coffee on the ground and Hank terminated the gig. As the residential guards ran inside and locked down the Germans’ living quarters, we leapt into the car and tooled up. We connected via the radio and Hank gave a sitrep to HQ. Back at base, Jim Price told us to stand-by and we waited as the sirens started up and flakes of paint and tiny lumps of dirt started accumulating on the hood of the Chevrolet.

  A Land Cruiser came screeching through the ISAF precinct streets and drove past us, and then stopped. It backed up level with us and the door opened. There were a couple of contractors in the car, and the one in the driver’s seat – Bill – said to me, in a Scottish accent: ‘You boys heard that?’

  ‘Fuck, yeah,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Fucking bombers just hit the Indian Embassy,’ he said, eyes wide, a bit freaked. ‘Car bomb. They hit the embassy employees starting work there. It’s terrible – fuck, there’s body parts everywhere.’

  We swapped details about which roads were still open – as contractors do in Kabul – and they sped off. I felt sick inside. The Indian Embassy was partly on Passport Road, a side street off a main boulevard that we used often as a short cut. The Indonesian Embassy was over the road. It was a leafy, quiet part of the city.

  We later learned that the suicide bomber who’d driven the explosive-packed car at the embassy gates was Pakistani. It was a sickening attack and one that kept the foreigners inside their compounds for weeks afterwards.

  I kept my head down and a few weeks later I became a team leader in the PSDs and convoys. I didn’t get paid any more money, but I got to make my own calls on how I wanted the jobs to go down. Remember, I’d been trained in convoy and motorcade work by a certain country’s government who do it better than anyone else. And I returned to that base premise: stop for no one and for nothing; maintain 100 kph whenever you can, backing off to eighty if necessary. And don’t lose contact with the other vehicles – don’t get split up. By the time I was into the second half of the contract, I had no time for talented amateurs who were slumming it in Afghanistan on a working holiday. I just wanted each of my jobs to go down safely and for everyone to be able to go home to their demountable each night.

  One of the problems with Kabul was my professional background. I saw most problems – such as terrorism, insurgency, suicide bombers – as an intelligence issue. Yet just about everyone in my world was purely operational. So I was now leading teams of people who were thinking about how to get from A to B and back again without being blown up; and I was thinking about how the terrorists chose a car, where they got the RDX, who was providing the money, and what the command and control structure might be. Same problem, same goals – different ways of looking at it.

  I concluded, after being in-country for about three months, that the Taliban and al-Qaeda had better intelligence than us. For starters, they had better local knowledge and better networks of local assets. But also, because they lacked the technical superiority of the Coalition’s intelligence apparatus, they compensated by being better at street intelligence, better at building in-place cells of support, and better at planning for ‘in plain sight’ attacks. What I mean by this last piece is that the insurgency commanders had realised that all of the technology was in Kabul and accessible. Cars, trucks, delivery vans, parcels, freight pallets and oil drums were all normal sights on Kabul’s streets, and those were the bearers of so many bombs. The only thing the terrorists did need was decent RDX-based explosives (C-4, Semtex) and good detonators and fuses, and they got those from the Pakistanis.

  I had about eight weeks to go on my contract and one afternoon, after I’d returned the cars and I’d signed off my logs and written my report for the day, Jim Price asked me out for a drink. I wasn’t working the next day, so I said yes and we went to the Hotel Serena which – after being attacked earlier in the year – was now the safest and most heavily guarded hotel in the world. Yes, and I include anything in Israel.

  I relaxed in the plush seats and admired the old rugs on the floor and on the walls. It was a ‘Western’ hotel in the standards of room, water and food, but it had a strong flavour of the Kush. Jim bought the rounds, and I drank the cold beers. At the start of the second round, he asked straight out: ‘Do you want to extend your contract?’

