Russia—Ukraine
April 2011
I wasn’t really surprised when Vasiliy missed his own deadline. The Russians have a saying that ‘God loves the Trinity,’ meaning, among other things, that when shit happens, it usually comes in threes. First, there was the attempt on Laura’s life in D.C. Then, the improbable attack and rescue on the Moscow—Domodedovo highway. And finally, Vasiliy’s disappearance added up to three disasters in a row. If the Russian proverb was true, maybe my run of bad luck was coming to an end.
We had all narrowly escaped death earlier in the day, and there was no reason to think the grim reaper would give up so quickly. There were probably a dozen or more logical and feasible explanations why Vasiliy might be running late, but none of them really held much water or served any purpose except to divert our attention from the obvious: Vasiliy was in deep trouble, and we would be too, if we didn’t get moving.
My companions weren’t overly sentimental. They likely had been through the drill too many times before to shed any crocodile tears about what might have happened to Vasiliy. Quindarius looked at his watch without emotion and simply said, “It’s time. Let’s move!” No bugle calls sounding retreat; no women weeping as they bid us farewell. We gathered our weapons and luggage and hit the road.
We turned southwest somewhere off the MKAD with Vadim at the wheel of the rented Audi. At the exit I thought I saw a sign pointing to Varshavskoye Shosse. As we left Moscow behind and drove through the night toward Orel, the trip became a jumbled mix of gas stations, Russian convenience stores, and pit stops on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere with the smell of recently plowed earth in the cold night air. Fatigue had numbed me to the possibility of pursuit, and I spent a good portion of the trip in that middle ground between consciousness and fitful oblivion. A rough spot in the road or the roar of a passing truck would bring me back to reality, but only briefly. It’s amazing how a brush with death can have a soporific effect once the initial adrenalin rush wears off.
The next morning we stopped about a half-hour’s drive from the Russian-Ukrainian border crossing of Goptovka –Nekhoteyevka, located some forty kilometers north of Kharkov, Ukraine. Vadim drove off the highway onto a dirt road leading to what used to be a collective farm of some sort. Fallow, abandoned fields covered with last year’s harvest stubble lay on either side of the road. We parked the car on the far side of a thick grove of fir trees about 100 meters from the highway. The road was muddy and Vadim had switched into four-wheel drive.
Without saying a word to each other, Quindarius and Tupelo began to disassemble their weapons while Vadim dug a hole in the middle of the grove of trees with a military-style trenching tool he pulled out of the trunk. I stood watch, ready to whistle a warning at the approach of any vehicle or pedestrian, but I could see no sign of life in any direction. My colleagues placed the weapons carefully in impermeable plastic cases and helped Vadim arrange them in the hole he painstakingly had dug. To all appearances, someone in the group believed the weapons might come in handy again. It was a small arsenal, and I know Quindarius was going to feel completely naked without his usual full complement of weapons and ammunition. Personally, I would have just wiped them clean of fingerprints and thrown them away. I certainly had no plans to return to Russia any time soon.
A scant thirty minutes later we assumed our place in a long line of passenger cars, buses, and trucks waiting to process through passport control and customs at the border crossing. In the distance I could see the white wood shacks that passed for government offices here in the hinterland and the yellow and black boom barriers that were occasionally lifted to allow vehicles to pass through. The three of us remained in the Audi while Vadim took our passports and vehicle registration papers and walked forward to do battle with the Russian bureaucracy, hoping that nobody at this remote border crossing was on the lookout for an American journalist named Max Crandall. Quindarius handed him a hundred dollar bill as he got out of the car. “Just in case, Vadim,” he said with a smile.
“Okay, here’s the drill,” announced Quindarius, breaking the tense silence in the car after Vadim left. Even if we get across the border, Ukraine is still not quite neutral territory. The Russians can pretty much do as they want there, at least in most parts of the country. We can’t even call ahead for plane reservations. Putin’s crowd could be monitoring phone calls and screening for keywords. We’re going to have to arrive at Borispol airport in Kiev and buy tickets in person on the next flight out to an EU country, no matter where. Fortunately, Ukraine does not require visas from U.S. or European Union citizens. Right now, let’s just hope the Russians are as inefficient as they’ve always been. If they’re looking for Max, we’ve got our tit in a ringer, but I suspect we’re going to be okay. Russian bureaucracy, even in the security services, moves at a snail’s pace, and Putin certainly doesn’t want too many people to know about the goat fuck on the Domodedovo highway.”
