Free Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder Page B

all that time would have been painful in any airport, but it was particularly so at Pulkovo. There was no air-conditioning, and even though it was so far north, the air was hot and stuffy. Everyone was smoking and sweating. I tried to get away from the bodies and cigarettes, but even after I’d found a row of empty seats, a large stranger plopped down next to me. He didn’t say a word, but he pushed my arm off the armrest between our seats and promptly lit a cigarette, taking pains to blow the smoke in my direction.
    I got up and moved.
    I finally boarded an old Aeroflot Tupolev 134 just before 3:30 a.m. Its seats were threadbare and sunken. The cabin smelled of tobacco and old age. I settled into a window seat, but it wouldn’t lock into position and every time I leaned back, it would fall into the person’s lap behind me, so I didn’t lean back.
    The cabin door closed and we moved out to the runway without the slightest hint of a safety announcement. We took off and were treated to a short but exceedingly bumpy flight. When the plane neared Murmansk, the pilot announced something in Russian. Anotherpassenger who spoke English explained that we had been diverted to a military airport an hour-and-a-half drive from Murmansk because of a problem at the municipal airport.
    I was relieved when the plane finally came in to land, but my relief was short-lived. The runway was so potholed and crooked, and the landing so violent, that I thought the wheels were going to be torn off the plane.
    When I finally disembarked at 5:30 a.m., I was completely exhausted. Because I was so far north, the late-summer sun was low in the sky and had barely set. There was no terminal at the military airport—just a small warehouse-like building and a parking lot—but I was happy to see that the trawler fleet’s president, Yuri Prutkov, had made the trip to greet me. Irina, an unsmiling and leggy blonde with too much makeup, was there too. Prutkov was almost a carbon copy of the general manager of Autosan—late fifties, large, and with a handshake like a vise. He and I sat in the back of the company car while Irina sat in the passenger seat, twisting around to translate. The driver took off across a desolate tundra landscape that looked like the moon. Ninety minutes later, we arrived in Murmansk.
    I was dropped off at Murmansk’s best hotel, the Arctic. I checked in and went to my room. The bathroom smelled like urine, there was no toilet seat, and large chunks of porcelain were missing from the sink. The room’s window screen was broken, allowing mosquitoes the size of golf balls to fly in and out freely. There were no curtains to blot out the barely setting sun and the mattress was lumpy and sunken in the middle, as if it hadn’t been changed in twenty-five years. I didn’t even unpack. My only thought was How soon can I get the hell out of here?
    A few hours later, Prutkov returned and drove me to the docks for a tour of the fleet. We walked up a rusting gangplank to one of the trawlers. It was a huge oceangoing factory that stretched hundreds of feet long, boasted a crew of more than a hundred men, and was capable of holding thousands of tons of fish and ice. As we descended into one of the subdecks, I was hit by the overpowering odor of rancid,spoiled fish that hung in the air. I felt like throwing up the whole time Prutkov spoke. Remarkably, he was unfazed by the smell. I pitied the poor guys who worked on these ships for six months at a stretch without any reprieve.
    We toured the vessel for twenty minutes, then made our way to the fleet’s offices at 12 Tralovaya Street. These were just as decrepit and tumbledown as the boats, but thankfully they didn’t smell. The lighting in the hall was weak and green, and the walls of the reception area looked as if they hadn’t been painted in decades. I couldn’t help but think that everything about this operation was an insult to the senses, but then, as we settled down to a cup of