Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [47]
“What about Nalchik? Makhackala? Sleptsovsk?” Rybkin inquired.
“No airport in the North Caucasus will let us land.”
It was not the weather. It was the military playing tricks, Rybkin thought.
“Do we have fuel?”
“For about an hour,” said the pilot.
They turned around in midair and landed in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), six hundred miles to the north. It was 4 a.m.
They snatched three hours of sleep in the airport hotel. In the morning, Rybkin’s staff worked out landing rights for them in the Ingush airport of Sleptsovsk. Maskhadov and his people drove there from Grozny. They looked at Rybkin and Boris in disbelief when they announced that they were taking them to Moscow because Yeltsin had signed off on the withdrawal.
“Why hasn’t it been announced?” the Chechens asked.
“Trust us,” said the Russians.
They landed in Moscow, undiscovered, on late Friday afternoon.
On Saturday morning, the two prime ministers gathered at Rybkin’s dacha, waiting for Yeltsin to announce the troop withdrawal on TV.
Then, finally, they signed the agreement. Until the last moment Maskhadov did not believe it would happen.
Chechen-Dagestan border, December 14, 1996: Salman Raduyev, the Chechen warlord, is stopped at a border checkpoint on his way to a congress of Chechens living in Dagestan. When the Russian police try to detain him, a backup force of Raduyev’s militia moves in, disarms the Russian policemen, and takes twenty-one of them hostage. Defying orders of the Chechen government to release the hostages, Raduyev threatens to kill them unless the Russian command apologizes for impeding his passage.
Boris Berezovsky arrived at Raduyev’s stronghold of Novye Gordali on the morning of December 18, the fourth day of the hostage standoff. He was there to make a last-ditch effort to prevent the incident from escalating to a full-scale confrontation. The forces of the Interior Ministry were getting more and more edgy with every hour of captivity of their comrades. Raduyev, the maverick warlord whose oversized beard, dark glasses, and baseball cap concealed a face that had been disfigured in a shootout, had defied all pleas and pressure from the separatist government to free his prisoners. Raduyev did not recognize the Khasavyurt Accord because it did not grant Chechnya full independence. Now, at a minimum, he wanted an apology from the Russians for not letting him travel to Dagestan.
“You have my apology, Salman,” said Boris.
“Come on, Boris, you are not the one who I want to apologize,” smiled Raduyev.
Suddenly they heard a loud clattering outside. Two unmarked helicopter gunships appeared out of nowhere and showered Raduyev’s camp with several bursts of machine-gun fire before disappearing. No one was hurt.
“These are the ones, Boris,” said Raduyev. “They know you are here, don’t they? I want an apology from them.”
After three hours of negotiations they were close to an agreement to exchange the hostages for eleven of Raduyev’s men captured a year ago at Pervomaiskoye, a deal they planned to keep secret. But Raduyev still insisted on a Russian apology.
To demonstrate impatience, Boris looked at his watch.
“Nice watch,” said Raduyev. “Is it a Rolex?”
“No, Patek Philippe.”
“Never heard of it. Is it better than Rolex? How much did it cost you?”
“Fifty thousand dollars,” said Boris.
“Nice watch.”
“It is yours,” said Boris, taking the watch off his wrist.
Raduyev played with the watch for a few minutes.
“Okay, you can have your cops. You can take them today, and I will take your word that you will release my men.”
On the same day that Boris was negotiating with Raduyev, in the predawn hours of the morning, masked men broke into the Red Cross compound in the Chechen village of Novye Atagi and, using guns with silencers, killed six foreign relief workers, including five women, in their sleep. On the next night five local ethnic Russians were killed in the same