Free The Wolves by Alex Berenson

Sergeant.
    Burn her as soon as you can. Get her out of this world.
    He spent four years in Chechnya. The rebels there were a vicious bunch, in every way the forerunners of ISIS, down to their snuff videos. They hated the Spetsnaz, and Buvchenko knew what they’d do to him if they caught him. He was equally merciless to the ones he captured. He came home with a dozen medals for combat bravery and a jar full of ears. Two sides of one coin.
    Away from the front lines, the military’s rules bored him senseless. He quit three months after his last deployment, went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to work as a quote-unquote technical advisor. Unlike a lot of wannabe mercenaries, he had real experience. Within months, he was ferrying AKs and RPGs to the eastern Congo, where a half-dozen militias fought for the jungle’s diamonds. He spent three years in Africa before coming back to Volgograd, where he hadeasier access to advanced weapons like helicopters. Year by year, his deals grew. To add to his profits he brought heroin and cocaine back into Russia on the same jets that flew weapons out.
    In the seventies and eighties, the legendary arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi had made billions of dollars brokering weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Buvchenko would never be in that league. These days the biggest orders went country to country, making nine-figure skims impossible. Still, by his thirty-ninth birthday, Buvchenko had seventy million dollars in banks in Moscow, Geneva, and the Cayman Islands.
    —
    B UVCHENKO ’ S LINE OF WORK did have drawbacks. Two years before, a federal grand jury in Virginia had charged him in absentia with arms trafficking, supporting terrorism, and money laundering. He’d never sold a single weapon on American soil, or to a group like ISIS. He’d sell to everyone, but not those savages. Not after what he’d seen in Chechnya. No matter. The meddlers in the United States believed they ruled the entire world.
    The warrant led Interpol to issue a Red Notice for him, asking its members to arrest him at their borders or if he passed through their airspace. Now he chose his destinations with care. Western Europe was out. He would land on the moon before he set foot in New York. But thanks to long-range jets and carefully edited flight manifests, he could still get to the Middle East, Africa, even South America.
    But he spent most of his time on Russian soil, where the Americans couldn’t touch him. And Russia was more than comfortable for him. Along with an apartment in Moscow, he had an estate outside Volgograd with a shooting range, a stable, and what might have been the best-equipped gym anywhere in Russia. Buvchenko’s body was his only religion. He rose at dawn each day to lift weights and injecthimself with a steroid regimen that three doctors had helped him design. Nearing forty, he had biceps bigger than most men’s legs. His eyes were too small for his face and his neck too big, but he was handsome in a bruising way. He had no problem finding girlfriends, though he tired of them quickly.
    As long as he kept himself too busy to think about the cruel pointlessness of existence, Buvchenko couldn’t complain. Life was good.
    Still, he had to keep Papa happy. Papa Putin, and the men around him. Without the Kremlin, Buvchenko didn’t have a business. The Defense Ministry arranged the arms-transfer licenses he needed for open-market deals. For his
other
sales, the Foreign Ministry quietly orchestrated clearances so his cargo planes could fly to the Caspian Sea and then over Iran to the Gulf of Oman. From there, the jets could travel all the way to the east coast of Africa over open water.
    Buvchenko paid well for the help. He gave to Papa, too, always through a bagman, never directly, of course. He never asked for anything in return. Simply by taking the money, Putin confirmed Buvchenko’s status as a friend. So Buvchenko didn’t mind the fact that his fortune would have been three times as big if