Outlaws Inc.

 

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

PART I GOOD MEN ARE HARD TO FIND: THE CREW

  
1. The Devil's Greatest Trick: Over Kabul

  
2. What Am I Doing Here? Serbia, 1998

PART II EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG: THE USSR

  
3. The Lost Boys: Soviet Union, 1992

  
4. The Machine: Post-Soviet Russia, Early 1990s

  
5. The Birth of the Global Network: Russia, 1993

  
6. The Warlord Is Always Right: The Caucasus, 1994

  
7. Rogue State: Yugoslavia, 1994–1996

PART III GOLD FEVER: THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

  
8. The Men with No Names: The Arab Gulf, 1995–1997

  
9. This Is How You Disappear: West Africa, 1995–1999

 
10. Plunder in the Jungle: The Congo, 1997–2000

 
11. Men of Wealth and Taste: Milan, 2000

PART IV HIGH AND WILD: AFGHANISTAN TO IRAQ

 
12. The Boys Are Back in Town: Afghanistan, 2001

 
13. Afghan Black: The Drug Pipeline, 2002–2010

 
14. There Are Huge Forces: Afghanistan, 1995 and 2010

PART V BACK TO THE JUNGLE: CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE HORN OF AFRICA

 
15. High Times on the Costa Coca: Central America, 1999–2008

 
16. Welcome to Little Minsk: Africa, 2003

 
17. Russian Rain Keeps Falling: The Congo, 2005–2009

 
18. Just Drop the Cash out of the Plane: Uganda, 2009

 
19. Getting Your Kicks on Route Il-76: Central Asia and the Caucasus, 2009

PART VI THE JOURNEY HOME: EAST AFRICA AND RUSSIA

 
20. The Ghost Factory: Russia, 2008

 
21. Death and Taxes: Entebbe to Ekaterinburg, 2010

 
22. The Gathering Darkness: Russia, 2010

Author's Note

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

A Note on the Author

Imprint

 

To Mikhail

&

Sergei

The last of the independents

 

It was hunted for the sake of its arms and accoutrements from hill to hill, from ravine to ravine, up and down the dried beds of rivers and round the shoulders of bluffs, till it disappeared as water sinks in the sand—this officerless, rebel regiment.

RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE LOST LEGION”

But would you kindly ponder this question. What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV,
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

 

Prologue

 

T
HE
R
USSIAN PILOT THROWS
his paper cup onto the tarmac and walks across the pitted runway. The giant plane's Soviet military decals are still faintly visible under gray paint.

That's the signal. There are no words, no checks, no IDs: just a long walk in the last rays of the afternoon toward a tattered Soviet warplane so big it plays tricks with the eyes. As the engines rise to a deafening whine, I climb the ramp and twist my body into position inside the cavernous Ilyushin Il-76, code name Candid. Bathed in the bright light of the cockpit glass, the skipper kicks off his shoes, takes his seat, and flips the switches. Seconds later we're airborne, heading into the Afghan night.

FROM AFGHANISTAN TO Chechnya, the giant Il-76 was the USSR's ultimate warhorse. It saw action on every front, in every capacity, from commando missions to reconnaissance, military intelligence, explosives drops, arms transport, and even cosmonaut training.

At more than forty-six meters long and forty meters wide, it is one of the biggest planes on the planet. Weighing 210 tons, this superplane can fly in Arctic ice storms and African heat. It can operate from shorter, more bomb-damaged and unprepared runways than planes half its size. It can carry a staggering sixty tons of guns, soldiers, tanks, bombs, or anything else halfway around the world. And these days, for half a million dollars, anyone can have one.

But the Il-76 also carries a secret.

Beneath the floor of the cargo hold, deep in the belly of the plane, its Soviet creators added a number of extra spaces. Originally designed for escape equipment, armaments, and classified payloads, they can be hollowed out to create secret chambers. These chambers don't appear on any cargo paperwork; they won't be checked by customs; officially, they don't even exist. But they are there.

And if you're determined enough to fill them—and foolhardy enough to fly—then your plane will carry anything up to fifteen extra tons of “phantom” cargo. Cargo for which some men are willing to die and others are prepared to kill.

