Eight Pieces of Empire (12 page)

The airport, once I did reach it in spite of Aleksandr’s gentleman’s loneliness-laden chivalry, was a war zone of a different kind.

When one of the planes would land, near-riots ensued. Screaming women fought with the paramilitaries, themselves trying to escape. The fighters waved Kalashnikovs and barged their way into the planes. The power of their weapons determined who would get on. The battles were nonsensical. The planes landed and took off until everyone who wanted out was out. Then the fighting would die down again. Ethics held little sway. It was often women and children last.

There was, however, one cardinal rule.

The dead were given priority.

In Georgia, the dead are more alive than the living. The culture enshrines a cult of funerals and wakes. Georgians—as well as Abkhaz and many in the Caucasus—feast around the graves of their departed every year on their birthdays. They leave succulent food, jugs of wine, and even cigarettes for the dead.

The dead.

They were stacked in simple zinc coffins and loaded onto the planes. Not military aircraft—just more requisitioned former Aeroflot passenger jets.

A fighter with a clenched face guided me up the ladder and past the screaming women and shouting paramilitaries. The Georgian custom of chivalrous hospitality can reduce one to a state of embarrassment. This was, after all, a flying hearse, and I was jumping the line. Below the plane echoed the shrieks of women and yells of men, and the larger sense of noisy Georgian chaos of the time. But inside, those shimmering, clean, perfect zinc rectangles of coffins stacked high conferred a feeling of pedantic order.

The fighter took me into the cockpit. The Pilot was a thickset man with a pencil mustache. He welcomed me in the same cheerful, oblivious Georgian spirit, as if I had walked into a wedding party, not a plane of rotting bodies.

From the cockpit, the Pilot watched nervously out the window as more people jammed aboard the plane. I tried to open the door to the cockpit to take a photo of the cabin, but it was so overloaded with coffins, refugees, and fighters that I had trouble pushing it open. The air was stifling, one hundred degrees of sweltering humidity.

His face turned from apprehension to anger. He looked at a weight indicator dial nervously. “We’re overloaded by thirty percent. We’ve been flying regularly twenty percent overweight,” he told me. “But thirty is pushing it. You see the condition this plane is in. The tires are bald. The fuel is of rotten quality; I think they’ve been watering it down.”

The Pilot put on his headset and barked at the dispatcher. “We’re not taking off. Do you want us all to die or something? We’re overweight. Unload some of them or I’m not flying anywhere.”

No one budged.

I could hear commotion coming from outside the cockpit. It swung open, and a fighter glared at the Pilot, gripping his AK. “Start those damn engines or we’ll bring another pilot and leave you here.”

The Pilot swore and began going through the preflight checklist. Sweat accumulated on his forehead. The engines roared to life. We taxied
to the runway and then went all the way back to the end of it—to give us as much length as possible to take off. The plane groaned and picked up speed. We hurled toward the end of the runway. We lifted off with only a few feet to spare.

FROM THE WINDSHIELD
, I watched the crowd of waiting women would-be escapees with their woven bags. They and the fighters left around them slowly faded from view. We passed over those bright mandarin groves full of wandering cows, derelict tea plantations, and the bougainvillea-lined main road along the beach. That misleadingly serene beach, devoid of holidaymakers, devoid of women in bikinis, devoid of children with sand pails and old men gathering shells. From the cabin the sound died. The shuddering craft was filled with the scent of sweat and death.

The Pilot wiped his brow. He aimed the plane in the direction of Tbilisi. He said we’d fly lower than normal to save fuel. I nodded as he told me the story I’d already heard hundreds of times. Georgians, he said, had not expected freedom to be so tough, or so brutal.

THE PILOT PUT
the plane at cruising altitude and then performed his obligatory duties as a good Georgian host. “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

He sat me down in his pilot’s seat. I took my place at the controls. Tupolev-134s, now mostly obsolete, are low on automation—therefore many veteran pilots actually relish flying them, rather than running what is essentially a mainframe with wings. This one had an old-style transparent nose cone. I could see everything around, like in a glass-bottom boat.