The three of us sat nervously in the car listening to Russian techno music on the radio. I had no idea that Russian pop music was so bad. If anything, it was even a little worse than the insipid crap the Western Europeans listened to, and that stuff would make a tone-deaf Janet Reno cringe.
“Here he comes,” said Tupelo after about fifteen minutes. “Look…Christ, he’s got one of the border guards with him. That can’t be good.”
“Relax,” said Quindarius. It’s standard operating procedure. Looks like a customs official anyway. That means we’re already through passport control. This guy has to make a show of looking at the car and opening the trunk, or he might want to get away from his comrades to accept a little cash from Vadim. He’ll stamp our customs forms, and we’ll be home free.”
I sat up and looked out the front windshield. Vadim approached the car in animated conversation with the Russian official. Both smiled broadly, and I saw Vadim slip something in the official’s coat pocket. As soon as they both reached the car, the Russian official saluted perfunctorily and headed back toward the wood shack. Vadim got back into the car and returned our passports.
“No problem,” said Vadim laconically. “We’ll have dinner in Kiev tonight.”
●
Kiev was supposed to have become a beautiful city since Soviet times with its restored architectural landmarks dating back a thousand years and its theaters and restaurants, but we saw nothing of that. Vadim and Quindarius wouldn’t allow us to check into a hotel out of security concerns. Russian influence in the Ukrainian security service was too pervasive, they said, and we had to think about Putin’s people possibly tasking their Ukrainian sources for information about my whereabouts. It was all about playing the odds, like a baseball manager calling plays, putting in the left-handed pinch hitter against the right-handed reliever. We spent an uncomfortable night in our Audi parked at Borispol Airport outside of Kiev. Four men sleeping in an SUV is not conducive to deep, restorative sleep. Every time I woke up and glanced over at Quindarius, he was keeping watch. It was a comforting feeling. I felt like a small child in the reassuring presence of his father.
The next morning we bought tickets to Newark on a Lufthansa flight connecting in Frankfurt for the final leg of our journey. Vadim bid us farewell and promised to find out what he could about Vasiliy and let us know. The only seats still available on the trip back were in First Class, something which went a long way to make up for the previous unpleasant night spent in the Audi.
Maybe Quindarius and Tupleo were used to getting out of tight situations like this, but for me, it wasn’t the kind of thing I did every day. I was more than a little relieved to still be alive and for a while decided to match Tupelo drink for drink as we inched our way across the Atlantic Ocean toward Newark. Common sense soon prevailed, though, and I realized Tupelo was a seasoned professional. It was a long flight, and I needed to be conscious when we landed in the United States. I put down my glass of Wild Turkey and ordered a coffee. I felt an odd kinship toward these two aging warriors. Without them I’m pretty sure my life would have ended on the side of that highway outside of Moscow.
“Max, you’ve got some balls. I’ll say that for you,” Quindarius unexpectedly said to me from across the aisle in the first class cabin.
“Just trying to do my job and write a story,” I answered, surprised and flattered at the compliment coming from this old war dog. “Believe me, I don’t like getting shot at or slapped around. Seems to come with the territory if you want to write about Mako Sloane. I’m beginning to wish I had chosen to write a cookbook instead.”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t have any stories to tell your grandkids.” Quindarius laughed.
He had already downed a few Wild Turkeys with Tupelo, and I thought the time might be propitious to ask a few journalistic questions. He had provided the perfect opening to begin an innocuous conversation. Sometimes the depths of my self-serving opportunism surprised me.
“Oh, you got any of those?” I asked innocently enough.
“Two grandsons living in Charleston, South Carolina. They live with my mother near the intersection of Line and Meeting. You know Charleston?”
“I’ve been there, but I’m from the West Coast. Never felt real comfortable in the South.”
“Ha, and that’s coming from a white boy! Imagine how I feel,” replied Quindarius.
