Guns [John Hardin 01] (19 page)

During the month-long stay Strake hosted two large house parties crowded with a diverse mix of people. They made trips down the coast to Los Angeles and San Diego, Cowboy waiting in the FBOs each time as Strake went off with Davis in tow to conduct business. During his off times, Cowboy explored Vancouver, which he found to be fascinating and beautiful, with many parks scattered among the busy streets and skyscrapers. Along with a rich mix of English, Germans, Sikhs, and Musqueam Indians, there was a strong Asian presence, and he discovered a restaurant he particularly liked amid the glitter of Chinatown.

He went on five-mile runs along the tide-lapped beach perimeter of Stanley Park, which jutted out into the water, separating Vancouver Harbour from English Bay where several freighters were always anchored, waiting to be loaded with grain from Canada’s vast plains. It was autumn and front after front swept in from the Pacific to keep the city veiled in mist. He enjoyed his solitary runs and always found Stanley Park, like the other green areas of the city, to be clean and absolutely free of litter.

On a rare sunny morning Davis curtly told him he would be free for the day so he dressed in jeans and a denim shirt and took a cab to Stanley Park for a run on the beach. He had gone about a mile, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face, when he glanced back to see a man gaining on him with smooth tireless strides. Within a quarter mile the man drew abreast and slowed to match his pace.

“Good day for it,” the man said. He was in his middle thirties and obviously fit, dressed in green sweats and good foot gear. He wore a white band that held his longish brown hair back, and large amber shooter’s sunglasses.

“Sure is. One thing about all the rain, it makes you appreciate a day like this.”

“So they call you Cowboy.”

They ran on. He was eyeing the man now. He said, “Do I know you?”

“My name is Nolan Rader. No, we’ve never met but I know a great deal about you. For example you work as a pilot for Louis Strake, but he seems to be grooming you for more. You’re due to fly him back to Teterboro the day after tomorrow.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the BATF, based in D.C. I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time right now. There’s a bench coming up just ahead. Let’s take a break. Enjoy the view for a while.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“You don’t have to talk. Just listen. What have you got to lose?” He smiled. “Come on. If you don’t you’ll only wonder what the hell it was all about, right? Ten minutes, no more. Hear me out and then I’ll jog away.”

“Ten minutes then.”

They sat on the iron bench, Rader wiping at his face with his sleeve. He said, “This man you work for. I’m going to assume you don’t know the full scope of his business yet. He’s a criminal and he’s a killer.”

“I don’t think so. He sells light weapons. It’s a legitimate business. He’s not responsible for what people do with what he sells.”

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people, right? Like the bumper sticker. That’s the line he spouts in so many words. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean he is a killer. Just like that bodyguard of his. Montgomery Davis has a long sheet going back eighteen years. Assault. Loan sharking and protection racketeering when he worked for the Chicago syndicate. Arrested for murder once and weapons charges twice, and he’s suspected in two unsolved homicides. He’s slippery, though. Only done a total of three years inside during his long and lucrative career. But he’s down at the bottom of the food chain.

“Your Mr. Strake, now, he’s right up there at the top. His father ran a more or less legitimate business. Louis does not. He may have started out pretty much that way, but since his old man went to the big arsenal in the sky, and since more and more governments have passed more arms control laws, junior has ventured further and further into a lot of gray areas and done more than a few downright illegal deals. The more he gets away with the more he seems willing to try. He’s like a lot of your top bad guys. They don’t print enough money to satisfy him. He’s ruthless and he’s cunning. And he
is
a killer.”

“If you know all of this, why don’t you arrest him?”

Rader put his hands on his knees, leaned back on the bench, and tilted his head slightly to look at the sky. He said, “They killed fifty million people in the Second World War. How many conflicts would you say there have been since? I mean those in which significant numbers have died.”

“I don’t know. Maybe a hundred.”

“That’s more than most people would estimate. There have been three hundred major conflicts—in places like Lebanon, Biafra, the Yemen, Katanga, Cambodia, Argentina, and so on—that have killed a total of twenty-five million people. Let’s put that in some perspective. Imagine Fenway Park filled to capacity—a vast sea of faces.

