I nodded and the hood of the Suburban slammed shut as James walked over to us, his face like thunder.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The Indonesians are insisting on leading us into the village.’
‘We have to go with them?’ I asked.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ said James, his face twisting. ‘What are we going to do? Stay here because we don’t like their methods?’
‘Our job is recon,’ I said, trying to dial down the heat. ‘We confirm Ramdi’s identity – that’s the tasking. So, perhaps we follow them to a certain extent, but if they’re looking for contact . . .’
‘Ah, yeah, Mike,’ he said. ‘They’re looking for contact.’
‘Well,’ I said, seeing an opportunity to do what I had to do. ‘You want to sit this one out?’
‘You high?’ said James. ‘I don’t know how they do it in Australia, Mike, but we’re not staying here while the Indonesians contact the tangos. Right, John?’
John shrugged.
‘What’s the embassy detachment doing?’ I asked.
‘They’re going in, of course,’ said Captain James, and I sensed an opportunity to peel away from the main group and do our separate tasking.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The Indonesians lead and we support, right?’
‘Copy that,’ said James, and turned for the Suburban.
Behind us, soldiers were shrugging off packs and checking weapons. On the back of the Pantech truck, a couple of the blokes were putting on the padded bomb-disposal suits and the one with no insignia looked unnervingly calm. We were going in.
9
At the top of the rise, in a lightly wooded glade, we stopped and waited behind the Indonesian EOD truck, the radio receiver in Anwar’s hand barking with the orders from the officers. I had my window down and the M4 assault rifle across my chest. John was in an identical position on the other side of the rear bench seat. The big V8 motor idled as in front of us the Indonesian soldiers slapped magazines into their rifles and chattered. From where I was sitting, there was a slow dip for around 100 metres, into a dry creek, and on the other side of the ford – about 300 metres up a gentle slope – was a settlement of some kind. I could see buildings and houses through the trees. Which meant whoever was up there was also looking at three unannounced vehicles through the jungle. Around me, the team checked weapons and made adjustments. I put on my 5.11 backpack, felt the weight of the filled CamelBak.
The radio crackled and one of the officers came through clearly.
‘He say that we stay here, wait for him to wave us through,’ said Anwar, and before Captain James could respond the Indonesian EOD truck was moving away from us and down the hill.
‘Seriously?’ said James, spinning in his seat and staring at Anwar and me – like I was in on it. ‘What are we supposed to do here?’
‘Wait for the boss,’ said Anwar.
James turned a purplish red, not helped by the black baseball cap he’d pulled on for the gig. ‘Wait!? Fuck that, it’s our mission!’
Before Anwar could offer an explanation, James was heaving open his door and spilling outside. He stalked past my window, muttering. Turning, I watched him walk to the cab of the vehicle behind us. There were a lot of raised voices, and it seemed obvious that the team leader of the embassy detachment wasn’t sympathetic about James’s complaints. James came back to the Suburban, mouthing obscenities about Indonesia and amateurs, and threw himself back into the car.
‘Well, that’s that,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘We’re the nursemaids.’
In front of us the Indonesian EOD truck jumped and jittered its way to the creek ford, the canvas awning over the back swinging and swaying with every rut and hole. To my mind it all looked a little open. If I was standing guard in the settlement on the hill, I’d be watching that truck filled with soldiers and assuming it was so obvious that it must be a ruse – like the Trojan Horse.
The truck slowed and stopped at the ford, and Anwar’s radio sparked to life, a slightly stressed officer’s voice pouring out and into the car. We didn’t speak Bahasa Indonesia but that tone – with its short breath and lack of tonal variance – was the international sign of a worried man.
‘What’s he saying?’ demanded James. ‘That contact?’
Anwar shook his head. ‘He say we are to stay put – he sending scouts.’
‘They’re getting out of the truck?’ said James. ‘We should be down there.’
Anwar sparked the radio and asked the question and the officer’s reply came back.
‘He say no – you stay here till he order you forward.’
James was getting agitated again. ‘Order us, huh?’
Anwar missed the sarcasm and nodded. ‘That’s the order.’
I saw John wince and James turned in his seat, and looked back and down on Anwar. ‘Let’s get this straight . . .’ he began, and that’s when we heard the pop-pops we’d all been waiting for. The gunfight was underway.
10
I suppose for most people, the sound of automatic gunfire is a trigger for fear – a signal to start running. For people like me – which meant everyone in that car – that poppedy-pop-pop is an adrenaline starter. It’s exciting, it’s focusing.
Time to go to work!
‘Start the car,’ said James, chambering his M4, and turning to face the front.
Anwar yelled into the radio, and the Indonesian officer yelled back. ‘He say, stand down – stand down,’ said Anwar. ‘Don’t come forward yet.’
The Suburban was running and James looked at Calvin, and pointed forward, and Calvin put the car into ‘Drive’ and we lurched forward.
‘Why are we going forward?’ I asked James. ‘Let’s see how it plays.’
‘I can see how it plays,’ said James, ‘can’t you?’
