The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  Then, at 4 p.m. they received a call saying that one of their aircraft had crash-landed.

  The crash of the navy Sea King helicopter designated Shark 02, caused by a maintenance fault, claimed nine Australian lives – six navy and three air force. It was the first time Hayes had ever lost colleagues on an operation.

  ‘So, you know, there was a job to be done and we kept doing that,’ she says. ‘We stayed, obviously, to do a lot of the work, body recovery, all those sorts of things and we continued to provide aid. And then, when we got the word, we headed home.’

  She stayed with Kanimbla for a further five months. Her next move was her first command, in 2006 – as skipper of one of the new Armidale Class patrol boats.

  ‘Patrol boats are a unique team environment where everyone has to pull their weight or the boat doesn’t do what it needs to do.’

  This was a significant period in her career.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re in command as a lieutenant, lieutenant commander, commander or captain, you know that you have that boat or ship at sea and in the end the decisions you make are yours,’ she says. ‘So I guess the weight of that doesn’t change. The environment changes a lot and the challenges with people change a lot too because there’s more of them, not less of them.’

  Hayes was selected to command Toowoomba in 2012 and joined the ship in 2013. After two short but intense operations – one on border protection and the other in the search for the vanished passenger aircraft MH370 – it was off to the Middle East.

  After her record haul of hashish, Toowoomba headed south away from the hash highway and down the smack track off Dar es Salaam. She soon came across suspicious-looking dhows.

  ‘During some of these boardings, the guys do all of the paperwork at the side of the wheelhouse while I get approval for a detailed search,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes they’re searching for a long time. We sit there and they send photographs, so we’re going, “Check under that board,” or, “Is there anything there? Is there space under that?” So, we’re all trying to see because they’re very, very inventive. You know they’re not hiding it in simple spots.’

  Some searches lasted for twenty hours. ‘At some stage you have to say, “Enough’s enough.”’

  On one dhow, the skipper told them where a package of drugs was hidden, but it was only a small amount. They kept searching and in the end they found about 300 kilograms of heroin.

  ‘The guys were very, very keen,’ she says. ‘It used to make me smile because they’d come back and they’d be dirty and filthy and stinking like fish, because they’d made [the crew] pull out all the fishing nets. It would take four hours and they’d search everything and they’d get down on their bellies.’

  Another dhow, on which they found nothing, was carrying crates of mangoes and bales of straw.

  ‘So they’re wading through the mangoes,’ she says. ‘I thought, “I don’t want to eat a mango ever again.” They’re pushing bales like a game of Tetris, squishing through the bales like little worms, one line then another line. “Oh, we’ve found a little hole” and they’d go in there and check it out. They came back filthy and exhausted, stinking like fish, straw, whatever they’d been searching through.’

  But they would still say, ‘Is there another one?’

  She would say, ‘Can you have a shower first? You’ve got to stop.’

  The thrill of finding smuggled narcotics was immense.

  ‘I think what we used to say is, you get addicted to finding the drugs, not for taking the drug,’ she says. ‘They were addicted to the success of that.’

  They picked up a total of 713 kilograms of heroin from two dhows. It was now November, getting towards the end of their tour, but they did one final boarding before they left, after an aircraft reported a dhow that was coming south.

  ‘It was a fair way north of where we were,’ she says. ‘We only had so much fuel and we had to get to Seychelles and I only had so much aviation fuel as well, so I could only fly so many hours.’

  The command of CTF 150 had just switched from the Pakistanis to the Canadians. ‘That night we’re all in the ops room saying, “Okay, let’s calculate if we can make it up there.” We drew circles around the Seychelles. “Can we get this boarding in? How many hours can we go on board before we have to go to the Seychelles?” And, “We can’t run out of fuel, we’re going to run too low on fuel,” and all this sort of stuff. We’re all in there with this plan and the boys were getting excited and they’re saying, “All right, let’s go for it.” And we said, “Okay, we’re going for it and we’re going to get on board – c’mon, we’ve got to find this thing.”’

  It was their first boarding under Canadian command.

  ‘We had this whole little plan about how we were going to find it and track it. We found it, we got on board and we only had so many hours we could spend before we had to go. I think we got to eighteen hours but we couldn’t find anything. So if he had something on board obviously he’d hidden it well. We’d thought we were going to get one more bust.’

  Then they had to head to the Seychelles. ‘But the good thing was, it was challenging like the first one when we had to orchestrate this plan. And the guys loved doing the plan and loved how we were operating on the margins of our fuel, how we had to calculate it. I’m watching the principal warfare officers and all the guys in the operations room had their radars, going, “Oh, I can see it, no it’s not there, no …” The [birdies] were hanging out because they wanted to be the ones that sighted it first. Part of it is that once you get the taste of success you want a little bit more and a little bit more.

  ‘It’s almost like a puzzle – you’re out there and we’re trying to solve the puzzle. We are adults playing hide and seek because the supplier is hiding somewhere and we’ve got to work out how he’s thinking, where he’s going, what his speed is, how is this affecting that, and it just shows the training that the guys do. To me, that was them coming up with a plan and I just needed to tick off on it. And then they executed it and they found the dhow and they got the final boarding, so I think it was a good way to finish.’