I had heard all about these mercenary aviators—mercs, as they're often known in Africa. I had read the CIA dossiers and seen the crash reports. But now as the plane took off with me on it, I was about to see an operation from the inside.

The men's names, their life stories, and even their appearances and flight patterns have been changed to protect them and me. But this is their world. From the lawless streets of Russia's Wild East to the pirate-controlled coast of Somalia, from rogue states and rebel “ 'stans” to the shadow world of drug traffickers and black markets, this is the story of those fifteen extra tons.

 

PART I

Good Men Are Hard to Find: The Crew

 

CHAPTER ONE

The Devil's Greatest Trick

Over Kabul

THERE IS NO WARNING, just a sickening upward lurch as we abandon our flight path. A red light goes on in the cockpit. The instruments say we're over Kabul, but that we're suddenly climbing, not landing, and that we're doing it too fast and too steep.

“What's going on?” I ask in Russian, but Sergei, one of the seven-man crew, can no longer hear me over the scream of the four engines tearing our dangerously overloaded giant up and out of what should have been our runway approach and almost vertically into the night. In the dim light of the freight hold, his face is a mask. Under my feet the greasy, gaffer-taped, twenty-year-old, 176-ton metal tube shakes, groans, and pops.

Then he looks at me and leans in close. “Missiles,” he shouts, as if pointing out a house where he once lived, or a roadside bar. “Here's where they start shooting.” For the first time I notice he stinks, not just of the usual sweat and oil, but of booze. I've seen the news stories: vague one-liners about unexplained cargo-plane crashes in Africa, Russia, the Balkans. Blamed on RPG launchers on the ground, vodka in the air.

“Jesus! Who?”

He shrugs. “Mujahideen. Rebels. Soldiers. You never know. But always somebody.” He closes one eye, an imagined potshot. Then he grins. “Mikhail is a top pilot, though. He knows the airstrip from the war. He's got this method where he lands by climbing up high over the airport, then sort of dive-bombing the runway like a corkscrew.”

Sergei laughs. “You don't get shot down that way. His trick is knowing when to pull up out of the dive. Incredible! You watch.”

But suddenly we are at peace. The plane levels off. The engines are almost hushed now, and despite the pressure, bursting ears, fear, and humpback-bridge dizziness, an odd feeling of almost euphoric weightlessness washes up from the soles of my feet.

It takes a moment for me to register the sudden downward tilt, to see the lights of Kabul in the cockpit glass. The ground is laid out like a map, dead ahead, where seconds ago there were stars.

The Soviets used the Il-76 in cosmonaut weightlessness training—the infamous “Vomit Comet” flights. It would execute a series of parabolic climbs and dives in which the descent was marked by an upward anti-gravitational push in the cabin. Extremely dangerous to execute—in a Candid, at an approach angle of 20 percent or more, stalling is a real risk—these dives from high altitudes in which the pilot would attempt to pull up just before the nose hit the tarmac are said to have resulted in a number of messy deaths and the spontaneous redecoration of many more flight decks. As we plummet earthward and my stomach passes upward, not just through my mouth but through the top of my skull, it's unclear which of these things will happen first.

Against my better judgment, I lean out to look over the pilot's shoulder. Mikhail is hunched forward like a man reading on the toilet, or praying. Either way, I'm with him. The ground is more than very close now; it's just yards from the nose. Pull up. For God's sake, pull up. But it's too late. Involuntarily, my fists clench, legs kick out, eyes shut. Fuck. This is it. We're going down.

“SOME PEOPLE DELIVER letters for the post. That's me—just a postman. Only the parcels are heavier.”

I don't really know how I'd expected an outlaw aviator and international gunrunner to look, but Mikhail is definitely—almost comically—not it.

Heavy-boned, gray, and stooping, he looks fifty, maybe more. His gaunt, ashen face carries a permanent expression of mild disappointment more suited to anti-smoking ads in hospital waiting rooms than wanted posters at the UN. His enormous hands are cracked, filthy, and horn-nailed; he's wearing a gray boilersuit, battered cap, and army-surplus boots. Sitting on the parched earth of another third world airstrip after an aid run, cadged cigarette already on the go, he looks for all the world like a car-factory worker on his break. It's just gone seven in the morning, but already the hot dust is, he grumbles, making him thirsty for a Baltika.