Calvin gunned the engine down the hill. I looked behind me and saw the embassy detachment coming with us, and when I turned back, the black-clad Indonesian soldiers were dispersing to the left of the EOD truck. Somewhere back in the bush, red tracer rounds were shooting out of the glades of rainforest and making cracking sounds against the trees. I immediately looked to the right of the truck, assuming that the shooters would launch a main attack from one flank and then pounce from the other flank. For now, the Indonesian officer had planted four men on the right side and the rest were pinned down on the shoulder of the road, staying out of the fire zone.
We motored to the EOD truck and as we closed to thirty metres, the first hostile round hit the upper right-hand corner of the windscreen, making a cobweb with a hole in the middle. We instinctively ducked, and Calvin steered us off the road and onto the shoulder where a cluster of vine-covered banyan trees provided at least some cover. We sprang from the car, and because the right flank was at my door, I scanned that side before assuming I could use the Suburban for protection. It looked okay, and as I moved to the rear of the Suburban to stand with John, the embassy detachment truck blasted past us, heading for the Indonesians’ truck. We were now at the rear of our convoy, a position that would annoy Captain James but which suited me just fine.
The deep rhythm of an AKM started up about fifty metres away, rustling the foliage above us and loosening a branch onto the roof of the car. The sound of a 7.62-millimetre round hitting steel pinged out and I was happy for the cover of the Chevrolet.
‘Where’s James and Jerry?’ I said to John, not realising my mistake with their names until I’d said it.
‘Gone into the bush,’ said John, edging around the rear of the car, trying to get a better look. ‘Got cover behind a tree, in front of the car.’
‘Got eyes on these tangos?’ I asked, looking through the windows of the station wagon part of the Suburban and not seeing much because of the tinted glass.
‘Negative,’ said John, not taking his eyes off the bush. ‘Fire’s co
ming from behind this stand of trees – two of them, at least. AKs, is my guess.’
‘Which way they moving?’
‘If I was them, I’d be swinging around, and I’d be setting up right about there.’
I looked where his rifle was pointed, to a zone that would put the shooters at about eight o’clock to the line of the Suburban.
I agreed. ‘Wanna beat them to it?’ I asked.
John nodded, and pointed to the other side of the road where there was a ditch running its length.
‘Get underneath them?’ I asked, and John nodded.
We ran directly across the dirt road from the Suburban and leapt into the shallow ditch, putting us up to our knees in long grass. I wasn’t sure what John was thinking but I’m from Australia, and muddy ditches mean frogs, and frogs mean snakes. John didn’t stop, just crouched over and ran along the ditch, and I followed in close. I saw for the first time that he had the Remington 870 shottie strapped over his shoulder and across his back. We jogged like that for thirty seconds, and stopped as we came up against an old tree felled across the drainage ditch. Ducking under the tree, we came out on the other side and crawled up the bank and onto the shoulder of the road. Panting and sweating, we stayed low in the grass and cased the bush on the other side. I could feel my soaking-wet fatigue pants against the backs of my legs as we waited for a tell. It came after ten seconds: the shooters – two of them – were precisely where John had predicted, and when they opened up on the Suburban a window exploded. Then the fire was coming back the other way at them, probably from James and Calvin. Down the road, some of the embassy soldiers ran, trying to get cover behind the Suburban, and also opened fire on the shooters in the bush. The noise was incredible: I reckoned at least twenty people were engaged in the firefight.
‘We still got to find Ramdi,’ I said to John. ‘These guys have it covered down here – what do you think about this side of the road?’
‘Let’s take a look,’ said John, and we crawled backwards into the ditch and emerged on the other side, in the cover of trees. I was panting by the time we moved into the cool of the forest and I sucked on the CamelBak straw, needing water against the humidity. My radio, which had barked and squawked with Captain James yelling situation reports at no one in particular for five minutes, now featured my call sign: ‘Red Unit, this is Red Leader, what’s your position? Over.’
John and I swapped looks; we paused behind a big tree and collected ourselves. We’d work so much better without micromanagement. So I reached over to the transmitter pack with my left hand and touched the comms button on the mic boom with my right index finger.
‘Red Leader, this is Red Unit,’ I said, whispering. ‘Please be advised we are in contact. Now going silent, Red Unit out.’
I switched the transmitter box down low and I could hear the comms open up again, probably from James, but then he must have thought better of it as another burst of fire came from over the road. I didn’t want to leave James, but I had a job to do. I was going to enter that village on foot with John, identify Samson Ramdi and get as many pics and evidence of his operation as I could. We just had to tread carefully through the jungle because with only two of us, we’d have trouble punching through if there was a larger force waiting in there.
11
To people not of this world, it might seem strange that one mission involves two totally different styles of operation. It isn’t so strange for people who have worked in intelligence or military. We often work together, in the same teams, and we have different agendas and approaches. When someone asks me to do a recon job in the Javan jungle, to confirm an identity and take some pics of a bad guy’s operations and documents, I immediately design it as a covert operation. My skills and experience dictate that the professional way to do this is via an infiltration, perhaps some covert recce around the village and then go back to my team and design a way to get into the bomb factory, take our photos, and get out again. No one should be dead or injured, and there should be no exchange of gunfire. Ideally, the enemy shouldn’t know that we’d visited him. To effect this I’d add to the gig some long lenses and good camera technology, perhaps a bit of audio surveillance with a big parabolic directional microphone, and if I were designing it, I’d ask a government to give me UAV time over the compound, letting me know when people were moving around and when they weren’t.