The plane pitched slightly as I moved the controls. Crazy thoughts filled my head. If I turned too sharply, those neatly stacked zinc coffins would tip over and the corpses would spill out. If I aimed the nose down, we would descend into the aquamarine waves of the Black Sea. Then the Pilot retook the controls as we reached the midpoint over the water.

Tbilisi came into view and we began our descent. As we approached, he turned to me.

“Friend, do you know what happens when you try and land a plane that is this overweight?” the Pilot asked me.

I did not, I said.

“When a plane is this heavy, it’s very dangerous to put down. We could swerve off the runway. We could run out of runway. Or one of the tires could burst, and with all the extra weight, we might spin out of control and flip over.” He seemed relieved to verbalize all the apocalyptic possibilities.

I didn’t ask any more questions.

The wheels hit with a thud, and the plane bounced back up. The women jammed in the toilet and amid the coffins shrieked. The Pilot gritted his teeth. We shuddered to a halt at the very end of the runway. A crowd of civilians and fighters surged along the sun-drenched route toward us, looking for relatives, dead and alive.

OVER THE NEXT
few weeks, the Georgians were forced to consent to a peace plan to end the war in Abkhazia. As a condition, they agreed to pull out their military hardware: tanks, artillery pieces, and armored personnel carriers (APCs). But the truce would not last. Too much blood had been shed. Both sides accused the other of cease-fire violations. The Abkhaz, backed by the Russians, smelled victory. In late September, the Abkhaz again cut the main road.

The provincial capital of Sukhumi was surrounded. The Georgians had little left to fight with. Again, Shevardnadze flew to the city to rally his troops.

The next day, I followed his path in another converted passenger jet. It was, as usual, stuffed to the hilt with ammo.

The pilot of this plane also told me to ride in front with him. “If we take fire on our approach, the cockpit is the safest place to be,” he explained, not so reassuringly.

Sure enough, as we approached the city, we saw a gunboat in the
harbor. It was one of the small vessels the Abkhaz had rigged up with crude antiaircraft missiles. The pilot pointed at the boat below, like a warped tour guide. He banked hard left as an evasive maneuver. Again, we landed hard. It was a relief, as if being delivered to a doomed city can be called that.

OURS WOULD BE
one of the last Georgian planes to ever land in the city. I headed back to the sanatorium with a group of Georgian fighters. More Russian officers had arrived. They were there as monitors for the now-doomed peace deal. In reality, Russia had sided with the Abkhaz—for the Abkhaz, alliance with the Russians was pragmatism. The Russians helped arm and train them; this was openly admitted to me later by top-level Russian military officers in Abkhazia. For the Russians, a part of the reasoning was cultural—the Abkhaz being perceived by the Russians as more “Russified”—but mostly it was strategic (Abkhazia had excellent military facilities, resorts for the Soviet military brass, and seaports); add to that the Kremlin’s hatred toward Shevardnadze for his role in “destroying” the Soviet Union as Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign minister. Some of them were out to return the favor by helping to, as they saw it, destroy Shevardnadze and shatter Georgia into its own fragmented state.

The world had responded to the crisis by sending a tiny team of eight United Nations “observers” and their Danish commander, Brigadier General Hvidegaard, all of whom had also taken up residence at the sanatorium. They were powerless to do anything.

Condemned cities are repositories of the poor, the foolhardy, and the naive. They are also sanctuary to the eccentric and the twisted.

I NOW FOUND
myself sharing a room with Ed Parker, a sinewy, excited Brit. His jerky body movements and taped-up wire-rimmed glasses infused him with the aura of an unhinged chemistry buff. Parker had arrived in the capital as a fixer for a British TV crew, ITV. The telecrew stayed one day and then hurriedly flew off on one of the last planes out.

But Parker stayed behind. He told the TV crew to “go to hell,” even though he had no outlet to report to and no means of filing news. He stayed out of ghoulish interest, a war tourist.

Ed told me he had fought as a mercenary on the Croatian side during the war in Bosnia.

“Did you kill anyone?” I asked.

“Hell, everyone asks me that question. OK, man, yeah, I killed some guys. There were a bunch of Serbs in a truck. We saw them over a ridge and blasted them with a bazooka. Don’t ask me that fucking question again.”

Ed relished his apocalyptic situation. “When I got here, I was determined to be the last one out,” he told me proudly.

