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If You Do Nothing... You'll Die
Taylor Antrim 12.11.06 from Forbes Magazine
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the story from it's original source
Buying the right armored car is only half the
solution. Learning how to use it can save your life.
Rounds thudded the windshield, I hit the gas and
the car engine stalled. The gunmen closed in, firing at point-blank
range. Frantically, I found park, turned the ignition key, shifted
into drive and rammed through the wrecked sedan blocking my way. I
wasn't dead--those were paintballs, not live ammunition, and the
gunmen were instructors from ArmorGroup International Training,
Inc., not bad guys--but I had definitely lost my cool.
I'd also lost any remaining illusion that I had
the level head and whip-fast reflexes to survive a
carjacking/kidnapping/terrorist attack. It had taken me six seconds
to recover from the engine stall and, in the words of instructor
Dave Phillips, "get off the X." Even if I'd been driving a new
armored Mercedes S-Class rather than ArmorGroup's beat-up Reagan-era
Caprice Classic test car, six seconds is time enough for a
moderately trained gunman to fire a fatal triangle, the shot pattern
that best defeats ballistic glass, into the window. According to
Phillips's inarguably apt postsimulation assessment, I was "pretty
much done."
The first lesson you learn on entering the market
for an armored car is that you're not buying a tank. You're buying
time on the clock, a second chance to escape, a delay switch on
death. It's just one of the cheery messages I took back from recent
visits to the Fairfield, Ohio, headquarters of Centigon, the world's
biggest armored car manufacturer, and to West Point, Virginia, for a
two-day course at the ArmorGroup campus, site of my mock ambush.
Traditionally regarded as off-track destinations for a luxury
lifestyle magazine editor, Fairfield and West Point nevertheless
combine for a world-class itinerary in high-end personal security.
The former is where you can pick up the latest armored Mercedes or
Jaguar or Range Rover or Suburban; the latter is where you learn to
drive it off the X.
This is where you say: But I'm not road-tripping
to Bogotá or planning a Sunday drive around Tikrit anytime soon. I
don't need an armored car.
But could your company be extorted if something
happened to you? Or could you be extorted if something happened to
your family? Unpleasant questions, but instructive. Here's another
lesson from the world of personal security: You're more targetable
than you think.
"Your readership benefits from a society built
upon a rule of law," says Andrew Griffey, a bearish, jovial
instructor at ArmorGroup (who nevertheless can do a convincing
carjacker impersonation at a moment's notice). "That's what makes
Americans among the best victims in the world. Our perception that
everything is okay is our single biggest vulnerability." Once a
Saudi-based translator for the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations, Griffey is one of ArmorGroup's experts on
countersurveillance. He rapidly spoils one's can't-happen-to-me
composure: "Forbes is a multimillion-dollar magazine company. I know
that. The U.S. won't negotiate with terrorists, but will Forbes?"
Note to self: Check employee handbook.
"For every one person that needs training, there
are probably ten people who don't know they need it," he says
smiling.
"We sell confidence" is the more upbeat way Gary
Allen, president of Centigon, delivers the same message. "In the
U.S. we have a limited client base. That's a good thing. But the
business is growing." According to Darren Flynn, director of sales
for North America, Centigon's armored car customers include "the
type of people who know how to run banks or run corporations, who
know how to be movie stars or sports stars, but they don't
necessarily understand ballistics, so they come to trust us."
Centigon can assess each customer's needed level of protection and
armor his sedan, limo or SUV accordingly. For instance, if the
client travels for business to São Paulo or Riyadh, he'll want his
on-site Range Rover or Jaguar XJ8 to defeat the weapon du jour among
the local baddies. Or he might want to know that in Mexico City,
multibillionaires drive armored Jettas or Camrys to blend in. "If
you drive a Bentley in downtown Mexico City," says Allen, "it's like
putting a sign out: Come rob me."
Centigon, formerly O'Gara-Hess (nyse:
HES -
news -
people ) & Eisenhardt, has more than six decades of experience
in this field. Notable customers have included Truman, Elvis and JFK
(who, alas, picked a convertible model for his parade through
Dallas). In addition to Fairfield, the company has sales offices
throughout Central and South America and Europe, and two new outlets
in Hong Kong and Dubai. Its engineers are continually assessing and
upgrading armor, a practice that involves routine ballistics tests
as well as detonating the occasional brick of C4 explosive beneath a
fully armored Suburban (good customers get spectator seats for these
once- or twice-a-year assessments).
Centigon's armoring menu runs from handgun
protection to military-grade blast-and-assault rifle protection.
Run-flat tires are standard, and add-ons include fire-suppression
systems, tear gas, smoke canisters or flash-bang grenades for crowd
dispersal, and rear-mounted oil sprays to blind chasing cars.
Centigon's engineers pride themselves on staying abreast of the
latest threats in the kidnapping/terrorist world. "You come up with
the greatest armoring system and it's only good for six months,"
says Matt Burke, Centigon's ballistics specialist. "We know, because
we're constantly being attacked."
The most basic armored car starts at $70,000;
custom luxury SUVs or limos price up from $100,000. Fine leather
seats, wood consoles and entertainment/ surveillance plasma screens
are common; there are also more elaborate requests. "I remember
building a million-dollar limousine," says Allen. "We must have
spent six months trying to find the right crystal for the decanter
in the bar." And Flynn recalls a foreign diplomat who wanted his
country's crest mounted on the door. "It cost $10,000, and it wasn't
that big. Maybe three inches, solid gold." Then there was the guy
who wanted a wine rack in the back of the vehicle. Flynn: "Who
drives around with a 30-bottle wine rack?" Needless to say, he had
it installed.