The team? Yes, it could be led by Captain James, but it would be deployed in the jungle around the compound, giving me real-time ground intelligence and acting as fire support (if really needed) and a comms node for collecting, processing and sending data. The team would provide the food and water and the safe place to sleep should the thing drag on, and they’d have the vehicle primed and ready to skedaddle.
So as I was forced to run through the jungle with John, while the firefight went on behind me, just understand that this was not shirking. It was also not simply soldiers versus spooks. People like Captain James are prevalent in the armed forces, but lots of special forces people operate more like me. The Aussie SAS and the US Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance are excellent recon operators, with the same sneaky, soft-infiltration approach that I take. The person assigned to me – John – was obviously ex–US military, but he was completely on board with what was required, which was to leave all the shoot-em-up types behind and actually get something in the bag: like a Ramdi ID and some pictures of the factory.
We moved steadily but with little sound. As we reached higher ground, the jungle thinned slightly and now we could see the guys on our side, standing on the road and pointing. The gunfire was abating and the people shooting at us seemed to be moving back towards the village.
John asked if I wanted to keep doing our own thing and I told him, ‘Yep.’ I took the lead, thankful I’d been assigned a soft-foot. I was introduced to hunting in the New South Wales bush as a child, quickly learning that if I made a racket I wouldn’t be invited again. So for a big guy I move softly through foliage and it gave me an extra layer of comfort knowing that John moved the same way. The walk was uphill and the dappled light coming through the canopy was great camouflage for an ambush. The gunfire was now an odd pop and bang, with male shouts coming through louder than weapons. But that was from our left. Ahead of us – up the hill – was the village and, I hoped, Ramdi’s lair. The birds and the occasional monkey were the only other sounds, save for our rasping breathing.
As we neared the crest of the hill I saw an outbuilding, which had either been built in the jungle or the jungle had grown around it. It was a wooden hut, painted white, with wooden weatherboards. We approached it carefully, satisfied ourselves there was no one around it or in it, and set ourselves up beside it. From here, we looked directly down on the village. I pulled out my rangefinder monocular, and had a look. There was a main dirt road through the middle of about thirty buildings, most of which were modest dwellings. Some of them were shops and café-restaurants, and one was a village depot of the type in Indonesia that do FedEx and DHL pick-up/drop-offs. The depot had a Western Union sign beside the main door, and when I saw that I decided that the depot owner was answering to Ramdi: all terrorists need a way to shift money around the world, and often that money starts as cash in the Indonesian jungle.
I thought I could see what we were looking for: on the way out of town – about eighty-five metres past the edge of the village – was a driveway that ran to a compound of buildings and vehicles. I counted two satellite dishes – the big broadband ones typically used by governments and embassies – and several long whip aerials. In front of what looked like the secondary building, perhaps the enlisted men’s quarters, were a late model Land Cruiser, an oldish white Hilux and a new, red Nissan Navara with an empty ute tray. The place was not gated.
I passed the monocular to John. ‘Outside of town, left-hand side of the road.’
He had a look. ‘Five buildings, at least two of them living quarters,’ he mumbled, not lo
oking up. ‘Four propane tanks with two inbound lines to the secondary, so we have a good-sized kitchen and shower block.’
‘Numbers?’ I asked.
‘Maybe room for twenty, thirty people.’
‘Families?’ I said.
‘Nope,’ said John, and as he said that his free hand went up. ‘What’s this? I got a group of tangos riding in a truck, along a trail. They’re heading for the compound.’
I looked over with my naked eye and could see the vehicle moving through the light jungle, on a dirt track about 100 metres parallel with the main road into town. It was a white Hilux – what Americans call pick-up ‘trucks’, and we Aussies call utes.
‘We got soldiers on foot too,’ he said.
‘Where’re our guys?’ I asked.
As if to answer my question, the gunfire from the M4s echoed up to our ridge and then I heard a diesel revving, and the Indonesian EOD truck came over the ridge and headed down into the town. Now there was movement at the compound and the Hilux that had been haring through the jungle stopped briefly.
‘Here we go,’ said John. ‘Three tangos, all tooled up.’
We watched the three new shooters leap into the back of the Hilux, and the vehicle speared down the driveway, onto the main road and into town. And I mean that ute was flying.
We stood and watched the scene unfold like a train wreck: the gunmen were driving straight at the Indonesian soldiers’ truck. What had looked like retreat ninety seconds earlier had only been regrouping and re-engagement. Before we’d taken ten steps towards the town, the shooters on the back of the Hilux were opening fire at the army truck and the truck was doing a handbrake slide to a halt. It was now side-on to the approaching Hilux and the soldiers in the back – only a few EOD operators – took shooting stances and opened fire back at the approaching threat.
My radio squawked on the webbing over my vest.
At Hell's Gate Page 5