Guns [John Hardin 01] (15 page)

17

I
T STARTED THE DAY HE MET
L
OUIS
S
TRAKE.

The big brick warehouse in Edgewater, New Jersey, was behind a high razor-wired fence alongside a ship dock across the Hudson from Harlem. A small brass plaque on the steel entrance door bore the raised name Worldarms Corporation superimposed on a logo that was a stylized peeled globe. A receptionist had him sign in and ushered him into a large room with a leather-inlaid conference table at one end that could seat ten. An oversized ornate desk at the other end looked to be a valuable antique. Everything was darkly immaculate, softly lit from recessed ceiling fixtures. The walls were crowded with lighted glass display cases that held scores of different weapons, mostly military. There was a medieval feel about the room and it smelled of gun oil. He moved along with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, examining the exhibits. A large case labeled World War I contained old bolt-action rifles with bayonets affixed, gas masks, uniforms, sabers, and accouterments. None of it was dusty; all of it was well preserved.

A quiet voice behind him said, “Do you have an interest in weapons?”

He turned and said, “Yes, but I don’t really know much about them, except for some of the western frontier guns like the Spencer rifle, the lever-action Winchesters, the early Colt revolvers.”

“Have a seat at the table. Would you like coffee or a soft drink?”

“No, thank you. I had breakfast an hour ago.”

When they were seated across the table from each other he studied Strake. The man was impeccably dressed in a tailored blue suit. There was something about his manner and his erect bearing, his aura, that made you see beyond the surface and realize you were in the presence of an intelligent, powerful man. He had a dark penetrating gaze even though he was smiling. There was a hint of menace about him.

Strake said, “Mr. Kensington at the Teterboro Airport recommended you to me. He said they call you Cowboy. I need a pilot. My former pilot now captains a seven-twenty-seven for a Kuwaiti.”

“What kind of airplane do you have?”

“A Super King Air B Two Hundred. I’m told you know the airplane well.”

He had flown one five hundred hours over the past three years for a New York financier until the man had been caught up to his elbows in a widespread insider trading scheme. The financier was awaiting trial and facing the prospect of doing modest time in an upstate country club prison, where he would have plenty of leisure to contemplate whatever small portion of his portfolio the lawyers deigned to leave him.

“Yes, I do know it well. It’s an excellent plane. Probably the best turboprop twin ever built. It’s certainly been popular.”

“I like it because it has enough range to take me anywhere I want to go with minimal refueling stops,” Strake said. “It cruises at over three hundred miles per hour, yet it can operate out of relatively short, unimproved strips. The one I have is seven years old but it’s been well maintained and upgraded. GPS, color radar, an electronic flight information system, Collins autopilot and flight director. Virtual all-weather capability. I’ve owned it for almost three years. It’s as good as—in many respects better than—brand new and I insist that it be kept that way.”

“It sounds like a fine machine. I’d like to take a look at the logs, of course.”

Strake’s smile widened fractionally. “I tend to be rather more demanding than others you may have worked for. I need someone who will be on call every day at least from dawn until dark, someone I can reach within an hour so I can be airborne within two or three hours for any destination. I also require absolute discretion concerning my business affairs. I’ve had you checked out rather thoroughly and so have some assurance that you’re a competent pilot and a man to be trusted. In return for what I demand I’m willing to pay fifty percent more than that Wall Street fool was paying you. There are other amenities.

“The company has a comprehensive benefits package. There are the best accommodations wherever I go. The best food. The opportunity to meet some of the most influential people in the world. I do a great deal of my business these days right from that desk, with the telephone, e-mail, and Fax, but there are still many occasions when I must travel to inspect a stock of weapons that I want to buy or to conduct a transaction that can’t be handled any other way. Very often time is at a premium. I have a home in Vancouver and a getaway cottage in the Bahamas, so there are planned flights to those places. I take commercial flights most of the time to Europe, Asia, or Africa, although there will be times I will want to use the King Air for overseas trips. I have agents who work for me around the world and I maintain small subsidiary offices in London, Vancouver, and Panama. I ski in Vail and I go to Caracas and other South American destinations from time to time.”