  I looked at him. I was genuinely in a bind on that. I really wanted to get back to Liz but I also saw the need for someone like me in this city. I actually thought I could do good – in particular, I would have liked to build an intel team and try to root out these Taliban and al-Qaeda cells. I’m a GNE operator – Good Not Evil. That’s what motivates me.

  ‘Forget the contracts,’ said Jim, leaning in. ‘Corporate like the way you operate and they like your skill set. They want you on board as an employee, senior operational manager, like me.’

  I nodded. I’d redesigned my life to be around Liz for the foreseeable future – to give ‘us’ a chance – and what Jim was suggesting would mean a return to the way it was when I worked as a direct hire for governments: the job becomes your wife, and Liz would have to wait at the back of the queue.

  ‘Let me think about it,’ I said.

  We drank a bit more and Jim said, ‘One of the special operations people asked me to approach you, should you decide not to stay on.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I’ll let him explain,’ said Jim. ‘They’re aware of your CV; I think there’s work there if you want it.’

  At this point I didn’t want to think about more military contracting – which I almost certainly would not be doing – and the corporate job was way too big to dwell on now. So I remained open to this mystery job

  The next morning a clean-cut gent in his mid-forties sidled up to me in the dining area and asked if I was Mike Daly. I said I was and he put out his hand. ‘Tony Stansfield,’ he said, friendly and direct. ‘Jim may have mentioned me.’

  ‘Special operations?’ I said.

  ‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Feel like a coffee?’

  Tony took me through the proposed gig. A Black Tower client suspected one of his executives of using the company’s finance systems to launder money for arms dealers, and the suspect had proved a bit elusive. Now, as the government implicated the company itself, the client wanted the executive removed, interrogated and then fed to the right authorities at the right time.

  ‘Why the rendering?’ I asked. ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘I’ve been working on this for about seven weeks now,’ said Tony, who had an American accent but was actually Canadian. ‘There’s a delicate situation that concerns the extent to which someone in the government might be involved.’

  ‘With the money laundering?’

  Tony nodded. ‘The executive’s wife’s family is well connected in government, and our client doesn’t want to make accusations that blowback on him, if you see what I mean?’

  I thought about it. Snatching a person and delivering him was an expertise of mine. But I needed to know more.

  ‘Where is this occurring?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s unfair to tell you too much, unless I know you’re interested.’

  I looked at him for five seconds. ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On how much you pay me and how much control I have.’

  ‘The budget for the job is fifty thousand for the team leader, and we’ll supply the operators. It’s a Black Tower job.’

  I shrugged. ‘Okay, I’m interested, as long as I have full control. Where is this?’

  ‘Cebu Beach, in the Philippines.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ I said, chuckling.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit like that.’

  12

  I hadn’t done private gigs previously, they’d all been for governments and their agencies. So I didn’t know back then how to structure things to suit my style. Tony Stansfield had a Black Tower
operation all planned and he wanted me to come in and run it. Fair enough, I thought. He pays me US$50,000, and I run his guys who are on salary.

  I’d gone over the details with Tony. The executive’s name was Barry Lao, and he would be holidaying for two weeks at his resort apartment on the east coast of Mactan, the resort island beside Cebu City. The plan: book in to a neighbouring resort, establish Lao’s movements, and snatch him. He was to be delivered to a warehouse on the edges of Cebu airport, handed over to another Black Tower team, and then my guys would disperse.

  The timing? Lao and his wife holidayed at the start of the dry season – late November – into early December.

  I tentatively agreed, and told Tony that the gig was dependent on a confirmation that I needed before committing.

  That afternoon I rang Liz and told her that she needn’t worry about the Bali trip – we were going to Cebu in late November.

  She was a bit stunned. ‘Cebu?’ she said. ‘The Philippines?’

  ‘Yeah, love,’ I said. ‘As in scuba-diving, white beaches, nightclubs and a lot of lying around on the beach.’

  She perked up. A work friend of hers – Mary-Anne – had been to Cebu recently and raved about it.