In Fairfield, I watch the various stages of the
job, from the teardown of a GMC Yukon XL (the interior stripped
away) to the fitting and welding of interlocking steel armor plates
inside the shell of a Land Cruiser, to the molding of custom door
panels and the hand-sewing of new upholstery. An armored Suburban
looks nearly identical to an unarmored model--until you ease open
the heavy, three-inch-thick door and try to throw it shut.
Inside the ballistics range, I join the engineers
(one of whom, alarmingly, looks 16--a ballistics intern?) as they
fire a lipstick-sized 7.62-mm round into a square piece of 39-mm
glass. This is done, rather clinically, by pushing a button on a
console. After the very loud bang, Burke and I enter the reinforced
measuring "tank" where the actual bullet traveled into the glass.
The air smells like cordite and vaporized lead, and pulverized
windshield crunches underfoot. The starburst impact point is still
popping, a sound like Rice Krispies in milk. Burke has me reach
around and run my hand along the other side of the glass, to see if
it stopped the bullet. "You don't want to feel any spall or
penetration," he says. The glass has gone convex, formed a bulge
that feels warm on my hand, but it has held.
What about the next bullet, and the one after
that? Two weeks later, in West Point, Richard Weaver, president of
ArmorGroup ITI, presses the point: "You can defeat the armor in any
armored car with a little bit of time," he tells me. "The only way
to survive is to get off the X."
Learning how, especially in a car with 4,000-odd pounds of extra
steel, takes practice. This is the reason Centigon refers many of
its new clients to ArmorGroup, where for about $5,000 you can get a
two- or three-day tailor-made course on staying alive: surveillance
detection, attack recognition and response, advanced driver training
and weapon handling. The 1,000-acre wooded West Point campus (other
ArmorGroup facilities are in Texas, England, Iraq and Afghanistan)
has a two-mile course for high-speed driving, a parachute drop zone,
two 200-meter firing ranges, a DC-9 parked in the woods for
antihijacking drills and a reinforced "TAC" house for man-on-man
combat (with plastic bullets). These latter facilities serve mainly
government, military and law enforcement clients, who comprise 95
percent of its students. ArmorGroup doesn't advertise, and conducts
background checks on private citizens who come for training. "We
wouldn't take someone off the street and teach them to be a sniper,"
says Weaver.
Second
part
I'm here to learn how to handle an armored car, but first I spend
a day in the classroom with Andrew Griffey, absorbing lessons on how
to detect surveillance, vary my travel patterns and recognize
imminent attacks. The next day I tear around the driving course with
Dave Phillips. There are signs of other students at the facility:
Parachuters drift out of the sky and assault rifles go pop-pop-pop
in the woods.
This would be disconcerting if my attention wasn't so focused on
my high-speed drills. I'm learning to take 90-degree turns and
S-curves at 50 miles per hour in a Grand Prix test car. One turn I
take too hot. In the passenger seat, Phillips braces against the
dash, and just before I lose control, says, good-naturedly, "Hang
on." We spin 720 degrees before stopping.
A couple of (much slower) loops of the course in an armored
Suburban impresses upon me how 4,000 pounds of steel changes the
dynamics of a car. I stand on the brake pedal to slow down, and ease
my way around the turns as if driving a bus. Phillips teaches me to
control the weight transfer with finely controlled shuffle-steering
(no crossovers, please), to look away from obstacles, to stay
connected to the "feel" of the car. "The vehicle is constantly
talking," he says, the car-whisperer of the personal security world.
"You've got to listen to what it is telling you."
I switch to the beat-up Caprice Classic for my ambush drills.
"Remember, a car blocking your path is nothing more than a mental
barrier," Phillips says. "Think of your car as a weapon."
Which is a little hard to remember when the paintballs start
thudding in. After my engine stall and ramming escape, I'm racing
out onto the airfield. I notice an instructor bearing down on me. I
speed up; he speeds up. He pulls alongside, only inches apart; we're
making 40 mph. He's laying on his horn. Phillips's lesson about
rolling ambushes comes to mind. Sideswipe the car. Regain the
element of surprise.
I grip the wheel and jerk it left. We collide, then swerve apart.
The instructor slows down, gives me a thumbs-up. Lesson complete.
At the end of the day, DAVE Phillips summarizes my training:
"We're just giving you some things to do. If you do nothing, it's
predictable. You'll die." Were I the owner of an armored SUV heading
to Caracas, I'd give him a determined nod. As it is, I smile a
little blankly and start to put my notebook away.
Griffey comes over to see me off and to revive my sense of
vulnerability. "South of the border they want your money. In other
parts of the world, they want your head. Either way, they want you
to be surprised." The message is clear--a little insecurity is a
good thing, as is a car encased in steel. I get in my rental.
"There's a fine line between awareness and paranoia," Griffey says.
"Usually when folks walk out of here they feel paranoid." He shuts
the car door for me. It makes a thin-sounding, distinctly unarmored
click. "That's not paranoid," he says.
Centigon, (513) 881-9800, www.centigon. com. ArmorGroup ITI,
(804) 785-6000, www.armorgroup.com.
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