“A hit squad comes in and starts killing them all. Every last fan. Every man, every retiree, every pregnant mother, every child. They shoot some, blow some up, make some kneel in front of pistols The squad works hard but it still takes hours. Then tomorrow they fill up the park and do it all over again, and the next day, and the next. They keep it up seven days a week. For two years. That’s how many have died in major conflicts since the Second World War. And the vast majority of those human beings, folks not so different from your friends, your relatives, the skinny kids you see on a playground who couldn’t even spell politics, have died—and an untold number of millions have been wounded—by light weaponry. Rifles, pistols, submachine guns, mortars, shotguns, grenades. The sort of merchandise Worldarms has been marketing.”

Rader paused and then said, “Name one of the biggest recent wars.”

Cowboy said, “I don’t know. Desert Storm?”

“That little fracas only killed four hundred Allied troops and maybe ten thousand Iraqis. Fact is, every year since Desert Storm this tired old planet has seen an average of ten conflicts that have
each
killed ten thousand or more. Georgia, Sudan, Tadzhikistan, East Timor, southeast Turkey. In under a two-year span
half a million
Angolans died from war or war-related starvation in the most brutal ways you can imagine.

“Oh, I know there are festering feuds and deep-rooted political and ideological and religious differences among people all over the place. Differences that can’t easily be resolved, some that may never be resolved. But when you take a country, or two bordering countries, where there are already intense arguments and you sprinkle a couple hundred thousand AK-47s, a few million rounds of ammo, and maybe ten thousand grenades into that pot it more often than not will boil over into bloody carnage. Everybody stops arguing and they just start shooting.

“The shooting doesn’t have to go on for long before violence becomes a way of life. And life becomes cheap. People think that can only happen in some podunk country you can’t even point to on a globe. But it can happen anywhere. There are over two hundred and ten million guns circulating in the States and six million more are produced or imported every year. We’re beginning to see more drive-by shootings in the ghettos, Interstate gunnings just because somebody gets pissed off in traffic, more homicides out there in the suburbs. Your average Joes can get concealed carry permits all over the place. Look around the world and see where too many weapons have led other countries. The Rwandan Army casually killed thousands of civilians, anybody even remotely suspected of disagreeing with them, using AK-47s routed to them through Egypt. In the Iran-Iraq war they sent children out in waves across mine fields. Can you imagine that? Kids in rags blown to bits like so many small animals just to clear mine fields. Can you hear them screaming?

“Take Colombia. They’ve been fighting internally for so long it’s routine now. Kids are born into it so they don’t know anything else. Leftist guerrillas against right-wing paramilitary groups supported by the remnants of the drug cartels and to hell with whoever gets in the way. There are a hundred thousand well-armed private security guards in the country. A million permitted weapons and maybe five million illegal ones. A family argument, a shouting spat over traffic, a debate over a soccer match, any incident can turn into a shootout in a heartbeat. In a six-year period there have been a hundred and fifty thousand homicides, only ten percent prosecuted. In Cali and Pereira upper-class teenagers ride around at night shooting beggars, the homeless, drug addicts, and prostitutes from their cars for sport. In Bogota the police kill the same kinds of people—the
desechables
or the disposable ones—but they call it social cleansing. The U.S. arms the Colombian National Police with more sophisticated weapons so the guerrillas want upgrades, too. Keeps the black market demand right up there.

“You know why your boss has been to Venezuela three times in the past six months? He’s been black-marketing guns, ammo, and night vision equipment to a particular well-financed Colombian guerrilla army through a Venezuelan contact. He bought a load of government-owned AR-15s in Panama from corrupt officials a year ago, for example, and recently smuggled them into Venezuela labeled as drilling equipment on a container ship. The Venezuelan thugs he’s been dealing with got them across the border into Colombia. A Venezuelan investigative reporter named Armando Ramirez found out about the deal and was about to put the story out when Strake and Davis killed him. Not had him killed, but I mean
killed
him, up close and personal. We don’t think it’s the first time something like that has gone down. You see, I don’t think your Louis Strake is completely sane.”

“This is interesting and educational, but I’ll say again, if you know all of this to be fact why isn’t somebody arresting him?”

Nolan thought for a time, gazing skyward, then said, “Sometimes our government does things that are near impossible to understand. Do you remember when they hired the Mafia to get rid of Castro? That was a case in point. How about funding the Contras through the Sultan of Brunei? Old stuff, right? How about a little more recent stuff? How about fifteen of the nineteen Nine-Eleven hijackers being Saudi? But we aren’t supposed to think about that, are we? Got to have all that Saudi oil, right? What if the hijackers had been from North Korea or Iran? Politics and international dealings have gears within gears. Who the hell are we to figure it all out?”

“What has all this got to do with Strake?”