THEN THERE WAS
the Preacher Man.

I found him wandering amid the palm tree–lined grounds of the sanatorium with an accordion slung around his neck. A proselytizer from the southern United States, he spent his time wandering around various post-Soviet war zones, trying to save the souls of those about to enter the other realm. He had a serene twinkle in his eye, probably because he sensed he had plenty of work ahead.

The Preacher Man had just done something even the most adrenaline-crazed war junkies hadn’t: He’d walked across the front lines as Georgian and Abkhaz shells crashed down around him.

I told him it was a damn fool thing to do. Suicidal.

The Preacher Man just shrugged. “You never know when you’re going to meet your maker!” he said with a big grin. Then he raised his elbow and mashed his fist into the side of the accordion. His folksy voice and the accordion’s toyish vibes seemed to echo in unison along with the swaying tops of the palm trees.

All-consuming fire

You’re my heart’s desire and I love You, dearly, dearly Lord

Glory to the Lamb
,

I exalt the great I am
 …

The Preacher Man continued with his Armageddon talk. He’d spent several days with the Abkhaz on the other side of the front. They told him the final assault on the city would come soon. The end would come in a few days. Of that he assured me.

Later, the Preacher Man’s information would prove to be more accurate than that of any pontificating journalist or the UN “observers” (who were observing almost nothing, having just arrived a few days and weeks earlier and being confined to their quarters by the bombardments).

The Georgian defense of the city was quixotic. They had virtually no heavy armor left, save about a dozen rusting T-55 tanks of 1960s vintage. The covers to most of their artillery pieces were locked as part of the collapsed cease-fire, and they said the “mediating” Russians refused to provide the keys to unlock them. They were down to a few howitzers.

Two Georgian volunteers with soot-black hands did man one old artillery gun. They set it up on a jetty, just behind us and the sanatorium. We were now in the direct path of direct artillery barrages from Abkhaz positions. Dozens of boxes of ammunition were stacked up around the aging gun on our side. The Georgians took turns firing toward the front. The Abkhaz and their allies blasted back. But since they were using equally inaccurate firepower, many of the shells just exploded on the grounds of the sanatorium, blasting out our windows and scaring the few remaining residents to death.

Moreover, the Georgians were not bothering to change the location of the gun every few hours, as military logic demands. They blasted away, violating the cardinal rule governing artillery. Many of the Georgians had almost no weapons training. I saw one confused fighter struggling to jam his Soviet-made AK with ammo made for Romanian or other ex–East Bloc AKs, which can cause the guns to jam and explode. I didn’t hang around to see the outcome.

General Hvidegaard, the UN man, sat on his balcony, smoked a cigarette, and philosophized over the shrill whistling of the gun. He said there had been negotiations to save the peace deal. But in the typical bravado of so many wars, the sticking point was the ownership of a dozen or so AKs. The guns had belonged to the Georgian-Abkhaz-Russian
commission monitoring the cease-fire. The Abkhaz and the Georgians were bickering over their ownership.

“The sides insist this is a matter of honor. Unfortunately, this is the level we are dealing with,” Hvidegaard told me.

On the jetty behind the sanatorium, the lone howitzer kept blasting away. “That gun’s been firing every forty-five seconds for the last three days,” the general said nonchalantly. “It can’t continue forever. Either they will run out of ammunition, or …”

We spent the days of the siege running between the “resort” and the provincial capital’s main government building, a hulking nine-story edifice ringed with palm trees.

On the third day of the siege, Shevardnadze convened a press conference. He appealed to his countrymen to come to the aid of the city, saying Georgia was at war with Russia. The entreaty was broadcast over Georgian TV.

In response, several hundred tried to come to the front. They flew out from Tbilisi in another TU-154 passenger jet loaded with ammunition and fighters.

But as the jet attempted to land, the Abkhaz shot it down with a heat-seeking missile. The crippled craft broke into several pieces on impact. More than a hundred people died, including a journalist from the
Wall Street Journal
, Alexandra Tuttle. I had met her only once, coincidentally at the very airport where she would meet her death. It had been a few weeks earlier in the summer, ironically when I was arriving in Sukhumi and she was leaving to go back to Tbilisi.