“This is quite some collection you have here, Mr. Strake,” he said, looking around at all the weaponry. “No offense at all intended, sir, but I’ve been approached by certain potential employers who have offered tempting sums for regular trips that would have involved flying very low over the Gulf of Mexico and night landings in some out-of-the-way places.”

Strake laughed dryly. “Tactfully put. The items you see here are only part of my collection. It’s probably the highest-quality and most extensive private assemblage of light arms in the world. The sword in the case behind my desk belonged to Napoleon.

“Let me assure you. I’m a businessman, the sole owner of this company. Not so different from other businessmen and with more scruples than many. I’ve never defaulted on a contract and have always paid my debts in full. I have sterling credit. Worldarms is fully licensed in every country where I do business. I serve as agent for twelve different weapons manufacturers in five countries. Governments do by far the bulk of the world trade these days, supplying each other with jet fighters, tanks, missiles, the latest technology. At the other extreme there are always those idiots who sell Saturday night specials in back alleys or move a few stolen assault rifles or grenades to crazed terrorists. This company has always operated—and has always flourished—well within those two extremes. I do business as openly as the Pentagon does and often with their tacit blessings. I control something on the order of sixty percent of the private world trade in light arms.”

“Again no offense, sir, but how do you make sure that the guns you deal in don’t wind up in the wrong hands? People who’ll use them indiscriminately?”

“I know enough about you to say that you’re not that naïve. Over in that desk there’s a gold-plated letter opener. You probably have a pocket knife. My wife has an expensive set of steak knives. All of those things are inherently dangerous. As potentially lethal as any of the bayonets on the rifles in this room or as the rifles themselves. I can’t be responsible for how you choose to use your pocket knife or for how anyone chooses to use any weapon. Does Detroit feel responsible for how people drive their vehicles, vehicles that kill forty thousand people in this country every year with monotonous regularity? Do car dealers feel responsible? In any given eighteen-month period, by the way, more Americans continue to die on the highways than died in the entire decade of the Vietnam War.”

It seemed like a set speech that had been delivered many times before. The man seemed to have a polished, practiced veneer, not allowing much of his real self to show through.

Strake went on, “Within legal limits I sell to anybody who can pay my price. The United States has sold complete air defense systems to both Israel and its Arab neighbors. The United States and Britain have sold weapons to both India and Pakistan, weapons that both those countries have used with vigor. The creation of Bangladesh has been one result, with attendant untold suffering. Surely you remember the Iranian hostage crisis. In the face of that crisis Israel blatantly sold military supplies to Iran that had come from the United States as foreign aid. Israel has never felt any affection for Iran but they always considered Iraq the far greater threat.

“The French have denounced America’s imperialist policies in Central America but they have sold arms to South Africa and Argentina. The Czechs will sell to anyone, no exceptions, as will the new Russians. Why should I show any more restraint than those governments do? I have no interest in any of the past or current conflicts in the world. My only interest in governments concerns how they might affect my business. I have personal views, of course, but I don’t take sides. That would be absolute professional folly. Politics change with the seasons. Leaders come and go but the items I trade will outlive all of them.

“There’s a flintlock musket over there in the corner. It is two centuries old and it still functions perfectly. Whatever political forces caused it to be created and employed have long since faded into murky history, but there it remains, and its value has increased steadily, if only as a collector’s item.

“I don’t sell to terrorists primarily because it’s bad business. It would threaten my entire legitimate operation. They are unreliable people at best, and the quantities of items they want are minuscule; not worthy of my time. If anyone objects to what I do let them first object to what their own governments are doing routinely, and let them first go talk to Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Dassault, and the Royal Ordnance Factories. The weapons they produce are potentially far more lethal to far greater numbers of people than my trade items. My business is almost as old as gunpowder and it will always endure. Trying to control it is often foolish and almost always ineffective because there is a constant intense demand. Years ago when the United States and Britain finally bowed to African majority opinion and stopped selling arms to South Africa, they only lost the business. France and Jordan stepped in and profited hugely, and South African military strength suffered not one iota. If I were to go out of business tomorrow there would be no long-term measurable decline in violence worldwide. You know that to be true, intuitively.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Strake,” he said with a smile, “I think you’re a consummate salesman. And your business seems to have been very good to you.”

