by Phil Bowie
“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.”
“That’s conditionally acceptable. If you refuse to take off, for example, I will probably need to know why in some detail.”
“Not a problem. And I accept your offer.”
Strake got up, went over to his desk, and pushed a button. “Margaret out there will help you with the necessary paperwork, sign you up for our insurance and the withholding.”
A large man came in the side door to the room. “This is Montgomery Davis,” Strake said. “He’s in charge of our security here and at my homes and elsewhere. Montgomery, this is Cowboy, our new pilot. I suggest you two meet at Teterboro Airport this afternoon. Why don’t you make it one o’clock. Montgomery will show you where the King Air is hangared, give you a set of keys, and introduce you to the maintenance people I use. You will oversee all the maintenance and routine cleaning. Run any significant modifications or upgrades past me first.
“The logs and manuals are in the plane. Take it up for a checkout flight. Within sixty days I’d like you to select a backup pilot we can put on a modest retainer and use if you’re ill or away for any reason. Give us the name and Montgomery will run a background check.
“I’d like you to wear black slacks, a white shirt with epaulets, and a black tie. A jacket will be optional except when we’re carrying somebody important, then I’d like you to wear it. Margaret will give you the name of a tailor I’ve used. You can charge your first set of clothes to my account.
“Your apartment is already close enough to the airport. Margaret will give you a beeper. Do you have objections to any of that?”
“None.”
“Shake hands with Mr. Davis, then. He’ll be along on most of our trips, sometimes with one or two of his people.”
Over the next few days Cowboy gave some thought to choosing the backup pilot. Duane Kelly was a casual acquaintance from his early training days. They had both had the same instructor for their commercial multi-engine ratings in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and had spent a night or two carousing in beach bistros. Kelly was darkly good-looking and attracted women with his good looks and cocky humor. Kelly had gone to work flying light twins for a freight hauler out of Macon and they had lost contact for several years. Then one day Kelly had called saying he had a proposition. They had met in a bar in Jacksonville, Florida, where Cowboy was flying a Super Cub towing banners along the beaches and flying an occasional charter in a Beech Duke.
Over cold beers, Kelly worked around to asking if he would be interested in a quick trip or two into Mexico. He smiled and made it sound virtually innocent.
“You’re talking about carting drugs, right?”
“Hey, a little coke. The stuff is everywhere these days, right? Nose candy for the affluent. Hell, you can’t go to a party now where there isn’t a supply in the back bedroom or right out there in the open on the damned coffee table. The trips are probably safer than you flying that old Cub for the tourists. You go down, they load you up, then you fly back low across the Gulf and land in Mississippi, or maybe Texas, depending. You get twenty-five thousand a trip, a bag full of cash. They provide the plane, probably a Baron or something like a twin Comanche. I figure if we don’t do it somebody else will, right?
“What you do is rig it so you can jettison the whole load over the water if you have to before you land. It’s weighted to sink. No evidence, no problem. You quit when you want to. No hard feelings. I’ve already made two trips without a hitch. I told the money people I’m working for I’d try to find them another good man. They’d surprise you. They’re not your typical movie image. These people are legitimate businessmen and professionals. They wouldn’t chance it if it wasn’t safe. The offer won’t last long. What do you say?”
“Duane, how the hell did you get involved in this? What if the plane turns out to be stolen? What if you’re caught on the ground in Mexico? Or on the ground back here while they’re offloading? What they’re paying won’t seem like nearly enough money if you wind up doing ten years in a federal prison. Think about it. Are these people—these money men—are they really taking any chances compared to what you’re risking? Count me out.”
“Hey, I was just asking, you know? You’re not interested, that’s cool. If you change your mind give me a call.” He wrote his number on a bar napkin.
“Be careful, Duane. Those aren’t any kind of people to ever turn your back on.”
“Hey, two or three more trips and I’ll have a real stake. Then I’m gone. Don’t you worry about me.”
A year later Cowboy heard that Duane had crashed an old DC-3 on takeoff from Amarillo but had walked away. The law had come close to charging him but he’d had a thin cover story about simply trying to ferry the old plane to a mechanic for repairs. The story had barely held up, so he had walked away from that, as well. He had showed up in Teterboro a year ago, down on his luck, contrite about his Mexican adventures, and vowing to turn his life around. He was working as a part-time charter pilot for a shoestring operation. Two days after he was hired Cowboy phoned Kelly and said, “I might have a slot for you as a backup pilot for the company I’m working for. Are you interested?”
Kelly said, “Buddy I appreciate that. I really do.”
“You’re not making any runs down over the border these days, are you?”
“No way. I can be a little dense, but that’s one lesson I’ve learned real well.”
The next day Cowboy told Strake, “I might have a backup pilot for you. A man named Duane Kelly. He and I trained at the same place years ago. You ought to know some say he hauled a few illegal loads up from Mexico, but not for at least a year now. He’s supposed to be a good twin pilot.”
Strake said, “Give the details to Davis.” Two weeks later Strake signed Kelly on for a modest retainer.
The first trip was one week later to Atlanta with Strake, Montgomery Davis, and an accountant named Chester Thurgood aboard, to evaluate a small company that made Walther pistols. The King Air was in perfect condition and the six-ton airplane handled like a much smaller docile twin, the PT6 turboprops delivering a total of 1,700 horsepower smoothly. At dawn they climbed strongly out of Teterboro at 2,300 feet per minute and 140 miles per hour in cool clear fall air.
The Newark controllers vectored them through their complex crowded airspace with rapid-fire instructions. There was a cold front angling west to east between them and Atlanta but it was dry except for some light snow well away to the west. As the King Air cruised southwest on autopilot at 26,500 feet over Virginia at 310 miles per hour, Strake came up and took the right-hand seat. He said, “Have you found anything concerning the plane that needs attention?”
Monitoring the instruments, he said, “Nothing at all right away. The maintenance people tell me we should think about tires at the next inspection. You mentioned using unimpr
oved strips occasionally. In that case you might want to consider changing from the standard high-pressure tires to high-flotation ones. They’re wider so they would protrude from the wheel wells slightly when they’re retracted. The extra drag would cost you, for example, about four miles per hour at 16,000 feet, but the fat tires would ease operations on rough fields so the whole plane wouldn’t absorb as much stress, and they’d be better than what’s mounted on here if there’s mud or snow.
“The other thing would be a set of wing-tip landing lights. Yours are mounted on the nose gear now. The wingtip lights would let me drag a strip at night to check it out without putting the gear down, supplement the nose gear lights in certain conditions, and light us up better in traffic areas when we’re traveling at higher than gear-down speed.”
“Go ahead and have it all done. Just let me know when and how long the plane will be down for it.”
They made conversation to pass the time. Strake’s knowledge of light weapons was encyclopedic and he obviously liked to discourse on the subject. “For decades the United States was slow to adopt new weapons technology,” he mused. “And always at a cost of lives. There are many examples. Smokeless powder was developed by a Frenchman in 1884. Peter Paul Mauser was a genius and he designed a bolt-action rifle that used a cartridge with the new powder. His gun was highly accurate at long range and was rugged and reliable but the U.S. Ordnance Board ignored it and instead bought Norwegian Krag-Jorgensen rifles for the troops.