“Not much, after all, I guess. Just rambling. As far as Strake goes, knowing and proving are not real close cousins. This is where you come in. We think you’re a basically honest dude. We need somebody on the inside who’s willing to feed us just a little information. Who Strake meets. Where he goes and when. Small crumbs he drops here and there.”

“You’re wasting your time with me.”

“True loyalty these days is a real rarity. It’s downright refreshing to witness. But misplaced loyalty doesn’t make any sense. Your boss is moving more and more in the underground, down where the sun doesn’t shine. He specializes in South America but has dealt all over the world. He bribes government officials, pays off customs people, doles out percentages to a number of criminal contacts all over the place. Brokers all kinds of shady deals. There’s a whole international underground economy now that trades in designer drugs, product knock-offs, raw gems, computer chips, toxic wastes, a lot of valuable contraband, and guns. Always guns. There are entire networks of ghost companies and we-don’t-kiss-and-tell banks for laundering the proceeds. Your boss is right down there in the thick of it. Dealing in death. The longer you work for him the more you’ll see that.

“Anyway, suppose we leave it this way.” Rader pulled a plain business-sized card out of his fanny pack. There were no names on the card, just three hand-printed phone numbers. “Here’s how you can reach me at any time, day or night. The top number is my cell phone. The second, the toll-free one, is my office. The last is my home. Use a pay phone. I may not answer but just tell whoever does that you’re Cowboy and you need to speak with me. Nolan Rader.”

“I really can’t help you,” he said.

But he took the card.

20

D
URING THE FLIGHT BACK TO
T
ETERBORO
S
TRAKE ONCE
again came up to take the copilot’s seat. There had been no further mention of the incident with Strake’s wife.

Strake said, “I’ve been giving you a gradual education in my business, of course. I need someone to handle some aspects of it routinely. You have demonstrated an aptitude for it. What I have in mind will mean an eventual increase in salary. You will continue to fly, and will schedule your other new responsibilities as you can. Do you have any problems with that?”

He thought for a moment, scanning ahead for any traffic, and then said, “The flying has been exceptional. I don’t think this plane could be in much better shape, and my salary is already generous. I have no complaints. The business intrigues me, I have to admit, but I have some reservations about selling weapons. I do believe basically that people kill people, but it seems to me that guns make it a whole lot easier for them.”

“I thought we’d had this conversation,” Strake said evenly, his eyes dark and brooding. He stared off into the hazy sky and went on, “Humans persist in the pretense that they are somehow inherently noble. The reality is we are predators to our cores. The most effective, most efficient predators ever to inhabit this planet. Killers of every other species on the planet and of each other by the millions. Our own government is responsible for Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and the deaths of uncounted innocent people. Why are we so reluctant to admit what we are? It’s the reason we admire other rival predators—the lion, the wolf, and the eagle. Sports teams are not named for rabbits or doves. Violence runs in us like a current just under our skins. With the right provocation any one of us can become violently enraged in an instant, with or without a weapon at hand. You have certainly experienced flashes of it. Everyone has. Conflict is at the dark heart of all our drama—our vicarious other lives—and the more intense that conflict the more fascinating we find it to be.

“How many riots, how many indiscriminate homemade bombings and lead-pipe kneecappings and piano-wire garrotings and bare-knuckle beatings have been perpetrated in the name of one political or religious belief or another? Gather a group of humans and infuse them properly with religious or ideological zeal and what they can accomplish in the way of devastation can be awe-inspiring. There’s no better modern example than Nine-Eleven.

“In World War Two the Allies were continually confronted by rabidly suicidal Japanese who were willing to fight hand-to-hand to the last man just to defend one worthless jungle outpost or another.

“In the 1860s Paraguay fought against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay simultaneously in a senseless and utterly hopeless contest. The entire country fought to the bitter end, often with nothing more than razors lashed to poles. Before the war the population was 450,000. At the war’s end there were only 221,000 left alive, and only 14,000 of those were men. The availability of or lack of weaponry had nothing to do with their desire to kill as many of their neighbors as possible by any means, at any cost.

“Weapons have been with us since the first prehistoric human picked up a thigh bone to settle an argument, and our police still carry clubs. There is nothing inherently lethal in a length of hickory. The lethality lies coiled within us. Every last one of us. Weapons can, in fact, serve well as deterrents to violence. The cold war was a protracted nuclear and conventional weapons stand-off, after all, with enough destructive power stockpiled to erase all life from the planet several times over, yet it has ended almost amicably for all concerned. Our own government has doled out heavy and light weapons for decades with the intent of deterring conflicts.