  Toowoomba handed over to HMAS Success and headed for home, arriving just in time for Christmas on 23 December.

  Reflecting on the Middle East tour of duty, Hayes says, ‘I like to be proud of what my team achieves, what they do and how they handle it the right way. I think that’s inspiring.’

  She admits that there is always unofficial competition between the ships but says she and Terry Morrison never talked about who found the most drugs.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter. And the nice thing is that when we got a bust Terry said, “Well done, really good, well done you guys.” And when the next frigate up there got [their hauls] I did the same thing because you know what their team is feeling.’

  The financial value of the narcotics to terrorist organisations was sobering. ‘It’s not just some guy trying to make a buck out of a bunch of dates. It’s really big money if you consider how much is involved in 700 kilos of heroin.’

  The boardings can also be hazardous. ‘It’s not all beer and skittles,’ she says. ‘Some of the things we do, they’re risky. When the guys are boarding those vessels, there are always moments. As a CO we watch what they’re doing and it’s usually the moments when they’re getting on board and they’re securing that vessel and they’re climbing up a ladder onto a dhow, which looks like a little Noah’s Ark. The sides on these things are a good twenty feet high and the boat’s moving around and the little boats are moving around and they’re trying to climb up with all their gear on up a rope ladder.’

  She used to sit watching them on the ship’s television camera and every few seconds she would count them. ‘How many are on board? One’s on board, two’s on board,’ she says. ‘And because we had someone drop in the water your heart goes in your mouth. You want them on board, secure and safe.’

  Boarding parties climb aboard the dhows fully equipped to deal with any
threats.

  ‘They go on expecting danger but the reality is that these guys are there just to courier the stuff, so we weren’t finding huge amounts of resistance,’ she says. ‘When you drive a big warship up alongside a small fishing dhow, and I’ve got five-inch gun and I’m sending a boarding party who are fully kitted and spurred with their ballistic vests on and weapons and the whole lot, I think it would be a suicide mission for them to do anything. They’re not there for that sort of thing. They’re there to make money.’

  MAKING IT WORK

  12

  Tonnes of guns

  Darwin was only a week and a half into her first patrol of 2016, steaming 170 nautical miles or 313 kilometres off the coast of Oman, when on 27 February an officer of the watch spotted a dubious-looking dhow that appeared to be heading for Somalia. The vessel was tracking towards the Yemeni island of Socotra – hardly a known fishing ground, which made it one of the key ‘tripwires’ or indicators that something was amiss. The Socotra area was where Toowoomba had seized 5.6 tonnes of hashish in 2014.

  ‘We initially suspected it was drug smuggling,’ Commander Henry recalls.

  As usual, Darwin had two boarding parties – one on, one off. The ‘red’ team was led by the lanky and plain speaking twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant James Hodgkinson. His second-in-command was the no-nonsense forty-one-year-old Petty Officer clearance diver, John Armfield. In charge of the ‘black’ team was the more reflective red-headed and bearded clearance diver Lieutenant Robert Kelly, with the witty and extroverted Petty Officer David Herrer as his 2IC.

  Hodgkinson says, ‘It was the first boarding that we’d done since in-chopping and we actioned the boarding party late the night before, around 2300 or 2330 [hours], based off a cold hit. We didn’t have any intelligence on this particular dhow [but] it met all the tripwires for us to board. It was heading south, it was a fishing-style dhow which was outside of fishing areas and things like that.’

  It was not a small boat. At forty or forty-five metres long, searching the ‘jelbut’ dhow was never going to be quick and easy. By the time the boarding party got on board it was after 2 a.m. They first secured the vessel and then transferred over US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent Paul Lerza and his Baluchi language interpreter.

  Australian vessels deployed to the Middle East Region carry an NCIS agent when possible and an American-employed interpreter who works with them.

  ‘It was a flat night and we had a little bit of moon but the ocean was incredibly calm,’ Hodgkinson recalls. ‘So it was relatively easy to get on board. Once we did get on board and the crew were secured we went up to the wheelhouse with the master and the interpreter, [and Lerza] went through his paperwork. [The master’s] paperwork was incomplete and also his fishing licences didn’t match up with his registration paperwork, which didn’t match up with the crew manifest that he had. He had an odd number of people on board and everything just didn’t add up.’

  As soon as they had collected the evidence that his registration was not correct they recommended to Phill Henry that he declare the vessel stateless.

  ‘He did that in consultation with headquarters ashore in Bahrain,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘And from there we started searching the vessel.’

  It was about 4 a.m. before the search got underway. Armfield says that after discussing the various tripwires they picked the areas they wanted to target first, leaving the fishing nets until later. ‘On this particular vessel the nets are quite large. We like to bring the nets out last because it takes up too much space, so we’ll systematically search front to back, top to bottom [first].’

  Hodgkinson explains, ‘The structure of these dhows is that they’ve got an area all the way forward, they’ve got a little bit of deck here and they hit the anchor there. Then immediately behind that they have a net well or a net hold. Behind that they’ve got a freezer hold and behind that, engineering space. You’ve got the wheelhouse up higher and below that living quarters and stuff like that.’