  ‘So let me lock it in,’ I said. ‘Take leave for that last week of November and first week of December.’

  I found Tony in the corporate offices of the compound that evening.

  ‘The answer’s yes,’ I told him. ‘But I’ll do this under cover of marriage. It’s a resort island, so it’ll help us blend in.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tony, smirking. ‘And I suppose we pick up the costs?’

  ‘That would be best,’ I said, and he agreed, so we got down to the paperwork.

  The last weeks of my engagement in Kabul were focused on both the roads and Cebu. I was involved in designating new security routes through Kabul – especially from the airport to the Green Zone – as the US government sent another 4500 soldiers into the country. The bombings were getting bigger, the methods less noticeable. It was bombs in cars, bombs in trucks, bombs under the roads at intersections.

  I also had to plan and execute PSDs into the hinterland as we transported increasing numbers of oil and gas people out to refineries and along pipelines. It’s pointless saying one gig was more dangerous than another – it was all dangerous, all the time.

  A couple of days before I flew out, a very large IED went off near a major intersection of Kabul. They put the bomb under the road about five cars back from the red light, and waited for the traffic to build. Then they detonated the IED and there was so much explosive that the investigators couldn’t do much: the car had been pulverised. That was my lasting impression of Kabul: terrorists being so oversupplied with powerful explosives that they could waste it on disintegrating a civilian car. One of the ways to reduce terrorists’ effectiveness was to starve them of materiel – but the Taliban had no such constraints. I just didn’t get it, and I knew if I ever returned to this place, I’d want the power to really go after these bastards.

  After a few beers on my last day, I was driven to the airport by Hank and Pete, both of whom were staying on.

  We shook hands and man-hugged and I asked them to be careful. And I meant it. One moment of distraction on the streets of Kabul, and it’s over.

  I watched Kabul and then Afghanistan disappear as the charter jet climbed into crystal-clear skies and headed for Dubai. It had been a jerky introduction to private contracting, but I was back and I liked it. Now I just had to sell it to Liz.

  13

  So how was this going to work? My deal with Liz was that she would get total honesty about the job I was doing, and she wouldn’t push on the details. So now that I was going to be on holiday with her, how much would I tell her about the gig?

  I decided to play it straight and do what I’d promised. After a great night when I got home, when we drank too much red wine, danced a bit and then went to bed, I woke up the next day and hit the Berocca and black coffee.

  Liz joined me, and while I shipped up some pancakes, I dropped it on her. ‘This Cebu place is gorgeous, but I’ll have to duck away for a couple of meetings,’ I said.

  ‘Who with?’ she asked, and I made a face. And you know what? Liz dropped it, immediately.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, smiling. ‘You want to blend a little work with play? I’d like you to meet Delia’s husband, Tom.’

  I shrugged. ‘You mean German shepherd Delia?’ I asked, passing her a coffee. Delia was the best friend of Liz’s sister – she bred and showed German shepherds.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Tom’s her husband. He’s a builder and he needs some help.’

  Alarm bells went off in my mind because when tradies hear that someone needs ‘help’ as opposed to someone needing a ‘job’ done, it tends to suggest a lack of remuneration.

  But Liz had been a good sport about Cebu, so I smiled and agreed. Then she told me we should have them over for a barbecue, and like all men who stumble into these traps, I said, ‘Sure,’ and then the discussion turned to how much gas was in the bottle and the steaks she had in the fridge.

  I went along with it and that night I met Tom. He was a flush-faced Aussie tradie with a silver moustache and a real taste for beer. And he was completely under his wife’s thumb. We hit it off very quickly and I asked him what was going on with his latest job, and he looked at me, confused. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Liz told me you needed a hand with something,’ I said, getting the barbecue started.

  ‘Darling!’ yelled Tom, into the house, at his wife. ‘What’s this job I need a hand with?’

  ‘That roof, at Croydon Street.’

