Howard Linskey - The Dead

He nodded. ‘There are five billion barrels of crude oil waiting underground in a small East-African country that will be transformed by my wells.’

‘You know this for sure?’

‘I have hired many experts; surveyors, geologists, oil company men, it is they that tell me this.’

‘The trouble with paying big money for experts is that they often feel obliged to tell you what you want to hear.’

‘In Uganda they are already taking one hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day out of the Rift Valley. That’s real oil. My wells will be bigger, there will be more of them and I am building the refinery there myself. I will control everything.’

‘You think their government will just let you do this?’

‘It is taken care of. I have made many rich men already and they will continue to profit by my presence in their country. In one month we start to drill, then the oil and the money will flow.’ I had no idea why he was bothering to tell me all of this until he added, ‘with this oil I will have five, maybe ten billion dollars a year to put aside to spend on my passion. Do you know what my passion is, Mr Blake?’

‘Human Rights?’

He looked irritated for a moment then he brushed my comment aside. ‘My country, my homeland, a place to which I can never return. Cowboys and crooks run everything there now. This so-called government everyone deals with, the one even the official EU reports say is no more than a gangster state…’ and he shook his head in seeming amazement, ‘a gangster state? Can you imagine?’

I could, easily.

‘When the communists ran everything, when you had to pretend to be on their side, when even a man like me was forced to join the fucking communist party so I could do business of any kind, then it was bad, but now? There is no hope for anyone. The President, the Prime Minister, the FSB, the so-called Red Mafia, they are all just part of the same corruption. The shit has piled so high now you can smell it all the way across the world. I want to bring it all crashing down so there is nothing left. Then we can rebuild it and start again. What we need, Blake, is a new revolution.’

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The guy might have been worth billions, but he was just one man, and here he was talking about bringing down the government of one of the biggest countries on the planet. It couldn’t be done. I was starting to wonder what madness had been festering away all of these years while he was exiled in London, surrounded by flunkies. What did it do to a man if he never heard the word no ?

‘Khodorkovsky already tried that.’

‘Khodorkovsky was an idiot. He tried to change Russia from within, by founding schools on political thought and funding opposition parties. He thought he could stay out in the open and give Putin the finger, that he was too rich and famous for the FSB to come after him. Look at him now.’

The FSB is the Russian Federal Security Service, successor to the notorious KGB, which is directly controlled by the President. Less than a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been the richest man in Russia, now he was serving fourteen years in prison for tax evasion and fraud and all because he wouldn’t keep quiet and toe the line. Khodorkovsky’s trial and conviction has been condemned all over the world as political and rigged but still he rots in jail.

I didn’t want to spend any longer hearing a monologue about corrupt politicians in Russia so I just came out with it.

‘What exactly do you want from me?’

‘Your supply line,’ he told me, ‘part of it, at least; the part which runs from the eastern ports of the UK to Amsterdam, then through Europe until it reaches Russia. I know about your Russian supply line so please don’t bother to deny it. You will waste the time of both of us.’

There didn’t seem to be any point in denying anything. He knew everything there was to know about our European operation.

‘Why do you need to use our supply line?’

‘Men and materials,’ he said simply, as if he was discussing a building job.

‘What sort of men and what kind of materials?’

‘You do not need to know that.’

‘Oh, but I do. If you are paying me to use our supply line, I need to know what’s going through it.’

He shook his head. ‘Let me explain this. I will pay you, sure, but I am not giving you a choice. I will use your supply line to ship men and materials into Russia. If you cooperate with me, you will be generously rewarded, if you do not I will remove you and use the supply line anyway.’

I had already resolved to find any way I could to duck out of this arrangement but not here; later, when I could get Amrein onside, to help me kick this mad Russian into touch. For now, I went along with it as if it might be a slim possibility.

‘I don’t need you to explain,’ I told him, ‘it’s not drugs, clearly, that’s not your business, so what could you possibly want to ship over a border into Russia that you couldn’t just send by air freight with your guys flying in on a passenger jet? You’re planning something and you’ve stated that the men who run your country don’t understand democracy, reform or free politics, so what is it? If you are going to blow up the Kremlin using my supply line then you’ve no chance. They’ll go to war on you,’ I told him, ‘and me.’

‘The Russian government declared war on me years ago. They have tried to assassinate me many times. Before I left Russia I tried to follow the political road. I was even the governor of a province. One day I was due to take a helicopter flight with my family, only I had to stay behind and finish a deal, so I let my wife and young son go on ahead. The helicopter was blown out of the sky, shot down by a missile, everyone on board was killed. Nobody could provide a satisfactory explanation for the “tragedy”. I have lost my wife and child in this struggle and the authorities in Russia will not rest until I am also dead. I am already at war.’

‘That has nothing to do with me.’

‘Which is a good reason to use you,’ he said, before adding, ‘you have no links to me at all. You pay corrupt officials to look the other way while you send heroin and cocaine to the Russian crime syndicates your associate, the Turk, has cultivated. Those same officials will continue to look the other way when my men and materials are delivered by your supply line. The men I wish to send back to my homeland cannot simply fly in on a scheduled flight. They will be picked up as soon as they land. The materials will enable me to bring the war to my enemies.’

‘So, you’re a terrorist, plain and simple?’

He slammed his hand on the table, hard.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘I am one side in a war and I must win that war to survive. I am not a terrorist, I am a freedom fighter. I am the agent runner and the men I am recruiting and training are all patriots. My Joes are willing to return to Russia to risk their lives fighting injustice and corruption. It is the only way, we have tried everything else.’

‘But it’s ridiculous,’ I said, ‘what can one man with a bomb achieve? You can’t bring down a government like that.’

‘With one man, no, you cannot,’ he agreed, ‘but with a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand? When the government cannot prevent wave after wave of sabotage and civilian unrest coordinated by my people then it loses all of its authority.’

‘You are going to try to send ten thousand trained men into Russia along my supply line, without anyone noticing? It’s madness.’

‘Not at first, of course,’ he seemed calmer now, more reasonable, ‘your route will be for the first men, the vanguard of a new revolution. What they will achieve can change history, believe me, I know.’