“If you could rid the world of gunpowder tomorrow humans would merely revert to using spears and crossbows and maces. Less efficient, of course, but no less lethal, and they would soon devise better weapons. Witness the relatively recent development of chemical and biological weapons, or tactical nuclear weapons. There are ingenious people working industriously right now to perfect caseless ammunition that will be lighter, cheaper, and more deadly, and on sound suppression through new bullet design, and on compact optical low-light sighting devices.

“I have not invented or refined any weapons. I do not campaign to perpetuate them. I am merely a broker engaged in a trade that will flourish with or without me. What I do is simply conduct business, and there have been more than a few instances when various high-level people in your government have been thankful that Worldarms has existed to carry out transactions they have preferred not to carry out themselves. I do not claim to be a patriot. My motive is profit. That is certainly not unusual. Money allows me to maintain a life style, to sustain my business, and to sign your paychecks. Decide once and for all whether you want to continue receiving those paychecks. Let me know in one week.”

With that he got up and went back into the cabin.

Seven days later Strake summoned him to a morning meeting in his office. Seated behind his massive ornate desk, he said, “What have you decided?”

With only his modest living expenses his savings account had been growing nicely and it would not be too far in the future before he would be able to think about striking out on his own with a small charter operation or some other venture. He was not likely to earn this kind of money elsewhere, and flying the immaculate, well-equipped King Air to exotic places had been a keen pleasure. The conversation with Rader in Vancouver had receded into a murky realm of doubtful and unproven events that in any case need not concern him. He had done no real wrong working for Worldarms and intended to do none. He said, “I appreciate the job, and I’m willing to do whatever else I can for the company.”

“No more moralistic probings?”

“No.”

Strake appraised him for a long moment. He said, “Then I want you to go to Atlanta for a month. Take a commercial flight. Oversee the installation of my new manager in the Walther plant and assist him in any ways you can. I want you to make your own assessment of what needs to be done to lean out that operation. I’ll want your opinions on the new manager and on the remaining top executives. While you’re in Atlanta the backup pilot can fly the King Air for me as necessary. Alert him before you leave. That will be all for now.”

He enjoyed the assignment in Atlanta, immersing himself in it, looking for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency with an objective outsider’s eye. The new manager, a portly CEO in his mid-fifties who had been hired away from a small Connecticut company that made hunting rifles, did not seem to resent the presence of an emissary from Strake, and took over the rusty operation affably but firmly, making his leadership felt beneficially within the first week, letting the department heads and employees know exactly what was expected of them and injecting a fresh energy that seemed to be welcomed. The two of them got along well and the CEO was attentive to any suggestions.

At the end of the month Cowboy returned to meet with Strake and give him a detailed written report. Strake immediately sat behind his desk and read through the report, stopping frequently to ask pointed and perceptive questions, not satisfied until he had received exhaustive answers.

Strake gave no indication that he was either pleased or displeased, but he delegated more and more responsibilities over the following weeks.

Three months after the Atlanta assignment, Davis called him at his apartment late one Sunday night and said, “Get the King Air ready for a flight to Venezuela at dawn.”

Strake and Davis met him at the all-night FBO, Strake dressed in a neat gray suit and muted tie and Davis looking bear-like in slacks and a black windbreaker. In addition to the usual light traveling luggage, Strake carried a large thick metal briefcase that appeared to be weighty.

Strake handed him a spiral-bound pad and said, “We’re going directly to a private ranch about two hundred miles inland, southeast of Caracas near the Orinoco River. There is a narrow but adequate paved three-thousand-foot strip with pilot-controlled lighting. If the weather is bad there is a non-directional-beacon approach that you can back up with the GPS. The coordinates are listed in that notepad, along with the elevation and other details about the strip. The ranch belongs to a former government official, a business associate, so you do not need anyone’s permission. We will stop in San Juan for fuel. Make the final destination for your flight plan Ciudad Bolivar, but we will not stop there. Twenty miles from the coast set the transponder code to the one listed in the notepad and press the ident button. Press the ident button again in exactly three minutes, and again exactly three minutes later, then keep the transponder on that code the rest of the way. Do not talk to anyone.”

“But I’ll need to get clearances and weather advisories from Venezuelan ATC, and what about customs?”