“But wasn’t your father Uzbek or something like that?”
“You’ve got good sources, Max, but try telling that to those rednecks in South Carolina. No, every cliché about black folks and southern rednecks comes true in South Carolina. They even have two fried chicken places at one intersection in that part of town.” Quindarius looked at me pointedly to see how I’d react to that statement.
“Isn’t profiling out of vogue these days, Quindarius? I smiled innocently.
“It is if you want to stick your head in the ground like an ostrich and deny reality. I’ve never cottoned to someone telling me what statements or points of view are “inappropriate” or fashionably taboo at the moment. Shit, black people really do like fried chicken, and the white folks at Wall Mart really are so fat they need electric wheel chairs to transport them to the ice cream section. I’m too old to become politically correct all of a sudden. I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”
I had never seen the taciturn martial arts expert so talkative, and I tried not to sound too eager to continue the exchange. Somehow I hadn’t imagined that Mako Sloane’s closest CIA companion would have had roots in the black community in Charleston, South Carolina. I knew his mother had been an Olympic high jumper back in the 1950s, but his other half, at least genetically, was Uzbek of Korean extraction. I fell silent and waited for Quindarius to pick up the conversation again. I didn’t have to wait long.
“You know, I was in Charleston visiting my mother a couple of months ago. I turned on the television and started watching a local talk show. The subject was bariatric surgery. You know what that is?”
“Sure, I know basically what it is. It refers to a number of different surgical procedures that reduce the size of the stomach,” I said, curious at Quindarius’ choice of subjects.
“Well, first of all, I couldn’t even believe that people actually resort to surgery to lose weight, but the real kicker was that the crazy motherfuckers in the South Carolina state government were spending taxpayers’ money to perform that operation on one hundred obese state employees. So, are you telling me that my mother’s supposed to reach into her pocketbook and shell out her hard-earned dollars because a bunch of sedentary slugs don’t have the will power to push themselves away from the dinner table? Shiiit! And nobody on the show had the balls to call a spade a spade. Because having a fat ass nowadays is supposed to be some kind of a disease or disability. Send those weak-minded cocksuckers to me and Tupelo and we’ll whip them into shape.”
Quindarius had me struggling to stifle guffaws of laughter. The man had a human side and a sense of humor after all.
“What the hell are you laughing at? I spent most of my life in places where people had to worry about where their next meal was coming from or whether they’d even be alive to look for their next meal. Then I come back to my own country, and people’s lives are so easy their biggest problem is they can’t stop eating and want the government to pay to take out part of their stomachs so they’ll lose weight. That’s the country I been risking my life for? Fuck that.”
Quindarius was keeping pace drinking with Tupelo, who hardly had said a word. The Uzbek-African American didn’t seem to be affected by his consumption of Wild Turkey. I didn’t take him for a drinker like his companion, but I figured that’s the way these guys wound down after a mission.
“So listen, QL, how long have you known Mako Sloane?” It was time to get substantive. I figured that was an innocent enough question. I figured wrong.
Quindarius looked at me with surprise. He was quiet for a minute and then said, “Remember what I said about not believing in the existence of taboo subjects?” he replied. “I lied. That’s one of them.”
He turned back to Tupelo and poured both of them a generous shot of Wild Turkey from the little bottles the stewardess had brought them earlier. Surely they had seriously depleted Continental’s supply of bourbon at this point, but the stewardess somehow managed to keep the Wild Turkey flowing.
A few minutes later Quindarius turned to me again and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Max. That’s just a question you’ll have to put to Mako himself.”
I was relieved that I hadn’t offended QL and asked, “Are you coming with me to Nicaragua to see him?”
“No, Max, you’ll be going yourself. I’ve got some urgent business to attend to, but first we’re all going to Sherwood Forest to regroup. You’re part of the team now for better or for worse. Just consider the incident on the Domodedovo highway our wedding ceremony.”
“Part of the team? Sherwood Forest? What the hell are you talking about?”
Quindarius looked and me and grinned. Then he reclined his leather seat and leaned back. He closed his eyes. His way of summarily ending our conversation, I suppose.