  They started searching at the bow. ‘There was a fair bit of stuff down there which we had to pull out, but that took us through to 0500,’ Armfield says. ‘At 0500 they usually like to do a prayer. You can’t really work around them, so we do prayer from 0500 to say 0530, however long it takes, and mostly everyone will do it one at a time. And then from there we went into breakfast, which was about another half an hour, fed the crew and by that time everyone had finished completing the searches that we wanted to do.’

  When they finally came to the nets there seemed to be some confusion. The boarding party wanted the crew to take the nets out; the crew, who were generally quite a friendly lot, tried to put them back in as fast as they could.

  ‘So the interpreter had to come down to get them to start taking the nets back out,’ Armfield recalls. ‘And that went on for about five to six hours.’

  Hodgkinson says, ‘There was something in the vicinity of seven to nine miles of nets that we took out in varying states of repair. So obviously those nets hadn’t been used for fishing because we had new nets, we had old nets, we had nets that were patched together and, in hindsight, the way that they handled them was not the way that other fishermen handled them. So I’m not convinced that they were fishermen. And right when we got near the bottom of these nets they started going really slowly pulling them out, but we kept pushing. In fact, I was pretty close to being over it, after having pulled out nets for something like six hours.’

  The ‘black’ boarding team had arrived on board to take over just after breakfast, around 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. Their 2IC, David Herrer, recalls, ‘You guys were pretty fatigued by that stage. You’d been up all night then we came on with our fresh set of eyes.’

  Almost everyone was ready to give up. ‘Command was very close to wanting us to get off – we’d spent a lot of hours on there and were coming up fruitless,’ Herrer says. Agent Lerza and the interpreter also both thought there was probably nothing there and that it was a legitimate fishing dhow. But John Armfield’s internal alarm bells were ringing.

  ‘Petty Officer Armfield was keen to keep going just to see what we had under there,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘The rest of us were ready to walk out. We were ready to go. He said to me, “Sir, I really want to get in here and find out what’s under this,” because I was ready to up stumps.’

  Herrer too thought they should keep going. ‘I was like, “No, all we have to do is finish with the nets. It’s crazy to leave now, we’ve gone this far.”’

  ‘So I decided we should stay and continue with the nets,’ says Hodgkinson. ‘But I still wasn’t convinced that the crew were anything but innocent fishermen. And it’s as we were doing our handover that we started to see a few white bags, sacks and cases poking out from underneath.’

  Herrer says, ‘They’re looking, and I’m like, “What’s all that white stuff through the nets?” And then one of the ABs – one of our EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] techs – jumped down and opened it up and straight away we knew. And that’s when we found them all.’

  Meanwhile, the others prevented the crew from continuing to pull out the nets and pushed them inside the wheelhouse so that they would not be able to see what was going on. The EOD pulled out the first case to make sure it was not booby-trapped and took it all the way to the top of the vessel. He opened it up and brought out two RPG-7s and then the launchers. The initial estimate was that there were about a hundred bags; the final count was closer to 500 filled with weapons.

  To this day, those who boarded the dhow are not certain whether the crew knew the full story of what was going on.

  ‘I don’t think the crew knew,’ says Hodgkinson. ‘I think the master had some indication of it. While the search was happening, the NCIS agent, the interpreter and myself were questioning the master and questioning the crew and going through and finding the inconsistencies that existed in their different stories, and then hammering home on those inconsistencies. There were a few holes [in their stories] but nothing
too revealing.’

  While the weapons were being transferred onto Darwin, they kept the crew isolated so they could not see what the Australians were doing.

  ‘The skipper, when we took him forward to show him and explain it, he was shocked,’ Hodgkinson recalls. ‘Whether it was feigned or not he was very shocked and he went down on his knees and started grabbing our interpreter around the legs, which we found out later was a humiliation thing. He was showing how humiliated he was and turning his face away, and he said that he had no idea and he was disgusted. But he didn’t look at us then for the next few hours, sort of looked away.’

  The interesting thing about the weapons was the way they were packed, Hodgkinson says. ‘They were packed in an equal weighting, so that they provided an even balance at the bottom of the ship. When you looked at it you could see that it had a load but it was so well balanced that the ship still rode properly. It didn’t unbalance it at all which, if it had been an amateur job, it would have done.’

  Instead of loading the weapons on the RHIBs to ferry back to Darwin it was decided to bring the dhow alongside the ship for a direct transfer. ‘It was just easier to bring it alongside and use our boat crane to crane it all off in a big cargo net.’

  The total load on the dhow was about seven tonnes of weapons and five tonnes of nets. Once the sailors started pulling out the weapons and stacking them on one side they started to unbalance the dhow.

  ‘We induced a list,’ says Hodgkinson, ‘and [so] we had to modify how we were doing that, and that was part of the deliberations as to why we brought [the dhow] alongside – just realising what a large quantity of weapons we had. We would have been there for another twelve hours [otherwise].’

  An added difficulty was that it was hard to ‘clear’ the weapons, to ensure they were not loaded with ammunition, because they were all wrapped in packages.