“We are fully cleared already and will be recognized by the transponder code. Any conflicting traffic will be made aware of us. You can monitor the automated weather station at Caracas. The official is ex-military and is high level, and he wishes this visit to be discreet for reasons of his own.”

“This is…unusual.”

“This is an unusual business, as I’m sure you have been discovering.”

The man they were visiting could be a retired Venezuelan military officer who was involved in an arms deal on some kind of commission basis from Strake, a cash commission that could be in that metal briefcase, and the official might not want the government to know about it. Cowboy didn’t like the idea of flying into the country semi-covertly, but dealings were decidedly different in South America. If Strake was tendering some kind of bribe to this Venezuelan it would only be considered business as usual by most Latin American standards.

After they boarded, Cowboy called ATC to change the final destination on his flight plan from Simon Bolivar to San Juan, Puerto Rico. He would file again from there, listing Ciudad Bolivar as his destination. This Venezuelan must really have some clout if he could persuade somebody in ATC down there to quietly monitor the flight and to cover up a non-landing at Ciudad Bolivar. There were several ways that could be done, he thought. One way would be to convince the civilian controllers that this was some kind of covert Venezuelan military flight.

When they took off from Teterboro in a dingy dawn there was a spaced-out line of heavy thunderstorms, some topping out at 45,000 feet, advancing threateningly northward across Tennessee and the Carolinas and Cowboy was soon busy picking a way among them, relying on the King Air’s sophisticated color radar, which showed the huge cells as menacing scarlet otherworldly amoeba-like organisms, and on helpful vectoring from ATC.

The turbulence was on the bad side of moderate and occasionally somewhat worse and he slowed the plane to contend with it. There were frequent joltingly bright flashes not far away embedded in the heavy rain squalls and swirling dirty mists. The air was much less corrugated by the time they crossed the Florida line, and the rest of the flight, including the refueling stop in Puerto Rico, went smoothly. Strake did not come up to the cockpit.

The weather over the Caribbean was good, with only a high thin cloud layer blurring a three-quarter moon as they passed over the Venezuelan coast in silky late evening air between Caracas and Barcelona above the Pan American Highway, which was marked by widely-spaced vehicle headlights crawling along. They were squawking the specified transponder code, the infrequent chatter from Caracas approach giving no hint of their presence. The chart showed the rugged terrain of the Guyana Highlands ahead. Not far away to the southeast somewhere was Angel Falls and ten-thousand foot Mt. Roraima. The provided coordinates placed the private ranch alongside the Rio Caura, one of the Orinoco’s main tributaries. The nearest towns were Cabruta and Caicara about fifty miles west on opposite banks of the snaking Orinoco.

He flew directly to the coordinates and keyed the transmitter five times on the given frequency. Twin rows of dim lights winked alive down in the blackness, looking impossibly short from eight thousand feet up. He spiraled down and slowed the King Air to pass a thousand feet above the strip. There was a dimly-lit wind sock that pointed out a light breeze favoring the western approach. The runway was clear but very narrow, no more than sixty feet wide. Trees and brush had been cut back at both ends to provide reasonably unobstructed glide paths. It was not a strip he would have wanted to approach in IFR conditions, with mountains uncomfortably close and a lot of hostile-looking tangled jungle all around. He spotted a complex of buildings among trees on a hillside a half mile from the strip, with lights on here and there.

He set up for a close-in downwind leg, slowing the King Air to a minimum on the base and final legs, the powerful landing lights probing a light ground fog that hung above the jungle, and dropping it in steeply to take advantage of as much of the runway length as possible, ready to pour the power back on for a go-around if necessary. The mains touched down less than a hundred feet beyond the threshold and he immediately reversed the props. There were rough places in the blacktop that looked like they had been patched with tarred gravel. He stopped the plane with just two hundred feet to spare, realizing how tense he had been as he released his tight grip on the yoke.

The hard part was over now. Taking off out of here would pose no particular problem with only the two passengers and a good deal of the fuel weight burned off. In the wan moonlight he had noted that climbing away to the northeast would keep him clear of the highest terrain. He taxied slowly to a small apron where a Beech Duchess was tied down under an open-walled T-hangar and a white Land Rover was waiting with its parking lights on. He swung it around and shut the engines down, setting the parking brake.

Strake came to the cockpit door and said, “Stay here with the plane. We shouldn’t be gone more than two hours. Keep the air-stair closed against the insects.” He had the metal briefcase in hand. Davis could be heard back at the left rear of the cabin opening the door that hinged down to create a boarding stairway.