  Now Tom looked at me, shook his head, and said softly, ‘Fuck me dead – that bird can talk.’

  It turned out the roof in question was halfway to being completed, and Tom admitted he couldn’t get the levels right. ‘It’s sinking too much when the tiles go on, but only on one corner.’

  I looked in through the window, to where the ladies were chatting and drinking wine. ‘It’s, what, ten blocks away?’ I said. ‘You wanna take a look?’

  And that’s how I met my new mate. I helped him sort his roof, he lined me up with some work he couldn’t do himself, and we were off to the races. Liz and I were actually making this work: the real job with the real social life, and my other contracting running in the background.

  *

  We flew into Cebu airport in the late afternoon and took the shuttle to our hotel, the Blue Reef Resort on the east coast of Mactan. The suite looked over the sea towards Olango Island, but when we sat on the balcony we could also see the resort’s pool and outdoor bar area. It was warm – about twenty-six degrees in the late afternoon – but with none of the humidity that can make the Philippines so annoying in the wet season.

  I tipped the porter and flopped on the bed. This was actually what I needed. A resort, on a beach, with a pool and bar and restaurant right in front of me. Keep it simple for the man: feed him, water him and let him lie in the sun.

  Liz lay beside me on the bed and we felt the warm breeze blow in the open sliding door. I made a move or two and she told me she was going to have shower after the direct flight in from Melbourne. As the water started running, I tore open the prepaid phone I’d bought at the airport and texted Tony Stansfield’s number. It started with +659, which I noticed was a Singapore cell phone format. I texted, Lion in place. Friends can have this number.

  ‘Lion’ was the name Stansfield had given me for comms, and we were calling Barry Lao ‘Eagle’.

  The text came back very quickly. Hope you have a great time.

  My basic premise with Tony was that while I might be working for Black Tower, this would certainly be my gig. So I didn’t want some stampeding group of ex-soldiers charging around the place, getting all gung-ho on me. Before putting the job together, I’d asked for a six-man
team and we’d settled on a five-man – including me – because I told him I’d rather be one man short than have to use people who I couldn’t rely on. My list of possibles had been Black Tower operators, and I selected two I knew: Alex, a Kiwi ex-SAS operator who had worked for Black Tower in Kabul, and Ken, the ex-sniper from the Aussie SAS. I added in another person called Rich, who was former Paras, but most of his combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan had been in deep recon operations. Finally, I pulled out a name that seemed to be hiding away, a person Tony didn’t know much about. The operator went by the name MG, and Tony had to call another manager into his office to get a full briefing on the Texan: former US Marines Force Recon, veteran of Mindanao, Iraq and Afghanistan, an ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) operator who’d had a hell of a lot redacted from his file – a sure-fire sign of a man who operated in Tier 1 special operations. This was the sort of experience I wanted in my gig.

  ‘He’s in the compound?’ I asked, and Tony said, ‘No – he doesn’t like to be employed. We call him for the special stuff.’

  Which told me that MG and I were possibly destined to work together.

  Why so picky about my people? I had experience of the ‘special stuff’ and many very tough, very able people are not suited to it. My gigs – when working for governments – entailed zero detection, either coming in, during operations, or exfiltrating. From go to whoa the whole thing is a discipline, and as I put my toe back in the water, I didn’t want any chest-beaters.

  So now I waited for a text or two to come back, and in short order the first of them came in from MG and then Rich. I sent a reply to MG, saying, Main bar 2nite. Then I deleted it. Alex and Ken, I knew, were flying in the next day.

  Liz got dressed and we had a glass of the complimentary champagne on the balcony. We toasted us and had a laugh and a kiss, and then we moved down to the restaurant that adjoined the bar and looked out over the pool. It wasn’t the flash restaurant with the lobster bisque, but we were good. We ate and drank and got into the swing of it. There were a lot of other visitors, some from Australia but most from China. Everyone was drinking.