“It has made me wealthy, yes. Worldarms grosses on the order of eighty million dollars in a good year. And my father started it all with only his own wits.” He tapped his temple with a manicured finger.

“That must be quite a story.”

Strake became pensive, gazing into a distance. “It is. It began with a trip he took as a young man through Europe right after World War Two. He had no money and no real idea of what to do with his life. The roads over there were lined with tanks and howitzers, many of them fully functional. Fields were littered with abandoned arms and war debris. Rifles, pistols, machine guns. There were piles of gravel by the sides of the roads where farmers were supposed to throw cartridges, grenades, and fragments for disposal. There were bleached skeletons of soldiers that the peasants wouldn’t touch for fear of booby traps. It took the Russians two years to collect all the discarded ordnance along that front and it took the Allies even longer to clean up. A lot of it was simply dumped at sea. From field artillery pieces right down to Luger pistols and fine Mauser rifles.

“My father slept in abandoned bunkers where there were cases of rifles, grenades, and ammunition stacked to the ceilings. The people were sick of war, of course, and wanted nothing to do with the weaponry. But a lot of it was collected and stored. My father knew the demand would return and he began to learn who had what and where. Back in the United States he went to work for the CIA and when the Korean War broke out they sent him to Western Europe to buy weapons to arm Chiang Kai-shek, who they hoped would then distract the Chinese from their focus on helping North Korea. He learned a great deal more during that buying trip.

“In the early nineteen-fifties he left the CIA. He bought a load of weapons from Panama on credit, sold them to Eastward Arms at a one-hundred-percent profit, and never looked back. He bought hundreds of thousands of weapons in every caliber and millions of rounds of ammunition. He paid eighty-five cents each for bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifles that sold through American chain stores to hunters for twenty dollars each.”

“That was the rifle that killed John Kennedy, wasn’t it?”

Strake ignored the comment and went on. “He sold thousands of rifles himself by mail order to sportsmen for ten dollars each. He sold M-1 Garands to Guatemala. He found a huge cache of weapons in a vast bunker in the Netherlands that even included V-1 rockets. He bought hundreds of the excellent German MG-42 machine guns there for twenty dollars each and sold them to Germany for three hundred and fifty dollars each. Within a decade of the end of World War Two Germany was re-armed, a fact most people don’t realize. He even sold helmets, uniforms, and weapons to Hollywood in respectable numbers for the endless succession of mostly-inaccurate war movies. He dealt with Trujillo, with both Somozas, father and son, with first Batista and then with Castro, with Perez Jimenez of Venezuela. He taught me well and for the past eighteen years I’ve run the company myself. He died ten years ago in his sleep.”

“That’s a fascinating story. It would make a good movie on its own I would think.”

Strake seemed to refocus. “That’s something to consider one day. But I’ve talked far longer than I intended. What I need to know right now is do you want the job I’m offering you?”

“With all respect there’s one point I’d like to cover up front, sir. I had a friend who went down in a Navajo. He took three top executives from the same company with him. I happen to know they pressured him, to the point of threatening to fire him, to fly in extremely bad weather against his far better judgment, and they all died because of it. Your plane sounds well-equipped but there are some conditions, like severe icing or bad thunderstorms, that make staying on the ground, or at least diverting, the wisest course, and I’ll have to retain the absolute right to make decisions like that, no matter what. I also have to abide by a lot of ATC instructions, FAA rules, aircraft limitations, and legal restrictions. It’s in your best interests as well as mine that I be in command of the plane at all times.”