Not, on appearances, quite the Han Solo–style maverick I've fantasized about riding the skies with.

But if Mikhail—whom I soon take to calling Mickey, first to his good-humored annoyance, then his resignation—makes an odd outlaw, he makes an even odder businessman. An Il-76 pilot all his adult life and a product of the Soviet military—via a childhood in the Urals, his local air force training base back in Russia, then the massive Vitebsk military base in Belarus and the Military Air Transport Regiment to which it was attached, then Central Asia—this squinting, chain-smoking veteran of the bloody, desperate last days of the Soviets' Afghan war is blue-collar right down to the sloping shoulders and alcoholic sweat. Yet here he is, he says: partner in a highly profitable air-transport business spanning the Emirates, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, whose operations in the world's worst trouble spots put them beyond the sharp end of the global free market.

Mickey (not his real name—it's understood that his real identity, his past, even the details of his plane, will remain a secret) and the crew have flown together for more than a quarter of a century. As Soviet air force pilots, navigators, gunners, engineers, and loadmasters, they flew more than three hundred hostile missions over the same Afghan mountains, villages, plains, and cities they specialize in navigating today—and in the same plane.

“When the USSR started to break apart,” Mickey explains, “well, some of us saw the weather change and took our chance to do something different.” That something was a dramatic escape from the military and a bid for a piece of the private-enterprise pie. “It wasn't difficult. We knew some people, and when they ‘acquired' a military plane, we flew it down to Kazakhstan and, you might say, rebranded.” He suddenly looks embarrassed at this corporate-sounding phrase. “Naturally, not a word we used, but it turns out that's what it was.”

Good-bye, Red Army star and CCCP livery; hello, anonymous, no-logo gray paint and primer. “We were,” he smiles awkwardly, “suddenly
biznesmeny
”—to Russian speakers, the word is full of the carpetbagging mafioso connotations of those wild times. “And today we are the A-Team.”

Call them and the twenty-four-hour, no-questions-asked elite crew will fly whatever you've got to wherever you want it in one of the largest planes on earth, danger no object—if the price is right.

“We operate as private transport for all sorts of things,” says Mickey. “We fly a lot of freight. Military things. And a lot of aid.”

Which has had the effect of turning Mickey, his men, and their “partners”—a shadowy group of men Mickey is reluctant to discuss and whom it will take me nearly a decade to pin down—into rather reluctant saints, too. Because from Pakistan to Somalia and from famines to tsunamis, Mickey's crew and their battered, twenty-year-old Ilyushin are the first into disaster areas with lifesaving humanitarian relief. Chartered by everyone from NGOs to Western governments, they are regarded as agile, responsive, and—largely thanks to their background in commando drops—able to get more aid closer to more hazardous, harder-to-access disaster zones than anyone else. If the money is right.

Their unorthodox methods, guts, and sheer chutzpah have made these aircrews legendary, and made them the men to call when—in the words of the A-Team themselves—you've got a problem and no one else can help.

John MacDonald is a Surrey-based chartering agent, one of the middlemen who take the initial job specs from armies, aid organizations, importer/exporters, and private individuals and find the planes and the aircrews to do them. Despite coming from a long line of aviation specialists and having “seen it all,” he laughs as he recounts one wildcat Il-76 team job that left the American military command in southern Afghanistan breathless with admiration, knowing they'd been hoodwinked by a five-man crew of Russians and their shadowy network.

“The U.S. military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south. This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of U.S. troops, it was completely under bandit control. There was no fuel available for miles around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a barge pole. They all kept saying, ‘We'll never get out again, how can we take off from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?'

“The job was priced at between $60,000 and $70,000, but one day there's a phone call from these Russian guys. They said, ‘We'll do it, but it'll cost you $2 million, in advance.' The Americans didn't really have a choice by this stage, so they paid. And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old Il-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke.

“Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there's a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke—and these airmen just get in and drive off. The Yanks were all going, ‘Hey, how will you get the plane back?' And the crew just said, ‘We won't. It's an old one—we only bought it for this job, and we're ditching it here.' Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off $1.5 million in profit and left it to rust. It's still there.

“Everyone just applauded them—the U.S. guys in command, us, and charterers the world over. Not just for the flying, but for the incredibly sharp business mind that could hatch this. It was truly beautiful.”

Mickey laughs when I tell him this story, but points out that flying dangerous missions, under fire, into hostile lands where the airports may or may not have been destroyed is “more or less what we were brought up to do.” Still, like the potential rewards, casualties are high—together, maverick Il-76 and Antonov transport outfits court one of the highest civilian fatality rates since the dawn of aviation history.

And for anyone even thinking about shadowing these guys on their missions as I am, the roll call of death makes for especially sobering reading. In 2009 alone, two Russian-manned Il-76s collided above Makhachkala, near the Chechen border; an entire ex-Soviet crew and all passengers were killed when an Il-76 blew up midair over Uganda; a Ukrainian Antonov-12 bound for Entebbe crashed on takeoff in Luxor, killing all on board; and another crew was wiped out attempting a crash landing in the Congo. As I write this, in November 2010, another An-12 has just crashed with all hands dead in Sudan, and Pakistan's news network is showing a mysterious Georgian-registered Il-76 on an aid run to Sudan bursting into flames over Karachi, killing all eight Russian and Ukrainian crew. And that's comparatively good going: Of all the world's Antonov-12s—the Soviet military's second-most popular cargo plane—just under one in seven have been destroyed by accidents and disasters.

Mickey stops me. “Yes, of course there are risks, just like any job—don't make too much of them.” He ranks the dangers, counting them off on his fingers like a man remembering ex-girlfriends—“Tiredness, enemy fire, stupid errors, overloading, mechanical failure, bad conditions, bad cargo, bad luck”—but adds that “alcohol and bad living have killed just as many men in the business as flying.”

Over the years, he says, they've learned what not to do. They never approach an airport in Afghanistan or Africa on a standard landing approach, for example, having been attacked too many times by rocket launchers on the perimeter, so they climb and either corkscrew down over the runway or dive steeply onto the tarmac. “There are things you don't forget once you've done them in a war.”

A recent United Nations report compared the crews to swallows: migrating great distances guided by mysterious commands and principles, rarely landing, and whenever possible avoiding contact with others. Missions are rumors, routes and stopovers often remaining unconfirmed until you're already in the air, cargo arrangements and contents kept deliberately fuzzy to preserve deniability on all sides.

“In Kabul,” explains Sergei, “we know we're picking up mail and fruit for South America. When we get there, who knows? Maybe we'll collect washing machines for Morocco, and there someone will tell us to pick up humanitarian aid for Congo, then fish for Europe or bricks for Iraq.”

This keeps turnaround and “ground time” to a minimum, and profits high. But it also has the effect of keeping their visibility and contact with the authorities low.

It seems insane, I tell Mickey: Why risk their lives on missions like this, in aircraft that were made before most of today's Red Army recruits were even born, aircraft held together with rust, for nothing more than the standard $120 per hour (for pilots) and $55 per hour (crew) plus per diems and board?

Mickey enjoys the life, he says. “I became a pilot because I love flying. So that's my life. I can choose most of what I do. The people are nice. It's a job.” He does that modest Mickey shrug thing again. “
Zhizn harasho.
” It's all good.

I believe Mickey. He comes across as a decent, reliable man trying, like all of us, to carve something out for himself. But I also know a couple of things that he's omitting to mention in what, at this stage, is just a casual conversation.

Because as they line up anonymously on runways, jungle tracks, and military air bases across the world beside the hundreds of aboveboard, legitimate operators with their own liveried ex-Soviet warhorses, there's a shadier side to some of these crews, to a fair few of the outfits they fly for, and to their missions. Theirs is work that means big money—millions upon millions of dollars—changing hands, often through elaborate networks of bank accounts in places like Cyprus, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Dubai. And this money doesn't come from aid organizations, the U.S. military, the UN, or anyone else whose real name appears on the receipts.